Hope Against Hope [Nadezhda Mandelstam] (fb2) читать постранично, страница - 2

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 astonishing that there are so few sad poems in Mandelstam. But while this or that fact of his tragic existence can explain the brute meaning of many lines, nothing can explain the poetry of them other than the wild joy that he took in the Russian language. It is not astonishing. "Pechal moya svetla," Pushkin wrote, "My sadness is luminous"; and Mandelstam not only could but did use the line. The irrepressible Shakespeare could not restrain his pleasure in the antics of language even for Hamlet's bleak­est soliloquies

it cannot be But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall To make oppression bitter.

To all of which Yeats directly alludes when speaking of the essential gaiety of art in his "Lapis Lazuli":

They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.

All things fall and are built again And those that build them again are gay.

In an early essay on Pushkin and Scriabin, of which only fragments remain, Mandelstam was evidently trying to find the source of this joy within the terms of Christianity. Christian art is joyous because it is free, and it is free because of the fact of Christ's having died to redeem the world. One need not die in art nor save the world in it, those matters having been, so to speak, attended to. What is left? The blissful responsibility to enjoy the world. Such, I take it, was the argument, as one can see it, from what is left. Whether in later years Mandelstam would have sought quite this underpinning for his innate gladness in ttfe, I cannot tell. Perhaps the missing segments of this same essay might have modulated the statement in some way. But that is beside the essential point, which is that Mandelstam habitually converted not only the prose of life but even its truly darker mo­ments into poems from which a sense of pleasure, even beatitude, is seldom absent.

Nadezhda Yakovlevna says in one place that he drew strength from what might drive others, herself included, into despair. But that is unfair. For her ample spirit, no