'Our House Had Been Stricken by the Plague'

Good metaphors survive for good reasons. They work. They are useful and quickly understood. Even when turned into clichés by overuse, they communicate. One tries to avoid such overworked warhorses (see?), especially in writing, but they leave our lips spontaneously in conversation. One ameliorating tactic is to ironize them, exaggerate and make fun of their familiarity. Of course, we all know people whose speech is strictly used goods, second-hand wares (see?).

Take plague. The OED tells us the word is rooted in classical Latin, plāga, meaning “stroke, wound.” In post-classical Latin it morphed into “affliction, illness, plague, especially one interpreted as divine punishment.” Already it was metaphorical. It first shows up in English in the fourteenth century, in the Wycliffe Bible, in several senses. By the late fifteenth century it had arrived in the most common modern sense: “Any infectious disease which spreads rapidly and has a high mortality rate; an epidemic of such a disease.” In the following century it was applied to the disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis – bubonic plague. Today, all of these meanings and more coexist. Consider this passage from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope (trans. Max Hayward, 1970):

“He was still a boy, but so alive with ideas that wherever he appeared in those years he always caused a stir. People sensed the dynamic strength fermenting in him and knew that he was doomed. Now our house had been stricken by the plague and become a death trap for anyone prone to infection.”

Context: In late 1933, Osip Mandelstam had written his famous “Stalin Epigram” or “Stalin Ode.” Mandelstam had read the poem several times at private gatherings. Someone ratted him out and he was arrested and exiled to Cherdyn, a thousand miles northeast of Moscow. There he attempted suicide. In the last sentence quoted above, Mandelstam’s future widow means Osip is politically contaminated. To associate with him could prove fatal. Nadezhda goes on to describe their situation in 1937, the year before his second, final and fatal arrest:

“Men would not come near our plague-stricken house, but sent their wives instead—women were less exposed. Even in 1937 most women were arrested because of their husbands, not on their own account. No wonder, then, that men were more cautious than women.”