The Stalin Epigram (39 page)

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
.

CREDITS

Pasternak’s poem on page ix, “Hamlet,” was translated by Lydia Pasternak Slater.

Mandelstam’s
Kremlin mountaineer
epigram on page 95 was published in Nadezhda Mandelstam,
Hope Against Hope
(London: Collins & Harvill Press,
1971).

Mandelstam’s poem
I have studied the science of good-byes
on page 126 is from
Tristia
104, from
The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam
, translated by
Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin (New York: New York Review Books, 2004).

Tsvetaeva’s poem on page 131,
Where are the swans?
is from Marina Tsvetaeva,
The Demesne of the Swans
, a bilingual edition, with introduction, notes,
commentaries, and translation by Robin Kemball (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980).

The snatches of Mandelstam poems starting on page 147—
In the black velvet . . . Whom will you next kill . . . wolf-hound century . . . speak my mind . . . starving
peasants”
are all from
Osip Mandelstam: 50 Poems
, translated by Bernard Meares (New York: Persea Books, 1977).

Akhmatova’s
In the room of the banished poet
on page 303 is from the poem entitled “Voronezh” and dedicated “To O.M.,” in
Poems of
Akhmatova
, selected, translated, and introduced by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward (Boston: Atlantic-Little Brown, 1973).

Mandelstam’s
In splendid poverty
on page 361 is from the poem dated January 1937, “Voronezh,” in
Osip Mandelstam, Selected Poems
, translated by
David McDuff (Cambridge, Eng.: Rivers Press Ltd., 1973).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Littell, a
Newsweek
journalist in a previous incarnation, has been writing about the Soviet Union and Russians since his first work of fiction, the espionage
classic
The Defection of A. J. Lewinter
. Among his numerous critically acclaimed novels are
The October Circle, Mother Russia, The Debriefing, The Sisters, The Revolutionist, An Agent in
Place, The Visiting Professor,
the
New York Times
best-selling
The Company
(adapted for a TNT miniseries), and Legends (winner of the
Los Angeles Times
Book Award for Best
Thriller of 2005). Littell is an American who makes his home in France.