Hope Against Hope has been described by Martin Amis and Clive James as the essential memoir of the 20th century. It was written towards the end of her long life by Nadezhda Mandelstam, the wife of arguably Russia's greatest modern poet, Osip Mandelstam.
Reading the book in translation (although Nadezhda was an accomplished linguist and earned much of her meagre living by translating from Russian into English, she wrote this book in Russian) is both a sobering and an uplifting experience.
A kind of black humour pervades the writing (she recalls the story of a school "inspector" in the 1930s who pleads with the staff on one visit to cut down the number of denunciations they're writing, threatening not to read the anonymous ones at all), and, not unexpectedly, given that her husband died in 1938 aged 47, sadness too.
But it is another quality that shines through a book which reads in places like a domestic diary and in others like a literary biography: the sheer enthusiasm for life that characterised her husband's life, and indeed her own.
Rather than falling into despair as the truth about Stalin became clear to him in the early 20s, Mandelstam channelled his disillusionment (he had supported the Revolution) into his writing. After falling silent for the second half of the decade, he came back with a bang in the 1930s with poems that would never be published in his lifetime.
One of them reached the ears of Stalin, not surprisingly given its opening lines:
We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,
All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,
The murderer and peasant-slayer.
That Mandelstam lived for five years after composing his "Stalin Epigram" is rather a mystery, but might have had something to do with the personal interest the dictator of the proletariat took in his case.
The book conveys the reality of being shunned and avoided, of living in grinding poverty, in a manner that is all the more powerful for the absence of sensationalism. Besides hope (Nadezhda means hope in Russian), what comes over most strongly is the reality of objective truth and values.
Reading the book in translation (although Nadezhda was an accomplished linguist and earned much of her meagre living by translating from Russian into English, she wrote this book in Russian) is both a sobering and an uplifting experience.
A kind of black humour pervades the writing (she recalls the story of a school "inspector" in the 1930s who pleads with the staff on one visit to cut down the number of denunciations they're writing, threatening not to read the anonymous ones at all), and, not unexpectedly, given that her husband died in 1938 aged 47, sadness too.
But it is another quality that shines through a book which reads in places like a domestic diary and in others like a literary biography: the sheer enthusiasm for life that characterised her husband's life, and indeed her own.
Rather than falling into despair as the truth about Stalin became clear to him in the early 20s, Mandelstam channelled his disillusionment (he had supported the Revolution) into his writing. After falling silent for the second half of the decade, he came back with a bang in the 1930s with poems that would never be published in his lifetime.
One of them reached the ears of Stalin, not surprisingly given its opening lines:
We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,
All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,
The murderer and peasant-slayer.
That Mandelstam lived for five years after composing his "Stalin Epigram" is rather a mystery, but might have had something to do with the personal interest the dictator of the proletariat took in his case.
The book conveys the reality of being shunned and avoided, of living in grinding poverty, in a manner that is all the more powerful for the absence of sensationalism. Besides hope (Nadezhda means hope in Russian), what comes over most strongly is the reality of objective truth and values.
"Why do you think you ought to be happy?" he had said as a rebuke to his wife when she suggested suicide as a way out of the unbearable life they were living. "Life is a gift that nobody should renounce."
Above all, though, the reader is left with a measure of the great love these two people shared.
2 comments:
"This age: layers of lime harden in the sick son's blood…
There's nowhere to run from the tyrant-epoch…
Who else will you kill? Who else glorify?
What other lies will you invent?"
Old ruin, old son, you just keep getting better.
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