Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope

Readings:

• Hope Against Hope, “Obituary by Joseph Brodsky,” “Introduction by Clarence Brown,” and Chs. 1–17 (pp. v-xxv, 3–70)
• Excerpts from The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks:
  • “Introduction” (pp. 9–11),
  • “The Wolf” (38–39),
  • “Meteorite” (157)

Discussion Questions:

1. Odes to Stalin were a standard form of Soviet “literature.” What are the essential themes of M’s genre-exploding ode? How does N’s portrayal of M illuminate why he wrote and dared to share this poem, and why Stalin is—and must be—a real poet’s mortal enemy?
2. Why is Brodski described (p. 6) as a “wooden sculpture of some savage tribe”—an idol? How does this relate to N’s remark about the difficulty of serving two gods (p. 36)? What are these two gods? What do they require of those who serve them? How does M’s poem ‘The Wolf’ speak to these questions?
3. How did M’s interrogation and exile affect him? How did it affect N? What does N mean when she speaks of going “through the looking glass” and of “the end of everything,” of “the world” and of “change”? Do A’s lines (pp. 30 and 69) shed light on N’s experience?
4. How do N’s reflections in Ch. 18 (‘Professional Sickness’) illuminate the process of poetic composition, the nature of poetry, and the poet’s need to compose poetry? How does ‘Meteorite’ represent and speak to that need? Why does the love of poetry doom people to death or exile (p. 73; cf. p. 15, on Lev Gumilev)?

Readings:

• Hope Against Hope, Chs.18–35 (pp. 71–163)
• Excerpts from The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks:
  • ‘I was a child in the world of the powerful’ (pp. 35)
  • ‘The flat is quiet as paper’ (pp. 71–72)
• Excerpts from Poems from the Stray Dog Café:
• • • ‘The Word’
    • Image of Anna Akhmatova
    • ‘And all day long’
    • ‘Why is this age worse’
    • ‘Lot’s Wife’

Discussion Questions:

1. N writes that one’s character “is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him.” (p. 93; cf. p. 119 on fate). What are the moral and metaphysical implications of N’s claim? What is squeezed out of M? What is squeezed out of others, e.g., Bliumkin, Bukharin, the Moscow psychiatrist (discussed on p. 126)?
2. What does it mean to have a home or to be homeless (cf. Ch. 30, ‘The Disappointed Landlord’)? In what literal and metaphorical ways were N, M, and Soviet “citizens” in general homeless? How do ‘I was a child in the world of the powerful’ and ‘The flat is quiet as paper’ shed light on this question? (‘I was a child in the world of the powerful’ is about Leningrad, where M grew up.)
3. N writes that their three years in Voronezh were the happiest they had ever known (p. 143). How is this possible? What was the secret of their happiness? Is the story about the “jumpers” (143-144) relevant to understanding M and this happiness, perhaps by way of contrast? Is it relevant to understanding the basic error of Soviet Communism?
4. How does Ch. 35 (‘The Path to Destruction’) illuminate M’s decision to write the Stalin poem? How did this atypically straightforward poem nevertheless flow “logically from the whole of his life and work”? How is N’s understanding of “loneliness” (cf. p. 160) reflected in A’s Cassandra-like poems ‘’And all day long’ (1917), ‘Why is this age worse’ (1919), and ‘Lot’s Wife’ (1924)?

Readings:

• Hope Against Hope, Chs.  36–51 (pp. 164–246)
• Excerpts from The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks:
  • ‘Untruth’ (pp. 41–42),
  • ‘I’ve many years to live’ (pp. 53–54)

Discussion Questions:

1. What was the relationship of Communism, a “religion—or science, as it was modestly called by its adepts,” to Christianity? What did this new “science” or “creed” get wrong? What were its internal contradictions? Why did artists and intellectuals capitulate to Communism? Do you detect echoes in our time of what N describes in Ch. 36 (‘Capitulation’)?
2. N discusses in Chs. 38 to 43 M’s understanding of his poetic art, his process of composition, and his understanding of what it means to be a poet. What are the main themes and paradoxes of M’s life and work as a poet? What does truth mean to him, and how did he understand his task as a poet (cf. 195, 203, ‘Untruth,’ and ‘I’ve many years to live’)? What explains the prophetic character of his poetry—a trait he shared with A?
3. How do the oppositions of past and future, earth and sky, West and East, “Fear and the Muse,” figure in the frozen present of A’s poem ‘Voronezh’ (p. 220)? What themes characteristic of Mandelstam’s own work are reflected in this poem? Why did M call the room where he and A sat in their Moscow apartment a “Bessarabian Carriage”? Does this remark illuminate A’s ‘Voronezh’?
4. How does Ch. 49 (‘The Reader of One Book’) refute the common notion that poetry is merely an aesthetic endeavor? What are the defining intellectual, moral, and spiritual characteristics of a real poet? What role does reading play in the poet’s formation? Why is Dante’s Divine Comedy M’s “one book”? Do N’s reflections in this chapter illuminate her religious vocabulary in speaking of A and M—e.g., “sanctuary” and “communion” (pp. 219, 231)?
5. N writes: “All we had was the past, and we lived off it as best we could” (p. 243). What was M’s literary and artistic diet (cf. 51, ‘The Bookcase’), and what do his tastes tell us about him? Why did M have no use for German philosophy, including Marx and Engels, and for verse translations?

Readings:

• Hope Against Hope, Chs. 52–66 (pp. 246–316)
• Excerpts from The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks:
  • ‘My earphones’ (pp. 124),
  • ‘Red Square’ (pp. 125)
• “Morning of Acmeism,” Osip Mandelstam

Discussion Questions:

1. How did M’s understanding of history, and of the relationship between culture and civilization, differ from that of the State and Party (see Chs. 52-55)? How is his view of these matters reflected in the poems ‘My earphones’ and ‘Red Square’? (On the meaning of the sharply curved earth in ‘Red Square,’ consider Ch. 56, ‘Morning of Acmeism,’ and the effects of gravity on spacetime curvature in the light of Stalin’s rhetorical question “How much does the Soviet Union weigh?”)
2. “A man sits and carves a piece of wood, and out of it comes God” (p. 264). How does this statement capture M’s understanding, as reflected in Ch. 56 (‘The Earth and its Concerns’) and ‘Morning of Acmeism,’ of poetry as building, the consolations of the word, and the fullness of existence? How does his elevation of the earth fundamentally oppose Soviet doctrine and today’s “progressive” ideology?
3. What forces threatened to consign M’s work to oblivion (cf. 57, ‘Archive and Voice’)? What means did N employ to save his poetry and prose from that fate? What did she learn, and how did she benefit, in memorizing his words? What varieties of memory— e.g., personal, ethical, metaphysical—were involved in that act of internalization?
4. 60 to 66 document the responses of different kinds of people to the reign of terror that started in 1937. Who are the unsung heroes of these pages, who the all-too-human compromisers, and who the real villains? Does this part of Hope Against Hope shed light on why N wrote this memoir? How does her sober and moderate voice as a chronicler of these awful times—her literary form—suit the content of her communication?

Readings:

• Hope Against Hope, Chs. 67–83 (pp. 317–401)
• Excerpts from The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks:
  • ‘Having deprived me’ (p. 133),
  • ‘The Goldfinch’ (p. 143)
  • ‘The Cage’ (p. 144)
  • ‘They, not you nor I’ (p. 145),
  • ‘The Beggar Woman’ (p. 154)
  • ‘If our enemies captured me’ (pp. 168–169)
  • ‘To Natasha Shtempel’ (p. 185)

Discussion Questions:

1. In 71 (‘Rebirth’), N surprisingly predicts “a complete resurgence of humane values.” Why does she think these values disappeared, and what is the basis for her (qualified) faith in a restored intelligentsia worthy of the name? What is the intelligentsia? Who belongs to it “by right,” and who does not? Do her reflections illuminate the situation of the intelligentsia in the United States today?
2. What was N’s experience among the working-class people in the towns of Kalinin and Strunino (Chs. 72 and 73)? What are the qualities of the “ordinary folk” who lived in these towns? Do they share some kinship with the real intelligentsia as opposed to the “semi-educated”? What does their kindness toward N say about her? How do these ordinary folk compare with their American counterpart in 2024?
3. M speaks of birds in his poems ‘The Goldfinch’ and ‘The Cage,’ and in 74 and 79 N connects birds with herself, M, and writers in general. How do these comparisons work, and what do they illuminate? What is the cage of which N and M speak? What light does N shed on how it was constructed and by whom, both in general and in the period leading to M’s final arrest?
4. What are the central themes of ‘Having deprived me,’ ‘They, not you nor I,’ ‘The Beggar Woman,’ ‘If our enemies captured me,’ and ‘To Natasha Shtempel’? What sense of the poet do these compositions leave us with? Do they support the claim of Clive James that “Mandelstam is one of those supreme artists who convince you that there is such a thing as poetic immortality, and that it is at one with the simplest forces of creation, so that nothing can destroy it”?
5. Is the mysterious L. of Ch. 83 (‘One Final Account’) in some ways N’s alter-ego? How does his labor of memory and narrative resemble hers? How does ’s report of M being befriended in the camp by Arkhangelski and given food in exchange for his words rise to the level of myth? What are the tone and literary antecedents of the scene in the loft— i.e., what kind of myth is this? How are we readers affected by this parting image? How does this bookend complement the first chapter and bookend of Hope Against Hope?