“To think that we could have had an ordinary life with its bickering, broken hearts, and divorces! There are people in the world so crazy as not to realize that such is the normal human existence of the kind everybody should aim at. What wouldn’t we have given for such heartbreaks!”
Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who was arrested and tortured and, in essence, killed by the Soviet State, in her memoir Hope Against Hope. Osip himself noted that
Only in Russia is poetry respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?
Such histories can make one despondent, but there is also the consolatory power they posses: what we endure is nothing alongside the anguish of our forebears, and what they endured too pales in comparison to our distant ancestors, and so on.
