In 1933 the poet Osip Mandelstam wrote a short satirical poem denouncing Stalin and read it to a small circle of friends. The poem proved to be a 16-line death sentence. Mandelstam was arrested by the Cheka, the secret police, interrogated, exiled and eventually re-arrested. He died en route to a labour camp in 1938. His wife Nadezhda was with Mandelstam on both occasions when he was arrested and Hope Against Hope, the first volume of her memoirs, chronicles her last four years with him. In moving detail she describes the efforts she made to secure his release, to rescue his manuscripts from the Cheka and, later, to discover the truth about his death. One of the great literary achievements of the Soviet period, Hope Against Hope is a harrowing account of persecution under Stalin’s terror and a portrait of a great poet struggling against the forces of history.

Hope Against Hope recounted the last four years in the life of the great Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, and gave a hair-raising account of Stalin's terror. Hope Abandoned complements that earlier masterpiece, and in it Nadezhda Mandelstam describes their life together from 1919, and her own after Mandelstam's death in a labour camp in 1938. 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.

Hope Against Hope was first published in English in 1970. It is Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir of her life with Osip, who was first arrested in 1934 and died in Stalin's Great Purge of 1937-38. Hope Against Hope is a vital eyewitness account of Stalin's Soviet Union and one of the greatest testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written. But it is also a profound inspiration - a love story that relates the daily struggle to keep both love and art alive in the most desperate circumstances.