"It is a most serious and engaging book. It tells the bitter truth about mass murder in the name of progress and other such nice words. It is a great lesson in sociology and in human behavior." Isaac Bashevis Singer
"Nadezhda Mandelstam (whose given name means 'hope' in Russian, hence the title) has survived all this and decided at last to record what she has witnessed, whatever the consequences. In a tough old woman's tongue, spare, matter-of-fact, unadorned by figures of speech, she rambles back and forth through the past and brings an age to life." *
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
"Shining with the noblest glory of the human spirit; darker than the very depths of terror; richly witty, wonderfully wise and heartbreakingly sad; telling a tale for our time that none should fail to read; above all, an unimaginably beautiful book—that is the very least one can say of Hope Against Hope." Joseph AIsop
"...not merely a superb narrative of travail but also a valuable account of Russian cultural life and an equally valuable series of reflections orfthe nature of totalitarianism. Beautifully translated by Max Hayward, Hope Against Hope is a classic of its kind." Irving Howe • A
"Her memoirs are surely the most luminous account we have—or are likely to get—of life in the Soviet Union during the purges of the 1930's. Mme. Mandelstam's voice is strong, clear, settled, without a trace of self-pity; and the accuracy of her memory of those nightmarish times would be a miracle were it not in part explained by the intensity of her devotion to Mandelstam and the memory of their years together."
Olga Carlisle, The New York Times Book Review
Cover design: Jeany ее Wong
* These quotations are from the poems "The Finder of a Horseshoe" (1923) and "The Age" (1923).
t Author's Note: In M.'s verse of the thirties there are sometimes completely open statements or deliberately camouflaged ones. In Voronezh we were once visited by an "adjutant" of the semi-military kind (one of those we now refer to as "art historians in uniform") and questioned about the sense of the line "wave follows wave, breaking the back of the one ahead." "Could that be about the Five Year Plans?" he asked. M. walked up and down the room and replied with a look of astonishment: "Is that what you think?" When the man had gone, I asked M. what to do when they inquired about the hidden meaning like this. "Look surprised," M. said. I didn't always see the hidden meaning, and M. never explained it to me, in case I should ever be interrogated in prison.
[1] Member of the Cheka, the secret police. At later periods the Cheka was known successively as the OGPU, GPU, NKVD, MVD, MGB. It is now called the KGB.
[2] The notorious article (covering "anti-Soviet propaganda" and "counterrevolutionary activity") under which all "political" prisoners were charged.
[3] Lenin's famous phrase summarizing the issue between the Bolsheviks and their enemies.
[4] Acronym for "Commission for the Improvement of the Living Conditions of Scholars," created in 1921. See the note on Gorki in the Appendix.
[5] A center for writers and journalists set up in Moscow in 1920.
t A kind of mezzanine in houses in central Asia.
[6] The period after 1956 when some of Stalin's victims were officially cleared of the charges once made against them.
[7] The twenty-six Bolshevik commissars of Baku who were shot in 1921, allegedly on British orders.
t Author's Note: Georgi Ivanov's story about how M. had tried to kill himself as a young man in Warsaw is, I believe, completely without foundation, like many other romantic tales by this writer.
[8] Kulak: a pejorative term for a rich peasant. During collectivization it was used indiscriminately for all small holders.
[8] A form of banishment which allowed people to live anywhere except in twelve major cities.
+ Stalin's name is derived from the Russian for "steel."
[9] Non-Marxist Russian revolutionaries who collaborated with the Bolsheviks in the days after the October Revolution.
[10] The monthly literary magazine Moskva [Moscow] published nine of Man- delstam's poems in August 1964.
[11] Published in Berlin, 1922-24, Nakanune was pro-Soviet and Moscow- financed.
Genuine astonishment might not save me, but at least it could make things easier. Feeblemindedness and ignorance were always a good recommendation, both for a prisoner and for a bureaucrat.
[13] Russian intellectuals, particularly in the sixties of the nineteenth century, who were not of noble origin. The singular form is raznochinets.
[14] "Fourth Rome": a reference to the idea, proclaimed by the monk Philo- theus in the seventeenth century, that Moscow was the Third Rome—"and a Fourth there shall not be."
+ Akaki Akakievich, a down-trodden clerk, is the "fourth estate" anti-hero of Gogol's Greatcoat (1842).
J In 1928 Mandelstam was accused of plagiarism by a translator, A. G. Gorn- feld, because his name had been omitted from his version of Charles de Coster's La Legende d'Uylenspiegel after it had been revised by Mandelstam. The fault for this omission lay with the State Publishing House, which had commissioned Mandelstam to revise Gornfeld's translation. The whole affair was blown up into a scandal by the press, but a savage attack on Mandelstam by David Zaslavski (see the note on Zaslavski in the Appendix) provoked a strong defense of him by a group of leading Soviet writers, including Pasternak, Zosh- chenko, Fadeyev, Katayev, Averbakh and others, published as a collective letter to Literary Gazette in May 1929.
[15] Catching wild birds and selling them as songsters is still a widespread practice in Russia.
[16] The highest mountain in the Caucasus. + The syllable os occurs four times here.
[17] From the poem beginning "I am not yet dead, I am not yet alone" (January 1937)-
[17] Obshchestvo Stankovoi Zhivopisi (Society of Easel Painting), founded by Yuri Annenkov and David Sternberg in 1921.
turned up out of the blue to see us before going back to the university in Tashkent—he worked there together with Polivanov, who had given him a taste for philology and poetry. So why were we so startled at his coming in like that? Whenever we met with Akhmatova, we felt a little conspiratorial and were easily frightened. And then, like all Soviet citizens, we were afraid of unexpected visitors, cars stopping outside the house, and the sound of elevators at night. At the time of Akhmatova's visit, fear was not yet "standing watch" and only occasionally clutched us by the throat. In Moscow, on the other hand, during those days when we were under the spell of our illusions, we had no fears at all. Improbable as it may seem, we fell into an inexplicable state of calm and believed for some reason that
[19] Cash emoluments secretly given to officials in addition to their regular salaries.
t The History of the CF.S.U. [Communist Party of the Soviet Union]: Short Course was published in 1938, and until Stalin's death it was the basis of all political indoctrination. At first Stalin was proclaimed to be the author only of Chapter 4 (on Dialectical Materialism), but in the post-war years he was credited with having written the whole of it.
[20] A figure in Russian folklore.
t Famous series of poetry editions, founded by Maxim Gorki.
[21]This is administratively separate from the Union of Writers and is supposed to give material aid to writers: loans, medical care, vacations, etc.
[22] The Party Congress of 1934, many of whose participants perished in the terror three years later.
[23] Labor-day: the unit by which work was measured on the collective farms, and for which the peasants received payment in kind and a small amount of cash at the end of the working year.
[24] Elections with a single list of pro-Government candidates for the Supreme Soviet were provided for by Stalin's "Constitution" of 1936. Most of the freedoms and privileges "guaranteed" by it were strictly nominal.
[25] Country dishes. Tiuria: bread soaked in kvass. Murtsovka: eggs and onion mixed with kvass or water.
[26] All the leading Yiddish writers were shot, on Stalin's orders, in 1952.
+ Tribunals consisting of three officials which sentenced political prisoners behind closed doors during the terror.
[27] I.e., after Yezhov took over from Yagoda in 1937 and was ordered by Stalin to step up measures against "enemies of the people."
[28] See the note on Brik in the Appendix.
t Stalin.
[29] Established in 1934 to deal with "socially dangerous persons," the Special Tribunal was composed of high-ranking NKVD and militia officials and could impose sentences of exile or confinement to forced-labor camps.
the addressee was dead. A few months after this, M.'s brother Alexander Emilievich was given a document to certify his death. I know of no other prisoner's wife who ever received a certificate like this. I cannot imagine why such a favor was shown to me.
Not long before the Twentieth Congress, as I was walking along the Ordynka* with Akhmatova, I suddenly noticed an enormous number of plainclothes police agents. There was literally one in every doorway. "You needn't worry," Akhmatova said to me, "something good is happening." She had already heard vague rumors about the Party Congress at which Khrushchev read out his famous letter.t This was why so many police agents had been stationed around the city. It was at this juncture that Akhmatova advised me
* A Moscow street.
t Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's crimes at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 was in the form of a circular letter to the Party organizations.
[30] This presumably refers to editions of Mandelstam abroad, which are used by the Soviet authorities as an excuse for not publishing Mandelstam's work in the Soviet Union.