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Nadezhda MandelstamHow one wife's suffering changed how we see Communism.

By Clive James
Updated Tuesday, March 27, 2007, at 2:21 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

In that respect, the Communist despotisms left even Hitler's Germany looking like a throwback. Hitler was hell on earth, but at least he never promised heaven: not to his victims, at any rate. It's the disappointment of what happened in the new Russia that Nadezhda captures and distills into an elixir. There were some mighty thinkers about the true nature of the Soviet incubus: Yevgeny Zam­yatin, Boris Souvarine, Victor Kravchenko, Evgenia Ginzburg, Varlan Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Roy Medvedev and Aleksandr Zinoviev are only a few. Generally, however, the artists, if they lived long enough to speak, spoke better than the philosophers. But it was Nadezhda's distinction to speak better than the artists. With no lyrical world in which to find refuge, she commanded a prose more potent even than her husband's poetry, and perhaps that made her the greatest artist of all. She found the means to express how an unprecedented historic experiment had changed the texture even of emotion.

Even the incandescently gifted Akhmatova, with whom Nadezhda had always been involved in intimate bonds of passion, jealousy, and respect, never quite grew out of the romantic nature that helped to make her one of the most justly loved of the modern Rus­sian poets. In "Requiem," Akhmatova encapsulated the anguish of millions of devastated women when she wrote "husband dead, son in jail: pray for me." But a romantic she remained, still believing in the imaginative validity of a love affair beyond time. In Hope Abandoned, Nadezhda was able to say firmly that her friend was mistaken. Love affairs beyond time were impossible to take seriously when violent separations in the present had become the stuff of reality. With real life so disturbed, the nature of romanticism had been changed. In the new reality, all love affairs were beyond time.

It is important not to reach conclusions too quickly about whom she means by we and us. An unreconstructed Stalinist, if we can suppose there were such a thing left, might say that she was identifying the class enemy. Quite early in the regime's career of permanent house cleaning—certainly no later than Lunacharsky's crackdown on the avant-­garde in 1929—anyone stemming from the ­pre-­revolutionary intelligentsia was automatically enrolled along with remnants of the bourgeoisie in the classification of "class enemy." Civilized articulacy was as deadly a giveaway as soft hands. (The Komsomols identified a victim's ability to defend himself verbally as certain evidence of guilt.) Eventually any kind of knowledge that had been acquired under the old order was enough to mark down its possessor. The Soviet "organs" discovered that even a knowledge of engineering was a threat to state security. (Solzhenitsyn, it will be recalled, was especially poignant about the fate of the engineers.) Any field of study with its own objective criteria was thought to be inherently subversive.

To this day, scholars puzzle over the reasons for Stalin's purging the Red Army of its best generals in the crucial years leading up to June 1941, but the answer might lie close to hand. The fact that military knowledge—strategy, tactics, and logistics—was a field of data and principles verifiable independently of ideology might have been more than enough to invite his hatred. In attacking his own army, of course, Stalin came close to demolishing the whole Soviet enterprise. But at the center of the totalitarian mentality is the fear that the internal enemy might go unapprehended.

A totalitarian regime's progressively expanding concept of the enemy is the thing to bear in mind when Nadezhda seems to be identifying herself as part of a class. She is really identifying herself as part of a category, and the category includes anyone who might offer a threat to the regime's monolithic authority—which means anyone capable of independent moral judgment. She does not go so far as to propose the possibility of independent moral behavior: Not even a hero can actively dissent if the penalty for recalcitrance is the suffering of loved ones. But she does believe that there is such a thing as independent moral judgment, a quality in perfect polarity with the regime, which has come into being to eliminate all such values.

Throughout her two books, Nadezhda looks for comfort to those whose memories go back to the ­pre-­revolutionary past. But her originality lies in her slowly dawning realization that decency is a human quality that can exist independently of social origins. Without that realization, she would never have been able to formulate the great, ringing message of her books, an unprecedented mixture of the poetic and the prophetic—the message that the truth will be born again of its own accord. She didn't live to see it happen: So the whole idea was an act of faith. Her inspiring contention is unverifiable; when, after the nightmare was at last over, the truth indeed reborn, it was hard to imagine that such a renaissance could have occurred without books like hers in the background.

But there weren't many like hers, and although it will always be useful to examine how the agents of change received their education in elementary benevolence, it might be just as valuable to consider her two main principles in the full range of their combined implications. One principle was that the forces of unreasoning inhumanity had won an overwhelming victory with effects more devastating than we could possibly imagine. The other was that reason and humanity would return. The first was an observation, the second was a guess, and it was the inconsolable bravery of the observation that made the guess into a song of love.

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Clive James, the author of numerous books of criticism, autobiography, and poetry, writes for the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. He lives in London.
Reprinted from Cultural Amnesia by Clive James © 2007 by Clive James, with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company Inc. This material may not be reproduced, rewritten, or redistributed without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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