The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (26 page)

Soon after Stalin’s death, an amnesty was announced and over a million prisoners released, most of them common criminals. Political prisoners, accused on false charges, had to wait their turn in the camps. Only a small fraction of these were freed, including Kremlin doctors accused of the “plot” during Stalin’s final campaign. Newspapers revealed that the “Doctors’ Plot” had been fabricated. Each day brought new developments. Lavrenty Beria, head of Soviet security and secret police who controlled the gulag empire, was arrested in June and executed in December. Courts were flooded with appeals to review political cases from prisoners and families pursuing posthumous rehabilitation of relatives. Although the “collective leadership” of the country consisted of the same people responsible for the purges, the general mood was changing: “We were no longer paralyzed by fear, but there was still uncertainty how things would go in the new era.”
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In summer 1953, Nadezhda arrived at the Ministry of Education in Moscow where teachers from across the country received their appointments. They would crowd the corridors, standing along the walls for days. Nadezhda’s new appointment was in Chita, a city in the Far East, near the Mongolian and Chinese borders. At fifty-four, she had to travel to one of the remotest places in the Soviet Union, some six thousand kilometers from Moscow. Known as the birthplace of Genghis Khan, Chita was also where the Decembrists had been exiled after their ill-fated 1825 uprising against autocracy and where they worked the silver mines.

Impressed by Lake Baikal and the mountains she saw from the plane, Nadezhda wrote her Moscow friend, Vasilisa Shklovsky, that she liked Chita. She liked the place for its distinct architecture exhibiting a clash of styles and cultures: the city of exiles where people of all nationalities lived, it had a wooden mosque and the eighteenth-century Michael the Archangel Church where a few Decembrists had been married.

To help her prepare for Siberian winters, with temperatures below –40˚C, her friends sent warm clothes and a Primus stove from Moscow, for such essential consumer goods were hard to get elsewhere.

Within months at her new job, Nadezhda’s erudition won her respect, but it also created problems. In January 1954, she wrote a friend that she was “the smartest” in her department and likely would not be left in peace. Administration would soon begin making inquiries into her background: “It’s the usual thing.… I am afraid I will have to leave Chita … although there are few places on earth I like so much.”
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Constant stress, poor diet, and incessant smoking led to an ulcer, from which Nadezhda would suffer as long as she lived. Ironically, during a medical exam she was diagnosed with arteriosclerosis, with loss of memory one of the symptoms.

In 1953, her dissertation on old Germanic languages was “blocked” in the Institute of Linguistics in Moscow. Before her defense, one of the opponents informed the committee that Nadezhda “had been married to a scoundrel.”
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She wrote a second dissertation, on the functions of the Accusative Case in Anglo-Saxon Poetic Monuments. This defense took place in 1956, during the Khrushchev era, under the tutelage of the renowned scholar Victor Zhirmunsky, Mandelstam’s former classmate. Nadezhda’s degree, an equivalent of a doctorate, entitled her to a higher salary and made her comparatively well-off. She could finally repay her brother’s family and the families of friends who had supported her and Mandelstam in the 1930s.

Despite moving from place to place for two decades after Mandelstam’s death, Nadezhda maintained friendships. Her closest friend, Elena Arens, whom she joined in Kalinin before the war, was still in exile with her two boys. At the start of the war, they were dispatched to a village in Udmurtiya, in the Upper Volga—and this is where Nadezhda would visit them. Elena’s younger boy, Alyosha, associated her visits with food. They were starving in exile, and their mother’s salary as a schoolteacher of French only paid for a small room in a communal apartment. The family survived on cabbage
soup, eating it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Alyosha remembers playing chess and cards with Nadezhda (they always played for money). After losing a game, she would give him cash, with which he could buy ice-cream or pastries. “I still remember the taste.… Nadezhda Yakovlevna once brought us a huge piece of halva.… She never visited without gifts.”
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Nadezhda was affectionate with all her friends’ children; Alyosha remembers her eyes—“attentive, gentle, and remarkably intelligent.”
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During her vacation in 1955, Nadezhda met Akhmatova, then living in Moscow, and the two went for a stroll, discussing recent developments. Akhmatova had made many unsuccessful attempts to free her son. (Lev was finally freed the following year and, soon after, exonerated by the Supreme Soviet.) Nadezhda was pursuing Mandelstam’s posthumous rehabilitation. Akmatova suggested meeting Alexei Surkov, the new head of Writers’ Union who, unlike other functionaries, recognized Mandelstam’s talent.

The two writers belonged to different worlds: Surkov’s patriotic verse won him two Stalin Prizes for poetry; his songs were broadcast across the Soviet Union. But times were different: the Party was rehabilitating victims of Stalin’s regime. And so Nadezhda was welcomed at the Writers’ Union, the very organization that had helped destroy her husband. Surkov’s first question concerned Mandelstam’s legacy: “He could hardly believe his ears when I said I had preserved it all—a small part he could have understood, but
all
of it!”
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They discussed plans for Mandelstam’s rehabilitation and publishing his works. On the spur of the moment, Surkov promised to help Nadezhda obtain permission to live in Moscow. In addition, he phoned the Ministry of Education to say that the Writers’ Union was handling Mandelstam’s rehabilitation. This phone call had a magic effect: Nadezhda, who had unsuccessfully applied for jobs that year, was promptly received by the Minister himself. She was offered a position as acting department head of English at the university in Cheboksary, a port city on the Volga. “I set off … with the feeling that a new era had begun, and with a promise from Surkov that he would get a room for me in Moscow in a year’s
time and make arrangements for the publication of Mandelstam.”
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But seven years later, only a few of Mandelstam’s poems had been published in his homeland. And she would wait a decade to have the police reissue her Moscow residency permit.

Mandelstam’s rehabilitation took place in August of 1956, six months after Khrushchev’s secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress denouncing Stalin’s crimes. Nadezhda received a document clearing Mandelstam of the charges of “counter-revolutionary activities,” brought against him in 1938. However, the court did not absolve him of the charges made in 1934 for a poem critical of Stalin. Nadezhda’s appeal for a review of this earlier case was rejected. She blamed it on timing, coinciding as it did with the Hungarian uprising of 1956. But in fact, such partial rehabilitations were issued frequently in those days. Mandelstam received full rehabilitation only in October 1987, when Nadezhda could no longer bear witness.

When, in 1957, the Writers’ Union approved a proposal to publish Mandelstam’s works, a committee was appointed. Aside from Akhmatova, Nadezhda, and her brother, it included the influential writer Ilya Erenburg, who had been Nadezhda and Mandelstam’s friend for almost forty years. For several decades Mandelstam’s name had been taboo, but his resurrection was coming slowly. That year, Nadezhda read his name in a marginal literary publication in a report on the decision to publish his works. The first account of Mandelstam’s life appeared in 1961 when the prominent literary magazine
Novy Mir
published a chapter from Erenburg’s memoir. Three years later, a small collection of Mandelstam’s poems appeared in
Moskva
literary magazine, which inspired Nadezhda’s remark that Mandelstam “has at last returned to Moscow.”

Twenty years went by between the time of M.’s death and the moment when I was able to take from their hiding place all the poems I had managed to save and put them openly on the table (or, rather, the suitcase which served me as a table). During all those years I had to pretend to be
someone else, wearing, as it were, an iron mask. I could not tell a soul that I was only waiting secretly for the moment when I could again become myself and say openly what I had been waiting for, and what I had been keeping all these years.
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Mandelstam’s collection would take many more years to produce. A volume of his poetry was scheduled to appear in 1956, in the Poet’s Library, but publication was repeatedly postponed. Ten years later, the collection was still being delayed: it could not appear before or during the fortieth anniversary of the 1917 Revolution. Thinking she would not live to see Mandelstam’s poetry published in their homeland, Nadezhda remarked, “I am consoled only by the words of Akhmatova, who says that M. does not need Gutenberg’s invention.”
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In the late 1950s his poems had begun to circulate in samizdat, which came into being during the Thaw.

While Mandelstam was returning to Moscow, Nadezhda was still prohibited from living in the capital and had to continue her wanderings. The authorities refused to acknowledge that her apartment had been taken away, maintaining she had left Moscow of her own free will. The bureaucratic formula made her situation unsolvable. In 1958, she left her position in Cheboksary and settled in Tarusa, a town 140 kilometers south of Moscow, where, taking a break from teaching, she supported herself translating from English and French. Living close to Moscow allowed her to meet people who could press for Mandelstam’s publication.

At sixty-three, still homeless, she accepted her final teaching appointment in Pskov, an ancient city near the border with Estonia. By 1962, she did not have to hide that she was Mandelstam’s widow. Although her colleagues and students now appreciated her, she was too exhausted to keep working and would teach only two more years. In spring 1964, she wrote Elena Arens that she did not want to waste her final years teaching linguistics.
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She wanted to write a memoir and to devote herself entirely to the project.

Most gulag survivors Nadezhda had met were broken physically and emotionally and afraid to record their accounts; others confused names and events. Her retentive memory made her a valuable witness who could accurately tell what it was like to live under Stalin’s dictatorship. “In these later years I have managed to summon up both strength and fury; others—the majority—simply wasted away without saying anything.”
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But first, she had to rise above her fear of speaking up; she managed to overcome it in a dream:

For twenty or even thirty years I always listened intently as cars went by, straining my ears in case they stopped outside. At the beginning of the sixties, in Pskov, I dreamt I heard a truck come rattling into the courtyard, and then M.’s voice saying: “Get up, they’ve come for you this time.… I am no longer here.” And I answered him, still in my dream: “You are no longer here, so I do not care.” After that I turned over and went into a deep sleep without dreams.… By the time I had that dream, M.’s poetry was already printed. Now it is indestructible, and therefore I feel totally and absolutely free.… How many people will understand what joy it is to breathe freely just once before you die?
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With Mandelstam’s poems now more widely circulating in samizdat, Nadezhda was becoming a legend, since she preserved his verse. Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn were among the intellectuals who came to see her in Pskov. She read chapters from her memoir to her visitors, saying that her only wish was to finish her testimony.

Meanwhile, a respected and well-connected journalist, Frida Vigdorova, organized a group of influential writers to lobby the government for Nadezhda’s living permit in Moscow. In 1964, the new Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, gave his personal permission. The following year, writer Konstantin Simonov helped purchase a small cooperative apartment for her, paying one thousand rubles of his own money. Nadezhda returned the sum at the first opportunity.

Located in the outskirts, on the ground floor of a faceless building, her flat consisted of a single room and a kitchen. Her visitors thought the location undesirable, since her windows faced a noisy trolley track, but Nadezhda was delighted: she had a place of her own—for the first time since leaving her parents’ house at nineteen. As she wrote in
Hope Abandoned
, “I only hope to die in my own precious little cooperative apartment.”
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The remark also reflected her fear of being arrested; even in old age, she could not completely part with the fear that plagued her entire generation.

On May 1, 1965, Mandelstam’s first memorial literary evening was held at the Moscow University. This day was chosen because Nadezhda had met Mandelstam on May 1 and he was arrested in the morning of May 2. Erenburg, who had been present at their 1919 meeting, made a tribute to Nadezhda in his opening remarks: “She lived through all the difficult years with Mandelstam, went into exile with him, saved all his poems. I cannot imagine his life without her.” Learning that she was present, the audience gave her a standing ovation. Nadezhda responded by quoting Mandelstam, “‘I’m not accustomed yet to panegyrics.…’ Forget that I’m here. Thank you.”
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In the West, interest in Mandelstam had been on the rise since 1955, when his collection was published in New York in Russian. It included his pre-Revolutionary poetry and some of the later verse smuggled from the Soviet Union by travelers. Two émigré scholars, Gleb Struve and Boris Filippov, were the first to seek out and compile Mandelstam’s texts abroad. At this time, they did not have accurate versions, which Nadezhda alone could provide. As soon as they established contact with her through covert means (Soviet authorities prohibited communication with foreigners), Nadezhda sent them accurate texts. At long last, Mandelstam’s comprehensive edition was published in 1967, in three volumes. By this time, Nadezhda was actively helping several scholars in Europe and America to access Mandelstam’s texts and background information.