'The Future Spells Only Disaster'

Several weeks ago in a post I wrote about Robert Conquest I referred to “the essential books published in the twentieth century,” and listed some of the titles deserving a place in that category. Most, I wrote, “are not found in the traditionally defined literary categories; that is, novels, poetry, plays. They tend to be histories and memoirs, most related to communism.” A reader asked for specifics. Here’s a strictly personal list of books I have read, not intended to be definitive, and limited to one title per writer: 

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

 

Vasily Grossman: Life and Fate

 

Aleksander Wat: My Century

 

Vladimir Nabokov: Speak, Memory

 

Whitaker Chambers: Witness

Primo Levi: If This Is a Man (or Survival in Auschwitz)

Czesław Miłosz: The Captive Mind

Eugenia Ginzburg: Journey into the Whirlwind

 

Tadeusz Borowski: Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories

 Zbigniew Herbert: Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems

Osip Mandelstam: The Prose of Osip Mandelstam

 

Armando Valladares: Against All Hope

 

Varlam Shalamov: Kolyma Stories and Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories

 

Arthur Koestler: Darkness at Noon

 

Józef Czapski: Inhuman Land

 

I have not included volumes produced by historians, in favor of those from the category formerly known as belles-lettres. Most of these writers produced other books worth pursuing. Obviously, you would want to read Mandelstam’s poetry, his most essential work. Virtually everything Solzhenitsyn wrote is useful. There are totalitarian regimes – China, Vietnam – whose witnesses I have never read. Just to eliminate ambiguity, I’ll note that plenty of other “essential books” were written in the twentieth century, starting with one title – In Search of Lost Time. I’m dealing here with books written in response to a century of unprecedented barbarism. And the same abattoir remains in business in the twenty-first. Another reader made an excellent suggestion – Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which deals with neither Nazis nor communists.

 

In an exclusive category are the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam: Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974), both translated by Max Hayward. She was Osip’s widow. The poet died in one of Stalin’s camps on December 27, 1938. If I could mandate the reading of any writer on this makeshift list, it would be Nadezhda. Her voice is harsh, intelligent, defiant, uncompromising and occasionally even funny. Her first name in Russian means “hope,” an irony she often plays with. In a chapter titled “Major Forms” in Hope Abandoned she writes:

 

“In our conditions it is inadvisable to let one’s mind dwell on the future. The future spells only disaster and casts its shadow on the present; it poisons your life, grips you by the throat in paroxysms of terror, drains away your strength and your very life’s blood. It is fatal to start feeling afraid beforehand. . . . Even now, if I  were to start thinking about the future, I would sink into total lethargy—despite the fact the present is like paradise compared with the past. But, of course, on this large planet of ours ‘paradise’ is a relative concept. Some pampered people might take our paradise for nothing less than hell on earth. It all depends on what you compare it with and what you take as your base of comparison. Optimists like me start off the period before the Boss’s death [Stalin, 1953] until the Twentieth Congress [the much-touted “thaw” of 1956, following Khrushchev’s speech to the 20th Party Congress].”

 

Nadezhda Mandelstam died on this date, December 29, in 1980, age eighty-one.