Hope Against Hope

In 1933 the poet Osip Mandelstam wrote a short satirical poem denouncing Stalin and read it to a small circle of friends. The poem proved to be a 16-line death sentence. Mandelstam was arrested by the Cheka, the secret police, interrogated, exiled and eventually re-arrested. He died en route to a labour camp in 1938. His wife Nadezhda was with Mandelstam on both occasions when he was arrested and Hope Against Hope, the first volume of her memoirs, chronicles her last four years with him. In moving detail she describes the efforts she made to secure his release, to rescue his manuscripts from the Cheka and, later, to discover the truth about his death. One of the great literary achievements of the Soviet period, Hope Against Hope is a harrowing account of persecution under Stalin’s terror and a portrait of a great poet struggling against the forces of history.