'No More Than Morbidly Suspicious'

“You show up here as if I were a job.” 

This is the famously acerbic Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980) on first meeting Clarence Brown, her entrée to readers in the West, in 1965. Brown had learned of her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, several years earlier from professors Roman Jakobson and Vsevolod Setchkarev at Harvard. Mandelstam, dead in a Gulag transit camp in 1938, was a phantom even to some scholars of Russian. Brown writes in “Memories of Nadezhda,” published in The Russian Review in 2002:

  

“In 1965, I went to Moscow, ostensibly to study the problems of translation. I could scarcely have alleged an intention to study the life of a poet who had officially never existed. (My translation of the nonexistent Mandel’shtam’s prose had by then appeared, so I had at least the credentials of a translator, presuming always that I had not invented the original.)”

 

Brown showed up at the door to Nadezhda’s apartment, seemingly unannounced, though she had learned through the grapevine he would visit. Brown had entered the warped funhouse mirror that was the Soviet Union.   

 

“As for the caution, Nadezhda Iakovlevna’s hard life of serial betrayal had provided her with every right to a terminal case of paranoia. That she was no more than morbidly suspicious and careful should be seen as a sign of mental health. . . . For me, it was a lesson in how Soviet citizens lived normal lives in the black night presided over by Stalin and his successors. I grew accustomed to the moments when, laying a finger to her lips, she would write out what she wanted to say on a slip of paper. When I’d read it, she would shred the paper and flush it down the toilet.”

 

Memories of such a world should be documented – surely, one of literature’s vital purposes. Eventually, Brown begins thinking like a Soviet citizen, assuming that every conversation is monitored by the KGB, though “what the poor eavesdropper could possibly make,” he writes, “of my persistent probing into the link between the meter of a line and its meaning is more than I can imagine.”

 

Brown recounts how he smuggled the manuscript of Hope Against Hope out of Mandelstam’s apartment to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and mailed it safely to the West in a diplomatic pouch, secure from search by the secret police. The memoir was untitled in Russian. Brown gave it a title rooted in the author’s name: Nadezhda is Russian for hope. The Oxford don Max Hayward handled the translation and Hope Against Hope was published in 1970. Its sequel, Hope Abandoned, also translated by Hayward, was published four years later.

 

The copy of the first volume I’ve owned for almost half a century, and it's ragged but intact. My Hope Abandoned is falling apart. The spine has broken in several places and what remains is less a book than a vertical stack of paper. These are among the twentieth century’s few sacred books. A final anecdote from Brown:

 

“The most imposing visitor whom I encountered across the kitchen table was Varlaam Shalamov, a man who had spent decades in the camps and, far from weakened by the experience, had grown into a human replica of some gnarled pine weathered on a Pacific palisade. His hands played over the books and manuscripts on the table like creatures from the prehistory of man, but eager to catch up. He was there several times a week. My speaking Russian struck him as miraculous: a stone with the power of articulate speech. That there were others like me he refused to believe.”

 

See my reviews here and here of Shalamov’s recently translated (by Donald Rayfield) story collections. Every reader owes much of his  education to the work of dedicated translators.