Hope Against Hope

Nadezhda means "hope" in Russian. And Nadezhda Mandelstam wife of Osip Mandelstam one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century is aptly named for it is hope alone that seems to have buoyed her strength during very trying times. In this the first of two volumes of her memoirs she offers a harrowing account of the last four years she spent with her late husband. She re-creates in terse stripped-to-the-bone sentences the atmosphere of intense paranoia that enveloped Russias literary intelligentsia. In 1933 Osip had written a lighthearted satire ridiculing Stalin. It proved to be a 16-line death sentence. Nadezhda recalls the night the secret police came for "There was a sharp unbearably explicit knock on the door. Theyve come for Osip I said." He was arrested interrogated exiled and eventually rearrested. Nadezhda chronicles each turn of event describing her feelings of heartbreak and joy with self-effacing discipline. Not only does Mandelstam write with the vitality and insight of the classic Russian novelists she is far too selfless to write an account of her own travails. Instead she acts as witness to a societys. Similarly although Osips mind became unbalanced by his ordeal in prison his spirit remained unbroken; it is this liberating imaginative force that Nadezhda celebrates in Hope Against Hope. --Lilian Pizzichini Amazon.co.uk