Nadezhda Mandelstam - Hope Against Hope

impossible. For all her diminu­tive size, she was colossally there in the hall (to murmur "Rot!" at the occasional statement with which she disagreed). And she is every­where in this memoir of her husband. Her tone and her spirit, at least, are here.

In this note I shall set down some of the external facts of her life which she omits and which happen to be known to me.

She was born Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina—the daughter, that is, of Yakov Khazin—on October 31, 1899, in the town of Saratov. Her mother was a physician. I don't know what her father's occupa­tion was, but I find in one of her letters the information that her parents were "nice, highly educated people." She had a sister, Anna, and a brother, Evgeni Yakovlevich, who became a writer. Though she relishes the slightly outre circumstance of having been born in Saratov—something like Balzac's having been married in Berdichev— the fact is that all her early life was passed in Kiev. There she studied art in the studio of A. A. Ekster, where one of her best friends was Ilia Ehrenburg's future wife, Liuba. Another was A. G. Tyshler, who later became a well-known artist. An acquaintance, but hardly a friend, was the extraordinary Bliumkin, the assassin of the German ambassador Count Mirbach and at times one of the most pestilential banes of Mandelstam's existence.

She learned the principal European languages to such an extent that she can still translate handily from French and German today. Her family traveled widely, nonchalantly, naturally, as used to be done, and she retains today a vivid familiarity with the now for­bidden landscape of Europe. Her knowledge of English also began in childhood, for she has often mentioned her English governesses in letters to me ("they were all parson's daughters"), and she savors the slightly fusty Victorianism of some of her idioms. "Hope against hope" is one of these, which I count so often as I read back through her letters that it has practically become her slogan in my mind. The pun on her own name—Nadezhda means Hope in Russian—makes it eligible for this, and so does its expression of her obstinate courage. It doesn't make a bad title for her book, which has none in Russian.

Her knowledge of languages was very valuable in the twenties and thirties when she and her husband, like many of the old intelligentsia, were driven into a feverish spate of translating in order to live. She translated and edited numerous books—probably, I should think, under a pseudonym. At any rate, it would be impossible to determine what she translated, for those chores were no sooner finished than forgotten. She even collaborated with Mandelstam on many of the works, including those in verse, that carried his name as translator— an added reason, if any were needed, for putting little store by those pages in his canon. It must surely have been Nadezhda Yakovlevna who was mainly responsible for translating things like Upton Sin­clair's Machine or editing the novels of Captain Mayne Reid, for she knew English far better than her husband, but when I asked her this she waved the question away with a gesture of distaste: "Who knows? What didn't we translate?"

As for her knowledge of English, it became her means of liveli­hood after Mandelstam's death, for she seems to have taught it in half the provincial towns of Russia before she was finally allowed to return to Moscow in 1964, when she began writing this book. In 1956, as a student of Mandelstam's old schoolmate, the great scholar Victor Zhirmunski, she earned the degree of "Kandidat nauk"—the equivalent of our doctorate—in English philology. Ten years later she presented me with a copy of the printed abstract of her disserta­tion, a brochure of thirteen pages, and since it is her principal ac­knowledged work before the present book, perhaps it should be noticed. The author is identified as "Head of the Department of English Language of the Chuvash Teachers' Training College," and the title of her work is Functions of the Accusative Case on the Basis of Materials Drawn from Anglo-Saxon Poetic Monuments. There is one tutelary reference to Engels, and one to Lenin. I do not suppose that she looks upon this with quite the contempt re­served for her translations, but the inscription in my copy reads, in part: "this thoroughly pleasant bit of rubbish."

Foreign visitors to the Soviet Union seldom realize how possible it is to meet people there without, in a sense, Meeting them. Very dis­tinguished visitors have made this mistake. In fact, the more distin­guished they are, alas, the more likely they are to be fooled, for the effort expended on them will be much greater. Nor does the effort cost very much. The roles of Poet's Widow, Rebellious Young Poet, Disloyal Journalist, etc., etc., are all too practiced to fail often of their goal. I say all this simply in order to remark that this is a book in which one can Meet the author of it. There are patches of reti­cence, true, but it is for the most part an utterly naked book, from its first page to its last an utterance from beyond the point of no return. Writing of her birthday on October 31, 1969, she said, "Everybody was astonished at my refusing to see anyone that day. ... It was a most pleasant experience to be alone at seventy. I'm glad to be on my vosmoi desiatok [eighth decade]," It gave her, she said, the "free­dom of the city," adding that I, living in England, would grasp what she meant. "Believe me, it is horribly good to be old and unable even to defend myself. Whoever wishes to knock me down will do it in no time." There is little reason, I am sure, to warn the reader of what Dostoyevski found: how dangerous such vulnerability can be, how powerful stark defenselessness.

But it would not be fitting to end this word of introduction on so heavy a note as that, for the fact is that Nadezhda Yakovlevna's book, however melancholy the sum total of its burden, is lightened time and again by an inexplicably buoyant sense of liberation, joy and even . . . humor.

There is an occasional scene that might have derived from Gogol's Inspector General. Consider, for example, the official of the Ministry of Education who came to that Chuvash Teachers' Training College for a meeting. Hapless man! He could not have known that the Head of the English Department would laconically detail, years afterward, his pleas to the faculty to stop writing so many denunciations of each other and his warning that in future unsigned denunciations would not even be read. One tends to forget what a damned nuisance Stalin­ist officials must have found the system of ritual informing. In Voro­nezh an old Jewish grandmother raising her three grandsons was re­ported by some ill-wisher to be a prostitute. The Mandelstams, living nearby, were reported to be entertaining sinister guests at night and . . . firing guns. Right up to 1937, Nadezhda Yakovlevna writes, a certain plausibility was still required.

Some of the humor has no barbs at all. The village of Nikolskoye had been settled by exiled criminals and fugitives in the; days of Peter the Great. The street names had all been changed, of course, but Mandelstam eagerly noted down the names by which the locals still knew them: Strangler's Lane, Embezzler's Street, Counterfeiter's Row. . . .

But the buoyancy of which I speak does not depend upon such passages as these. It depends upon the central figure of Osip Mandel­stam himself. Nadezhda Yakovlevna calls him in one place "endlessly zhizneradostny." The word is usually rendered as "cheerful" or "joyous"—rather feeble counters for an original that means, in its two parts, "life-glad." Those who seek the roots of poetry in a close equivalency with life will find it perfectly

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