Nadezhda Mandelstam | a reader who read only one book

Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980) was the wife, writer and translator of the famous Russian poet Mandelstam. Born in Saratov on October 30, 1899, her maiden name was Hazina. On 1 May 1919, he met Mandelstam in a café in Kiev, and three years later they married. After a brief period of calm in the mid-to-late twenties, Nadezhda had to face her husband's arrest twice. The wife, whom her husband called "the comrades of the dark years," lived with her husband for only sixteen years, the last four of which were spent in exile. In the early sixties, Nadezhda began writing memoirs about her husband, about that terrible era, the "memoir trilogy" of the seventies, "Memoirs," "The Second Book," and "The Third Book." Nadezhda died in Moscow on December 29, 1980. "Nadezhda" means "hope" in Russian.

Readers who only read one book

O'Mann was always cautious in his speech when he was young, and then he became rash. In 1919, when he was very young, he once said to me that there was no need to have many books, and that readers who read only one book in their lifetime were the best readers. "This book is the Bible?" I asked. "Maybe." He replied. I think of the old, flowing orientals who read only their Korans all their lives, and in our time they may be the only representatives of ancient tribes that read only one book all their lives, but I can hardly imagine that my elated companion could play such a role. "Of course I'm not such a reader," he admitted, "but..."

O'Mann did not become an ideal reader, and single-minded people were rare in the twentieth century, but it was no accident that he blurted out this sentence. There are people whose every insight is closely related to their general understanding of all things. These are people with a complete worldview, to whom poets most likely belong, differing only in the breadth and depth of their thoughts. Could it be that it is this quality that motivates them to reveal themselves? Could this quality be the yardstick by which true and false poets are measured? You know, there are many people whose poems are not worse than poets, but they always lack something in their poems, which everyone can see immediately, but it is impossible to explain where the problem lies.

It would be naïve to talk about a poet who was not recognized by his contemporaries. Those who are happy with the poet and those who go mad by the poet can immediately recognize a real poet. Poets can make many people angry and mad. Obviously, this is inevitable. Even Pasternak, who for a long time was careful not to drive the non-readers crazy, had been serving every interlocutor with care and consciousness, but on his deathbed he had not escaped the common fate of the poet.

Perhaps, the poet provokes this anger because they feel the truth in their hands and dare to tell the truth, "We tell the truth, this is not only the children's toy pistol" (1), this honest attitude is the result of a complete worldview ... Know that every poet is a "shaker of meaning," that is, he does not use the judgment formulas that people of his time used to, but extracts ideas from his own worldview. Those who have become accustomed to decent universal formulas will naturally be moved, when they are confronted with a new idea, a primitive, unprocessed, rough-edged thought... O'D.M. Mann has spoken of the primitive nature of poetry, of poetry being more of a raw material than even a living colloquialism, and is that what he means? People who are afraid of this ingredient will say, "Where is he better than us?" Or: "He was too resentful, very suspicious, self-righteous, always arguing, trying to teach everyone..." It was under this tone that the persecution of poets began, with the victims of Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Mayakovsky before he became a state poet. Even against the dead Gumilev, they had said so for a long time. In any case, they cannot do without these clichés, but as soon as the ethos changes, these repeaters of the established formula will immediately forget what they said a week ago, because they will replace the old formula with the new one. But it should not be forgotten that in addition to non-readers, the poet is always surrounded by friends and acquaintances. Somehow, it is always these people who have the upper hand in the end.

Speaking of "the reader who reads only one book," O.M. Mann refers to an ability he is hostile to, that is, to indifference to devour all kinds of unrelated things, and to the weakened sense of choice, which he calls "forbearance of everything," "what should have been the mother of philology, what should have been all blood, all intolerable things, became the blood mixed with water, the forbearance of everything..." (2)

He also had a saying about it, which was "devouring everything." O'Mann's first eloquent argument against "devouring everything", which I also heard in Kiev in 1919, was a rebuke of Bryusov, who in his poem compares the various epochs of history to a string of colored lanterns (3).

O.M. Mann said that since such a metaphor can be given, it means that Bryusov does not care about everything, and that history is nothing more than an object of appreciation for him. I don't remember exactly what he said at the time, but that's generally what he meant, and he later found a formula for this with Anna Andreyevna, namely "centuries and peoples"... O'Mann himself knew, at least he wanted to know, what was "yes" and what was "no" to him. All his views are concerned with this extreme or the other, and in this sense he is a distinct dualist, like an ancient doctrine that regards good and evil as the basis of existence. But be aware that poets cannot face good and evil indifferently, and they never say that existence is reasonable.

O'Mann's keen sense of choice and ability to choose are also reflected in his reading. In the Notebook in which Armenian Travels was written, there is a reference to the "demon of reading", a demon that has emerged from the abyss of "culture as a destroyer". People enter an illusory world when reading, struggle to remember what they read, in other words, completely succumb to printed words. O'Mann advises reading not to memorize, not to remind, that is, to examine each word with one's own experience, or to examine each word with one's own basic ideas that make one a personality. You know, it is through this passive, "remembered" reading that it is through this passive, "remembered" reading that prevails ideas, polished ready-made truths for the use of the masses, prevail. Such reading, which is difficult to stimulate the mind, can become a kind of hypnosis, although there are now some more effective ways to deprive people of their freedom.

O'Umán refers to reading as an "activity," for which it is first and foremost a selective activity. Some books he just flipped through casually, others he read with relish, such as the works of Hemingway and Joyce. But at the same time there was a certain kind of true cast reading, there was certain books that he was constantly reading, books that determined a certain stage in his life, or that determined his life. The appearance of such a new book that can determine a life is like an encounter with a person destined to be friends. "I am awakened by friendship, as awakened by the sound of gunfire", this sentence refers to his encounter with Kuzin, but more importantly to his encounter with German poets: "Tell me, friends, / In which Valhalla Palace (4), / We smash walnuts with you, / What kind of freedom we share, / What kind of road signs you have planted for me..." O'Mann had previously been familiar with these poets, such as Goethe, Hölderlin, Merrick (5), and the Romantic poets. But reading alone does not constitute an "encounter.".

The encounter in Armenia was not accidental. He had long been looking forward to going to this country, and he spoke in his Fourth Essay of the failure of his first attempt to go there, which made his previously dormant longing for an object of desire which I at this moment completely erroneously call "natural philosophy", or even more incorrectly "cultural philosophy". It was a strong curiosity about a weak and small country that, as an outpost of Christianity in the East, had resisted Islamic attacks for many centuries. Perhaps, at a time when there was a crisis of Christian consciousness in our place, Armenia attracted the attention of O.D. Mann with its tenacity... Georgia has not attracted his attention so much, and life in Georgia is much easier.

The small room in which we were in the Yerevan Hotel was immediately filled with many books on Armenian culture, such as the books of Sturzhgorsky (6), the annals of Armenia and the history of Moses Horensky (7), as well as many books on the economy and nature of the country. Of all the writings on the Armenian economy, O'Umán most valued Chopin's (8) Overview of armenia's Finance and Economy, written by an official of alexander's time. O'Mann compares Chopin's strong interest in the country with the indifference of today's countless "business travelers", whom we often encounter in hotels, one by one, fierce and chattering.

After Armenia, O'Mann's fascination turned to Goethe, Herder (9), and other German poets. An encounter with Kuzin, a young biologist who was full of philosophical and literary interests at the time and always had some taste of a German university student, could quietly happen somewhere in Moscow, but the ball ended up in Armenia. They talked in the courtyard of the mosque, drank a few cups of Persian tea together in a very small cup, and then went back to the hotel where we were staying to continue the conversation.

What intrigued O'Man seemed to be Kuzin's new biological approach to the questions O'Man was thinking about, as well as the eternal casting problems. O'Horman wrote long before he met Kuzin that the study of poetry could only become a science if biological methods were introduced. It is highly likely that this formulation reflects a linguistic theory that was very popular in the first decade of the twentieth century, namely that linguistics is related to both the social sciences and biology. However, the trust in the biological method of poetic research has been fruitless, and only interest in purely descriptive biological works and the problems of life at ease remains.

Kuzin loved Goethe, and it happened by chance. While in Moscow, when O'Mann "met" Dante, his friendship with Kuzin and other biologists became a regular drinking friend. About Dante O'Mann is quick to talk about, this is the most important thing. Since then, O'Mann has never broken up with Dante, and he has even taken Dante's books to prison twice. Like everyone else he knew, O'Mann thought he might be arrested at any moment, so he got a small folio of the Divine Comedy and kept it in his pocket wherever he went, knowing that people were arrested not only at home, but also on the street or in the workplace, and sometimes called somewhere, and then taken away from there, and never heard from again.

A friend of mine often complained that he could not drag that pocket to work, which contained all the necessities necessary for life in the concentration camp, but at the moment of arrest (coming to the house in the middle of the night to arrest him), he panicked and forgot to take the pocket that had been packed in advance... The pocket version of Dante's work was left in Moscow, and O'Mann went to Samakiha with a much heavier version of the Divine Comedy, from which he was captured. I don't know if he would be able to take the book to the "Erdaohe" transit camp near Vladivostok, where he died. I think he may not be able to bring to, in the concentration camps of the Yezhov and Stalin eras, no one can still think of books.

It turned out that Anna Andreevna and O'Mann had not consulted beforehand, but were reading Dante at the same time. After they learned about the situation, Anna Andreevna recited a fragment of the Divine Comedy for O'Mann, and listening to Anna Andreevna's recitation, O'Man was tearful with excitement, and he liked Anna Andreevna's voice.

Both Akhmatova and O'Umán possess an astonishing talent for reading poets' works, and they seem to be able to eliminate the time and space that lies between them and those poets. This reading is anachronistic in its nature, but they have a personal connection with the original author. This kind of reading is an approximation of exchange and conversation, and is aimed not only at contemporaries, but also at those who have long since passed away. O'Mann also seems to have discovered this ability in Dante, when he saw Dante in Hell when he met his favorite Greco-Roman poet.

In His Essay on the Nature of Words, O'Bergson is mentioned, who seeks connections in various phenomena of the same kind separated only by time, and O'Mann believes that this method also has another advantage, that is, to find friends and allies across time and space. Keats probably understood this too, because he also wanted to meet all his living and deceased friends in the tavern... Akhmatova resurrects those who have left us in order to communicate with them, and she is interested in their lives, in their interactions with others. That's how she first introduced Shelley to me, and she seems to have used Shelley to practice... After that, she began an era of communication with Pushkin. With the sensitivity of an investigator or a jealous woman, she probed step by step to understand how everyone had acted, thought, and spoken, who was around Pushkin, and she thoroughly understood every psychological motive, figuring out who had ever received a smile from Pushkin.

In the face of any living person, Akhmatova never showed such a strong personal interest. Another point was that she could not stand the wives of writers, especially the wives of poets. I'll never understand why she made me an exception, but the truth is, she did, even though she herself had a hard time explaining why... O'Khmatova, on the other hand, rarely explores the personal lives of his friends, and I am referring to poets of the past, for he is very attentive to his surviving poet friends, and though on the surface he seems a little careless, and he knows far more than I do about those around us, and I often do not even believe his words, but he turns out to be always right.

He had no interest in women such as Natalia Goncharova (10), Paletika (11) or Anna Grigolievna Dostoevskaya (12), and knowing that he was indifferent to such issues, Anna Andreyevna no longer shared her views with him. As for the living, he is reluctant to take a stand: let them do whatever they want... They would talk about the lines of the poem, the details,—— did you find this miracle? Do you remember how it was written there? Why...... They often recited together, saying their favorite verses, gifting each other the best sentences they found, as the saying goes, courtesy exchanges... Adding color to O'Mann's last years was Dante and a number of other Italian poets, but as usual there was also Russian poetry.

It is even more difficult to say which books accompanied O.M. Man in his early stages of life. In Kiev in 1919, he came with Frolensky's book (Pillars and Foundations of Truth (13)). It seems that what amazed him most was the chapter on doubt in that book, for he had said the same thing about doubt more than once, but did not give its source. He must have read Herzen in middle school, and Vladimir Solovyov (14) was also his interlocutor during his adolescence, and Solovyov, as a philosopher rather than a poet, apparently made O'Mann feel closer, closer than the average person could have imagined. He never mentioned Solovyov in his articles, for the simple reason that most of his articles were written during the Soviet period and were intended for publication, but none of the editors were willing to publish about Solovyov unless they denounced and insulted Solovyov.

Traces of Vladimir Solovyov's decisive influence, however, are everywhere in O'Man, such as Solovyov's version of the Christian worldview, as well as the ways in which arguments are conducted, the dialogue body, many fixed concepts, and even some individual words. For example, O'Mann's use of the "pillar of man, time, and impression" in his poem dedicated to Beret is reminiscent of the phrase "pillar of thought" that appeared in Solovyov's philosophical anthologies. O'Mann highly recommends Solovyov.

We had taken a small stay in a sanatorium called "Uzkoye" of the Central Committee for the Improvement of the Lives of Scholars, which had once been the estate of the Trubetskoy family (15), where Solovyov had died, and to O'Mann's astonishment, in the dark blue study where Vladimir Solovyov had worked and eventually died, the Soviet scholars could still do their own thing indifferently, writing small articles, reading newspapers, and listening to the radio. I knew nothing about Solovyov at the time, so he said to me with disgust: "You are also a barbarian, like them..." This group of professors made O'Mann feel that they were barbarically invading the holy land of Russian culture. He rarely talked to them in these places and seemed isolated.

Once, some women who studied philosophy and literature came to borshevo and asked him to recite poems and said to O.M. Mann, "You are our poet..." He replied to them: "Make it clear that if his poetry existed, there would be no such thing as their scholarship, and vice versa, so that the peace-loving omnivorous character had no place to stand... O'Mann would utter such perverse remarks at any time, either in the newsroom, or in speeches (which are naturally always closed to the public), or in private conversations, which gave rise to many rumors that O'Mann's character was unbearable, but in fact he was only a little paranoid. O'Mann's paranoia is enough for ten writers, but unfortunately, this quality is not supplied by ticket... O'Mann in particular could not stand us intellectuals who engaged in scientific research: "They are all traitors..." By the late twenties and thirties, the authorities had learned to "raise" the "standard of living" of those who were useful and not to allow any "egalitarianism" in this regard.

The division of levels becomes very striking, and everyone wants to keep their hard-earned and happy life. This was particularly important, for the brutal poverty of the early days of the revolution had just passed, and no one was willing to repeat that experience, and a privileged class with a small number of people with "envelopes" (16), villas, and cars was unconsciously formed. They realized very late the illusion of this comfortable life, and it was only during the Great Terror that everything could be stripped away in an instant, without any reason... At this time, these graced people are still doing their best to accomplish everything that needs to be done by them. At Voronezh, O'Umán once showed me a newspaper with a statement by Academician Bach (17) on the Concise Course. "Lo and behold, he went so far as to write: 'The Concise Tutorial' was an era in my life... And he was 'concise'..." "Not written by him, copied. I said. Such a document would be prepared in advance and taken to someone's house with just a sign of their own name on it..." That would be even worse. O'Mann replied.

What can Academician Bach do? Revise the text, so as not to sign this fully official article, and start writing something more decent? I can't be sure about that... Or to get rid of the journalist who came to him for his signature? Can those who are well aware of such acts be required to do so? I don't think so. So what to do? I do not know. The peculiarity of the Great Terror is that everyone is tied up in their hands and feet, and no one can move their fingers. (18)

But another question now arises: Has there ever been a time in our lives when intellectuals were able to assert their independence? Such moments may seem to have occurred, but the loose and divided intellectuals who had emerged long before the revolution were no longer concerned with their independence, because there had been a process of capitulation and revaluation. Perhaps, there is now a new value-setting movement, with values accumulating blindly, slowly, and with difficulty. I will never know if people will be able to uphold these values and defend them in the trials we are about to face.

(1) Speaking of a mourning poem written by Mandelstam for Beret.

(2) Speaking of the "Fourth Essay".

(3) See The poem "The Lantern" by Bryusov.

(4) Valhalla Palace, the temple of the Fallen Soldiers in Scandinavian mythology.

(5) Merrick (1804-1875), German poet and novelist.

(6) Sturzhygovsky (1862-1941), Austrian artist.

(7) Moses Horensky (410-490), historian of the Armenian Middle Ages, author of The History of Armenia.

(8) Ivan Chopin (1798-1870), historian.

(9) Herder (1744-1803), German poet and historian.

(10) Pushkin's wife.

(11) It is said that this person arranged a date between Dantes and Natalia.

(12) Dostoevsky's wife.

(13) Florensky (1882-1943), philosopher of religion, published in 1913 his book Pillars and Foundations of Truth.

(14) Solovyov (1853-1900), philosopher, founder of modern Russian philosophy.

(15) Aristocratic families, of which Sergei Trubetskoy (1862-1905) and Yevgeny Trubetskoy (1863-1920) were Russian religious philosophers and followers of Solovyov.

(16) It is said that Stalin would issue envelopes containing cash to those he admired.

(17) May refer to Alexei Bach (1857-1946), founder of the Soviet school of biochemistry and the Institute of Biochemistry of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

(18) The recollection here may be incorrect, and the Concise Course on the History of the United Communist Party (Brazzaville) was published in September 1938, when Mandelstam was imprisoned.

This article is excerpted from The Memoirs of Mrs. Mandelstam by Nadezhda Mandelstam

Translated by Liu Wenfei, Guangxi Normal University Press