Tag: Nadezhda Mandelstam

You Say You Want a Revolution?

My brother Evgeni Yakovlevich used to say that the decisive part in the subjugation of the intelligentsia was played not by terror and bribery (though, God knows, there was enough of both), but by the…

Nadezhda

Why, at the dawn of the new era, at the very beginning of the fratricidal twentieth century, was I given the name Nadezhda [“Hope” ] ? All I now heard from our friends and acquaintances…

Russian Reflections on Kindness

1. When nineteenth-­century novelists exposed the hy­poc­risy of cruel ­people pretending to be kind, observed Nadezhda Mandelstam, they testified to the unquestioned ac­cep­tance of kindness as a virtue. As La Rochefoucauld observed, hy­poc­risy is the…

Maniacal Obstinacy

I often wonder whether I have in me a single gene or drop off blood inherited from my biblical ancestors, or even from the ghettos of the old Spanish and German cities. Who knows, perhaps…

Today’s One-Liner (#76)

“She has a rare quality of taking full responsibility in the moment for everything she does and says.” –Grigory Dashevsky, quoted in Maria Stepanova’s introduction to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, Everyman’s Library, 2023

The Demise of Kindness

There were once many kind people, and even unkind ones pretended to be good because that was the thing to do. Such pretense was the source of the hypocrisy and dishonesty so much exposed in…

Reading the Russians

In this book I portray the Russian tradition as a dialogue of the dead (and a few still living) extending over centuries. Novelists and their characters, critics and ideologists, argue about ultimate questions that obsessed…