One of the most striking achievements Nadezhda Mandelstam carries off in "Hope Against Hope," is to make real the idea of remembering a person so thoroughly that the person described lives again in the mind of the reader. While Nadezhda argues that the poetry will be the true embodiment of the eternal Osip Mandelstam, she does such an incredible job that the reader can see the man in their mind by the time the last page is read. This accomplishment is made largely -- despite her argument -- without poetry.
There is so much to this book that I'm sure the class will be fascinating and thought-provoking. For me, I was struck by the sheer number of quotes I took from the work. I would like to share many of them. Each, in their own way, is a worthy topic of conversation.
"Poetry only really lives in the poet's own voice, which is preserved forever." (190)
"Virtually excluded from the life of the country, how could he imagine that his voice would sound forth in the cities? It can only be explained by that sense of being right that wihtout which it is impossible to be a poet." (198)
"How could we stand in awe before the forces of nature and the eternal laws of existence if terror of a mundane kind was felt so tangibly in everyday life? In a strange way, despite the horror of it, this also gave a certain richness to our lives." (263)
"Everybody is a victim -- not only those who die, but also all the killers, ideologists, accomplices and sycophants who close their eyes or wash their hands -- even if they are secretly consumed with remorse at night." (300)
"But the champions of terror invariably leave one thing out of account -- namely, that they can't kill everyone, and among their cowed, half-demented subjects there are always witnesses who survive to tell the tale." (320)
"Life is hideous and intolerable, but one must go on living nevertheless, because life is life." (329)
"We have seen the triumph of evil after the values of humanism have been vilified and trampled upon. The reason these values succumbed was probably that they were based on nothing except boundless confidence in the human intellect." (332)
"Man's first duty is to live." (342)
"He told us that songbirds always learned to sing from certain older birds that were particularly good at it. In the Kursk region, once famous for it's nightingales, the best songbirds had all been caught, and young birds had no way of learning anymore." (351)
"When I see books by the Aragons of this world, who are so keen to induce their fellow countrymen to live as they do, I feel I have a duty to tell about my own experience...M. always said that they always knew what they were doing: the aim was to destroy not only people, but the intellect itself." (366)
No comments:
Post a Comment