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Lädt ... Hope Against Hope: A Memoir (1999. Auflage)von Nadezhda Mandelstam, Max Hayward
Werk-InformationenDas Jahrhundert der Wölfe (5744 784). Eine Autobiographie. von Nadezhda Mandelstam
Lädt ...
Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. Beautifully written. The poet Osid Mandelstam’s wife writes a series of tight vingettes which together weave an account of life as an intellectual in the days of Stalin and his terror. Depressing, disorienting untethering of sane social order, honesty, trust....all leading to his death of unknown exact time, and manner or cause. The pointless cruelty of it all. Superlative, deeply honest memoir of the poetry years of Nadezhda's famous husband, Osip Mandelstam. Nadezhda asks the questions in 1970, year her book came out, that most were still afriad to ask. What was it like to be an artist under Stalin's totalitarianism? She tells us how life under Stalin's terror contributed to her husband's mental illness. In the midst of The Terror, her husband continued to write poems. What is the purpose of art, she asks, 30 years after Osip's death in a labor camp. Nadezhda writes with both detachment and compassion how she and her husband became completely isolated once Osip had experienced his first arres. Only a provincial, uneducated landlady was unafraid to help them. Indigent, exiled from their home of Moscow, they move from one provincial town to another. The rare target of The Terror who escaped did so by continuing to move -- town to town -- keeping one step ahead of the NKVD. Finally, Osip and Nadezhda are lured to a sanatorium which offered desperately welcomed comfort, regular meals and medical care. It is here that Osip is arrested, transported to a labor camp and -- mercifully, according to Nadezhda --soon dies. One of the better books on Soviet Russia. It remains vibrant 50 years after its writing. The 20-year old Nadezhda Mandelstam met the poet and her future husband Osip Mandelstam (*1891) in 1919. In these reminiscences - it is more a biography of O.M. than an autobiography as this german edition claims - written in the late 1950s, she looks back on the years with Ossip Mandelstam until he was taken away and died 1938 in a transit camp in Siberia. A Russian edition was published 1970 in New York and translated into German, English, French, .. in the following years. In the Soviet Union it was handed on only as samizdat copies.The German title is a reference to poems by O.M. but an insult to wolves: only humans are capable of inflicting such horrors on their own kind. The English title 'Hope against Hope' is well chosen as nadezhda means "hope" in Russian. In 83 stories N.M. relates observations and descriptions, encounters and reflections, not always in chronological sequence which can at times be a little confusing. It is a record of the times of terror she lives through with O.M., she tells us more about O.M. and their friend the poetess Anna Akhmatova, than of herself: relationships are poisoned by suspicion, friends become spies, … I found some of O.M.’s poems translated by Paul Celan, himself a poet, to German in the last volume of his collected works: Paul Celan: Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, Fünfter Band: Übertragungen II, Zweisprachig, Suhrkamp, 1983 keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
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The story of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who suffered continuous persecution under Stalin, but whose wife constantly supported both him and his writings until he died in 1938. Since 1917 The Modern Library prides itself as The Modern Library of the World's Best Books. Featuring introductions by leading writers, stunning translations, scholarly endnotes and reading group guides. Production values emphasize superior quality and readability. Competitive prices, coupled with exciting cover design make these an ideal gift to be cherished by the avid reader. Of the eighty-one years of her life, Nadezhda Mandelstam spent nineteen as the wife of Russia's greatest poet in this century, Osip Mandelstam, and forty-two as his widow. The rest was childhood and youth." So writes Joseph Brodsky in his appreciation of Nadezhda Mandelstam that is reprinted here as an Introduction. Hope Against Hope was first published in English in 1970. It is Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir of her life with Osip, who was first arrested in 1934 and died in Stalin's Great Purge of 1937-38. Hope Against Hope is a vital eyewitness account of Stalin's Soviet Union and one of the greatest testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written. But it is also a profound inspiration--a love story that relates the daily struggle to keep both love and art alive in the most desperate circumstances. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)891.713Literature Literature of other languages Literature of east Indo-European and Celtic languages Russian and East Slavic languages Russian poetry 1800–1917Klassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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It is a memoir of these two specific people, yet so much more. It is full of great historical, sociological and psychological insight into the times. She clearly identifies the Revolution as a total overthrow of old values and their replacement by new. In the early days of the 1920s, there was widespread enthusiasm for this new project. Consider this passage in which she writes of the new regime: During this time, Osip's poetry went silent as he tried to find a vantage point from which to firmly approach and understand this new world. He was not unsympathetic to it, but he was unable to come to terms with its demand for absolute unanimity and lack of doubt, or to go silent. His poetry resumed in the later twenties, though he had an increasingly difficult time being published, and in 1934 was arrested for the first time.
Her description of society's reaction to the Stalin terror is the best I've ever read. There were few heroes who dared to openly challenge it. She writes, "I can testify that nobody I knew fought - all they did was to lie low. This was the most that people with a conscience could do - and even that required real courage." What most people did was to try to save themselves. If they did not become informers, they acted for the benefit of their neighbors who were. Nadezhda sees the terror as a natural outcome of the post-revolutionary value change, the discarding of humanism and faith in the new scientific certainty, and not some accidental anomoly: And she brightly analyzes the purpose and methods of the terror, the quotas of victims that must be met in increasing numbers until continuing the terror is no longer tenable: After Osip's arrest, a "miracle" occurred in that he was not shot or sent to a labor camp, but exiled from major cities. With his status as an exile, however, he and Nadezhda could hardly find work in the completely state-controlled economy, as their hiring by anyone could have led to the denouncement and arrest of anyone so "unvigilant" enough to hire an enemy of the people. So they were reduced to begging among their friends and literary circles until Osip's second arrest in 1937 and sudden death shortly thereafter.
Unlike most of her contemporaries even in the post-Stalin "thaw" of the sixties, Nadezhda decided not to keep quiet about her experiences. Writing this memoir was a triumph of individual will and moral strength refusing to be conquered and go silent. This stance was mirror of her husband Osip's. Reading this incredible book today can be a bit difficult due a couple of factors: the historical insularity and discursive nature of her writing. So many names are discussed that the non-expert in Soviet history and literature will not recognize, and the appendix of names in the back makes for essential flipping back and forth. The narrative of her and Osip's trials, meanwhile, is frequently broken up by these musings on larger societal issues, or stories about people they knew. For instance, shortly before Osip's final arrest they returned to the Moscow region, but after the narrative takes them there we wander off into sixty pages of discussions of what books they used to own, how Osip felt about Italy, poetic theory... and then the narrative story picks up where it was left.
I'll leave off with this hopeful conclusion of Nadezdha Mandelstam: ( )