Cultural Amnesia (63 page)

NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina, known to us as Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899–1980), would have been
sufficiently famous as the heroic wife and widow of Osip Mandelstam, one of the finest poets of twentieth-century Russia, and therefore one of the most illustrious of Stalin’s victims
among those luminaries of the old intelligentsia who had stayed on in Russia in the mistaken belief that the Soviet regime would be an opportunity for culture. As the naïvely
non-political lyric poet soon found, it would have been an opportunity for him to starve, if Nadezhda’s scholarly ability to translate easily out of the principal European languages had
not helped to pay for the groceries. After the poet was arrested in 1934 (his “crime” had been to write a few satirical lines about Stalin), Nadezhda’s translations from
English were her only means of sustenance during her long banishment to the provincial towns, during which time, in 1938, her husband finally perished in the Gulag. Only after she was
permitted to return to Moscow, in 1964, did she begin to write
Hope Against Hope
, the magnificent book that puts her at the centre of the liberal
resistance under the Soviet Union and indeed at the centre of the whole of twentieth-century literary and political history. Some would
place her book even ahead of Primo
Levi’s
Se questo è un uomo
(
If This Is a Man
—unforgivably known, in America, under the
feel-good title of
Survival in Auschwitz
) and Jung Chang’s
Wild Swans
as required preliminary reading for
any prospective student enrolled at a university. A masterpiece of prose as well as a model of biographical narrative and social analysis,
Hope Against
Hope
is mainly the story of the terrible last years of persecution and torment before the poet was murdered. Nadezhda and her husband are the most promiment characters, although there
is a vivid portrait of Anna Akhmatova. The book’s sequel,
Hope Abandoned
, is about the author’s personal fate, and is in some ways even more
terrible, because, as the title implies, it is more about horror as a way of life than as an interruption to normal expectancy. Both volumes are superbly translated into English by Max
Hayward. Until the collapse of the regime, they were available in the original language only in samizdat or else from printing houses situated outside the Sovet borders. As with
Akhmatova’s permanently banned poem “Requiem,” their final, free and full publication in Russia marked the day when the Soviet Union came to an end, and freedom—which
Nadezhda, against mountainous evidence, had always said would one day return of its own accord—returned.

We all belonged to the same category marked down for absolute
destruction. The astonishing thing is not that so many of us went to concentration camps or died there, but that some of us survived. Caution did not help. Only chance could save you.

—NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM,
Hope Abandoned
, P. 67

“
O
NLY
CHANCE COULD
save you” is the best thing ever said about life under state terror, and it took Nadezhda Mandelstam to say it so directly, bravely and unforgettably. Max Hayward chose
the English titles well for his magnificent translations of her two great
books.
Hope Against Hope
is about a gradual, reluctant but
inexorable realization that despair is the only thing left to feel: it is the book of a process.
Hope Abandoned
is about what despair is like when even the
memory of an alternative has been dispelled: the book of a result. The second book’s subject is spiritual desolation as a way of life. Several times, in the course of the text, Nadezhda
proclaims her fear that the very idea of normality has gone from the world. “I shall not live to see the future, but I am haunted by the fear that it may be only a slightly modified version
of the past.” The memory of what happened can’t even be passed on without ruining the lives of those called upon to understand. “If any brave young fellow with no experience of
these things feels inclined to laugh at me,” she writes, “I invite him back into the era we lived through, and I guarantee that he will need to taste only a hundredth part what we
endured to wake up in the night in a cold sweat, ready to do anything to save his skin the next morning.” Well, none of us brave young fellows back there in the comfortable West of the late
1960s and early 1970s felt inclined to laugh at her. Schopenhauer had said that a man is in a condition of despair when he thinks a thing will happen because he wants it not to, and that what he
wishes can never be. Nadezhda had provided two books to show how that felt. As such, they were key chapters in the new bible that the twentieth century had written for us. In a bible it is not
astonishing that some of the gospels should sound like each other and seem to tell the same story. In Primo Levi’s books, the theme is often struck that the only real story about the Nazi
extermination camps was the common fate of those who were obliterated: the story of the survivors was too atypical to be edifying, and to dwell on it could only lead to the heresy that Levi
called Survivalism and damned as a perversion. Survival had nothing to do with anything except chance: there was no philosophy to be extracted from it, and certainly no guide to behaviour. In
Russian instead of Italian, Nadezhda said exactly the same thing about life under Stalin: Only chance could save you.

It was the dubious distinction of the Soviet Union to create, for the remnants of the old Russian intelligentsia,
conditions by which they could experience, in what passed for ordinary civilian life, the same uncertainties and terrors as the victims who would later be propelled into Nazi Germany’s
concentrated universe. The main difference was
that in Nazi Europe the victims knew from the start who they were, and eventually came to know that they were doomed. In the
Soviet Union, the bourgeois elements could not even be certain that they were marked down for death. Like Kafka’s victims in the
Strafkolonie
, they
were in a perpetual state of trying to imagine what their crime might be. Was it to have read books? Was it to have red hair? Was it (the cruellest form of fear) to have submitted too eagerly?
Other versions of the same story came out of China, North Korea, Romania, Albania, Cambodia. The same story came out of the Rome of Tiberius, but the twentieth century gave something new to
history when societies nominally dedicated to human betterment created a climate of universal fear. In that respect, the Communist despotisms left even Hitler’s Germany looking like a
throwback. Hitler was hell on earth, but at least he never promised heaven: not to his victims, at any rate. It’s the
disappointment
of what happened
in the new Russia that Nadezhda captures and distils into an elixir. There were some mighty thinkers about the true nature of the Soviet incubus: Yevgeny Zamyatin, Boris Souvarine, Victor
Kravchenko, Evgenia Ginzburg, Varlan Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Roy Medvedev and Aleksandr Zinoviev are only a few of them. Generally, however, the artists, if they lived long enough to
speak, spoke better than the philosophers. But it was Nadezhda’s distinction to speak better than the artists. With no lyrical world in which to find refuge, she commanded a prose more
potent even than her husband’s poetry, and perhaps that made her the greatest artist of all. She found the means to express how an unprecedented historic experiment had changed the texture
even of emotion.

Even the incandescently gifted Anna Akhmatova, with whom Nadezhda had always been involved in intimate bonds of passion,
jealousy and respect, never quite grew out of the romantic nature that helped to make her one of the most justly loved of the modern Russian poets. In her poem “Requiem,” Akhmatova
encapsulated the anguish of millions of devastated women when she wrote “husband dead, son in jail: pray for me.” But a romantic she remained, still believing in the imaginative
validity of a love affair beyond time. In
Hope Abandoned
, Nadezhda was able to say firmly that her friend was mistaken. Love affairs beyond time were
impossible to take seriously when violent separations in the present had become the stuff of reality. With real life so
disturbed, the nature of romanticism had been changed.
In the new reality, all love affairs were beyond time.

It is important not to reach conclusions too quickly about whom she means by “we” and
“us.” An unreconstructed Stalinist, if we can suppose there were such a thing left, might say that she was identifying the class enemy. Quite early in the regime’s career of
permanent house cleaning—certainly no later than Lunacharsky’s crackdown on the avant-garde in 1929—anyone stemming from the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia was automatically
enrolled along with remnants of the bourgeoisie in the classification of “class enemy.” Variations of the Sicilian Vespers multiplied. Civilized articulacy was as deadly a giveaway as
soft hands. (In a development that eerily echoed Shakespeare’s scenes about Jack Cade, the Proletkult Komsomols were able to identify a victim’s ability to defend himself verbally as
certain evidence of guilt.) Eventually any kind of knowledge that had been acquired under the old order was enough to mark down its possessor. Just as Pol Pot’s teenage myrmidons assailed
anyone who wore spectacles, so the Soviet “organs” discovered that even a knowledge of engineering was a threat to state security. (Solzhenitsyn, it will be recalled, was especially
poignant about the fate of the engineers.) Any field of study with its own objective criteria was thought to be inherently subversive. Given time, Stalin would probably have applied the Lysenko
principle to every scientific field. To this day, scholars puzzle over the reasons for Stalin’s purging the Red Army of its best generals in the crucial years leading up to June 1941, but
the answer might lie close to hand. The fact that military knowledge—strategy, tactics and logistics—was a field of data and principles verifiable independently of ideology might have
been more than enough to invite his hatred. In attacking his own army, of course, Stalin came close to demolishing the whole Soviet enterprise. But at the centre of the totalitarian mentality is
the fear that the internal enemy might go unapprehended. Luis Buñuel gives a poetically condensed rendition of this truth in his
Discreet Charm of the
Bourgeoisie
, when the chief of police, who has slept like a baby while dreaming of prisoners being tortured, wakes screaming and sweating when he dreams that one of them escapes.

A totalitarian regime’s progressively expanding concept of the enemy is the thing to bear in mind when Nadezhda
seems to be identifying
herself as part of a class. She is really identifying herself as part of a category, and the category includes anyone who might offer a threat to the
regime’s monolithic authority—which means anyone capable of independent moral judgement. She does not go so far as to propose the possibility of independent moral behaviour: not even
a hero can actively dissent if the penalty for recalcitrance is the suffering of loved ones. But she does believe that there is such a thing as independent moral judgement, a quality in perfect
polarity with the regime, which can’t tolerate the existence of independent moral judgement, and indeed has come into being specifically so as to eliminate all such values.

Throughout her two books, Nadezhda looks for comfort to those whose memories go back to the
pre-revolutionary past. But her originality lies in her slowly dawning realization that decency is a human quality which can exist independently of social origins. Without that realization, she
would never have been able to formulate the great, ringing message of her books, an unprecedented mixture of the poetic and the prophetic—the message that the truth will be born again of
its own accord. She didn’t live to see it happen: so the whole idea was an act of faith. Finally her inspiring contention is unverifiable, because when, after the nightmare was at last
over, the truth was indeed reborn, it was hard to imagine that such a renaissance could have occurred without books like hers in the background. But there weren’t many books like hers, and
although it will always be useful to examine how the agents of change received their education in elementary benevolence, it might be just as valuable to consider her two main principles in the
full range of their combined implications. One principle was that the forces of unreasoning inhumanity had won an overwhelming victory with effects more devastating than we could possibly
imagine. The other principle was that reason and humanity would return. The first was an observation; the second was a guess; and it was the inconsolable bravery of the observation that made the
guess into a song of love.