On Hope

So I am a really horrible blogger. I suppose in some ways that is acceptable to me. Primarily beause I believe I rather enjoy the fact that everybody out there can think what he or she will of me and not really have any insight into the real me making such judgements in my mind arbitrary and insignificant. On the other hand I benefit greatly from the process of writing out my thoughts and ideas because it requires me to actually put a concious efforts into which I should pull from the stream, which I should leave, and even which of the netted thoughts I should keep and which I should cast back.

I have been reading a wonderful book called Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam. At the beginnin of the book, before the introduction even, there is a copy of an obituary for Nadezhda Mandelstam written by Joseph Brodsky, a post Stalinist Soviet poet. Brodsky starts out his introduction thusly: "Of the eighty-one years of her life, Nadezhda Mandelstam spent nineteen as the wife of Russia's greatest poet in this century, Osip Mandelstam, and forty-two as his widow."

So basically the book is Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir of life as the wife of a banned poet under the Stalin regime. It is a fascinating read. Much of the book has been more on philosophy and an explication of various attitudes prevalent in Soviet Russia before, during, and after various purges. One of the main ideas Mandelstam keeps going back to is the failure of humanism in Soviet Russia. I am fascinated by humanism and therefore find this very interesting. Anyway, earlier I blogged about a book I was reading called The Stalin Epigram by Robert Little about a scathing poem Osip Mandelstam (Nadezhda’s husband) wrote about the one he dubbed in the original version, “the Kremlin mountaineer,” and the aftermath of the poem’s writing. That novel got me interested in the story of Mandelstam and his widow’s memoir is marvelously insightful. It makes me want to study the greats of the Stalin era, Bulgakov, Mandelstam, Pasternak, and many others of whom I have not yet heard. It also makes me want to study poetry. Not just the reading but the writing.

There were some other things I wanted to blog about too but I do not think I will get to them tonight. They are just not quite ready yet, and they are to me quite dear.