Overview

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 window into Stalin’s persecution of Russia’s literary intelligentsia in the 1930s and beyond. But it is also a profoundly inspiring love story that relates their determination to keep both love and art alive in the most desperate circumstances. After years of circulating privately in the Soviet Union, Hope Against Hope was smuggled out and published in the West in 1970 and has since achieved the status of a classic, not only for its essential testimony to a dramatic period of history but also for the enduring brilliance of Mandelstam’s writing. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

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9781101908365

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Reviews

Nothing one can say will either communicate or affect the genius of this book. To pass judgment on it is almost insolence--even judgment that is merely celebration and homage. --George Steiner, The New Yorker Surely the most luminous account we have--or are likely to get--of life in the Soviet Union during the purges of the 1930's. --Olga Carlisle, The New York Times Book Review No work on Russia which I have recently read has given me so sensitive and searing an insight into the hellhouse which Russia became under Stalin as this dedicated and brilliant work on the poet Mandelstam by his devoted wife. --Harrison E. Salisbury Of the eighty-one years of her life, Nadezhda Mandelstam spent nineteen as the wife of Russia's greatest poet in this century, Osip Mandelstam, and forty-two as his widow. The rest was childhood and youth. So writes Joseph Brodsky in his appreciation of Nadezhda Mandelstam that is reprinted here as an Introduction. Hope Against Hope was first published in English in 1970. It is Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir of her life with Osip, who was first arrested in 1934 and died in Stalin's Great Purge of 1937-38. Hope Against Hope is a vital eyewitness account of Stalin's Soviet Union and one of the greatest testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written. But it is also a profound inspiration--a love story that relates the daily struggle to keep both love and art alive in the most desperate circumstances. Nadezhda Mandelstam was born in Saratov in 1899. She met Osip Mandelstam in 1919. She is also the author of Hope Abandoned (1974). She died in 1980. Nadezhda means hope in Russian.

“[Hope Against Hope is] surely the most luminous account we have—or are likely to get—of life in the Soviet Union during the purges of the 1930s.” —The New York Review of Books “Nothing one can say will either communicate or affect the genius of this book. To pass judgment on it is almost insolence—even judgment that is merely celebration and homage.” —The New Yorker   “A masterpiece of prose as well as a model of biographical narrative and social analysis.” —Clive James   “No other work conveys as well the atmosphere of the 1930s terror, nor how Russian people survived it by listening to their great poets.” —Orlando Figes   “A superb memoir . . . A reminder that it is only a genuine work of art which is capable of communicating a reality so appalling as the Stalinist terror.” ―Philip Toynbee   With a new Introduction by Maria Stepanova

Author Information

NADEZHDA 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. About the introducer: MARIA STEPANOVA is a Russian poet, novelist, and journalist. She is the current editor of Colta.ru, an online publication specializing in arts and culture. In 2005, she won the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize for poetry, and in 2018 was awarded the Big Book national literary award for her novel In Memory of Memory.

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