Superlative, deeply honest memoir of the poetry years of Nadezhda's famous husband, Osip Mandelstam. Nadezhda asks the questions in 1970, year her book came out, that most were still afriad to ask. What was it like to be an artist under Stalin's totalitarianism? She tells us how life under Stalin's terror contributed to her husband's mental illness. In the midst of The Terror, her husband continued to write poems. What is the purpose of art, she asks, 30 years after Osip's death in a labor camp. Nadezhda writes with both detachment and compassion how she and her husband became completely isolated once Osip had experienced his first arres. Only a provincial, uneducated landlady was unafraid to help them. Indigent, exiled from their home of Moscow, they move from one provincial town to another. The rare target of The Terror who escaped did so by continuing to move -- town to town -- keeping one step ahead of the NKVD. Finally, Osip and Nadezhda are lured to a sanatorium which offered desperately welcomed comfort, regular meals and medical care. It is here that Osip is arrested, transported to a labor camp and -- mercifully, according to Nadezhda --soon dies. One of the better books on Soviet Russia. It remains vibrant 50 years after its writing. ( )

The 20-year old Nadezhda Mandelstam met the poet and her future husband Osip Mandelstam (*1891) in 1919. In these reminiscences - it is more a biography of O.M. than an autobiography as this german edition claims - written in the late 1950s, she looks back on the years with Ossip Mandelstam until he was taken away and died 1938 in a transit camp in Siberia. A Russian edition was published 1970 in New York and translated into German, English, French, .. in the following years. In the Soviet Union it was handed on only as samizdat copies.The German title is a reference to poems by O.M. but an insult to wolves: only humans are capable of inflicting such horrors on their own kind. The English title 'Hope against Hope' is well chosen as nadezhda means "hope" in Russian.

In 83 stories N.M. relates observations and descriptions, encounters and reflections, not always in chronological sequence which can at times be a little confusing. It is a record of the times of terror she lives through with O.M., she tells us more about O.M. and their friend the poetess Anna Akhmatova, than of herself: relationships are poisoned by suspicion, friends become spies, …

I found some of O.M.’s poems translated by Paul Celan, himself a poet, to German in the last volume of his collected works: Paul Celan: Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, Fünfter Band: Übertragungen II, Zweisprachig, Suhrkamp, 1983 ( )

a little disorganized but really gives you the feeling of living in russia in the 30s and 40s. ( )

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