Ultimate issues

In his preface to this anthology of brief memoirs, Robert Silvers suggests that its ‘invisible, tragic core’ is to be found in an account by Isaiah Berlin of one of his several meetings with Boris Pasternak. Pasternak told Berlin how Stalin had once telephoned him to ask him two questions: had Pasternak been present when Mandelstam read out his notorious ‘Epigram’ about Stalin; and was Mandelstam a ‘master’? Pasternak sidestepped these questions by saying that it was essential that he and Stalin meet: they needed to ‘speak about ultimate issues, about life and death’. This was in 1934, not long before Mandelstam’s first arrest.

Over a quarter of these essays, including all the longer ones, focus on writers from Russia, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Many, like the passage summarised above, touch on questions of the utmost moral, aesthetic and political importance. Joseph Brodsky, for example, writes of Nadezhda Mandelstam:

For decades this woman was on the run … The status of nonperson gradually became her second nature.