I am now faced with a new task, and am not quite sure how to go about it. Earlier it was all so simple: my job was to preserve M.'s verse and tell th… - Nadezhda Mandelstam

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I am now faced with a new task, and am not quite sure how to go about it. Earlier it was all so simple: my job was to preserve M.'s verse and tell the story of what happened to us. The events concerned were outside our control. Like any other wife of a prisoner, like any other stopiatnitsa or exiled person, I thought only about the times I lived in, racking my brains over the question: How could this happen, how had we come to such a pass? Thinking about this, I forgot myself and what had happened to me personally, and even that I was writing about my own life, not somebody else's. The fact is that there was nothing exceptional about my case. There were untold numbers of women like myself roaming the country-mute, cowed creatures, some with children, some without, timidly trying to do their work as best they could and constantly "improving their qualifications," which meant joining study groups to sweat year in, year out, over the "Fourth Chapter," (Footnote: "The chapter on Dialectical Materialism written by Stalin in The History of the C.P.S.U.: Short Course (1938).") including the story of how the ape turned into Homo sapiens by learning to distinguish left from right. (This development was aided to some extent by food rich in vitamins and protein-more than we could say of ours.) But at least we had our work, and we clung to it frantically, knowing that without it all was lost...