Word: mandelstam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There was nothing extraordinary about Lili's camaraderie with the secret police. After all, Soviet society, including the literary salons, was riddled with spies, as Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, recalled in her magnificent memoir Hope Against Hope. Had Mayakovsky not tak en his own life, he would surely have fallen victim to such informers, as Mandelstam and hundreds of other writers did during the Great Purges of the late '30s. But who could be held accountable for his actions? asked Nadezhda Mandelstam. Her answer may apply to all the characters...
...other respects, Pasternak acted with exemplary, even foolhardy courage, as Ivinskaya makes plain. During the Great Terror of the '30s, he had refused to sign an endorsement of the death sentence meted out to Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other officers. In her memoirs Nadezhda Mandelstam recalled that Pasternak was the only person who dared visit her when her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, died in a concentration camp. Pasternak bravely directed that the royalties for his translations of Shakespeare's tragedies be spent to help prisoners in the Gulag. When prison regulations eased after Stalin's death...
...loosening up. The stereo rig blares, though Misha may interrupt it to recite the Russian poetry - Pasternak, Mandelstam, Pushkin - he loves. Records of Florence Foster Jenkins' haywire coloratura are another new enthusiasm. He enjoyed a recent trip to Paris because "there, people have more time than in New York." He is absorbing the American pace, however. When Gelsey Kirkland stalled at a recent photo session, he nudged her with "Let's go, Gelsey...
...first book centered around the last four years of Mandelstam's life. Hope Abandoned shuttles unchronologically back and forth over the past half-century, concentrating heavily on their early years together. The author, a former teacher and translator who lives in Moscow, regards the precise preservation of memories as both a personal and socially responsible moral...
...Mandelstams met in 1919, a time of optimistic chaos, and began living together a year later. Writers generally, and even poetic idealists like Mandelstam, found ready employment in newly formed educational and cultural agencies, where payment was usually in food and clothing. A lecture on the Russian symbolist poet Alexander Blok earned Mandelstam enough cloth for a suit and two dresses for his wife...