Hope Against Hope

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xcellent books are slippery things. They slip through the fingers of policemen who want to prevent them being pub­lished, and once they are in print, they slip out of the categories into which tidy-minded critics long to fix them. This book is, for the most part, a memoir; but it is much more. To say of it that it relates the nineteen years, from May i, 1919, to May 1, 1938, that Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam spent with her husband, the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, is to say, under the circumstances, a very great deal. But it is still not enough. For such a statement ignores many things that the curious reader will delight to find here. I shall try to name some of them.

The first is the author herself. "I played the role of 'poet's widow' with him," she once told me of her meeting with a visitor from the West. "It is a thing I can do when required." Indeed she could, but it was precisely that—a "role," something objectively different from herself, a kind of bedraggled plumage that she could, in case of need, snatch from the Victorian chiffonier and don in the nick of time to satisfy, with the addition of a few heart-rending phrases, some pil­grim's need to share the suffering and injustice of her life. When the coast was clear, the sweetly sad figure who had dispensed this and that fact of her husband's biography (even glancing at times, in her hammier moments, over her shoulder) would clear the general air with some spine-shattering Russian oath and revert to her true na­ture: a vinegary, Brechtian, steel-hard woman of great intelligence, limitless courage, no illusions, permanent convictions and a wild sense of the absurdity of life.

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