When was the last time something got to you?
[Nadezhda Mandelstam] met her future husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, on May Day 1919 in a Kiev restaurant catering to the avant-garde of that city. [She was twenty.] On a later May Day, in 1938, she watched as the secret police arrested him for the second time and took him away in a truck, never to be seen again. The nineteen years enclosed by these dates, rendered fatidic by sheer coincidence, were spent by two people who appear to have been enlarged and ennobled by their association, becoming somehow greater than the sum of their parts -- a third spiritual entity. We are the richer for this happy union; it has provided us, one partner magnifying the other, with infinitely more than we should otherwise have known about Russian life and letters in this century. Certainly we owe to these two something of what we have learned about the power of uncorruptible character and courage.
If Nadezhda Mandelstam had not lived through the balance of the Stalinist nightmare and into the relatively mild reigns of Kruschev and Brezhnev, we should no doubt be ignorant today of an immensely important fund of Osip Mandelstam's writing. She preserved it in her memory. She hid from the authorities whatever unpublished works had been comitted to paper, of course, but she memorized even them, just in case. She carried not only the poetry but the prose in her head, rehearsing it in a cycle of daily routines -- a feat of literary devotion not unknown to the history of sacred letters but surely unequaled in our secular times.
She did not waste the forty-two years of left-over life that remained to her after that second May Day. The first task was to preserve her husband's legacy. The second was to keep herself out of the way of the genocidal fury -- this she did by teaching English in a series of remote teachers' training establishments in the Russian outback...The third task was to write the true story of Osip Mandelstam's life, of her own, and of their time, and, when she was old enough to be past caring, to publish it.
This task was accomplished in two volumes, Hope against Hope and Hope Abandoned, which have revised our notion of how biography and autobiography might be written. They combine the narrative of two lives -- principally his in the first book and hers in the second -- with memoirs of other persons and events, with essays, with sharp political invective and speculation, with literary criticism, and with a sort of dry lamentation, alternately witty and anguished...
Her covenant with Osip Mandelstam discharged and her two books written, Nadezhda Mandelstam lived out the rest of her days smoking ruinous cigarettes and admitting haphazardly to her presence friends, journalists, and utter strangers who had absolutely to see her. The more her government practiced against her such petty atrocities as the denial of all postal service, the greater was her personal ascendancy. When she finally died, her corpse figured in a macabre farce staged by the KGB, whose agents confiscated the eighty pounds or so of her body to prevent the Christian burial requested by Nadezhda that was in the process of being carried out by her friends. Then they eventually returned it. Then Nadezhda Mandelstam was put decently underground beneath a wooden structure in the shape of the Cross.
-- Clarence Brown
Can you imagine? Finding the person meant for you, your god's-honest-truth soulmate, and having them taken from you by something so ridiculous?