The success of Orlando Figes's latest book "The Whisperers" about every day life in Stalin's time makes me thankful that I still own a more remarkable book on the same subject, published in English translation almost 40 years ago. After Stalin's death, a new breed of tough women emerged from the twilight, the Gulag widows, who had lost their menfolk to Stalin's firing squads or forced labour system. Nadezhda Mandelstam was the queen of the widows. Her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, wrote a famous epigram about the great leader, for which he met an early death in a labour camp.
Almost none of his poetry was published in his lifetime. It survived only because Nadezha memorised it, retaining it in her memory for decades until it could be safely written down. His collected works, published legally when communism collapsed, filled two volumes. She was over 65 years old before she put pen to paper herself, to write a memoir with a pun for a title - "nadezhda" being Russian for "hope" - which remains the unsurpassed account of what it was like living in the USSR through that awful period (Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam).
The singer-songwriter Ana Silvera wrote a beautiful elegy entitled 'Nadezhda' about the texture of such memories ("Requiem, I hid his songs / In porcelain, and dead man's lungs / I even caught a breath of one / In church bells ringing for the fallen sons..."). It's the first song at http://www.theliberal.co.uk/downloads/anasilvera_192.mp3
Posted by: Benjamin Ramm | Friday, 07 March 2008 at 09:42 PM
There are, of course, endless such memoirs, and they have to be read in total to piece-together the fractured, dysfunctional theme-park of insanity that was Stalin's USSR.
For myself, though, I prefer the fiction - because it can portray the "fact" better than the factual can ever manage... because it embraces a universality that no single person's memoir can ever reach.
As a single book, Bulgakov's "The Master & Margerita" remains the greatest novel of the C20th. For a look into the ghastly nightmare of the camps, Varlam Shalamov's "Kolyma Tales" (a selection of short stories, based on his real-life imprisonment in the Kolyma Gulag in the Arctic North) is probably the most terrifying book you might ever read.
But thanks for reminding us, on 8th March, of Nadezhda Mandelstam... she stands symbolically for so many, many other women whose sons or husbands disappeared into the Gulag. They may not have been poets like Osip Mandelstam - but they were human lives of value, snuffed out by a system rooted in pig-headed stupidity, brutish cruelty, and insane devotion to a dysfunctional ideology.
Posted by: Neil McGowan | Saturday, 08 March 2008 at 12:21 AM
Why the gratuitous put-down of Figes? Hope Against Hope is a remarkable book, but so is The Whisperers. They are different. Mandelshtam was a poet's wife. She speaks for the intelligentsia. The Whisperers gives voice to ordinary people who were too afraid to talk when Mandelshtam wrote her memoirs.
Posted by: Shaun O'Grady | Saturday, 08 March 2008 at 09:01 AM