[1] Mandelstam read the poem only to a few friends, including Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova.
Nikolai Bukharin visited Yagoda to intercede for Mandelstam, unaware of the nature of his "offense".
According to Mandelstam's widow Nadezhda: "Yagoda liked M.'s poem so much that he even learned it by heart – he recited it to Bukharin – but he would not have hesitated to destroy the whole of literature, past, present and future, if he had thought it to his advantage.
His thick fingers are bulky and fat like live-baits, And his accurate words are as heavy as weights.
He is forging his rules and decrees like horseshoes – Into groins, into foreheads, in eyes, and eyebrows.