Hope Against Hope
Introduction by Maria Stepanova
Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir of life with her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, is a vital eyewitness account of Stalin’s Soviet Union and one of the most moving testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written.
In 1933, Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) wrote a satiric poem about Joseph Stalin, and the result of his defiance was arrest, interrogation, and exile, followed by re-arrest and death in a transit camp of the Siberian gulag in 1938. Osip’s wife, Nadezhda (1899–1980), loyally accompanied him into exile in the Urals and later worked courageously to rescue the manuscripts of his poems and to discover the truth about his death. Hope Against Hope is her harrowing account of their last years together and a…
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November 14, 2023NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM (1899-1980) was a Russian writer and educator, and the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in 1938 in a Siberian transit camp of the Soviet gulag. She wrote two memoirs about their life together and the repressive Stalinist regime: Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1973), both first published in the West in English.