- Herausgeber
:
Penguin; First Edition (1. Januar 1975)
- Sprache
:
Englisch
- Taschenbuch
:
544 Seiten
- ISBN-10
:
0140038795
- ISBN-13
:
978-0140038798
- Artikelgewicht
:
335 g
Nadezhda means "hope" in Russian. And Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of
Osip Mandelstam, one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century,
is aptly named, for it is hope alone that seems to have buoyed her
strength during very trying times. In this, the first of two volumes of
her memoirs, she offers a harrowing account of the last four years she
spent with her late husband. She re-creates in terse,
stripped-to-the-bone sentences the atmosphere of intense paranoia that
enveloped Russia's literary intelligentsia. In 1933, Osip had written a
lighthearted satire ridiculing Stalin. It proved to be a 16-line death
sentence. Nadezhda recalls the night the secret police came for "There
was a sharp, unbearably explicit knock on the door. 'They've come for
Osip,' I said." He was arrested, interrogated, exiled, and eventually
rearrested. Nadezhda chronicles each turn of event, describing her
feelings of heartbreak and joy with self-effacing discipline. Not only
does Mandelstam write with the vitality and insight of the classic
Russian novelists, she is far too selfless to write an account of her
own travails. Instead, she acts as witness to a society's. Similarly,
although Osip's mind became unbalanced by his ordeal in prison, his
spirit remained unbroken; it is this liberating, imaginative force that
Nadezhda celebrates in Hope Against Hope.