'My Every Thought Is About You'.

Notions at least as old as the Greeks, heroes and heroism are now discredited. Flaws and failings overshadow putative accomplishments. We’re too good for heroes. We see through their pretensions. Diagnosing moral taints is easier than admiring and striving to emulate courage and rectitude. Heroes reproach us by their example, so we reduce them to our level.

Some of us hold on to our heroes. They remind us that human nature is not universally detestable, that virtue can prevail in the most difficult and compromised of souls and circumstances. Dr. Johnson, for one. Anton Chekhov, Louis Armstrong and Whittaker Chambers. Make your own list. Near the top of mine is Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam, née Khazina, who was born in Saratov in western Russia on Oct. 30, 1899.

In 1922, the annus mirabilis of modernism, she married the poet Osip Mandelstam. It is one of history’s grand and tragic love affairs. After her husband’s arrest in 1938, she never saw him again. Nadezhda (hope in Russian) lived a life of internal exile and was forbidden to return to Moscow until 1964. She earned a meager living teaching and translating while writing two of the twentieth century’s essential books, Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974). Both were first published in the West in English, translated by Max Hayward.

Nadezhda was tough, argumentative, brilliant and bellicose. She took no one’s shit, not even the KGB’s. And yet she could write in Chapter 40 of Hope Abandoned:

“Now and then you run into a kind person, someone who suddenly appears when you least expect it, like a messenger out of the blue telling you all is not lost, to hold your head high and never despair. But the important thing is not to let him pass you by and to say the right word so that he reveals himself: otherwise you will go your separate ways and the message will fail to reach you.”

The final two pages of Hope Abandoned are the letter Nadezhda wrote to Osip in October 1938 when he was already in a Siberian transit camp, two months before his death. One sure gauge of emotional dysfunction is the ability to read this letter without tears. She writes:

“My every thought is about you. My every tear and every smile is for you. I bless every day and every hour of our bitter life together, my sweetheart, my companion, my blind guide in life.”

Nadezhda Mandelstam died on this date, Dec. 29, in 1980 and was buried in Kuntsevo Cemetery in Moscow, where Varlam Shalamov, Anatoly Rybakov, Ramón Mercader and Kim Philby are also buried.