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Home , Anna Akhmatova, Demyan Bedny, Eduard Bagritsky, Lev Gumilyov, Marietta Shaginyan, Nadezhda Mandelstam

Mandelstam, Nadezhda (Emma Carson)

Figure 1: A photo of Nadezhda taken in 1925. Figure 2: A photo of Nadezhda (year unknown). Alternate spellings: Mandel'stam, Nadezhda; Mandelstam, Nadyezhda; Mandelshtam, Nadezhda; Mandel'shtam, Nadezhda; Наде́жда Я́ ковлевна Мандельшта́м. Born: 30 October 1899. Ethnicity: Russian. Class background: Middle-class. Field of activity: .

Spouse: . Children: None. Died: 29 December 1980. Brief biography (born Nadezhda Khazina) was a Russian writer, educator and the fourth child (Links to an external site.) of Vera Yakovlevnak (Links to an external site.)and Yakov Arkadevich Khazin (Links to an external site.). After completing gymnasium prior to the October Revolution, Mandelstam studied to become an artist at 's (Links to an external site.) studio in Kiev, where she became a close friend of . Much of Mandelstam's early adulthood was spent at Junk Shop: a popular night club among literary and artistic circles. On 1 May 1919, this is where Nadezhda met her future husband, the poet, Osip Mandelstam. Their relationship began almost immediately, albeit they were separated for over a year during the Civil War. In March 1921, Osip returned to Kiev and a year later they

1 married and moved to . Through Osip's involvement in Russian literary circles, Mandelstam became associated with , Lidiya Ginzburg, , Nikolai Punin, (Links to an external site.) and , among others. Akhmatova, Ginzburg and Pasternak were particularly intimate friends. In 1934 Osip was arrested after writing a satirical poem about Stalin. (Links to an external site.)Nikolai Yezhov (Links to an external site.)and were among the involved in Osip’s arrest and interrogating Osip and Nadezhda. In part due to intervention by and Pasternak, the severity of Osip's sentence was lessened; he was exiled for three years to . After his term of exile, Osip and Nadezhda returned to Moscow. On 1 May 1938, Osip was arrested again and sent to a transit camp in , where he died in December. (Links to an external site.) After Osip’s second arrest, Mandelstam lived a mostly nomadic existence. To avoid persecution, she moved around several provincial cities. She also received her diploma and began teaching English in 1939. It wasn't until 1965 that Mandelstam settled in Moscow again and began writing her memoirs. Mandelstam died in 1980 from heart problems and was buried in the Kuntsevo Cemetery. (Links to an external site.)

Biographical analysis Through Nadezhda Mandelstam resides a common narrative among writers during the period. She initially met the Revolution with vigour, but over the years became disillusioned and fearful of the . Mandelstam’s work at Ekster’s studio involved painting sets for theatre productions, many of which were overtly pro-Bolshevik. In her memoir Hope Abandoned, Mandelstam considers this period of her life to be embarrassing (Links to an external site.), as her support of the waned after the Civil War. Much of Mandelstam’s disillusionment stemmed from the early hardships she and her husband faced in the 1920s. Osip struggled to publish his poetry and in 1923, his name was removed from the list of contributors to all Russian literary magazines. Andrew Wachtel and Ilya Vinitsky consider how, “The contemporary writer was expected to keep ‘in step’ with the cosmic revolutionary transformations,” (205). Unlike other prolific writers from the period, Osip did not embrace (Links to an external site.) and continued to be an avid Acmeist poet. (Links to an external site.)The refusal to conform meant Osip and other writers like him increasingly found it harder to work. It also made them targets of the NKVD (Links to an external site.). Osip’s arrest in 1934 and subsequent exile with Nadezhda after writing the “” showed that although the poem was not published, the Mandelstams were regarded with suspicion. As Osip only read the poem to ten close friends (including Akhmatova and Pasternak), it was certain he was betrayed. Even before the , trust among friends became difficult to maintain, as any small act against the regime could be reported and have severe consequences. The importance of blat in the Soviet Union and personal connections, in elevating a person’s position or undermining them, are also clear throughout Nadezhda Mandelstam’s life. Connections to people such as Bukharin, who was a friend of the Mandelstams, ensured Osip was able to make money doing translating jobs while he was unable to publish poetry in the 1920s and early 1930s. Osip’s connection to Bukharin and Pasternak also saved his and Nadezhda’s lives in 1934, after his first arrest. Interestingly, it was in May 1938 when Osip was arrested for the second time and sent to the transit camp, only two months after Bukharin was executed. His former connection to Bukharin may have led to this arrest; it is unlikely Stalin would have forgotten Bukharin’s defence of Osip after being slandered so veraciously. Nadezhda’s own luck at avoiding incarceration, despite her association with Osip, Babel, Bukharin, (Links to an external site.) and Ginzburg, among other ill-fated victims of the purges, is also significant. It appears to be sheer chance and her resolve to continue moving, rather than staying in one place, which kept her alive in the end. As she did not publish any works until the 1970s, Mandelstam’s prominence in the field of literature only extended to being Osip’s widow. Hence, her only crime against the Soviet Union prior to the 1970s was association rather than action.

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Nonetheless, Mandelstam’s association with Osip did present difficulties in terms of employment and education. Obtaining a job through the (Links to an external site.) was impossible, as her husband was a well-known exile and furthermore, a Jewish person. When Nadezhda completed her dissertation under Viktor Zhirmunsky (Links to an external site.) at the Russian Academy of Sciences (Links to an external site.), despite his support and that of other linguists in the academy, it was ultimately rejected by (Links to an external site.) and Olga Akhmanova. Akhmanova justified this rejection because of anti-Semitic policies and because Nadezhda was, “…married to a scoundrel,” (Hope Abandoned, 386). After Yagoda recited the “Stalin Epigram” to him, Bukharin also cut his association with the Mandelstams entirely and (Links to an external site.), a former friend of the Mandelstams, also refused to intervene after Osip’s arrest. In The Centuries Surround Me with Fire: Osip Mandelstam, Mandelstam recalls how with the exception of the few individuals who supported her (i.e. Pasternak, Akhmatova and Ehrenburg), she was “…among enemies.” Despite there being close associations and intimate friendships between writers that were fostered in the early years of the Revolution, through Nadezhda’s hardships, it is clear how quickly these associations could be snuffed after an individual fell out of the regime’s favour. A final point to make on Mandelstam’s life and career was that her prominence, beyond being associated with Osip, only came in the 1970s when she published her memoirs Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974). Although Stalin died almost twenty years before and restrictions on publishing had reduced significantly, Mandelstam still only published her memoirs and Osip’s poetry abroad. Mandelstam accepted the unlikelihood of her memoirs or Osip's poems being published in until after her death. Even the only recorded interview of Mandelstam for the documentary The Centuries Surround Me with Fire: Osip Mandelstam (1981) was, by her request, not allowed to be released until after her death. Mandelstam’s paranoia at speaking out against the Soviet Union was still apparent; in her final years, she embodied the legacy of a generation of Russian writers, considered to be suffering from a, “…persecution mania [they] still haven’t recovered from,” (Hope Against Hope, 34). Mandelstam’s memoirs are testament to the fear she and other writers faced during the period and a veritable voice that was only granted to the survivors years after the worst of the purges were over.

Figure 3: Mandelstam during the filming of The Centuries Surround Me with Fire: Osip Mandelstam in 1973.

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Bibliography:

Primary Sources: Akhmatova, Anna. My Half-Century. Trans. Ronald Meyer. Northwestern: University Press, 1977. Austin, Anthony. “ Bury Nadezhda Mandelstam.” The New York Times. 3 January, 1981. Accessed 20 August, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/03/world/russians-bury- nadezhda-mandelstam.html (Links to an external site.). Diamanda, Frank. The Centuries Surround Me with Fire: Osip Mandelstam. Web. Netherlands: VARA, 1981. Accessed 20 August 2016.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5ARWfrzOQk (Links to an external site.) (Links to an

external site.) Gerstein, Emma. Moscow Memoirs. Trans. John Crowfoot. London: The Harvill Press, 2004. Mandelstam, Nadezhda. Hope Against Hope. Translated by . New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1970. Mandelstam, Nadezhda. Hope Abandoned. Translated by Max Hayward. New York: Antheneum Publishers, 1974.

Secondary Sources: Holmgren, Beth. "Nadezhda Mandelstam.” In Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time: On Lidiia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelstam, 97-168. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. James, Clive. “Nadezhda Mandelstam.” In Cultural Amnesia, 414-419. New York: W.W Norton & Company, 2007. Slonim, Marc. Soviet . New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Baines, Jennifer. Mandelstam: The Later Poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Brown, Deming. “Literature re-examines the past.” In Soviet Russian Literature since Stalin, 253- 284. London: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Baines, Jennifer. Mandelstam: The Later Poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Brown, Clarence. Introduction to Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam, v-xiii. Translated by Max Hayward. New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1970. Wachtel, Andrew B. and Vinitsky,Ilya. “The Future as Present.” In Russian Literature, 204-232. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. NB – All hyperlinked articles from WordPress are my own and are based on information I have found in the above sources.

Additional Information on Nadezhda Mandelstam: Connections with her and other prominent Russian figures (mostly found in her memoirs):

Osip Mandelstam – Nadezhda and Osip were married from 1922 until 1938.

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Aleksandra Ekster – Nadezhda worked in Ekster’s studio in the mid to late 1910s.

Ilya Ehrenburg – Nadezhda and Ehrenburge were close friends and colleagues. They both worked at Aleksandr Ekster’s studio in the mid-late 1910s. Adelina Adalis – Mandelstam and Adalis were aquaintances through Osip. Mandelstam criticised Adalis in her memoirs for her outright denouncement of her former partner after he was arrested and believed her own vows to protect her and Osip from the secret police were empty. Anna Akhmatova – Mandelstam and Akhmatova were close friends. They lived together at various points in Mandelstam’s life. Lidiya Ginzburg – Close friends. Boris Pasternak – Close friends. After Osip was arrested the second time, he was the only person from literary circles to visit her for a long time after.

Nikolai Punin – Friends through Akhmatova. Nikolai Bukharin – Friends through Bukharin. Bukharin helped lessen the severity of Osip’s first arrest. Konstantin Vaginov (Links to an external site.) – Friend of the Mandelstams. Eduard Bagritsky (Links to an external site.) – Acquaintance of Osip and Nadezhda. Vladimir Admoni (Links to an external site.) – One of the linguists who supported Mandelstam when she wrote her dissertation. Viktor Zhirmunsky (Links to an external site.) – Sponsored Mandelstam’s dissertation in the Institute of Linguistics at the Russian Academy of Sciences (Links to an external site.). Viktor Vinogradov (Links to an external site.) – Rejected Mandelstam’s dissertation.

Olga Akhmanova – Rejected Mandelstam’s dissertation. Mikhail Steblin-Kamenski – Supported Mandelstam when she wrote her dissertation. Marietta Shaginyan (Links to an external site.) – Friends. Nikolai Yezhov – Involved in the arrest and interrogation of Osip. He also interrogated Nadezhda. Genrikh Yagoda – Involved in the arrest and interrogation of Osip Mandelstam. He recited Osip’s “Stalin Epigram,” which led to Bukharin abandoning his former support for the Mandelstams. Isaac Babel – Acquaintances. Demyan Bedny – Friends until Osip’s arrest in 1934. Lev Gumilyov – Acquaintances. Mikhail Lozinsky (Links to an external site.) – Friends. Offered the Mandelstams financial support after Osip’s pension was cut in 1937. Yakov Agranov (Links to an external site.) – One of Agranov’s mistresses (her name was not specified) was a close neighbour of Mandelstam. Osip refused to let them get too close out of paranoia she would denounce them. – Chukovskaya criticised Mandelstam regarding the content of her memoirs. Mandelstam said of her in an interview, “Nobody can be right, but her,” (The Centuries Surround Me With Fire: Osip Mandelstam). Veniamin Kaverin (Links to an external site.) – Rival of Mandelstam’s in her later years. Wrote her what she described as a “horrible” letter regarding the content of her memoirs (The Centuries Surround Me with Fire: Osip Mandelstam). Alexander Shcherbakov (Links to an external site.) - After Osip’s pension was cut in 1937, she visited him in the hope he could restore it. When she told him of Osip’s services to Russian

5 literature, Shcherbakov replied, “What sort of services to Russian literature can there be if Mandelstam has been exiled for his works?” (Hope Against Hope, 140) Brodsky (Links to an external site.) – Brodsky was mentored by Akhmatova in the 1960s, so he met Mandelstam through her. Both Akhmatova and Mandelstam considered him to be an embodiment of the positive future of Russian literature. Maria Petrovykh (Links to an external site.) – Acquainted with Nadezhda, through her friendship with Akhmatova and Osip. According to Akhmatova, Osip fell in love with Petrovykh and wrote a poem for her she called, “The best love poem of the twentieth century” (My Half-Century, 90). Which poem it was or whether Petrovykh reciprocated his advances was ambiguous. Alexei Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Links to an external site.) – Acquainted with the Mandelstams. At the beginning of Hope Against Hope, Mandelstam recalls how Osip slapped him in the face over an argument and Tolstoy threatened to “…make sure M. was never published again, that he would have him expelled from Moscow” (11). A few days later, Osip was arrested, so Mandelstam speculates at the possibility he may have been the one to denounce him, although discourages her readers from speculating themselves. For this reason, she also omits the names of all ten people who had heard the “Stalin Epigram.” Emma Gerstein (Links to an external site.) – Lived with the Mandelstams at different points and was a close friend of Nadezhda and Akhmatova. She wrote Moscow Memoirs, which provided substantial information about her life with Osip and Nadezhda. Other information: During the Civil War, anti-Semitism, perpetuated by the Bolsheviks, affected the lives of Mandelstam and her family. They were evicted twice from their homes in Kiev between 1919 and1921 by the and experienced other disturbances as well, including raids. Nadezhda’s father attempted to sue the Cheka for their disturbances, but failed. Intimate details about Nadezhda’s and Osip’s sex life were also outlined in Hope Abandoned and The Centuries Surround Me with Fire: Osip Mandelstam, which showed how the and life under the Soviet Union led to a change in attitudes towards sex and marriage. Mandelstam recounts in her interview how on, “The first day [she and Osip met, they] went together to bed,” and how this was normal at the time, for the Russian Revolution brought on, “…the beginning of the Sexual Revolution.” She considered in Hope Abandoned how she, “…did not understand the difference between a husband and a lover” and thought the destruction of marriage as an institution was one of the great “achievement[s]” of the Revolution (136). Sexual relationships, especially among the middle class were becoming less serious, especially in the 1920s, when abortion was decriminalised and divorce easier to obtain than before. Despite being happily married and Nadezhda’s resolution to not marry again after Osip’s death, he was unfaithful to her at least once in their marriage. Olga Vaksel, a friend of the Mandelstams, was found to be one of his mistresses, which caused some tension in their relationship. After breaking a plate during a fight and giving Osip an ultimatum between her and Vaksel, Osip was “beside himself with joy,” (Hope Abandoned, 137) believing Mandelstam had finally shown some maturity in their relationship. Petrovykh was also, according to Akhmatova, the subject of one of his love poems, but whether there is truth in this statement, or his affection extended beyond the poem he wrote, is unknown. On the other side, Mandelstam described how Osip would not allow her to leave home without him, which could be an indication of both possessiveness and hypocrisy, but also a fear she would become a victim of the secret police. After one of their neighbours was found to be a mistress of Yakov Agranov, their suspicion of those living around them only grew. Agranov’s mistress asked Nadezhda to spend time with her on several occasions, which Osip objected to. Whether it was entirely due to paranoia surrounding the purges and cruelty Osip experienced, or due to underlying mental illnesses, Osip and Nadezhda often spent time in sanatoriums throughout their married life. This was how they met Emma Gerstein in October 1928, while they stayed at the sanatorium of the Scholars’ Aid Commission in Uzkoye. During his interrogations, which often involved physical torture and threats the officers would also harm Nadezhda, Osip managed to smuggle a razor into his cell and tried to kill himself by slitting his wrists. While on the way to Voronezh in 1934, Osip attempted suicide (Links to an external site.)again by jumping

6 out of a hospital window. Nadezhda was blamed by the nurses for not stopping him. For Osip to be at the brink of suicide at least twice, the extent to which the Soviet Union left many of its people in an utter state of hopelessness is apparent. Nadezhda also recalls suggesting to Osip multiple times that they should commit suicide together and avoid persecution and further suffering. The fact Nadezhda chose to live after Osip’s death is all the more important when her own thoughts of suicide are apparent. She clearly saw a purpose in her choice to continue living, especially with the role she assigned herself of preserving Osip’s poetry and surviving long enough so she could tell his story. Without her efforts, memorising many of his poems word for word, hiding manuscripts in various locations and smuggling them overseas, much of his work may have been destroyed by Soviet authorities and lost forever. Throughout Mandelstam’s life, she travelled to several parts of Russia, including populous industrial areas like Moscow and Petrograd, and remote areas including Cherdyn, Voronezh, Maly Yaroslavets, Sturnino, Kalinin, Muinak, Dzambul, , Ulianovsk, Chita, Cheboksary, Vereya, and Pskov. By visiting so many placed during Stalin’s rule and after as well, Mandelstam was able to see how life under the USSR affected several different people, from all social classes, in different parts of Russia. She recalled how in Moscow, for example, people would put pillows over the phones, out of fear people were listening in. While staying at a hospital in Cherdyn, she found the nurses would eat their patient’s scraps, as there wasn’t enough food and they were starving. The landlord of a house Mandelstam and Osip stayed at in Voronezh during their exile would frequently insult them and grilled a live mouse in their electric toaster, as he believed they should not have toasters as they were “bourgeois” (Hope Against Hope, 132). Not only do Mandelstam’s memoirs provide great insight into how the Soviet Union affected her life and brought a reign of terror on fellow writers, but also on how it affected the lives of Russian citizens as a whole, from various class backgrounds and fields of work. On researching Nadezhda Mandelstam: Overall, there was a substantial amount of sources on Nadezhda Mandelstam. AGoogle search provided a Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadezhda_Mandelstam) which contained an outline of her life, in addition to other sources to look for in the References list. Here, ’s highly useful biographical essays in Cultural Amnesia(2007) were listed.Cultural Amnesia could be found in the Barr Smith Library. Other websites also provided basic information (such as http://spartacus-educational.com/RUSkhazina.htm), although did not often cite scholarly sources or were more focused on her memoirs than on her life. Both the Barr Smith Library and The State Library had English of Mandelstam’s memoirs Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974), in addition to other works written by her and her husband, Osip. The State Library had Osip’s memoir, Journey to Armenia (1933), which contained insight into their married lives from his perspective. YouTube also had an interview of Mandelstam from the 1970s in the documentary The Centuries Surround Me with Fire: Osip Mandelstam (link in the bibliography above).

The Barr Smith Library and State Library also had secondary sources, including monographs on Russian literature in the 20th century and the lives of writers and fugitives in Soviet Russia. Many of these monographs, including Soviet Russian Literature (1977) and The Cambridge of Russian Literature (1989) contained information on Mandelstam or mentioned her better known husband. There were no books in either library that were focused entirely on Nadezhda Mandelstam. However, one biography on Osip, Mandelstam (1973), was found in the Barr Smith Library and Beth Holmgren's Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time (1993) was available from the Barr Smith and State libraries. Both were useful, although Mandelstam did not contain any information about Nadezhda outside of her relationship with Osip. Holmgren’s book was particularly helpful as it not only provided comprehensive details about Mandelstam’s life, but also had a large reference list of English and Russian sources Holmgren sourced to write it. The Barr Smith Library catalogue also had plenty of sources. In particular, reviews of Mandelstam’s memoirs and monographs on Russian literature were available. They provided some information on her life, but were more focused on analysing her works.

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Trove, The New York Times and The Times also had some articles on Mandelstam including obituaries and details on her burial, albeit nothing comprehensive. Similarly, The Great Soviet Encyclopedia and The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System had no information on Mandelstam, although the Encyclopedia had a brief entry on Osip Mandelstam. Sources on Mandelstam were therefore, not difficult to find through the Barr Smith Library and State Library in particular and helped create a comprehensive narrative and analysis of her life and works. Nonetheless, some difficulties were encountered when researching Nadezhda Mandelstam. In regards to Mandelstam’s memoirs, while they provided comprehensive details about her married life and insight on life in Soviet Russia, they neglected much of her life outside of marriage. She provides some important details about her early life and the suffering she experienced after her husband’s death, but even these passages are constantly referring back to Osip. Understandably, Mandelstam's memoirs were written for her to deal with the grief of losing her husband and were a way for her to immortalise him in a society that had tried to destroy his life’s work. In Hope Abandoned, Mandelstam insists writing about her husband was her, “main task”, once the threat of persecution was lessened. Given her memoirs were also written decades after most of the events Mandelstam described, the reliability of her writing is questionable, as much of what she remembered would have changed over the years. Although her analysis of Russian society would be true to her opinion, it would also be heavily influenced by her negative experiences; undoubtedly the death of her husband as a result of Soviet purges would have a phenomenal influence on her perception of and the Soviet Union. I have taken her biased opinion into account when researching and have also considered other sources, particularly secondary sources and scholarly reviews of her work. Another issue (or rather, an observation) was that a lot of sources, including The Great Soviet Encyclopedia and some monographs on Russian literature provided plenty of information on Osip, but little to no information on Nadezhda. This isn't surprising as Osip Mandelstam is better known in the Russian literary canon and Nadezhda is generally remembered instead as the wife who wrote about him. Through reading on Osip however, I was able to find information on his travels and experiences that undoubtedly would have affected Nadezhda. For example, Soviet Russian Literature detailed Osip’s exile and attempted suicide in 1934. Incomplete memoirs Mandelstam wrote on her childhood were only available in Russian, which proved difficult. I attempted to translate these as best as I could through Google Translate, but this could only do so much. Thankfully, Beth Holmgren’s book contained some translations of Mandelstam's writing. There was also the issue of reliability in regards to secondary sources. Conflicting dates on the marriage of Nadezhda and Osip was a major example, with some sources saying they married in 1921 while others said they married in 1922. Mandelstam's memoirs were able to confirm the date, however. Many websites, including Wikipedia and others also had provisional knowledge and were not always backed up by scholarly sources. Overall, Wikipedia contained citations for most of its facts and the majority were from reliable sources with confirmed knowledge. A blogger on Wordpress (https://tigerloaf.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/nadezhda-mandelstams- last-letter-to-osip-mandelstam/) also had a letter from Nadezhda to Osip as one of its entries. I attempted to find out where the blogger sourced this letter from, but was unsuccessful, so I am unsure of whether it is a legitimate letter and am regarding it with caution.

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