Horseshoes at the Head
THORNE, LUDMILLA
Horseshoes at the Head Hope Against Hope: A Memoir By Nadezhda Mandelstam Translated by Max Hayward Atheneum. 431 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Ludmilla Thorne "Poetry is power," Osip Mandelstam once...
...From then on publication of Mandelstam's work virtually ceased...
...When life seemed too great a burden, she reminded herself that only if she survived would his work survive...
...He could not do without a comfortable apartment, his writing table and pen...
...he, in turn, did not seek points of contact...
...In 1956 she earned her doctorate in English philology...
...She says that she sometimes would see him trying to rid himself of this persistent "hum" as if it were an animate body that had managed to attatch itself...
...Mandelstam kept his favorite book near him: Dante's Divine Comedy (he even carried a pocket edition whenever he went out in the street...
...A rare woman, she has spent her life as the devoted wife and widow of a great writer, seemingly unmindful of her own talent...
...I have a feeling that verse exists before it is composed," writes Mrs...
...The memoir spans a period of 45 years--from the Mandelstams' first meeting in May 1919 to 1964--with much of it focusing in painstaking detail on the tragic events of 1934-38...
...occasionally, he would even reproach her for not hearing it as he did...
...His second book, Tristia, was published in 1922 and again, under the title Vtoraya kniga (Second Book), in 1923...
...As early as 1923 Osip Mandelstam's name had been removed from all the lists of contributors to the various literary magazines...
...Meanwhile, she concealed what verse she possessed in shopping baskets, inside cushions and between saucers...
...Her description of Osip's creative process comprises one of the most fascinating chapters of the book: "A poem begins with a musical phrase ringing insistently in the ears...
...reduced to begging from friends in order to live, they spent their last year together in dire poverty...
...Fear, descending from the summit of authority, crept over the land like a poisonous fog, muting and maiming everyone in its path--those who killed no less than those who were killed...
...Soviet leaders must have agreed...
...Spineless intellectual," a common official term of abuse, assumed a sinister new dimension...
...If I were a poet and a poet friend of mine were in trouble, I would do anything to help him," he explained...
...Some of Mandelstam's contemporaries, even the great Pasternak, allowed themselves "to be adopted...
...Nadezhda Mandelstam, now 71 years old, still resides in Moscow...
...Reviewed by Ludmilla Thorne "Poetry is power," Osip Mandelstam once said to the poetess Anna Akhmatova...
...He concluded the conversation with a strange reproach: Why hadn't Pasternak tried to do something for Mandelstam...
...At some point in this process words would begin to form behind the musical phrase and his lips would move...
...The whole process of composition is one of straining to catch and record something compounded of harmony and sense as it is relayed from an unknown source...
...everyone knew that one could be arrested for nothing...
...Pasternak needed a certain amount of material well-being in order to work...
...Much of his imagery is drawn from sculpture and architecture, and his allusions are generally classical...
...And every killing is a treat For the broad-chested Ossete...
...We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Nadezhda Mandelstam, and not only for her memoir...
...No man dared ask why another was arrested...
...After his exile in 1934 the mere mention of his name was impossible without threat of reprisal...
...Mandelstam's fatal act was actually committed in the autumn of 1933, when he wrote a poem about Stalin: His fingers are fat as grubs And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips, His cockroach whiskers leer And his boot tops gleam...
...That same year marked the appearance of a book of criticism, O poezii (On Poetry), and a third book of poetry, Stikhotvorenia (Poems...
...These were the most terrifying years of their lives, and the life of all Russia as well--a period of mass surveillance, mass terror and mass exterminations...
...It has given us Osip Mandelstam's poetry and his wife's remarkable memoir...
...Most kept packed bags in readiness for their arrests...
...She compares Pasternak and her husband to antipodes, men "located at opposite poles of the same sphere," and yet, she adds, "it is possible to draw a line between them...
...I can think of no other book that so graphically illustrates the disarming effects of a totalitarian regime on its people--particularly the intelligentsia...
...For him, like everyone else, the key was "to expect nothing and be ready for anything...
...In 1925 he published a collection of autobiographical prose titled Shum vremeni (The Noise of Time), which in 1928 was retitled Egipetskaya marka (The Egyptian Stamp...
...Upon a poem's completion, it "fell away" from the poet and no longer tormented him with its presence...
...Mandelstam decided that the only sure method of preserving her husband's work was to commit it to memory...
...And how did a poet survive under such conditions...
...After Mandelstam's death, however, when no one would risk visiting the widow of a political victim, Pasternak was the only one who came to see her...
...Hope Against Hope, as her memoir has been titled, is one of the most important and absorbing books to come out of the Soviet Union--where it was not published...
...Not a line of his work appeared in the Soviet Union for 32 years--until the literary magazine Moskva (Moscow) published nine of his poems in 1964...
...Fortunately, Mandelstam's work is available in the United States in a three-volume collection edited by the Russian emigre scholars Gleb Struve and Boris Filippov...
...others, dispersed among friends for safekeeping, disappeared in the turmoil of the epoch...
...Mandelstam writes, "some suspected that everybody they met was an informer, others that they might be taken for one...
...They whinny, purr or whine As he prates and points a finger, One by one forging his laws, to be flung Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin...
...It was also becoming increasingly difficult for him to obtain translating work...
...readers who fully understand him comprise a poetic elite...
...at first inchoate, it later takes on a precise form, though still without words...
...Mandelstam, on the other hand, believed nothing should prevent an artist from doing what he had to do...
...She studied art with the well-known Russian artist Aleksandr Tyshler and acquired an excellent knowledge of European languages, notably French, German and English...
...In May 1938 Mandelstam was arrested again, and this time vanished in the frozen depths of Siberia...
...Instead of being promptly liquidated, he was banished from Moscow and forced to spend three years in the provincial town of Voronezh...
...Both reflect the cool temperature of a marble tomb...
...Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders-Fawning half-men for him to play with...
...In his Introduction, Clarence Brown tells us that Nadezhda Mandelstam was born in Saratov and spent most of her early years in Kiev...
...He composed his verse in his head and only needed to sit down briefly and transfer it to paper or dictate it to his wife...
...This gave her the strength to persist...
...Nevertheless, her brilliant book reveals a unique literary gift: the ability to involve the reader emotionally with events foreign to his own experience...
...In July 1934, as Mandelstam was being interrogated in the Lubianka prison following his arrest by the secret police, Stalin telephoned Boris Pasternak to assure him that his friend Mandelstam would be all right...
...Mandelstam's first book of poems, Kamen (Stone), appeared in 1913 when he was 22 years old, but he had already achieved fame as one of the outstanding young poets of the Acmeist school...
...A collected edition of Mandelstam's poetry that was supposed to have been published in the USSR 10 years ago has still not appeared...
...They not only harassed but twice arrested Mandelstam, one of Russia's greatest modern poets, before finally sending him to a concentration camp, where he died sometime during the last months of the Great Purge of 1936-38...
...In an atmosphere of repression a poem becomes "a document" and the writing of it "a terrorist act...
...Her husband's natural make-up made him unyielding to the tyranny of his time from the very outset...
...Mandelstam, "but the sum of a man's natural make-up and the basic trend of the times he lives in...
...at least at the beginning...
...Osip Mandelstam's poetry is difficult to describe to anyone who does not read Russian...
...Upon his return, he and his wife were barred from any sort of work...
...Each day she memorized one of his poems...
...Eventually, Mrs...
...The publishing of Hope Against Hope pays his work further homage...
...Fate is not a mysterious external force," writes Mrs...
...After Osip's arrest, she kept on the move to avoid the secret police...
...Stalin's initial reaction was surprising...
...physical comforts were not necessary to his creativity...
...This month the Chekhov Publishing Corporation of New York will bring it out in the original Russian, under the title Vospominaniya, or Memoirs...
...This constant anxiety inevitably left its mark: "We all became slightly unbalanced mentally--not exactly ill, but not normal either: suspicious, mendacious, confused and inhibited in our speech, at the same time putting on a show of adolescent optimism...
...More than 25 years later Mandelstam's widow began to write her recollections of his life and death...
...Many of her husband's manuscripts were confiscated by the nkvd...
...His art is often described as "opaque," "impenetrable" and "impersonal...
...The Soviet literary establishment, which became more and more submissive to the dictates of the regime, treated him as an outcast...
...Even to many Russian readers he is frequently incomprehensible...
...People developed two kinds of phobia," Mrs...
...As it turned out, Stalin's odd behavior merely delayed Mandelstam's death...
Vol. 53 • November 1970 • No. 22
