PARTISAN REVIEW
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delstam's companion, Osip Mandelstam's wife, the person who chose his exile
rather than separation from him .
Hope Against Hope,
the first volume of her
memoirs, now continued with
Hope Abandoned,·
proved a source book for
political scholars and literary critics primarily interested in how the apparatus
worked to destroy writers and intellectuals. But both books were much more
than biographical addenda to the life of Osip Mandelstam: just as, say, Con–
rad's Marlow in
Heart of Darkness
set out to find and discuss a man named
Kurtz but, in fulfilling his task, wrote another, perhaps more significant tale,
of how a single human being survives " the great demoralization of the land,"
so Nadezhda Mandelstam, dedicated to telling the story of Mandelstam's de–
struction and death, writes, as counterpoint, the tale of her miraculous surviv–
al and the survival of Mandelstam's poetry.
Hers is not a happy-ending tale. In a life such as, say, Hannah Arendt's
and her husband , Heinrich Bluecher's, there is an action of physical escape,
even though Nazi terror incarcerates in camps and threatens death daily. Han–
nah Arendt and Heinrich Bluechl'r
did
get out, and did live to witness the
destruction of not only Hitler but Hitler's Nazi and Gestapo apparatus. In
1972, when I saw Nadezhda Mandelstam in Moscow, Osip had been dead thir–
ty-four years, Stalin nearly twenty, but the apparatus had not disappeared or
even weakened. The
apparat
was, that is, unaffected by the death of Stalin in
exactly the way any well-designed machine would not stop running when its
inventor and perfector died . In
Hope Abandoned
Nadezhda suggests that the
apparat
has been refined and has "stood the test of time." It exists, she goes on,
"to the present day, even though the individual members of it have constantly
been replaced by more efficient ones."
Talking with her I felt much as I have when I have visited lifers in prison.
Jokes are made about the guards and the warden, about the system, but nobody
wants to be reminded of what's obvious: that the guards and warden go home
at night, that they, not the prisoners, are in charge of the keys.
Hope Aban–
doned
is, on its most profound level, a historical novel about how a young
girl, giddy as a teen-age Natasha, was seized
by
the day, locked into history,
and forced, ultimately, to march to tunes Stalin could whistle. The existential
playground shrinks, her freedom of field narrows till she is left standing tiptoe
on a dust mote. What sustains her is her sense of notleuing the sons-of-bitches
beat everybody and everything down. The instrument of survival is, in fact, the
physical
existence of Mandelstam's poems, which she bears like a chalice
through camps, exile, frightened friends, cowardly acquaintances. In
Hope
Against Hope
she describes her life in a textile factory where she had charge of
twelve machines:
·The titles are Mme Mandelstam's and the play on her name, Hope, is intentional.
