The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (20 page)

By then, Nadezhda’s family had been evicted for the second time, their apartment assigned to a high-ranked Bolshevik, but the couple wanted to make use of it. Just as they shut themselves in Nadezhda’s former room, a crowd of female prisoners was brought in by soldiers to scrub floors. Unperturbed by what was going on, Mandelstam and Nadezhda spent two hours in the room while soldiers banged on the door. “But we just stayed put. M. read me a lot of poems.…” Then the two went to the apartment building where Nadezhda’s parents had rooms.

A few weeks later, the couple left the city to seek refuge in relatively peaceful Georgia. It was “destiny, rather than love”
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that bound them together, Nadezhda remarked. They never separated again until the night of May 2, 1938, nineteen years later, when Mandelstam was taken away under guard.

Soon after the Revolution, many intellectuals fled to Georgia, which remained independent of the Bolsheviks for several years. Their journey to Georgia began in safety and comfort on a special train of a Bolshevik commissar who was Mandelstam’s acquaintance. But upon arrival, they found the small independent republic overwhelmed by Civil War refugees. The couple stayed in the Caucasus for about six months, traveling through Georgia “as free as birds.” Earning bread by occasional translations, they were homeless and hungry migrants in a land famous for magnificent food and wine. “I know from my own experience how bitter the émigré’s bread can be in foreign parts. I discovered this in Georgia.”
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In December 1921, on New Year’s Eve, the couple boarded a steamer for the Russian port of Novorossiisk. The ship was so packed that the Mandelstams considered themselves lucky to get sleeping space on the floor of a cabin belonging to a woman commissar who took them in.

In early March 1922, in Kiev, the couple registered their marriage in a civil ceremony, which Nadezhda felt was “a totally meaningless formality.”
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They had believed themselves married back in 1919 when they bought a couple of cheap wedding rings at a market. Mandelstam kept his ring in a pocket and Nadezhda attached
hers to her pearl necklace, a present from her father. But now they needed a marriage certificate to share a compartment, a requirement of train commandants. Upon arriving in Moscow, they lost their marriage certificate.

In 1922, they roamed through many cities in search of a home and stability. At thirty-two, Mandelstam was tired of a nomadic existence, but could find only occasional freelance work, publishing articles in local newspapers. In April 1922, they had something of a home in Moscow, a room in the writers’ dormitory in the wing of Herzen House on 25 Tverskoi Boulevard. The Empire-style house with columns later became the prestigious Gorky Literary Institute, but then it housed several writers’ organizations and lodged impoverished writers.

The Mandelstams lived in a single room, next to the communal kitchen, and their quarters were exceptionally noisy because of the never-ending squabbles of other tenants. For Mandelstam, with his exceptionally good hearing, the noise was sheer torture. The couple’s furniture consisted of two spring mattresses and a kitchen table, which someone donated. But since they received food rations, they believed themselves fortunate and even fed a destitute poet, Velimir Khlebnikov, to whom the writers’ organization arbitrarily refused rations. Although the couple was hard up, Mandelstam objected to Nadezhda’s employment. He wanted her to be “entirely dependent on his will.”
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So she would spend most of her day sitting on her mattress, taking his dictations. During this period she disliked her duties as Mandelstam’s secretary and stenographer. “At that time he treated me like a piece of booty he had seized and brought back by force to his lair. All his efforts were directed to isolating me from other people, making me his own, breaking me in and adapting me to himself.”
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Mandelstam’s new collection of poems,
The Second Book
, with dedication to Nadezhda, came out in May 1923. He dictated this book to her and, according to Nadezhda, even stopped making notes beforehand. She had “a good ear for poetry,”
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so their dictations did not go smoothly: when she made suggestions, “he hissed
at me: ‘… You don’t understand, so keep quiet.’”
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She would retort that he should hire a stenographer who would “write it all down without batting an eyelid.”
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Mandelstam treated her “as a puppy” and even stuck a pacifier in her mouth so she would not interrupt him; he insisted she wear one on her neck, and it was attached to her pearl necklace.
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Nadezhda put up with this abuse because, in fact, he did value her opinion: “Tired, tear-stained, and at the end of my tether, I would doze off on his shoulder, and then, at night, I would wake up to see him standing by the table, crossing out and making changes. Seeing me awake, he would show me a new bit he had just written.…”
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Despite their arguments and her lack of secretarial skills, Mandelstam continued to dictate all his compositions to her. Even Nadezhda’s faulty grammar (she was influenced by the Ukrainian language) and disorderliness did not relieve her of these duties. Mandelstam was trying to mold her character: “From me he wanted only one thing: that I should give up my life to him, renounce my own self, and become a part of him.… He was telling me that I not only belonged to him but was a part of his own being.…”
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With the honorarium for
The Second Book
, Mandelstam bought her a blue fox fur; however, “it turned out to be not a real pelt,” but tufts of fur cleverly sewn onto cloth.
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Both of them were impractical, but Nadezhda’s lack of domesticity became proverbial. Elena Galperina-Osmerkina, who visited the Mandelstams in their dormitory, recalled Nadezhda squatting in a corridor, cooking supper on two Primus stoves. “I wondered why she had to cook in such an uncomfortable pose.”
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Nadezhda’s privileged upbringing was responsible for her ineptitude: her family had a cook. In addition, as a true Bohemian, she despised domestic duties. Mandelstam, in contrast, liked order and kept his things tidy.

Their hideous room became filled with “gorgeous colors” when the couple acquired a marvelous tapestry of a hunting scene. It had probably been stolen from a palace or a museum, and they bought it for a song at a market. But they could not hold on to their only treasure because they soon lost their room. In fall 1923,
Mandelstam got into a conflict with some other tenants who were making noise in the communal kitchen and rashly renounced his room. This led to the couple’s “fantastic homelessness”
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lasting ten years.

The winter of 1924 was spent in a rented room in the Yakimanka, one of the oldest Moscow districts, where both were freezing: their iron stove consumed loads of fuel, but was cold by morning. In fact, most of their earnings from translations went on firewood. They translated Western authors who were approved by the authorities, such as the French novelist Henri Barbusse, a French Communist Party member. “What
didn’t we
translate?”
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Both starved and, in addition, lost their sexual drive, depriving them from indulging “in the kind of frivolous things which … always cheered us up a little.”
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Mandelstam, who had learned from a friend in the Party that he would not be allowed to publish his verse, only translations, tried to establish himself as a prose writer. In 1924, he began dictating an autobiographical work,
The Noise of Time
, commissioned by a Moscow literary journal. Before each dictation session, Mandelstam would take a long walk, returning “tense and bad-tempered.” Then he would tell Nadezhda to sharpen her pencils and get to work. The first sentences, likely memorized, were dictated quickly, and she could barely keep up. Later he would slow down and even neglect to complete sentences, leaving it to Nadezhda to fill in the blanks. Upon finishing a chapter, he asked her to read it back. If she recorded his sentences unpolished, as he had dictated them, he would be upset, as though he expected her to “hear” words going through his head.
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When his book of prose was published, Mandelstam received rare praise in the Soviet press and was described as “a master of the refined, rich, and accurate style.”
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The most precious comment came from Boris Pasternak, who wrote in August 1925 that he experienced a rare pleasure from the book, savoring it at his dacha; he also suggested that Mandelstam write a novel.
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Although not close friends, Mandelstam and Pasternak had many things in common. Both were genuine poets and intellectuals who wrote prose rich in metaphor but weak in story line. Both men
were musically sensitive (their mothers were pianists), and both particularly valued Scriabin’s compositions. In addition, Pasternak’s first wife, Evgeniya Lurie, was an artist, like Nadezhda, although Nadezhda’s work did not survive.

On January 21, 1924, Lenin died—an event that would change their country’s destiny. For the next several days and nights, while his body lay in state, lines of people stretched through Moscow. The Mandelstams stood in the same line as Pasternak. There were bonfires on the streets to prevent frostbite; life in the capital had stopped. Mandelstam remarked, “This was the Moscow of ancient days burying one of her tsars.”
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Lenin’s funeral, Nadezhda observed, was “the last flicker of the Revolution as a genuine popular movement” when veneration for the leader was not inspired by terror.
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Remembering Pasternak’s visits, Nadezhda would write that Mandelstam expected her to keep her intelligence to herself, so she “never butted in masculine conversation.”
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She was mostly silent with other friends as well: Mandelstam would inevitably put her down. Vasilisa Shklovsky, the wife of the literary scholar Victor Shklovsky, remembers Nadezhda “sitting with a book in a corner and glancing at us with her dark-blue, sarcastic and sad eyes.”
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The wives often had to take a second role to let their husbands shine. As Akhmatova remarked during her relationship with the art scholar Nikolai Punin, “With our men around we sat in the kitchen cleaning herring.”
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Nadezhda Volpin, a poet, describes the Mandelstams shortly after they had moved to Leningrad. Mandelstam was briskly walking down the street, holding his head high, as was his habit; Nadezhda followed with a heavy case, an arrangement similar to the Nabokovs’ decades later. Vladimir would get out of a car with just a chess set and his butterfly collection while Véra would follow, lugging two suitcases.

The Mandelstams left Moscow in summer 1924. Housing shortages in Leningrad were less severe: the capital had moved to Moscow and, besides, luxurious apartments and palaces of the
aristocracy stood empty after their inhabitants had fled abroad. After the Revolution, some scholars and writers were housed in the servants’ quarters of the Marble Palace, former residence of Prince Konstantin Romanov. Akhmatova lived there with her second husband, the distinguished scholar Vladimir Shileiko. They froze in winter because heating high-ceiling rooms was unaffordable.

The Mandelstams took two rooms in a private apartment on the Great Morskaya Street, not far from the Winter Palace. Their quarters were impressive even without an entrance door, stolen for firewood. In Leningrad, Nadezhda met Akhmatova for the first time, and the two women became friends for life. Akhmatova, who had known Mandelstam since 1911 and had seen him with other women, describes his affection for Nadezhda as “extraordinary and unbelievable.” He was at once possessive of her and dependent on her: “He wouldn’t let her out of his sight, didn’t let her work, was insanely jealous, and asked her advice on every word in his poems. In general, I have never seen anything like it in my life.”
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However, Mandelstam soon became involved with a younger woman named Olga Vaksel and, in January 1925, brought her to their apartment. Olga at one time had belonged to a circle of novice poets around Gumilev and had also tried acting. Akhmatova thought she was “a dazzling beauty.”
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Nadezhda realized he had another woman when Mandelstam stopped reading his poetry to her; in fact, his poems were now dedicated to Olga. The three had a turbulent relationship, but according to Nadezhda’s version, “It was Olga, not I, who played the part of the demanding, reproachful, weeping woman—something that generally falls to the wife rather than the mistress.”
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In the early 1970s, Nadezhda told Carl Proffer, the American scholar, that the “three of them lived together for six weeks and it was the most shameful memory of her life.”
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Possibly they had a
ménage à trios
, as Emma Gershtein, a friend, implies in her memoir.
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The affair brought the couple to the brink of divorce: “M’s head had really been turned.… This was his only affair during the whole of our life together, but it was enough for me to learn what it was like to have a marriage break
up.”
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Nadezhda soon decided to leave Mandelstam for Vladimir Tatlin, a prominent painter and architect who wanted to take her in. Upon learning this, Mandelstam severed his relationship with Olga, even though he was still attracted to her. Later trying to understand why Mandelstam made this choice, Nadezhda thought their collaboration was a major factor: “I still suspect … that if none of his poetry had yet been written, he might well have decided to let me leave him.…”
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That spring, Nadezhda, who had been suffering from tuberculosis, went to a sanatorium in Tsarskoe Selo, outside Leningrad. Akhmatova was also there to treat her chronic tuberculosis, and the two spent many hours lying on the verandah, wrapped in coats, taking temperatures, and breathing salubrious air. As Nadezhda’s illness continued to progress, she was advised to change climate and take a rest cure in Yalta. When in September she left for the Crimea, Mandelstam wrote almost daily: “My beloved, you’re thousands of versts away from me in a big empty room with your thermometer! My life, you must understand that you are my life! What is your temperature? Are you happy? Do you laugh?”
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