Hope Against Hope

The story of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who suffered continuous persecution under Stalin, but whose wife constantly supported both him and his writings until he died in 1938. Hope Against Hope was first published in English in 1970. It is Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir of her life with Osip, who was first arrested in 1934 and died in Stalin’s Great Purge of 1937-38. Hope Against Hope is a vital eyewitness account of Stalin’s Soviet Union and one of the greatest testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written. But it is also a profound inspiration–a love story that relates the daily struggle to keep both love and art alive in the most desperate of circumstances.