And there are so many of them in human history.
The Mandelstams: Hope Against Hope
On this day in 1891 the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam was born. While by no means the only writer driven to death by Stalin's Reign of Terror, Mandelstam has become, for many, the symbol of all those so destroyed. This is partly due to his poetry -- most rank him among the best Russian poets, some among the best of all 20th century poets -- and partly due to his wife. Nadezhda Mandelstam salvaged many of Mandelstam's banned poems by either memorizing them or collecting them in manuscript form; she also chillingly and movingly documented her husband's death and times in her memoir, Hope Against Hope.
you regarded yourself as a widow or orphan from the moment of his arrest. When a woman was told in the Prosecutor's office that her husband had been given ten years, the official sometimes added: "You can remarry." Nobody ever raised the awkward question as to how this gracious "permission" to remarry could be squared with the official sentence.... |
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