The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (19 page)

Aware of her contribution, Tolstoy had written to her thirty-five years into their marriage: “You gave me and the world what you were able to give; you gave much maternal love and self-sacrifice, and it’s impossible not to appreciate you for it.”
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Nadezhda Mandelstam: Witness to Poetry

A
survivor of Stalin’s Terror, which sent millions to death camps, Nadezhda wrote one of the best known accounts about her generation, beginning with her revelatory memoir,
Hope Against Hope
. After her husband Osip Mandelstam perished in the gulag, she made it her mission to preserve his poetry and tell his story.

She could not understand people’s obsession with their childhood, saying that her life began when she met Mandelstam on May 1, 1919. Her pampered childhood with an English governess did not prepare her for life as a poet’s helpmate and homeless wanderer in one of the most violent eras in Russian history. And it was not until her late seventies that she began to reminisce. “Why, at the dawn of the new era, at the very beginning of the fratricidal twentieth century, was I given the name Nadezhda [Hope]?”
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Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina was born on October 31, 1899, in Saratov, a port city on the Volga in southern Russia. Saratov was
a multicultural city populated by Germans, Russians, Ukrainians, Tartars, and Jews. Her family had Jewish origins, but the children absorbed little Jewish culture. Nadezhda’s grandfather, on her father’s side, was forcefully converted to Orthodoxy under Nicholas I. For her father, Yakov Arkadievich, embracing Christianity and forsaking their Jewish roots was a requisite step to university education and entrance to the Bar.

A graduate of the Department of Mathematics, her father possessed “a very orderly mind” and brilliant memory, which allowed him to pass the Bar exams without attending Law School. He further proved himself by making a fortune with his very first case.
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Yakov Arkadievich read Goethe’s
Faust
in German and loved classical languages and literature: he savored Greek tragedies in the original for relaxation. The system of education, which produced such men as her father, was a measure by which Nadezhda would later assess “the gradual fall” of the state of education after the Revolution.

Nadezhda’s mother, Vera Yakovlevna, also came from a Jewish family but, unlike her husband, remained Jewish. Educated in Europe and becoming a medical doctor, she was in a vanguard of Russia’s professional women pursuing education and careers since the 1860s. Nadezhda’s parents were married in France, and their first son, Alexander, was born in 1891. Nadezhda describes her mother as “a student radical” of the pre-Revolutionary days, critical of the tsarist government. She supported the 1917 Revolution, but became disillusioned with the Bolsheviks in power. During the Civil War that followed, the state seized grain and supplies from the peasants, leaving nothing in exchange. With the economy in shambles, Lenin was desperate to feed the major cities, where he was losing control. Lenin’s disastrous policy became responsible for the severe famine of 1921–22 that killed around ten million people, to become Russia’s greatest calamity since the Middle Ages. Mobilized to work in the Volga region, the most afflicted by the famine and epidemics, Vera Yakovlevna saw devastation unknown under the tsars. (She worked in the same region where Tolstoy had organized his first relief in the 1870s.)

Nadezhda was the youngest in a family of two boys and two girls, all educated by English governesses. Anna, eleven years older, became a specialist in medieval French literature. After the Revolution, unemployed, she lived in her uncle’s house, occupying a dark storeroom, a place for servants in the past. Alexander, the older brother, was a gold-medal graduate of Law School with a brilliant career ahead of him. However, his career was halted before it began: during the Civil War, he joined the White Army, fled to the Don region to fight the Bolsheviks, and was never heard of again. Nadezhda was not able to even mention Alexander under Stalin and only told his story in old age when she no longer had anything to fear. Her younger brother Evgeny, who managed to conceal that he also had enlisted in the White Army, made his living as a writer; he and Nadezhda would remain close over the years.

Before the Revolution, their parents took them to France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Sweden. By the age of nine, Nadezhda spoke English, German, and some Italian. In Switzerland, where they lived for two years, she picked up French, later complaining to a friend about the inconvenience of living in the trilingual country, “You go outside to play hopscotch and it turns out that again you have to switch to another language.”
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Nadezhda was a third-generation Christian Orthodox and had attended church since childhood, despite her Jewish roots. In 1910, when the family moved to Kiev from Switzerland, her Russian nanny often took her to services at the ancient Cathedral of St. Sophia, which she quite liked. (Mandelstam converted in Finland in 1911, which Nadezhda believed was not only for practical reasons but because he was drawn to Christianity.) In Kiev she studied in a gymnasium, which followed a more thorough boys’ curriculum and, unlike the easier fare for girls, embraced Latin, Greek, mathematics, and sciences. In 1917, pushed by her father to excel academically, she entered Kiev University to study law. Anna Akhmatova, who would become Nadezhda’s close friend, also took law at the Kiev College for Women.
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Nadezhda stayed
at university for about a year, leaving when the country plunged into Civil War.

In Soviet times, one could not pursue a genuine career in law. When the Bolsheviks expropriated the family’s possessions, Yakov Arkadievich wanted to launch a court action but returned home, describing the new court as a joke. He said he had fathomed Roman law in two weeks but could not figure out Soviet decrees. Yakov Arkadievich did not complain about the family’s impoverishment during the ensuing economic collapse, declaring with typical irony that he was only sorry for their cook, who lost her savings. Nadezhda, with her leftist views, despised property, but only in theory, as it turned out. She remembers “the sharp stab of astonishment” when her father broke the news that their money had come to an end.
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Yakov Arkadievich did not consider emigration, refusing to abandon his homeland in its misfortune; later, people closest to Nadezhda, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova, held similar views.

After leaving university, Nadezhda joined the studio of Alexandra Exter in Kiev. A prominent avant-garde artist and designer, Exter worked at Alexander Tairov’s Chamber Theater. Nadezhda’s first assignment as assistant decorator was painting “a huge garland of artificial fruits, vegetables, fish, and birds, all suspiciously phallic in appearance.”
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Nadezhda was “not proud” of her early youth, describing her bohemian milieu and their artistic pursuits with self-deprecating irony: “In those days I ran around as one of a small herd of painters.… We were kept busy all the time making stage decorations or painting posters, and we had the feeling that life was a hectic round of pleasure.”
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Like many of her crowd, she frequented a café popular among artists, writers, and musicians called Khlam
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(Trash) in the cellar of the Hotel Continental. There Nadezhda met future celebrities, including journalist Ilya Erenburg, artist Alexander Tyshler, and poet Vladimir Narbut. Mandelstam also came to the café when in Kiev. His first collection,
Stone
, published in 1913 at his own expense and only in 600 copies, made an impact beyond his immediate milieu. The book established Mandelstam as a principal poet
of a new movement, Acmeism, which he defined as “a yearning for world culture.” Nikolai Gumilev, one of the founders of this movement, was a major Petersburg poet, then married to Akhmatova, who would surpass him in fame. Gumilev’s life was cut short in 1921 at the age of thirty-five when he was arrested and shot without trial on false charges of belonging to a monarchist conspiracy.

Mandelstam was sometimes seen writing at a table in the café, rocking on his chair while composing. He was nearing thirty, although his thinning reddish hair made him look older. On May 1, 1919, he came down from his room and headed toward Nadezhda’s table. He introduced himself: “Osip Mandelstam greets the beautiful Kievan women,” bowing toward Nadezhda, and “handsome Kievan men,” bowing to everyone else. Asked to recite his poems, Mandelstam readily agreed: “He read with his eyes closed, swimming in the rhythms.…” He gazed straight at Nadezhda when he opened his eyes.
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Born in 1891, Mandelstam was raised in a prosperous Jewish family, whose children received excellent education. His mother was a music teacher, his father a cultured leather merchant interested in German philosophy. Raised in Petersburg, Mandelstam had traveled abroad as a young man and studied Old French Literature at the University of Heidelberg.

Mandelstam and Nadezhda at once took up with each other “as though it were the most natural thing in the world.”
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Nadezhda’s “free and easy generation” embraced the concept of woman as girlfriend and companion, rather than wife. “I did not understand the difference between a husband and a lover, and I must confess that I still don’t.”
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A few days later, the couple was seen in the café, clearly in love: Nadezhda had a bouquet of water lilies, collected from the Dnieper.
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Mandelstam had told her that their meeting “was no mere chance”
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and, indeed, the relationship that began as a casual affair would prove unbreakable.

But their characters were not well-matched, making it difficult to get along. Ten years her senior, Mandelstam bossed her around, and Nadezhda was ill suited for this treatment: “Neither meekness
nor forbearance was in my character, and we were constantly colliding head on.…”
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Having obtained employment in a Bolshevik government agency (the Continental housed government offices), Mandelstam hired Nadezhda as his secretary. Earlier, he had worked in the People’s Commissariat for Education and had been terrified of his secretary there, he told her. Nadezhda was to remain his private secretary, for he did not allow her to assist others, even their friend Erenburg, who became their coworker.

Although Mandelstam could be despotic in private life, he had an aversion to political tyranny, rejecting capital punishment and the Bolsheviks’ use of violence. He had known several revolutionaries, including the notorious Yakov Bliumkin, head of the Cheka’s counter-espionage department, who worked under Felix Dzerzhinsky. Bliumkin had become known for murdering the German ambassador Count Mirbach, a crime for which he received a nominal prison sentence.
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Mandelstam heard Bliumkin boast that he had “powers of life and death in his hands.” According to one version, Bliumkin showed Mandelstam a blank death warrant, already signed, and which, while drunk, he was filling with names. Whether Mandelstam grabbed the blank and tore it up, as his biographer Clarence Brown tells, or complained to Dzerzhinsky, Bliumkin became his sworn enemy. In 1919, Nadezhda witnessed Mandelstam’s brief encounter with this man, which nearly cost him his life. As she and Mandelstam stood on the balcony of the Hotel Continental, Bliumkin with a mounted escort rode onto the street. The next thing she saw was Bliumkin’s revolver aimed at Mandelstam. Instead of ducking, Mandelstam waved to the horseman and the shot was not fired. Mandelstam believed the Bolsheviks had broken a major commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” and foresaw greater suppression of individual rights and tyranny.
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In 1919, he shared little of his thoughts with Nadezhda: “He always talked to me very cautiously, opening up a chink into his inner world, only to shut it again at once, as though protecting it from me, yet wanting me to have a glimpse at the same time.”
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They lived through several changes of power in Kiev. When the White Army forced the Bolsheviks out, Mandelstam went into hiding. He quit his hotel room and moved in with Nadezhda’s family. From the windows of her father’s study, they saw a cart piled with naked corpses: before fleeing Kiev, the Cheka executed their prisoners. During the Civil War, atrocities were committed by both sides: “Blood flowed in every street, outside every home. Bullet-ridden corpses lying in the roads and on the pavements were a familiar sight.…”
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But this was only the prelude to Stalin’s terror.

When Mandelstam suggested that they flee the city and go south, she refused, believing travel was risky. They separated, and she thought that in this chaos people were better off forgetting each other. Communication between the cities was severed and, besides, she could not expect Mandelstam to find her, because her family had been evicted from their house. But in December of 1920, she unexpectedly received his letter, carried to Kiev by an acquaintance: Mandelstam had located her through Erenburg’s wife, Lyuba. His letter defied time, distance, and war:

My darling child! You have become so dear to me that I constantly talk to you, call you, complain to you. It is only to you that I can tell everything.… With you nothing will be frightening, nothing will be difficult.… My daughter, my sister, I smile with your smile and hear your voice in the silence.… Nadyusha, we shall be together at any cost. I shall find you and live for you because you give me life.…
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Mandelstam arrived in Kiev in March 1921; when they met, he ran his fingers over her face: “He always closed his eyes and passed his hand over my face, like a blind man, lightly brushing it with his fingertips. ‘So, you don’t trust your eyes then?’ I would tease him. He said nothing, but the next time he would do the same thing again.” In fact, Mandelstam had a highly developed sense of touch and perceived the world more acutely than most people with this additional “window on the world.”
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