- Person
- Osip Mandelstam
- Lived
- 1891–1938
- Field
- Poetry
- From
- Russian (Soviet)
The story
Nadezhda Khazina was born in 1899 in Saratov to a middle-class Jewish family and grew up in Kiev. On 1 May 1919 she met the poet Osip Mandelstam at a Kiev nightclub, and the two quickly became inseparable. They married in the early 1920s and settled in Moscow. When Osip was arrested in 1934 for his poem mocking Stalin, Nadezhda went with him into exile, first to Cherdyn in the Urals and then to Voronezh.
In May 1938 Osip was arrested again, and he died in a transit camp near Vladivostok that December. The secret police had already seized many of his manuscripts, and there was a real danger that every copy of his poetry would be destroyed. In her memoir Nadezhda recalled the moment she understood her life's purpose: some manuscripts had survived, much more was preserved in her memory, and only she could save it all.
Knowing that written copies were too dangerous, she set out to memorise his entire body of poetry, while hiding a few precious paper manuscripts. For years she led an almost nomadic life to avoid her own arrest, moving often and taking temporary jobs. On at least one occasion, in Kalinin, the NKVD came for her the day after she had left. She panicked when she found herself forgetting lines, and she wrote modestly that many Soviet widows had spent sleepless nights repeating their dead husbands' words.
Through those years she earned a degree, taught English in provincial towns and, after Stalin's death, completed a dissertation in linguistics in 1956. She was not allowed to return to Moscow until 1964. In the 1960s and 1970s, as the political climate thawed, she arranged the clandestine republication of Osip's poems, and in 1976 she gave her archive to Princeton University.
She also wrote two celebrated memoirs, Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974), first published in the West in English translations by Max Hayward; the titles play on her name, which means hope in Russian. The Jewish Review of Books compares her portrait of Osip to Boswell's portrait of Samuel Johnson, and the critic Clive James called Hope Against Hope a masterpiece of prose. The Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova, who visited her, called her a holy woman for saving her husband's poetry. She died in Moscow on 29 December 1980.
Why it matters
Thanks to Nadezhda's memory and courage, one of the twentieth century's greatest poets was not lost, and her memoirs remain a classic account of life under Stalin.
About Osip Mandelstam
Warsaw-born Jewish poet, one of the greatest in the Russian language, whose sixteen-line epigram on Stalin led to exile and death in a Gulag transit camp in 1938.
More about Osip Mandelstam
- Osip Mandelstam's first book Stone appeared in 1913Osip Mandelstam published his first collection, Stone, in 1913, followed by Tristia in 1922, establishing him as a leading Russian poet.
- Osip Mandelstam translated 19 books in six yearsIn the 1920s, while he had almost stopped writing poetry, Osip Mandelstam translated 19 books into Russian in six years.
- In exile, Osip Mandelstam wrote the Voronezh NotebooksDuring his 1934 to 1937 exile in Voronezh, Osip Mandelstam wrote the Voronezh Notebooks, including the cycle Verses on the Unknown Soldier.
- Osip Mandelstam wrote the manifesto of AcmeismOsip Mandelstam helped found the Acmeist movement in Russian poetry and wrote its manifesto, The Morning of Acmeism (1913).
- Osip Mandelstam dared to mock Stalin in a poemIn 1933 Osip Mandelstam composed a poem mocking Stalin and, when arrested, refused to disown it, believing a poet must never renounce his work.
Sources
- Osip Mandelstam Wikipedia
- The Russian Joseph Jewish Review of Books
- Nadezhda Mandelstam Wikipedia
- Remembering Osip Mandelstam, Litvak Poet, 125 Years after His Birth Lithuanian Jewish Community
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