NADEZHDA YAKOVLEVNA MANDELSTAM (1899-1980) was a Russian writer and educator, and the wife of the great poet Osip Mandelstam who died in 1938 in a transit camp to the Siberian gulag.  Following his death, Nadezhda continued to preserve husband's works and his memory in the face of official disapproval.  Without her extraordinary courage and fortitude, most of his work would have died with him.

Her two volumes of memoirs, both first published in the West in English, provide an epic analysis of her husband's life and times.  The first volume, HOPE AGAINST HOPE (1970), is a vivid and disturbing account of her last four years with her husband, the efforts she made to secure his release, to rescue his manuscripts from oblivion, and later, tragically, to discover the truth about his mysterious death.  It is a harrowing, first-hand account of how Stalin and his henchmen persecuted Russia's literary intelligentsia in the 1930s and beyond.  Literary critic Clive James called the book "a masterpiece of prose as well as a model of biographical narrative and social analysis."

HOPE ABANDONED (1974) complements her earlier volume, and describes Nadezhda and Osip's life together from 1919, and her own after Mandelstam's murder in 1938.  She also sets out his system of values and beliefs, and provides striking portraits of many of their contemporaries including Boris Pasternak and their champion till his own downfall, Nikolai Bukharin, as well as an astonishingly candid picture of Anna Akhmatova.  Nadezhda's anguished final letter to her beloved as he was being transported to the gulag (pp. 620-21) is not to be missed.


The following books are in PDF format:

* Hope Against Hope: A Memoir (Atheneum, 1970 [1983]).  Translated by Max Hayward.

* Hope Abandoned (Atheneum, 1974 [1981]).  Translated by Max Hayward.

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