Hope against Hope: A Memoir

Nadezhda Mandelstam was born Nadezhda Khazina in Saratov, Russia, to a middle-class professional family; her mother was one of the first female doctors certified in Russia, and her father was an attorney. She spent her formative years in Kiev, where she met poet Osip Mandelstam. They were married in 1922. In 1934, after Osip read from a satirical poem about Stalin, he was sentenced to the gulag. Nadezhda joined him. In May 1938, Osip was arrested again and died. Nadezhda spent the next twenty-eight years wandering throughout Russia’s provincial towns to avoid arrest, teaching English. In 1964, she was allowed to live in Moscow, where she completed her dissertation in linguistics. Mandelstam committed her husband’s poems to memory in the hope that someday she would be able to publish them, a goal that she ultimately achieved. The focus of her memoir Hope against Hope, a masterpiece in its own right, is on the terrible last years of the poet.