The phrase "hardly survive" is correct and usable in written English.
It is typically used when something is barely able to stay alive or remain functional. For example, "With the current financial difficulties, many small businesses are hardly surviving."
The empire could hardly survive Alexander's death as a unit.
I figured that her malign power could hardly survive in a household as impious as mine.
Given the leave campaign's concern about borders, the current ease of crossing could hardly survive.
They would form the third big carrier, possibly even joined by Northwest, which could hardly survive on its own.
But with plummeting birth rates and an aging populace, Italy can hardly survive now without foreign laborers.
The pretense that Athens was merely leading a voluntary association of willing Ionian cities in need of protection could hardly survive the reduction of Aegina.
It befits a novel whose clipped prose hardly survives out of context, but rattles along between the covers.
It is well known that a big part of Europe is hardly surviving, and this is what we show.
Furniture of bamboo, principally intended for garden use, has hardly survived, but barrel-shaped seats of porcelain for the same purpose are not uncommon.
It has usually been supposed that the writings themselves hardly survived beyond the period of Plato and Aristotle, but this view requires modification in the light of papyrus finds, admittedly few, that were copied from Sophistic writings in the early Common Era.
Unlike medieval Kabbala, which experienced a broad and varied development starting in the second half of the 13th century, the movement designated as German, or Ashkenazic (from a biblical place-name conventionally used to designate Germany), Hasidism hardly survived as a living and independent current beyond the second quarter of the 13th century (it has no connection with modern Hasidism).
