I – 9 – Hope

Hope –

The Russian poet Ossip Mandelstam, who was a critic of the Russian Revolution, was persecuted by Stalin, and deported to Siberia, wrote about his fellow poets and intellectuals in the Soviet Union who embraced Stalinism as a career opportunity or a dream:

“Stalin doesn’t need to cut off heads. They fly away on their own like dandelion seeds.”

Ossip and Nadezhda Mandelstam

“For the right to live,” wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam, “one had to pay due homage to the ideology and the prevailing style. People were alarmed only when those who did so were killed anyway. People were quite indifferent toward Mandelstam. Those who did not play their part were not admitted into the superstructure. All they could hope for then was a bunk in a labor camp, although in our camps, as in the German ones, there were not even bunks, but only bare planks.”

Nadezhda Mandelstam; *Hope against Hope*; A memoir; London, Harvill Press, 1999

Nadezhda Mandelstam, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5ARWfrzOQk

In the photo right: Nadezhda Mandelstam in the 1970s in her apartment in Moscow