The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (22 page)

Mandelstam recited some of these incendiary poems in his usual manner, eyes closed, singing his verse. He gave readings in Leningrad, where audiences sat breathless and mesmerized. Vladimir Admoni, a scholar of German literature and a friend of Akhmatova, remembers:

We were shaken by the poems that Mandelstam read—those we already knew and those we heard for the first time. But we were most struck by Mandelstam’s image, a combination of pride and doom, strength and fragility.… He behaved with such natural assurance, as if there was room within him for the tremendous power of the human spirit, the inexhaustible and deep source of poetry. And yet, in spite of this, his small figure seemed—and was—extremely vulnerable and unprotected.
434

But the most unnerving readings took place in their new Moscow apartment, which Bukharin had helped secure in the fall of 1933. The grim-looking apartment house belonged to the Writers’ Union and was inhabited by toadies of official literature—and these people filled the Mandelstams’ apartment during the readings.

I can remember nothing more terrible than the winter of 1933–34, which we spent in our new apartment—the only
one I ever had in my life.… We had no money and nothing to eat, and every evening there were hordes of visitors—half of them police spies. Death might come to M. either quickly or in the form of a slow process of attrition. M., an impatient man, hoped it would come quickly.
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Mandelstam “steered his life with a strong hand towards the doom,”
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and she had to share his destiny. During sleepless nights, Nadezhda was beginning to feel she was “the older of the two.” Mandelstam, immersed in work, was “becoming younger … while I turned to stone and aged from fear.”
437
By then, Mandelstam’s
Journey to Armenia
had been attacked in an unsigned article in
Pravda
and condemned as “prose of a lackey.” Criticism in the major Party newspaper was more than a condemnation: it suggested the start of an official campaign to eliminate Mandelstam for good.

It was with a sense that his fate was sealed that in November 1933 Mandelstam composed a poem in which he made his indictment of the regime, referring to Stalin as “the Kremlin mountaineer, the murderer and peasant-slayer.”
438
He read it in their apartment, exposing himself and his listeners to danger. Mandelstam’s friends begged him to forget the poem, realizing that the reading was an act of suicide. “I asked,” recalled Vasilisa Shklovsky, “‘What are you doing?! Why? You are putting your neck into a noose.’ And he: ‘I can’t do otherwise … I wrote it and I must recite it.’”
439

Mandelstam wrote his satire on Stalin in an unusually straightforward, uncomplicated style, to make it widely accessible and to exclude misinterpretation. When he recited it to Pasternak during their walk in the city, the latter was terrified: “I didn’t hear this, you didn’t recite it to me.”
440
With mass arrests beginning in 1934, people were afraid of any political conversations. Mandelstam understood what awaited him: when in February he and Nadezhda were in Leningrad, he told Akhmatova that he was “ready for death.”
441
Yet he was full of creative ideas, studied Italian, and wrote about Dante, apparently perceiving parallels between the
Inferno
and contemporary events.

The couple was still in Leningrad when Mandelstam assaulted Alexei Tolstoy, one of the most influential writers and Stalin’s favorite. (He was not related to Leo Tolstoy.) Mandelstam publicly slapped him in the face and called him “an executioner.” Although he was settling his personal scores with this writer, Mandelstam chose accurate words to describe him. Tolstoy was a talented but unscrupulous man, eventually a recipient of three Stalin Prizes for literature. At the height of the terror, from 1936 till 1938, he was the head of the Writers’ Union, clamoring for execution of innocent people.

Mandelstam’s act of courage and folly took place in early May 1934, in Nadezhda’s presence. She remembers that Tolstoy “had shouted at the top of his voice, in front of witnesses, that he would make sure M. was never published again, and that he would have him expelled from Moscow.”
442
After Stalin’s death, Akhmatova would tell Isaiah Berlin that she believed Tolstoy became “the cause of the death of the best poet of our time.”
443
But Mandelstam’s arrest cannot be attributed to this incident alone; more likely, it brought on the event.

Immediately after, the couple went to Moscow. Mandelstam began to phone and send frantic telegrams to Akhmatova begging her to come for what could be their last meeting. She arrived, soon to witness Mandelstam’s arrest on May 13. At one o’clock in the morning, there was “a sharp, unbearably explicit knock on the door.” Nadezhda, who had anticipated the arrest for months now, said simply, “They’ve come for Osip.”
444
She opened the door to the uninvited guests: three secret police agents.

Without a word or a moment’s hesitation, but with consummate skill and speed, they came in past me (not pushing, however) and the apartment was suddenly full of people already checking our identity papers, running their hands over our hips with a precise, well-practiced movement, and feeling our pockets to make sure we had no concealed weapons.
445

The secret police were then working thoroughly, so the search lasted six hours. (When Mandelstam was re-arrested four years later, the same procedure took only half an hour.) The police rummaged through Mandelstam’s manuscripts, confiscating his poems and trampling his other papers. At seven in the morning, when they took Mandelstam away, Nadezhda and Akhmatova stayed in the ransacked apartment, guessing what the indictment would be.

Nadezhda never committed Mandelstam’s most dangerous poem about Stalin to paper. But an informer was able to memorize it and report it to the police. As for other Mandelstam’s works, Nadezhda had made duplicates while anticipating the arrest. She gave some copies to their friends and hid others at home. The police failed to find the papers she had sewn into her cushions or stuck inside saucepans and shoes. Mandelstam, who believed his poetry was enduring and that his audience would remember it, was then unconcerned for his archive. But Nadezhda realized that his writings could be irretrievably lost.

On that May night I became aware of yet another task, the one for which I have lived ever since. There was nothing I could do to alter M.’s fate, but some of his manuscripts had survived and much more was preserved in my memory. Only I could save it all, and this was why I had to keep up my strength.
446

That day, fearing that the police would return for another search, Nadezhda and Akhmatova smuggled Mandelstam’s most valuable papers out of the apartment in shopping baskets. Nadezhda’s next move was to see Bukharin, who still had some influence as editor of
Izvestiya
. When he asked her whether Mandelstam had written “anything rash,” Nadezhda denied it and was later ashamed that she had lied and put their protector Bukharin at risk. The government already knew about Mandelstam’s poem. Genrikh Yagoda, the future head of the NKVD, the secret police, who had signed the order for Mandelstam’s arrest, recited the poem to Bukharin
when he tried to interfere. On her next visit to Bukharin, he refused to admit her. Nadezhda would never see him again: Stalin would destroy Bukharin in a spectacular show trial in 1938, the year Mandelstam died in a camp.

Akhmatova managed to arrange a meeting in the Kremlin with Avel Enukidze, Stalin’s old friend.
447
Enukidze knew that Mandelstam had written some poems against the regime. But the very fact that Akhmatova and Pasternak interceded on Mandelstam’s behalf influenced Stalin, and he commuted the sentence. Initially sent to the forced-labor camp building the White Sea Canal, Mandelstam had stood no chance of survival. Stalin changed his sentence to three years in exile, a surprisingly mild punishment for offending “the most awesome person in the land.”

Another act of clemency confirmed Stalin’s personal involvement. Two weeks after the arrest, Nadezhda received a call from Mandelstam’s interrogator summoning her to the Lubyanka, headquarters of the secret police. Allowed to meet Mandelstam in his interrogator’s presence, she considered it a miracle since other families were denied all information of the arrested: “We lived on rumors and trembled.”

The massive building that had housed the central insurance company before the Revolution became a dreaded place of interrogation and imprisonment. The brightest politicians, military officers, scientists, artists, and diplomats would disappear inside the Lubyanka. Mandelstam’s protector, Bukharin, wrote several works in the Lubyanka prison before his own execution. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of Lubyanka’s famous inmates, describes in the
Gulag Archipelago
how the prisoners’ spirit and body were broken there.

Although Mandelstam admitted to writing poems against the regime, he was still subjected to intimidation and torture. He was deprived of sleep, refused water, and led to believe that Nadezhda had also been arrested. At night, when interrogations took place, he heard prisoners’ screams. Mandelstam had a mental breakdown and slashed both of his wrists with a razor, which he had smuggled in in a sole of his shoe.

Nadezhda did not know this when meeting Mandelstam in the Lubyanka, but she saw his “fear-crazed” eyes. The interrogator constantly interrupted their conversation, his language peppered with the words “crime” or “punishment.” Nadezhda was reprimanded for failing to report her husband to the authorities:

The interrogator described M.’s poem as a “counter-revolutionary document without precedent,” and referred to me as an accessory after the fact. “How should a real Soviet citizen have acted in your place?” he asked. It appeared that in my place any real Soviet person would immediately have informed the police.…

When offered permission to follow Mandelstam into exile, Nadezhda agreed at once. Mandelstam was banished to Cherdyn, a small town in the Urals and a historical place where Russian aristocracy had been exiled since the seventeenth century. An uncle to the first Romanov Tsar was sent there by Boris Godunov, who viewed him as a potential rival. Romanov was held in an earthen pit, dying within a year.

But the Mandelstams were not afraid of exile. “Let them send us away,” Mandelstam used to tell Nadezhda. “Others may be frightened, but what do we care?” When the news of their banishment spread through their apartment house, friends, mostly women, began to visit Nadezhda, bringing money for the journey. Elena Bulgakov, who lived in the same building, burst into tears and turned out her pockets when Akhmatova told her the news.

The exiles boarded the train separately. Mandelstam was already in his compartment, guarded by three armed soldiers, when the train pulled up to the platform where Nadezhda was waiting. Her brother, Evgeny, and Mandelstam’s older brother, Alexander, came to see them off. Mandelstam was not allowed to open the window and say good-bye to them, he just gazed at their two brothers through the glass: “A barrier had been raised between us and the world outside.”

Although Nadezhda was not formally under arrest, she was treated as a prisoner once she joined Mandelstam. At a change in Sverdlovsk, the couple was forced to sit on a wooden bench under guard from morning till night, with no permission to eat, drink, or even stir: “At our least move … the guards at once sprang to the alert and reached for their pistols.… They had put us on a seat right opposite the station entrance, so we faced the endless stream of people coming in. The first thing they saw was us, but they looked away immediately.” Mandelstam whispered in Nadezhda’s ear that they could be murdered in front of these passersby and no one would interfere.

We traveled in crowded cars and on river steamers, we sat in busy stations swarming with people, but nowhere did anybody pay any attention to the outlandish spectacle of two people, a man and a woman, guarded by three armed soldiers. Nobody gave us as much as a backward glance. Were they just used to sights like this in the Urals, or were they afraid of getting infected?

Mandelstam was agitated and refused to sleep during their journey. By then, Nadezhda had learned of his suicide attempt and stayed awake too, watching over him. In early June, when they arrived in Cherdyn, she insisted on being lodged at a local hospital and on the first night there dropped her guard from fatigue. When she dozed off, Mandelstam jumped out of a second-floor window. The immediate consequences were dislocation and a fracture of his right shoulder. Because hospital staff failed to detect the fracture, Mandelstam would have limited use of his right arm ever after. But his jump also helped cure his mental condition, as he describes in a poem: “A leap—and my mind is whole.”

Mandelstam developed paranoia in prison, expecting execution at a certain hour each day, so Nadezhda would advance the hands of the clock to help him overcome his bouts of terror. This worked, but Mandelstam continued to have strange fantasies: he believed
Akhmatova was dead and looked for her corpse in the ravines around Cherdyn.

With no psychiatrist in their small town, Nadezhda pleaded to transfer Mandelstam elsewhere. Bukharin, who received her telegram, wrote a long letter to Stalin describing Mandelstam’s attempted suicide. He added in a postscript that Pasternak was upset with Mandelstam’s arrest. Stalin inscribed on Bukharin’s letter, “Who gave them the right to arrest Mandelstam?”
448
With such a remark, however hypocritical, Mandelstam’s sentence was reviewed with extraordinary speed. On June 10, he was allowed to settle anywhere except in twelve major cities.

On June 13, Stalin made a phone call to Pasternak, whom he respected. He inquired about the reaction in the literary community to Mandelstam’s arrest and asked what Pasternak thought of Mandelstam’s poetry: “But he is a genius, he’s a genius, isn’t he?” Pasternak replied that this was not the point. “What is it, then?” Stalin asked. Pasternak said he would like to meet Stalin and have a talk—“about life and death.” Stalin did not reply to this and hung up. Perhaps the most incredible part of this conversation was that Stalin chided Pasternak for failing to stick up for his friend. Nadezhda heard the story from Pasternak himself during her visit to Moscow. When she reported it to Mandelstam, he was pleased with how Pasternak handled it and concurred with his observation that “whether I’m a genius or not is beside the point.… Why is Stalin so afraid of genius? It’s like a superstition with him. He thinks we might put a spell on him, like shamans.”