One of the greatest Russian poets Osip Mandelstam died at the age of 47, cold and emaciated. Mandelstam is one of the poets who died because of his poetry; a defiance turning into death. The Last days of Mandelstam is a harrowing account of Mandelstam's final days, filled with horror of suppression and destitution, hallucination and hunger. Vénus Khoury-Ghata's terse and acute prose profile a poet living by the death-clock hanging over his head, and a fall of a man, a husband and a poet, designed by the dictator.
At the height of his power and
ascension, Stalin was skimming the country, purging his enemies, scheming even
against his old comrades: fated for the show trial and execution. At such times
of state terror, Mandelstam voiced the forbidden and recited Stalin Epigram (part of which has become
a leitmotif throughout the book) – the poetry that opened an abyss of downfall
and death for him – among his few friends. He was betrayed by someone he
thought was his closest, gave away his poetry, and it led to animosity of the
regime. His poetry became the spark that made him a personal enemy of Stalin,
who didn't kill Mandelstam in the first hand, thanks to the appeal of poets and
littérateur, but poisoned his life with deprivation, hunger and exile.
All we hear is the
kremlin mountaineer,
The murderer and peasant-slayer
Exiled from Moscow, Mandelstam
and his wife Nadezhda settled in Voronezh. The couple did not have work permit
and M. was not allowed to publish poetry. At the mercy of few fellow close poets,
penury and hunger made the couple's life miserable. M. wrote his poetry in his
mind, recited them to his wife at night, who mostly remembered them by heart in
her memory-vault – the only way to make sure it is not confiscated – and would
then transcribe them, and entrust them to few trustable. M. was already weak by
this time, and had an ailing heart.
In this biographical, almost
poetic, prose we see Mandelstam and his wife – who happily shared the fate of
the poet – were the victims of state made impoverishment, and of Stalinism and
its persecution. Imaginary dialogues and confrontation with Stalin throbs with
terror Mandelstam felt throughout the rest of his years. As a dissident turned
into an outlaw, Mandelstam attempted suicide, rejected his hunger, though he
was aware of life and death, and even aware of the limbo. At the last days in a
transit camp - where people only spoke the language of hunger – near Vladivostok,
Mandelstam lived in paranoia, was decimated due to hunger and bad health. Fated
for 5 years forced labor camp in Siberia, the poet couldn't last that long and
return once again to his wife. This time, the poet had no strength left to
survive.
The people in the street look like
ghosts. They sleep to forget their hunger… Grass scorched by a horrible hot
summer, there was a lack of hay. Starving cows gave scant milk. Mules had
trouble pulling carts. A common sight, horses collapsed on the road, their
masters whipping them to make them stand up.
A different sound made by the body
dragged on the wet ground after a rain and for the one tossed into a grave.
They learned to differentiate them, learnt to distinguish the sick man who
still had one or two days of life in him from the one who has only a few hours.
In The Last Days of Mandelstam,
we find ourselves in the ruminations of the poet on his past, poetry and exile.
Poetry pieces used in the text show the distinctiveness of M., his realization,
his dissatisfaction, his quips, his voice and his death. We have read so many
stories about Gulag, but this is a tapestry of death, a montage of the poet's
sad end, a gnawing existence where poetry confronts the power. Throughout the
book, we find a restlessness but also an urgency to live, a life interspersed
with poetry, and also a life intercepted due to poetry. The complex drama
sprouted during the reign of terror grips Mandelstam. His life becomes a loop,
a vortex and churning – life going out of him, hope coming back to him. Every
sentence is like an episode of the sad end, a snippet of struggle for existence,
a poetic flame fighting with a storm. In a typhus infested camp, where dead
left the place for the dying, Mandelstam died as if in a hallucinatory pit of
extinction and like a cold demise of a flame. This short book has played the
strings of a dying poet's thoughts and soul, rendering a painful account of the
poet's final days.
To eat: the final thought of the Soviet
citizen tied to the execution pole, thinks the poet under his blanket who
refuses to eat, and without hesitation allows himself to perish.
A strange era, spoken words rarely
connected to thoughts. Denunciations were common currency in cities, the
countryside, even in Voronezh where everyone knew everyone else. People of good
faith spoke of misunderstandings.
The book feels like as if reading
a great Russian novel from the canon, only that here the major characters are
real, cannot choose for their life any longer, and that is how everything is
set and ends. Hunger-stricken harsh individual realities of Mandelstam and his
wife are like the final act of a tragedy. Resistance, denunciation, animosity,
antipathy, persecution, destitution, hunger, hope, love, rejection, exile, death
– Mandelstam's life thread unfurls in these. The poet was attacked on the most
vulnerable spots – basic needs of human survival and well-being. Nadezhda,
poet's wife had at least made sure that the poet lived – otherwise killing the
art would have killed an artist, killing the poems would have killed the poet. Separated
from his wife by a trickery and fated for a labor camp, regime hit the one
final blow, put the poet in a death track, and this time the poet reached his
end. 27 December 1938 – this date will never be forgotten. Mandelstam couldn't
live longer then. But, Nadezhda survived it. We now know Mandelstam was never
dead, Mandelstam can never die!
Original Text: French
Translator: Teresa Lavender Fagan
Publisher: Seagull Books https://www.seagullbooks.org
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