NADEZDA MANDELSTAM, A MEMOIR (Hope Abandoned)

 Translated by Max Hayward, Hope Abandoned. Atheneum paperback,1972.

This book complements the author’s previous voume ‘ Hope Against Hope’ (Which describes the last years of her husband) and covers the period from 1919, when she met Mandelstam to the present day. ‘ (1972).

As a moving account of two lives , as an examination of the roots of Mandelstam’s poetry, and as an account of the system of repression in Stalin’s Russia, it is a document of the highest importance, but it has other functions too; a political philosophical and religious study of the ills of modern man, an essay on aesthetics and culture, a settling of accounts with an intellectual world that assisted or did not prevent Mandelstam’s fate’ – Robin Milner-Gulland in the Guardian.

‘ Mrs Mandelstam’s spicily textured, sour-sweet account of her life as a young girl, poet’s wife and poet’s widow in Russia is a minutely descriptive narrative about people, things, daily life; acerbic, fierce, touching and profoundly moving’ – Marina Vaizey in the Sunday Times.

Apart from some slight creases to the cover boards here and there, and some very slight light tanning to the page edges, the book is in good condition, still tightly bound.