Hope Against Hope is one of the greatest testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written. Praising Nadezhda Mandelstam's classic memoir, Joseph Brodsky wrote that it "amount[s] to a Day of Judgement on earth for her age," adding, "her memoirs are something more than a testimony to her times; they are a view of history in the light of conscience and culture." Now restored to print, this is perhaps the most powerful account of life in Stalin's Russia ever written. A harrowing memoir that recounts Mandelstam's last years with her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, it begins with his first arrest in 1934 and ends with his final incarceration in 1938, at the end of the Great Purges. Marked by a gut-wrenching immediacy, the book brings to life the vibrant Russian intelligentsia of the time--among others, we meet Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Maxim Gorky, Ilia Ehrenburg, and Mikhail Bulgakov--as well as some of our century's greatest villains, including Stalin and his inner circle. At the heart of the story is Osip's decision not to compromise with a ruthless system; he consciously chooses martyrdom by denouncing Stalin in a poem. As she provides a background to this act of defiance, Mandelstam offers unique insight into the terror state and the psychology of mass complicity, showing how an inner freedom in Stalin's Russia could only be purchased by death. Translated by Max Hayward--the translator of Dr. Zhivago-- Hope Against Hope is that rare work that combines history and literature in a way that is unforgettable.
"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... It leaves one richer, more hopeful than one has a right to be."
--George Steiner, The New Yorker
"Not merely a superb narrative of travail but also a valuable account of Russian cultural life and an equally valuable series of reflections on the nature of totalitarianism. Beautifully translated by Max Hayward, Hope Against Hope is a classic of its kind."
--Irving Howe
"So churning in its impact, so tearfully brave and enduring, so horrifying and yet so intelligent that no one of sensibility dare deny himself knowing it."
--Faubion Bowers, The Village Voice
"Hope Against Hope is at once a love story, an unblinking account of the decimation of a culture, and a luminous inquiry into what it means to be human.... Nadezhda Mandelstam's unswerving, unquestioned commitment to spiritual presence and witness answers a hunger we've almost forgotten we possess, and proves a startling antidote to the trivialization of meaning and relationship so endemic in current American life.... In preserving [Osip's] work, she fought to preserve witness to a people and culture nearly obliterated by the paroxysms of history, and to protect the human voice itself."
--Jayne Anne Phillips, Book Forum
