The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (27 page)

Mandelstam’s biographer and translator Clarence Brown describes Nadezhda as “a steel-hard woman of great intelligence, limitless courage, no illusions, permanent convictions and a wild sense of the absurdity of life.”
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They first met in 1966, at the apartment of Akhmatova’s friends in Moscow. Brown had come to tape-record his conversation with Nadezhda, but the prospect frightened her so much that she shut herself in a separate room, refusing to go out. Brown’s interest in Mandelstam eventually won Nadezhda’s trust and they became friends. She had a permanent apprehension of strangers interested in Mandelstam, at first suspecting that they were informers. Back in the 1930s, police informers, posing as Mandelstam’s fans, had questioned her about his work and demanded his manuscripts; she would expose them by asking them to recite his poetry.

Carl and Ellendea Proffer, whose publishing house, Ardis, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was dedicated to Russian literature, met Nadezhda in 1969. Like other foreign guests, they had Nadezhda’s instructions not to visit her in the daytime and not to phone from a hotel. If coming by cab, they had to get out several blocks from her house. When the Proffers asked what she was afraid of, given her age, Nadezhda replied that there were things they simply “didn’t understand.” This was not all paranoia, since phones were still tapped and receiving foreigners at home was still prohibited. She had lived much of her life under surveillance and in fear of arrest, hard to fathom for people from the free world.

Nadezhda’s flat lacked comfort—bare light bulbs, bare wooden floors, and wobbly furniture from a thrift shop. What she treasured were her books, the icons above her bed, and paintings by Moscow artists. With a smile, she “pointed out a blackened pot on her shelves—this pot was the ‘historical archive’ in which many of Mandelstam’s poems had been saved from confiscation.”
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Scholars and publishers from Europe and America came to see her because her memory for people and events was unmatched. As Carl Proffer writes, her memory was “one of the primary sources for anyone doing serious research not only on Mandelstam but on the whole period.” She not only had met the poets Mayakovsky and Pasternak, but could provide insights into their character and creativity. In
addition, she was independent-minded, unlike most people of her generation, and gave her forthright view of the past. Her intellect and boldness made a striking contrast with her perennial fear of arrest: “She seemed so extraordinary, so independent, it was hard to believe her fears.”

At home she wore a housecoat pocked by cigarette burns—and met her guests in it. (But at an exhibition, she was stylishly dressed: long woolen skirt, elegant sweater, and colorful scarf.) A chain smoker, she smoked only Belomor cigarettes, a domestic brand named after the White Sea Canal built by slave labor, one of Stalin’s construction sites where Mandelstam nearly ended up working. In the 1930s, a score of official writers readily praised the project, although tens of thousands perished on its construction.

Nadezhda stubbornly contradicted her image as a devoted poet’s widow. One could recognize the young Bohemian artist in her when she unreservedly discussed sex, taboo in Soviet culture. Her free-spirited language was meant to shock: she would say that she studied Russian poetry in bed. She asked the Proffers to bring her an erotic magazine. At seventy, she was “a very clever woman, and a very silly little girl,” as someone had described her long ago.
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The Proffers thought she was “bright and touching, good-humored and bitter at the same time.”

Deprived of society for two decades after Mandelstam’s arrest, she relished the freedom of having friends over: in a normal day five or six visited. During “receptions,” her flat was crowded with ten to fifteen people—scientists, artists, writers, and famous dissidents. There would be a translator of Robert Frost and poet and writer Varlam Shalamov, a survivor of the notorious Kolyma camp. Pasternak had praised his poetry, which he composed in Kolyma, the place commonly known as “the land of white death.” Harshlooking and reticent, Shalamov had spent a decade and a half in labor camps for such offences as “Trotskyist activities” and referring to the émigré writer Ivan Bunin as a “classic Russian writer.” Shalamov’s
Kolyma Tales
, which he then was writing, would become his best-known work. Solicitous of him, Nadezhda would make
sure someone would give him a ride; but they had a serious falling out over Solzhenitsyn, whom she defended. Nadezhda, like Solzhenitsyn, was deeply religious, while Shalamov, who grew up in the family of a priest, had become an atheist in the gulag. In the 1960s, when Solzhenitsyn visited Nadezhda, he was working on his gulag cycle: he said he had three questions and only half an hour. Nadezhda would laughingly tell her friends that she answered only two because time ran out.
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In 1970, Nadezhda’s first memoir,
Hope Against Hope
, came out in New York, producing an explosion of interest in Mandelstam. She told the story of his arrest and provided clues to his poetry and prose, which she discussed with great sensitivity. As biographer Brown wrote in the introduction, her memoir was “very much the book of her husband, to whom as man and poet she was utterly devoted.”
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At home, her book circulated in samizdat, creating a sensation among intellectuals. Beginning in the late 1960s, Stalin’s repressions again became a prohibited topic, while a new generation of dissidents wanted guarantees that there would be no return of terror. Nadezhda became their champion: they brought flowers to her doorstep and were eager to help with chores. She lived in a new district without stores nearby and practically did not go out, so her fans would also deliver groceries. Among them was Natalya Svetlova, Solzhenitsyn’s future wife, who helped Nadezhda with secretarial work.

When foreign travelers brought royalties from her memoir, Nadezhda distributed the money among her needy friends. She bought a small cooperative apartment for a young woman in Leningrad who had nowhere to live and whom she barely knew. In addition, she established an unofficial fund, collecting cash for political inmates and their families. Those she helped included the prominent dissident writer, Andrei Sinyavsky, and his wife Maria Rozanova. (In 1966, during a show trial that marked the end of Khrushchev’s Thaw, Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years in prison for satirizing the Soviet regime. Allowed to emigrate in 1973, he became a
professor at the Sorbonne.) There were also royalties from Mandelstam’s works, which Nadezhda also used to feed and clothe many people. Everything from delicacies to fashionable clothes, unavailable elsewhere, could be found in “Beryozka” hard currency stores, which catered mostly to foreigners and Soviet elite. Nadezhda’s friends would buy specialty food and gin for her “feasts.”

Interested in Mandelstam’s success in the world, she was delighted when foreign visitors brought his new editions. In 1971, she received his three-volume collection published in the United States. The books were delivered by an Italian woman who had smuggled them through the border in the lining of her fabulous muskrat coat. At Nadezhda’s apartment, she cut the lining with scissors, producing the volumes like a magician.

Contemporary Russian literature barely interested her, if at all. She read the Bible, which also had to be smuggled through the border, and asked foreign visitors to bring additional copies for her friends. Nabokov’s works, prohibited at home, were delivered from abroad; in addition, she requested English books and magazines. With no escapist literature in the Soviet Union, she enjoyed Agatha Christie. And to engage her mind she was learning Spanish, one of the languages Mandelstam had studied.

Other gifts brought by foreign visitors would go to friends, with the exception of a colorful throw, which the Nabokovs had sent after they read her memoir. The Proffers delivered this present along with Nabokov’s essay about Mandelstam published in 1969 in
The New York Review of Books
, which emphasizes the poet’s importance.

Her second memoir,
Hope Abandoned
, which appeared in New York in 1974, angered many at home. Her book told the story of cultural survival under Stalin; it also revealed there was a privileged caste of writers who supported the regime and were treated like Party elite. Numerous writers were offended by this exposure. Veniamin Kaverin, who was awarded the Stalin Prize for his novels for young adults, chastised Nadezhda in a letter released in samizdat, “Who gave you the right to judge artists who gifted their
country and the whole world with their brilliant works?” Nadezhda was Mandelstam’s shadow, he bellowed, and a shadow should know its place.
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Joseph Brodsky, enthusiastic about her memoirs, would declare them to be “more than a testimony to her times; they are a view of history in the light of conscience and culture.”
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By then, Nadezhda was famous, and many people regarded it a privilege to visit her. There was no need for her to go to a hospital after a heart attack in 1977, since some of the best doctors, Vita and Gdal Gelshtein, attended her at home. They came on weekends, when Father Alexander Men also visited. Before she fell ill, Nadezhda visited his parish church in Novaya Derevnya, outside Moscow.

A prominent intellectual and religious writer, Father Men was popular in Nadezhda’s milieu. Born to a Moscow Jewish family and baptized as a Christian, he was instrumental in reviving the Orthodox Church and other religions in the Soviet Union. Father Men wrote books on the history of Christianity, which influenced many, including those in Nadezhda’s circle. The KGB harassed him for his refusal to collaborate with the authorities, which was demanded of all priests. Father Men received anonymous death threats and, in 1990, was murdered outside his home in Sergiev Posad; his assassin was never found.

Nadezhda was getting weaker; her visitors noticed that even her famous memory had begun to fail. She had completed her tasks—Mandelstam was published, his archive was safely abroad, and her own memoirs completed. Nadezhda’s remaining wish was to meet Mandelstam, beyond the grave. He also had believed in their eventual meeting, having written in 1937, “We are together eternally, and that fact is growing to such a degree and growing so formidably, that there is
nothing
to fear.”
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Nadezhda had composed a “Prayer of the Two,” repeating it daily, “We pray to Thee, our Lord, to grant us, Osip and Nadezhda, asking Thee in agreement of the Meeting.”
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She talked casually how she would scold Mandelstam there for making her suffer alone all these years.

Designer Tatyana Osmerkina felt there was something maternal in Nadezhda’s attitude to Mandelstam. “Whether she remembered
him with laughter or with sadness, she always spoke about him as the closest person, her alter ego. She lived without him for so long, but remained conscious of his presence as if they never parted.”
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Human rights activist Vera Lashkova, who knew Nadezhda during her final fifteen years, also sensed this: “It was as though she continued to live with him.… He was constantly present in her life.… ”
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Lashkova had been arrested for dissident activities and Nadezhda wanted to know everything about her imprisonment. This helped her to imagine what it was like for Mandelstam.

At eighty, also suffering from bronchitis, Nadezhda gasped for air as Mandelstam had during his final years. She died on December 29, 1980, almost the same day as Mandelstam. Lashkova, who was with her, remembers, “And I thought: Lord, now her spirit is rising, now she is meeting Osip Emilievich.”
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When plainclothes policemen attempted to remove Nadezhda’s body before final respects were paid, the dissidents formed a live chain in the corridor, while others read Orthodox prayers in her bedroom. Before leaving Nadezhda’s home, friends took some of her things as keepsakes; Lashkova appropriated the Bible, wrestling it from a KGB agent’s hands. They closely followed the police vehicle when Nadezhda’s body was taken to the morgue. Friends demanded she be buried in downtown Moscow near her brother, but were refused. To avoid commotion in the city center, the authorities allotted a place at Kuntsevo Cemetery, which was on the outskirts of the city.

On New Year’s Day, 1981, a crowd of five hundred came to Nadezhda’s funeral in the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mother. It could not contain everyone, and many waited outside during the requiem. In her coffin Nadezhda was covered with a piece of the throw, which Mandelstam had handled, his only belonging that survived. It came to pass, as Mandelstam wrote in a poem
Midnight in Moscow:
“We have a spiderwork of honest old plaid—drape it over me like a flag, when I die.”
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Believing the poet and his wife were inseparable in spirit, mourners were paying tribute to both. On Nadezhda’s grave they erected a cross with her
name and, beside it, a separate headstone for the poet, giving him a symbolic resting place.

In 1979, in a letter to Princeton University, where Mandelstam’s archive had been transferred from Paris, Nadezhda wrote of her wish to create a center for studying Mandelstam: “Perhaps, many years after his death, the homeless, destitute and little published poet will finally receive a home, with his books, his papers, his archive, and his own press.”
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Princeton became a place for international scholars to study and popularize Mandelstam’s legacy. During the poet’s centennial in 1991, readings were held across Russia and plaques unveiled in several cities; a Mandelstam society was also formed. In 1998, the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow designated a separate room, called Mandelstam’s Study, and several years later a cast-iron monument to the poet was erected in Vladivostok, where Mandelstam had perished. Russia has finally paid tribute to the great poet, whose legacy Nadezhda preserved.

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