Robert Littell: Nadezhda Mandelstam

I phoned Madam Mandelstam as soon as I reached Moscow. Some years before, having led a nomadic existence for decades, she'd been granted a residence permit and installed herself in the capital. She invited my companion and me to come by for tea. With the biggest box of chocolates I could find in the hotel's hard currency store under my arm, I flagged down a taxi. It took us to a bleak apartment house in a distant suburb filled with six-storey brick buildings that looked as if they had come into existence ramshackled and gone downhill from there.

When the door to the ground floor flat opened, we found ourselves standing before a short, worn, emaciated woman, ancient when she should have been merely old. Young poets were taking turns caring for the widow of the poet Mandelstam. One was preparing tea and cakes in the tiny kitchen when we arrived. Madam Mandelstam lay propped up on a settee most of the time we were there, occasionally selecting, after some deliberation, a bonbon from the box of chocolates open on her lap. "I was never skilled at predicting how something would taste from its shape," she said absently. The narrow apartment was terribly overheated. She was wearing a white sleeveless shift. Her elbows were bare and jutting, the skin on her arms hanging in soft pleats off her bones.

The conversation was in English, which she spoke fluently—she had used it to make ends meet with translation work in the years when the poet Mandelstam was not being published and earning no income. When I began recording the conversation she said, "It's been an eternity since you came around with the infernal taping machine of yours that filled a small suitcase. The time you interviewed Mandelstam, I seem to remember you had to change reels every half hour—after you left he complained that watching the spools go round made him dizzy. Now you turn up with a device not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes."

"In the future they'll get even smaller," I said.

Smiling faintly, Madam Mandelstam looked away. "When I was permitted to see him in the Lubyanka, Mandelstam asked me if the future was behind or ahead of us."

"What did you answer?"

"Damn it, Robert, I can't be expected to remember something I said in 1934. That's why you record these conversations. You tell me what I said."

"A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then," I remarked. "I'll have to look it up in my notes."

She laughed under her breath. "My great friend Akhmatova pretended that what flows under bridges is spilt milk. She was surely right. When she died, not long after returning from Oxford, I thought it entirely possible she might have drowned in spilt milk." Responding to a question, Madam Mandelstam began to talk about her husband: "He was a silly young man, very gay even when things started to become difficult for him as a poet in the twenties. He was endlessly zhizneradostny, which can be translated as joyous or, better still, life-glad. In the thirties, when we were especially miserable—we experienced hunger, homelessness, fear, filth, abject poverty—Mandelstam would ask me: Where is it written you should be happy?"

Staring off into space, Madam Mandelstam seemed to pick up the thread of a conversation with her husband that had been interrupted forty-one years before. "I was never disillusioned, my darling, because I never had the luxury of illusions."

We sipped our tea. My tape machine recorded minutes of silence. After a while I asked Madam Mandelstam if she thought her husband had actually come face-to-face with Stalin.

"Mandelstam wasn't the only Russian intellectual of his day to be fascinated by Stalin. He wondered what enigmas lay hidden behind those eyes, he was curious about what had transformed the Caucasian peasant Dzhugashvili into the Kremlin peasant-slayer Stalin, which is to say, into a practicing paranoid." "But you haven't answered my question."

She thought about this for a moment before coming up with a response that satisfied her. "Mandelstam certainly encountered Stalin," she said carefully. "You must decide for yourself whether the meetings took place in the Kremlin or a dacha, or in the poet's head."

Responding to another question, she said she had no idea why she hadn't been arrested along with her husband. At both of his arrests they could have taken her off as easily as they took him. "After the second arrest I followed Pushkin's advice. Try to be forgotten. I worked at so many jobs, and in so many places, I've lost track. I was a teacher, a translator, I once cleaned government buildings. I never lived in any one city for very long. I heard there were arrest warrants issued for me but I kept moving and managed to stay one jump ahead of the Chekists. I had to if Mandelstam's oeuvre—a portion of which existed and still exists only in my head—was to survive."

"In the end, obliging you to memorize his poems saved your life."

"You are mistaken if you think he obliged me, Robert. I committed his poems to memory because I wanted them on the tip of my tongue. Only later did it occur to either of us that memorizing his oeuvre would give me an incentive to survive if something were to happen to him." Madam Mandelstam closed her eyes for a moment. "Well, against all the odds I did survive. And here I am back in Moscow, if you can call this Moscow"—she waved tiredly at the window looking out onto another apartment building in her remote suburb. "I'm an old lady now. They have lost interest in me."

I asked her to describe the last months before Mandelstam's second arrest.

"You must understand, he was never the same after his first arrest. He once told me how, at his very first interrogation, Christophorovich promised he would experience fear in full measure, and he did. Something happened to Mandelstam in the Lubyanka that crippled his life-gladness. On several occasions he let slip allusions to his execution, but he never offered particulars and I didn't ask for fear of opening the wound. In exile, even after exile, there were months on end when Mandelstam seemed frightened of his shadow. He was afraid to be left alone. He was afraid to eat unless it was me who prepared the food for him, or he could join others serving themselves from a common bowl. He lay awake nights in Voronezh, later in Kalinin, straining to catch the sound of automobiles braking to a stop or footsteps drawing nearer on the street or doors opening in our building. Like countless millions of Russians, he finally fell asleep at dawn.

Looking back, I can see there were long stretches when Mandelstam found refuge from terror in madness. It wasn't what I think of as creative madness, which is what drove him to compose that first Stalin epigram—no, no, it was unadulterated madness filled with auditory hallucinations and demons capable of pushing someone to leap into the darkness from the second storey of a hospital.

There were also intervals when he would claw his way back to something resembling sanity. It was during these saner moments that he composed the wonderfully wistful poems in his Voronezh cycle.

In splendid poverty, luxurious beggardom I live alone—both peaceful and resigned"

Madame Mandelstam shook her head as if to clear it.

"It was during a saner moment that he got off a last letter, written on pages torn from his copy of Pushkin, asking me to send warm clothes and soap to him at Vtoraya Rechka, which you call Second River. We learned of Mandelstam's death from his brother Alexander—he received an official government letter informing him that Mandelstam died of heart failure on the twenty-seventh of December 1938. In those days, everyone who died, whether in the Lubyanka cellars, on the cattle cars heading east or in the gulag camps, was said by the authorities to have died of heart failure, so of course we considered the official version worthless, except perhaps for the date.

Akhmatova arrived from Leningrad soon after. I didn't know how to tell her the news without breaking down before I could finish the sentence, so I said, I am the widow of the poet Mandelstam. And we fell into each other's arms and sobbed until we had used up a lifetime's ration of tears."

I mentioned that I was familiar with the poet's last letter and asked her what she made of the signature.

"You are not the first to be intrigued by Mandelstam's Still dancing, Robert. One could tease various meanings out of the Still before dancing. On one level he was surely signaling, with typical Mandelstam bravura, that despite everything he was continuing to dance—a nod to your Roaring Twenties when he used to post lookouts at the door so we wouldn't be denounced for doing the Charleston. But my guess is that Mandelstam, as usual, was being more precise. With the cattle car approaching Siberia, he was, like the stars in Philip Sidney's astonishing poem, dancing in place to keep his feet from freezing, against the day when he could make his way back to his best friend and comrade-in-arms and lawful wedded wife."

"So still dancing suggests hope?"

"More like hope against hope. But hope all the same. Absolutely."

I told Madam Mandelstam how much I admired the two books she'd written that had been smuggled out of Russia and published in the West under the titles Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned', how, like a great many people, I thought they were the best writing to come out of Russia, Solzhenitsyn notwithstanding, about the savage Stalinist period that took the lives of millions, the poet Mandelstam among them. I asked if she thought things had changed for the better. She said she hoped against hope this was the case, but you could never be sure; that, like the Jew sitting on the last bench of the synagogue during the time of the pogroms, you had to keep glancing over your shoulder while you prayed if you wanted to survive.

When I thought we'd worn out our welcome, I thanked Madam Mandelstam for receiving us. With an effort she rose to her feet and accompanied us to the door. Before opening it to the dark corridor, she said something that has haunted me since:

Don't speak English in the hallway.

The Stalin Epigram, 2009