Manuscripts Don’t Burn

For me this book is also a postscript to Andrei’s memoirs. I was their initiator and, later, typist, editor and nursemaid. I had to do everything as the nursemaid — to make sure the manuscript survived and became a book and reached its readers — and to tell that story alone would call for another volume of memoirs or perhaps a mystery book; but the time for that has not come.

Andryusha worked on his memoirs in Gorky, periodically rewriting sections. Not because of the author’s severity or the grumblings of his first reader, first editor and first typist (all of them me) — no! Because of another’s will and another’s hand. Sections kept vanishing. Once from the apartment in Moscow; once stolen along with his bag at the dental clinic in Gorky; once from our parked car, which had been broken into, with Andrei knocked out by some drug. Each time he rewrote his book. Each time there was something new — sometimes better written, sometimes not, sometimes on a different subject.

The day after his bag was stolen at the dental clinic, Andrei met me at the train station. He looked haggard, as if he were suffering from insomnia or prolonged illness. His lips were trembling and his voice broke: “Lusia, they stole it.” He spoke with acute pain.

When the bag was stolen from our car, Andrei walked from the vehicle toward me. His expression was that of a man who had just learned of the death of someone close to him. But after a few days he would sit down at his desk again. Andrei has a talent for finishing what he starts.

What I had to do was to develop a talent “to save,” and I developed it, God knows. I tried to make sure that “manuscripts don’t burn,” to borrow a phrase from Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita — and to make sure that Andrei’s writing would not rot in the cellars of Lubyanka or some other prison.

On Dec. 8, 1982, I went to Moscow. I was searched on the train, which was shunted onto a siding far beyond the Moscow station. They took away a chunk of his manuscript — burned again!

What they confiscated on the train was the fourth loss. There were others to come. So don’t be surprised that I call myself a talent. The book will come. It already exists.