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"Since then I've always been a fake and a defector," he used to
say . But he came late to the Institute and was never entirely at home
there.
It was in Liverpool that Max Hayward discovered gypsies. He
had a natural gift for languages. Later, he was known as a brilliant
linguist who not only commanded many vernaculars of Russian, but
most of the other Slavic languages, Hungarian, Welsh, Chinese,
and modern Greek, an array in which his fluency in French and
German hardly counted! But Romany was his first love, and it
sprang out of his deep sense of identificaton with gypsy-life: im–
poverished, vagrant and outlaw, classless and commonplace, yet
mysterious and exotic, ground-down, persecuted, dispersed, yet
toughly surviving, after so many disasters and dispersions, seemingly
capable of perpetual regeneration. Some of that first-feeling for gyp–
sies was later attached to "cosmopolitan" Jews, dissident Russians
and other outcasts. On holiday from his Moscow diplomatic post in
1948, traveling along the Georgian Military Highway, Max came
across a band of gypsies he recognized as belonging to a rare tribe, a
straggle of survivors from Stalin's attempt at genocide, and he was so
moved he wept.
Never on very good terms with his own family, especially not
with his father whose aspirations for him he alternately succumbed
to and resisted, there was something very adoptional about Max,
and though he was an awkward and alien figure among his fellow
students at Oxford, he became an intimate in the households of the
emigre Russian professor, George Katkov, a descendant of the great
nineteenth-century Russian publicist, and of the Slaters (Lydia
Slater was the sister of Boris Pasternak) . His shift in study away
from primary concentration on Chinese, first to German and then to
Russian, was influenced as much by personal as by public considera–
tions. Later, he spent a year studying in Prague, just before the
Communists took over, and then two years with the British embassy
in Moscow, at a time when few foreigners had or could have any but
the most formal and restricted contact with Russian life. Under such
circumstances Max had an extraordinary talent not only for getting
on, but even for getting in.
Leonid Leonov, for instance, a talented but quite "official"
novelist, became his friend. Later, Max was to write that Leonov
regarded conforming to the standards of socialist realism as "a kind
of
podvig
in the Russian Orthodox tradition ." Leonov, generally
compliant to the wishes of the regime and under strong pressure to
disavow the description, curiously refused . Max had not only
