by Mara Naselli
Osip Mandelstam spent a lifetime moving from one place to another. His family moved often during his childhood; his exile, however, began after he recited to a gathering of friends a poem he had composed in the fall of 1933. The poem mocked Stalin and his totalitarian rule: “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 broadchested / Georgian munching a raspberry.”
The following spring, Mandelstam was arrested and his apartment searched. The poem was not found and was probably never written down. After his arrest, Mandelstam went to prison for a time and he and his wife Nadezhda were condemned to move from one place to another. “It has been said that Soviet citizens do not need to build houses for themselves because they have the right to demand a free apartment from the state,” wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam in her memoir Hope Against Hope. “But whom does one demand it from?” Soviet propaganda boasted everyone deserved a place to live, but residency required permission, to which all kinds of coercion could be attached. Nadezhda writes,
Your permit to reside went with your accommodation and if you lost it you could never return to the city you had lived in. For many people their apartments turned out to be real traps. The clouds were already gathering, their friends and colleagues were being picked up one after another, or, as we used to say, the shells were falling nearer and nearer, but the possessors of permanent titles to apartments stayed put for the police to come and get them.
Soviet logic worked in two directions at once. A right to live meant a right to be traced, monitored, interrogated, moved. Nadezhda lived in twelve cities between the time of her husband’s arrest in 1934 and his death in 1938. “Every time we joined all the other people making the rounds of offices to get our bits of paper,” she writes, “we trembled in case we should be unlucky and be forced to move in some unknown direction for reasons not revealed to us.” Osip’s first city of exile was Cherdyn, where he was required to report to a bureaucratic office every three weeks. The reporting, the applications for permits, the constant threat of informants. The state forced on the Mandelstams and countless others a life of dislocation.
No wonder Osip Mandelstam loved Dante. When the police took him to prison in the middle of the night, he brought The Divine Comedy with him. When Nadezhda followed him, months later, she brought another copy in case the first had been lost or confiscated.