The Buried Life

By R. Z. Sheppard

HOPE AGAINST HOPE by Nadezhda Mandelstam. 431 pages. Afheneum. $10.

"Madness in great ones must not unwatch'd go," said Claudius as he sent Polonius to eavesdrop on Hamlet. The prince of petulance had his problems, not the least of which was that he was an excellent poet who could not keep his mouth shut. Compulsively putting the truth into unforgettable images and rhythms is indeed a form of madness that tyrants have always feared.

Osip Mandelstam, one of modern Russia's best poets, was touched with such divine madness. Born in 1891, he became an Acmeist, one of a group of poets who reacted against the excess vagaries of the Symbolists by celebrating the palpability of things in clear, earthy language. Although the son of a Jewish leather merchant, Mandelstam was most at home in classical Christian humanism. A rose was a rose because of its petals and perfume, not because it stood for something else.

And a butcher was a butcher. In 1933, when Stalin began preparing for his first Great Purge, Mandelstam did a wild and unheard-of thing. He wrote a poem about Stalin, and even read it to a group of literary friends. It began:

We live, deaf to the land beneath us, Ten steps away no one hears our speeches.

It went on to describe the dictator in images redolent of death, decay and sickness. Stalin's "fingers are fat as grubs," his "cockroach whiskers leer," his laws are like horseshoes to fling "at the head, the eye or the groin." One version of the poem ended with Stalin savoring every execution like a raspberry.

Some poem. Some razzberry. In those days--and for a decade to come--people disappeared forever behind the walls of Moscow's Lubianka Prison for much less. Inevitably, Stalin heard about Mandelstam's poem. Yet it was not until 1934 that he had the poet arrested. Even then, it was difficult to do away with a man as acclaimed as Mandelstam. In addition, influential friends put in the good word for him. The result was that Mandelstam was released and exiled with his wife to live as best he could in the provinces. For three years, he was officially "isolated but preserved." Then, in 1938, at the height of the purges, Mandelstam was rearrested and sent to a labor camp near Vladivostok. He died there at 47, starved, frozen and justifiably paranoid.

Hope Against Hope is Nadezhda Mandelstam's recollection of the four years during which she and her husband wandered as nonpersons through the small cities and towns of Russia. They were harassed by officials, plagued by spies, kept from steady work and forced to borrow, beg and live in the corners of cold rooms. Their constant companion was the realization that they could be arrested at any time for any reason. "Give us a man and we will make a case" was a big office joke among the secret police.

Life was full of grotesque jokes straight out of Gogol. The author tells of the 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 up.

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 launched him on a new cycle of real poems.

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's only published work is a doctoral thesis in English philology, entitled Functions of the Accusative Case on the Basis of Materials Drawn from Anglo-Saxon Poetic Monuments.

R.Z. Sheppard

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