BOOKS
HOPE WITHOUT HOPE
HOPE ABANDONED . By Nadezhda Mandelstam. Translated with a
foreword by Max Hayward. Atheneum . $13.95.
In the fall of 1972, almost two decades after the death of Stalin, it
LOok me twelve days to overcome the fears of several sane, rational, unparanoid
Russians hesilant LO arrange a meeting between Nadezhda Mandelstam and a
writer from the Wesl. She herself, as it turned out, scorned such hesitation, but,
laki~g
into account her past and present history, her cautious friends were
probably righl. We met, Osip Mandelstam's widow and I, in her small cooper–
ative apartment on the outskirts of Moscow, the city from which she had been
exiled for more than thirty years and to which she was not allowed to return
till 1965, twelve years after the death of Stalin.
She was a month short of her seventy-third birthday then, a small woman,
frail, ailing. For the five hours of our talk she reclined on an old Russian
wooden bench, her head on flowered pillows, her green housecoat snugged by
a purple wool blankel. She was proud of her window full of thriving green
plants, some in flower. Someone had brought her a few red roses. As we talked
a friend dropped in with a gift of watermelon. Mme Mandelstam insisted I
drink her tea, which she characterized as the best in all Russia, served with
broad leaves open, filling half the mug.
"Did you ever taste such tea?" she asked me. "You never did."
She followed with:
" Now you must taste this herring," trilling her
r
with that gastronomical
enthusiasm lovers of food still show when they talk about the things they are
no longer permitted to eal.
"Who, " she asked me almost at once, "are your great men?"
I offered a few names.
"No, no, I mean the way T. S. Eliot was greal. Who understands the
crisis? Christianity-I think nobody."
Her name is Vera Nadezhda Lubov-Faith Hope Love-and though she
considers herself a Jew, and is considered by the Soviet authorities as a Jew,
was the third generation of her family to be baptized Christian. When I saw
