Nadezhda Mandelstam

[Peter Janssen]

I wanted to write and let you know that Modern Library has reissued
Nadezhda Mandelstam's classic work HOPE AGAINST HOPE ("Surely one of the
most powerful, moving, and important memoirs of the century"--Francine
Prose).

HOPE AGAINST HOPE is one of the greatest testaments to the value of
literature and imaginative freedom ever written. Now restored to print,
this is perhaps the most powerful account of life in Stalin's Russia ever
written.  A harrowing memoir that recounts Mandelstam's last years with her
husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, it begins with his first arrest in 1934
and ends with his final incarceration in 1938, at the end of the Great
Purges.  Marked by a gut-wrenching immediacy, the book brings to life the
vibrant Russian intelligentsia of the time--among others, we meet Anna
Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Maxim Gorky, Ilia Ehrenburg, and Mikhail
Bulgakov--as well as Stalin and members of his inner circle.  At the heart
of the story is Osip's decision not to compromise with a ruthless system;
he consciously chooses martyrdom by denouncing Stalin in a poem.  As she
provides a background to this act of defiance, Mandelstam offers unique
insight into the terror state and the psychology of mass complicity,
showing how an inner freedom in Stalin's Russia could only be purchased by
death.

Joseph Brodsky wrote that it "amount[s] to a Day of Judgement on earth for
her age," adding, "her memoirs are something more than a testimony to her
times; they are a view of history in the light of conscience and culture."

"HOPE AGAINST HOPE is at once a love story, an unblinking account of the
decimation of a culture, and a luminous inquiry into what it means to be
human.... Nadezhda Mandelstam's unswerving, unquestioned commitment to
spiritual presence and witness answers a hunger we've almost forgotten we
possess, and proves a startling antidote to the trivialization of meaning
and relationship so endemic in current American life.... In preserving
[Osip's] work, she fought to preserve witness to a people and culture
nearly obliterated by the paroxysms of history, and to protect the human
voice itself."
--Jayne Anne Phillips, Book Forum

For more information, please visit:
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.cgi?0375753168

Translated by Max Hayward with Introductions by Clarence Brown and Joseph
Brodsky.

Professors: For examination copies, please email acmart at randomhouse.com