Reading Hope

Book in the spotlight: Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs

A picture is worth a thousand words; two pictures can be worth an entire history book. For an example of what I have in mind, compare a couple of extant photos of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. One of them, taken in 1923, shows a young intellectual gazing ahead with an intense dreaminess. In the other photo, taken at the time of Mandelstam’s first arrest in 1934, the dreams of yesteryear have been supplanted by resignation to the tragic destiny that awaits, and it is hard to believe that the man looking into the camera is not yet forty-five. Nadezhda Mandelstam’s two-volume memoirs, available in English under the titles of Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned (a play on the author’s name — “Nadezhda” means “hope” in Russian), chart the metamorphosis that took place between 1923 and 1934. The memoirs are far from flawless. They suffer from being disjointed and indifferent to chronological considerations; various fragments are repetitive and could have easily been excised. Nor is their author above settling scores. And yet this is an unforgettable text. N. Mandelstam provides an extraordinary psychogram of Stalin’s Soviet Union, and her descriptions of the climate of totalitarianism and the effect that it had on the psyche of those condemned to live in it will haunt the reader. The memoirs are less about the Mandelstams than about freedom, and if you are wondering why you should read them, it is because a nation’s freedoms, like Ernest Renan’s nation itself, are a daily plebiscite; society takes them for granted at its own risk. N. Mandelstam’s memoirs are a guide to what can happen when they are lost.

The nightmare began with “The Stalin Epigram,” a poem Mandelstam wrote about the Soviet dictator. The poem did not mention Stalin by name, but the depicted Kremlin Caucasian (“kremlyovskij gorets”) meting out executions left and right was not an exercise in subtlety. When Mandelstam read the poem to Boris Pasternak, the future author of Doctor Zhivago, who knew a death wish when he saw one, told Mandelstam to forget the poem. Mandelstam did not follow the advice and instead read it to others. The dreaded “midnight knock” on the door was inevitable. After a search that lasted all night sometime in May of 1934, the Cheka (secret police) agents took Mandelstam away. Plenty of Soviet citizens disappeared in the Soviet camps for lesser crimes than “The Stalin Epigram,” and Mandelstam was not supposed to come back. Incredibly he did. Although banished from the twelve largest Soviet cities (the “minus twelve” formula), his exile in a place of his own choosing was, given the gravity of the offense, a miracle. But, as N. Mandelstam concedes, with despots there are no miracles, only reprieves. Stalin, who took a great interest in Soviet writers, had supposedly issued an order to “isolate but preserve” Mandelstam. In all regimes based on private caprice, such formulations are subject to change. Despite writing a flattering ode to Stalin in 1937 (or perhaps because of it — some have argued it was a veiled attack on the dictator), Mandelstam was arrested a second time in 1938. This time, the search lasted only fifteen minutes, and Mandelstam never returned. Found guilty of counter-revolutionary activities, he was dispatched to a gulag and perished while in transit, most likely from disease.

The exact reason why Stalin decided not to preserve Mandelstam has long since been debated. These debates miss the point: the poet’s transgressions were ontological. Mandelstam belonged to the Russian intelligentsia, and for Stalin that was quite enough. The Russian intelligentsia made the Bolshevik Revolution, itself the result of a long-lasting rift between the intelligentsia and the tsarist regime that went back to the Decembrist Revolt. Lenin once compared the intelligentsia to excrement, forgetting that he himself was its member. Stalin represented a form of restoration; he resurrected tsardom, though in a peculiar way — by making himself tsar. In this, too, he may have been helped by the intelligentsia. N. Mandelstam confesses that the intelligentsia was so terrified of mob rule it hankered after someone who would rule with an iron fist and keep the muzhik at bay. It got what it wanted and paid dearly for it. As the instrument of restoration, the Red Tsar had to either destroy the intelligentsia or turn it into a servant of the state, which was really one and the same. N. Mandelstam lists the three strikes against Mandelstam, in no particular order: humanist, intellectual, Jew. Stalin loathed humanists and distrusted intellectuals; as for the Jews, he would have likely carried out a final solution of his own had he not died in 1953 — the Jewish Autonomous Region had been created in the Far East for a reason. In short, if Mandelstam hadn’t written “The Stalin Epigram,” it would have had to be invented.

There is no shortage of books about life in the Nazi and Soviet camps. But the horrors N. Mandelstam describes pertain not to the regime’s torture chambers or its gulags, but to its peacetime. This is what distinguished Stalin’s totalitarianism from Hitler’s, to which it is often compared. The Nazi system was a system, and if it was more awful than Stalinism, it was because it left entire ethnic and racial groups no chance. Its victims, however, were more or less clearly defined (“more or less” because once a political regime becomes a murder machine, it can turn on anyone). Like any totalitarian regime, the Hitler system sought to monopolize the hearts and minds of the citizenry; in practice, it stopped at racial pedigree. The Stalin machine was different. Under Stalin nobody was safe; anyone could be declared an enemy of the people. While those deemed to belong to the wrong social class were enemies ipso facto, belonging to the “right” social class did not confer automatic protection upon its members. Bolshevism, after all, was a secular religion, and not for nothing did Stalin attend a seminary in his youth. Purity was more than just a question of class; it was a question of thought. If, ideologically, Soviet citizens were not presumed to be born in sin, they were always at risk of committing it, and unceasing vigilance against impure ideas was the duty of every citizen. Perpetual self-censorship and rigorous intellectual conformism were required to avoid contamination of thought. Since no one was safe from falling into heresy, everyone was a potential suspect — and a potential victim. While guiding principles are immutable in religion, in a dictatorship they shift along with the regime’s requirements. What met the dictator’s approval yesterday might be censured today. In a regime that needs to empty several apartments on each floor in residential blocks so that it can survive, the survival of individual citizens comes down to luck.

The terror of Stalin’s regime relied on randomness. When your primary objective is to instill fear, who you choose to be your victims is of little importance — the more random, the better. Randomness will ensure no one will feel secure. Hitler implemented a politics of appalling barbarity, but he was not himself a sadist, and nor were some of the top Nazis who carried out armchair genocide (Himmler, head of the dreaded SS, was said to have nearly fainted while witnessing a mass execution). Hitler did not bully members of his entourage, and the worst torture he inflicted on them was his interminable nighttime table talks. In 1938 the Nazi government faced a major PR crisis when it was revealed that the young bride of the Nazi war minister had worked as a prostitute. Hitler, who had attended the wedding as a witness, could have had the woman shot — and the minister too, for good measure. Instead, he dismissed the minister with a golden parachute and allowed him to leave for Italy with his wife in tow. Stalin, by contrast, was a sadist constitutionally. He seemed to relish the fear he inspired in his subjects, and he had the loved ones of some of his closest associates sent to the gulags (the wives of Molotov and Kalinin) or executed (the wife of Poskrebyshev). These were not just people who reported to him; they were intimates with whom Stalin caroused at night. It was as if he demanded a personal sacrifice from anyone who came into his orbit. But in a dictatorship, everyone is in the dictator’s orbit. N. Mandelstam’s bewilderment at the relentlessness of the state apparatus in its persecution of Mandelstam is akin to Primo Levi’s inability to understand why a guard at Auschwitz denied him the use of an icicle to quench his thirst. “Warum?” Levi asked. “Hier ist kein warum,” the Nazi guard answered. Here there is no why.

Readers who grew up in free societies will struggle to understand the mood and temperature of a place where people froze at the sound of a car pulling up outside at night. Many lived in constant expectation of being arrested, and the more pragmatically minded even had basic necessities packed in advance so that they wouldn’t go to prison empty-handed — despite the jocular assertions of the nocturnal visitors (“You’ll be back home soon enough!”), few snatched away in the middle of the night expected to return home soon, and fewer still were proven wrong. Soviet citizens feared their very own dreams — nightmares could make you scream at night, wall partitions were thin, and neighbors were ready to tattle. The peacetime of Stalinism held so many terrors it made war palatable. The poet Anna Akhmatova (whose first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev, was executed by firing squad, and whose son Lev Gumilev, a historian and anthropologist, spent years in the Soviet camps) once told N. Mandelstam that the Second World War was the best time of their lives. A telling remark. Despite all its privations and atrocities, the war was a period of respite that hit the pause button on domestic terror and gave “enemies of the people” a vacation of sorts. For many, suicide became an acceptable way out — her Christian sensibilities notwithstanding, N. Mandelstam repeatedly offered her husband to take their own lives, and she regrets they didn’t act on it while they still had a chance.

Stalinism corroded traditional relationships and undermined normal bonds between people. In a society that promulgated the primacy of the state, rewarded denunciations, and made the likes of Pavlik Morozov (a Soviet youth said to have reported his father to the authorities) a hero, no one could be trusted. N. Mandelstam writes that the denunciation culture caused two diseases: if you had the first, you suspected everyone else of being an informer; with the second, you were terrified you would be taken for an informer yourself. Since anyone was a potential enemy of the people, Soviet citizens had to be vigilant. Buying produce at a street stall once, N. Mandelstam used a newspaper to wrap her purchases. Immediately some Soviet woman standing in line beside her made a huge scene, for the newspaper contained a portrait of Stalin. That street stalls did not provide bags and that every newspaper carried images of Stalin was irrelevant. N. Mandelstam beat a hasty retreat and felt lucky to have escaped. She encountered the same kind of vigilance at a subway station where she had spent too much time examining a mosaic of Stalin; the mosaic created an optical illusion that had completely discombobulated her, and she came to her senses only upon realizing she was attracting glances. Had she stayed a little longer, she writes, N. Mandelstam would have been whisked away to Lubyanka (the HQ of the secret police). Vigilance, of course, is a close sibling of fear. Following Mandelstam’s first arrest, acquaintances looked the other way when meeting the Mandelstams in the street — anyone branded an enemy of people became a pariah and was given a wide berth. People quickly succumbed to their own helplessness and became passive, a dangerous mental state that rendered all resistance futile. A David who decided to take on Goliath was seen as a quixotic fool. Worse, as a compensatory measure, one was at risk of deluding oneself into thinking that those singled out by the state for persecution had to be guilty of something — the no-smoke-without-fire justification.

Serfdom bequeathed Russia a slavish mentality; Stalin built splendidly on the inheritance. N. Mandelstam mentions the gravitas accorded to anyone working “at a desk.” In Stalin’s centralized bureaucracy, the cogs staffing the state apparatus were indispensable to its functioning, and they bestowed upon desk workers a special kind of authority. Government institutions were hallowed places of veneration. N. Mandelstam witnessed the following heart-wrenching scene in a prosecutor’s office. A woman whose son had been arrested and taken away by secret police had moved mountains to prove that it was a case of mistaken identity and that a neighbor ought to have been arrested instead. Tragically, by the time she had shown up at the prosecutor’s office and the evidence was accepted, her son had already been done away with, while the neighbor had escaped. Upon hearing of her son’s death, the woman suffered a breakdown, and the prosecutor came out to berate her because she made it impossible for him to work. The other unfortunates who were in line at the office sided with the prosecutor. The son was already dead, after all, and the woman was needlessly disturbing the peace of a government office. She was eventually escorted off the premises. Heartless, yes, but heartlessness is the norm in a society in which the state overrides the individual. The value of human life undergoes deflation; such a society breeds mental goblins and moral pygmies. The result is a bizarre kind of Tower of Babel — everyone speaks the same language without understanding each other. Those who steer clear of delusions and remain immune to government propaganda are condemned to solitude. Loneliness, N. Mandelstam says, is not the absence of friends, of whom there is never any lack; it is life in a society that, heedless of warnings, forges on along the path of fratricide.

“The Stalin Epigram” contains two references to Stalin’s ethnic background. There is the bit about the “Kremlin Caucasian.” (This is sometimes translated into English as “Kremlin mountaineer” or “Kremlin highlander”; while technically correct, this is not what Mandelstam meant. The Russian term “gortsy” denotes not only people of the mountains but also those from the mountains of the Caucasus, and there is no doubt about Mandelstam’s intended use of the term in this context.) The second reference, in the last line of the poem, is to a “broad-chested Ossetian.” Stalin, of course, was Georgian and not Ossetian, and Mandelstam was possibly alluding to rumors, popular in Georgian circles, that Stalin was at least in part Ossetian. Much has been made of these references. According to N. Mandelstam, Pasternak was outraged: “How could he write such a poem? He is a Jew, after all!” In Pasternak’s view, it was unbecoming for a member of an ethnic minority, especially one that has known much persecution, to use the ethnic card. Some literary scholars have also regarded the mention of Stalin’s ethnic origins as an expression of Mandelstam’s bigotry. Unlikely — and an intrepid literary investigation I recently came across acquits Mandelstam of charges of racism. Carried out by Ilya Vinitsky, the investigation suggests Mandelstam was inspired by a novel written by the Georgian Mikheil Javakhishvili, in which a weak-willed Georgian prince and intellectual loses his possessions to an Ossetian rogue who, thanks to the Bolshevik Revolution, gets his hands not only on the prince’s assets but also on his wife. Given Stalin’s imperialist policy in Georgia, Javakhishvili’s allusions were clear and eventually cost him his life. If there is bigotry, it should be imputed to Javakhishvili’s novel and not to Mandelstam, who merely availed himself of the novel’s theme.

The hypothesis is persuasive. Still, the fact remains that Mandelstam thought it was necessary to mention Stalin’s origins. The real reason, I suspect, was not bigotry but a civilizational clash. The Mandelstams were Europeans — by cultural allegiance, first and foremost. There are several illuminating references to this self-identity in N. Mandelstam’s memoirs. As she boarded the train with Mandelstam to join him in his exile, she felt it was the end — the end not only of their habitual life and relationships, but also of Europe. N. Mandelstam is not talking geography here. She returns to the topic two paragraphs later: “In the face of resignation, even fear is absent. Fear is hope, a will to life, an assertion of oneself. It is a deeply European feeling.” N. Mandelstam regarded herself as an exponent of European heritage and culture, and so did Mandelstam. He recognized the debt that Russian culture owed to Europe, a debt he acknowledged in essays such as “The Human Wheat” and “The Badger’s Hole,” and in his articles on Chénier, Dante, and Villon. Russian culture was European culture; its glorious flowering could have only come about after Peter the Great opened the window onto Europe. Its political elites tended to be either European or Europeanized. Catherine the Great was German; Nicholas II, the last Russian tsar, was mostly of Germanic stock. A case can be made, and indeed has been made, that the Bolshevik Revolution was a revolt against European Russia (it was no coincidence that the imperial capital of St. Petersburg, Peter’s “window” and Russia’s most European city, was moved back to Moscow after the Revolution), and while Stalin embodied restoration, he restored the wrong side of it. Culturally, politically, and temperamentally, Stalin represented eastern despotism, the Mongol invasion of Rus’, the oriental khanate. For N. Mandelstam, Stalinism was a rejection of Erasmus and Goethe in favor of Shahryar from The Arabian Nights who beheads subjects ad libitum. The “miracle” that followed Mandelstam’s first arrest was of a piece: “Miracles,” N. Mandelstam writes, “are an eastern phenomenon utterly harmful to a western consciousness.” Elsewhere she notes: “The greater the centralization, the more effective the miracle. We greeted miracles with happiness and accepted them with the sincerity of an Assyrian crowd. They [miracles] became part of our life . . . Only a life that is good does not require miracles . . .” (This penchant for miracles lives on; the current Russian president has staged televised shows in which callers were able to ask for miracles of their own. Thus in 2008 a nine-year-old girl from a poor town asked Putin, then head of government, for a fairy-tale dress for New Year’s and duly received it as a gift. A cheap show — it would have been more effective to provide a standard of living that would have made it unnecessary for a political leader to play the role of Santa Claus, but such is the difference between a life that requires miracles and one that does not.)

Although the term “biopolitics” is never mentioned in N. Mandelstam’s memoirs, the society she describes is a biopolitical project avant la lettre. Biopolitics is a political framework in which the government administers the biological life of the population, managing people as units. In his spectacular and spectacularly neglected magnum opus Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy offers a small European dictionary for the four main revolutions that shook the Western world. Where Martin Luther’s German Revolution engaged “Every Christian,” the Puritans’ English Revolution advanced the cause of “Every man,” and the French Revolution celebrated “Every individual,” the Russian Revolution apostrophized “Every body.” Not “everybody” but “every body.” Rosenstock-Huessy understood the notion of biopolitics long before the term was coined. The notorious statement that the death of one man is a tragedy and the death of millions is a statistic, attributed to Stalin, conveys more than the callousness of a tyrant who ruled over life and death; it describes a style of political administration. Stalin used people as matériel to industrialize and expand the Soviet realm. As a biopolitical project, Stalinism had an entirely different conception of souls — if Gogol’s Chichikov proposes to trade them in 19th-century tsarist Russia, Stalin wanted to manufacture them. Hence the “engineers of human souls” — only in a biopolitical framework can one conceive of a soul as something that can be churned out by an assembly line. Only in a biopolitical framework can an order be issued to “isolate but preserve” a human being, as if he were a kind of bacillus. N. Mandelstam mentions the top-down “extermination plan” behind the dizzying number of arrests; the plan incentivized repression by tying the salaries of Soviet henchmen to quotas. Death quotas — only in a biopolitical framework can the state come up with such a concept. In this sense, Stalinism was very much like Nazism, another biopolitical regime that took no account of an individual’s soul. Nazism lost because Hitler was a fanatic who pursued unlimited ends with limited means, while Stalin won because he was a hard-nosed realist who pursued limited ends with unlimited means.

Unlike her husband, N. Mandelstam lived a fairly long life (1899–1980), but she never viewed her longevity as a great blessing. “My century, my beast,” reads the first line of Mandelstam’s poem “The Century,” and it was a beast that had turned N. Mandelstam into an incurable pessimist. Even in her final years, with Stalin dead, N. Mandelstam still lived in fear of the “midnight knock.” She views history as a hostile force that rewards evil, and she dreads the future. N. Mandelstam’s pessimism, however, goes much deeper than Soviet reality. Her view of the world is intensely eschatological and makes one think of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, whom N. Mandelstam mentions in her memoirs. I suspect Berdyaev’s ideas influenced N. Mandelstam more than she would have cared to admit; certainly some familiarity with Berdyaev will go a long way towards understanding her worldview. Berdyaev rejected freedom as a legalistic concept, and he deplored the libertarian idea that one was free to act as one wished as long as others weren’t bothered. He did not have much time for freedom in the Western sense of the word, and if he opposed the Bolsheviks, it was because they encroached on the noetic sovereignty of individuals. Had the Bolsheviks stopped at the market and the economy, Berdyaev would have made his peace with them. He disliked capitalism as much as he disliked communism, and perhaps even more. In his thought, freedom was indissoluble from the idea of God. Christianity made man free by emancipating him from the paganistic shackles of nature; freedom was a creative act that got man nearer God. Berdyaev criticized humanism for evicting God and making man the measure of all things. The loss of God meant the loss of a divine image to aspire to; it sapped man’s creative powers and led to dehumanization.

Berdyaev’s ideas thread themselves into N. Mandelstam’s memoirs. She differentiates between freedom and svoevolie, a Russian term that has no literal equivalence in English and can be cumbersomely translated as the will to do as one pleases. The mantra of the latter is “I want to, therefore, I can,” while freedom says, “It is necessary, therefore, I can.” N. Mandelstam does not equate free will with freedom. A free person is one who avoids enslavement by dark impulses, whether his own or those of his time. This gives freedom a tragic dimension — the free person faces a multitude of questions, and one of them is whether the individual is right to oppose the zeitgeist of his times, or whether the opposition is a function of pride. Such a question cannot be answered without religious belief. The tragedy of secularism is that it arranged a divorce between humanism and Christianity, dehumanizing people and entire societies. The history of the first half of the 20th century, N. Mandelstam writes, was a direct consequence of a humanism that had lost its religious foundation. Like Berdyaev, who established contiguity between artistic creativity and God, N. Mandelstam believes that an artist’s work is an act of freedom, as long as the artist stays true to the purity of art and does not give in to the dark impulses of the epoch.

I have already mentioned Rosenstock-Huessy. A jurist by training, the polymathic historian-cum-philosopher was endowed with a brilliant mind and a sweeping view of history. He was German-born, Roman-Catholic, and an eccentric, but too disciplined intellectually to be given to Berdyaev’s forays into mysticism and metaphysics, with their inevitable detachment from worldly affairs. He was a man quite unlike Berdyaev and N. Mandelstam. Nevertheless, one finds a similar criticism of humanism in Out of Revolution. Rosenstock-Huessy defines liberty as the existence of a dilemma. Freedom comes down to a choice. People are not free to do what they want, but they are free to choose between two options (e.g., between bachelorhood and marriage, between religion and atheism, between self-employment and a corporate job, etc.). Freedom presupposes dualism. When Gregory VII challenged the Holy Roman Emperor in the 12th century, he created a second seat of power. Europeans now had a choice: the Holy Roman Emperor or the Roman Pope. This was the first revolution in the West, and the European tradition of freedom can be traced to the Papal Revolution of Gregory VII. Liberty, Rosenstock-Huessy tells us, “can exist only when every human soul has two loyalties.” The danger of the secularism of the modern world is that it is monistic. Monism can only produce slavery, and modern democracies are “leading to slavery, because they have no guarantee against the monocratic tendencies of popular government.” When N. Mandelstam talks about the end of Western civilization, it is this slavery that she envisions. Significantly, Out of Revolution was first published in 1938, the year of Mandelstam’s death.

Like the inscription on the gate to hell in Dante’s Inferno, N. Mandelstam does not offer the reader any message of hope. Hence the memoirs’ threnodic tenor, their plangent chant, their quivering lament. History is bereft of hope. No one remembers Peter the Great’s litany of victims. Why should future generations remember Stalin’s victims? History buries the memory of its killing fields and provides refined torturers with honorable alibis. It is inherently Manichean. The post-Soviet reader might find N. Mandelstam’s pessimism unfounded. Writing her memoirs a few decades before the collapse of the Soviet Union, N. Mandelstam could not have imagined that the empire would come to an end, and so soon. But did the collapse usher in a bright new dawn? While the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, there was no process of reflection and atonement. Stalinism is a wound that never healed properly and, as the post-Soviet history of Russia shows, such wounds can reopen and bleed again. N. Mandelstam saw it very clearly.

And yet there is hope. The late Russian literary critic Benedikt Sarnov wrote a four-volume work called Stalin and the Writers (Stalin i pisateli), in which he examined the relationship between the Soviet dictator and the country’s leading “engineers of human souls.” From that sprawling scholarly effort two conclusions can be drawn. One is that writers who sell their talent to the state become impotent artistically, at least for as long as they service the state. The other is that while a tyrant will easily triumph in a confrontation with a writer in the short run, the writer will most certainly win in the long run. The writer, the poet, will be the unlikely St. George who slays the fearsome dragon. The writer might be destroyed physically, but the writer’s work will live on. As the devil says in Bulgakov’s famous novel, manuscripts don’t burn. They certainly didn’t in Mandelstam’s case. Thanks in no small part to N. Mandelstam, his poetry survived and has outlived Stalin. N. Mandelstam writes in her memoirs that poetry is preparation for death. If this sounds lugubrious, it is because ours is a puerile civilization that has tried to banish death; we are forever in search of Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth. But, if I may quote Rosenstock-Huessy once more, any civilization that does not anticipate death is bound to break down completely. “Common sufferings create. Common tears restore.” A stream of tears can cleanse soil long since tainted by bloodshed.

N. Mandelstam would have strongly rejected this exaltation of suffering. As her memoirs make clear, she resents the shibboleth that suffering makes for good art. Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Pasternak all experienced long spells of creative aridity. There was, N. Mandelstam insists, nothing edifying or enviable about the plight of people who were so cowed by the state they preferred war to peace and regarded suicide as a normal kind of death. But her life-negating exhortation to others — “Do not bring children into this monstrous world” — is not a solution. In the end, one yearns for Rosenstock-Huessy’s life-affirming vision of man and of Western civilization. Rosenstock-Huessy mocks Spenglerian comparisons of human civilizations with living organisms. Human civilizations do not follow straight lines, nor do they go through seasons. The history of man is not mathematical and cannot be measured. At critical junctures, Western man has always found new historical forces to regenerate himself and overcome the monstrousness of the world. If Rosenstock-Huessy is right, then hope there must be. However cynical, monistic, and dehumanized in various aspects, modern Western civilization will perhaps once again find a way to auto-regenerate and discover, if not a divine image, at least a better version of itself.