'Some of Us Survived'

What does it mean to be provincial? From the provinces, yes, not from the cultural centers, usually cities. In lexicographic terms, the word is most often used depreciatively. It’s a put-down and reeks of snobbery. To be provincial is to be a hick, rube or hayseed – unsophisticated, unpolished, unfamiliar with city ways. Among elites, it amounts to a death sentence, at least in social terms. Here is Guy Davenport, writing in 1974 in The Hudson Review: 

“The remainder of the Twentieth Century (most miserable of ages since the Barbarians poured into Rome) might profitably be spent putting together the human achievements which tyranny has kept  behind walls. Surely these are the most provincial of times.”

 

I remember reading this review/essay as a sort of rallying cry, a call to action. He writes of our self-imposed provinciality. For this provincial reader, Davenport had unveiled an alternative reality, one long obscured by Soviet totalitarianism and its flunkies in the West. Little had escaped the New Barbarians but in the nineteen-sixties, cracks were forming in the Iron Curtain. Thanks to the courage of such intrepid scholars as Clarence Brown, the wonders of writers like Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam were being revealed. Davenport’s essay, “The Man Without Contemporaries,” reviews Brown’s translation of The Prose of Osip Mandelstam (1965), Max Hayward’s translations of Nadezhda’s Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974), and Brown’s critical biography of the poet, Mandelstam (1973). Also reviewed is Brown and W.S. Merwin’s translation of Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, published in 1973 – a wonderful year to be a reader turning twenty-one.

 

Nadezhda Mandelstam was an acidic truth-teller, no respecter of the despotism that had murdered her husband. In Hope Abandoned she writes:

 

“We all belonged to the same category marked down for absolute destruction. The astonishing thing is not that so many of us went to concentration camps or died there, but that some of us survived. Caution did not help. Only chance could save you.”

 

Osip  had been arrested in May 1938, sentenced to five years in correction camps for “counter-revolutionary activities” three months later, and died in a transit camp near Vladivostok on this date, December 27, in 1938.

 

In a letter to Hugh Kenner dated November 6, 1970, Davenport writes: “One of the best books of our time is Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope (NY publisher’s title, the Russian is the laconic Memoirs). . . . My friend Clarence Brown got the MS out of Moskva, and wrote the introduction.”

This is the time of year when readers and critics predictably assemble lists like “The Best Books of 2022.” Among new books, there’s a handful I would recommend to readers but I won’t waste your time with that. In the last twelve months I have reread or consulted each of the Mandelstam and Davenport titles cited here. Those are the books I suggest you read in 2023.       

 

[Davenport’s review/essay is collected in The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981). The letter can be found in Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner (ed. Edward M. Burns, 2018).]