Hope Against Hope
2007-05-06
Posted by: badanov
From Powerline comes a post about the poet Osip Mandelstam who was murdered by Russian communists just after 1934, during the Great Terror.
We read the biography "Hope Against Hope" years ago and what we came away with was that Osip was essentially a bystander who got caught up in the revolution and swept away.
Two things from the post which were inaccurate:
1) Mandelstam was an ethnic Pole not Russian, albeit who was in Russia during the startup of the Soviet Secret Police. He in fact knew a few of the men in the CHEKA.
Mandelstam got in trouble not just because of his poetry but because he took a job translating a book to Russian, from a language we don't remember at the moment. Right up until 1991, taking the task of translating anything into Russian was a huge political risk and even more so as the Chekists consolidated their grip on power in Russia. Mandelstam had been warned that taking this job was a Bad Thing.
If you have a chance to read "Hope Against Hope", do so, for it is a heartbreaking account of life in the early Soivet Union from the eyes of a wife who waited for the return of her poet husband from the camps.
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