Word: mandelstams
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...first volume of her magnificent memoir, Hope Against Hope (TIME, Jan. 18, 1971), Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of Poet Osip Mandelstam, recalled her husband's grim joke on the subject of Russian culture in the 1930s. "Poetry is respected only in this country," he said. "There's no place where more people are killed...
...literature; in this, I mean the tedious reproduction of lived life naturalism, as opposed to the rich tradition of European Realism, which exaggerated human experience, celebrated a wide historical consciousness, and reconciled real conditions with desire. No reader, to whom what is actual is anathema, would quarrel with Osip Mandelstam's axiom that "The only thing that is real is the work itself;" when he concludes, though, that the artist "desires no other paradise than existence," Mandelstam reveals the divergence between readers and artists. Existence, which to the writer is a paradise, is to the reader a veritable hell. Without...
...commissar who had to put a stop to patriotic letters denouncing offenders against the regime because his office could not handle the flow. She notes Stalin's surprise phone call to Boris Pasternak to ask the author of the yet unwritten Dr. Zhivago just how good a poet Mandelstam was. Pasternak cautiously digressed and then suggested that he and Stalin meet for a chat. "About what?" asked the voice from the Kremlin. "About life and death," replied Pasternak. Stalin hung...
Tough Voice. Mrs. Mandelstam's testimony ranks with the best that has echoed out of Russia since. In a voice whose toughness and total lack of pretension or self-pity have been preserved in Max Hayward's excellent translation, she captures an almost physical sense of the way people shifted their views and the very foundations of their personalities in order to survive. For Mandelstam, change was impossible. He once tried to keep off the Bolshevik wolves by writing an ode to Stalin. Try as he might, it was an impossible task. Yet the conflict and the tension...
...Nadezhda Mandelstam preserved most of his work by squirreling copies with trusted friends and hiding manuscripts in cushions, saucepans, old shoes, as well as in the crannies of her remarkable memory. After her husband's death, she continued to move from place to place, supporting herself first as a factory worker and later as a teacher. In 1956, Mandelstam, along with many other victims of Stalin's terror, was posthumously "rehabilitated" and cleared by Khrushchev. A few of his poems have since been published in the Soviet Union. But not this memoir. In her country, Nadezhda Mandelstam...