'Arrested Not at Home But in the Street'

“M. immediately decided that nobody was more important than Dante, and regarded him as an inseparable companion ever afterward—even twice taking him to prison with him. Anticipating his arrest—as I have already said, everybody we knew did this as a matter of course—M. obtained an edition of the Divine Comedy in small format and always had it with him in his pocket, just in case he was arrested not at home but in the street.” 

“M.” is Osip Mandelstam, as his widow Nadezhda refers to him in Hope Against Hope (trans. Max Hayward, 1970). Nadezhda tells us Osip did not read Dante until the nineteen-thirties, his final decade, when he taught himself Italian. The attraction was fierce and lasting. Pocketing Dante is a defining act of civilization, as reassuring as a St. Christopher medal. Mandelstam faced imminent arrest by Stalin’s thugs. What book would we carry while waiting for the goons to grab us? It’s a short list. Homer? King Lear? The Bible? Boswell? Something pocket-sized but dense with thought and feeling. Nadezhda continues:

 

“When M. went to Samatikha (the place where he was arrested the second time), he left his pocket Dante in Moscow and took another, rather more bulky edition. I do not know whether he managed to keep it until he reached the transit camp at Vtoraya Rechka, near Vladivostok, where he died. I somehow doubt it: in the camps under Yezhov and Stalin, nobody could give any thought to books.”

 

When Samuel Beckett died at age eighty-three, he had with him his boyhood copy of the Divine Comedy in Italian. September 14 is the seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death. In his essay “Conversation on Dante” (1934-35; trans. Clarence Brown and Robert Hughes, 1971), Mandelstam writes:

 

“A good education is a school of the most rapid associations: you grasp things on the wing, you are sensitive to allusions—this is Dante’s favorite form of praise.”