Is There Hope?
A book review of Hope Against Hope.
In Hope Against Hope Nadezhda Mandelstam bears witness to how the Terror destroyed her love, her life, and her generation. Hers is a story of how an entire people—people she knew—became the creators, the collaborators, the executioners, and ultimately the victims of what we call “Stalin’s” Terror.
One by one, she names incredibly talented people: writers, chemists, physicians, violinists—and one by one she tells us of their moral destruction and physical deaths and of the families they left behind. She speaks of how people sat in their apartments at night, trembling when they heard the car pull up or the elevator doors open. And how even so, “they deluded themselves with the hope that this cup might for some reason pass from them” (p. 185). She tells of how even close friends shunned those who had been visited by the police. She tells of parents terrified of saying anything in front of their own children lest “God forbid” the young ones repeat something in school. And of how futile it all was. “Give us a man and we will make a case,” the Chekists said. It did not matter what you did (or did not) do—once you were listed as one of the millions who was to be “picked up” you were going to be found guilty and almost certainly die in a camp.
But people still tried to do something. Although this “something” was never (that Nadezhda records at least) an act of overt resistance. Instead, people tried to prepare. Nadezhda tells us that everyone she knew had a suitcase packed for when the Chekists came. One of their acquaintances took this to the extreme. He lugged his suitcase around with him everywhere. You could, after all, be picked up anywhere—on the street, at your job, at your friends’. It did him no good. When the Chekists finally came for him, he was so flustered he forgot his suitcase. Osip Mandelstam too tried to prepare for the inevitable. He loved Dante and so he acquired—with great difficulty—a pocket-sized book of Dante’s verse. Something he could put in his pockets and take to the camps. In the end though he left with a bulkier Dante, a book that probably did not even make it to the transit camp. Stories like these—and this book is filled with them—make the Terror real. Turning these pages, I felt as though I was looking at slightly aged photographs from (thank God!) another world.
It was in that world that Nadezhda Mandelstam spent her last years with her beloved husband, Osip Mandelstam, a man whose poetry according to Isaiah Berlin and many others “possessed a purity and perfection of form never again attained in Russia .” Nadezhda tells the story of their last years together in an almost stream-of-consciousness prose. A prose that is not worried by chronology: flashbacks blend into premonitions and into the present constantly. It is a story of exile, of waiting, of loving, interspersed by arrests, petty official vengeance, endless fear, and news that this friend or that has been “picked up” and died in the camps. Yet this story—the personal story of how Stalin’s terror destroyed Nadezhda’s life—is constantly interrupted by accounts of Osip’s poetry. Some of it she translates for the first time but for the most part she tells us how he composed it, the people whom he needed around him (almost all of them perished as well) to write and gives us some of her theories on the nature of poetry and art itself. It may seem odd to have an account of the creative process right next to (sometimes in the same paragraph as) an account of the Terror but when you read these pages it works. For you get the feeling that to Nadezhda poetry is synonymous with life. And this book is filled with life.
This may seem an odd thing to say. But Nadezhda fills these pages are filled with humor and irony. At one point, for example, she describes a piece of Stalinist bureaucracy in this way: “He had devoted the whole of his life to the ‘reconstruction of higher education,’ and for this reason he had not had time to take any degrees himself” (p. 385). At another point she remembers how, after the official informants became too much of a hassle Mandelstam and she went to the local police station where Osip Mandelstam offered to save the Chekists time and trouble by sending them any new poetry that he created. The informants stopped coming after that.
And Nadezhda still has hope. She hopes that Osip’s poetry—which she saved against all odds—by hiding it in suitcases, memorizing it, giving copies away to trusted friends will in the end be allowed back into the land of his birth. She hopes the new generation will “hear” what he had to say. For she has high hopes for this generation. “This terror,” she tells us, “could return. But it would mean sending several million people to the camps. If this were to happen now, they would all scream—and so would their families, friends, and neighbors. That is something to be reckoned with” (p. 330).
At one point Nadezhda Mandelstam (whose name means hope in Russian) wonders why she was named thus if she was fated to live through such evil times. By the time you turn the last page of her haunting book, you will know.
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Sounds like a very interesting book. It is good to sometimes get the humanistic point of view – history books talk in facts and figures, but an individual’s point of view can reveal so much more.
Nice you shared…
cant wait to read this book.
cant wait to read ths book
Very interesting piece
A very well presented views. It must be a good book to read.
Enjoyed reading your review of this book of sad times.
Thanks for the share Inna, sounds like an interesting book!
A must see and read, sounds very interesting.
A must read and an excellent description.
And may we be ever watchful that the spirit of this terror does not rise again. Because it does.
It’s so heartbreaking and unimaginable what these people went through. You gave a good review.
this is why we fight for freedom and against repression
I have not heard of this book, as I cannot read books (my eyes are crappy) I appreciated you sharing this book of struggle with me here.
Thanks for the review, very well written.
“If this were to happen now, they would all scream”? No. Or yes, but not as she intended: They would scream in pain, not in protest. Because they waited until already “happen now”. To scream they should when it is patently clear that it is about to happen. Which they could only if they knew that these things did happen before – if anyone had bothered to remind, as you Inna, blessedly, help to do.
Thanks for this. I think there is hope if you really hope.
Very fine review. TX
Excellent review! Thanks for publishing it
Yes that was an excellent review Inna. cheers
Nice review. People who lived during those times must’ve felt what hell really means.
Well written review. This sounds like an interesting book. Thanks for sharing.
nice!
This was a great review! I don’t know how people manage to survivors some of these horrors, just like I don’t know how people can do such things to other people. I am glad that I never had to experience anything like it and I do think those of my generation and later should be required to read such material. It would help prevent such atrocities in the future.
A very good review, it will be an interesting read.
good health and success,
moneynwealth
Let there be hope cos there’s hope.We need to radiate love to one another.There’s no remedy for love but to love more.It’s rather a pity that we were taught only how to love but not how to stop.What the world needs is more love and less paper work.Let bygones be bygones;Obstacles are those things you encounter when you set your eyes off your goals.It’s just about time we put on our thinking caps; for it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.Great post my prolific friend.I give it thumbs up! Peace out!
Yup, we are a lucky bunch, to live in a world where these things happen to other people.
Good share, Inna. I just hope we will have the strength to resist when a new terror raises its evil head.
I do think those of my generation and later should be required to read such material. It would help prevent such atrocities in the future.
There’s always hope
Thanks,
A W H
A very well written review. What a horrible thing this is, that happened to such lovely peoples and I am still in disbelief of the atrocities that took place all those many years ago and should never have happened. I won’t read her book but only because I cannot take the sorrow. Best wishes from me!
nice book it’s interesting:)
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