Mandelstam, Nadezhda, and Max Hayward. Hope against Hope a Menoir. Harmondworth: Penguin Books, 1979.
Hope against hope is a memoir written by Nadezha Mandelstam as a testament to her life in Stalin’s Russia .The book centres around her life from 1919 to 1938, from Russia’s Civil War to the Great Purge and how it affected her life as well as the life of her husband, Osif Mandelstam, who as a poet, is often described as the “supreme verbal artist of the century.” Her aim in this memoir is clear as day from the very first pages: to expose the in-outs of daily life under an oppressive government while providing a first hand account of the precarious state of life she endured while protecting her husband’s life’s work. The memoir is intended to give people to whom Stalin’s Russia might be a distant past from an obsolete future, a knock-back into the very possible, unnerving taste of what could have been and still could be if we are not vigilant of sacrificing basic liberty in the name of advancement and security.
The memoir is a recollection of events that transpired from the moment she met Osif, till his inevitable death in a transit camp after being accused of anti-soviet views for the second time. Another arc to the story shows itself in the devotion that Nadezhda possesses towards the protection of her husband’s legacy through his poems. As she progresses with her compelling story, we can clearly see the deep cracks in society left by totalitarianism as it progresses into one that not only helps, but also supports heinous crimes against liberty and humanity. We see the Mandelstams struggle against a system that is rigged. The centre of the struggle starts from Otis’s “sixteen-line death sentence,” a satirical poem about Stalin that eventually leads to their apartment being raided as part of a “night operation” and the subsequent first arrest that Otis is subjected to. After interrogation, he is released, but exiled along with his wife to Cherdyn. Over the three years, he proceeded to write poems that he entrusted to Nadezhda, often into her memory instead of actually holding the written copy since she “didn’t trust paper.” However, Otis would soon be arrested at the dawn of the Great Purge and would sentenced to a labour camp, but was fated to die before he even got there.
Nadeezhda Mandelstam’s memoir is nothing less than a firsthand account of experience with the eerily similar dystopian tones we find in most recollections of the tyrannical government that Stalin had headed. It gives us a glimpse into the precarious lives that even members of the literary elite had to life through in order to merely survive and through that we can begin to understand the continuous terror and unease of a whole nation. To begin to dissect the historical evidence that this memoir provides and its legitimacy, we must first be able to assess whether we can trust the events and situations we learn about and the limitations of using this one single document as a historical source.
On the point of the legitimacy of facts described in the book, many events or situations described are firsthand accounts of conversations and experiences. So in a lot of these cases, the only two eyewitnesses to the conversations would be Nadezhda and the person she was conversing with, which leads us to take most of her accounts at face value. An example would be the accusation she made at Sergei Rudakov and Lina Rudakov for stealing Osif’s manuscripts and goes on to give a couple of accounts of how the Mandelstams had mistrusted Rudakov from the beginning. After he was killed, the manuscripts were left with the widow who had claimed she had lost it when she was arrested and that “everything was confiscated.”(274) Nadezdha herself tells us that she and Anna Akhmatova had “inferred” from stolen letters from Sergei to Lina that the manuscripts were stolen deliberately with the purpose of plagiarism although she also says that she hasn’t been able to find “the truth of the matter (274). It is evident that her anger at not being able acquire the manuscripts was directed primarily at the Rudakovs and therefore there is a chance that that anger or bleed from emotions may have had part in the way that Rudakovs' characters are portrayed.
One other issue that one might take with the accuracy of the information conveyed to us is the reliability of memory for Nadezdha. Firstly, we must acknowledge that the atmosphere of Soviet Russia was one of unease, with paranoia seeping through every nook and cranny. It would then be safe to assume that under these circumstances fear, stress and anxiety would have played a role in catalyzing emotional accounts into inaccuracies of perception. She does acknowledge that “each minute grain of sand is covered under huge layers of monstrous falsehood”(42) when it comes to the day to day life under the oppressive regime. So it is also possible that a lot of her accounts may have had misleading information based on the multitudes of falsehood that society as a whole was partaking in.
Beyond that, we are given a narrow scope to examine the state of Soviet Russia as a whole to be able to grasp a full overview over what life would have been like under a state of constant unrest. Because of the personal nature of these accounts, one may find it rather difficult to relate it to accounts from factory or agricultural labourers at the time since the literary elite still evidently had an upper hand over them in terms of safety and security( although by a rather narrow margin)
Even if we regard all of these fault lines, we still have to acknowledge that the memoir has it’s saving grace with corroboration from several of the people we see intertwined with the Mandelstams’ lives like Anna Akhmatova or Bukharim. Also, how necessary is it that every encounter be corroborated with testimony? A lot of history is derived from personal stories of circumstances such as the one that the Mandelstams had to face. Through her recollection, Nadezdha is able to walk us through what it must have felt like to be constantly watched, one misstep in a conversation would have landed you in a labor camp, condemned to die with almost absolute certainty. In a lot of cases, no offence was required at all, Nadezdha had stated how a common saying amongst the secret police was “give us the man and we will make a case.”(55)
It would be very difficult for someone who has not lived through the terror of systematic oppression where death would seem to be the easy escape to actually place themselves in the very real position we observe from Hope against Hope. These recollections do help us bridge the link to a time that seems so unfamiliar now but eerily still plausible. Personal stories are usually more difficult to assess but here we must take the truths of the memoir more seriously than we would in any other situation since the Stalinist Soviet Union was notoriously deceptive and manipulative when it came to conveying information and incredibly effective at rewriting events in history through deliberate and hyper-effective propaganda. Therefore, these memoirs might be the few independent links we have to help us empathize with the plight of civilians. This leads me to believe that even if we are faced with certain inaccuracies, we must take the memoir as the whole to be a reliable document we can add to the pages to history.