Nadezhda Mandelstam's Memoirs

[uchural]

Moscow Times

Saturday, April 1, 2000

Moments of Reprieve

By Oliver Ready

In her memoirs, Nadezhda Mandelstam recalled how in the early 1930s her
husband Osip acquired for himself a pocket-sized edition of Dante
Alighieri's "Divine Comedy." It was a sensible precaution for the poet
to take in the likely event of his imminent arrest. A notorious
neurotic, Mandelstam had been studying Dante for years, even learning
Italian to do so, and images of the Inferno haunted the anguished
landscape of his later and most brilliant verse.

Mandelstam's final choice of literature was more than a poet's flight of
fancy, however. It is only by reading the more prosaic memoirs of his
contemporaries, and their accounts of camp life, that it becomes clear
how prophetic it was, not just in terms of Mandelstam's own violent
death in a transit camp, but of the experience of an entire people. It
was in Stalin's Russia that the fantastic underworld of punishment and
guilt dreamed up by the liveliest imagination of medieval times found
its closest analogy in reality.

Till My Tale Is Told: Women's Memoirs of the Gulag, the latest
collection of eyewitness accounts of life in Stalin's prisons and camps
to appear in English, tells of living "shadows," consigned, in their
surreal, hidden existence, to a torment of perpetual motion across the
length and breadth of the Russian Empire. In the "dark inferno" of the
camp bathhouse, the convicts' naked bodies are compared by Vera Shulz,
one of the memoirists, to the "souls of the damned."

First published in Russia in 1989, "Till My Tale is Told" drops 16 new
ladders deep into that "amazing country of gulag" charted in such detail
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. All but one of these excerpted memoirs are
written by people who saw life from "below," in exile, prison or labor
camp, and emerged to bear witness; several, now in their 80s and 90s,
are still alive today.

With the colorful exception of the Socialist Revolutionary Bertha
Babina, who describes her first stint in Butyrka in the early '20s (a
time of relative "liberalism" in the prisons), the patterns of arrest
and punishment described by these "politicals," rounded up in the '30s
largely on trumped-up charges, are so similar that they inevitably merge
in the memory of the reader.

The value of the collection - in so far as it can contribute to the
existing literature on the gulag - lies largely in the wide variety of
perspectives on display. Veronica Znamenskaya describes life from
"above," as all her loved ones disappear; Nadezhda Surovtseva,
meanwhile, records the death throes of some truly amazing characters
from her bird's-eye view as nurse in the camp hospital in Vladivostok.
Rightly, the most space is given to Olga Adamova-Sliozberg's moving
account, "My Journey," where we hear tell of feats of human strength and
ingenuity, such as the traveling companions who keep morale up on the
freight car by reciting by heart the entire text of "The Idiot" or "Woe
from Wit." How different, though, is the tone of tightly controlled
bitterness and realism that marks some of the other memoirs, notably
that of the Ukrainian Hava Volovich, who is subjected perhaps to the
most lasting wound - seeing her golden-haired child die after a
year-long period of abuse and starvation at the hands of the camp
nurses. By this time the baby girl had revolted against her mother too.

If Solzhenitsyn's aims were global and historical, an attempt to harness
a nation's experience, the focus here is personal and human. The
accumulation of detail is what makes this collection so compelling: the
family dog licking the hand of the now captive owner through the prison
bar; the young girl who, upon being arrested, feels only relief at
avoiding the next day's Latin test.

Often the detail attests to remarkable feats of compassion, and this is
what editor Simeon Vilensky, himself a former convict at the Kolyma
labor camp, must have had in mind when he talks about the "undeniable
moral force" of the memoirs. This rings true of some of the accounts and
some of the episodes: So strong is the human imperative in Sliozberg's
account that when she hears of her release she can't stop crying,
wondering "How could I live alone, without the comrades I'd grown so
close to in the camp?"

The detail attests in at least equal measure, however, to the brutality
of prison and camp life, where the captives are told to forget their
womanhood, wash their clothes in one another's urine and ensure
themselves an extra bread ration by concealing the putrefying corpses of
their neighbors in the bunk beds. In the context of the entire
collection, the moments of compassion seem, to quote the title of Primo
Levi's slim volume, moments of reprieve: footnotes, albeit redeeming and
life-affirming ones, to a wider and still incomprehensible tragedy.

Retrospectively, our moral appraisal of Stalinism may seem a
black-and-white issue, but for the victims at the time, who had to come
to terms with the destruction of their once fervently held political
illusions, it was anything but that. There's no quick moral lesson to be
extracted, Spielberg-fashion, from their experiences. As Volovich
writes, the guilt at the time attached itself not just to the captors
but also to the captives:

"Judging by my own feelings, I would say that this reluctance to
remember isn't simply caused by the desire to shut out years of torment
and despair; it's also prompted by a sense of shame."

It is in this sense, then, that the experience these memoirs recall is
truly infernal. Dante conceived hell as a place of non-truth. Here, too,
mutual mistrust and moral confusion emerge as dominant motifs, reflected
by the type of vocabulary used to describe the general state of mind:
"haze," "hypnosis," "psychosis."

Simply by virtue of their very existence, this volume does represent a
moral victory for all those concerned, and especially for Vilensky's
Vozvrashchenie movement for camp survivors. But it is a retrospective
victory that comes at an incalculable price. Moreover, as Vilensky
notes, the victory is not complete: The Soviet elite lived on in a
different skin and the regime it represented, unlike its totalitarian
equivalent in Germany, has never been brought to justice. As Russia
ushers in a new political era, perhaps the most prescient question this
book raises, and to which it alludes directly in one of its epigraphs,
is the extent to which the past continues to "loom over" the present.

Till My Tale Is Told: Women's Memoirs of the Gulag," edited by Simeon
Vilensky. Translated by John Crowfoot et al. 385 pages. Virago. pounds
18.99.

Oliver Ready, a former arts editor of The Moscow Times, is a teacher and
freelance writer living in Poland.

Š copyright The Moscow Times 1997-1999