Regime of Timelessness: on the Centennial of the Meeting of Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam

Home , Alexander Men, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Varlam Shalamov

STATE OF AFFAIRS

Regime of Timelessness: On the Centennial of the Meeting of Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam

Constantin Sigov Translated by Inga Leonova

Historian Timothy Snyder recently 1968, when her astounding memoir This essay is based posed a question: Which key lessons was published in the West. The book on a paper delivered from twentieth-century resistance to told about the Leninist and Stalinist at the conference “Uomini liberi: La tyranny will be most useful in the near terror that befell the generation of her ‘cultura del samizdat’ future?1 To understand the experience husband, the great poet Osip Mandel- risponde all’oggi,” of resisting terror and overcoming stam. Varlam Shalamov wrote about October 12–15, 2018, fear, we should not only read Hannah the book: in Seriate, Italia. Arendt, but also Nadezhda Mandels- tam. The history of the Russian in- telligentsia, Russian literature, The world discovered Nadezhda Russian public life has acquired Mandelstam soon after the events of a new person of great stature.

1 Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin Random House, 2017).

Nadezhda Mandels- tam, Yalta, 1926.

Osip Mandelstam, Moscow, 1923.

The Wheel 19 | Fall 2019 81 The essence, as it turns out, is not supervisors for everything. The con- 2 Varlam Shalamov quoted in Nade- that it is the widow of Mandels- formity called ‘moral unity’ or ‘the zhda Mandelstam, tam who has faithfully kept and highest social discipline.’ The desire Собрание сочинений transmitted to us the poet’s- leg to denounce others before they de- (Yekaterinburg: acy and his secret thoughts, and nounce you; everyone’s ambition to Гонзо, 2014), vol. 1, who has told us the tragic truth become some kind of supervisor, to 42–3. about his terrible fate. No, this is feel connected to the state power. The 3 Richard Pevear, not the main thing at all, although desire to control the will and life of “On the Memoirs of of course those tasks have been the others. And above all—cowardice, Nadezhda Mandel- achieved. It is not the partner of cowardice, cowardice.”4 As Shalamov stam,” The Hudson Mandelstam who is entering our noted, Mandelstam’s text did more Review 24.3 (Autumn 1971): 427–40. public life, but a stern judge of than simply diagnose the problem: the time, a woman who has per- “The power of resistance is also great, 4 Nadezhda Man- formed and is performing a moral and this power of resistance, spiritual delstam, Собрание feat of extraordinary difficulty… and emotional, is noticeable on every сочинений (Yekater- 5 inburg: Гонзо, 2014), She has created a document which page.” vol. 1, 44. surpasses in its internal honesty everything I know in the Russian A New Antigone 5 Varlam Shalamov language. Its value is enormous.2 quoted in ibid. Mandelstam examines the epidem- 6 Nadezhda Mandel- Shalamov’s valuation is echoed by ic development of the virus she calls stam, Hope Against Richard Pevear in an essay that jux- “the GPU’s despising of people” Hope: A Memoir, taposes the unusual structure of the (гэпэушным презрением к людям).6 trans. Max Hay- memoir with Homer’s Iliad.3 In many places, her analysis of “lea- ward (New York: derism” (вождизм) recalls Hannah Atheneum, 1970), 266. This quotation Readers of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Arendt’s 1951 book The Origins of To- has been retranslated memoir discovered that she had per- talitarianism. Mandelstam elaborates to be more faithful formed a masterful anthropological on the history of this disease across to the original. GPU analysis of the Communist experi- three generations of Soviet society. was the abbreviation ment. She noted certain Soviet per- Her book is distinguished by the rare of the secret police, a predecessor of sonal characteristics that still stub- nerve of her testimony to the Soviet NKVD and the KGB. bornly refuse to become extinct: “The regime’s destruction of her husband —IL desire to ask permission from one’s Osip, the silenced voice of an entire

Osip Mandelstam’s prison photos, 1934.

82 epoch.7 Paul Celan, the great trans- lator of Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, called his Tristia the best poetry book of the twentieth century. Recently the contemporary poet and critic To- mas Venclova has confirmed that this praise is not exaggerated.

Father Alexander Schmemann has ob- served the tragic essence of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s witness:

Against the background of total silence and indifference it is not just a great poet who perishes, but a poet whose poetry, and this is N. moriae was precisely the kind of state Nadezhda Mandels- Y.’s [Nadezhda Yakovlevna Man- abuse of power against which the tam’s funeral service, delstam’s] thesis, presents the poet’s widow conducted her lonely January 1, 1981. On the left are Father last “antidote” to the demonism lifelong struggle. She memorized not Alexander Men and which has overcome Russia. The only Osip Mandelstam’s poems, but Deacon Alexander. task of N. Y. is not only to defend also his prose and essays, in order to Photo: Igor Palmin. her husband’s memory, to tell his save them from destruction. story and to preserve his literary 7 See Sergey Aver- heritage, but also to demonstrate Nadezhda Mandelstam became the intsev, “Судьба the entire depth of this tragedy, voice of the millions of voiceless and и весть Осипа the non-accidental meaning of rightless Soviet widows. She wrote, Мандельштама,” in the death of Mandelstam, and “Millions of unrequited Antigones Osip Mandelstam, the very manner of this death. In kept to their corners, filled out forms, Сочинения (Moscow: Художественная this context the perception of this went to work, and did not dare to bury литература, 1990), death by the “writers” and “liter- or even to mourn their dead. A crying vol. 1, 5–64. ature” assumes a key meaning. woman would have been immedi- Whether or not N. Y. is right in ately fired and starved to death. To 8 Alexander her grandiose scheme is a differ- slowly starve to death is much harder Schmemann to 9 Olga Andreyeva ent question, but it seems to me than to be executed.” People said to Carlisle, 1973, in that it is impossible to “diminish” her face, “Nad’ka barely stays on her “Посмотрим, кто her arguments in any manner. feet. . . . Oh well, Antigones don’t have кого переупрямит In a way her personal “attacks” days off.”10 . . .”: Надежда elevate those she attacks, brings Яковлевна Мандельштам them up to the level of tragedy Mandelstam lived day and night in в письмах, whose understanding can alone, expectation of being arrested, until воспоминаниях, using N. Y.’s expression, bring her eventual death in Moscow at the свидетельствах, ed. “catharsis.”8 end of 1980. She was even arrested P. M. Nerler (Mos- after death, albeit briefly. On Decem- cow: АСТ, 2015), 433. Osip Mandelstam was killed in the ber 31, 1980, the KGB and the police Gulag in the winter of 1938. The place came to her one-bedroom apartment 9 Nadezhda Man- in the Far East where his body was in Cheremushki where her friends delstam, Собрание thrown into a nameless pit is forgot- were keeping vigil around her casket сочинений (Yekater- ten. Everything the poet created was inburg: Гонзо, 2014), and forcibly removed her body to the vol. 2, 165. also destined for death and oblivion morgue. They did, however, allow for by Stalin’s regime. This damnatio me- her church funeral service and burial 10 Ibid., 164.

The Wheel 19 | Fall 2019 83 by Fathers Alexander Men and Alex- The third period began in the be- ander Borisov together with her true ginning of the fifties, when I re- friends. A memorial sign reading “To ceived the right to say my name, the blessed memory of Osip Emiliev- to explain who I am and what I ich Mandelstam” was installed near think. Almost immediately, both her grave. parts of my life, the first and the third, connected. . . . Life became The Centennial of the Meeting of whole and unified. It became Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam even more whole when I wrote in my first book about what had Osip first met his future wife in Kyiv, happened to us.11 the city of her childhood and youth, on May 1, 1919. Nadia Khazina was a Father Alexander Men helped Nade- sickly child, and between 1905 to 1914 zhda Mandelstam find words for the her parents took her on various trips witness of her faith: “If I didn’t be- to Switzerland, Germany, France, and lieve in a future reunion, I wouldn’t Italy for treatment. Thanks to these have been able to live those dozens of trips and her studies in the best Kyiv lonely years. I laugh at myself, I don’t schools, Nadezhda learned French, dare to believe, but faith doesn’t leave English, and German. As a young me. There will be a meeting, and there woman, she entered the circle of Kyiv is no separation. This has been prom- avant-garde artists such as Kazimir ised, and this is my faith.”12 Malevich and Alexandra Exter. Osip Mandelstam was arrested on the Despite this happy pre-war child- night of May 1, 1938. Nadezhda re- hood, Nadezha called her meeting called: “At night, during lovemaking, with Osip Mandelstam the real begin- I caught myself thinking, what if they ning of her life: enter now and interrupt us? This is what happened on May 1, 1938, leav- My life begins with meeting ing behind a particular trace, the com- Mandelstam. The first period is bination of two memories.”13 our life together. I call the second period life after the grave, During their life together, Osip and and that is how it feels to me, Nadezhda Mandelstam celebrated not in eternity but in the inde- and often remembered the day of scribable world of deathly ter- their first meeting. For example, in ror in which I spent fifteen years 1926 Osip wrote, “Nadiushok, on May (1938–1953), and altogether twenty 1 we will again be in Kyiv together, 11 Ibid., 381. years of continuous waiting (1938– and will go to that Dnepr hill.”14 May 12 Ibid., 274. 1958). . . . I have been haunted by 1, 2019 marked the centennial of that the feeling of a breach between first meeting of Osip and Nadezhda. 13 Nadezhda the first and the second peri- Let us hope it stimulates new atten- Mandelstam, Об tion to their books. Indeed, much in Ахматовой (Mos- ods—two disconnected pieces, cow: Три квадрата, one full of meanings and events, those books sounds as though it had 2008), 111. another devoid of everything, been written today. The issue is not even continuity, duration. . . . only the return of neo-Stalinists and 14 Osip Mandelstam, The only reality in those years their fellow travelers. The issue is the Собрание сочинений, vol. 4: Letters (Mos- were the meetings with [Anna] catastrophic results of the lack of at- cow: Арт-бизнес- Akhmatova, but these were only tention to the Soviet anthropological центр, 1999), 68. brief tête-à-têtes. catastrophe. Today, once again, the

84 political consequences of the nihilistic 1934 meant that his extermination © 2019 The Wheel. destruction of culture are threatening was temporarily put on hold. His wife May be distributed for the minority of “sane” readers. was permitted to accompany her hus- noncommercial use. www.wheeljournal.com band to his place of exile. She soon The world knows and continues to experienced the ominous effect of this read Hannah Arendt and Simone “isolation” at the Moscow railway Weil. But many who read those great station. Nadezhda Mandelstam was women of the twentieth century have accompanied to the station by Anna not yet read the memoirs of Nadezh- Akhmatova and various family mem- da Mandelstam. Yet she is the great bers. She entered the railway car in witness of what was happening in the which, in the farthest compartment, “bloodlands” described by Timothy three guards were guarding Osip. His Snyder. Long before the appearance brother and Nadezhda’s brother were of Snyder’s historical study Blood- standing outside the window. “M. lands, she wrote in her memoirs of tried to open the window, but a guard “our bloodstained land.”15 In 1928, stopped him: ‘It’s against the rules.’ . Osip Mandelstam gave his last book . . M. stayed by the window, desper- of poetry to one of the Bolshevik lead- ate for contact with the two men on ers, Nikolai Bukharin, in an attempt to the other side, but no sound could prevent innocent people from being penetrate the glass. Our ears were shot. The inscription read, “Every line powerless to hear, and the meaning here is against what you are going to of their gestures hard to interpret. A do.”16 barrier had been raised before us and the world outside. It was still a trans- The roots of the current discussion parent one, made of glass, but it was about “post-truth” lie in a histori- already impenetrable.”18 cal situation described by Nadezhda Mandelstam: “It is easy enough to On the train, under guard, the Man- fabricate documents; people signed delstams crossed the fatal line of civil the most incredible statements un- death, losing all connection with their der torture, and nothing would have previous life, “due to our knowledge been easier than to put alarming ideas that we had all set out on a path of in- about police spies and provocateurs escapable doom.” This doom cut them into the head of an old woman. . . . But off from their closest friends, from the how will the historians ever get to the very essence of their life, which Na- truth if every minute grain of it is bur- dezhda Mandelstam unexpectedly 15 Nadezhda ied under huge layers of monstrous referred to as “Europe”: “It would be Mandelstam, Hope falsehoods? By this I mean not just the the end of everything—friends, rel- Against Hope, 178. See Timothy Snyder, prejudices and misconceptions of any atives, my mother, Europe. . . . I say Bloodlands: Europe age, but deliberate and premeditated ‘Europe’ advisedly, because in this Between Hitler and lies.”17 ‘new’ state I had entered there was Stalin (New York: nothing of the European complex of Basic Books, 2010). For her “minute grain” of truth, this thought, feelings and ideas by which 16 Nadezhda Mandel- new Antigone crossed the line of de- I had lived hitherto. We were now in a stam, Hope Against spair and fear. world of different concepts, different Hope, 113. ways of measuring and reckoning.”19 17 Farewell Europe? Ibid., 24. Nadezhda Mandelstam describes the 18 Ibid., 41. “Isolate but retain”: the government’s “shift of consciousness” of people instructions for the poet’s exile in whose radical experience of doom 19 Ibid., 41–42.

The Wheel 19 | Fall 2019 85 © 2019 The Wheel. pushes them from the realm of wor- had juxtaposed Europe and Russia, by May be distributed for ry and fear to complete indifference. such thinkers as Berdyaev, Bulgakov, noncommercial use. What kind of resistance can be ex- and Zenkovsky. www.wheeljournal.com pected of people who have found themselves in this land of non-being? The Future and the Regime of “In the face of doom, even fear disap- Timelessness pears. Fear is a gleam of hope, a will to live, a self-assertion. It is a deeply In Nadezhda Mandelstam’s writ- European feeling, nurtured on self-re- ing, the train becomes the symbol of spect, the sense of one’s own worth, an inexorable and irresistible force, rights, needs, and desires. A man dragging along the human masses clings to what is his, and fears to lose with irrational inevitability, as if to it. Fear and hope are bound up with say, “there is no return.” The idea of each other. Losing hope, we lose fear historical determinism, with its mech- as well—there is nothing to be afraid anistic sense of inevitable necessity, for.”20 deprives people of free will and judg- ment. This cynical way of looking at When a person loses everything in- history insists that, everywhere and cluding despair, an oppressive, phys- always, everything is ruled by vio- ically perceived indifference “like lence and despotism. People repeat a heavy weight” piles up. The key newspaper clichés to each other, in- feature of this stupor is a complete sisting that “now everything is differ- loss of the sense of time: “I also felt ent,” as if that justifies it all. that time, as such, had come to an end—there was only an interlude Nadezhda Mandelstam compares the before the inescapable swallowed power of this ideology with hypno- us with our ‘Europe’ and our hand- sis: “We [were really] persuaded that ful of last thoughts and feelings.”21 we had entered a new era, and that we had no choice but to submit to The nihilistic suppression of “Europe- historical inevitability.”22 Even those an feelings” condemned its victims to who had only heard about the terror imprisonment in a zone condemned accepted the inevitability of violence, to the destruction of “Europe.” This and propagated this virus of doom zone could be of any size, be it train or like a psychological plague. Mandel- concentration camp, city or country. stam describes in detail the circles of Reckoning with this experience today hell in which those who had aban- can inform the question of whether a doned the last vestiges of “European particular country belongs to Europe feelings” walked, pulling others along or not. This question is no longer one with them. The inhabitants of those of geography. It is a question of mem- Dantean circles, servants of the state ory, in a particular place, of the “Eu- and people of culture, hastened to re- rope” that once lived there but was ject the old world of humanity and to exiled and destroyed. Moreover, the surrender to a regime that suffered no train to the east which, by the decision alternatives. They were ready to sacri- of Kremlin, transported the poet and fice anything to the idol of this regime: his wife away under guard is a sym- friends, family, everything they had 20 Ibid, 42. bolically significant detail of Stalin’s lived by. era. Nadezhda Mandelstam’s descrip- 21 Ibid. tion of the train’s deadly course marks This regime of timelessness required 22 Ibid, 44. a conclusion to earlier discussions that absolute obedience to the current

86 moment. It totally rejected the rights of the past and usurped total control over the future. Yet this blind spot contains its vulnerability. “All the murderers, provocateurs and in- formers had one feature in common: it never occurred to them that their victims might one day rise up again and speak. They also imagined that time had stopped—this, indeed, was the chief symptom of the sickness.”23

Mandelstam returns to this thought in her essay “My Last Testament.” “There is a wonderful law: the killer always underestimates the power of the victim, considering the destroyed and murdered ‘a fistful of camp Nadezhda Mandels- tam, late 1970s. Pho- dust,’ a trembling shadow of Babi to: G. B. Pinkhasov. Yar [a ravine near Kyiv where Nazi squads killed at least 34,000 Jews in contains an antidote, leading to lib- 1941]. . . . Who would have believed eration and to the reconsideration of that they would rise and speak?”24 newly relevant ideas: Europe’s new beginning after World War II was based on the experience 1. Resistance to the criminal re- of the camps and encounters with gime, in both large and small witnesses of the “shadows” who rose ways, focuses the attention on and spoke. Nadezhda Mandelstam particular acts of rejecting evil or survived Stalin’s timelessness and particular acts of complicity. Not condemned it. The publication in the everything disappears without a West of the poems and prose of Osip, trace in the “camp ashes.” preserved by her, symbolized the overcoming of Stalinism’s power. 2. Rejecting the axiom of the ab- sence of choice gives the lie to Nadezda Mandelstam’s memoirs the myth of the single track and also push back against the new ver- the overpowering train carrying sions of the regime of timelessness everyone in the same direction. that arose in the post-Stalin eras. The One does have a choice to leave dictatorship of historical determin- the train of the dictatorship. ism erases the boundaries between law and lawlessness, between good 3. Resistance to determinism and to and evil, between truth and lie, be- the usurping of the future forms tween crimes of the regime and the the basis of Nadezhda Mandel- complicity of taxpayers. By denying stam’s philosophy of freedom, 23 Ibid, 48. the illusion of choice, the govern- embodied in the entire corpus of 24 ment takes away any sense of guilt her texts. This is a unique syn- Nadezhda thesis of particular individuals’ Mandlestam, Мое and squashes the impulse to resist. завещание и другие Relapse into a sense of timelessness real experiences of resistance, of эссе (New York: Sil- is like a paralyzing poison. Nadezh- their internal freedom, and of the ver Age Publishing, da Mandelstam’s way of thinking practice of anti-totalitarian prin- 1982), 24.

The Wheel 19 | Fall 2019 87 © 2019 The Wheel. ciples. It is their life’s work, the tic depths. Enclosure within the May be distributed for work described by Osip Mandel- epoch also makes it impossible noncommercial use. stam: to understand the work’s future www.wheeljournal.com life in subsequent centuries; this To free life from jail, life appears as a kind of para- and begin a new absolute, dox. Works break through the the mass of knotted days boundaries of their own time, 25 Osip Mandels- tam, “The Age,” must be linked by means of a they live in centuries, that is, in trans. A. S. Kline flute.25 great time and frequently (with (2000), https://www. great works, always) their lives poetryintranslation. 4. “The fan of times” (to use a are more intense and fuller than com/PITBR/Russian/ phrase of Osip Mandelstam) are their lives within their own Mandelstam.php. opens the true text of culture, en- time.”27 26 Osip Mandelstam, livened by “the breathing of all “The Word and Cul- the ages.”26 Just as Simone Weil ‘s 5. The henchmen of the regime of ture”, trans. Sydney The Iliad, or The Poem of Force an- timelessness close their eyes to Monass, Arion, new series 2.4 (1975): 532. alyzed the totalitarian experience this “great time” and do not see of the twentieth century, so does how it weighs them on its scales. 27 Mikhail M. Bakh- Nadezhda Mandelstam’s “Odys- Neither Leonid Brezhnev’s nor tin, “Response to a sey.” She leads the reader from Vladimir Putin’s “timeless” re- Question from the “Soviet time” to the “great time” gime has wanted to hear the con- Novy Mir Editorial Staff,” in Mikhail described by her contemporary versations of its contemporaries M. Bakhtin, Speech Mikhail Bakhtin: “Trying to un- in the acoustics of the great time Genres and Other Late derstand and explain a work of culture. The century of the Essays, ed. Caryl Em- solely in terms of the conditions Mandelstams appears as useless erson and Michael of its epoch alone, solely in terms to them as Archimedes’ fulcrum Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: of the conditions of the most im- capable of moving the world. . . . University of Texas mediate time, will never enable Press, 1986), 4. us to penetrate into its seman- But what if everything is different?

Constantin Sigov teaches the history of theological and philo- sophical ideas at the Mohyla Academy State University in Kyiv and directs its Center of European Humanities Research. He is the founding director of the research and publishing association Dukh i Litera (Spirit and Letter) and the editor-in-chief of its journal. He is also the vice president of the international aca- demic and intellectual association European Forum for Ukraine. Sigov has lectured at prominent universities in Oxford, Stan- ford, Geneva, Rome, Berlin, and Paris.