Hope Against Hope
Hope Against Hope, written in secret in the Soviet Union and first published in English in 1970, is Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir of her marriage to the poet Osip Mandelstam and his persecution by the Stalinist state. After Osip wrote a satirical poem about Stalin in 1933, he was arrested, exiled, and eventually sent to a transit camp where he died in 1938. Nadezhda spent decades preserving his unpublished poems by memorizing them and moving from town to town to avoid arrest herself. Her book is at once a portrait of a marriage, a record of literary friendships including with Anna Akhmatova, and a clear eyed account of how terror operated through ordinary neighbors, colleagues, and institutions. The prose is sharp, bitter, and morally exact, and the book stands as one of the essential witnesses to the Stalin years.
What you might want to know about Hope Against Hope
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
The widow of poet Osip Mandelstam recounts their life under Stalin and his death in the gulag.
No, the memoir works without it, though readers often turn to his poems afterward.
Yes, Hope Abandoned continues the story and expands on her reflections about Russian literary life.
Hope Against Hope was written by Nadezhda Mandelstam.
Hope Against Hope is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.