UNDERGROUND WRITER

It is not surprising when revolutionaries are underground members. It's a wonder when writers.

With writers who are concerned with the truth, life has never been simple, never is (and never will be!): one was pestered with slander, another with a duel, one with the rupture of family life, the other with ruin or restless insurmountable poverty, some with a madhouse, some with prison. And with complete well-being, like Leo Tolstoy, your own conscience will scratch your chest even more bitterly from the inside.

But still, to dive underground and not to worry about the world recognizing you, but so that on the contrary - God forbid - this writer's lot is our native, purely Russian, Russian-Soviet. It has now been established that in the last part of his life Radishchev wrote something important both deeply and prudently concealed so deeply that now we will not find and will not know. And Pushkin wittily encrypted the 10th chapter of Onegin, everyone knows this. Less was known how long Chaadaev had been engaged in secret writing: he laid out his manuscript in separate leaves in various books of his large library. This, of course, is not a hiding point for the Lubyanka search: after all, no matter how many books I have, it is always possible to bring in a fair amount of operatives, so that each book can be taken by the ends of the spine and battered with patience (do not hide it in books, friends!). In the 1920s, they were discovered, found, studied, and in the 1930s, finally, prepared for publication by D. S. Shakhovsky - but then Shakhovsky was imprisoned (without return), and Chaadaev's manuscripts are still secretly stored in the Pushkin House - they are not allowed to be printed because of... their reactionary nature! So Chaadaev set a record - already 110 years after his death! - silence of the Russian writer. I have already written, so I have written!

And then times went much freer: Russian writers no longer wrote to the desk, but printed everything they wanted (and only critics and publicists chose Aesopian expressions). And to such an extent did they write freely and freely shake the whole state structure that all those young people grew up from Russian literature, who hated the tsar and the gendarmes, went to the revolution and made it.

But having stepped over the threshold of the revolutions it had engendered, literature quickly came to a halt: it fell not into the glittering celestial world, but under the ceiling and between the closer walls, which were becoming more and more cramped. Soviet writers learned very quickly that not every book can pass. And a dozen years later, they learned that the fee for the book could be a lattice and wire. And again the writers began to hide what they had written, although not of course despairing of seeing their books in print during their lifetime.

Before my arrest, I didn't understand much about it. I was senselessly drawn to literature, not knowing well why I needed it and why literature needed it. He was only tormented by the fact that it was difficult, they said, to find fresh topics for stories. It's scary to think what kind of writer I would have become (and would have been) if I hadn't been imprisoned.

From my arrest, for two years of life in prison and camp, already languishing under the piles of topics, I took it like a breath, understood as everything indisputable that my eyes see: not only will no one publish me, but a single line will cost me a price in my head. Without a doubt, without dividing, I entered the lot of a modern Russian writer, concerned with the truth: one should write only so that all this would not be forgotten, that someday it would become known to descendants. In my lifetime, even the idea of such a dream, such a dream should not be in my chest - to be published.

And - I outlived my idle dream. And in return there was only confidence that my work would not be lost, that it would strike at which heads it was aimed at, and those who were sent by an invisible stream would receive it. I resigned myself to lifelong silence as to the lifelong impossibility of freeing my feet from earthly weight. And ending up in the camp, then in exile, then already rehabilitated, first poems, then plays, then prose, I cherished only one thing: how to keep them secret and myself with them.

Для этого в лагере пришлось мне стихи заучивать наизусть - многие тысячи строк. Для того я придумывал чётки с метрическою системой, а на пересылках наламывал спичек обломками и передвигал. Под конец лагерного срока, поверивши в силу памяти, я стал писать и заучивать диалоги в прозе, маненько - и сплошную прозу. Память вбирала! Шло. Но больше и больше уходило времени на ежемесячное повторение всего объёма заученного - уже неделя в месяц.

Тут началась ссылка и тотчас же в начале ссылки - рак. Осенью 1953 года очень было похоже, что я доживаю последние месяцы. В декабре подтвердили врачи, ссыльные ребята, что жить мне осталось не больше трёх недель.

Грозило погаснуть с моей головой и всё моё лагерное заучивание.

Это был страшный момент моей жизни: смерть на пороге освобождения и гибель всего написанного, всего смысла прожитого до тех пор. По особенностям советской цензуры никому вовне я не мог крикнуть, позвать: приезжайте, возьмите, спасите моё написанное! Да чужого человека и не позовёшь. Друзья - сами по лагерям. Мама - умерла. Жена - вышла за другого; всё же я позвал её проститься, могла б и рукописи забрать, - не приехала.

Эти последние обещанные врачами недели мне не избежать было работать в школе, но вечерами и ночами, бессонными от болей, я торопился мелко-мелко записывать, и скручивал листы по нескольку в трубочки, а трубочки наталкивал в бутылку из-под шампанского. Бутылку я закопал на своём огороде - и под Новый 1954 год поехал умирать в Ташкент.