Called into the dentist’s surgery the other day, I put the book I had been reading in the waiting-room – The Dream that Failed (1994) by Walter Laqueur – on a table by the door. The title caught the eye of the dentist’s assistant, who asked what it was about. ‘The fall of the Soviet Union,’ I replied. ‘The Soviet Union?’ she asked. I was surprised the name meant nothing to her: the assistant, Julia, is Polish, as I had discovered on a previous visit. ‘What Russia was called until 1991. Haven’t you heard of it?’ ‘Maybe at school we did,’ she replied.
Laqueur’s book is largely an investigation of how and why Western observers, including the Sovietologists as they were known, failed to understand the USSR and foresee its collapse. However, it would not be the book I would recommend to Julia to learn about the system that ruled Russia from 1917 to 1991. For that, I would go to a book that showed me the reality of the Soviet Union when I first read it in the 1970s, when the USSR was still going strong (or appeared to be). That book was Hope against Hope (1970), by the incomparable Nadezhda Mandelstam.
Nadezhda Mandelstam was born Nadezhda Khazina in the southern Russian town of Saratov, on the Volga, in 1899, into a middle-class Jewish family. Her father was a lawyer and her mother a doctor, one of the first women in Russia to be allowed to qualify. Early in her life the family moved to Kiev, where Nadezhda attended school and then studied art. But she is famous not as an artist – she never pursued her career – but as the wife, and widow, of the poet Osip Mandelstam, whom she met in Kiev in 1919 and married soon after; and for the two-volume memoir she wrote clandestinely in the 1960s, remembering her life with her husband and reflecting on the ‘catastrophe’, as she calls it, that had overta
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Subscribe now or Sign inCalled into the dentist’s surgery the other day, I put the book I had been reading in the waiting-room – The Dream that Failed (1994) by Walter Laqueur – on a table by the door. The title caught the eye of the dentist’s assistant, who asked what it was about. ‘The fall of the Soviet Union,’ I replied. ‘The Soviet Union?’ she asked. I was surprised the name meant nothing to her: the assistant, Julia, is Polish, as I had discovered on a previous visit. ‘What Russia was called until 1991. Haven’t you heard of it?’ ‘Maybe at school we did,’ she replied.
Laqueur’s book is largely an investigation of how and why Western observers, including the Sovietologists as they were known, failed to understand the USSR and foresee its collapse. However, it would not be the book I would recommend to Julia to learn about the system that ruled Russia from 1917 to 1991. For that, I would go to a book that showed me the reality of the Soviet Union when I first read it in the 1970s, when the USSR was still going strong (or appeared to be). That book was Hope against Hope (1970), by the incomparable Nadezhda Mandelstam. Nadezhda Mandelstam was born Nadezhda Khazina in the southern Russian town of Saratov, on the Volga, in 1899, into a middle-class Jewish family. Her father was a lawyer and her mother a doctor, one of the first women in Russia to be allowed to qualify. Early in her life the family moved to Kiev, where Nadezhda attended school and then studied art. But she is famous not as an artist – she never pursued her career – but as the wife, and widow, of the poet Osip Mandelstam, whom she met in Kiev in 1919 and married soon after; and for the two-volume memoir she wrote clandestinely in the 1960s, remembering her life with her husband and reflecting on the ‘catastrophe’, as she calls it, that had overtaken them and their friends, acquaintances and contemporaries, and their homeland, since the Bolsheviks seized power. The first volume of her memoir, Hope against Hope (a pun in English on her first name, Nadezhda, which means ‘hope’ in Russian), opens with an account of her husband’s arrest by the secret police in Moscow on the night of 13 May 1934 and ends with an account of how she learned about his death in a transit camp in eastern Siberia and her attempts to ascertain the exact date on which he died (established later as 27 December 1938). In the eighty short chapters between the two, she takes the reader into the heart of Soviet life during those four years, years when the Stalin terror reached its height and tens if not hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were arrested, imprisoned, interrogated and either summarily shot or carted off to the camps of what became known as the Gulag. Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir is written from the inside of the ‘new epoch’, by someone who, while not close to the seat of Soviet power, was through her husband well connected to the world of Soviet literature, even though he was ostracized from it. None of Osip Mandelstam’s poetry was permitted to appear in print after 1928 and, effectively an ‘unperson’ from that time on, he survived on what he could earn from translation and the occasional prose piece he could get published. In the late ’20s, the intellectual conflict between his understanding of poetry and a need not to be out of step with his times – a need which was leading almost all of his fellow writers to make their pact with the regime – dried up his poetic inspiration. Only in the early ’30s did his ability to write poetry return after, in his wife’s words, he had ‘ceased to regard the new order as the beginning of the millennium’ and had ‘recovered complete inner freedom’. In late 1933 Mandelstam used this inner freedom to compose the poem that precipitated his first arrest, the event with which Hope against Hope opens. The poem, known as ‘The Stalin Epigram’, was a biting satirical portrait of the ‘great leader’, painting a picture of a physically and morally repulsive ‘mountain-man’ with fingers like grubs and a moustache like the bristles of a cockroach. Mandelstam, as was his habit, read his new poem to a small circle of friends, one of whom – to no one’s surprise – turned out to be a police informer. There was, as Nadezhda explains, one among everyone’s friends, if not family. This poem, as someone commented about another of Mandelstam’s poems, was ‘the kind of thing which would bring three men in uniform knocking on your door’. This it had done. The police agents spent the night searching the apartment, examining any and every poem and piece of paper they turned up (missing some which Nadezhda had sewn into cushions or hidden in saucepans). When morning came, Mandelstam was taken off to the Lubyanka prison, leaving Nadezhda and their friend, the poet Anna Akhmatova, alone in the Moscow apartment. In her third chapter, Nadezhda Mandelstam reflects on how they reacted, and how typical they were of the family and friends of those picked up by ‘the organs of state security’:We never asked, on hearing about the latest arrest, ‘What was he arrested for?’ but we were exceptional. Most people, crazed by fear, asked this question just to give themselves a little hope: if others were arrested for some reason, then they wouldn’t be arrested, because they hadn’t done anything wrong. They vied with each other in thinking up ingenious reasons to justify each arrest: ‘Well, she really is a smuggler, you know’ . . . or . . . ‘I always thought there was something fishy about him. He isn’t one of us at all.’ This was enough for anyone to be arrested and destroyed: ‘not one of us’, ‘talks too much’, ‘a bad character’. . . variations on a theme we had first heard in 1917 . . . This was why we had outlawed the question, ‘What was he arrested for?’ ‘What for?’ Akhmatova would cry indignantly whenever, infected by the prevailing climate, anyone of our circle asked this question. ‘What do you mean, what for? It’s time you understood that people are arrested for nothing! ’This is the technique of Hope against Hope, which uses the author’s personal experience, and anecdote, as an illustration of the history of her times and a spur to reflection on the causes, especially the intellectual and moral causes, of the Soviet tyranny. Because she experienced this tyranny at first hand, escaping imprisonment and the camps herself only by chance (in late 1938 the secret police came to where she had been living just one day after she had moved elsewhere), her words, delivered with pungency and black humour, and without the least sentimentality or self-pity, convey directly what it was like to live through the disastrous experiment of creating a Communist state. In reading Hope against Hope, it is as if you have found yourself in private conversation with her and you realize, after her very first words, that this is someone you have to listen to. Nadezhda Mandelstam’s style is blunt, straight-talking, miraculously free of jargon and Soviet ‘newspeak’, simultaneously severe and compassionate about those who sold their souls to the new regime. She does not rant or stand in judgement on individuals who made their pact with the devil: it was only too understandable. She even refuses to condemn the person – Vladimir Stavski – who, as head of the Union of Writers, wrote and signed the denunciation of Mandelstam that supplied the pretext for his second arrest and the five-year sentence of ‘corrective labour’ which led directly to his premature death. (Stavski’s denunciation was retrieved from the archives after the fall of the regime in 1991.) ‘Any other official would have done the same as Stavski,’ Mandelstam writes,
unless he wanted to be spirited away by car at the dead of night. We were all the same: either sheep who went willingly to the slaughter, or respectful assistants to the executioners. Whichever role we played, we were uncannily submissive, stifling all our human instincts . . . Crushed by the system each one of us had in some way or other helped to build, we were not even capable of passive resistance.Nadezhda Mandelstam did not live to see the release of this document, for she died in 1980. Nor did she live to see her own work officially published in her own country: the English translations were made from a text published through the samizdat underground publishing system. So she never personally enjoyed the fame her memoirs brought her in the West and remained a more or less invisible figure. Or so I thought at the time I first read the books, in the mid-’70s. But in 1982, the BBC broadcast a documentary about the Mandelstams. Made by the writer and programme-maker Nigel Williams, it featured the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky and some footage from an interview with Nadezhda filmed in 1973, which was shown for the first time in the UK. Brodsky had been forcibly exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972, after serving part of a sentence of forced labour and then being hounded as persona non grata for his (clandestinely published) poetry and his Jewishness. A magnetic personality on the screen, reading Mandelstam’s poetry in Russian and hailing Nadezhda’s memoirs as a ‘literary masterpiece’, Brodsky appears alongside other literary figures of the time. But all, even Brodsky, are eclipsed by the footage of the quietly spoken, dark-eyed, calmly self-assured Nadezhda, who sits slightly hunched in her chair in her Moscow apartment, quite still, puffing occasionally on the Russian papirosa cigarette she holds in her right hand, looking unwaveringly at the camera and speaking in accented but fluent English in reply to the (unheard) interviewer’s questions. ‘Our marriage was sexually very successful,’ she says at one point, with the faintest flicker of a smile on her lips. It was, for the time, an extraordinary thing to hear; and it conveys something of the essence of her and her husband’s shared understanding of the world. Mandelstam, she explains in the sequel to Hope against Hope, Hope Abandoned (1974), thought that ‘in the world of human beings . . . everything good and creative was endowed with sex, while everything dead or destructive is sexless . . . [He] was convinced that the basis of life, the source of goodness, and the higher illumination of love were to be found in the intimacy between two people . . .’ Hardly a conviction you would have found echoed in official Soviet thought. After her husband’s death, Nadezhda Mandelstam devoted her life to preserving his poetry and then, in her memoirs, preserving the record of his life, their life together and the terrible times through which they had lived. Hope against Hope and Hope Abandoned are her great testament and, in Brodsky’s words, ‘a Day of Judgement on earth for her age and its literature’. In them Julia my dentist’s assistant will find no better account of what it was like to live through ‘the dream that failed’.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 75 © Anthony Wells 2022
About the contributor
Anthony Wells is currently writing a reflection on anti-Semitism inspired by his years at the Wiener Library in London, on whose shelves he first came across Hope against Hope. You can also hear him discussing the library in Episode 27 of our podcast.
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