Volume 21, Number 2 · February 21, 1974
The Attack on Mme Mandelstam
By Carl R. Proffer
Russia has a distinguished tradition of autobiographical prose which goes back to the middle of the last century. Annenkov's An Extraordinary Decade, Herzen's My Past and Thoughts, Leo Tolstoi's trilogy, Korolenko's A History of My Contemporary, Nabokov's Other Shores (the Russian version of Speak, Memory), and Osip Mandelstam's The Noise of Time are among the main works of this tradition, and the most recent additions to it are Nadezhda Mandelstam's literary memoirs Hope Against Hope (English version published in 1970), Mozart and Salieri (English translation in 1973), and Hope Abandoned (reviewed in NYR, February 7—the Russian title actually being Second Book, the same title used for an early collection of Mandelstam's poetry). Her books prove that she was not only a 'witness of poetry' (her words) and witness of history, but a great prose writer whose permanent place in Russian literature is more secure than that of any other living writer.
Feature, 4271 words
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