Hope Abandoned

In Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelshtam recounted the last four years in the life of the great Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, and gave an account of Stalin's terror. Hope Abandoned complements that earlier masterpiece, and in it Nadezhada Mandelstam describes their life together from 1919, and her own after Mandelstam's death in a labour camp in 1938, including through the years of World War II. She also sets out his system of values and beliefs, and provides striking portraits of many of their contemporaries including Boris Pasternak and their champion till his own downfall, Nikolai Bukharin, as well as an astonishingly candid picture of Anna Akhmatova. [Adapted from description of 2011 Vintage paperback printing]