Hope Against Hope: Introduction by Maria Stepanova

Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir of life with her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, is a vital eyewitness account of Stalin’s Soviet Union and one of the most moving testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written.

In 1933, Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) wrote a satiric poem about Joseph Stalin, and the result of his defiance was arrest, interrogation, and exile, followed by re-arrest and death in a transit camp of the Siberian gulag in 1938. Osip’s wife, Nadezhda (1899–1980), loyally accompanied him into exile in the Urals and later worked courageously to rescue the manuscripts of his poems and to discover the truth about his death. Hope Against Hope is her harrowing account of their last years together and a window into Stalin’s persecution of Russia’s literary intelligentsia in the 1930s and beyond. But it is also a profoundly inspiring love story that relates their determination to keep both love and art alive in the most desperate circumstances.

After years of circulating privately in the Soviet Union, Hope Against Hope was smuggled out and published in the West in 1970 and has since achieved the status of a classic, not only for its essential testimony to a dramatic period of history but also for the enduring brilliance of Mandelstam’s writing.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM (1899–1980) was a Russian writer and educator, and the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in 1938 in a Siberian transit camp of the Soviet gulag. She wrote two memoirs about their life together and the repressive Stalinist regime: Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1973), both first published in the West in English.

About the introducer:
MARIA STEPANOVA is a Russian poet, novelist, and journalist. She is the current editor of Colta.ru, an online publication specializing in arts and culture. In 2005, she won the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize for poetry, and in 2018 was awarded the Big Book national literary award for her novel In Memory of Memory.