Customer Reviews

Hope Against Hope: A Memoir

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I'll start by reiterating George Steiner's quote, "Nothing one can say will either communicate or affect the genius of this book. To pass judgment on it is almost insolence--even judgment that is merely celebration and homage."

And that is the truth, well-put.

In this lucid tome Mandelstam's widow recounts the years of their exile, the real life people whom they met in their travels, the day-to-day hells of the Stalinist regime, the tiny mercies and kindnesses of others, the cowards and the idiots, the drive to create art out of the most dehumanizing experiences, the triumphs and pitfalls of the human spirit... I'm getting too flowery here, and this is a book that deserves to be read, not praised by some spoilt American white-boy pseudo-intellectual like myself. I just want to say that this book evokes the kind of courage and wit one seldom sees these days.

Like Ahkmatova, like Yelena Sergeyevna Bulgakova, like so many Russian women, Nadezhda survived- because of her (and their) resilience we have not only her husband's works, but also this masterpiece. The chapters are short and so finely crafted that it shocks me. How someone can be so accurate, so succinct, so resolute and so honest all at once... If this were the standard by which writers judged their own works, well, amazon would have far fewer books to sell.

If you are looking for a glimpse of what life was 'like' during Stalin's reign in Russia, if you are looking for an unflinching view of humanity and 'utopian' projects, or if you are looking for the most eloquent and disturbing memoir I have ever read- well, here, all I can do is add my empty two-cents.

This is one of the most wonderful books i have ever read and a sensational portrait of the russian poet Ossip Mandelstam. The book focus on mandelstam's last years when he was under the pressure and prosecution of Stalin. The prose is beautiful, full of musings on the condition of Art. She also draw a very clear portrait of what Stalinism meant for artists and people in general in Russia. But for me the most important part of the book is to see the way Ossip dealt with horror and Death. For me, this book is one of the best studies about the condition of human beings. A must.

Highly recommended reading. This is a detailed but very readable account of the years following the revolution as recalled by the wife of one of Russia's leading poets. It is a witty, frank, and intelligent analysis of conditions that contrast so starkly with the premise of the revolution - freedom and equality for all people.

Only a process that is very beautiful and very terrible could produce this book: the anguish of two human souls being tormented by a cruel, fiendishly clever, and virtually all-powerful State determined to murder both the body and soul of its victims. Whether we deserve to benefit as readers from the terrible tempering endured by the poet Osip Mandelstam and his widow Nadezhda Mandelstam is a matter that can be easily determined: we do not deserve it. We are not worthy of the Mandelstams. They belong to a very select group of all the human beings who have ever lived, most of whom we will never know. Thanks to her memoir, we do know Nadezhda and Osip. If Osip's great characteristic was his commitment to truth, Nadezhda's was her endurance (if this sounds dismissive recall that the New Testament repeatedly includes endurance as one of a short list of authentic signs of the divine Spirit). Her personal survival made possible the survival of (most) of Osip's poetry, and of the story of their lives, preserved in this unique memoir. Wordsworth defined poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility", and this memoir has something deeper than tranquility to it, a profound serenity, a luminous sadness, a fusion of love and truth which is the pivot on which human history revolves. It is clear from reading this book that Osip was one those described in the 11th chapter of Hebrews as those "of whom the world was not worthy". What better way to understand the industrial scale barbarisms of the twentieth century than to read about how they were observed and interpreted through the sensibilities of great poets and writers? Perhaps because of the relative brevity of the "Thousand Year Reich", we have had far more accounts from Hitler's victims than from Lenin and Stalin's victims. But the ones that did survive from the Soviet Union, not just HOPE AGAINST HOPE but works by Ginzburg, Brodsky, and Solzhenitsyn, are testaments of the human spirit of the same order as those written by witnesses to the Holocaust. But the significance of HOPE AGAINST HOPE is not primarily its historical account of the Stalinist system, but its depiction of cosmic injustice and the possibility--even in the worst circumstances--for some kind of ultimate triumph of truth and integrity and decency and love. I doubt that a person picking up this book on a whim will read it through, unless, without knowing it, they have been preparing themselves for years to understand what Osip and Nadezhda have to tell us about ourselves and about the human potential for choosing truth and for acting with moral courage. That was true for me. I bought this book twenty years ago, and although I started it a couple of times, I have only just read it after all that time it has been on my shelves. Paradoxically, although it's a life-changing book, perhaps one's life has to have already changed, or begun to change, before one can engage with it. There is so much to reflect on in HOPE AGAINST HOPE. It is clear, for example, that although he died at the age of 46 in one of Stalin's camps, Osip was spiritually far advanced of the level achieved by Nadezhda herself in old age as she writes this memoir. She faithfully reports her long-dead husband's remarks and opinions without, in many cases, quite understanding them. This is to be expected: what is anybody to make of an observation such as the following: "Although [Osip] did not seek happiness, he described everything he valued in terms of pleasure and play: 'Thanks to the wonderful bounty of Christianity, the whole of our two-thousand-year-old culture is the setting of the world free for play, for spiritual pleasure, for the free imitation of Christ.'"? [page 267] One last comment about HOPE AGAINST HOPE is the perspective it provides for reading and evaluating other books on the period. HOPE AGAINST HOPE is an almost Biblically rigorous metric for ethical and moral decision. Stimulated by this memoir, I've been reading or re-reading LIFE AND FATE, Bulgakov's diaries and letters collected as MANUSCRIPTS DON'T BURN, Bulgakov's novel THE MASTER AND MARGARITA, Schklovsky's THEORY OF PROSE, Montefiore's YOUNG STALIN, and a fascinating biography by Tom Reiss of the early Stalin biographer Essad Bay, who was actually a Jewish resident of Baku named Lev Nussenbaim. All of these books read differently in the pure light of HOPE AGAINST HOPE; behaviour and poses which seem plausible and even praiseworthy simply look inadequate against the standard set by the Mandelstams. Everything, everybody, looks inadequate.

This is a great book. The devotion of Nadezhda Mandelshtam to her husband, to his work is at the center of this work. She writes with poetic intensity and chronicles the story of their life together and their cruel separation . Her devotion her self- sacrifice and her great love for her husband make her story a heroic example. Her perceptiveness and the beauty of her language lift the work into a higher realm. It is intense and it is deep, and at times so painful as to be difficult to read.

The most brilliant book on the state of the Russian intelligentsia during the Stalin purges. Nadezhda Mandelstam's account of her husband Osip covers a whole generation of writers who suffered the harsh censorship of the regime and all the consequences that came out of any form of free expression in their work. Is a sad history of the decline of the Russian intelligentsia of everything genuine and original in the face of a state controlled literature and state controlled life. The authors' intellectual perseverance against all odds explains best that survival instinct so innate to the Russian intellectual from the Petrine era to today.

Presents an image of Russia as profound and gripping as Dostoevsky (only it's a memoir, not fiction). Fascinating portrait of one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. One of the 10 books which have meant the most to me since I began reading 40 years ago.

Nadezhda Mandelstam's haunting memoir describes life with her exiled poet husband during the 1920s and 1930s in the Soviet Union, as the noose of the government gradually tightened around the intelligentsia and culminated in the years of the Great Terror, when no one was safe. She and her husband were reduced to begging and tramping from one town to another, knowing that there would be no escape for him. Her memoir is full of keen insights and above all, love for her husband and his poetry. While many people lived through those years with a dimly growing awareness of what was happening, the Mandelstams saw it all very clearly and understood exactly what it meant from the beginning. As she notes, "We lived among people who vanished into exile, labor camps or the other world, and also among those who sent them there." Joseph Brodsky, a Nobel Prize winner, went to meet Nadezhda Mandelstam at the end of her long life and wrote that she sat in a dark corner of her kitchen, "The shadow so deep that the only things one could make out were the faint flicker of her cigarette and the two piercing eyes. . . . She looked like a remnant of a huge fire, like a small ember that burns if you touch it." A huge fire, indeed.

This is a beautiful tribute to a harassed, brutalized and, finally, murdered poet, who died along with so many in the meat grinder of the Soviet killing machine. That his beloved wife guarded and watched over his meager output is a tribute to their marriage as well as a mark of the artistic community, the Soul of the Russian people, and the belief one may have in miracles. Above and beyond all else it is a tribute to this brave woman's will to live and to save the memory of her talented, if naive, husband. It is a curious irony of history that the Soviet system that destroyed him made him the poet that he came to be. Although as aesthete, part of the elite intelligentsia celebrated in St. Petersburg for their allegiance to aesthetics over politics, thus attracting the scorn of Gorky and other loyal Bolsheviks, Stalin and the goons of the terror turned Mandelstam into a poet of the people. He found his voice in denouncing Stalin. Their harassment and persecution, the hardships and degradation had the affect of turning this refined gentlemen into a beast with a harsh growl. The people heard and recognized themselves in his poetry.

Hope against hope is one of the great works of the 20th century.

It's a reminder that for whatever reasons, American novels and non-fiction since WW 2 can't touch the Russian and other European masters.

The fool who complains it is "ponderous" and who wishes it was more about poetry tells you where the American public is in its education and expectations.

fbenjul
Madison, WI.