Akhmatova was visiting the Mandelstams in Moscow in May 1934 when the secret police burst into the flat. 'The search went on all night', she wrote in a memoir about Mandelstam. 'They were looking for poetry, and walked across manuscripts that had been thrown out of the trunk. We all sat in one room. It was very quiet. On the other side of the wall, in Kirsanov's flat, a ukulele was playing… They took him away at seven in the morning.'121 During his interrogations in the Lubianka, Mandelstam made no attempt to conceal his Stalin poem (he even wrote it out for his torturers) - for which he might well have expected to be sent straight to the gulags in Siberia. Stalin's resolution, however, was to 'isolate but preserve': at this stage, the poet was more dangerous to him dead than alive.122 The Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin had intervened on Mandelstam's behalf, warning Stalin that 'poets are always right, history is on their side'.123 And Pasternak, though obviously careful not to compromise himself, had done his best to defend Mandelstam when Stalin called him at home on the telephone.124
The Mandelstams were exiled to Voronezh, 400 kilometres south of Moscow, returning to the Moscow region (but still barred from the capital itself) in 1937. Later that autumn, without a place to live, they visited Akhmatova in Leningrad, sleeping on the divan in her room at the Fountain House. During this last visit Akhmatova wrote a poem for Osip Mandelstam, the person whom she thought of almost as her twin. It was about the city they both loved:
Not like a European capital With the first prize for beauty -
But like stifling exile to the Yenisei,
Like a transfer to Chita,
To Ishim, to waterless Irghiz,
To renowned Atbasar,
To the outpost Svobodny,
To the corpse stench of rotting bunks -
So this city seemed to me
On that midnight, pale blue -
This city, celebrated by the first poet,
By us sinners and by you.125
Six months later Mandelstam was re-arrested and sentenced to five years' penal labour in Kolyma, eastern Siberia - in effect a death sentence in view of his poor health. On his way there he passed the Yenisei river, the towns of Chita and Svobodny, and ended up in a camp near Vladivostok, where he died of a heart attack on 26 December 1938.
In her memoir about Mandelstam, Akhmatova recalls the final time she saw her friend, stripped of everything, on the eve of his arrest: 'For me he is not only a great poet but a great human being who, when he found out (probably from Nadya) how bad it was for me in the House on the Fontanka, told me when he was saying goodbye at the Moscow train station in Leningrad: "Annushka" [which he had never used before], always remember that my house - is yours." '126
Mandelstam's seditious poem also played a role in the arrest of Lev Gumilev, Akhmatova's son, in 1935. Since the death of his father, in 1921, Lev had lived with relatives in the town of Bezhetsk, 250 kilometres north of Moscow, but in 1929 he moved into the Punin apartment at the Fountain House and, after several applications (all turned down on account of his 'social origins'), he was finally enrolled, in 1934, as a history student at Leningrad University. One spring evening at the Fountain House Lev recited the Mandelstam poem, which by that time he, like many people, knew by heart. But among his student friends that night was an informant of the NKVD, who came to arrest him, along with Punin, in October 1935. Akhmatova was driven to a frenzy. She rushed to Moscow and, with the help of Pasternak, who wrote personally to Stalin, secured lev's release. It
was not the first time, nor the last, that Lev would be arrested. He had never been involved in anti-Soviet agitation. Indeed, his sole crime was to be the son of Gumilev and Akhmatova; if he was arrested it was only as a hostage to secure his mother's acquiescence to the Soviet regime. The mere fact of her close relationship with Mandelstam was enough to make the authorities suspicious of her.
