members freshly liberated from “tonguelessness.” In Samoilov’s version of Mandelstam’s immersion in the “rootedness and the sound of Great Russian speech, slightly impoverished by intelligentsia conventions,” Semyon stood for language as both life and truth. “Semyon’s wisdom came not from reading but from all the experiences that had accumulated in popular speech. Sometimes I felt that he had no thoughts of his own, just clichés for all occasions. But now I understand that we also speak in clichés, except that we quote inaccurately and haphazardly. Our signs may be individualized but they are pale as speech acts. The people swim in the element of speech, washing their thoughts in it. We use speech to rinse our mouths.” 106 Sharing duties with Semyon was an immaculate culmination of Babel’s and Bagritsky’s first loves. During the Great Patriotic War, the Jewish Revolution against Jewishness seemed to achieve—finally—a perfect fusion of true internationalism and rooted Russianness, knowledge and language, mind and body. Samoilov and Semyon were fighting shoulder to shoulder “on behalf of Russia,” the world’s savior. Samoilov the poet was Semyon’s true heir. “Semyon . . . belonged to the Russian folk culture, which has now faded away almost completely along with the disappearance of its carriers, the peasants. This culture lived for many centuries and became an inherent part of the national culture, having dissolved into the geniuses of the nineteenth century, above all Pushkin.” 107 Samoilov’s fulfillment was platonic, fraternal, and mostly verbal. Margarita Aliger’s passion was a direct—and self-consciously female—response to Babel’s “First Love,” “First Goose,” and “First Fee.” Her long poem “Your Victory” (1945–46) is the story of an all-conquering love between a beautiful Jewish girl from “Russia’s southern coast,” who “escaped the prison of warm rooms and favorite books,” and a “savage, fearless, and obstinate” boy from a Cossack village, who “stole watermelons and teased girls.” They both belonged to the generation conceived by the revolution, raised to the sounds of the “Internationale,” and tempered by the First Five Year Plan—a generation that “will never grow old” and “will never learn how to save money or keep goods under lock and key.” They shared hopes, friends, and their faith; they got married in Turkmenistan, where she was a Komsomol official; and they moved to Moscow, where they received a new apartment with “two rooms, a balcony, a hallway.” They were in love, but they had different “characters” and different “souls,” and their last and decisive revolutionary battle was the one for mutual discovery, recognition, and acceptance. Or rather, it was her personal battle to learn how to “live in dignity” with someone as “huge, frightening, good,