PATRICK O'BRIBN

Hope Against Hope, or Against Mirades

Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir, translated by Max Hayward. (London: Collins, Harvell, 1971.)

The very pace of events was testimony to their miraculous nature: when the right button was pressed above, the bureau- cratic maclfi'ne functioned with astonishing speed. The greater the degree of centralisation, the more impressive the n~racle. We were overjoyed by miracles and accepted them with the innocent credulity of an Oriental mob. They had become part of our life [p. 93].

By such a miracle, that splendid woman of limitless courage, Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the tragic Russian poet Osip Man- delstam, survived the traumatic world of Russia in the 1930s and 1940s. Like the God of the Old Testament, Stalin was the scourge of his enemies, working many great miracles of absolute destruction against them. Through the intercession of favoured intermediaries, Nadezhda survived the Stalinist plagues; many millions, including her husband, did not. They were the victims of the Twentieth Cen- tury's greatest miracle worker, who in his time was a prophet who certainly did not go unrecognized in his own country nor, indeed, within the world at large.

Hope Against Hope is undoubtedly one of the most important books to be published in this century. Yet the greatest tragedy of all is that it was necessary. Through an act of supreme will Nadezhda Mandelstam survived in order to bear testimony to her husband, who

448 STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM

died under unspeakable circumstances on a human rubbish heap in Siberia in 1937 because the Great Genius of the Universe was averse to satirical poetry. However, it is not an egotistical work. Far from it. Through the tragedy of her own and her husband's life, Mrs. Mandel- stain bears testimony to the agony of Russia and in doing so has produced a literary masterpiece, a work of memory and imagination that not only confirms the wisdom of Orwell's, Arendt's, Camus's and Koestler's judgments on the nature of totalitarianism, but that also succeeds in answering one of the key historical questions of an unfor- gettable epoch in the history of Russia in a way and to a degree that neither a work of academic history nor a novel could accomplish. That question is, how was it possible for one man to exercise such absolute power over such a vast and heterogeneous empire as the U.S.S.R.?

The text is a rich weave of memories, historical commentaries and analysis, philosophical discourse, proverbial wisdom, and incredible insights not only into the nature of power and the pecking-order in a totalitarian polity, but also into the tragedy and the beauty and the evil of human nature:

I often wondered whether it is right to scream when you are being beaten and trampled underfoot. Isn't it better to face one's tormentors in a stance of satanic pride, answering them with con- temptuous silence? I decided that it is better to scream, This pitiful sound, which sometimes, goodness knows how, reaches into the remotest prison cell, is a concentrated expression of the last vestige of human dignity. It is a man's way of leaving a last trace, of telling people how he lived and died. By his screams he asserts his r~ght to live, sends a message to the outside world demanding help and calling for resistance. If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity [p. 42].

Mrs. Mandolstam (whose Christian name in Russian means " h o p e ") is optimistic that such terror will never occur again, because she believes that a younger generation of Russian intellectuals is at last refusing to be silent. She partly blames her own generation of intellectuals for the rise of Stalin:

: There had been a time when, terrified,of chaos, we had all prayed foi" a strong system, for a powerful hand that ,would stem the angry human river overflowing its banks. There is not one of us • . . who does not believe that he would be the first victim if the mob ever got out of hand. "We would be the first to be hknged from a lamppost "----whenever ~ hear this constantly repeated phrase, I remember Herzen's words about the intelligentsia which

HOPR AGAINST HOPI~, OR AGAINST MIRACLES 449

so much fears its own people that it prefers to go in chains itself, provided the people, too, remain fettered [p. 96].

The work compounds tragedy upon tragedy, but despite it all, des- pite the apocalyptic, Old Testament world of Stalinist Russia, beauty and hope amidst unimaginable human anguish tear at one's heartstrings.

She tolls the paradigmatic story of the tragic hope and anguished love of one good woman, the wife of a jailed writer, who all through the long years of his imprisonment, and despite the miserable condi- tions under which she was forced to live as the wife of an "enemy of the people," kept her hands and her hair beautiful in preparation for her husband's return. She kept herself as a woman to be caressed by the man she loved. The long years of suffering went by and her hus- band was released, but tragedy struck again and he died. However, hope still did not die within his wife, who continued to prepare herself for the cherishing of her husband when the grave would become quiet. She was in the very best sense of the word a "liberated" woman, a woman who lived for and by love, an unsung martyr of a political cause whose philosophical roots arc still being invoked today in the name of "liberation" and "freedom," an embarrassment to our "l iberated" consciences.

The knowledge of the commitment of such women, loyal to their husbands to the bitter end, pales to insignificance the exhibitionist antics of our fashionable" libs."

Mrs. Mandelstam pays homage to the courageous loyalty and love of those tragic figures "l iberated" from bourgeois family life by Stalin's decrees:

The women who stood in line with me tried not to get drawn into conversation. They all, without exception, said that their hus- bands had been arrested by mistake and would soon be released. Their eyes were red from tears and lack of sleep, but I don't recall anyone ever crying while we stood in line. When they left their homes, they composed their features by some effort of the will and tried to look their best . . . . Their faces had become masks [p. 371].

Mrs. Mandelstam's discussion of the pro-Bolshevik, revolutionary Russian cultural intelligentsia and their predilection for futurism and a new morality is strikingly contemporary, and the parallels with present movements in cultural.political thought are obvious. Listen all you avant-garde to the rallying cry of cultural terrorists:

450 STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM

All were agreed on the superiority of the new creed which promised heaven on earth instead of other worldly rewards. But the most important thing for them was the end to all doubt and the possibility of absolute faith in the new, scientifically obtained faith . . . . There was something cocksure about them--they loved to talk down at you and shock you. They had taken it upon themselves . . . to destroy the values of the past and since the tide was flowing in their favour, nobody noticed how primitive their weapons were. For most of the neophytes, all values, truths and laws had been done away with . . . . Christian moral i ty-- including the ancient commandment " T h o u shalt not kill " - -was blithely identified with "bourgeo i s " morality. Everything was dismissed as a fiction. Freedom7 There's no such thing and never was l Since art, and particularly literature, only carried out the orders of the ruling class, it followed that a writer should con- sciously put himself at the service of his new master. A number of terms such as " h o n o u r " and " c o n s d e n c e " went out of use at this time--concepts like these were easily discredited now the right formula has been found [pp. 164, 165].

Yes , e v e n d o w n to t h e q u e s t i o n o f a g e :

When [Osip Mandelstam] and Akhmatova were still not much over thirty, they were quite seriously thought of as old people [p. 16V].

In conclusion, it must be said that we in the West are now in Mrs. Mandelstam's debt for reminding us once more and so sensitively that people are infinltely more important than the ideologies of all those would-be miracle workers who naively imagine that they can achieve---without terror--that which neither Christ, the greatest Christian, nor Lenin, the greatest of the revolutionaries, nor Hitler, nor Stalin, the greatest of the paranoiacs, could achievo---a "superior humanity."

The only way to repay that debt and to do honour to a great and courageous woman is by reading what she has to say.