NOW I REACHED the most intense period of my whole creative life. During the week, I attended lectures. I read books years in advance of what was being taught on the official syllabus. In the early evenings I took the steam-tram home and made my own notes. Then, at around eight or nine at night and with some gesticulating and lip-pursing from Madame Zinovieff, I would join Kolya at his flat or at one of the cabarets we favoured. He would recite endless poetry in French, English, Russian and abominable German. I would tell him how a Zeppelin was constructed, or the principle allowing the tank to function, or how electricity is generated. I believe he sometimes paid as much attention to my lectures as I paid to his poetry. I had become a sort of mascot of the New Age for him, but he was always polite and never at any time was he rude and he would never allow anyone to offend me. At
By the time the Summer Vacation came I was ready for a holiday. With Kolya, Hippolyte, a girl who called herself ’Gloria’, after the English fashion (though she was Polish), and a couple of ’poets’, we visited the Summer Gardens and broad quays of the Neva, took the rare steamer up the river, enjoyed picnics on the banks, or lunches at those magnificent wooden establishments on several floors, not unlike Swiss ski-lodges, which catered for the steamer-trade and by now were pleased to welcome any sort of customer.
Empty of the haut-monde, St Petersburg filled up with wounded soldiers and sailors, with nurses on leave from the Front who sought consolation in the arms of healthy civilians (there were all too few of us left). This wealth of femininity even distracted agitators like Lunarcharsky, who became Commissar of Education under Lenin, or Onipko, the notorious anarchist, who had helped spark the abortive 1905 revolution. For obvious reasons these were ineligible for the army. Happily, Kolya had few intimates in this latter group, though the proprietor of
I should make it clear here that I was no hypocrite. I aired my own views frequently and often found others who supported me, particularly amongst the ‘Pan-Slavic’ group. Even those who disagreed seemed to treat me with the best possible humour. If I had not had the lesson of my father, I might have been caught up in their infantile enthusiasm for destruction and change. I drank absinthe in the company of beautiful whores. My compatriots were revolutionaries, vagabonds, poets. They nicknamed me The Professor or The Mad Scientist and bought me more wine and listened to me as few have listened to me since. These same people were to survive the Revolution only at the expense of their humour, their irony, their very souls. They became the grey men of Lenin and his successors. Some died early - Blok and Grin - and did not live to see the destructive consequences of their foolish hopes. Most, like Mandelstam, were to see all their visions decay, all their hope fade, all their courage and generosity become a weapon turned against them to insult and degrade them. This was, indeed, the last year of their Revolution, that year of 1916, for their enthusiasm lay in the dream of Utopia, not in the reality which was to trap me as much as it trapped them. I was lucky to escape. Some (Mayakovski, for instance) escaped only through suicide.
