Refiner’s Fire: Nadezhda Mandelstam: Memoir as Prophecy

In 1933, Osip Mandelstam, one of the premier Russian poets of his generation, wrote a poem about Josef Stalin. It was a comic poem—savagely, libelously comic, the revenge of Mandelstam’s gift on everything he hated. He was unwise or outrageous enough to recite the poem in public. As a result he was arrested; he expected to be killed.

Instead he and his wife, Nadezhda, were reprieved by an unexplained “miracle”—this entailed being sent to the provinces, to live on nothing—and Mandelstam’s second, final arrest was postponed until May 1938. Shipped to Siberia, he apparently died of heart failure in a transit camp in December; neither his widow nor literary historians are certain.

Nadezhda Mandelstam survived, improbably, by hiding in the provinces, by running whenever she was noticed, by lying so low that the state machinery passed her by without stopping. In this way she preserved all of Mandelstam’s verse she could memorize—her memory is excellent—and all of his manuscripts she could place with friends for safekeeping. Now the verse has been collected and published in the United States. Mandelstam’s widow and executor has published two memoirs of him, which comprise as well a rare, prophetic memoir of the Stalinist time—Hope Against Hope (Atheneum, 1970) and Hope Abandoned (Atheneum, 1974).

Mandelstam’s story is far less unusual than his wife’s. The list of writers murdered by Stalin is very long. We have gotten used to mourning them, and being accustomed much of our grief is sentimental. It thrives on the careers of today’s Russian dissidents. It turns, very easily, into a sort of radical hypocrisy, a willed sympathy with the expatriates that no experience of American history actually warrants. When a famous American poet wired Nadezhda Mandelstam his compliments, on the grounds that “things are the same all over,” she dismissed his sympathy as a lie. On those grounds, it was.

There is very little sentimentality in Mrs. Mandelstam, or in her writing. Fear, poverty, anonymity, constant suspicion and persecution have burned that out of her; she has earned her bitterness. Yet she wears it sceptically, knowing that it is nothing to be desired, no facile pleasure, and never forgetting at what terrible cost her clearsightedness was bought.

Nadezhda Mandelstam should not be thought of as an original thinker, for the central virtue of her writing is not novelty, complexity, or subtlety, but clarity—her vision of the fact. For interpretation, she turns persistently to her dead husband, the protagonist of her story. His ideas appear and reappear; his agon gives the work structure, since he embodies the values he found and wrote.

These values are Christian, and Christian in somewhat more accessible ways than the Holy Russian faith of Solzhenitsyn. But there are common features: especially, a tendency to see Russia’s tormented modern history as the result of nineteenth-century humanism and rationalism taken to their logical conclusion. For the Mandelstams’, the breakdown of Europe’s Christian tradition prepared for the appearance of totalitarianism. Russia has therefore become the laboratory test, the experiment, in which Europe’s secular ideals have been put disastrously into practice. “Russia once saved the Christian culture of Europe from the Tatars, and in the past fifty years, by taking the brunt on herself, she has saved Europe again—this time from rationalism and all the will to evil that goes with it” (Hope Against Hope, p. 329).

Mrs. Mandelstam sees “rationalism” in conservative terms, as the hope of remaking the world to an abstract pattern, ignoring tradition and the organic life of culture. Rationalism makes creative living impossible. In particular, it replaces freedom with license—individual moral strength and initiative with a magical millennium in which all desires may be expressed, regardless of consequence. License, in turn, destroys all community.

Mrs. Mandelstam seldom discusses ideology in its own terms; that would be a form of surrender. But her vision of moral derangement and private suffering is, innately, a firm rejection of the practical Marxism of her day. Stalinism was possible, she argues, because its supporters/victims wanted it. In their fear and inertia they desired its stability, its “discipline,” its interest in emptying social life of moral restraints. It persuaded them that history had ceased, and thus allowed any act in its own service. “All the murderers, provocateurs and informers had one feature in common: it never occurred to them that their victims might one day rise up again and speak. They … imagined that time had stopped …” (p.48). In this way she comes to her most astounding statement. In Stalin’s camps and prisons “we got what we deserved.”

To take responsibility, and in this way to reaffirm history as memory and as judgment, is Mrs. Mandelstam’s chosen work. It is also, she suggests, the work of the poet. Mandelstam himself is her model. Into the vacuum, the poet speaks the rich language of tradition and continuity. Having found in himself the moral freedom that license denies, the poet freely accepts responsibility for the sins of his society; he speaks its guilt, and so proclaims repentance, purification, new freedom.

The religious terms are appropriate. Mandelstam’s own view of poetry was no less serious than his wife’s, but had in it a distinctly Christian ring of humility and joy. “In his view [Christian art] is neither sacrifice nor atonement—the Atonement has already taken place—but joyful communion with God, a game that the children play with their Father” (Hope Abandoned, p. 106). “… the strength which art derives from Christianity is certitude of personal salvation” (p. 490). Freed from guilt and falsehood, the poet is truly free, his verse a “ ‘free gesture of self-assertion within the all-embracing element of the Atonement’ ” (p. 302).

According to his wife, Mandelstam showed his joyous intensity. If any part of her work might be charged with sentimentality, it is her portrayal of the poet. She hides none of his vices; her domestic scenes are sometimes grueling studies of sensitive people driven to obstinacy and cruelty, her own as well as his. The fact is, I think, that having learned her values from Mandelstam, and watched them at work in their mutual ordeal, she sees them now ineradicably in him and proceeding from him. He has become the standard by which she judges their enemies and false friends.

It is also clear that Mrs. Mandelstam derives her literary vocation from her husband. Horatio surviving Hamlet, she has become the teller of truths, the shamer of the system. Against the obsession of Soviet life with lies, with deliberate and systematic mystification, she sets herself to state facts, as a moral work and sacrifice.

The power of her memoirs does not lie in their philosophy or sociology. It lies in her overwhelmingly clear and bitter voice. Pain, incredulity, outrage cut the haze of translation like steel: “Why are we supposed to be brave enough to stand up to all the horrors of twentieth-century prisons and camps?” (Hope Against Hope, p. 85).

The most characteristic and valuable thing about the question is that it makes two statements in one. It expresses the extremity to which victims of such a system are brought; and it rejects the conventional ideal of conduct under pressure—honor, heroism, endurance. Such ideals, it implies, only work when the situation is not really extreme; in the context of real extremity, they are merely pretentious. Or worse: to respond with traditional bravery would be to accept the unacceptable, to give moral substance to the utterly immoral.

Mrs. Mandelstam does little systematic moralizing, therefore, and in its place she tends to put her private outrage. There is a kind of toughness here that has no use for generalization, for explanation, for calming oneself with principle. It is as if she had decided ironically to accept the dissolution of normal society and then to speak from the only perspective granted her, the standing of an outcast.

This is why her final judgment on her material comes in her tone of voice. In form her memoirs are casual—unchronological, she calls them, energetic and random: anecdotes, character sketches, commentary, speculation and analysis, terse essays on writing, literary history, quarrels and revenge, bits of poems, all of it held together solely by the cutting line of her monologue.

Their startling, uncushioned intensity gives the memoirs a peculiar literary power. The voice is as immediate and convincing as Solzhenitsyn’s; but while Solzhenitsyn is an orator, using a style full of abrupt challenges and thick with allusion to literature and classical dialects, Mrs. Mandelstam is above all a direct talker, a brilliant, Spartan gossip animated by passion and anger. She is the isolated voice in the wilderness. Often amused and sometimes querulous, the voice is always existential, directing us not to analysis but to experience, not to contemplation but to existence.

For all their social and personal importance, then, the memoirs are also a literary triumph. Their style accomplishes just what it must: it awakens history by rescuing it from abstract figures, which lie, and restoring it to the individual witness.

As memoirs, too, they are unique. They are not meant primarily to chronicle events and personalities—so that “memoir” may itself be inaccurate. Nor are they autobiography; Mrs. Mandelstam is compellingly present, but not looking at herself. They form instead personal testimony, a kind of prophecy.

I have used this religious vocabulary before, and I think it appropriate in specific ways. A prophet may speak to the present about the future; Mrs. Mandelstam is not concerned with predictions, being thankful, as she says, that she will not live to see them confirmed. But a prophet also speaks to appearances about realities, to liars and hypocrites of the facts they deny. There is a sense in which Stalinism was based on a denial of facts (this is shared with Hitlerism), on a refusal to admit the obvious. Mrs. Mandelstam prophesies by exposing the fact. She is in the position of the child toward the Emperor’s clothes, though without naivete; she scandalizes with the truth.

“Prophetic” can also be understood to mean “visionary.” But vision of what is beyond the present world—escape, transcendence, apocalypse—has no place here, because of the special vocation of this writing. Opening the mythical vista inevitably denies the immediate fact, the local, limited, and temporal. It might be to invite us to some delusive consolation, where what Mrs. Mandelstam clearly means to do is to force us to see the fact itself, and to offer no comfort but the fact.

Once again her form is dictated by her situation. What seems to offend her even more than the arrests and executions is the silence in which they were accepted, the people involved being eager to ignore the arrests, to accept official lies, to lie themselves if necessary. The eagerness was, of course, part of the general fear.

In such a condition, a simple statement of fact, or a mere demurral at a lie, or even a refusal to give enthusiastic endorsement to a lie, would be an act of moral heroism. Mrs. Mandelstam records very little exceptional courage. She celebrates patience and occasional charity; she offers humble compliments to ordinary humanity, and to the few who kept it alive. But when she herself comes to tell the truth, she does it not discreetly and with qualifications, but in loud shouts of protest and defiance.

Unvisionary, anti-metaphysical, this is a Christian art. It stands in the tradition of the literature of memory, of oral history. Indeed Mrs. Mandelstam’s life after her husband’s arrest was nomadic—rootless, always in search of subsistence, animated only by the words she had memorized and determined to preserve. It is likely that her evidence will be attacked, ultimately, for bias and limited applicability. This does not matter. Statistics, even names and faces, are not finally as important as the act of bearing witness to history. That the voice of witness can never be wholly silenced means that history cannot be destroyed; and history, in the providence of God, remains the moral agent that totalitarian societies fear most.

Lionel Basney is associate professor of English, Houghton College, Houghton, New York.

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