'You Can Also Tell By Their Eyes'

“‘Usually,’ she explained, ‘they have a clear desk, since they don’t actually do any work, and when they say something, people do not argue with them. You can also tell by their eyes. They are dead behind. Lies do not bother them. It is very important to be able to spot them.’” 

Helpful tips for getting along in the twenty-first-century office? Essential skills for remaining employed and maintaining your sanity? Increasingly so. The speaker is Nadezhda Mandelstam, c. 1970. Peggy Troupin recounts their friendship in “Toward a Personal Memoir of Nadezhda Iakovlevna Mandel'shtam,” published in 2002 in The Russian Review. Troupin was a graduate student when she went in 1970 to Moscow, where the widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam appointed herself mentor to the young, naïve American. She briefed her on how to navigate the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union. Mandelstam advises her to “look out for the person in every office who was KGB.” The advice can be seamlessly adapted to life in today’s American universities.

 

I grew up thinking a university was an environment where a strict-constructionist understanding of the First Amendment could be assumed – the free exchange of ideas, and all that. Even fools had a perfect right to speak. My naïveté shames me. All of us say something stupid or offensive on occasion. That’s easy to forgive. What I was failing to appreciate was the human drive to dominate others. We all experience Stalinist impulses. Some of us stifle them before impulse turns into action. Others, less so. “A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding,” Eric Hoffer writes in The True Believer. “When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.” We have become a nation of busybodies, finks and scolds, without dignity, mutual respect and good manners. Discretion today is a job requirement. Troupin continues:

 

“It is interesting that since then I have spotted those types of eyes here, in my comings and goings, eyes like polished stones, with no human connection. Once you start looking for them, you find them everywhere, but there they were truly quite dangerous.”

 

In Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward, 1974), Mandelstam writes of the late thirties when she and her husband were under intense scrutiny: “It was quite enough to be surrounded by police spies taking notes on everything we said. Luckily, however, they were so illiterate that one’s words lost all meaning as rendered by them. They were yahoos, the whole lot of them.”

 

One of the yahoos reported to the police that Mandelstam had read his Stalin epigram to a group of friends in his Moscow apartment in 1938. He was arrested and, by year’s end, dead in a Siberian transit camp.