'To Be a Thorn in the Side of All'

The bottom of the year, the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, is a melancholy one for readers, a time to remember the loss of four essential writers. Charles Lamb died on Dec. 27, 1834; Miguel de Unamuno, Dec. 31, 1936; Osip Mandelstam, Dec. 27, 1938; Nadezhda Mandelstam, Dec. 29, 1980. Gifted and otherwise, writers die daily, but such a cluster prompts gratitude among those who still value the written word. 

As the new year approaches, it’s natural to contemplate the coming year. But let’s also honor the dead who formed us as readers, and as men and women. The truest act of thankful remembrance is to read their books again. Readers are the truest critics, whether or not they write a word. Nadezhda Mandelstam writes in Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward, 1974):

 

“The whole game of ‘posthumous rehabilitation’ is now over, and nobody wants to publish M. [her husband, Osip Mandelstam] in any case—so what does it matter? My concern is with a man long since dead, who for more than thirty years has been lying somewhere in a mass grave—though he still manages, without the aid of Gutenberg, to be a thorn in the side of all ‘true Soviet writers.’”