Hope against Hope: A Memoir - Softcover

Mandel?shtam, Nadezhda

4.37

1,109 ratings by Goodreads

9780689705304: Hope against Hope: A Memoir

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0689705301 ISBN 13: 9780689705304

Publisher: Prentice Hall & IBD, 1976

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An intimate portrait of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam whose confrontation with Stalin resulted in his imprisonment in a Siberian concentration camp

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Review:

Nadezhda means "hope" in Russian, and for the wife of one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century, Osip Mandelstam, Nadezhda needed to hang on to it for survival. This is the first of two volumes of memoirs, and it is a harrowing account of Nadezhda's last four years with her husband. So she recreates in terse, stripped-to-the-bone sentences the atmosphere of intense paranoia that enveloped Russia's 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 him; "there was a sharp, unbearably explicit knock on the door. 'They've come for Osip,' I said." He was arrested, interrogated, exiled and eventually re-arrested, and 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 society's. Similarly, although Osip's mind became unbalanced by his ordeal in prison, his spirit remained unbroken; it is this liberating, imaginative force that Nadezhda celebrates. - -Lilian Pizzichini

Review:

"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" (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" (New York Review of Books)

"Magnificent. A masterpiece of prose as well as a model of biographical narrative and social analysis" (Slate)

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