#Voronezh Notebooks

[birchblood]

Twin Peaks // Osip Mandelstam, from Voronezh Notebooks; "Rome".

[llovelymoonn]

on january

paul guest my index of slightly horrifying knowledge: “the lives of optimists” (via @sweatermuppet​) \\ sylvia plath the unabridged journals of sylvia plath \\ osip mandelstam voronezh notebooks \\ annette wynne i’m january \\ sara coleridge the months \\ nancy schoenberger january (via @mitskey​) \\ jean-paul sartre \\ pablo neruda i do not love you except because i love you \\ patricia highsmith the price of salt (via @metamorphesque​) \\ st louis globe-democrat, missouri, january 2, 1919 (via @yesterdaysprint​)

kofi

[hereternalsins]

Where can I hide in this January?

Osip Mandelstam, from Voronezh Notebooks

[xuxanov]

İndi mən; ışığın toratan torundayım.

Osip Mandelstam, from Voronezh Notebooks; “Me, right now, I’m...”

____

[shattered-pieces]

The accused of treason spoke about the pressure in the pre-trial detention center. They took away his notebooks in the Slobozhan dialect | OVD-Info

Dimitrenko was detained on May 28, 2022 after a search. According to investigators, the man was preparing an explosion at the Maslovka railway station in Voronezh. The man does not admit guilt. During the search, security forces allegedly found explosives in Ukrainian juice boxes and a Ukrainian passport in his house, but Dimitrenko himself says that all this was planted on him. The person involved in the case spoke about torture, including having a bag put over his head and threatened with an electric shocker in order to obtain the testimony the security forces needed. During one period, the man was taken from the pre-trial detention center to the investigative department for interrogation, where he was beaten again. After the lawyer’s visit, Dimitrenko again declared his innocence, refusing to testify against himself under Article 51 of the Constitution. They continued to beat him until he returned to the pre-trial detention center, including “with a drill or a screwdriver,” they forced him to say the word “palyanitsya,” and they threatened to put pressure on his loved ones. The lawyer filed a request for a medical examination, but the man was taken to the doctor only two weeks later, when the bruises had disappeared.

[theoptia]

Osip Mandelstam, from Voronezh Notebooks

Text ID: Where can I hide in this January?

[livethinking]

Hope is the last to die: how Nadezhda Yakovlevna saved Osip Mandelshtam’s poems

If we can still read the Voronezh Notebooks, it’s because the courage and perseverance of Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelshtam (nee Khazina) who, for love, learnt by heart every single lines written by her husband, Osip Emilevich Mandelshtam, in order to transcribe them; who, for love, travelled throughout the whole Russia to run away from being arrested and so saving the few manuscripts left (which many of them were destroyed, got lost, or stolen by the Rudakovs), including during World War Two German invasion in Russia; who, for love, was able to spread Mandelshtamks poetry collections via Samizdat and managed to, after several attempts, make rehabilitate his husbands name. A love that in Nadezhda’s memoir seems imperfect but it’s stronger than Stalin’s regime, than censorship, than hunger; a love that overcame death. Love for Osip and his works, for culture, for freedom. It doesn’t seem a coincidence that her name is Nadezhda, which means “hope” in Russia and, indeed, she had never surrendered to fear because she hoped sooner or later her husband’s books could be published officially again. Nadezhda Yakovlevna collected and saved from war and secret police partly for Mandelshtam’s archive, hiding the manuscripts inside pans or sewing them to pillowcases, learning by heart her husband’s verses in the night of during her night shift in a textile factory (where she worked after Mandelshtam’s death, during her pilgrimage to run way from NKVD, and before getting a job as English language teacher). But Nadezhda didn’t only save the poems, she writes in her memoir: «I am now faced with a new task, and am not quite sure how to go about it. Earlier it was all so simple: my job was to preserve M.'s verse aod tell the story of what happened to us. The events concerned were outside our control»[1]. During Khrushchev’s era, she wrote three memoir books, Vospominaya, Vtoraya kniga e Kniga tretya (further a critical book on Osip’s poems, Kommentarii k stikham), first published in the US, the first under the title of Hope Against Hope in 1970, and the second one as Hope Abandoned, in 1974. In these memoirs she tells about her husband, the poetic work, the last years of Mandelshtam’s life with poignancy and much resolution, the horrible years of Stalinian Terror, nor missing to scold those intellectuals who committed to the socialist realism and bureaucrats but understanding the people, who ere in turn victims of fear and poverty. Her memoirs are «a scream of pain suffered for decades», pages that tell not only Nadezhda and Osip’s life together, but that also enlighten the abyss where they fell into. Those pages is a scream of hope after much silence and the continuation of Osip Mandelshtam’s testimony. Nadezhda moved her lips for him, when he couldn’t do this anymore.

Nadezhda Yakovlevna didn’t limit herself to this: she edited the Samizdat edition of the last Mandelshtam’s works, even though she wanted her husband’s poetry would have been published officially. She realised how huge was the circulation of this clandestine edition and she got surprised, because, despite the education system designed to affirm the socialist realism as the lonely critical canon, despite the censorship, the discrimination against a certain group of intellectuals and the destruction of the intelligentsia, «new readers come into being before our very eyes, but to understand how it happened is quite impossible. All one can say is that it came about against all the odds. The whole educational system was geared to preventing the appearance of such readers»[2]. Poetry can’t die because it’s life itself, because there will be always someone who manages to save and transcribed verses, including during terror, because it’s only in this way we can protect our Ego when everything is divided in indefinite “us” and “them”.

During Khrushchev era, Nadezhda understood something was changing and several names there weren’t published any longer, got rehabilitated. Osip Emileivich Mandelshtam’s name appeared only in samizdat and many didn’t dare to pronounce it yet; his name too should have been rehabilitated because he was arrested and condemned while he didn’t commit a crime, and so Nadezhda Yakovlevna, in the middle of the 50s, tried to get Mandelshtam rehabilitated, meeting Aleksey Surkov several times, poet and prominent figure of the Union of Soviet Writers. In 1956, Osip Mandelshtam will have been cleared from the accuse of “counterrevolutionary activities” of 1938, but only in 1987, during Gorbachëv’s administration, his name was completely rehabilitated and cleared from all the charges. Still through Surkov’s help, in 50s, Nadezhda tried to get published all Mandelshtam’s works officially. If Surkov was optimistic, many times the Party denied this idea, especially after the “Zhivago affaire”; Mandelshtam kept being a controversial name. Official publication of Mandelshtam’s work happened only in 90s. Nadezhda Mandelshtam died in 29th December 1980; after ten years her death, in 1990, the Voronezh Notebooks appeared in a complete and official edition in Moscow. «My odd experience, that as witness to poetic work, tells me it’s impossible to put a foot in the throat, it’s impossible to put a muzzle. It’s one of the most sublime human expression, bringer of universal armonies, and it can’t be anything else»[3].

Viviana Rizzo

Reference:

[1] MANDELSHTAM, N.J., Hope Abandoned, New York, Atheneum, 1974, p. 3

[2] Ivi, p. 9

[3] «La mia strana esperienza, quella di testimone del lavoro poetico, mi dice che è impossibile mettergli un piede sulla gola, impossibile infilargli la museruola. È una delle espressioni più sublimi dell'uomo, portatore di armonie universali, né altro può essere», in MANDEL’ŠTAM, N. J., L’epoca e i lupi. Memorie, with an introduction by Clarence Brown, trans. Ita by Giorgio Kraiski, Milano, Mondadori, 1971, p. 221

Sources:

1. FRISIA, A., “Coraggio e poesia. Osip e Nadežda Mandel’štam” in Gariwo: la foresta dei Giusti, web, 30.10.2014, p. 6, https://it.gariwo.net/dl/201410300557_30%20ottobre%20Osip%20e%20Nadezda.pdf (retrieved 18 November 2020)

2. KUVAKDIN, J.,, “Ulica Mandel’štama. Povest’ o stikakh”, in Bibilioteka Aleksandra Belousenko, web, 16.11.2004, https://web.archive.org/web/20071017204834/http://belolibrary.imwerden.de/books/Kuvaldin/kuvaldin_mandelshtam.htm# (retrieved in 20 November 2020)

3. MANDELSHTAM, N.J., Hope Abandoned, New York, Atheneum, 1974

4. MANDEL’ŠTAM, N. J., L’epoca e i lupi. Memorie, with an introduction by Clarence Brown, trans. Ita by Giorgio Kraiski, Milano, Mondadori, 1971

[derangedrhythms]

to pass through the worlds of dreams and death,

Osip Mandelstam, The Voronezh Notebooks; from 'Eyesight of Wasps', tr. Richard & Elizabeth McKane

[chicago-geniza]

memory worse than usual & couldn't recall the name of the russian city where i used to work so googled "город в котором мандельштам был в ссылке" (city where mandelshtam was in exile) because i remembered *that* from nadezhda mandelshtam's memoirs

[dark-academic-dead-poet]

"Then I started slipping out of the world/ And I kept on slipping."

Osip Mandestam, from Voronezh Notebooks|| Camille Norton, Corruption: Poems; The Brado Of The Mind In Contemplation

[hotniatheron]

Transplant: After Georgia O’Keeffe’s Pelvis IV, 1944 -  William Bearhart // Supernatural 4x20 // Osip Mandelstam, from Voronezh Notebooks; “Rome” // Nicola Samari -  The Limits of Control // Supernatural 7x17//   Eleanor Eli Moss, “THE BOOK OF HORSE // The Void King - Kim Jakobsson // Selections & Redactions from ‘100 Bible Verses About Teeth’ - Lip Manegio 

[girlucifer]

western religious themes present in obey me!

betrayal.

[obey me! from brothers no more chat: hello from the celestial realm 2]

even my close friend, someone I trusted, one who shared my bread, has turned against me. [psalms 41:9]

[kiss of judas, giotto]

rebirth.

[osip mandelstam, voronezh notebooks]

it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment... [hebrews 9:27]

[obey me! lesson 12-19]

temptation.

[sinful indulgence, miura ayme]

when the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good and pleasing to the eye [...] she took some and ate it. [genesis 3:6]

[obey me! lesson 35-19]

sinful indulgence.

[obey me! lesson 7-14]

come now, i will test [myself] with pleasure to find out what is good. but that also proved to be meaningless. 'laughter' i said, 'is madness. and what does pleasure accomplish?' [ecclesiastes 2:1-2]

[me and mr. wolf, the real tuesday weld]

wrath.

do not let the sun go down on your anger. [ephesians 4:26]

[close-up of the fallen angel, alexandre cabanel]

[obey me! lesson 19-20]

[peoplesuckandihatethem]

— Osip Mandelstam, from Voronezh Notebooks

[lacunademia]

Where can I hide in this January?

-Osip Mandelstam, from Voronezh Notebooks

[mast7r]

                                             one boy to end the war,   ( like a pig to the slaughter )

sources.   dunkirk (2017) - ilya kaminsky, a city like a guillotine shivers on its way to the neck - aeschylus, the oresteia -  john martin, the destruction of sodom and gomorrah - osip mandelstam, voronezh notebooks - reddit - miriam cahn - the return of black adam (2010) - bo burnham, all eyes on me

[finita--la--commedia]

And snow eyes gnaw like crisp, immaculate bread

Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), from “The Voronezh Notebooks” (1935-1937), translated from the Russian by Tony Brenkley and Raina Kostova “И снег хрустит в глазах, как чистый хлеб, безгрешен”