Word: mandelstams
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...Press articles appeared on such subjects as drug abuse and juvenile delinquency. The picture magazine Ogonyok and the multilanguage weekly Moscow News started printing hard-hitting stories about corrupt officials, inefficient factories and alienated youth. Ogonyok, for example, has published such long-banned writers as Vladimir Nabokov and Osip Mandelstam. Moscow News has exposed police harassment of a journalist seeking to document shoddy construction of a power plant. Just how daring the press became is illustrated by a joke making the rounds in Moscow. A pensioner calls a friend and exclaims, "Did you see that incredible article in Pravda today...
Similarly, Brodsky's essays are tributaries flowing toward a connecting sea. It is the idealization of "world culture," nurtured by the legendary Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. He died in one of Stalin's prison camps in the late '30s and was resurrected in Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, the magnificent two-volume memoir by his wife Nadezhda. She died in 1980, and Brodsky recalls her life of outcast poverty and how she hid her husband's manuscripts in saucepans. In the end, her kitchen became a cultural pit stop for touring writers and scholars. She tired of the attention...
...Poetry is power," observed Osip Mandelstam, Russia's great 20th century poet who died some time in the late '30s in a Soviet concentration camp. "Poetry is respected only in this country -people are killed for it. There's no place where more people are killed...
DIED. Nadezhda Mandelstam, 81, doughty widow of the major Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who preserved her husband's work after his death in a concentration camp in 1938, making possible the 1974 publication of a small selection of his poetry in the Soviet Union; of heart disease; in Moscow. Her own memoirs, Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974), powerful chronicles of life in Stalinist Russia, had to be smuggled out of the U.S.S.R. to be published...
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...