On Jan. 15, 1991, five members of the Ninety South Expedition reach the South Pole.
-- "Antarctic Navigation" (1994)
By Elizabeth Arthur

From "The Book of Fictional Days"
Know when something that did not really happen
occurred? Send it to fictiondays@yahoo.com.

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Osip Mandelstam was brought up in St. Petersburg in a cultured, outward-looking way -- music, the classics, some time at the Sorbonne and the University of Heidelberg. His early poetry appeared in the progressive magazines; his description of "Acmeism," the school of poetry to which he belonged, was as a "yearning for world culture." He did not react well to Stalin's boot-kick politics. Though Mandelstam's poems can be allusive and complex, he made this one, written in 1933, not hard to understand -- and available only to a small circle of friends:

"We live without feeling beneath us firm ground,
At ten feet away you can't hear the sound

Of any words but 'the wild man in the Kremlin,
Slayer of peasants and soul-strangling gremlin.'

Each thick finger of his is as fat as a worm,
To his ten-ton words we all have to listen ..."

Mandelstam was arrested about seven months later. It was shortly afterwards that he became the subject of Stalin's famous telephone call to Boris Pasternak, himself a possible target at this point and therefore susceptible to turn-the-screw tactics: Had Pasternak heard the poem? What did he think of Mandelstam? Pasternak avoided the poem and praised the poet, but this did nothing to save Mandelstam from the four-year nightmare -- interrogation, imprisonment, exile, release, reimprisonment, final disappearance -- documented by his wife.

The name Nadezhda means "Hope." Her book was published when she was in her 70s, and there is no Dr. Zhivago sentimentality in it -- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's review described "a tough, old woman's tongue, spare, matter-of-fact, unadorned by figures of speech." It has moments of black humor, such as the story of one party official so swamped by his tattle-telling system that he had to announce a ban on unsigned denunciations. But mostly it is compulsive, let-this-not-happen reading, full of iron love and, from first door knock to last rubber stamp, of contempt:

"The issue of a death certificate was not the rule but the exception. To all intents and purposes, as far as his civil status was concerned, a person could be considered dead from the moment he was sent to a camp, or, indeed, from the moment of his arrest, which was automatically followed by his conviction and sentence to imprisonment in a camp. This meant he vanished so completely that it was tantamount to physical death. Nobody bothered to tell a man's relatives when he died in camp or prison: you regarded yourself as a widow or orphan from the moment of his arrest. When a woman was told in the Prosecutor's office that her husband had been given ten years, the official sometimes added: 'You can remarry.' Nobody ever raised the awkward question as to how this gracious 'permission' to remarry could be squared with the official sentence ..."

-- Steve King

To find out more about "Today in Literary History," contact Steve King.