Nadezhda Jakowlewna Mandelstam

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Nadeschda Jakowlewna Mandelstam, 1925

Nadeschda Jakovlevna Mandelstam ( Russian: Надежда Яковлевна Мандельштам ; scientific transliteration Nadežda Jakovlevna Mandel'štam ; * 18 October July / 30 October  1899, greg. In Saratow ; † 29 December 1980 in Moscow ), born in Russian Хазинази Moscow was a Russian author and the wife of the poet Ossip Mandelstam .

life and work

She was born in Saratov into a middle-class Jewish family . She spent her early years in Kiev . After attending high school, she studied art.

In 1919 she met Ossip Mandelstam. After their marriage in 1921 (or 1922) Nadezhda and Ossip Mandelstam lived in the Ukraine , Petrograd , Moscow and Georgia . Osip was arrested in 1934 for his Stalin epigram and sent into exile with Nadezhda to Cherdyn , Perm region , and later to Voronezh .

After Ossip Mandelstam's second arrest and his subsequent death in the Wtoraya Retschka transit camp near Vladivostok in 1938, Nadezhda Mandelstam led a nomadic life. She spent the war years in Tashkent with Anna Akhmatova , with whom she became a close friend in 1925 . For fear of being arrested, she often changed her whereabouts and worked as an English teacher in various cities in the Soviet Union. At least once, in Kalinin , NKVD officials rang the doorbell just one day after they had escaped.

She made it her life's task to protect her husband's poetic legacy from destruction by learning his texts by heart, recording them and storing them with her few reliable friends. After Stalin's death, Nadezhda Mandelstam completed her dissertation (1956) and received permission to return to Moscow (1958).

At the end of the fifties she began to write her memoirs, which made her world famous. They were first published abroad in 1970, in the USA, in Russian and almost simultaneously in German, English and French translations (English: Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned , German: The Century of Wolves and Generation Without Tears) . In the Soviet Union, the memoirs circulated in samizdat . In the century of the wolves is engaged in the time from 1934 to 1938, between the first arrest of Osip Mandelstam and his death in 1938 in a transit camp. Her text is also a brilliant analysis of totalitarianism, in which she describes not only the increasing terror of the 1930s, but also the "accomplice role of the intelligentsia ": "The twenties became so fatal because people not only recognized their own helplessness, but because they also praised them and considered any intellectual, moral and spiritual resistance to be out of date, ridiculous and nonsensical. […] And if someone resisted, he was accused of anarchism, pathetic individualism and stupidity that prevented him from recognizing the laws of historical development. ”In the second volume of the memoirs, she goes back to the 1920s and portrays the literary development in the Soviet Union very critically. The English title of the memoirs are puns: Nadezhda means in Russian "Hope" (English. Hope ). The Russian edition is simply called Memories (Russian Воспоминания ; Book 1 to 3).

A third book was left unfinished. The memories of Anna Akhmatova , which were thought to be lost for 40 years, are taken from him. They were published in German translation by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2011.

In 1979 Nadezhda Mandelstam gave her archives to Princeton University . In 1980 she died in Moscow at the age of 81.

Work editions

  • Hope Against Hope. A memoir. Atheneum, New York 1970
  • Hope Abandoned. A memoir. From the Russian by Max Hayward. Atheneum, New York 1974
  • The century of the wolves. An autobiography. Translated by Elisabeth Mahler. S. Fischer, Frankfurt 1971 ISBN 3-10-047702-2
  • Generation without tears. Memories. Translated by Godehard Schramm . S. Fischer, Frankfurt 1975 ISBN 3-10-047703-0
  • Memories of Anna Akhmatova. Translated from Christiane Körner . S. Fischer, Frankfurt 2011 ISBN 978-3-518-22465-6

literature

Name variants

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam, Nadežda Yes. Mandel'štam, Nadeschda J. Mandelstam, Nadeschda Mandelstam, Nadežda Jakovlevna Mandel'štam, Nadežda Mandel'štam, Nadesha Mandelstam;

Web links

Commons : Nadezhda Mandelstam  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Review: Non-fiction book: All that remains is the cobweb of the Schottenplaid . In: FAZ.NET . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed May 8, 2020]).
  2. ^ N. Mandelstam: Generation without tears. P. 140 f.
  3. ^ Nadezhda Mandelstam's touching "Memories of Anna Akhmatova" friendship in times of terror . Review by Felix Philipp Ingold, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, January 3, 2012
  4. ^ A friendship in the century of the wolves Nadeschda Mandelstam's "Memories of Anna Akhmatova" . Review by Daniel Henseler, literaturkritik.de
personal data
SURNAME Mandelstam, Nadeschda Jakowlewna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mandelstam, Nadezhda; Chasina, Nadezhda
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian author, wife of Ossip Mandelstam
DATE OF BIRTH October 30, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Saratov
DATE OF DEATH December 29, 1980
Place of death Moscow