Pick worthy heroes.
On October 31, 1899, Nadezhda Mandelstam was born, thus I wanted to take a moment to wish happy birthday to a woman who never ceases to inspire, amaze and humble me with her extraordinary courage in the face of certain death and destruction. I’ve read and re-read her books countless times since I first discovered them when I was about 23, and each time, I am more impressed. Her courage was almost mythical. You can seek guidance from Taylor Swift or whatever; I’d rather stick with a woman who, in her determination to serve the truth, refused to be intimidated by Stalin’s gangster government. #aimhigh
Nadia was the wife of martyred poet Osip Mandelstam, and when he was taken from her, she spent the next 40 years memorizing and saving his poems for posterity. (This, at a time, when being caught with his poems, could have resulted in her immediate execution. “Immediate” execution if she was very lucky. Instead, she probably would have been tortured to death. Stalin’s jailers were not known for their humanity, as they beat and raped and killed wives in front of their husbands, for example. There’s a reason many people consider Hitler a rank amateur next to Stalin…)
She lived in Stalin’s Soviet Union, a country strangled by fear and murder, and she never lost her contempt for brutality, and her respect for humanity. She saw many of her friends and colleagues murdered, and she continued to believe that poetry was worth fighting for. ( Does that surprise you? When Osip Mandelstam went to his final death camp, he was greeted by average Russian citizens who, gratefully, quoted his poems to him, as they tried to care for him, during his final days. I find that more moving than I can say. “I am easy in bones,” Anna Akhmatova famously said, “we know how durable poetry is.”)
Nadezhda Mandelstam, wrote Hope Against Hope: A Memoir and Hope Abandoned, two fearless, furious, heartbreaking and beautiful memoirs that can be said to have help set the stage for the truth of Stalin’s horrors against his people to come out, and by extension, for the destruction of the Soviet Union. I know; in 2014 we overuse the adjective “fearless.” Every mascara or toothpaste or TV starlet is “fearless,” but no: Nadezhda Mandelstam was truly fearless.
When her husband was arrested, for the final time, she saved his (illegal) poetry and essays, and spent the next 40 years memorizing them, till the time was right and they could be put on paper and shared with the world. A natural aristocrat, she endured decades of miserable, exhausting poverty to keep the flame of her husband’s genius alive…even as she still did not know what had happened to the man she loved. Osip Mandelstam was killed. Killed for a poem he wrote, a poem mocking Stalin. He was beaten, tortured, starved and finally buried in a mass grave. Nadezhda never saw him again, but it’s due to her determination, and her struggle that people today, around the world, savor Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, as Stalin, that pock-marked, cowardly bastard, lies on the dust-heap of history.
She wrote her first memoir when she was 70 years-old…and fearless. She wrote the truth, knowing that she could still be arrested and killed…but what did she have left to lose anymore? The man she adored was dead, dead on a heap of corpses. The truth came raging out, forcing Russians to confront the past, and themselves.
In Soviet Russia, in the savage years of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, as Stalin systematically destroyed entire families and poisoned his country with corrosive fear, she held her to on her beliefs, and did not give in. She lost many dear friends to Stalin’s death camps. She grit her teeth and re-committed herself to the truth. And, in her own way, she “won.” She lived a life she could be proud of. She lived a life worthy of the beautiful writing she fought for, poetry that people still (passionately) read and need and recognize themselves in.
Life is hard. Pick the heroes who will sustain you when you’re fighting to build the life you need. Happy birthday, Nadezhda!
