Hope Abandoned

'Mrs Mandelstam's bitter reminiscences read like unvarnished reality itself... her descriptions of events and circumstances and situations carry total conviction. In this respect the work seems to me literally unique'  - Isiah Berlin

Two of the most fortifying books of our times, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope and Hope Abandoned ... were finally written in the late Sixties. In these books, we have a devastating indictment of most of what happened in post-revolutionary Russia

A bursting compendium of glances at people, framed in essays of scorn for the inquisitors and compassion for the victims... If she is vinegarish, she is also powerful and enhancing

Describes the whole range of her life with Mandelstam, their travels, vicissitudes and friendships, above all the friendship with Akhmatova... a vivid triple portrait

Max Hayward's translation reads easily and seems to me to convey exactly the style and tone in which this great book is written

Nadezdha Yakovlevna Mandelstam was born in Saratov in 1899, but spent her early life in Kiev, studying art and travelling widely with her family. She learnt English, French and German fluently enough to be able to take on extensive translation work, which at a later period allowed her and her husband to survive. She met the poet Osip Mandelstam in Kiev in 1919, and they were married in 1922. From that point on until Mandelstam's death in 1938, her life was so closely bound up with her husband's that without her quite extraordinary courage and memory and will, a great part of his work would have died with him. She spent much of the Second World War in Tashkent, teaching English at the University of Central Asia and sharing a house for part of that time with her friend Anna Akhmatova. After the war she managed to survive by leading an inconspicuous existence as a teacher of English in remote provincial towns. In 1964 she was at last granted permission to reutrn to Moscow, where she began to write her memoir of the life she had shared with perhaps the greatest Russian poet of the century, and where she continued her determined attempt to preserve his works and memory against official discouragement. She died in 1980.

Hope Against Hope recounted the last four years in the life of the great Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, and gave a hair-raising account of Stalin's terror. Hope Abandoned complements that earlier masterpiece, and in it Nadezhda Mandelstam describes their life together from 1919, and her own after Mandelstam's death in a labour camp 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.

Hope Against Hope

'The witnesses to living on an edge under the tyrant are now many; none, not even Solzhenitsyn, has written better' - Doris Lessing

No other work conveys as well the atmosphere of the 1930s terror, nor how Russian people survived it by listening to their great poets

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

Not only a vivid account of persecution during Stalin's terror, it is also one of the few convincing descriptions of how a genius writes poetry

A Day of Judgement on earth for her age and its literature

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

The story is so fascinating and terrible, and told with such vitality and insight, that it englarges one's sense of life as well as of death and horror

As rich in detail and historical sense as a classic Russian novel

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam was born in Saratov in 1899, but spent her early life in Kiev, studying art and travelling widely in Western Europe. She learned English, French and German fluently enough to undertake extensive translation work, which supported her in the hard years ahead. She met the poet Osip Mandelstam in Kiev in 1919, and they married in 1922. From then until Osip's death, her life was so inextricably linked with her husband's that without her extraordinary courage and fortitude most of his work would have died with him. She spent the Second World War in Tashkent, teaching English and sharing a house with her close friend the poet Anna Akhmatova. After the war she led an inconspicuous existence as a teacher of English in remote provincial towns. In 1964 she was granted permission to return to Moscow, where she began to write her memoir of the life she had shared with one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century, and where she continued to preserve his works and his memory in the face of official disapproval. Nadezhda means 'hope' in Russian, and she herself chose the English titles for her two-volume memoirs. She died in 1980.

'Suddently, at about one o'clock in the morning, there was a sharp, unbearably explicit knock on the door. 'They've come for Osip', I said'. 
 
In 1933 the poet Osip Mandelstam- friend to Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova- wrote a spirited satire denouncing Josef Stalin. It proved to be a sixteen-line death sentence. For his one act of defiance he was arrested by the Cheka, the secret police, interrogated, exiled and eventually re-arrested. He died en route to one of Stalin's labour camps. 
 
His wife, Nadezhda (1899-1980) was with him on both occasions when he was arrested, and she loyally accompanied him into exile in the Urals, where he wrote his last great poems. Although his mind had been unbalanced by his ordeal in prison, his spirit remained unbroken. Eager to solve 'the Mandelstam problem', the Soviet authorities invited the couple to stay in a rest home near Moscow. Nadezhda saw it as an opportunity for her husband to mend his shattered life, but it was a trap and he was arrested for the last time. 
 
'My case will never be closed', Osip once said, and it is mostly through the courageous efforts of Nadezhda that his memory has been preserved. Hope against Hope, her first volume of memoirs, 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 also a harrowing, first-hand account of how Stalin and his henchmen persecuted Russia's literary intelligentsia in the 1930s and beyond. 
 
Nadezhda Mandelstam spent most of the Second World War in Tashkent, living with her friend Akhmatova. Only in 1964 was she at last granted permission to return to Moscow. Here she began Hope against Hope, and later Hope Abandoned, the two memoirs of her life.

Nadezhda Mandelstam

Max Hayward

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 witnesses to living on an edge under the tyrant are now many; none, not even Solzhenitsyn, has written better.

Hope against Hope puts [Mandelstam] at the centre of the liberal resistance under the Soviet Union. A masterpiece of prose as well as a model of bilgraphical narrative and social analysis.

A Day of Judgment on earth for her age and its literature

A harrowing yet uplifting account of Stalin's persecution of the Russian intelligentsia in the 1930s, and of one man - Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), whose poetry, in spite of the unfolding tragedy of his life, preserved its unique creative gaiety. Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam married in 1922. Nadezhda's memoir covers their last four years together. She begins in Moscow in May 1934 with the knock on the door at one o'clock in the morning, and her husband's arrest by the secret police for composing a satire of Stalin. She tells of his imprisonment, interrogation and exile to the Urals, where she accompanied him, and where he wrote his last great poems; his release and return to Moscow, only to be entrapped, rearrested and sentenced to hard labour in Siberia; of her own efforts to secure his release and to save his manuscripts (and to memorize all his poems in case she could not); of her discovery of the truth about his death in a transit camp near Vladivostock. For all its grim subject matter, it is a story of courage in adversity, and even humour finds a place. 
 Nadezhda means 'hope' in Russian, and Hope against Hope is one of the greatest testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written. It is also a love story that relates the daily struggle to keep both love and art alive in the most desperate circumstances. After years of circulating secretly in the Soviet Union it was published in the West in 1970, and has since achieved the status of a classic.

Nadezhda Mandelstam

Praise for Hope Against Hope

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 witnesses to living on an edge under the tyrant are now many; none, not even Solzhenitsyn, has written better.

Hope against Hope puts [Mandelstam] at the centre of the liberal resistance under the Soviet Union. A masterpiece of prose as well as a model of bilgraphical narrative and social analysis.

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 witnesses to living on an edge under the tyrant are now many; none, not even Solzhenitsyn, has written better.

Hope against Hope puts [Mandelstam] at the centre of the liberal resistance under the Soviet Union. A masterpiece of prose as well as a model of bilgraphical narrative and social analysis.

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 witnesses to living on an edge under the tyrant are now many; none, not even Solzhenitsyn, has written better.

Hope against Hope puts [Mandelstam] at the centre of the liberal resistance under the Soviet Union. A masterpiece of prose as well as a model of bilgraphical narrative and social analysis.

Books by Nadezhda Mandelstam

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter