'A homesickness for world culture': Eimear McBride Considers Osip Mandelstam's Legacy at New Statesman

At the New Statesman, Eimear McBride discusses the challenges that Osip Mandelstam faced as a poet in Soviet Russia. Perhaps most telling is this segment of McBride's article, "By the time of this first arrest, Mandelstam had already lived for several years with the knowledge that the long-term aim of the Soviet state machine was to take his life – the method and the timescale were all that remained to be revealed. 'Only in Russia is poetry respected,' he is quoted as ­saying. 'It gets people killed. Is there ­anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?'" But first, more about the years leading up to Mandelstam's arrest:

The truth of this statement had been borne out long before Russia arrived at the great Yezhov terror of 1937-38, which was to provide Mandelstam and so many others with their end. Anna Akhmatova’s former husband, the poet and founder of the Acmeist movement, Nikolai Gumilev, had been arrested by the Cheka, the secret police, framed for participating in a fictitious tsarist plot and summarily executed in 1921. Vladimir Mayakovsky, initially a vigorous supporter of Soviet ideology and evangelical in his profound personal admiration for Lenin, had fallen from grace and been driven, by a series of public accusations, to shoot himself in 1930. Later, in 1941, after years of torment at the hands of the state, including the execution of her husband and the imprisonment of her daughter, Marina Tsvetaeva hanged herself.

Nadezhda Mandelstam – the poet’s wife and invaluable support throughout his, and their, many years of persecution and exile – wrote in her powerful memoir of both the poet and the era, Hope Against Hope, about the many instances when, confronted with the desperation of their situation, they had asked each other if this was the moment when they, too, could no longer bear to go forward. The final occasion was to be the last night they spent in their Moscow apartment before being banished, without means of providing for themselves, to a succession of rural towns situated beyond a hundred-kilometre perimeter of all major cities. She awoke to find Mandelstam standing at the open window. “Isn’t it time?” he said. “Let’s do it while we’re still together.” “Not yet,” she replied. Mandelstam didn’t argue but she later reflected, “If we had been able to foresee all the alternatives, we would not have missed that last chance of a ‘normal’ death offered by the open window of our apartment in Furmanov Street.” Opting, in that moment, for a little more life changed nothing and Mandelstam soon found himself being moved inexorably towards Stalin’s endgame in the camps.

Continue at New Statesman.