How to start: This is a memoir written by Osip Mandelstam’s wife, from the period of his arrest in 1934, to his release, and his imprisonment with descriptions of life in the USSR under the communist regime.
Favourite quotes: We never asked, on hearing about the latest arrest, “What was he arrested for?” but we were exceptional. Most people, crazed by fear, asked this question just to give themselves a little hope: if others were arrested for some reason, then they wouldn’t be arrested, because they hadn’t done anything wrong. (p. 10)
In periods of violence and terror people retreat into themselves and hide their feelings, but their feelings are ineradicable and cannot be destroyed by any amount of indoctrination. Even if they are wiped out in one generation, as happened here to a considerable extent, they will burst forth again in the next one. We have seen this several times. The idea of good seems really to be inborn, and those who sin against the laws of humanity always see their error in the end - or their children do. (p. 24)
People always clutch at straws, nobody wants to part with his illusions, and it is very difficult to look life in the face. To see things as they are demands a superhuman effort. There are those who want to be blind, but even among those who think they are not, how many are left who can really see see? Or rather, who do not slightly distort what they see to keep their illusions and hopes alive? (p. 63)
The loss of mutual trust is the first sign of the atomization of society in dictatorships of our type, and this was just what our leaders wanted. (p. 95)
Kindness is not, after all, an inborn quality - it has to be cultivated, and this only happens when it is in demand. For our generation, kindness was an old-fashioned, vanished quality, and its exponents were as extinct as the mammoth. Everything we have seen in our times - the dispossession of the kulaks, class warfare, the constant “unmasking” of people, the search for an ulterior motive behind every action - all this has taught us to be anything you like except kind. (p. 134)
Tangential: The Poetry Foundation has the poet’s biography and some of his poetry online.