Hope Against Hope (#218)

Only a process that is very beautiful and very terrible could produce this book: the anguish of two human souls being tormented by a cruel, fiendishly clever, and virtually all-powerful State determined to murder both the body and soul of its victims. Whether we deserve to benefit as readers from the terrible tempering endured by the poet Osip Mandelstam and his widow Nadezhda Mandelstam is a matter that can be easily determined: we do not deserve it. We are not worthy of the Mandelstams. They belong to a very select group of all the human beings who have ever lived, most of whom we will never know. Thanks to her memoir, we do know Nadezhda and Osip. If Osip's great characteristic was his commitment to truth, Nadezhda's was her endurance (if this sounds dismissive recall that the New Testament repeatedly includes endurance as one of a short list of authentic signs of the divine Spirit). Her personal survival made possible the survival of (most) of Osip's poetry, and of the story of their lives, preserved in this unique memoir. Wordsworth defined poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility", and this memoir has something deeper than tranquility to it, a profound serenity, a luminous sadness, a fusion of love and truth which is the pivot on which human history revolves. It is clear from reading this book that Osip was one those described in the 11th chapter of Hebrews as those "of whom the world was not worthy". What better way to understand the industrial scale barbarisms of the twentieth century than to read about how they were observed and interpreted through the sensibilities of great poets and writers? Perhaps because of the relative brevity of the "Thousand Year Reich", we have had far more accounts from Hitler's victims than from Lenin and Stalin's victims. But the ones that did survive from the Soviet Union, not just HOPE AGAINST HOPE but works by Ginzburg, Brodsky, and Solzhenitsyn, are testaments of the human spirit of the same order as those written by witnesses to the Holocaust. But the significance of HOPE AGAINST HOPE is not primarily its historical account of the Stalinist system, but its depiction of cosmic injustice and the possibility--even in the worst circumstances--for some kind of ultimate triumph of truth and integrity and decency and love. I doubt that a person picking up this book on a whim will read it through, unless, without knowing it, they have been preparing themselves for years to understand what Osip and Nadezhda have to tell us about ourselves and about the human potential for choosing truth and for acting with moral courage. That was true for me. I bought this book twenty years ago, and although I started it a couple of times, I have only just read it after all that time it has been on my shelves. Paradoxically, although it's a life-changing book, perhaps one's life has to have already changed, or begun to change, before one can engage with it. There is so much to reflect on in HOPE AGAINST H

The most brilliant book on the state of the Russian intelligentsia during the Stalin purges. Nadezhda Mandelstam's account of her husband Osip covers a whole generation of writers who suffered the harsh censorship of the regime and all the consequences that came out of any form of free expression in their work. Is a sad history of the decline of the Russian intelligentsia of everything genuine and original in the face of a state controlled literature and state controlled life. The authors' intellectual perseverance against all odds explains best that survival instinct so innate to the Russian intellectual from the Petrine era to today.

This is a great book. The devotion of Nadezhda Mandelshtam to her husband, to his work is at the center of this work. She writes with poetic intensity and chronicles the story of their life together and their cruel separation . Her devotion her self- sacrifice and her great love for her husband make her story a heroic example. Her perceptiveness and the beauty of her language lift the work into a higher realm. It is intense and it is deep, and at times so painful as to be difficult to read.

This is one of the most wonderful books i have ever read and a sensational portrait of the russian poet Ossip Mandelstam. The book focus on mandelstam's last years when he was under the pressure and prosecution of Stalin. The prose is beautiful, full of musings on the condition of Art. She also draw a very clear portrait of what Stalinism meant for artists and people in general in Russia. But for me the most important part of the book is to see the way Ossip dealt with horror and Death. For me, this book is one of the best studies about the condition of human beings. A must.