Nadezhda Mandelstam Quotes

Now again we are not supposed to remember the past and think-let alone speak about it. (42: Last Letter)

Nowadays the average reader doesn't even look for new ideas-he is suspicious of them. For too long now he has been hoodwinked, palmed off with bogus ideas masquerading as genuine ones. Still unable to figure all this out, he is drawn to the other extreme, to anything beyond the bounds of his primitive reasoning process.

it is not just the frequency with which "I" occurs, but the general spirit of a person's work that shows to what extent he is afflicted by the besetting sin of "egotism." And anyway, wasn't it something of a feat to keep a grip on one's own personality and a true sense of identity in our era of wholesale slaughter and death camps on such a vast scale? Times such as these breed only individualism based on the principle "every man for himself," not a true sense of one's own worth. The loss of this sense is not something our age can be proud of, but a sign of its sickness. I know the symptoms from observing myself and those around me.

whatever his quality, the reader is the final arbiter, and it is for him that I kept M.'s poetry and it is to him that I have handed it over. And now, in this long period we are presently living through, a curious process is taking place: people casually leaf through a volume of poetry and, scarcely aware of what is happening, gradually soak it in, until it stirs their numbed and dormant spirits, waking them up and itself coming to life again as it revivifies those it touches. It is a process of diffusion, of interpenetration, by which at least some people are brought back to their senses and given the strength to shake off their accursed inertia. I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here-a sign of unparalleled respect-because they are still capable of living by it.

The man governed by license is prepared to destroy everything and everybody that stands in his way-himself first and foremost. Destruction and self-destruction are the inevitable consequences of license. The suicide of Hitler and his holocaust is the supreme example of self-destruction as the final stage of license. Hitler believed that the whole of Germany would gather around the fire he had lighted. I have read that he spent his last days issuing a constant stream of orders to armies that no longer existed or had disintegrated. He was indignant at these vanished armies for failing to carry out his instructions. His behavior is an excellent illustration of Sergei Bulgakov's observation that license always leads to loss of touch with reality. Bulgakov understood this at a time when license had still not taken on the extreme forms we have seen in our days.