'One of the Least Appealing Aspects of Our Species'

The twentieth century was a graduate-level education in irony. Our medical advances were extraordinary – antibiotics, insulin, the Salk and Sabin vaccines. Airplanes, television, computers, space exploration. And yet Guy Davenport was not being needlessly morbid when he characterized the last century as “the most miserable of ages since the Barbarians poured into Rome.” He means human nature. History suggests we have made little progress in that area, and in fact we have industrialized murder and oppression. We remain savages. 

Now for an irony-within-an-irony: the three greatest works of twentieth-century autobiography I have read are all byproducts of Soviet totalitarianism: Witness by Whittaker Chambers; Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov; and Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned by Nadezhda Mandelstam. Max Hayward translated the Mandelstam volumes, which started as a single untitled manuscript, in 1970 and 1974, respectively. Their publication in English was their first appearance in any language. The word for “hope” in Russian is nadezhda. Davenport’s childhood friend, the Russian scholar Clarence Brown, had met Nadezhda, widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam, and smuggled the manuscript out of the Soviet Union.

 

In 2006, Hope Against Hope was reissued by Modern Library, the novelist Francine Prose reviewed it for Harper’s and a reader has sent me a scan. Like those of us who had read the books three decades earlier, Prose was struck by the author’s voice, even in translation:

 

“[It] is hard to characterize, perhaps because it embraces so many apparent opposites—blunt and philosophical, amused and enraged, beyond surprise and astonished by what it has to relate. Mandelstam’s tone is alternately, even simultaneously, journalistic and metaphorical, witty and elegiac . . .”

 

Nadezhda was notoriously tough, cynical and defiant. 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 December 27, 1938. Nadezhda tells his story and hers. She died in 1980. Prose is a perceptive reader who reads on multiple levels:

 

“Mandelstam would never suggest that something in the Russian character enabled Stalin’s ascendancy. Rather, she notes the manner in which, under certain circumstances, certain humans behave. She observes that if a state keeps lying to, misleading, and mistreating its people, that if it keeps them perpetually terrified, uncertain, anxious, and off balance, their ability to resist will crumble and fall away until their leaders can pretty much do what they want.”

 

Prose’s understanding of the Mandelstams, totalitarianism and today’s world resemble my own:

 

“It would be absurd, even obscene, to compare the brutalities Nadezhda Mandelstam witnessed with the conditions under which we now enjoy our easy lives. But if one of the many possible functions of ‘realistic’ narrative literature, both fictional and historical, is to discover something unchanging in the human condition and therefore recurrent in history, Mandelstam’s book examines—again, with painstaking exactitude—one of the least appealing aspects of our species: namely, the compulsion on the part of a few to seize absolute power; the lengths to which they will go and the methods they will use to achieve this; and the more complex responses, from the majority, that allow, and even usher in, the resultant hell.”

[The phrase from Guy Davenport is taken from “The Man Without Contemporaries” in the Summer 1974 issue of The Hudson Review. He reviews the Nadezhda Mandelstam volumes; Brown’s biography of the poet, Mandelstam; and Mandelstam’s Selected Poems (trans. Brown and W.S. Merwin). The review is collected in Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981). The Mandelstams at that time were virtually unknown, in the Soviet Union and the West.]