The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (24 page)

“I have no conviction,” I said indignantly. “What do you mean,” the man said, and started looking through my papers. “Here we are: ‘Osip Mandelstam, convicted person.…’” “That’s a man,” I interrupted, “but I am a woman—Nadezhda.” He conceded this point, but then flew into a fury: “He’s your husband, though, isn’t he?” He got up and banged his fist on the table: “Have you ever heard of Article 58?” He shouted something else as well, but I fled in terror.… I knew that the State was speaking out of his mouth.

In early June, less than a month after their arrival, the couple was ordered to clear out of Moscow. They were given only twenty-four hours. The apartment was eventually granted to their “neighbor” who had written denunciations of Mandelstam. During their last night at home, Nadezhda woke up to see Mandelstam standing by an open window, about to make another leap, as in Cherdyn. Seeing her awake, he suggested committing suicide together, but Nadezhda told him it was not yet time. In the morning, they left for
the village of Savelovo, beyond the one-hundred-kilometer radius from Moscow where people of their status had to reside.

Facing their reality, Mandelstam told Nadezhda, “We must change our profession—we are beggars now.” No matter how poor, he had always worn his suit and a tie in the past, but was now an old tramp, “haggard, with sunken cheeks and bloodless lips.” That summer, life was still good and they lived in the village “like vacationers,” making occasional trips to Moscow to ask for money. As Nadezhda observed, unlike “ordinary beggars,” they collected their alms wholesale. In the fall, they made an expedition to Leningrad, where Mikhail Lozinsky, the famous translator of Dante and Shakespeare, gave them enough money for three months. Akhmatova would describe her meeting with the Mandelstams that fall as a “terrible dream”: it was 1937, the “apocalyptic time” when repressions peaked. Her son Lev, first arrested in 1935 (his only fault being Nikolai Gumilev’s and Akhmatova’s son), was still in the gulag. Every family had someone arrested or exiled: “Misfortune was at all our heels.” Mandelstam was very ill and “gasped at the air with his lips,” and both he and Nadezhda were still homeless.
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In the fall and winter they lived in the town of Kalinin, or Tver, as it was called originally, some hundred and fifty kilometers north of Moscow. Founded in the twelfth century, it was renamed after a Soviet leader. The town had witnessed the Invasion of the Golden Horde and Ivan the Terrible’s mass executions. Under Stalin, it lost its major architectural monument: the Savior Cathedral was blown up in 1936.

While living in Kalinin, the couple continued to make occasional trips to Moscow in search of money or food. The purges had reached their peak, and friends were afraid to meet them: even Pasternak, on behalf of his wife, asked them not to come anymore to their country house at Peredelkino. In Moscow, there was only one house left where an outcast could go: the apartment of literary scholar Victor Shklovsky and his wife, Vasilisa. The Mandelstams spent a night with them and left with money, food, and some old clothing.

Mandelstam and Nadezhda were later remembered by other members of the writers’ community as resembling the two inseparable and sad lovers from Marc Chagall’s paintings. The Mandelstams looked doomed, their fate written on their faces; people who met them wondered which would be the first to go.

After begging from friends who were also poor, the Mandelstams would be depressed and unable to have a coherent conversation between themselves. Their diet consisted of tea and dried peas, which Nadezhda tried to stretch as long as possible. When, at the railway station in Kalinin, Mandelstam would ask her to hire a horse-cab, she replied they could not afford the ride to their house on the outskirts. Making his way home on foot, he would stop for breath on the bridge over the Volga. “It was particularly hard for him on the bridge where a keen wind was blowing. He said nothing, but I could sense how ill he felt.…”
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A few years later when Nadezhda settled alone in Kalinin and crossed this bridge, she had a vision of Mandelstam stumbling along beside her.

Nadezhda’s survival instinct told her they must live unobtrusively and be constantly on the move. Mandelstam, however, wanted to be back in the spotlight: he believed that a poetry reading, organized by the Moscow Writers’ Union, could alter his fate. Of course, nothing but trouble came from the idea.

Mandelstam met with writer Alexander Fadeev, influential in the Party and in the Writers’ Union, who was moved by his poetry and promised to put in a word for him “at the very top.”
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There was another “unexpected stroke of luck,”
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or so they thought. The acting head of the Writers’ Union, Vladimir Stavsky, arranged a three-month stay for the couple in a rest home at the expense of the Literary Fund. By then, however, Stavsky had already sent a letter denouncing Mandelstam to the Commissar of Internal Affairs, Nikolai Ezhov. The Party provided employment to literary functionaries, like Stavsky, so they willingly collaborated with the security police. As Stavsky wrote in his denunciation, Mandelstam had violated the one-hundred-kilometer zone, where he had to reside, visited friends in Moscow, and continued to write poetry.

Around this time, Fadeev gave a lift to the couple in his government car. He was surprised to learn that the Mandelstams were going to Samatikha, a rest home that did not belong to the Writers’ Union. In fact, the place belonged to the Party. When the car stopped, Fadeev got out to give Mandelstam an unexpectedly warm farewell embrace.

In Samatikha, where they arrived in March, they were treated as important people. The resident doctor announced that he had been instructed to create the best conditions for Mandelstam’s work. However, when Mandelstam wanted to go to town and asked for transportation, he was refused. He asked Nadezhda, “You don’t think we’ve fallen into a trap …?”
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But the relaxing environment of the sanatorium, with its regular meals and freedom from financial worries, soon caused them to drop their guard. Later, Nadezhda thought that they probably had been dispatched here because the secret police were overworked and Mandelstam had to wait his turn. The police came to pick him up on May 2, 1938, at dawn. “That night I dreamed of icons—this is always regarded as a bad omen. I started out of my sleep in tears and woke M. as well. ‘What have we got to be afraid of now?’ he asked. ‘The worst is over.’ And we went back to sleep.… In the morning we were wakened by somebody knocking quietly on the door.”
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There was no time for a search: the police simply emptied the couple’s suitcase, where Mandelstam’s papers were kept, into a sack.

Nadezhda was still sitting on the bed in a torpor when the military led Mandelstam away and put him in a truck. She and Mandelstam had met on May Day in 1919. They parted on May 2, 1938, “when he was led away, pushed from behind by two soldiers. We had no time to say anything to each other—we were interrupted when we tried to say goodbye.”
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While the police were still in the room, Nadezhda told them that Mandelstam’s archive was in their Moscow apartment. It was a clever ruse: the manuscripts were actually in Kalinin. The deception allowed her to buy time. That same day, as soon as she could leave the sanatorium, Nadezhda rushed to Kalinin to fetch the archive,
just one step ahead of the police. They came to her landlady shortly after with a warrant for Nadezhda’s arrest, and turned the house upside down.

After Mandelstam’s incarceration, Nadezhda moved to the village of Strunino, outside Moscow, finding a job at a textile factory. Wives of convicted men were now allowed to work, since there were so many of them: “I was like a needle in a haystack … one of tens of millions of wives of men sent to the camps or killed in the prisons.”
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During her eight-hour night shift at the spinning shop, she walked from one machine to another, repeating Mandelstam’s verse. If his manuscripts were lost, they would survive in her memory. In the daytime she traveled to Moscow to stand in line at Lubyanka Prison. A little window with a wooden shutter was now the only place where she could inquire about Mandelstam and pass a parcel for him. Akhmatova spent seventeen months in such prison lines sending parcels to her son and to her husband, Nikolai Punin, experiences she described in the poem
Requiem
.

Once, during a night shift at the factory, two young men walked into the spinning shop, switched off Nadezhda’s machines, and led her to the personnel section. Other women workers, knowing that in such cases people were taken straight to the secret police, turned off their machines and followed in silence. A crowd standing outside the personnel doors made it awkward for the police to finish their business, and so Nadezhda was dismissed with a written promise to return for questioning next day. At night, some of her fellow workers stopped by the house where she lived and silently left money on the windowsill so she could flee. Her landlords drove her to the station for the early-morning train.

In late fall 1938, Nadezhda went to Leningrad to see her sister, Anna, who was dying of cancer. She also met Akhmatova, to whom she confided her fear that prisoners were tortured during interrogation. Akmatova remembers, “You could see the fear in her eyes. She said, ‘I won’t rest until I know that he’s dead.’”
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In November, Mandelstam’s brother Alexander received a letter from a transit camp in Vladivostok. Mandelstam said he was
freezing without warm clothes and was “utterly exhausted, emaciated, and almost beyond recognition.” Thinking that Nadezhda was also in a camp, he asked permission to write about her, and sent her this note: “Darling Nadenka, are you alive, my precious?”
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It was his only letter. (According to a gulag survivor, permission to write home was an act of mercy, given during an anniversary of the October Revolution.
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)

On January 19, 1939, in a desperate move to save Mandelstam, Nadezhda wrote a letter to Lavrenty Beria, newly appointed commissar for Internal Affairs and head of State Security. Beria was in charge of the vast gulag. Nadezhda wrote him, with surprising boldness, that Mandelstam had been taken away at the time when he should have expected publication, not arrest. Mandelstam was a sick man and she, his caretaker, had never left his side. Because he was charged with counter-revolutionary activity, she had to be called as a witness or an accomplice, but the investigation had failed to take this into account. She asked Beria to oversee a review of the case and to determine whether Mandelstam’s physical and mental condition made him fit to serve his sentence.
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But by the time she wrote this letter, Mandelstam was already no more: in February, a parcel she had sent him was returned with a note that the addressee was dead. She refused to believe this, requesting the Administration of Corrective Labor Camps to send her Mandelstam’s death certificate. Meanwhile, thinking that Mandelstam might be released while they took her away, Nadezhda wrote him a farewell letter. She found it among other papers years later:

Osia, my beloved, faraway sweetheart! I have no words, my darling, to write this letter that you may never read, perhaps. I am writing it into empty space.… Osia, what a joy it was living together like children—all our squabbles and arguments, the games we played, and our love. Now I do not even look at the sky. If I see a cloud, who can I show it to? Remember the way we brought provisions to make
our poor feasts in all the places where we pitched our tent like nomads? Remember the good taste of bread when we got it by a miracle and ate it together? And our last winter in Voronezh. Our happy poverty, and the poetry you wrote … I bless every day and every hour of our bitter life together, my companion, my blind guide in life.
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In June 1940, Alexander received his brother’s death certificate, with instructions to forward it to Nadezhda. The paper said that Mandelstam died on December 27, 1938, of heart failure, which made it sound as though he had died of natural causes. Nadezhda would spend years trying to verify whether the date was accurate.

After his death, Nadezhda went to live with her friend Galina von Meck in Maloyaroslavets, a town southeast of Moscow. Galina, who had just returned from her imprisonment to find that her husband had been re-arrested, did not allow Nadezhda to slip into depression. She told her, referring to Nadezhda’s Jewish roots, “I thought the people of your race were tougher.… ”
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Galina kept her on the move, sending her to run errands and purchase groceries. When in her “dazed state” Nadezhda forgot what she had to buy, Galina would send her right back to stand in line. This merciless therapy saved Nadezhda from “the inertia of silence.” She was then able to think of nothing else but Mandelstam’s final hours, visualizing his body thrown into a mass grave: “Sometimes I saw in my mind’s eye, with all the clarity of a hallucination, a heap of bodies dressed in the gray rags of camp prisoners, and strained to make out the dying M. among them.”
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(Galina emigrated to the West at the end of the war: like many ethnic Germans in Russia, she escaped with retreating German troops. When in the 1970s Nadezhda’s memoirs were published in the West, Galina was living in London; the two women exchanged letters, carried by travelers.)

When Mandelstam died, Akhmatova told her “Now you are all that remains of Osip.” Nadezhda’s goal was to preserve his poetry: “When he went out of my life I would have died too but for the joy breathed by his verse.”
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In spring 1939, she joined her close friend
Elena Arens in Kalinin. Elena was the wife of a Soviet envoy who worked in embassies in Paris and New York. In 1937, her husband was abruptly recalled to Moscow, where he was arrested on false charges and shot. Elena, who had recently given birth to their younger son, was tortured in Lubyanka and forced to stand for twenty-four hours in cold water up to her ankles while her breasts were bursting with milk. It was demanded of her that she renounce her husband, but she refused, despite the torture. Miraculously, Elena was only sentenced to exile and moved to Kalinin with her two boys. There she found a job teaching French in a local school and invited Nadezhda to join her. For a while, Nadezhda stayed with Elena’s family, becoming particularly attached to her younger boy, Alyosha.