Blok, who did not have to work for a living before the revolution, was hard up under the Bolsheviks, since he lacked the know-how to “ration hunt.” The Communists treated him sympathetically at first. Annenkov recalled how he, Blok, Bely, Olga Sudeikina, and a few other friends had stayed late at someone’s house in October 1919 and, because there was a curfew in Petrograd then, they decided to spend the night there.
They put Olga in the bed while Blok napped at a table. Toward dawn there was a commanding knock at the door: armed sailors led by the military commandant of Petrograd came to search the apartment in response to a report about “suspicious” guests from the vigilant neighbors of their “building committee of the poor.” (The Bolsheviks created such committees in every Petrograd house.)
“Any strangers here?”
“Yes, as you can see: the poet Alexander Blok is sleeping at the table,” replied the host. “He lives far away and would not have gotten back in time for the curfew.”
“Detail!” The self-important Bolshevik was impressed. “Which Blok, the real one?”
“One hundred percent!”
After a peek at the sleeping poet, the commandant whispered, “To hell with you!” to the host and tiptoed out, leading away the sailors with their clanging weapons. Annenkov thought then that as a young man the Communist must have read Blok’s
When Blok, Bely, and Annenkov left in the morning, a symbolic meeting of the new regime and the Petrograd intelligentsia took place on deserted Nevsky Prospect. They came across a bored militiaman with a rifle over his shoulder, legs apart, writing his name in the snow with his urine. Upon seeing that, Bely shouted, “I don’t know how to write on snow! I need ink, just a little bottle of ink! And a scrap of paper!”
“Move along, citizens, move along,” the militiaman muttered, buttoning his fly.149
Blok used to tell his friends who were making do with lecturing, “I envy you all: you know how to talk, so you lecture someone somewhere. I don’t know how. I can only read from a text.” But it was impossible to live on a writer’s fees in those days. One writer calculated that to survive in Petrograd in 1920, Shakespeare would have had to write three plays a month, and Turgenev’s fees for his novel
The poet worked in its theatrical department, sitting on all kinds of committees and on the editorial board of Vsemirnaya Literatura (World Literature) Publishing House. Here Blok and other intellectuals compiled an enormous list of masterpieces of all times and peoples that had to be retranslated into Russian and published for the proletarian audience. The first series alone was to include fifteen hundred titles of an academic nature with detailed commentary and another five thousand of a more popular kind.
It was Maxim Gorky’s utopian idea, and in the impossible conditions of postrevolutionary Russia, it would have taken a hundred years to complete, but in the meantime, writers could get fed. One of them, André Levinson, later recalled bitterly in exile that their work was the “hopeless and paradoxical task of implanting the West’s spiritual culture on the ruins of Russian life…. We lived in a naive illusion in those years, thinking that Byron and Flaubert reaching the masses even in the guise of the Bolshevik ‘bluff’ would enrich and astonish more than one soul.”151
At meetings of the editorial board of Vsemirnaya Literatura Blok often met with Nikolai Gumilyov, who had returned to Petrograd in 1918 from Paris, where he had been serving in the office of the military attaché of the provisional government overthrown by the Bolsheviks. To the friends who tried to dissuade him from what they considered to be a foolish decision, Gumilyov said, “I fought the Germans for three years and I hunted lion in Africa. But I’ve never seen a Bolshevik. Why shouldn’t I go to Petrograd? I doubt it’s more dangerous than the jungles.”152
Gumilyov behaved provocatively in Bolshevik Petrograd, announcing at every corner that he was a monarchist and crossing himself at every church he passed, which was considered almost a sign of madness in the conditions of official atheism and “red terror.” Just as Gumilyov arrived in Petrograd a Russian writer was complaining to another by letter, “There are patrols in the evenings now—they search people for weapons. The decree says that if they find a gun and take it away and the person resists, he is to be shot on the spot. So where’s the proclaimed abolition of capital punishment? In the past even regicides were first given a trial and only then hanged, but now they do it ‘on the spot.’ They’ve turned everybody into an executioner!”153
