Mandelstam

One of the ideas that kept coming up for me when reading (as seems to be the case for the other books we've read this semester) is the urgency and necessity to speak up. The poem that Osip wrote on Stalin, for example, is at the center of Nadezhda's book. Targeted for its criticism of Stalin and its anti-totalitarian notion, the poem led to Osip's arrest in 1933. When Nadezhda considers Osip's (or M.) motives for the poem, the first she cites is "a feeling that he could no longer be silent" (139).

The idea of silence appears often throughout the book. Particularly, I noticed, in connection with generations and truth. A few moments/lines that stood out to me:

"But how will historians ever get at the truth if every minute grain of it is buried under huge layers of monstrous falsehoods? By this I mean not just the prejudices and misconceptions of any age, but deliberate and premeditated lies" (24). These lines arrive just a couple of pages after Nadezhda talks aout the necessity of lying in order to survive under the Stalin regime. Truth and lies are a key theme of this book--as part of the oppression during the times, everyone was forced to lie, trust no one, withdraw. So although these were key to her survival, I think Nadezhda also understands the distinction between them and the necessity of ultimately exposing truth (the way M. did in his writing and in the way she does in this book).

"We are all exceedingly well 'prison-trained'--whether or not we have actually been in jail--and we know how to seize 'the last chance of being heard'" (31). That urgency, she says, comes naturally to those who lived in those times and lived that "sort of life." I wonder, also, if this idea can also be attributed to her feelings of obligation to preserve M.'s manuscripts.

This quotation falls moreso on the side of generations than it does speaking out/up. "In periods of violence and terror people retreat into themselves and hide their feelings, but their feelings are ineradicable...Even if they are wiped out in one generation...they will burst forth again in the next one...The idea of good seems really to be inborn, and those who sin against the laws of humanity always see their error in the end--or their children do" (39). It seems that in this instance, Nadezhda is speaking on the idea of how influential events are on the next generation. It is not enough to say that such-and-such happened in the past, because its effects will linger and drift into the following generation. And I suppose, to take it a step further, it might be the responsibility of that next generation to acknowledge those lingering effects--either because the previous generation remained silent or if only to build on to its story.

"I decied that it is better to scream. This pitiful sound...is a concentrated expression of the last vestige of human dignity. It is a man's way of leaving a trace, of telling people how he lived and died. By his screams he asserts his right to live, sends a message to the outside world demanding help and calling for resistance...Silence is the real crime against humanity" (43). One of the more explicit commentaries on silence in this book, Nadezhda finds that screaming, although it might seem like an abandonment of pride, actually symbolizes one's humanity. Throughout the book, she shows the ways in which Stalinist oppression stifled these screams or actually eliminated the power for people to scream. In this way, I think Nadezhda's ideas about screaming, if one can, are important not only to those who are under oppression or are suffering, but also for those in subsequent generations, to scream for those who could not.

I'm afraid I may be getting a bit too detailed here, combing through the book too meticulously and pulling out quotations. This post could go on for quite a bit.

One more idea about silence--a little bit different from the others--is that of being guilty and/or complicit in the oppression through silence. This comes up throughout the book. One of the first places I noted it was on page 109: "We all took the easy way out by keeping silent in the hope that not we but our neighbors would be killed. It is even difficult to tell which among us were accomplices to murder, and which were just saving their skins by silence."

I'll end: "What will our grandchildren make of it if we all leave the scene in silence?" (161).