Capital of Russia

Statement of bias: Hope Against Hope (1970), Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir of her poet-husband Osip, inspired in me, as in many others, admiration for the man so intense as to preclude “objective” assessment of his work even if I had been able to read it in the original. The events recounted were hideous—the poet’s arrest and exile in 1934 (the offense was an epigram mocking Stalin), periods of appalling mental torment, physical deprivation and terror, at length a second arrest (in 1938, for “counterrevolutionary activities”) and the imprisonment that killed him. The chronicler was obviously a remarkable woman, possessed of extraordinary courage and significant literary gifts. And the range of subjects and interests in her pages was wide indeed, homely truths of marital union and domesticity succeeding brilliant probes of the processes of poetic creation.

But the book was, centrally, the poet’s story, a tale of character. Its hero didn’t qualify as an impregnable fortress-soul or Superman. (Mandelstam was frail, had heart attacks, was driven crazy at the end by his oppressors.) His distinction lay, rather, in a most marvelously perfected self-respect, founded on exact estimates of personal worthno false pride, little habitual selfdenigration—and issuing in a lifelong current of truth. Honesty on Mandelstam’s scale cost everything, and I remember going on the alert a shade meanly, or self-defensively, as I read his wife’s words, prepared for the inadvertent bit that would prove the honesty to be alloyed with innocence, or self-righteousness, or self-love (the imperial theme). The inadvertent bit never came. Clear, open intelligence refusing, because aware of its own value, to do dirt on itself—this was the root of Mandelstam’s honor, startling and exhilarating to observe.

There was more to the character, naturally—aptitudes for kindness as well as for truth. Mandelstam was an ironist to the core (are we not lucky, he asked his wife, are we not blessed to live in an age when poetry matters so much you can be killed for it?). But his irony, unlike many people’s, was seldom smutched by sourness. Equally fine was his distaste for “new ethics” of villainy that promote themselves as “originality” or “nonconformity”; he seems not to have believed true values can be “personally” generated, and he tended to view patches of goodness or integrity in a life as echoes of the cultures of the past, the luck of an education, nothing self-sprung. Angelic he was not, nor prudent, nor a good husband as customarily conceived, nor undespotic, unmischievous, uninterested in other women, nor self-restrained about bumming smokes. But to the very borders of his own destitution he remained penetrating, passionate, humorous, elegant, and gay—something beyond genius, in other words, something else. And, to repeat, nobody who met this man as presented by his wife—Nadezhda Mandelstam spoke of him with a grave reserve that was superbly tactful— could begin to imagine sitting to his poems with armored critical gaze.

Bias acknowledged, judgment at hand: SELECTED POEMS OF OSIP MANDELSTAM, chosen and translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin (Atheneum, $6.25), is a priceless volume of poetry, a rediscovery of human range and complexity, and as powerful a witness to the permanence of the heroic resource as twentieth-century letters has yet produced. Since a portion of the book consists of poetry of suffering, a reader could be excused for fretting in advance about whether it is the art or the pain that he will find moving. No cause: the intensity of the language as felt on the translated page burns off standard-brand critical involution. Since the suffering is related unambiguously to actions of the state, one could also be excused for wondering whether admiring the artist isn’t at bottom an accusatory act—a political protest against the sins of a “competitive system.” Again no cause: the force in the book works in the deepest structures of feeling and isn’t the kind that inflates jingoes. A number of Mandelstam’s greatest poems are what they are partly because Stalin and the purges were what they were, but their subject remains the nature not of purges but of man.

Specifying the intellectual and poetic traditions that shape the poet’s address to this subject is no easy enterprise. Professor Brown, who has recently published a biography, Mandelstam, contributes a helpful introduction to the Selected Poems. He cites various relevant symbolist contexts, mentions Mallarmé, and observes that the logic of Mandelstam’s verse is “the intuitive and purely verbal logic of inner association”; he also gives a name to the poet’s moral doctrine—“democratic humanism”—and assigns him a rank in letters (Russia’s greatest modern poet). Nadezhda Mandelstam, in HOPE ABANDONED (Atheneum, $12.95), sequel to the volume of memoirs just mentioned, is again informative and subtle about her husband’s ways of working and his aesthetic principles. The dread sequence of events determining the narrative line of Hope Against Hope forced a variety of omissions; this second book fills in gaps in the life stories of both principals, provides extended accounts of their friends (some unforgettable glimpses of Anna Akhmatova), and permits the work as a whole to stand as a fullscale biography. Hope Abandoned is discursive and loosely written, but time and again it locates key interdependencies of character and literary gesture:

... in M.’s translations of Petrarch there is a peculiar shift of focus compared with the original: attention is transferred from subjective experience to the object of it. This is very characteristic of him. Even in everyday life he rarely spoke of himself, or of his feelings and sensations, preferring to talk of what aroused them. His field of vision at any given moment was dominated not by the personal element, but by the events and objects of the external world. This was even reflected in the way he spoke about the smallest of practical matters: not, “This mattress is so bad that it makes my back ache,” but, “I think a spring has gone; it ought to be repaired.”

The book is essential to comprehension of Mandelstam’s art.

It would be a mistake, though, to imply that the best of the Selected Poems require intricate glosses or complicated biographical apparatus. The pieces from Poems (1928) and from the work of the thirties are, for the most part, records of phases of a battle—revelations of the strategies by which individual reflective consciousness waged its struggle for self-possession as the night came down. At one moment, when the poet’s sense of his functionlessness strips him of an outer world, of physical balance, of the very capacity to arrange an orderly visual manifold, the single resource is to beat at the walls, to weep and shriek in fury and frustration:

At other moments an idea of reconciliation is summoned, or a fantasy or stoic content, or the pride of the survivor:

The volume covers a span of nearly three decades; included are a half-dozen richly allusive responses to Italy and classical culture, one or two Hardyesque meditations on mutability, and several affecting love poems. (The most beautiful of the latter is an untitled lyric in Tristia that begins, “Take from my palms, to smooth your heart/ a little honey, a little sun.”) Mr. Merwin isn’t entirely unaffected by the dominant poetic voice in English of the present hour, Robert Lowell, and his version of the Stalin epigram hasn’t the blunt, damning scorn of Max Hayward’s in Hope Against Hope. (Pasternak, on first hearing the poem, pronounced it a departure for Mandelstam, an abrupt turn toward directness; in the Selected Poems the style is harmonious with the work that precedes and follows it.) But a score or more of the translations in this book achieve independent existence as English poems, and almost every line rides strongly and well in its meter—no trace of slovenliness or haste. Like Nadezhda Mandelstam’s, in short, the translators’ devotion is worthy of its object; higher praise is unimaginable.

Two Stalins

“He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries,” says Mandelstam of Stalin four years before the start of the most infamous purges and trials. “He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.” Sound explanation of this monstrous relish requires, in theory, more than a simple survey of the ascent to power and the advent of terror; it demands inquiry into the cultural genesis of the concept of the revolutionary as ultimate man, and, in addition, consideration of the early psychological shaping of the figure of destiny to come. The first volume of Robert Tucker’s biography, STALIN AS REVOLUTIONARY, 1879-1929: A Study in History and Personality (Norton, $12.95), has both these requirements in view. A “Russian Prologue” provides useful nineteenth-century political and cultural backgrounds; a dozen clearly composed chapters summarize Stalin’s years in the party underground, his Siberian interlude, 1917, the conflict with Lenin and subsequent struggles with Trotsky and the others, the first industrialization debates, the defeat of Bukharin and “gradualism,” and the emergence of Stalinism as a system. There are repeated attempts in the mode of psychohistory (acknowledgments are made to Erik Erikson) to link the acts of the man to the experience of the child. And the biographer’s mastery of fact is visible throughout.

Yet it cannot be said, despite all this, that Stalin as Revolutionary is a wholly satisfying achievement in biography. The weakness is tonal, and derives from the influence of a vocabulary and set of attitudes that are incommensurate with the deeds examined and that create an impression of evasiveness and obliviousness. As Erikson and others have demonstrated, psychohistorical analysis is in no way inimical to the production of a literary voice of depth. And Professor Tucker’s use of this instrument is technically competent. Modes of “repression, rationalization and repression” in Stalin are defined. Feelings engendered by one or another important physical feature are noted, among them the subject’s “uneasiness . . . because of his short stature.” And the probe of his self-doubt is thoroughgoing:

[He] was nagged by an undercurrent of suspicion that he might not really be the unblemished hero-figure that he took himself to be. This in turn made him highly dependent upon the attitudes of others, no less so after he attained the pinnacle of power than before.

To assuage his underlying uncertainty and doubts, his suppressed awareness of not always fulfilling the dictates of his pride, he thirsted for others’ admiration and devotion. their recognition of him as a great man, their affirmation of his view of himself as thegenial’nyStalin. . . . Having been brought up by a mother who lavished praise and admiration upon him, Stalin now needed more of the same to bolster his unconsciously shaky ego.

—Nagged, feels inferior, is deprived of mother-love, needs praise, needs assuaging, needs his view of himself affirmed . . . Slowly, gently, psychology and understanding perform their magic and mist descends on the murderer. Assuredly the psyche of a mass slaughterer is a legitimate focus of interest; assuredly it’s sentimental to hold that a writer pursuing this interest must feel obliged at every instant to fill his reader’s consciousness with the reality of beatings, assaults, starvation, brutalization. Still a problem—call it one of nuance—obtrudes. Terms and idioms appropriate for harmless fools—for heroes, say, of comic novels by Philip Roth—don’t win their way as swiftly when invoked in an epic of depravity that brought inexpressible tragedy to millions. The reader asks for a word on the irony of their multifarious application, or for some other signal canceling the bid for sympathy obliquely carried in the terms. Professor Tucker gives no such signals, and in time his blandness weakens trust: we are offered, as a substitute for true authority, the moral weightlessness of expertise.

Adam B. Ulam’s completed biography, STALIN: THE. MAN AND HIS ERA (Viking, $12.95), is another matter altogether. The author, director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard, acknowledges that the General Secretary was, nearly to the end, a “superb diplomat,” and that, from the start, he stood forth as a leader of huge energy and enterprise. He further concedes the inadequacy of an image of Stalin that presents his coarseness, suspiciousness, bitterness, jealousy, misanthropy, megalomania, and savagery, but misses his astonishing capacity “to shed one personality and assume another.” And Ulam is properly dismissive of the notion that Stalin bears total responsibility for his crimes. A long history of political terrorism led to “that ‘war upon the nation’ which Stalin was to wage in the 1930s.” Lenin himself shared the responsibility, for his hatred for his own class laid the groundwork for Stalin’s destruction of that class, and his initial fascination with Stalin’s manners opened the door wide to barbarism.

But no concession, no acknowledgment, no quantity of genetical analysis dilutes Professor Ulam’s awareness of the ultimate meaning of Stalin’s life, its “position” in the history of human cruelty. Unremittingly conscious that crimes of this order demand precise placing, Ulam carefully distinguishes between terror before and after Stalin:

Even during the most brutal period of Tsarist repression, relatives of revolutionaries were not molested by the government. Every war, especially civil war, generates atrocities, erodes humanitarian and legal scruples, turns the ordinarily decent man into an oppressor. But while the more humane among the Bolsheviks deluded themselves into believing that all these phenomena were temporary and would stop once peace came to the land, it is undeniable that the Communists grew to think of terror as a technique of government. Some of them developed a weird theology of terror, reminiscent of those religious heresies which have maintained that until absolute human perfection is established, all forms of vice are permissible.

Stalin: The Man and His Era is not a mere indictment of its subject. Extraordinary troves of specialized knowledge of Russian life, international relations, complicated political duels fill these pages. (The accumulated masses of detail aren’t slickly marshaled, and the book is a demanding read, asking concentration and commitment throughout.) Nor is the author cursed by the illusion that final explanations can be brought forth. He sees “preposterous” mysteries at the core, chief among them that it was violence and cruelty that ultimately “made” the Cause:

One cannot avoid the unpalatable conclusion: it is unlikely that an enterprise which would not have demanded so much suffering could have evoked so much enthusiasm.

Perception of this frightening propensity in human nature constitutes Stalin’s best claim to fame as a political thinker.

But in the end the strength of this book lies neither in its scope nor in its alertness to paradox nor in the spaciousness of its vision of its themes. It lies rather in the humanity—often sardonic but never unfeeling—of its witness to hell. Ferocious yet unrhetorical in his sense of wrong, Professor Ulam on occasion seems almost to speak in the voice of Mandelstam; his book is morally as well as historically definitive.

The Drawing Account

In the early sixties, when a gesture by Khrushchev permitted the publication and sale in Russia of millions of copies of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, hope soared for improvement in Russian intellectual life. The geneticist Zhores Medvedev establishes, through a documented analysis of the persecution that Solzhenitsyn has endured since his book appeared, that the hope was premature. Few stories in contemporary letters could be more depressing, or so it appears at first glance, than the one laid bare in TEN YEARS AFTER IVAN DENISOVICH (Knopf, $6.95). The novelist is refused the right to publish his work—first Cancer Ward, then The First Circle, then August 1914. His personal papers are stolen. Manuscripts at a publishing house are confiscated. His wife, a trained professional, is denied work. He is expelled from the Writers’ Union. Public readings of his books are banned. Stolen sections of unpublished work are so “leaked” abroad as to suggest that he himself engineered the transactions to blacken his country further. PseudoSolzhenitsyns cavort drunkenly in public proclaiming their greatness. False reports are put about that he is dying of cancer, that he is a Jew, that he is hostile to the revolution because it stripped his wealthy family of their estates.

And worse, far worse. Dr. Medvedev offers this fearful report of treachery and hatred as an ironical Festschrift honoring the anniversary of Denisovich; the chapters are rich in outrage. But because his own dedication demands that he speak not alone about official corruption but about solidarity among those intellectuals who still dare to resist, his book leaves no final sense of doom. Men and women whose straightness has about it a noble inevitability call out from these pages, summoning belief in the fundamental seriousness of letters, as well as in the survival of readiness to die for truth. Not one voice but many echo Solzhenitsyn on the simple course of the simple brave man— “not to participate in the lie and not to support lying actions”—and on the duties of the artist and writer. The latter “are capable of more, they can conquer the lie. For in the struggle with the lie art has always conquered and always will conquer—visibly and irrefutably for all to see.” This plain-styled, moving book brings alive the agony of those who created and those who now renew the capital of bravery on which it draws; the truth it knows is that of Lawrence’s iron phrase, “the only riches, the great souls.”