When the end justifies any means, a poet's desires to tell the truth is suicidal.
In November 1933, Russian poet Osip Mandelstam wrote a poem about Stalin which he then shared with a small of coterie of friends in his Moscow apartment. Among those present for the reading of "The Stalin Epigram" were Boris Pasternak, Anna Ahkmatova, Sergei Petrovich, and Nahdezha Yakovlevna (Osip's wife), among six or so others.
To this mixture of listeners, Robert Littell adds a "Zanaida Zaitseva-Antonova" known to be a "theatre actress" and "poetry-lover"- and suggests that the actress and mistress was the one who turned in a copy of Osip's poem to the secret police. Littell's account of Osip's fall-from-grace is "based on stories he heard directly from Mandelstam's wife, Nadezhda". But Littell does not specify which parts are stories and which parts are stories of possible stories left untold.
My personal guess, based on nothing but a high regard for serendipity, suggests that Mandelstam's actress-mistress may have been Sofia Evgenievna Gollidey, a close friend and lover of poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Marina and Sofia cultivated their friendship in Moscow during the time of the famine, and Marina wrote a number of plays for Sofia. It is unclear whether the plays were performed in Moscow or to what extent Sofia was involved in supporting Marina's writing ambitions.
Marina and Osip ran in similar circles. In fact, by the time she met Sofia, Marina had published a book of poems revealing her past affair with Osip. Later, Marina would do the same for Sofia with the novella Povest' o Sonechke. Some say that Sofia eventually betrayed Marina to the Soviet government. Either Sofia and Zanaida were sisters, or they were two sides of the same treacherous coin.
THE STALIN EPIGRAM as translated by W. S. Merwin
Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.
But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,
the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,
the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.
Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.
One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.
He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.
He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.
THE STALIN EPIGRAM as translated by Scott Horton
We live, not sensing our own country beneath us,
Ten steps away they dissolve, our speeches,
But where enough meet for half-conversation,
The Kremlin hillbilly is our preoccupation.
They’re like slimy worms, his fat fingers,
His words, as solid as weights of measure.
In his cockroach moustaches there’s a hint
Of laughter, while below his top boots gleam.
Round him a mob of thin-necked henchmen,
He pursues the enslavement of the half-men.
One whimpers, another warbles,
A third miaows, but he alone prods and probes.
He forges decree after decree, like horseshoes–
In groins, foreheads, in eyes, and eyebrows.
Wherever an execution’s happening though–
there’s raspberry, and the Ossetian’s giant torso.
Both translations testify, though Merwin gives more credence to translating Mandelstam's images and flurry. Scott Horton is closer to the literal, especially in the last line where the Russian word "malina" directly translates as "raspberry". (I know this because raspberry has long been the favorite fruit of this particular Alina who appreciates the possessiveness of the letter "m" in the Russian word.)
The poem played a role in his own arrest and arrests of son and husbands of Akhmatova, Lev Gumilyov and Nikolay Punin. Anna's own life, of course, took its own dizzying turns. In 1921, Gumilyov was shot by the Bolsheviks, and Anna adopted an unusual itinerant, homeless existence, sleeping on sofas and floors around St Petersburg, unhappily remarrying, finding lovers and discarding them. Anne Applebaum writes:
For many years she lived with the art historian Nikolai Punin and his wife, at first sharing a bed with Punin, then sharing a room with his daughter when he decided he preferred his wife after all. Often ill with tuberculosis and thyroid diseases, she rarely had enough to eat. She suffered through the siege of Leningrad and through the Stalinist terrors that both preceded and followed the war, watching as friends and acquaintances died or disappeared into the camps.
Above all, Akhmatova suffered from the arrest of her son, Lev Gumilyov, who was later to blame her directly for his fate. He believed it was her fame which had led to his imprisonment for more than a decade in the Gulag. At the same time, he believed she had failed to use her connections to get him released, and accused her of relying on his misfortunes to inspire her poetry. At one point, he told her that ‘for you it would have been even better if I had died in the camps’, meaning it would have been better for her poetry. Although Feinstein defends her against charges of hard-heartedness, pointing out that both Lev’s fate and his terrible resentment brought Akhmatova pain, she also quotes Brodsky arguing that Lev’s attacks hurt his mother precisely because there was some truth to them.
It is assumed by many that Nikolai Bukharin tried to help Osip, but eventually, Stalin's obsession with Trotsky (and Bukharin's possible connections to Trotsky) neutralized any ability Bukharin may have had to affect the outcome of Osip's trial.
Ultimately, Bukharin was executed after an interview with Stalin. In his last note to Stalin, Bukharin poses the question which echoes through the Red Terror and the halls of Russian history- "Koba, why do you need me to die?". The question is left unanswered.
MORE EPIGRAMOGRAPHY
Reunited Digital Archive of Osip Mandelstam
Carl R. Proffer discusses "The Attack on Mme Mandelstam" (New York Review of Books)
The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell (Google Books)
Steven Poole reviews Epigram (The Guardian)
Michael Carlson probes the "amguity" (Irresistible Targets)
Joy Neumeyer explores "the women behind Russia's most famous writers" (Moscow Times)
Friendship in a time of terror: Anna and Nahdezha (Creative Conflict Wisdom)