(The story of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who suffered conti...)
The story of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who suffered continuous persecution under Stalin, but whose wife constantly supported both him and his writings until he died in 1938.
("Hope Against" Nadezhda Mandelstam recounted the last fou...)
"Hope Against" Nadezhda Mandelstam recounted the last four years in the life of the great Russian poet, Osip Mandelstaum, and gave a hair-raising account of Stalin's terror.
Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam was a Russian memoirist, philologist and teacher. Wrote memoirs which were originally published abroad. They represent Voronezh cultural and social environment of the mid-1930’s and tell about the life of the exiled in Voronezh.
Background
Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam (née Khazina) was born on October 18, 1899, in Saratov, Russian Federation. Nadezhda was the youngest of four children (she had an older sister and two older brothers) of a middle-class Jewish family. Her parents were Yakov Arkadyevich Khazin and Vera Yakovlevna Khazina, and the family was wealthy enough to travel. Her mother was among the first group of women in the Soviet Union to complete training as a medical doctor, and her father was an attorney. The family did not practice Judaism, and kept Russian Orthodox holidays. Later they converted to Christianity. The family moved to Kiev, Ukraine, for her father's work, and the greater cultural and educational opportunities of the larger city.
Education
In 1909, Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam entered the private women's gymnasium of Adelaida Zhekulina. Having graduated from the gymnasium she entered the Kiev Imperial University of Saint Vladimir, but she dropped out. During the October Revolution Nadezhda Mandelstam studied at the workshop of the famous artist Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Ekster.
Nadezhda Mandelstam was the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam. Osip was arrested in 1934 for his poem entitled "Stalin Epigram" and exiled to Cherdyn, in Perm Oblast, Nadezhda went with him. Later the sentence was lightened and they were allowed to move to Voronezh in southwestern Russia, but were still banished from the largest cities, which were the artistic and cultural centers.
After Osip Mandelstam's second arrest in May 1938 and his subsequent death at the transit camp "Vtoraya Rechka" near Vladivostok that year, Nadezhda Mandelstam led an almost nomadic life. Given the repression of the times, she tried to dodge an expected arrest, and frequently changed places of residence and took only temporary jobs. On at least one occasion, in Kalinin, the NKVD came for her the day after she had fled.
As her mission in life, she worked to preserve her husband's poetic heritage, with the goal of publication one day. She managed to keep most of it memorized because she did not trust paper. Many years later, she was able to work with other writers to have it published.
Nadezhda Mandelstam gained her college degree and taught English in various provincial towns. After the death of Joseph Stalin, when government's repression eased, she returned to her studies and completed her dissertation in linguistics (1956). She was not allowed to return to Moscow until 1964, following the first phase of Osip Mandelstam's rehabilitation. She had spent 20 years in a kind of internal exile until the "thaws" of the late 1950s. Nadezhda began writing her memoir, which was published in English as Hope Against Hope in 1970, in part as a way of restoring her husband's memory and integrating her own struggles. It first circulated in a samizdat version in the Soviet Union in the 1960s.
In 1976, Mandelstam gave her archives to Princeton University in the United States. In 1979, her heart condition deteriorated, and she took to her bed in early December 1980. Nadezhda Mandelstam died on 29 December 1980 in Moscow. The funeral was arranged in the Russian Orthodox rite, with the lying in state taking place on January 1, 1981, in the church of Our Lady of the Sign. She was buried on January 2, 1981, at the Kuntsevo Cemetery.
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky, a Russian poet: "For decades, this woman was in hiding, winding through the provincial towns of the Great Empire, settling in a new place only to withdraw at the first signal of danger. The status of a non-existent personality gradually became her second nature. She was quite short and skinny. Over the years, she was shrinking more and more, as if in an attempt to turn herself into something weightless that can be quickly folded and put in your pocket, in case of escape.Also she had no property. Books, even foreign, never stayed with her for long. After reading or viewing, she immediately gave them to someone, as actually should be done with books.
In the years of her greatest prosperity, in the late 1960s-early 1970s, in her one-room apartment, on the outskirts of Moscow, the most expensive object was a cuckoo clock on the kitchen wall. The thief would be disappointed there, as well as those who could appear with a search warrant. Renegade, refugee, beggar-girlfriend, as Osip Mandelstam called her in one of his poems, and who she, in fact, remained until the end of her life".
Connections
Nadezhda Mandelstam was the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam. Nadezhda met the poet Osip Mandelstam at a nightclub in Kiev in 1919, and they started a relationship which led to marriage in 1921-1922. They lived in Ukraine at first, but moved to Petrograd in 1922. Later they lived in Moscow, and Georgia.