(11/23/2008) Hope Against Hope: A Memoir by Nadezhda Mandelstam. New York. 1970. Atheneum. Translated From The Russian By Max Hayward. keywords: Russia Translated Autobiography Literature. 432 pages. Jacket design by Jeanyee Wong.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Osip Mandelstam ranks with Boris Pasternak as one of the most admired Russian writers of the twentieth century. Because of the hostility of competing literary groups that threw in their lot with the Bolsheviks, Mandelstam and his followers were marked from the beginning by the new regime. After his first arrest in 1934 for writing an anti-Stalinist poem, Man made a half-hearted attempt to adapt to circumstances, but was subsequently banished from Moscow. Redeemed by the pleadings of Paternak, he was again imprisoned and finally died during the Great Purge of 1937-38. His widow's memoir gives the first authentic account of the tragic confrontation between the poet and the dictator which has long been legend in Moscow literary circles. At the same time she provides an unparalleled wealth of information about the dismal effects of political terror on Russian intellectuals during the dark 1920's and '30's. HOPE AGAINST HOPE has been translated by Max Hayward, Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford whose previous translations include Boris Pasternak's DR. ZHIVAGO Mr. Hayward has also provided an Appendix identifying persons mentioned in Mrs. Mandelstam's text and explaining Russian literary movements and organizations of the twentieth century. The interpretive Introduction is by Clarence Brown, Professor of Russian Literature at Princeton University, author of THE PROSE OF OSIP MANDELSTAM.
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