In George’s Bar, Iowa City, autumn 1981, I encountered a Polish poet who had been studying medicine in Leningrad in March 1953 when Stalin died. George’s Bar was a stopping point for long-distance truck drivers, funereal red and purple lights in the window. In the covert darkness of this place she told me how on the day of Stalin’s death the girls in her dormitory wept. A few days later when they were told to be joyful and roar with laughter they were joyful and roared with laughter. Her story reminded me of a bizarre anecdote in Hope Abandoned, the second book of memoirs by Nadia Mandelstam, widow of the murdered Russian poet Osip Mandelstam.
In the middle of the night, shortly before Stalin’s death, she was woken and brought to a special meeting at the teacher training college where she lectured in languages, women in crêpe de Chine dresses gathered there, despite the late hour, one woman with a silver fox fur draped over her shoulder in the manner of Russian film actresses. Nadia was informed that in her classes she’d been setting the English gerund at war with the old infinitive, which indicated that she felt there was enmity between Soviet fathers and sons. She was told to pack and leave. Before she left news came of Stalin’s death. As she was walking out of the door she saw a Jewish couple from the mathematics department, who had been similarly dismissed, dancing together in the courtyard, gone mad. Stalin’s death had come too late for them.
For twenty years after Mandelstam was finally taken away on 1 May 1938 Nadia Mandelstam kept the words of most of his poems in her memory. Sequences of his poems were buried all over Russia and when they turned up in the Khrushchev era some of the poems were found to have people like Brigitte Bardot as their subject matter, which was slightly odd! Memory had proved a safer place. Mandelstam had been hounded by Stalin because of a derogatory poem he’d written about him: ‘The huge laughing cockroaches of his top lip,/the glitter of his boot-rims.’ In the late 1950s, despite Mandelstam’s rehabilitation, Nadia Mandelstam was denied permission to live in Moscow and in Pskov, 430 miles from Moscow, started into her memoirs which, ironically, she could not have done in a writers’ apartment block in Moscow where she would have been under constant and mendacious surveillance. The results were Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, published abroad in 1970 and 1972.
Hope Against Hope reads like the best detective novel ever written, Stalin’s pursuit of Mandelstam – the years of exile for Mandelstam and his wife, the lulls in persecution, the apparent relaxations of mood at the Kremlin, the times Osip and Nadia Mandelstam had to beg on the side of the road for survival, the times they sauntered around Moscow and Leningrad, only able to get into these cities for hours when they could get sustenance from people like the poetess Anna Akhmatova, Mandelstam’s final disappearance after he’d been seduced away with his wife on a kind of writer’s honeymoon at a writers’ rest home, the reconstructed journey towards death, by train, by barge, by boat, to a zenith where people chopped off their toes because they were so frozen with cold.
Hope Abandoned is a more philosophical work, a mad, fulminating, funny, affectionate book, the fatter of the two. Everywhere in its pages, through description of horror – a time when children of party officials in a rural district beat up and robbed travellers and then gouged out their eyes so they, the assailants, would not be later identified – through description of illustrious contemporaries like the poetess Marina Tsvetayeva – ‘I know of no fate more terrible than Marina Tsvetayeva’s’ – the devotion of Nadia’s love for Osip shines through. ‘He lived with us always and never left us.’
Whether in a dissertation on the use of red in Rembrandt’s The Prodigal Son or in a story about a shoemaker, once taken away and beaten to the point of death by the authorities, who made shoes of many colours, from bits and pieces, for Nadia in Tashkent during the war, these books are enthralling.
Nadia Mandelstam lived on in an apartment in south-west Moscow until December 1980, probably the twentieth-century’s greatest survivor. At one point in Hope Abandoned she talks about the difference between people who think that God is in their head, that they are God, and people who let God, truth, shine through them. The first state, I often think, describing Stalin and his followers, is as relevant to psychiatrists I meet and journalists I read in contemporary London, who apparently think that truth is cauterized in their heads, that they are God, that there is nothing beyond the intellect. What lies beyond the intellect Nadia Mandelstam puts like this: ‘All that really matters is the inner light. This, and only this, is important.’