Hope Against Hope Introduction by Maria Stepanova

A Contemporary Classics hardcover of the inspiring account by the poet Osip Mandelstam’s devoted wife of their life together as he faced exile and repression in the Soviet Union, before dying in Stalin’s Great Purge.

Nadezhda means "hope" in Russian, and Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir of her life with her husband Osip 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. After years of circulating privately in the Soviet Union, Hope Against Hope was smuggled out and published in the West in 1970 and has since achieved the status of a classic.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM (1899-1980) was a Russian writer and educator, and the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam who died in 1938 in a transit camp to the gulag of Siberia. She wrote two memoirs about their lives together and the repressive Stalinist regime: Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974), both first published in the West in English.
About the Introducer: MARIA STEPANOVA is a Russian poet, novelist, and journalist. She is the current editor of Colta.ru, an online publication specializing in arts and culture. In 2005, she won the prestigious Andei Bely Prize for poetry, and in 2018 was awarded the Big Book Prize for her novel In Memory of Memory.