Description
Book SynopsisHope 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.
Trade ReviewTwo 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 -- Seamus Heaney * London Review of Books *
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 -- V.S. Pritchett
Describes the whole range of her life with Mandelstam, their travels, vicissitudes and friendships, above all the friendship with Akhmatova... a vivid triple portrait * New Society *
Max Hayward's translation reads easily and seems to me to convey exactly the style and tone in which this great book is written * Daily Telegraph *
