458
JACK LUDWIG
Working on the night shift and running between one machine and anoth–
er in the enormous shop, I kept myself awake by muttering M.'s verse to
myself. I had to commit everything to memory in case all my papers were
taken away from me, or the various people I had given copies to took
fright and burned them in a moment of panic-that had been done more
than once by the best and most devoted friends of literature.
Once the poems were in her head,
she
was the poems, so
she
had to sur–
vive. But wouldn't it have been far simpler to give up, let the poems go, and
be
shut of her hideous task? Quite apart from the particular qualities in Man–
delstam's poetry, quite apart from her powerful commitment to him as her
man, her love, her friend, was the
idea
of poetry, which she and Mandelstam
thought of as "something sacramental." At a time when Stalin's terror threat–
ened to be the sole definer of man's essential nature-brutal, sly, murderous,
treacherous-poetry, the act of creating it, thinking it, feeling it, offered a
saving alternative. Out of his misery Mandelstam constructed a "simple song
of earthen hurts." Hunger, cold, despair, madness miraculously made music,
metaphors, wit, rhythms, all, in Ortega's words, "objectively superfluous," all,
in Nadezhda's words, proofs of man's capacity for "mysterious joy" even dur–
ing "moments of silence and sadness."
She doesn't come up with some sentimental foolishness about great art
compensating the broken life. Neither Nazi Germany nor the Soviet Union
had poets who "sang in their chains like the sea." Chains to Nadezhda Man–
deIstam are metal, heavy, encircling. Neither Osip nor Nadezhda played with
heroic boasts about silence, exile, and cunning. Their response to power and
terror was rather "resignation, silence, and decay." The point of Mme Man–
deIstam's memoirs is that her fate and Mandelstam's fate were the common
experience during the Stalin era. This point she almost despairs over ever
being able to communicate. Once a Candide herself, she knows that those who
did not experience what she and Mandelstam did are Candides too:
Even if they have some inkling, people cannot really imagine what our
life was like. Even the Germans can have no idea-perhaps only the Jews
who lived under German occupation . What M. and I lived through was
the common lot of everybody in this vast and fear-crazed country.
There is a force in the memoirs that grows till it dominates everything
else-terror. Terror not as something general or even programmatic, but terror
as "the most powerful sensation we [Nadezhda and Akhmatova] had ever
known-stronger than love, jealousy, or any other humar:t feeling." What
went with terror was a "horrible and shameful awareness of utter helplessness,
of being tied hand and foot." During her worst days Mme Mandelstam would
test herself: do I feel shame? I do. Therefore I am. The idea of poetry was what
humankind could and might do; the feeling of shame was what humankind
did to stay human. Shame was man's last ;efuge.
