The Last Days of Mandelstam – Vénus Khoury-Ghata (tr. Teresa Lavender Fagan)

We live, not feeling the ground under our feet,
no one hears us more than a dozen steps away,

And when there’s enough for half a small chat –
ah, we remember the Kremlin mountaineer:

Tick fingers, fat like worms, greasy,
words solid as iron weights,

Huge cockroach-whiskers laughing,
boot-tops beaming.

And all around him a rabble of thin-necked captains:
he toys with the sweat of half-men.

Some whistle, some meow, some snivel,
he’s the only one looking, jabbing.

He forges decrees like horseshoes – decrees and decrees:

This one gets it in the balls, that one in the
                forehead, him right between the eyes.

Whenever he’s got a victim he glows like a broad-chested
Georgian munching a raspberry

• Quoted from ‘Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam (translated bby Burton Raffel and Alla Burago) (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1973)

Russian poet Osip Mandelstam penned this poem, credited as “Stalin Epigram”, a satirical description of Stalin and the prevailing climate of fear for artists in the 1930’s in the Soviet Union, I like the line “huge cockroach-whiskers laughing”. It is two lines from an earlier version of this work that forms a leitmotif in this novella ‘The Last Days of Mandelstam’;

All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,
The murderer and peasant-slayer

This poem, “Stalin Epigram”, was recited at a few small private gatherings in Moscow, and a copy, using the term “peasant-slayer”, so the earlier version, was handed into the police. Given the risks involved, neither Mandelstam, nor his wife Nadezhda, had written down the work and therefore one of their so-called trusted friends who had heard the recitation had memorised and copied the piece before handing it to the police. As it was common for the death penalty to be carried out on “dissidents” such as Mandelstam, he rightfully became very concerned and a campaign was launched by his wife Nadezhda and the poet Anna Akhmatova to save him. He was exiled to Cherdyn, in the Northern Urals.

Anna Akhmatova, shortlisted for the Nobel Prize, has her own backstory, her first husband Nikolay Gumilyov, was executed by the Soviet secret police, and her son Lev Gumilyov and her common-law husband Nikolay Punin spent many years in the Gulag, where Punin died

For Mandelstam, there was to be suicide attempts, a return to Moscow where his home was now occupied by others, begging for food, clothes and housing, and further arrests and persecution. All of this captured by Lebanese born, exiled in Paris, writer and poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata in the haunting and reflective work ‘The Last Days of Mandelstam’.

At the beginning of this short work, we join Mandelstam “lying for months – how many? – on a wooden plank, his mattress, Mandelstam wonders if he is dead or still alive.” And we have many a short reflection on his life and the situations that led to him in being in a transit camp near Vladivostok, in the far east of Russia, awaiting his transportation to a correction camp to serve a five-year sentence for “counter-revolutionary activities”.

A frightened old man under his blanket, with his hallucinations and delirium.

The voices of his neighbours reach his ears through the tattered screen of the fabric.

He catches one out of two of the words they speak.

How difficult it is to put the words together in a sentence.

To give meaning to what seems to be important to them.

Listening to them, they have nothing to regret.

Conscience as white as the snow of the Urals but they found themselves in the wrong place, at the mercy of raids.

Should have moved before, left no trace behind.

No telephone or electricity, no children registered at birth, no schooling, no hospitalizations.

No death certificate.

To fade away. If needed, penetrate underground. Di one’s own lair. Imitate the hare, the ant, the weasel…

Wild imaginings flourish in the camp where the dead and the living are piled up like sardines.

Everyone shares his story. The others need not necessarily believe it.

Short, sharp sentences, the blank canvas of Mandelstam’s life populated with a broad brush, minutiae, memories, snippets of experiences, with no sequential order, blur and highlight the poetic, a voice that Mandelstam refused to renounce.

This novella is populated with the memories of other writers, Boris Pasternak who helped Mandelstam whilst remaining in favour with the authorities. According to a biography of Pasternak, in April 1934 Mandelstam recited his “Stalin Epigram” to Pasternak. After listening, Pasternak told Mandelstam: “I didn’t hear this, you didn’t recite it to me, because, you know, very strange and terrible things are happening now: they’ve begun to pick people up. I’m afraid the walls have ears and perhaps even these benches on the boulevard here may be able to listen and tell tales. So let’s make out that I heard nothing.”

There is also the harrowing tale of Anna Akhmatova and her husband’s execution and son’s exile to the Gulag.

Mandelstam, Akhmativa, Tsvetaeva and so many other muzzled poets, isolated from their young readers, deported.

Deportations often followed by executions. Gumilyov, Akhmatova’s husband, shot without a trial at the age of twenty-seven.

Her son Lev deported, Akhmativa didn’t write any more. Her poems could potentially aggravate her son’s case. You had to be invisible to survive. Pretend not to exist.

This is a beautifully rendered, if harrowing, insight into Mandelstam, his persecution, madness, and death in exile. The language flowing poetically, the snippets, fragments slowly forming a picture of a man reduced to a threadbare blanket, stripped of his poetry, his creations, reduced to begging for food from a rapidly decreasing circle of friends.

Vénus Khoury-Ghata uses poetic techniques, such as repetition, divergent metaphors, to recreate the final days of a persecuted, now celebrated, writer. Extremely moving and bringing to life the persecution of artists, some forgotten, but Stalin’s figure remains.

All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,
The murderer and peasant-slayer

Copy courtesy of the publisher – Seagull Books.