A review by bobbo49
Hope Against Hope: A Memoir (Revised) by Nadezhda Mandelstam

4.0

Mandelstam, the wife of poet Osip, wrote this memoir in the 1960s, providing a stark and passionate eyewitness account of Stalin's reign of terror and the ugly transformation of Russian society. Her first person account of literary life in Soviet Russia during the 1920s-1950s is filled with renowned figures (like Pasternak, a close friend) and the impossibly harrowing lives of writers and their families during the period, but it also presents both Osip's poetry (and the incredible story of how it survived) and the hopeful perspectives that kept people striving to stay alive and working during the period. Unfortunately, Nadezhda's own optimism that, having survived Stalin, Russia would evolve into a more open and liberal society has barely found footing in the ensuing half century. Indeed, it sometimes appears that the rest of the world is sliding toward Russia's past.