http://www.the-tls.co.uk/this_week/story.aspx?story_id=2107245

Moscow menages
Rachel Polonsky
13 May 2004


MOSCOW MEMOIRS

Emma Gerstein

336pp. | Harvill. | ?25. 1 86046 883 7



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The only kind of genius that Osip Mandelstam’s widow conceded to the
literary scholar Emma Gerstein was “a genius for getting everything wrong”.
“If any of this is written up by \[her\], it will be distorted out of all
recognition”, Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote in her second book of memoirs. “She
has sometimes told me stories from my own life at which I could only gape in
astonishment”, she continues, adding that her friend the poet Anna Akhmatova
was so “terrified of what Emma might write in her memoirs” that she did
“everything possible to propitiate her beforehand”. According to Gerstein,
Osip Mandelstam shared this anxiety. “You’ll write memoirs after I’m dead”,
he told her in 1936 after she had shown reluctance to petition the
authorities on his behalf while he was in exile in Voronezh, “but you don’t
care about the living poet.” As Gerstein grew “pale with rage” in response,
she noticed that “something like fear was reflected in Osip’s eyes”.


Seven years earlier, before he was first subjected to state terror,
Mandelstam had created an example of aggressive self-assertion in dealing
with his reputation and legacy, and some of the lesser terrors of a writer’s
life. At odds with literary Moscow after a divisive row in 1928 with the
translator Arkady Gornfeld who had, on the basis of a publisher’s error,
accused him of plagiarism, Mandelstam declared that, “things have come to
the point where I value the proud flesh around the wound in the word trade”.


In The Fourth Prose, the work with which he staunched the injury to his own
pride, he suggested that the “tone of absolute courtesy that we have for
some reason yielded to the memoirists” is the “greatest impertinence” in
speaking “about the present”. Courtesy yields to self-vindication and raging
abuse: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita . . . I was stopped in the dense
Soviet forest by bandits who called themselves my judges”. The Moscow
writers, editors and publishers in the midst of whom Mandelstam was then
living were a “bitch pack” from whom he stood angrily apart. “I have no
manuscripts, no notebooks, no archives”, Mandelstam declared, “I have no
handwriting because I never write. I alone in Russia write from the voice .
. .”.


Fear, propitiation and courtesy played no part in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s
self-presentation when she came to write her memoirs three decades after
Osip Mandelstam’s desolate end in a Gulag transit camp on the way to Kolyma.
“I . . . was such a wild and angry one”, says the unsent letter of farewell
to her lost husband with which she ends her second book of memoirs. Even if
its only reader turned out to be some “expert whose task it is to destroy
books, to eradicate words, to stamp out thought”, her work would at least
demonstrate to one of those “functionaries to whom nothing matters”, that
“this crazy old woman fears nothing”.


In Vtoraya kniga, the “Second Book” (published in English as Hope
Abandoned), Nadezhda Mandelstam forcefully disarms Gerstein with
imprecation, intellectual disparagement and bitchy ridicule. Gerstein had
for a time been a friend with whom Mandelstam liked to “gossip”, she grants,
but once he had heard “everything she had to say on the subject of Marxism”
(which “took her about a month”), he lost interest in the “old hen”. She was
a “dimwit” who hung around the Mandelstams in order to meet “interesting
people”, and “unsuccessfully pursue her amorous designs on \[Akhmatova’s
son\] Lev Gumilyov”. Gerstein, she recalls cattily, “was the kind who begins
every sentence with a little sermon: ‘I told you so . . . ’”, the kind who
takes “an interest in poets without knowing a damn thing about poetry”.


In great old age, between Nadezhda Mandelstam’s death in 1980 and her own in
2002, Emma Gerstein defied all propitiatory courtesies and pre-emptive
assaults from the women she described as a pair of “witches and grandes
dames”, and published a series of reminiscences and literary-historical
investigations that many Russian readers saw as a desecration of the memory
of the poet-martyr, Mandelstam, which his widow and Akhmatova had so
carefully enshrined. John Crowfoot has now admirably translated and
presented this controversial literary mosaic for English readers under the
title Moscow Memoirs. Needless to say, Gerstein’s accounts of her
friendships with the Mandelstams, with Boris Pasternak, and with Anna
Akhmatova and her son Lev Gumilyov (with whom, contrary to her enemy’s
insinuations, she did have a reciprocated love affair) differ markedly from
those of Mandelstam’s “wild and angry” widow, whose curses had failed to
silence her.


For all her fearlessness, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s sense of the danger that
Gerstein represented to her own work of testimony seems to have intensified
between the writing of her first and second books of memoir. The nature and
fate of the “manuscripts, notebooks and archives” which she had laboured to
produce from the work of Mandelstam’s living voice are at the heart of the
enmity between the two old women. The few references to Gerstein in Kniga
pervaya, the “First Book” (published in English as Hope against Hope), come
without personal vilification. Gerstein, who was a friend of the Mandelstams
in the 1920s and 30s, plays a minor role in the drama of the poet’s first
arrest in 1934. The morning after the arrest, before the second search of
his apartment, Nadezhda Mandelstam says that she entrusted Gerstein with the
safekeeping of some of his papers. A later reference in a chapter entitled
“Archive and Voice” is more ominous. Nadezhda Mandelstam notes
parenthetically that Gerstein had tried to persuade her to hand over all her
husband’s papers to the aspiring poet and literary specialist Sergei
Rudakov, a “very strange type . . .” who “had become friendly” with
Gerstein.


Nadezhda claims that she gave Rudakov original copies of Mandelstam’s most
important writings and that Akhmatova delivered into his keeping, “on a
sledge”, the entire archive of her first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov,
who had been shot by the Cheka in 1921. Rudakov’s letters reveal, says
Nadezhda Mandelstam, that “the poor boy was a psychopath”, and that the
“theft of our archives” was part of a deliberate scheme, either mercenary or
simply maniacal, to sell the manuscripts or to pass them off as his work in
an insane act of plagiarism. Rudakov, “one of the most important figures in
the story of M’s archives”, was killed at the Front in 1944, and whatever
papers were left with his widow were lost to literary history in a wretched
tangle of contradictory stories. The publication by Gerstein of Rudakov’s
letters from Voronezh does not, despite her worthy intentions, entirely
dispel the impression that, though devoted to Mandelstam and far from
vicious, Rudakov may indeed have been susceptible to delusions.


“Not everyone . . . can write memoirs”, Emma Gerstein warns in the essay “Of
Memoirs and More Besides” that concludes this volume. Both the writing and
the correct reading of memoirs have, she complains, become “forgotten
 skills” since she was taught source-study in the philological faculty in
the 1920s. “It was essential to indicate ‘I heard this from so and so . . .’
. Then . . . a note became a document. Its reader might check the accuracy
of the information received . . . .” Gerstein’s appeal to good academic
practice is, however, of uncertain application when it comes to many of the
precise matters over which she differs from Nadezhda Mandelstam and
Akhmatova, in which it is often a case of one written assertion against
another about what may or may not have happened, or been said, in a
totalitarian police state fifty years earlier between rivalrous, creative
individuals in closed rooms in communal apartments charged, as all these
accounts suggest, with high levels of “bohemian” sexual energy, and barely
tolerable domestic and political pressure. There is no way of checking the
accuracy of many of her claims. Furthermore, Gerstein herself falls far
short of the contemplation “without rapture, tearfulness or derision” of
material evidence which, she says, “scholarship demands”. In the essays in
Moscow Memoirs, she is no longer writing about Mikhail Lermontov and the
early nineteenth century, as she had with distinction in her professional
academic life, but about her own “life’s journey” and “the proud flesh
around the wounds in the word trade”, in times when these wounds were many,
fleshly and


terrible. She repays Nadezhda Mandelstam in her own currency, with a
depiction of the poet’s wife as arrogant, manipulative, “frivolously
insouciant” about others’ welfare, dishonest, suicide-prone and kinky, with
a disturbing penchant for menages a trois, and very bow legs. The Mandelstam
marriage itself, which achieves such surpassing fulfilment in Nadezhda
Mandelstam’s acts of remembrance, evokes distaste in Gerstein. She presents
the union as a selfish folie a deux, in which outsiders were habitually
compromised and sometimes destroyed. She finds Mandelstam’s love letters
cloying: “my wife, my friend, my daughter”, he wrote to Nadezhda, “you are
my radiant, my fearless one”, “without whom I can’t breathe”.


Gerstein denies, but cannot conclusively refute, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s
claims about her part in the panicked dispersal of Mandelstam’s papers after
the sleepless May night of his arrest. Nadezhda Mandelstam’s most
substantial, though unsubstantiated, allegation against “our \[sermonizing\]
Lermontov scholar” Gerstein, is that she had burned the only existing
autograph of a poem, part of a cycle in memory of the poet Andrei Bely,
given into her care after the secret police searches in 1934. “For some
reason,” Nadezhda Mandelstam says, “I am repelled by the fact that instead
of throwing it into the stove, she held it in the flame of a candle.” “I
remember this differently,” Gerstein writes, “she was mistaken.” The satchel
of documents she took from the Mandelstams was not part of a poet’s archive,
but only “papers compiled to collect money from a New York insurance company
on the death of Nadya’s father”, which Gerstein fed into the stove in wads
to conceal her friend’s bourgeois origins. The only “material evidence”, as
Gerstein puts it, for her version of the story was the satchel, which she
looked at every time she spring cleaned for the next twenty-seven years,
until she “threw it away on moving . . .”. Posterity has, in other words, no
more than her word for it, a description of a discarded bag. The draft
(which was not of the poem “From where have they brought him?”, as Nadezhda
Mandelstam claimed, but another, more wrought and “difficult to decipher”
poem in the cycle) had, Gerstein explains, long since been put down the
toilet by her “oldest friend” Lena.


Gerstein’s foremost achievement in responding to Nadezhda Mandelstam’s
allegedly “tendentious” and “inaccurate” memoirs, is not to vindicate or
avenge herself, or even to establish documentary truth based on material
evidence, so much as to deepen our understanding of the terrible strain to
which friendships and family relationships were subjected at a time when
people found themselves in mortal fear, flushing away or burning barely
decipherable manuscripts of philosophical poems memorializing dead symbolist
poets, or worse, naming one another in depositions taken in the Lubyanka by
“blood-crazed officials” afraid of poetry. “Today’s readers . . . cannot
imagine the malevolent atmosphere in which those days were shrouded”,
Gerstein writes.


In her essay on “Anna Akhmatova and Lev Gumilyov”, she intervenes with
painstaking and magnanimous scholarly attention in a mother–son relationship
tortured to destruction by the painstaking and malevolent attentions of the
secret police. She attempts to correct the “tormented Gumilyov’s doctored
version of the causes of his misfortune”, which had become current in the
Russian literary press after the popular Orientalist historian’s death in
1992. The story of Gumilyov’s persecution is linked, in her account, with
Mandelstam’s great act of poetic “terrorism”, the Stalin epigram. Like
Gerstein, Gumilyov had been named by Mandelstam in the Lubyanka as one of
those to whom he had recited the poem. Gumilyov was arrested in 1938 and
again in 1949, repeatedly punished for unspecified offences. Gerstein is
convinced that the basis of the case against him was Mandelstam’s poem,
which the young man had not only heard, but which he had also read aloud in
1935, and written out in his own hand. She also suggests that some of her
own professional misfortunes may have originated with Mandelstam’s
interrogation which, she concedes, had left the poet psychotic and suicidal.


Gumilyov made bitter accusations of neglect against his mother after his
release. In Akhmatova’s defence, Gerstein describes how the poet had burned
much of her archive, how she exalted Stalin in rhyme on his seventieth
birthday, hoping for clemency for her son. “She abandoned the moral purity
of her poetry to save her son and received insults from all sides and from
her own child . . . she was unable to bear it: ‘Not one mother has done for
her son what I did!’ The response was a rolling on the floor, screams and
camp obscenities. I was there.”


The power and the vulnerability of Emma Gerstein’s witness rest precisely in
unverifiable statements like “I was there”, “she was mistaken” and “I
remember this differently”. Nadezhda Mandelstam had noted, when describing
an encounter with a state functionary, that a Soviet official of “exalted
rank never commits anything to paper, thus leaving no material evidence . .
. but only a momentary disturbance of the air which leaves no trace”. Like
her, Emma Gerstein has transcribed and thus preserved the “slight air
turbulences” made by human voices that Stalin and the servants of his
anti-culture, “whose task it is . . . to eradicate words, to stamp out
thought”, had endeavoured to keep unheard.


“We live without sensing the country beneath us”, Mandelstam wrote in the
“Stalin epigram”, the poem that led him and his friends to so much hurt and
loss:

At ten paces, our words have no sound
And when there’s the will to half open our mouths
The Kremlin crag-dweller bars the way.


Emma Gerstein and Nadezhda Mandelstam make their words heard in defiance,
not so much of one another, as of the “Kremlin crag-dweller”. The catfight
between the two wounded and aggressive old women thus achieves
transcendence. In spite of their mutual antipathy, they are united in
defiance of an enemy committed to the systematic destruction of the
foundations on which Mandelstam’s poetics rest: the freedom and play of the
individual personality, of community, of memory itself, and of the great
synchronous conversation of the European cultural tradition. In Gerstein’s
memoirs of what Mandelstam called the “bitch-loud nights of Moscow”, no less
than in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s more soaring, spry and endearing volumes,
literature and politics are always personal, indeed domestic: a matter of
tinned fish, boiled eggs, Dutch stoves, saucepans, borrowed gas rings,
kitchen tables, tramcars, bad plumbing, communal apartments, residence
permits, health problems, and endless changes of address, as well as
nicknames, gossip, erotic mayhem, tantrums, poetic creation, lost
manuscripts, sacrifice, betrayal, forgiveness, plank beds in Siberian
barrack huts, and common burial pits.


For Mandelstam, art, personality and history flow in and out of one another,
and literature thrives precisely “in spite”. In his own memoir, The Noise of
Time, written a decade before his troubles with the Stalinist State began,
Mandelstam remembers the scholar V. V. Gippius, who taught literature at the
Tenishev School in St Petersburg, or rather, “not literature, but the far
more interesting science of literary spite”. It was Gippius’s quarrelsome,
spite-filled relationship with his subject that taught the schoolboy
Mandelstam that “it is only with the masks of other men’s voices that the
bare walls of my house are decorated”. “Even then,” the poet remembers, “I
knew that there gather around literature its witnesses, the members, so to
speak of its household.”