56
PARTISAN REVIEW
pressure on us, we would chew over the latest Party directives before
forgetting them completely and running off to the beach. Of what was
taking place in the countryside - collectivization, the thirties purges -
we heard only very indirectly, although we occasionally caught glimpses
of carts with bodies piled up in them.
Youth, infatuation with girls, architecture, theater. At various stages
I wanted to be Le Corbusier, Stanislavsky, and if worse came to worse,
Mikhail Chekhov. What's more, we all wrote a bit on the side. We
would meet at Serezha Domanski's bachelor apartment on Trekhsvyati–
telskaya Street where, to convey a sense of mystery, we would light a
candle on a round black table. There we read aloud our brilliant
"opuses," a mixture of Hemingway and Hamsun. Meanwhile, outside the
house, one socialist triumph after another was being proclaimed - we
heard about the Soviet icebreaker navigators who crossed the North
Pole, Chelyuskin, Papanits, Krasin, and Malygin; about the stratosphere,
about the flights to the Far East and the North Pole made by the Soviet
pilot Chkalov. On the screen we saw films about the battleship
Potemkin,
General Chapaev, and Maxim Gorky.
Somehow, miraculously, we survived 1937. It's an enigma. My par–
ents, after all, were from the old nobility. The same fearless Aunt Sonya
wrote streams of letters to Lenin's wife Krupskaya and to the Commu–
nist literary critics Nogin and Bonch-Burevich, protesting the illegal ar–
rests. Another aunt who lived in Switzerland kept up an active corre–
spondence with us, even sending us money via Torgsin, the International
Trade Agency. Yet none of us was ever called in by the police. The only
family member to be imprisoned was a wealthy uncle in Mirgorod. I
have no way of explaining it. Perhaps it was becaues we housed some
Cheka officers. They lived in one of our shrunken apartment's rooms.
Mother attended to their medical needs, as well as to their children's.
Thus passed my youth. I graduated from a drama school. I worked
in a semi-legal, bohemian, leftist theater. I must have explored every back
alley in Kiev, Zhitomir and Vinitsky. Then I had third-rate roles in
Vladivostok and Kirov - real theaters. I even fooled around with
decoration. At night I tried my hand at writing. I submitted the
manuscripts to journals. They sent them straight back to me - fortu–
nately.
My last theater job was in Rostov, in the Red Army theater. There I
was inducted into the army; the war had begun. Stalingrad. Donets. A
wound. A hospital in Baku. A second wound, this time in Lublin, in
Poland. Kiev regional hospital. My right hand was paralyzed, the bullet
having pierced the nerve.
