Khlysty Radenie
Прыгуны (Leapers)
In her reminiscences titled in English Hope Against Hope,
Nadezhda Mandelstam (NM) wife of Osip Mandelstam (M)—widely regarded as the
best Russian poet of the twentieth century—describes in detail the excruciating
life of herself and her husband in exile, after his first arrest in 1934.
While the two were eking out a living for three years in the
provincial city of Voronezh, M was fascinated with the Southern Russian speech
spoken there (bordering on Ukrainian). The Mandelstams had occasion to visit
the nearby village of Nikolskoye, where they encountered sectarians known as
Jumpers. According to NM, they “composed religious ballads of a traditional
type about their unsuccessful attempts to leap up to heaven. Not long before we
visited it, the village had been the scene of dramatic events. The sectarians
had fixed a day on which they would take off for heaven, and, convinced that by
next morning they would no longer be of this world, they gave away all their
property to their earthbound neighbors. Coming to their senses when they fell
to the ground, they rushed to retrieve their belongings, and a terrible fight
broke out” (English translation of Hope Against Hope by Max Hayward,
1970; above citation is from the paperback Modern Library Edition, 1999, p.
143-44).
As far as I can determine, the author here proves herself to
be almost as wonderful a fiction writer as her poet husband. What information I
can find about the Jumpers describes the sectarians as having much in common
with other Russian religious sects still operative in the nineteen and
twentieth centuries (e.g., the more notorious Khlysty and Skoptsy, the Whippers
and Castrates), and even with modern Pentecostals. True, I have made only a
cursory check of internet sources, and what I have found affirms that the rituals
of the Jumpers involved a lot of ecstatic, frenetic activity (dancing, jumping
around). But nothing that I can find claims that they made attempts to leap
from this earth directly to heaven.
This does make, however, for an irresistible tale of
fiction. Just imagine all the Jumpers of the village up in trees and on
rooftops on the Judgment Day. At a signal from their leader, they bend down
into squats, then leap out with all their might into the air, flapping their
arms like wings. But nobody makes it to heaven; all the would-be avians fall
heavily back down to earth. Coming to their senses, they pick themselves up,
dust themselves off. Muttering curses, they immediately go in search of the
wheelbarrows and spades they had given away to non-Jumper neighbors. A great
fight breaks out. End of fiction.
d
This bizarre tale of the Jumpers has a certain congruence
with the broad theme of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s whole book. After the poet
composed his epigram on Stalin he, of course, could not publish the poem, but
he read it to several friends and acquaintances. Then one of them secretly
denounced him. Boris Pasternak pronounced the poem “an act of suicide,” which,
given the temperament of the Stalinist times, it certainly was. M. was arrested
in 1934 and interrogated at the notorious Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, where they
showed him copies of the unpublished poem mocking Stalin. Then, in what seemed
like a miracle—but was apparently the result of Stalin’s personal
intervention—M was released and, along with his wife, sent into exile. The
order that came down from above was “isolate, but preserve.”
Upon their arrival in the provincial town of Cherdyn—first stop
in their four-year odyssey of exile—M, still in something of a psychotic state
after his stay in Lubyanka, attempted suicide by jumping from a hospital
window. This episode is described in a chapter titled “The Leap.” The result
was a dislocated shoulder, but after this the psychosis seemed to dissipate. A
few years later, after three years of exile in Voronezh, the couple, prohibited
from living in Moscow, survived by finding shelter in various villages
surrounding the capital city and begging for money from friends. During these
desperate days NM once awoke to find her husband standing and looking out an
open window of an apartment on an upper story. At this point he suggested it
was time for the two of them to jump. Normally it was NM who brought up the
possibility of committing joint suicide, but this time she refused to make the
leap.
After he was arrested for a second time in 1938, M was
sentenced to five years for “counter-revolutionary activity.” He ended up in a
transit camp in Vladivostok, on his way to a concentration camp. This,
apparently, is where he finally made his preordained leap into the next world.
NM’s account (in the first volume of her memoir) ends with her still expressing
doubts about exactly where, when, and how her husband perished. In June, 1940,
his brother Aleksandr was provided a death certificate at the Registry Office
in the Bauman District, Moscow, with instructions to pass it on to NM. “M’s age
was given as forty-seven, and the date of his death as December 27, 1938. The
cause was listed as ‘heart failure’” (Hope Against Hope, p. 381). Providing
a death certificate in such circumstances was a highly unusual act; most
relatives of those who perished in the maw of Stalinist oppression never
received any notice of their demise. Still hounded by Soviet authorities for
most of the rest of her life, NM continued on her itinerant path for years, moving
from one provincial town to another. She survived M by forty-two years, dying
only in 1980.
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