1922), assumed that she belonged to the intelligentsia by virtue of her Jewish origins in combination with her elite upbringing and social success. Describing the communal apartment in which her family, newly arrived in Moscow, lived in the late 1920s before moving to an elite building on Tverskaia, she mentions the apartment’s former owner and his “overripe daughter with straight greasy hair the color of rotten straw and deep-set eyes with colorless eyelashes”; “the proletarian Gurov, who had done well for himself by trading his heavy hammer for a job as a seeing eye of the Soviet security agencies”; the “prosperous chief accountant, Comrade Rubinchik, with his smooth, childless wife”; the “semiresponsible” Party official with his “irresponsible” mother-in-law; the engineer Fridman with his wife and two small children; and finally “the representatives of the Soviet intelligentsia”: Meromskaia’s own family. Meromskaia’s grandparents had been traditional Jews from the Pale of Settlement; her parents had both gone to prerevolutionary gymnasia and then to the Kiev University law school. Under the Soviets, her father (born Abram Mekler) had become a prominent journalist at the Peasant Newspaper and Izvestiya . Her aunt had become a film director and producer; her mother never worked. 47 Being a Soviet intelligent of the 1930s meant being both fully Soviet (committed to the building of socialism) and a true intelligent (committed to the preservation of the cultural canon). One reason Meromskaia ended up living in an elite house was that she lived with Pushkin. That’s right. He was always with me. I always checked my feelings, opinions, and tastes by asking myself: What would he have said, decided, thought, believed? I remember asking my dad when I was about five, “Did they have ice cream in Pushkin’s day?” It was important for me to know whether he had had the opportunity to enjoy it as much as I did. Later I read everything ever written about him. I knew all the houses in Moscow where he had lived or stayed, the places where his friends had lived, and of course the famous church where he was married. When in Leningrad, I never failed to visit his last apartment on the Moika; the site of his duel on the Chernaia Rechka, and the church where his funeral service was held. I saw the city through his eyes. I went to Tsarskoe Selo, where he had attended the lycée. Traveling around Bessarabia, I kept thinking of his “Gypsies.” And then there was Mikhailovskoe and Trigorskoe, where I could wander in the park to my