The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (25 page)

Soon Nadezhda became employed in the same school, teaching English. She made extra money by painting toys for an artisans’ cooperative, which allowed her to settle separately and invite her mother to Kalinin. In addition, she enrolled at the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages, taking classes by correspondence, but her studies were disrupted by the war.

In summer 1941, during the first horrendous months of the war, the German army made a rapid advance and civilians were fleeing in panic. The two barges available in Kalinin could take them down the Volga to Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod), but getting space was extremely difficult, especially for Nadezhda, who had to evacuate her mother and Mandelstam’s archive. She would not have made it without her high school students, who came to see her off. As the crowd charged across the gangplank to the barge, the boys passed Nadezhda’s mother aboard and then the suitcase with Mandelstam’s manuscripts.

Their party of refugees was headed to Central Asia. Nadezhda and her mother traveled in converted freight cars, then sailed on a steamer on the Amu-Darya River. Upon reaching Uzbekistan, they were detained in a refugee camp on the Muynak peninsula in the Aral Sea. Living there in devastating heat and without sanitation, Nadezhda’s mother fell ill; visiting her in a local hospital, Nadezhda saw even leprosy cases.

To escape from Muynak, Nadezhda befriended the head of the port, drinking vodka with him for a whole month. One night, when a steamer stopped in the harbor, the man asked the captain to take Nadezhda and her mother. Later, they traveled in freight cars and were prevented from leaving the train at large stations, which were already crammed with refugees. The entire time, Nadezhda guarded the suitcase with Mandelstam’s manuscripts: at night, she used it as a pillow. At a small station in Kazakhstan, near Dzhambul, their freight car was detached and the occupants were sent to collective farms to plant beets and clean canals. During the terrible winter in Dzhambul, Nadezhda earned her living “by carrying heavy loads like a camel, and felling trees.”
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It was no better than a labor camp, and Nadezhda had no way of escaping. To move elsewhere, one needed a living permit. She was rescued from this living hell in spring 1942: her brother, evacuated with the writers’ colony to Tashkent, managed to locate Nadezhda. With Akhmatova’s help, he obtained a permit for his mother and sister to live in Tashkent with him. Vera Yakovlevna died in Tashkent in September 1943, an event Nadezhda never discusses in her memoirs, where she writes little about her own family.

She collected accounts of Mandelstam’s final days. In 1944, a gulag survivor, Kazarnovsky, told her he had been in a transit camp with Mandelstam. Completely emaciated, Mandelstam refused to eat his rations for fear they were poisoned. He lived on lumps of sugar obtained in exchange for clothing. Over the years, Nadezhda heard many accounts, some of them improbable. As she observed, the gulag legends depicted Mandelstam as an insane old man of seventy who had written verse before his imprisonment and was called “a Poet.” A factual account of Mandelstam’s final days was published only during Gorbachev’s glasnost, a time Nadezhda did not live to see. This version would add only a few details. Before the New Year, prisoners were taken to a bathhouse. It had no water and they stood undressed and freezing until Mandelstam and another man fell unconscious. Mandelstam’s body, along with a tag specifying his name and prison term, was thrown into a pile. From
there, it was taken for burial in a shallow common grave dug in the permafrost, just as Nadezhda had visualized it: “Osip was thrown into a common burial pit.…”
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He was forty-seven.

During the first years of the war, the secret police showed no interest in Mandelstam’s archive, so Nadezhda made copies of his verse and prose and distributed them among acquaintances for safekeeping. (She had made so many duplicates that eventually she memorized both Mandelstam’s prose and verse.) But most people were afraid to keep these papers and destroyed them. In 1944, when Nadezhda briefly shared accommodation with Akhmatova, they began to notice traces of police searches of their belongings. In May, when Akhmatova was leaving for Leningrad, Nadezhda gave her a folder with Mandelstam’s most valuable papers, so as not to keep all his archive in one place.

Eduard Babaev, a teenager who was a fan of Akhmatova, was trusted to keep the precious suitcase with Mandelstam’s remaining papers. He later remembered that Nadezhda would despair at the mere thought of losing that suitcase. Babaev preserved it intact. In 1959, Nadezhda made a will leaving all her possessions and the copyright to Mandelstam’s work to Babaev and his family.
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As a widow, Nadezhda revealed a strong “masculine” temperament and an ability to adapt, which Mandelstam lacked. In 1944, she was accepted as a senior lecturer at the Department of Philology in Tashkent, while still studying for her degree. She completed her undergraduate and graduate requirements by taking external exams. Despite being overworked, she refused to take shortcuts. Her professor was impressed that she read
Das Kapital
unabridged, unlike all other students.

In August 1946, Nadezhda used her vacation to go to Moscow and Leningrad, meeting Akhmatova at the worst possible time, when persecution of intellectuals had intensified. On August 14, a Party resolution condemned the journals
Leningrad
and
Zvezda
for publishing apolitical works by Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko, a popular satirical writer. Shortly after, both were expelled from the Writers’ Union. The press denounced Akhmatova’s poetry
as “harmful and alien to the people.” Nadezhda saw Pasternak crying at the entrance to Akhmatova’s apartment house in Leningrad. He told Nadezhda of his fear that Akhmatova could be annihilated next, after Osip. The Party’s resolution made Akhmatova unpublishable, thus cutting off her income, so Pasternak had gone to Leningrad to give her 1,000 rubles.

Nadezhda’s immediate concern was to find a new hiding place for the folder with Mandelstam’s papers. Akhmatova, whose position was precarious, passed it to their mutual friend in Moscow, Emma Gershtein. That folder contained Mandelstam’s “dangerous” poems of “The Wolf” cycle and his Voronezh poems. Nadezhda was staying with her brother in Moscow when Gershtein returned the folder, which she was afraid to keep. With only hours remaining before her train to Tashkent, Nadezhda had to find another reliable keeper. She knocked on the door of Sergei Bernstein, a university professor of philology who lived within walking distance of her brother’s apartment, and asked whether he would hide Mandelstam’s papers. He accepted the folder.

The most prominent feature in Bernstein’s apartment was his enormous library: bookshelves covered the walls in every room. He kept illicit literature on these shelves, disguising samizdat volumes as Marxist literature. Bernstein and his brother Alexander Ivich-Bernstein, a children’s writer, kept Mandelstam’s illicit papers for eleven years, until Khrushchev’s Thaw. Both risked their own and their families’ safety, keeping the folder even when both were harassed and Alexander was labeled “the enemy number one in children’s literature.”
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That same summer, Nadezhda was nearly arrested. Her dean in Tashkent had asked her to bring back copies of archival documents from the Literary Institute in Moscow, and Nadezhda had to reveal her name to receive them. Learning she was Mandelstam’s widow, a library assistant gave her a sealed package. It was a plant: in Tashkent, her dean opened the package and was shaken to discover that it contained copies of documents with the names of Stalin’s personal foes. The incident was covered up thanks to the dean’s connections to the
secret police. If Nadezhda had traveled by plane, as she had intended, her package would have been opened in the airport. She managed to get only a train ticket, and although travel to Tashkent by rail was then unreasonably slow and took five days, it saved her life.

Beginning in 1947, Nadezhda spent summers with Sergei Bernstein and the Ivich-Bernstein family at their country house. During these visits, illicit manuscripts were brought out and work began on Mandelstam’s future collection. (The Bernsteins had made a typewritten copy of the poems, leaving fragile originals in their hiding place.) The brothers and Nadezhda were preparing Mandelstam’s works while it was still impossible to dream of seeing his poetry published. They committed to paper the poems and their variants that Nadezhda had memorized. To check her memory, the brothers would read a line, or even a word, from a random poem, and she would go on reciting it correctly. “Until 1956 I could remember everything by heart—both prose and verse. In order not to forget it, I had to repeat a little to myself every day.”
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They also recorded background information for each poem and supplemented the text with commentaries. Nadezhda’s memory was a resource center where different redactions of Mandelstam’s works could be found. She compared the variants and selected the final text.

It was without sentiment that Nadezhda told the Bernstein brothers that they would not live to see Mandelstam’s publication and that she had to write a will. Nadezhda announced it during a working session on August 9, 1954, when the entire Bernstein family was present. She appointed Ivich-Bernstein’s teenaged daughter Sophia as keeper and heiress of the only verified copy of Mandelstam’s works. Sophia remembers her astonishment when Nadezhda produced the paper with her “will” and gave it to her: “She said … that I should accept it as her daughter would, for she never had children of her own and therefore Mandelstam’s legacy would be in my hands.…”
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(Nadezhda’s “will” could not be notarized, of course.) Sophia had the impression that Nadezhda believed it was her duty to place Mandelstam’s legacy in good hands
although in her heart she never gave up hope of living to see his poetry published.

In 1957, during Khrushchev’s Thaw, a committee was formed to publish Mandelstam’s works, two decades after his death. Abandoning her former loyalties to the Bernsteins, Nadezhda told Sophia’s father abruptly on the phone to pass the archive to the future editor of the volume, Nikolai Khardzhiev. Perhaps she believed preserving Mandelstam’s poetry the responsibility of any decent person. Perhaps harsh times had taught her to abandon civilities. Whatever the case, her loyalty was to Mandelstam.

Back in 1949, Nadezhda had received a teaching appointment in Ulyanovsk, a city on the Volga some two hundred miles from her native Saratov. (Founded in the seventeenth century as Simbirsk, this city was renamed after Vladimir Ulyanov [Lenin], who was born here.) Each time Nadezhda applied for jobs, she had to fill out dreaded questionnaires. These were composed by the security bureaucracies to expose people with a politically untrustworthy background, which meant that families of those arrested would be “marked for life.” Evicted from their homes and banished from major cities, they were also denied work. To survive, one had to be creative: “I have often had to fill in forms with a question about whether I or any close relative has ever been convicted for an offense. To cover up such unpleasant facts, people were always inventing new life stories for themselves. Whether children should mention that their father had died in prison or in a camp was a constant theme of a family discussion.”
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Everyone had something to hide. Solzhenitsyn concealed that his father had been an officer in the Imperial Army, writing instead that he had been a clerk.

While teaching, Nadezhda felt under constant surveillance, having to hide her actual thoughts “every day and every hour: in the classroom, in the lecture hall.…” With spying and denunciations still widespread, one careless word could get her ten years in a labor camp. She addressed her students only “in prescribed official jargon” instead of her normal language, sensing that they would
report her to the secret police, to ensure she spent “the rest of my life felling timber.”
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In 1953, “the ultimate purge” was being prepared on a grand scale: institutions across Russia were ordered to expel Jews and everyone else with politically suspect backgrounds. “By April all institutions were supposed to be ‘cleaned up’ in such a way that it would never again be necessary.”
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Stalin’s final terror campaign, known as the “Doctors’ Plot,” had anti-Semitic undertones. Most of the Kremlin doctors, accused of deliberately mishandling the treatment of highly placed officials, were Jewish. Beginning in 1949, Jews and other “rootless cosmopolitans” lost their jobs across the country. Rumors of more people thrown into prisons filled everyone’s heart with fear.

One night there was a knock on her door: Nadezhda was summons to a late meeting. When she arrived, it was announced that the gathering was actually to discuss her “case.” Her legs gave way under her: she was invited to be present at her own denunciation. The accusations were ridiculous, of course, since a semiliterate Komsomol activist was analyzing her lectures on linguistics: “In my lectures on the theory of grammar I had said that the young English gerund was ousting the old infinitive. This statement of mine was seen as a hint of some kind of struggle between fathers and sons.…”
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She was expelled from her position as a senior lecturer on charges of “hostility to youth,” with more severe measures to follow. As she packed her suitcase, a colleague burst into her room:

“Stalin is dead!” she shouted now, from my doorway. I went cold all over and pulled her into the room. As long as a dictator lives he is immortal. I decided my colleague must finally have taken leave of her senses: for such words you could easily be accused of plotting to kill the Leader and be packed off to rot in a camp to the end of your days. I switched on the radio and was overcome by a joy such as I had never known before in my whole life. It was true: the Immortal One was dead. I now rejoiced as I went on packing
my wretched rags and tatters, and for the first time in many years I looked at the world with new eyes.
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