Word: mandelstam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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HOPE ABANDONED by NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM Translated by MAX HAYWARD 687 pages. Atheneum...
...survived only by a miracle or an oversight, which is the same thing," says Nadezhda Mandelstam, who at 74 is one of the last relics of a class once respectfully known as the Russian intelligentsia. For 50 years she has lived and suffered in the shadow of her famous husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in one of Stalin's prison camps during the winter of 1938. Two years ago Mrs. Mandelstam introduced herself to the West with Hope Against Hope, a book-never published in the Soviet Union-that established her as one of the great memoirists...
...witness to one of the age's most massive and systematic assaults on individualism, she also salvaged an era of epic hardship and courage from the limbo of censored history. The book began with Mandelstam's first arrest in 1934 for a poem that described the dictator as a tribal hetman savoring each death like a raspberry. Thereafter, the impoverished Mandelstams were hounded all over Russia by vengeful bureaucrats...
...Revolting Cowardice." Mrs. Mandelstam makes few concessions to those who have not read Hope Against Hope. Her new book, which has also been superbly translated by Max Hayward, is a sprawling but inhabitable annex to the first volume. It is as if in memoir form she has staked out the private living space that is so scarce in the communal world of the Soviet Union...
Akhmatova's life seems to have been dedicated by history to a task more important than making fine poems. She had a mission, as her friend Nadezhda Mandelstam said, to survive and testify about a cruel age. She embraced the role. In a brief recollection, she tells about the hundreds of hours spent waiting outside Leningrad's prison for word about...