October 18
On October 18, 1938, Osip Mandelstam was arrested by Soviet authorities for the second time, transported east, and died in a transit camp near Vladivostok in December 1938. His wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, had been with him for the previous years of terror, moving constantly, burning manuscripts, and memorizing the poems her husband could not safely write down.
Nadezhda Mandelstam was born in 1899 in Saratov. She met Osip Mandelstam in 1919 in Kiev and they married in 1922. By 1933, when he composed a short satirical poem about Stalin — known as "the Stalin epigram" — that was recited in private to a small circle and then denounced, the situation they were in was already dangerous. Stalin had him arrested in 1934. He was sent to the Urals; Nadezhda followed. He was arrested again in 1938.
After his death, she spent decades memorizing and recopying his work — poetry that existed in no official archive, that Soviet authorities were actively trying to erase. She typed copies and distributed them to trusted friends. She moved constantly, teaching English in provincial universities.
She survived the Stalin era, the Khrushchev era, and into the Brezhnev era. In 1970, she published Hope Against Hope — her memoir of the Mandelstam years. In 1972, Hope Abandoned. Both were published in the West and circulated in samizdat in the Soviet Union. They are among the most important literary memoirs of the twentieth century.
She died in 1980 in Moscow.
Nadezhda Mandelstam preserved her husband's poetry by memorizing it during decades when committing it to paper would have been dangerous. The memoir she wrote afterward is an account of the Stalinist terror from inside, written with analytical precision and without sentimentality. The preservation work and the memoir work are both acts of intellectual resistance — neither of which was possible for her to do publicly during the period when she was doing them.
A new forgotten woman, every day. Direct to you.