On Chicherin

AT MY AGE receding memory yields some strange surprises. I suddenly remember the only poem I knew by heart sixty years ago, namely a stanza from Beniowski: “Who hasn’t felt You in a terror of nature / on a great steppe or on Golgotha / Or amid the columns that the moon and stars’ fortune / have over them instead of a roof / Or the smell of youth’s emotions . . . / or picking a daisy . . .” and on until . . . “He is not just god of worms / and the creation that crawls / . . . He is a feather from the flame of fierce lightning flashes and not the bridle of wild horses / . . . He is often called to great acts / not to vain tears on the church’s threshold / Before him I fall on my knees, he is God.”1

I remember declaiming this poem to Merezhkovsky on a walk in the woods near Mordy. Merezhkovsky, who naturally didn’t understand Polish, said only with a pretty indifferent look on his face, “Well yes, that’s a typical Nietzschean poem!”

Where does my love of this poem come from? After all, never in all my life was I a Nietzschean, and my basic instinct is more that of a coward. I was thrilled by the amalgam of metaphor with a burst of brilliant inspiration. I can’t refrain from telling a story here I know only from family confessions and from the Soviet encyclopedia.

I’ve written a hundred times that Chicherin, Lenin’s commissar for foreign affairs for many years, was a relative of mine and spent several months in 1905 at my grandmother’s in Kraków. And that was probably not the first time. The only person Chicherin wanted to see apart from my grandmother was Professor Zdziechowski. I think they were connected only by an apocalyptic foreboding of the near future. I remember that he wrote in a heartrending letter to Zdziechowski that Russia would be destroyed, that she would destroy herself, and said this sentence in three languages simultaneously: “It seemed to me,” Chicherin confessed after the first Japanese attack on the Russian fleet, “that those Japanese torpedoes cut straight through my body. Our situation is terrible, terrible . . . la Russie deviendra un désert, le peuple russe wird aussterben müssen. . . .” This Chicherin, “a sick man,” as Zdziechowski spoke of him, spent evenings reading Albert Vandal’s Napoléon et Alexandre to my grandmother.

I found the following information on Chicherin’s career in an encyclopedia published in Communist Poland: “First an official of the czarist ministry of foreign affairs, he took part in revolutionary activity in the French and English workers’ movement from 1904 on. For twelve years (1918–1930) he occupied the position, first of deputy commissar, then of people’s commissar for foreign affairs of the USSR. He signed among others the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Soviet accord with Germany at Rapallo, with Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan. At the conference in Genoa he presented for the first time the principles of Soviet Russia’s foreign policy, based on the idea of peaceful coexistence, and a program for disarmament.” I need this text cited from the encyclopedia to reflect on the figure of Chicherin. A fiery Russian patriot in 1905—to which the letter to Zdziechowski testifies—then a socialist internationalist, and finally a Communist (Bolshevik)—Lenin’s friend and foreign minister. It was Chicherin who, deputizing for Trotsky, signed the Brest treaty (ni mir, ni voina—as the treaty was called—neither peace nor war). And when he returned from Brest (he told my uncle Meyendorff this himself, with a certain masochistic humor, I imagine), there were two German officers with pistols standing on the running boards of his car as it passed through Pskov, for the whole street was chanting: “Svoloch, svoloch.” (Scum, scum.) And another time, when my uncle Meyendorff went to Chicherin as foreign minister to ask him to permit a relative of both of theirs to travel outside the country, Chicherin agreed to it very unwillingly. During their conversation a sailor came into his office, eating a cucumber. My uncle fell silent, and said after a moment, “Well, get him to leave,” but Chicherin replied, “Oh no, he has the right to come and go everywhere, he has to check up on us. Tu n’as pas idée comme il est amusant, c’est tout à fait un type de Sardou.”

At the time when I was still in Saint Petersburg, Meyendorff spoke of Chicherin very reluctantly. When I started asking him, wanting to know more, I said, “But surely that man who lived through such a revolution has to be a man of ideas.” My uncle responded laconically but with passion, “He wasn’t about ideas at all, he’s a coward and one day he’ll hide out behind this sofa of mine. He simply knew that it had to come to a conflict between the great Russian masses and the ice-thin layer of the ruling class. Il a préferé se mettre du côté des masses.

Meyendorff saw Chicherin again at the moment when the Soviet government was moving to Moscow. He told him then that the Bolsheviks had destroyed Russia, and Chicherin replied, “We started a revolution across Europe, that’s all we wanted.”

One of my aunts, very arrogant and also very protective of her possessions, deposited her jewels in the safe of some bank a few months before the revolution. Of course the revolution wiped it all out, but she in her naivete thought that since her husband’s relative was a minister, she would be able to retrieve her jewels through him. After great difficulty she got through to him. Naturally Minister Chicherin had no intention of saving her jewels, and she, bawling him out, finished by saying: “La seule chose qui me reste c’est de demander à Dieu qu’il vous rende la raison.” To which Chicherin answered in his exquisite French burr: “Dieu? Je le considère comme non-existant!

And one more, essential detail: When Chicherin was in Poland, as I’ve described, he as a polyglot immediately began learning Polish and developed a passion for Polish poetry. “Polish poets,” he wrote to Zdziechowski, “are a real revelation to me, I read your book in one breath. The quotations from Słowacki and Krasiński are marvelous beyond belief (eto do bezumia chudno), that gigantic Schwung, that power of infinity, the splendor of images, the combination of joy and melancholy, the incomparable richness of color, it’s embarrassing to compare them to Shelley, who’s dry and pedantic like all English aesthetes.” Chicherin compared the Polish messianists to the poetry of the fin de siècle, with Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. And when we sent our first ambassador to the Soviet Union, Chicherin as foreign minister put on a dinner in honor of the newly arrived ambassador and began to recite Słowacki to him during dinner. That poor ambassador didn’t even know whose poetry it was.

Years later that same Chicherin met my dear friend Weissberg-Cybulski,2 friend to Koestler and Einstein. As a passionate Communist he went to Kharkov when the Russians put him at the head of a big factory. He told us that he saw through the window people literally starving to death at the moment when the pages of Izvestia and Pravda showed the happy faces of healthy, glorious workers. Not long after that, after being subjected to atrocious torture in Moscow, he was sent to the Gulag, but Stalin after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact kindly returned him, as a gift to Hitler. Weissberg was sent directly to the Kraków Ghetto, where his future wife, a Pole, later rescued him. After the war he wrote a famous book about the Great Purge, Conspiracy of Silence.

So while he was still in Moscow, Weissberg-Cybulski met Chicherin at some Austrian’s house, a freestanding house (osobniak) that had been granted him for his services to the Soviets. He saw him worn down, in rags, and inquired, “Why don’t you apply to an old-age home for Soviet dignitaries?” Chicherin replied, “Nichevo nie khochu imet' obshchevo s etoi svolochiu.” (I don’t want to have anything to do with that scum.)

What do a patriot of 1905, a powerful Soviet commissar, and a friend of Lenin have in common with the clochard whom Weissberg met? I think that that man, who had been struck dumb by Słowacki, because he felt an extraordinary poetic passion in him, had to have been similarly struck dumb by the revolution. I remember Blok’s famous poem, written in a period when he too had succumbed to the revolution. That widely known work, The Twelve, ended with a march of revolutionary workers, and among them “v belom venchike iz roz / shol Iisus Christos” (in a white crown of roses / went Jesus Christ). Blok explained at that time that if we thrill to the dissonances of modern music and other works of art, we must also accept the dissonances of reality. Blok very quickly lost all his illusions and never wanted to recite that poem at his poetry evenings. Naturally the paths of those two people, Chicherin and Blok, had to be different, but I wonder why Chicherin remained so long inside the Soviet machine. Only in 1931, not agreeing with Stalin’s views on international affairs, did he offer his resignation. He dodged a death sentence, was forgotten. He died alone and impoverished. Only his old cook did not abandon him.

Fragment published as “Page from a Diary,”

in Zeszyty historyczne 70, Paris

1984

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