against all hope

“When we met, we spoke in a whisper and glanced at the walls: are the neighbors not listening?

[...] No one trusted anyone and in each acquaintance we saw a snitch” Nadezhda Mandelstam writes in

, her memoirs that cover the 20th century to leave a literary monument about the suffering, resistance and repression suffered by so many writers and Russian intellectuals under Stalinism, including her husband Osip Mandelstam, liquidated in 1937.

It was the original title that the writer's widow was able to publish first in the United States in 1970 and that was published decades later in Russia.

The title alluded to the fact that if a written testimony of the unimaginable terror that they suffered in the times of Stalin were to see the light of day, there is hope.

Mandelstam had said that Russia is the only country where they really value poetry: "Only in Russia do they kill poets," she noted.

”People say that you are a poet;

Can you describe the horror of what we are experiencing?”, begins her poem

Anna Akhmatova, who lost her two husbands in the Stalinist purges and her only son, Lev Gumilev, spent almost 20 years between various Soviet prisons .

The poet remembers how in the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, waiting in a queue in front of the Leningrad prisons to find out something about her relatives, a woman approached her to ask if she could describe the unbearable suffering they experienced —and that in Russia and the lands associated with it has been repeated so many times throughout history.

"Yes, I can," Akhmatova replied to this woman, and "then something like a smile slipped over what had been her face before."

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Russian literature has always represented a powerful weapon in the struggle against the despotism of power and at the same time an enormous moral force and hope for its people.

Already in the verses of the consecrated Aleksandr Pushkin, which marks the beginning of great Russian literature, the need for freedom in the face of tsarist despotism was claimed: "I want to sing freedom to the whole world and drown so much vileness on the throne!"

we read in his

, where in turn the poet addresses her compatriots appealing: “And you: courage, stand up, brothers, stand up, oppressed slaves!

[...] tyrants tremble from this world!”

It is not surprising that a trap was laid for this poet in the form of a conjured duel in tsarist circles, as a result of which Pushkin lost his life.

Russian power has always endeavored to censor or silence the voices of these, not only great writers, but authentic prophets of the people, erected on this pedestal precisely for daring to challenge political despotism.

From the first Russian novelist, Aleksander Radischev, sent to Siberia by Catherine the Great for having described the misery of Russia in

(1790) to Anna Politkóvskaya, the journalist murdered in the doorway of her house in the times of Vladimir Putin, the transcendence of the written word is manifested as well as its dramatic destiny.

For all these reasons, it is even sadder and more incomprehensible that today in the West Russian authors are banned from cinemas or courses on their writing are canceled in academic auditoriums.

I imagine that whoever thought that the best way to show solidarity with the catastrophe that Ukraine is experiencing is to propose to tear down a statue of Fyodor Dostoevsky ignores that this writer was sentenced to death by Tsar Nicholas I for his intellectual work, pardoned already on the scene of execution in St. Petersburg's Senate Square in 1849 and sent to Siberia for the next 10 years.

“Tyranny also becomes a custom;

it has the capacity to develop and in the end it becomes a disease” he left written in

, the book that offers an x-ray of the years that Dostoevsky spent in prison.

It is no coincidence that a collection of books by Russian authors such as Babel, Platonov, Bulgakov, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova—all of them killed, or persecuted and silenced by those in power—was brought together under the title

(Circle of readers/ Gutenberg Galaxy).

"Russia has always been a country with an enormous elitist culture and also great political ignorance, whose main feature is intolerance," said Evgeni Evtushenko.

Putin has gone beyond intolerance.

He has taken good note of the autocrats who preceded him, that to stay in power you have to spread fear and despair.

And in these circumstances, as Nadezhda Mandelstam describes in her memoirs, human beings behave according to a universal pattern: apart from a few convinced ideologues, there are a few other idealists, willing not to succumb to the madness of a collective ideology and to preserve their ethical values.

Finally, a third group, the largest, is the mass of the people, trapped by a collective ideology, disinformation and fear,

who lend themselves to comply with what they are ordered in order to preserve their positions and in some cases also their lives.

“Before the face of the irremediable, even fear disappears.

Fear is a light, it is the will to live, the affirmation of being.

It is a profound European sentiment, the product of respect for oneself, for the awareness of one's own worth, rights, needs and human desires” we read in

, a book that Joseph Brodsky defines as "a vision of history in the light of consciousness and culture" and compares it to the Last Judgment.

Because it is not just about great literary texts, but about the essential pages to do justice to universal human suffering.

The Russian tradition has always shown this: literature leaves testimony, against all hope.

("manuscripts cannot be burned"), in the words of Mikhail Bulgakov's motto in

.

Let us not forget this in our human solidarity with suffering peoples, because citing Dostoevsky, Akhmatova or the Mandelstams today is another way of challenging the terrible war that is taking place before our eyes.

Tamara Djermanovic

is a professor at Pompeu Fabra University and a writer.

Her latest book is

Cliff, 2021)

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