Against all hope

This was intellectual and political life in the Soviet Union under the Stalinist regime.

First published in the West in 1970, it is both a personal memoir and a historical document of cultural oppression and the persecution of writers and artists during the 1930s and 1940s in the Soviet Union.

Nadejda, the widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam, gives us the meticulous and painful details of the years of persecution that culminated in her husband's arrest and death in 1938 in a forced labour camp.

Deprived of freedom and material means, Nadejda devoted herself to preserving Osip's memory and reconstructing his poetry by heart, as much of the manuscripts had been destroyed to keep them out of the hands of the police.

“Our life was spent in the shadow of death.”

This was the atmosphere of constant fear in which she lived. An essay on the nature of tyranny and moral resistance. Memory as a weapon against oblivion.

When was the last time you learned something by heart?

Nadejda Mandelstam, 1899 ... 1980: Saratov, Russia, Jewish. She studied art and literature and became the inseparable companion of the poet Osip Mandelstam, one of the greatest names in 20th-century Russian poetry. After her husband's death, she lived in precarious conditions, often in hiding, but never gave up preserving his work and bearing witness to the atrocities of Stalinism.

In addition to Against All Hope, she also wrote Abandoned Hope, about terror and memory. She left us much of what we need to understand the Soviet 20th century.