The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (23 page)

The Mandelstams chose to settle in Voronezh, an ancient town on the Russian borderlands. They journeyed unaccompanied for the first time since the arrest: Mandelstam could not run away, since the only document he had was a travel warrant. So, the couple did not feel like exiles; moreover, they were privileged: because Mandelstam’s papers were stamped by the local intelligence agency, they were entitled to purchase their railway tickets in a military booking office. Travel was restricted, and the crowd
in the station, mostly peasants uprooted by collectivization, envied the convict and his wife.

In Voronezh, Mandelstam lucidly described his illness to a psychiatrist who had seen numerous cases of psychological trauma from imprisonment; he even took Mandelstam on a tour of his hospital. Thus reassured, Nadezhda asked to be admitted to the hospital on her own account: she caught spotted typhus on the journey and concealed her fever from Mandelstam. Aside from this incident, the couple enjoyed almost untroubled existence during the first two years of their exile. Nadezhda even remarked that their life in Voronezh “was happier than any we had ever known.” Importantly for both, Mandelstam returned to writing poetry.

Despite social isolation, cramped rooms, and the usual lack of funds (they lived mostly on cabbage soup and eggs), Mandelstam worked with great productivity. Sensing that he had little time left, he hurried to write, asking Nadezhda to take down several poems in succession. “The poems poured out of him,” she remarked.

In Voronezh, where they shared a single room and were constantly together, Nadezhda witnessed how poetry is made. Mandelstam worked from his voice, as he used to say. His poetry originated in the sounds buzzing in his head, which he “converted” into words. When Mandelstam was restless, Nadezhda knew he was at work: he moved around a lot when he composed. But during the freezing winters in Voronezh, there was nowhere to go and Mandelstam, pacing their small room, looked “like a caged animal.” To accommodate him, Nadezhda pretended to sleep. There were other times when they sat across the table from each other, and she knew, from watching him, that he was completing a poem and was about to dictate. In the first stage of composition his lips moved soundlessly, then he began to whisper, “and at last the inner music resolves itself into units of meaning.…” Writing poetry was hard work, she realized when watching Mandelstam compose for long hours. At forty-three, he had a weak heart but refused to rest: “‘You must understand that I shan’t have time otherwise.…’ He drove himself so hard … that he became even more painfully short of breath: his
pulse was irregular and his lips blue. He generally had his attacks of angina on the street, and in our last year in Voronezh he could no longer go out alone.” But none of this was reflected in his poetry: his unbound verse pulsated with music and joy.

Mandelstam was fond of Voronezh, the town where Peter the Great had built his Azov flotilla. He sensed the free spirit of the borderlands: outcasts and religious sectarians had settled here over the centuries to hide from the law. The Mandelstams, also outcasts, felt more at ease here than in Moscow.

After dictating his new poem, Mandelstam would count up the lines, estimating how much money he had earned. At the end of the day, just before Nadezhda would put his new poems in the suitcase, he added up all the “earnings.” Unrealistic in his expectations, Mandelstam sent his poems to literary magazines and to
The Literary Gazette
, controlled by the Writers’ Union. Only once did the couple receive a “stilted reply,” but in their isolation even a refusal was a welcome event, an acknowledgement of their existence.

In the past, Mandelstam’s attitude to getting published had been philosophical. When a young poet complained to Mandelstam that he could not get published, he was thrown out: “Did they publish André Chénier? Or Sappho? Or Jesus Christ?”
449
But in exile, he yearned for publication, since this was the only way he could communicate with the world.

The year 1935 was “prosperous” for the couple: they collaborated on several broadcasts for local radio, producing scripts on such innocuous topics as “Goethe’s Youth” and “Gulliver for Children.” A local newspaper assigned book reviews; in addition, Mandelstam was asked to write a feature article about a local collective farm. The couple set out together, since Mandelstam now did not go anywhere without Nadezhda, but nothing was written. He was not a feature writer and besides, could not produce a phony story about successes on a state farm after seeing the horrors of collectivization. Their “joint efforts” secured another job: with Nadezhda acting as Mandelstam’s agent, he was given a position as literary adviser to a local theater. His salary covered their rent, paid for groceries
and cigarettes, and gave the couple a sense of stability. In addition, Nadezhda obtained translating work while visiting Moscow: the State Publishing House gave her a novel by Guy de Maupassant.

Trying to persuade each other to smoke less, the couple invented a game. As soon as Nadezhda would pick up a cigarette, Mandelstam reminded her to put it down. She would let the cigarette rest in the ashtray for a minute and then light it. In her turn, she would pull a cigarette from Mandelstam’s lips: “Osya, don’t smoke!” When an acquaintance asked what the point of this exercise was, Mandelstam replied, with a smile, that smoking was bad for one’s health: “Nadya will argue and rest her cigarette, and this takes time. This means she will smoke six to seven cigarettes less.”
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The day Mandelstam had his identity papers returned was “an enormous event” for the couple. His passport had been taken away during his arrest, requiring him to renew his residence permit every month. To do this, he had to collect papers from various institutions, standing in long lines each time. Soviet bureaucracy was as bewildering, inefficient, and absurd as in Kafka’s
The Trial
. In addition, Mandelstam needed a reference from the local branch of the writers’ union, confirming that he was “really engaged in literary work.”

Police informers would pay regular visits. Posing as the poet’s admirers, they interrogated Mandelstam about his work. Eventually Mandelstam, escorted by Nadezhda, went to the headquarters of the local secret police and suggested that he mail his poems directly to them to spare everyone’s time.

In 1936, when loudspeakers began to broadcast news of the show trials, the exiles were refused even basic literary hackwork, since vigilance became the order of the day. Mandelstam was promptly discharged by the theater, the local radio station was abolished as all broadcasting became centralized, and newspaper work also dried up. All doors became closed for Nadezhda as well: she was refused further translating work. They lived on the generosity of their two brothers and several friends: Akhmatova, herself just making ends meet, and Pasternak sent them money. In winter 1936, Akhmatova journeyed to Voronezh, later describing in a
poem the town “encased in ice” and “the disgraced poet’s room.” Mandelstam read his verse to her from his new collection. Akhmatova would convey her impressions in an essay dedicated to him: it struck her “that space, breadth, and a deep breathing appeared in Mandelstam’s verse precisely in Voronezh, when he was not free at all.”
451
Mandelstam believed his
Voronezh Notebooks
to be his main achievement, but publication would not be attained until decades after his death. During Akhmatova’s stay, Nadezhda watched two great poets, both “banished, sick, penniless and hounded” and yet possessing great spiritual power, the only thing that could not be taken away by the regime. As Mandelstam had observed, “Poetry is power.”

With repression on the rise across the country, Mandelstam’s mental and physical condition deteriorated. His anxiety and fear of having a heart attack made him dependent on Nadezhda. In late summer, to help him recuperate, the couple traveled to the small ancient town of Zadonsk on the Don River. Built in the seventeenth century, the town was famed for its monastery and other holy sites. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky mention it because of their interest in the elder, Tikhon of Zadonsk, canonized by the Orthodox Church. (Dostoevsky refers to St. Tikhon in
The Brothers Karamazov
and Tolstoy compares him with St. Francis of Assisi.) Although churches and cathedrals were not functioning under Stalin, the couple was drawn to the picturesque old town for its history. The place inspired Nadezhda to resume painting: her watercolors captured the golden domes of the cathedrals, the monastery, and the Don. She spread her paintings on the floor of their room, inviting a few writer friends to see her “improvised gallery.”
452

Writer Yuri Slezkin, who helped the couple rent a place in Zadonsk, was surprised with Mandelstam’s overwhelming dependency on Nadezhda: she had to be near him all the time. The couple gave his illness a name, “being without You.”
453
In Nadezhda’s absence, Mandelstam would develop psychosomatic symptoms—attacks of dread and breathlessness. “When I’m with Nadya I breathe normally,” he explained, “but when she has to leave I
literally begin to suffocate.”
454
He could not compose without her either, reporting to her while she was in Moscow, “I find it bitter and empty to write without you.”
455

In September, writers in Voronezh decided to excommunicate Mandelstam from Soviet literature. During their disgraceful meeting, Mandelstam was proclaimed a class enemy and a Trotskyite. Writer Olga Kretova, who held an official position in the Voronezh writers’ union, elaborated on their resolution in an article in the local newspaper. (Later, she would remember that article with shame.) Mandelstam and Nadezhda didn’t read it until spring 1937, shortly before the end of their exile, when they were destitute and applied everywhere for financial aid, even to the local writers’ union. The response was predictable and always the same: “Refused.”

During this time, the couple lived on small donations from the local printers and actors who would secretly share a few rubles with them. In the atmosphere of political paranoia, it became dangerous to be seen near the exiles: “We generally arranged to meet them in some deserted side street, where, like conspirators, we walked slowly past each other while they slipped us an envelope with their offering of money.”

In early 1937 Mandelstam sent frantic letters to the successful children’s writer, Korney Chukovsky, asking for money and explaining that the right to work had been taken away from him: “I have only the right to die.”
456
Nadezhda looked for work and money in Moscow. When, in January 1937, she was planning to go there for over a month, Mandelstam pleaded with his mother-in-law, who stayed in their Moscow apartment, to come and be with him in Nadezhda’s place. His letter was filled with medical detail to convince Vera Yakovlevna, a doctor, that her presence was essential. She set out at once to look after her son-in-law and give Nadezhda a respite.

Mandelstam wrote childish letters to Nadezhda, refusing to understand the matter-of-fact problems that kept her in Moscow and insisting she return immediately to Voronezh: “I’m counting the days and minutes until Your return.”
457
Although not alone, he
could not stand their separation, writing to her, “We are together eternally, and that fact is growing to such a degree and growing so formidably, that there is
nothing
to fear.”
458

But fear was a prominent feature of their day and both were afraid of the future. Crushed by dire circumstances, reduced to being a “shadow,” as he called himself, Mandelstam was prepared to compromise. In winter of 1936–37, Nadezhda watched him write an “Ode to Stalin.” He had an illusion that there was “only one person in the whole world” to whom he could turn for help: Stalin himself.
459
It was the only time when he did not dictate a poem to her, apparently deciding it should come from his hand. “Every morning he seated himself at the table and picked up the pencil, as a writer is supposed to.…” After sitting for some time, he would jump up, curse himself, and wonder why others could produce such poems and he couldn’t. “This was a sign that he had not been able to stifle the real poetry inside him.…” When thinking of Stalin, Mandelstam would see “mounds of heads,” he told her. In the end, he did compose the eulogy to the tyrant, something Akhmatova would also do to save her son, Lev Gumilev. Acquaintances later advised Nadezhda to destroy Mandelstam’s “Ode,” but she preserved it, thinking that “the truth would be … incomplete” without it.

The exile term expired in mid-May, but it was understood that the length of a sentence depended not on law, but chance: with civil rights nonexistent, the authorities could always add another term on a whim. When, on May 16, Nadezhda and Mandelstam stood in line at the local office of the secret police, they did not know what fate had in store for them. A clerk from behind a small window gave Mandelstam a paper. He gasped when he read it and asked whether he was free to leave Voronezh. The clerk simply snapped back at him to step out of the line. This was the customary way the state communicated with exiles and the families of the arrested.

Assuming they were free to go, the couple returned to Moscow two days later. It was a great moment when they first opened the door to their flat: it felt like “a real home to which we had returned.” But they were not alone anymore in their two-bedroom apartment: during their exile, the Writers’ Union had given one of their rooms to a police informer with a typewriter. Nadezhda had met this man, a party writer, on her previous visits to Moscow. Soon after, without unpacking, the couple went to a downtown gallery to see French art, which Mandelstam had badly missed in exile.

Their stay in Moscow was brief: the authorities refused Mandelstam a living permit and canceled Nadezhda’s registration. Soviet “law” could not be fathomed by logic: after serving his sentence, Mandelstam discovered he had fewer rights than before. While in 1934 he was barred from twelve major cities for three years, now he was banished from seventy cities for life and could not even return to Voronezh. Upon learning this, Mandelstam told Nadezhda they should act “as separate persons,” a suggestion he made to her this one and only time in their marriage. She tried her luck separately, going to see a high-ranking police official. But in the eyes of the state, her subsequent fate was forever bound with Mandelstam’s.