HOPE ABANDONED by NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM Translated by MAX HAYWARD 687 pages. Atheneum. $13.95.
"I survived only by a miracle or an oversight, which is the same thing," says Nadezhda Mandelstam, who at 74 is one of the last relics of a class once respectfully known as the Russian intelligentsia. For 50 years she has lived and suffered in the shadow of her famous husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in one of Stalin's prison camps during the winter of 1938. Two years ago Mrs. Mandelstam introduced herself to the West with Hope Against Hope, a book—never published in the Soviet Union—that established her as one of the great memoirists of the century.
In a prose style that combines rich digression with bitter clarity, she told how Stalin played a sadistic game of cat and mouse with her and her husband.
As a witness to one of the age's most massive and systematic assaults on individualism, she also salvaged an era of epic hardship and courage from the limbo of censored history. The book began with Mandelstam's first arrest in 1934 for a poem that described the dictator as a tribal hetman savoring each death like a raspberry. Thereafter, the impoverished Mandelstams were hounded all over Russia by vengeful bureaucrats.
"Revolting Cowardice." Mrs. Mandelstam makes few concessions to those who have not read Hope Against Hope. Her new book, which has also been superbly translated by Max Hayward, is a sprawling but inhabitable annex to the first volume. It is as if in memoir form she has staked out the private living space that is so scarce in the communal world of the Soviet Union.
The first book centered around the last four years of Mandelstam's life. Hope Abandoned shuttles unchronologically back and forth over the past half-century, concentrating heavily on their early years together. The author, a former teacher and translator who lives in Moscow, regards the precise preservation of memories as both a personal and socially responsible moral act.
"To lose one's memory—provided it was an honest one—is to lose touch with reality," she writes. "The present becomes meaningless when facts are 'processed,' and you serve them up to yourself and others in whatever guise happens to suit the moment."
She can be harsh about the foibles of acquaintances and even of friends whose memory she holds dear. But when she calls someone a scoundrel or a swine, or describes a "major" unnamed contemporary Russian poet as "an unhappy, downtrodden creature of revolting cowardice," she manages not to sound petty, vindictive or prone to literary backbiting. Her judgments have been shaped by a hard life that has compelled her to see the difference between good, weak and evil men.
The Mandelstams met in 1919, a time of optimistic chaos, and began living together a year later. Writers generally, and even poetic idealists like Mandelstam, found ready employment in newly formed educational and cultural agencies, where payment was usually in food and clothing. A lecture on the Russian symbolist poet Alexander Blok earned Mandelstam enough cloth for a suit and two dresses for his wife.