In a world always hostile to fresh voices, one needs the encouragement
of a friendly eye or ear, good-humored banter, and lively debate.
To see a far-off speck of light and walk toward it alone
is far harder without companions and friends.
~ Nadezhda Mandelstam ~
The value of a book like this—along with her first memoir, Hope Against Hope—is truly, ultimately beyond words. Yet, so fortunate are we, words still do their work, and the work behind Nadezhda Mandelstam is immense. It wasn’t really until the closing chapter of Hope Abandoned that I came to appreciate just how incredible it is that she was able to write and publish so much of her life in these memoirs, not to mention the poems and writings of her husband, Osip Mandelstam.
In the introduction to Hope Against Hope, the biographer Clarence Brown described Nadezhda Mandelstam as “a vinegary, Brechtian, steel-hard woman of great intelligence, limitless courage, no illusions, permanent convictions and a wild sense of the absurdity of life.” That description still gives me chills to read. Who on earth would not want to hear what she has to say? Who would not want to sit down with her at a table with a coffee or a beer and hear her stories? I have not read Alan Jacobs’s recent book, Breaking Bread with the Dead, but I hope that it contains deep elements of this, of the privilege of pulling a person from the past off the shelf, traveling around the country with her and regularly sitting down with this soul who “went before you”—not to mention with someone so astounding, with one who lived so hard and finished so well. That is, anyway, what the thought of “breaking bread with the dead” evokes for me. And that is often how I felt in reading Hope Abandoned.
In a nutshell that does little justice to her full life, Nadezhda Mandelstam was the primary keeper of her husband’s poetry, both during his life and, especially, after his second arrest and subsequent death in a labor camp in Vladivostok in 1938. The poems were sometimes written on scattered pieces of paper, but more often they were dictated to Nadezhda and transcribed by her. And what’s more, some of these poems survived for long stretches only through memorization, as she and Osip were forced to move around the Soviet Union as internal exiles, from Moscow to Cherdyn to Voronezh, constantly fearing arrest and the confiscation of all their work. Nadezhda believed (in hindsight, at least) that it was her pre-ordained task in life, through no shortage of pain and trial, to preserve and share that poetry, in the hopes of stirring “numbed and dormant spirits” to life.
It should always be borne in mind by our friends in distant parts that this was true of every one of us, and of every scrap of paper we managed to save. The survival of each single article or manuscript is the result of a miracle. I am very conscious of the fact that in certain conditions it is more painful to live on in order to preserve such things than it is to die, but, as is well known, we are not hedonists, and were not created merely for our own happiness or pleasure. . . .”
There is no end to things that could be said about someone so single-minded and unflagging. In reading Nadezhda Mandelstam, everything she says convicts your attention, but not for the sake of her story or her generation alone. On any page or corner you turn, you might find yourself face to face with your own time, to find that a woman speaking of 1920’s or 1960’s Russia could just as easily be speaking of you, wherever you are in 2023. And I think she believed this as well, not with the arrogance of some self-described sage or scholar, but with the humility of one who trusted history to be meaningful, even if, in the end, it was nearly impossible to find hope anywhere.
Over and over, she has things to say to us today, things that she believed with a depth of experience that few of us could ever appreciate. She believed in a deep and overlooked civic courage, but saw that cowardice disguised as bravery was everywhere. She believed that nationalism was a sign of sickness and a distorted way to seek healing.
She believed that to renounce people was to give up on the gift of life; that a great temptation of the 20th century was for people “to believe their commissars [i.e., cultural authorities] instead of their grandmothers”; that the first thing to go is conversation (though “talkers” always remain), followed closely by any real quality of personality; that only fools sing praises to the strong; that one could just as easily—more easily—put a modern gloss on memory as to see and remember a thing clearly for what it was; that some buckwheat and a tin of tushonka laid out on a suitcase could, for the heart that refuses to curse fate, be called a banquet.
And of course, so central to her story, she believed, with her husband, that poetry was opposed, in its very essence, to all that she saw around her, to all those who actively or passively gave way.
Poetry did not agree with them at all. Poetry brings out the reader’s personality, deepens it, and makes him an accomplice in the poet’s cause—something quite impossible for men who control the destinies of whole peoples. The two things are mutually exclusive.
That mutual exclusivity is what made poetry such a dangerous thing in the Soviet Union. “There’s no place where more people are killed for it,” Osip repeatedly said. That’s because true poetry, the Mandelstam’s believed, had an ingrained “healing power,” that it produced and was itself a part of a vibrancy of life, the opposite of which was “unanimity”:
Lovers of strong-man regimes fail to realize that the stability and efficiency of a society stands not in direct but in inverse proportion to the increase in the use of dictatorial powers, and that “unanimity” is a sign of decay, not of vitality. […]
Terror works only when when people are impressed by the very idea of it; bribes can be placed only in outstretched palms, and “unanimity,” by the same token, is possible only when people are ready to abandon independence of thought in order to enjoy the feeling of being surrounded by the like-minded. Such types do not appear en masse in a single day. A long period of preparation is needed.
At the heart of the matter lies a mode—a need and a practice—of understanding. And it is a mode of understanding that is deeply, intrinsically open to… well, open to understanding. It is a language trying to breathe new life back into itself. Language, as much as it works in the service of knowledge and communication, can also—sometimes through natural stagnation, sometimes through force—become a barrier to any genuine thought. An increasingly dead and superficial use of words and phrases will inevitably lend “an air of consummate shallowness to knowledge that might otherwise have been living and tangible.”
Our ordinary everyday speech consists to a very large extent of set phrases, hackneyed combinations of words which stand in the way of any new thought struggling to burst forth. In poetry words have to penetrate the fog of ready-made, congealed speech in order to convey poetic ideas as effectively as possible. Such words gain strength in the very process of overcoming the obstacles, as they thrust up through the mounds of debris under which they are buried, emerging in fresh combinations to bring out whatever ideas are seeking expression.
The poet is one who seeks to convey that inchoate expression. And, whether poet or reader, it matters that you are open to what you seek, even if you don’t know precisely what that is. In fact, it is exactly the point that you don’t know in advance. What matters here, you might say, is that an impatience with poetry—with poetic understanding, poetic depth or direction—is an impatience with that-which-you-don’t-understand. Can you see where this is going?
All over Soviet Russia, the Mandelstam’s encountered others who seemed incapable of seeing or hearing other people. Language—written or otherwise—pervades life, and a person who is willing to use words only for what he already wants or needs, whether for safety or for power, will be, at best, dangerously close to seeing and using people in the same way. Such a person will only ever be protected morally by the culture around them. If the culture fails, it is almost certain that they, too, will fail.
Nadezhda Mandelstam saw this failure—of culture, of language, of character—quite literally everywhere, even leading to Osip’s death. And yet, while being utterly critical, she also managed to sympathize and to refrain from throwing stones. How could anyone act, how could anyone “do the right thing,” knowing what it would cost? She asks this, sometimes explicitly but always implicitly, of herself as well as others: “How could we go on living and laughing knowing all the time what end awaited us?”
Yet she does go on, living and laughing. She and Osip (referred to as “M.”) had their share of suffering, and about this she always speaks plainly.
M.’s horror of the cold and his craving for warmth and sun were a consequence of the years of hunger and malnutrition. In relatively good years, when we had enough food, he did not mind the cold at all, so that by the end he was quite reconciled to it—only to undergo, before his death, cold and hunger more than sufficient for a whole lifetime. I know myself how cold you feel when you are hungry—though I experienced it not in the camps but as a “free” Soviet citizen. The hunger suffered in a camp is unimaginable—all the sons of bitches who still block up their ears and close their eyes should know this.
That direct, “vinegary” character is peppered across her memoirs, and it can’t help sending a chill down your spine, but also, often, putting a smile on your face, if only for the candidness. But even with a smile, any reader knows that this is nothing if not serious business.
If any brave young fellow with no experience of these things feels inclined to laugh at me, I invite him back into the age we lived through, and I guarantee that he will need to taste only a hundredth part of what we endured to wake up in the night in a cold sweat, ready to do anything to save his skin the next morning.
Not once, however, not even in moments like these that speak of cold and hunger and pain, do I recall her even appearing to complain about the life they lived. Justified though she surely would be, and despite the title of the second memoir, it does not appear that she ever abandoned hope.
And this is another feature of her writing: a capacity for hard-boiled lament. It may be that ever-present tinge of hope in her perseverance, or it may be her matter-of-fact voice, or it may be that she rarely, if ever, offers a word of sorrow for herself apart from what it meant for those around her. Of course, it is all of these things and more, and I am happy to call the quality of her voice a mysterious thing. But it should catch your notice that, when you are done with these memoirs, you have just read over a thousand pages about the Soviet Union in the first half of the 20th century, a dead-honest account of life in one of the harshest regimes in human history, and yet you feel that you have not read one sentence that could be called a complaint. Lament, yes. But complaint is nowhere to be found.
In the early 1960’s, after finally getting Osip’s poems published in the United States, Nadezhda says that she was at last able to let go of her remaining fears.
Now [M.’s poetry] is indestructible, and I therefore feel totally and absolutely free, and I can breathe easily (despite the lack of air). How many people will understand what joy it is to breathe freely just once before you die?
How many of us will ever know what it’s like to live our whole lives holding our breath? Nadezhda Mandelstam spent nearly her entire life trying to speak, waiting for that moment when she could breath a sigh of relief. The terrible irony is that a woman who could not speak without risking her life somehow managed to speak more clearly and truthfully than most of us could ever hope to.
The most astonishing thing is that there are still a few people with just enough life in them to try making their voices heard, but only through an immense volume of water, from the bottom of the ocean, as it were. Among them I count myself—and I know, if anybody does, what superhuman efforts are needed just to preserve a handful of manuscripts. Yet I could not have departed this life without telling something about the blithe soul who once lived at my side, never letting me lose heart; about poetry and people, the living and the dead; about stopiatnitsas like myself, most of whom go on carefully hiding their past. . . . I say there can be no limit: we must go on talking of these things, over and over again, until every justice and every tear is accounted for, until the reasons for what happened (and still happens) are made plain to see.
In a 1974 review of Hope Abandoned, Robert Altar spends a good deal of time differentiating between Osip’s and Nadezhda’s relationship to Christianity, Nadezhda’s having gone on to become much more explicit, if still quite unique. He does this, he says, too address the problem it makes for the historian’s proper understanding of Osip. I think he is probably (mostly) right about this difference, and that it is a difference that Nadezhda herself was well aware of. But, perhaps too often, people have tended to read Nadezhda as a means of getting to her husband. Given the way she writes about her own life and of Osip’s, this is a perfectly understandable thing, and one for which she would take little offense.
She saw her life as inextricably bound to Osip’s. And she knew that behind her experience in life, there was a voice that needed to be heard. Only when she was able to share Osip’s work, to ensure that his death was not his end, could she find rest. Would that any of us knew a fraction of that self-sacrifice.
I am, however, very glad that, not only did Nadezhda live to preserve her husband’s poetry and legacy, but that in the process she was, and is, able to present her own life and legacy as well. Truly, for Osip or for Nadezhda, there is no way of understanding or hearing one without the other.
As Robert Altar put it in his review, “It is a miracle of fortunate coincidence that so extraordinary a poet should have had as a wife so extraordinary a witness.”
Well, amen.
