Robert Littell: Nadezhda Mandelstam

I phoned Madam Mandelstam as soon as I reached Moscow. Someyears before, having led a nomadic existence for decades, she'd beengranted a residence permit and installed herself in the capital. Sheinvited my companion and me to come by for tea. With the biggest box ofchocolates I could find in the hotel's hard currency store under myarm, I flagged down a taxi. It took us to a bleak apartment house in adistant suburb filled with six-storey brick buildings that looked as ifthey had come into existence ramshackled and gone downhill from there.

When the door to the ground floor flat opened, we found ourselvesstanding before a short, worn, emaciated woman, ancient when she shouldhave been merely old. Young poets were taking turns caring for thewidow of the poet Mandelstam. One was preparing tea and cakes in thetiny kitchen when we arrived. Madam Mandelstam lay propped up on asettee most of the time we were there, occasionally selecting, aftersome deliberation, a bonbon from the box of chocolates open on her lap."I was never skilled at predicting how something would taste from itsshape," she said absently. The narrow apartment was terriblyoverheated. She was wearing a white sleeveless shift. Her elbows werebare and jutting, the skin on her arms hanging in soft pleats off herbones.

The conversation was in English, which she spoke fluently—she hadused it to make ends meet with translation work in the years when thepoet Mandelstam was not being published and earning no income. When Ibegan recording the conversation she said, "It's been an eternity sinceyou came around with the infernal taping machine of yours that filled asmall suitcase. The time you interviewed Mandelstam, I seem to rememberyou had to change reels every half hour—after you left he complainedthat watching the spools go round made him dizzy. Now you turn up witha 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 permittedto see him in the Lubyanka, Mandelstam asked me if the future wasbehind or ahead of us."

"What did you answer?"

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

"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 pretendedthat what flows under bridges is spilt milk. She was surely right. Whenshe died, not long after returning from Oxford, I thought it entirelypossible she might have drowned in spilt milk." Responding to aquestion, Madam Mandelstam began to talk about her husband: "He was asilly young man, very gay even when things started to become difficultfor him as a poet in the twenties. He was endlessly zhizneradostny,which can be translated as joyous or, better still, life-glad. In thethirties, 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 thethread of a conversation with her husband that had been interruptedforty-one years before. "I was never disillusioned, my darling, becauseI 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 hadactually come face-to-face with Stalin.

"Mandelstam wasn't the only Russian intellectual of his day to befascinated by Stalin. He wondered what enigmas lay hidden behind thoseeyes, he was curious about what had transformed the Caucasian peasantDzhugashvili 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 responsethat satisfied her. "Mandelstam certainly encountered Stalin," she saidcarefully. "You must decide for yourself whether the meetings tookplace in the Kremlin or a dacha, or in the poet's head."

Responding to another question, she said she had no idea why shehadn't been arrested along with her husband. At both of his arreststhey could have taken her off as easily as they took him. "After thesecond arrest I followed Pushkin's advice. Try to be forgotten. Iworked at so many jobs, and in so many places, I've lost track. I was ateacher, a translator, I once cleaned government buildings. I neverlived in any one city for very long. I heard there were arrest warrantsissued for me but I kept moving and managed to stay one jump ahead ofthe Chekists. I had to if Mandelstam's oeuvre—a portion of whichexisted 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 committedhis poems to memory because I wanted them on the tip of my tongue. Onlylater did it occur to either of us that memorizing his oeuvre wouldgive me an incentive to survive if something were to happen to him."Madam Mandelstam closed her eyes for a moment. "Well, against all theodds I did survive. And here I am back in Moscow, if you can call thisMoscow"—she waved tiredly at the window looking out onto anotherapartment building in her remote suburb. "I'm an old lady now. Theyhave 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, Christophorovichpromised he would experience fear in full measure, and he did.Something happened to Mandelstam in the Lubyanka that crippled hislife-gladness. On several occasions he let slip allusions to hisexecution, but he never offered particulars and I didn't ask for fearof opening the wound. In exile, even after exile, there were months onend when Mandelstam seemed frightened of his shadow. He was afraid tobe left alone. He was afraid to eat unless it was me who prepared thefood for him, or he could join others serving themselves from a commonbowl. He lay awake nights in Voronezh, later in Kalinin, straining tocatch the sound of automobiles braking to a stop or footsteps drawingnearer on the street or doors opening in our building. Like countlessmillions of Russians, he finally fell asleep at dawn.

Looking back, I can see there were long stretches when Mandelstamfound refuge from terror in madness. It wasn't what I think of ascreative madness, which is what drove him to compose that first Stalinepigram—no, no, it was unadulterated madness filled with auditoryhallucinations and demons capable of pushing someone to leap into thedarkness from the second storey of a hospital.

There were also intervals when he would claw his way back tosomething resembling sanity. It was during these saner moments that hecomposed 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, writtenon pages torn from his copy of Pushkin, asking me to send warm clothesand soap to him at Vtoraya Rechka, which you call Second River. Welearned of Mandelstam's death from his brother Alexander—he received anofficial government letter informing him that Mandelstam died of heartfailure on the twenty-seventh of December 1938. In those days, everyonewho died, whether in the Lubyanka cellars, on the cattle cars headingeast or in the gulag camps, was said by the authorities to have died ofheart failure, so of course we considered the official versionworthless, except perhaps for the date.

Akhmatova arrived from Leningrad soon after. I didn't know how totell her the news without breaking down before I could finish thesentence, so I said, I am the widow of the poet Mandelstam. And we fellinto each other's arms and sobbed until we had used up a lifetime'sration 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 Stilldancing, Robert. One could tease various meanings out of the Stillbefore dancing. On one level he was surely signaling, with typicalMandelstam bravura, that despite everything he was continuing todance—a nod to your Roaring Twenties when he used to post lookouts atthe door so we wouldn't be denounced for doing the Charleston. But myguess is that Mandelstam, as usual, was being more precise. With thecattle car approaching Siberia, he was, like the stars in PhilipSidney's astonishing poem, dancing in place to keep his feet fromfreezing, against the day when he could make his way back to his bestfriend 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'dwritten that had been smuggled out of Russia and published in the Westunder the titles Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned', how, like agreat many people, I thought they were the best writing to come out ofRussia, Solzhenitsyn notwithstanding, about the savage Stalinist periodthat took the lives of millions, the poet Mandelstam among them. Iasked if she thought things had changed for the better. She said shehoped against hope this was the case, but you could never be sure;that, like the Jew sitting on the last bench of the synagogue duringthe time of the pogroms, you had to keep glancing over your shoulderwhile you prayed if you wanted to survive.

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

Don't speak English in the hallway.

The Stalin Epigram, 2009