Hope Abandoned

702 Pages·1981·40.43 MB·English

by  Nadezhda Mandelstam

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One of the most extraordinary books of the
twenrierh century is N'adezhda i\landelstam's
Hop~ Agai11St Hope, published in 1\tax Hay
ward's English translation in 1970. Harrison E.
Salisbury said of that book, "~ o work on Russia
which I have recently read has given me so sen
sitive and scaring an insight into the hellhousc
which Russia became under Stalin as this dedi
cared and brilliant work on rhe poet Mandclstam
by his devoted wife."
In her new book this most extraordinary woman
begins as follows: "I am now faced wirh a new
task, and am not sure how to go about it. Earlier
it was all so simple: my joh was to preserve M.'s
verse and tell the story of what happened to us.
Thinking abour tbis, I forgot myself and what
had happened to me personally, and even that I
was "\vriting about my own life, not somebody
else's."
So Hope Abtmdoned becomes the story of
Nadezhda 'Yakovlevna Khazina, although from
their earliest meetings it is hard to separate her
story from that of Mandelstam. It is here told
with an absolutely :tstonishing immediacy and
with a youthful vibrancy, as though the srory
were being told by the woman she was when
events happened, rather than from the vantage
poinr of her scvem:y-fourth year. It becomes an
endlessly fascinating account of a period in lhc
history of a great country, a history thnt its rulers
have done everything in their power to falsify.
Nttdezlltltt MttutlelHftt 111
Nadczhda Yakm lc, na Khazina was born
111
Saratov in 899, hut spent all her early life in
1
Kiev, studying an, traveling widely with her
family, learning several \Vcsrcrn European bn
guages flucmly enough to cn~tble her to do ex
tensi vc trans lacing work at a later period. She mec
Osip i\hndclsram for the first time in 19 19, also
in Kiev. The life they shared is recounted in this
book. For almost thirty years after her hus
band's death tVlrs. i\'landelstam traveled the Rus
sian provinces, teaching Engli~h for her living.
In 1964 she was granted permission to return to
Moscow, and there began writing the first vol
ume of this memoir, Hope Agaimt Hope, which
has now appeared in most major languages .
.1 1a.I' 1/ayu·artl
A fellow of St. Amony's College, Oxford, iVIax
Hayward is a specialist in Russian literature. His
previous translations include Boris Pasternak's
Dr. Zbivago (with l\1anya Harari), Alexander
Solzhenirsyn's 011e Day i11 tbe Life of h•an
Deniso't1cb, Isaac Rabel's You tHust K11ow Ev
erytbing, and volume one of Nadczhda i\'landcl
stam's memoir, Hope Agaimt Hope.
BOOKS BY
Nadezhda Mandelstam
Hope Abando11ed 1974
Hope Against Hope 1970
Nadezhda Mandelstam
HOPE
ABANDONED
Translated from the Russian by
MAx HAYWARD
New York
ATHENEUM
1974
Originally publis!Jed i11 Russian under tiN title
VT oR A Y A K N 1 G A by Editions YMCA Press, Paris, lf/72.
Copyright© 197.2 by Atheneum Publis!Jers
English translation copyright <i;) ty7;, I flU by Atbeneum Publisbers
All rights reser-..•ed
Library of Congress catalog card number 76-87141 z
ISBN IJ-68y-IO'J4-Y-)
Published simulumeousiy in Canada by McClcJiaud tmd Ste'IL'aTt Ltd.
Manufactured in the United States of America by H. JVolff, New York
Designed by Harry Ford
First Edition
TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD
I
N THE first chapter of this book Mrs. Mandelstam herself defines
her purpose in writing it, but it may be helpful, particularly for
readers unfamiliar with the first book,., Hope Against Hope, to say a
little more about the relation between the two. The "First Book" (as
it was originally called by her) is essentially a narrative about the
last four years in the life of her husband, Osip Mandelstam. Despite
the avowedly discursive manner that frequently allows her to stray
into other periods-as she says, her method is "unchronological"-thc
first volume is basically contained within this limited time span. It
begins abruptly with an account of the poet's first arrest in May
19 34 and ends with a review of all the scraps of evidence about the
circumstances of his death in a camp ncar Vladivostok in December
1938. Having decided there could be no compromise with a sysrem
that had reversed or traduced the cultural and ethical values he be
lieved in, Mandelstam consciously chose martyrdom and death by
denouncing Stalin as a murderer in a poem which he then read to a
few people in private-with the inevitable consequence that the text
was speedily relayed to the secret police by one of his listeners. He
was saved from immediate execution thanks only to the pleas of
Bukharin (who at that rime still had a lirtJe influence), Pasternak,
and others. Through this officially arranged "miracle," he was given
a few years' respite, which he spent mainly in enforced residence
in the provincial town of Voronezh. Here he wrote several brilliant
cycles of poems (the "Voronezh Notebooks") before returning, at
the end of his term of exile, to Moscow in 1937-just in time for the
Great Purge. Tho11gh as a "proscribed person" he could find no work
and was not allowed to live within the city limits of Moscow itself,
he was at first left alone and for several months suffered nothing
worse than the constant humiliation of literally having to beg for
alms in order to keep himself and his wife alive. But Stalin had not
forgotten him. Towards the end of 1937, the Union of Soviet
Writers began to take an ostensibly benevolent interest in him, and
• For such readers the Chronology at the end of this book may be helpful,
since it recapitulates a good deal of what is cold in Hope Agafnn Hope.
v
Translator's Foreword
Vl
in the spring of the following year arranged for him to go to one of
its "rest homes" in a remote place in the country called Samatikha.
Here, during the night of /\lay r, r938, he was arrested in the pres
ence of his wife, who never saw him again. At first i\lrs. Mandelstam
continued to live within easy traveling distance of Moscow in the
hope of learning something about his fate and of getting food parcels
to him. But, as for all the countless other women in her situation, the
heartbreaking business of trudging from one Moscow jail to another
(which had to be done on brief visits from small towns nearby, be
cause of the ban on residing in the capital) and ·waiting endlessly in
Jines was all in vain. It was not until the end of the year that she be
came virtually certain, after the return of one of her food parcels,
that her husband was dead. This was officially confirmed in June
1940 by the issue of a death certificate that gave the date of his death
as December 27, r938. It was only gradually, however, that i\lrs.
Mandelsram was able to obtain some details about his terrible end in
a "transit camp" near Vladivostok, where he was evidently awaiting
transfer to a forced-labor camp in Kolyma or Magadan. Hope
Against Hope concludes with a careful account of all she was able
to glean from a few people who had been in that camp at the same
time, or had heard more or less credible stories about Mandclstam's
last days there.
This second book (called Hope Abandoned in translation at Mrs.
Mandelstam's request) is not a mere continuation of the first, or a
sequel to it, but is complementary to it in at least two vital ways. The
first is in filling some vast and conspicuous biographical gaps in
Hope Against Hope, where larger perspectives on the life of Osip
Mandelstam and his wife are sacrificed-often tantalizingly-to the
telling of his story during the four years in which he went to his
doom. Thus, Hope Abandoned gives a fairly extensive account of
their life together from their first meeting in Kiev in 1919 up to the
time of Osip's arresr in 1\lay 1934 (there are only sporadic backward
glances at this period in Hope Against Hope). The author's own
life after her husband's death, from r938 almost up to the present, is
similarly described in much richer detail; she also adds considerably
to her portrait gallery of contemporaries, bringing Mandelstam's
lonely eminence into even sharper relief. One of these portraits, the
extraordinarily candid one of Anna Akhmatova, whose presence in
the first book is more episodic, gives the second book a wholly new
dimension.
The second way in which Hope Abandoned complements the
Translator's Foreword
VII
first volume is by providing much broader interpretative background
to Mandelstam's unique act of defiance and self-immolation. To have
done this in Hope Against Hope-though some of the issues are
sketched out there too-would have slowed down the central narra
tive intolerably; but within the larger confines of this new work, the
author has felt free to dwell on aspects of her husband's life and
times that illuminate the sense of his ordeal and his poetry with in
sights only she can possess. In the years after his death, during
all her painful wanderings from one dreary provincial town to an
other, her only aim in life was to be a living repository of his memory
and his poetry, to preserve them from the total extinction to which
they had been condemned. The publication of his work abroad (once
attempts to have it published in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death
had failed) and of the tale of what happened to him in Hope Against
Hope are the fulfillment of Mrs. lVTandelstam's pledge to keep her
husband's name alive and to perpetuate what he left behind. In Hope
Abandoned she goes a stage further by endeavoring to complete on
his behalf something he did not himself have time to do before his
life was cut short, namely, to set forth a system of values and beliefs
that run quite counter to the dominant ones of the age we live in,
whether in the East or the West. Mandelstam was distinguished by
his immunity to the beguilements of the times, both before and after
the Revolution. By the end of the twenties-when most of his fellow
intellectuals had succumbed to the overwhelming "temptations" of
the age-after a period of uncenainty and confusion, he achieved
the "inner freedom" which in Stalin's Russia could be purchased only
by death. The arguments that led him-alone among his contempo
raries-to make this choice are unfolded by his widow partly through
interpretation of his poetry and essays, partly through her intimate
knowledge of his otherwise unrecorded thoughts and reflections.
In a work of this complexity, containing many references to per
sons, events, and other things not necessarily familiar even to Russian
readers, it has been found essential (as in the case of the first volume)
to add a good deal of explanatory or supplementary material in the
form of footnotes, a chronology, and special appendixes of biograph
ical notes and notes on the various tenns relating to Russian liter
ary movements and organizations that frequently recur in the text.
The biographical notes often include information of direct relevance
to a fuller appreciation of the text, and where this is of particular
importance, it has been indicated in footnotes. A certain amount of
Vlll Translator's Foreword
cross-referencing to Hope Against Hope has also been supplied.
Otherwise, editorial intervention has been kept to a minimum.
Scarcely any cuts have been made, except for one or two sentences
that seemed obscure in meaning (the Russian original very occasion
ally may be slightly garbled), and several others that were plainly
superfluous in translation. Two chapters have been given different
titles than in the original. In a few instances I have felt justified in
correcting or questioning statements that are clearly based on faulty
or confused information. There could be no more painstakingly
truthful witness than Mrs. Mandelstam. She is ruthlessly honest about
herself and her friends (and more charitable, incidentally, than might
appear at first sight even towards those who destroyed her husband
and made her life into a nightmare), but, apart from the fallibility
of all human memory, she has lived in circumstances of such un
imaginable isolation, both from the outside world and within her
own country, that it is scarcely surprising if she has not always
been able to verify the stories and rumors that naturally gain cur
rency from time to time in a community denied access to all normal
channels of information. A case in point is the story on page 357-
reported as hearsay, it should be noted-to the effect that "some
Oxford students'' were sent by Sir Isaiah Berlin to interview Akhma
tova and Zoshchenko on their reaction to the Party denunciation
of them in 1946. This is a legend (which probably arose from a
quite pardonable misunderstanding on Akhmatova's part) and I
have supplied a footnote summarizing the rather different facts
known to me from firsthand sources-on which it is based. Another
case that should be mentioned here, but that readers can judge for
themselves without benefit of special annotation, is the author's
lengthy comment on T. S. Eliot's Notes Tow11rds the Definition of
Culture. As she says, 1\'trs. Mandelstam read this in a Russian trans
lacion published in the West-perhaps she did so in some haste and
rather cursorily, since such surreptitiously imported materials tend
by their nature to be passed rapidly from hand to hand. Whatever
the reason, however, several of her specific strictures on Eliot's
views would evidently seem to derive from a faulty memory of the
text, or from a misreading of certain passages. There further appears
to be no foundation for Mrs. Mandelstam's belief that the Notes
originated from lectures given at Oxford. Since Eliot's essay serves
mainly as a point of departure for her own arguments, most of what
she had to say in this chapter is by no means invalidated by any
wrong construcrion she may have placed on Eliot's meaning.