Word: mandelstams
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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...
...Mandelstam was to die in one of Stalin's Siberian prison camps at the beginning of World War II. He was one of Russia's finest modern poets, an artist who built his poems from gritty blocks of life. Anna Akhmatova, a close friend of the Mandelstams, shared this politically hazardous aesthetic. When she died in 1966 at the age of 77, she was regarded as Russia's greatest woman poet. It is a distinction that today might be considered sexist, were this issue not overshadowed by the enormous struggle in the Soviet Union for intellectual...
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...