Hope Against Hope (Masterplots II: Nonfiction Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Nadezhda Mandelstam
- First Published: 1970
- Type of Work: Memoir
- Time of Work: 1919-1938
- Setting: The Soviet Union
- Principal Characters: Osip Mandelstam, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova
- Genres: Criticism, Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography
- Subjects: Culture, History, Suffering, Communism or communists, Prisoners, Human rights, Courage, Marriage, Poetry or poets, Hope, Oppression, Creative process, Cruelty, Biography, Russia or Russian people, Soviet Union or Soviets, Concentration camps, Arts or crafts, Persecution
- Locales: Soviet Union
Form and Content
Nadezhda means hope in Russian, and this book proffers hope for Russia (even in the proverbial “against hope”: The book had no title in manuscript, and the Russian edition published in New York the same year as the English translation was given the title Vospominaniya, that is “memoirs”)—hope through its past and its poetry, through its language and its tradition. The book’s first sentence places the reader in medias res with an opening as vivid and evocative as any in modern writing: “After slapping Alexei Tolstoi in the face, M....
[The entire page is 2754 words long]
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