Nadezhda Mandelstam > Quotes

“I decided it is better to scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.”
― Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope

“The only good life is one in which there is no need for miracles.”
― Nadezhda Mandelstam

“When a bull is being lead to the slaughter, it still hopes to break loose and trample its butchers. Other bulls have not been able to pass on the knowledge that this never happens and that from the slaughterhouse there is no way back to the herd. But in human society there is a continuous exchange of experience. I have never heard of a man who broke away and fled while being led to his execution. It is even thought to be a special form of courage if a man about to be executed refuses to be blindfolded and dies with his eyes open. But I would rather have the bull with his blind rage, the stubborn beast who doesn't weigh his chances of survival with the prudent dull-wittedness of man, and doesn't know the despicable feeling of despair.”
― Nadezhda Mandelstam

“And after his death - or even before it, perhaps - he lived on in camp legend as a demented old man of seventy who had once written poetry in the outside world and was therefore nicknamed The Poet. And another old man - or was it the same one? - lived in the transit camp of Vtoraya Rechka, waiting to be shipped to Kolyma, and was thought by many people to be Osip Mandelstam - which, for all I know, he may have been. That is all I have been able to find out about the last days, illness and death of Mandelstam. Others know very much less about the death of their dear ones.”
― Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope

“On the bottom shelf M. kept the books from his childhood days: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, the Iliad - they are described in The Noise of Time and happened to have been saved by M.'s father. Most of them later perished in Kalinin when I was fleeing from the Germans. The way we have scurried to and fro in the twentieth century, trapped between Hitler and Stalin!”
― Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope

“The old Russian proverb that prison or the poorhouse waits for every man has never been more true and the verb, "to write" took on an additional meaning in the Russian language.”
― Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope

“It seems to me that for any artist eternity is something tangibly present in every fleeting fraction of time, which he would gladly stop and thus make even more tangible. What causes anguish in an artist is not longing for eternity, but a temporary loss of his feeling that every second of time is, in its fullness and density, the equal of eternity itself”
― Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope

“...the earth is not an encumbrance or an unfortunate accident, but a God-given palace.

--OSIP MANDELSTAM”
― Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope

“People always clutch at straws, nobody wants to part with his illusions, and it is very difficult to look life in the face. To see things as they are demands a superhuman effort. There are those who want to be blind, but even among those who think they are not, how many are left who can really see? Or, rather, who do not slightly distort what they see to keep their illusions and hopes alive?”
― Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope

“The old Russian proverb that prison or the poorhouse waits for every man has never been more true, and the verb "to write" took on an additional meaning in the Russian language.”
― Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope

“Стихи как слово. Сознательно выдуманное слово лишено жизнеспособности. Это доказано всеми неудачами словотворчества - наивной индивидуалистической игры с божественным даром человека - речью. К
фонетическому комплексу, называющемуся словом, прикрепляют произвольное
значение, и получается блатной язык или та словесная шелуха, которой пользуются в корыстных целях жрецы, заклинатели, правители и прочие шарлатаны. И над словом, и над стихами совершают это надругательство, чтобы пользоваться ими, как хрусталиком гипнотизера. Обман рано или поздно будет разоблачен, но человеку всегда грозит опасность попасть под обаяние
и власть новых обманщиков, другой стороной повернувших свой хрусталик. "Внутри”
― Nadezhda Mandelstam

“The idea of good seems really to be inborn, and those who sin against the laws of humanity always see their error in the end - or their children do.”
― Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope