Athenc-um 218 College Edition $8.95

Hope Against nope

A MEMOIR

Nadezhda Mandelstam

■ HARRISON E. SALISBURY says of this book:

I NO WORK ON RUSSIA WHICH I HAVE RECENTLY READ | HAS GIVEN ME SO SENSITIVE AND SEARING AN INSIGHT INTO THE HELLHOUSE WHICH RUSSIA BECAME UNDER STALIN AS THIS DEDICATED AND BRILLIANT WORK ON THE POET MANDELSTAM BY HIS DEVOTED WIFE.

10404

Mandelshtam, Nadezhda,

PG

3476 M355 Z813 1983

NEW COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA (SF)

Handel'

#6045

Mandel'shtam, Nadezhda, 1899-

Hope against hope : a memoir / Nadezhda Mandelstam# Translated from -the Russian by Max Hayward, with an introd. by Clarence Brown* New York : Atheneuro, 1983*

xvi, 431 p* : ports* ; 21 cjp* Translation of Vosporainaniia (roraanized form)

#6045 Brodart $12*95*

06 dec 84

1* Mandel'shtam, Nadezhda, 1899- 2* Mandelshtam, Osip, 1891-1938* 3* Russia—Politics and government— 1917-1936* 4* Russia—Intellectual life 1917- I* Title

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Hope Against Hope

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Nadezhda Mandelstam

Nadezhda Mandelstam

HOPE

AGAINST

HOPE

A MEMOIR

Translated from the Russian by Max Hayward With an Introduction by Clarence Broum

Atheneum New York 1983

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Copyright © 1970 by Atheneum Publishers English translation copyright © 1970 by Atheneum Publishers Introduction copyright © 1970 by Atheneum Publishers All rights reserved q Library of Congress catalog card number 77-124984

ISBN 0-689-70530-1 Published simultaneously in Canada by McClelland and Stewart Ltd. Manufactured in the United States of America by The Murray Printing Company, Forge Village, Massachusetts ' Designed by Harry Ford

First Atheneum Paperback, February 1976 cO Second Printing, March 1978

Third Printing, September 1979 Fourth Printing, November 1980 Fifth Priming, April 1983

INTRODUCTION

by Clarence Brown

E

xcellent books are slippery things. They slip through the fingers of policemen who want to prevent them being pub­lished, and once they are in print, they slip out of the categories into which tidy-minded critics long to fix them. This book is, for the most part, a memoir; but it is much more. To say of it that it relates the nineteen years, from May i, 1919, to May 1, 1938, that Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam spent with her husband, the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, is to say, under the circumstances, a very great deal. But it is still not enough. For such a statement ignores many things that the curious reader will delight to find here. I shall try to name some of them.

The first is the author herself. "I played the role of 'poet's widow' with him," she once told me of her meeting with a visitor from the West. "It is a thing I can do when required." Indeed she could, but it was precisely that—a "role," something objectively different from herself, a kind of bedraggled plumage that she could, in case of need, snatch from the Victorian chiffonier and don in the nick of time to satisfy, with the addition of a few heart-rending phrases, some pil­grim's need to share the suffering and injustice of her life. When the coast was clear, the sweetly sad figure who had dispensed this and that fact of her husband's biography (even glancing at times, in her hammier moments, over her shoulder) would clear the general air with some spine-shattering Russian oath and revert to her true na­ture: a vinegary, Brechtian, steel-hard woman of great intelligence, limitless courage, no illusions, permanent convictions and a wild sense of the absurdity of life.

And it is the true nature that one meets everywhere in this book. The style, in Russian, is an almost uncanny reproduction of her speaking voice. The toughness of the spirit that animates these pages will be familiar to anyone who has ever known her. The angle of vision is always hers.

But, for all of this, she herself, her person, the externals of her own life, are strangely absent. Her book is very much the book of her husband, to whom as man and poet she was utterly devoted through­out their years together and ever afterward; and where he is con­cerned she never has the slightest desire to make herself conspicuous. Her attitude is always that which she herself memorably expressed one May evening in 1965. The students of the Mechanical Mathe­matics Department of Moscow University had organized on their own initiative the first memorial evening of Mandelstam's poetry to be held in Russia. They invited Ilia Ehrenburg, an old friend of the poet and an even older one of his wife, to preside. Nikolai Chukov- ski, N. L. Stepanov, Varlam Shalamov and Arseni Tarkovski were among the writers and scholars who contributed reminiscences of Mandelstam and recited his poems. At one point Ehrenburg men­tioned rather hesitantly, knowing that she would dislike his doing it, that Nadezhda Yakovlevna was in the auditorium. He continued, "She lived through all the difficult years with Mandelstam, went into exile with him, saved all of his poems. I cannot imagine his life with­out her. I hesitated whether I should say that the poet's widow was at this first evening. I don't ask her to come down here . . But here his words were smothered under thunderous applause that lasted for a long time. Everyone stood. Finally, Nadezhda Yakovlevna her­self stood and a hush fell upon the house. Turning to face the audi­ence, she said, "Mandelstam wrote, 'I'm not accustomed yet to panegyrics. . . .' Forget that I'm here. Thank you." And she sat down. But the applause would not die away for a long time.

In all fairness, the request was and is impossible. For all her diminu­tive size, she was colossally there in the hall (to murmur "Rot!" at the occasional statement with which she disagreed). And she is every­where in this memoir of her husband. Her tone and her spirit, at least, are here.

In this note I shall set down some of the external facts of her life which she omits and which happen to be known to me.

She was born Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina—the daughter, that is, of Yakov Khazin—on October 31, 1899, in the town of Saratov. Her mother was a physician. I don't know what her father's occupa­tion was, but I find in one of her letters the information that her parents were "nice, highly educated people." She had a sister, Anna, and a brother, Evgeni Yakovlevich, who became a writer. Though she relishes the slightly outre circumstance of having been born in Saratov—something like Balzac's having been married in Berdichev— the fact is that all her early life was passed in Kiev. There she studied art in the studio of A. A. Ekster, where one of her best friends was Ilia Ehrenburg's future wife, Liuba. Another was A. G. Tyshler, who later became a well-known artist. An acquaintance, but hardly a friend, was the extraordinary Bliumkin, the assassin of the German ambassador Count Mirbach and at times one of the most pestilential banes of Mandelstam's existence.

She learned the principal European languages to such an extent that she can still translate handily from French and German today. Her family traveled widely, nonchalantly, naturally, as used to be done, and she retains today a vivid familiarity with the now for­bidden landscape of Europe. Her knowledge of English also began in childhood, for she has often mentioned her English governesses in letters to me ("they were all parson's daughters"), and she savors the slightly fusty Victorianism of some of her idioms. "Hope against hope" is one of these, which I count so often as I read back through her letters that it has practically become her slogan in my mind. The pun on her own name—Nadezhda means Hope in Russian—makes it eligible for this, and so does its expression of her obstinate courage. It doesn't make a bad title for her book, which has none in Russian.

Her knowledge of languages was very valuable in the twenties and thirties when she and her husband, like many of the old intelligentsia, were driven into a feverish spate of translating in order to live. She translated and edited numerous books—probably, I should think, under a pseudonym. At any rate, it would be impossible to determine what she translated, for those chores were no sooner finished than forgotten. She even collaborated with Mandelstam on many of the works, including those in verse, that carried his name as translator— an added reason, if any were needed, for putting little store by those pages in his canon. It must surely have been Nadezhda Yakovlevna who was mainly responsible for translating things like Upton Sin­clair's Machine or editing the novels of Captain Mayne Reid, for she knew English far better than her husband, but when I asked her this she waved the question away with a gesture of distaste: "Who knows? What didn't we translate?"

As for her knowledge of English, it became her means of liveli­hood after Mandelstam's death, for she seems to have taught it in half the provincial towns of Russia before she was finally allowed to return to Moscow in 1964, when she began writing this book. In 1956, as a student of Mandelstam's old schoolmate, the great scholar Victor Zhirmunski, she earned the degree of "Kandidat nauk"—the equivalent of our doctorate—in English philology. Ten years later she presented me with a copy of the printed abstract of her disserta­tion, a brochure of thirteen pages, and since it is her principal ac­knowledged work before the present book, perhaps it should be noticed. The author is identified as "Head of the Department of English Language of the Chuvash Teachers' Training College," and the title of her work is Functions of the Accusative Case on the Basis of Materials Drawn from Anglo-Saxon Poetic