THE MANDELSTAMS

1. MRS. MANDELSTAM

"Of the eighty-one years of her life, Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980) spent nineteen as the wife of Russia's greatest poet in this century, and forty-two as his widow. The rest was childhood and youth. In educated circles, especially among the literati, being the widow of a great man is enough to provide an identity. This is especially so in Russia, where in the thirties and in the forties the regime was producing writers' widows with such efficiency that in the middle of the sixties there were enough of them around to organize a trade union" (Joseph Brodsky). Hope Against Hope is a memoir of the nineteen years Nadezhda Mandelstam spent with her husband. She began writing the book when she was sixty-five years old, and had never published anything before then. For most of their lives, Akhmatova liked to say, Russia had reverted to the "pre-Gutenberg era": the most important texts–Mandelstam's and Akhmatova's poems, for example, were committed to memory rather than to print. Nadezhda Mandelstam's principal mission was to save her husbands poems from oblivion by memorizing them.

Akhmatova was the closest friend of the Mandelstams, and during the war years Alhmatova literally saved her friend's life by smuggling her into Tashkent, where some of the writers had been evacuated, and by sharing the daily rations with her. Fortunately, as Brodsky remembers, Mrs. Mandelstam's caloric needs were minimal: "For decades this woman was on the run, darting through the back waters and provincial towns of the big empire, settling down in a new place only to take off at the first sign of danger. The status of a non-person gradually became her second nature. She was a small woman, of slim build, and with the passage of years she shriveled more and more, as though trying to turn herself into something weightless, something easily pocketed in the moment of flight. Similarly, she had no possessions: no furniture, no art objects, no library. The books, even foreign books, never stayed in her hands for long: after being read or glanced through they would be passed on to someone else–the way it ought to be with books. In the years of her utmost affluence, at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, the most expensive item in her one-room apartment on the outskirts of Moscow was a cuckoo clock on the kitchen wall. A thief would have been disillusioned here; so would those with a search warrant."

In old age Mrs. Mandelstam was revered by intellectuals in Russia and the West, and many of them made pilgrimages to her tiny apartment, as Bruce Chatwin did. But her second volume of memoirs, about the period after her husband's death, offended some of the Russian dissidents: "She shat on our entire generation," one of them complained. "She was terribly opinionated, categorical, cranky, disagreeable, idiosyncratic; many of her ideas were half-baked or developed on the basis of hearsay. In short, there was a great deal of one-upwomanship in her, which is not surprising given the size of the figures she was reckoning with in reality and later in imagination. In the end, her intolerance drove a lot of people away, but that was quite all right with her, because she was getting tired of adulation... All she wanted was to die in her bed, and, in a way, she looked forward to dying, because 'up there I'll again be with Osip.' 'No,' replied Akhmatova upon hearing this. 'You've got it all wrong. Up there it's now me who is going to be with Osip'" (Brodsky).

2. THE POET AS ORPHAN OF HIS EPOCH

She had met her husband in 1919, when when he was twenty-eight and she twenty years old, and the Bolshevik regime was lurching into its first terrorist phase. Someone had tried to assassinate Lenin, and the Cheka (the secret police, later the KGB) was busy not only rounding up the usual suspects but executing them. One evening the poet was sitting in a cafe and there saw the notorious terrorist politician Blumkin drunkenly copying the names of men and women to be executed onto blank forms already signed by the secret police. Mandelstam suddenly attacked the man, seized the lists and tore them to pieces, then ran out and disappeared. On this occasion he was saved from death by the intervention of Trotsky's sister. But from this time on he was a marked man: "There is scarcely one of his major poems or prose fantasies from which there is absent either a scrupulous intimation of death or a reference, often secret and amused, to the clandestine wonder of another day of life" (George Steiner).

Like Akhmatova, Mandelstam was an Acmeist poet. The title of his first collection, Stone (1913), indicates his interest in craftsmanship and architecture. "Mandelstam's earliest poetry," Clarence Brown has suggested, "is marked by an extraordinarily low temperature and a lack of movement that sometimes amounts to a virtual stasis. It is characterized by a quietude of manner, whiteness of color, elebance of form. The emotions are chaste, and there is a solemn ceremoniousness in the tones and attitudes of the speaker of the poems, whose presence is seldom felt. He was a master at describing absence, emptiness, vacancy, silence."

But unlike her he became a modernist poet: that is why his poetry is more difficult than hers to translate. In an essay on Dante, Mandelstam arrived at the view that "poetic material is not referential but generated by the poem's restless exploration of its own patterns, image begetting image through the complicating reinforcements of multiple association and sound. Poetry is of course made out of human experience in this world, but it achieves its 'monstrously condensed reality' through its freedom to follow its own uncannily non-discursive, asyntactical logic of images and sounds" (Robert Alter). Mandelstam's poetry relies on a complex pattern of echoes, correspondences, and allusions: there are closely knit harmonies within the particular poem and references to a poetic tradition that extends back to the ancient Mediterranean world (Greek, Roman, and Hebrew). This double orchestration is almost impossible to capture in translation.

"One of his figures for poetry is of a swarm of Chines junks moving about in various directions on a river. As the junks continue to move this way and that, it is pointless even to try to re-establish the thought's hectic itinerary from one to another. Poetry written in the spirit of this image is alive with a sense of daring enterprise and constant, unfailing amazement. He [now] put the very highest estimate on surprise as a quality of art in general" (Brown). This increase in kinetic energy, along with the emphasis on surprise and metaphoric transformations, reminds us of Apollinaire. Mandelstam had become a modernist.

Another issue in Mandelstam's work is his Jewish identity. "Unlike Boris Paternak, who was born Jewish but raised in a thoroughly Russian cultural milieu, or Isaak Babel [the master of the short story], who grew up steeped in Jewish cultural and literary life, Mandelstam was brought up between cultuers by parents who abandoned the past without mastering the new world that was to take its place" (Claire Cavanagh). At first Judaism seemed to Mandelstam to be a chaotic and irrelevant tangle of traditions, but he eventually came to see himself as a wandering Jewish poet, "custodian of Mediterranean crimsons and blues and golds in the bleakness of a northern landscape and a harsh time" (Alter). Judaism becomes for him an ancient aristocratic lineage.

But by the 1930s, the period of his exile in Voronezh, Mandelstam's subject became the existential horror of life in the Stalinist universe. Brodsky comments on the increasing density and acceleration of his verse in this period: "Its sublime, meditative, caesuraed flow changed into a swift, abrupt, patterning movement. His became a poetry of high velocity and exposed nerves, sometimes cryptic, with numerous leaps over the self-evident with somewhat abbreviated syntax–not a bardlike but a birdlike song. It was the immense intensity of lyricism in Mandelstam's poetry which set him apart from his contemporaries and made him an orphan of his epoch." So perhaps it's fair to say that while Akhmatova's poetry became increasingly public in its orientation, Mandelstam's became increasingly private and hermetic.

3. THE STALIN POEM

But there was one great exception, one "political" poem: the powerful poem about Stalin (composed in November 1933) that triggered Mandelstam's arrest and eventually his death:

We live, deaf to the land beneath us,

Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

But where there's so much as half a conversation

The Kremlin's mountaineer will get his mention.

[Original version: All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer

The murderer and peasant-slayer]

His fingers are fat as grubs

And the words, like lead weights, fall from his lips,

His cockroach whiskers leer

And his boot tops gleam.

Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders–

Fawning half-men for him to play with.

They whinny, purr or whine

As he prates and points a finger,

One by one forging his laws, to be flung

Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.

And every killing is a treat

For the broad-chested Ossete.

This poem is not hermetic or difficult at all: its meaning is very clear. The tyrant corrupts human speech, which either becomes a language of death or of bestial fawning and flattery. At the beginning of the Second World War, in "Courage," Akhmatova would promise that the poets would preserve the purity of the word, of the Russian language, from defilement by the Nazi invader. But in his Stalin poem Mandelstam was describing the corruption of langauge under the monstrous regime of Stalin. "There is a compelling logic in his representation of Stalin in the fatal poem as a kind of mythic antitype to poetry, the implacable issuer of 'words like measures of weight' which kill, who arrogates all language to his own homicidal purposes and surrounds himself with fawning retainers that can only grunt and squeal like beasts" (Alter).

4. TOTALITARIANISM

Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope is, among other things, a commentary on the Stalin poem, on the nature of a regime that corrupted terrorized every aspect of Russian society. It belongs to the classic literature on totalitarianism, along with the great books by George Orwell, Czeslaw Milosz, Hannah Arendt, and Franz Neumann. One of the early descriptions of the phenomenon of totalitarianism came from the American historian Carlton J. Hayes in 1940: "Wherever this kind of dictatorship has triumphed, it has been the achievement not of a deliberative majority but of an active minority, a result of pressure politics; and in each instance it has followed something like a national cataclysm. Behind a mask of plebiscites, popular elections, and occasional assemblings of a so-called parliament–which listens and applauds but doesn't really parley–the government actually functions through and with a single political party which comprises a small minority of the nation, which is more or less hand-picked, severely disciplined, and equipped with a monopoly of the means of influencing public opinion and enforcing the will of the dictator. The exalting of might and force not as means but as ends in themselves involves the repudiation of the whole Western tradition..."

This is the tradition that Mandelstam had embodied and celebrated in his densely allusive poetry. His wife showed the consequences, in everyday life, of the total politicization of society by the devices of the monopolistic party and the secret police. The book is an account of life on the run for two people who existed, as "non-persons," in various degrees of administrative limbo as from 1934 to 1938, the years of Stalin's terror. "Hundreds of thousands of thousands of ex-human beings were in motion across Russua, refused residence permits, refused residence without permits, barred from work, condmened as parasitic wreckers if they did not work, cut off from normal human encounter by the leprosy of unstated crimes" (George Steiner). Nadezhda Mandelstam was not a political scientist, but one can learn from her book how the Stalinist regime functioned and how precisely it terrorized and corrupted people, turning almost every neighbor or co-worker into a potential informer. The wife of the great poet has given us an unforgettable portrait of one of the twentieth century's darkest hours.

RECOMMENDED:

George Steiner, "Death of a Poet," The New Yorker, 26 December 1970.

Isaiah Berlin, "A Great Russian Writer," New York Review of Books, 23 december 1965.

Robert Alter, "Osip Mandelstam: The Poet as Witness," in Defenses of the Imagination.

Joseph Brodsky, "The Child of Civilization" and "Nadezhda Mandelstam: An Obituary" in Less than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1986).

Clarence Brown, "On Reading Mandelstam," in Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism, ed. Edward Brown (Oxford, 1973).

Claire Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (Princeton, 1995)