Hope Against Hope - Nadezhda Mandelstam Translator: Susan Bernofsky

Translator: Susan Bernofsky

and when he returned

alone on the mysteriously deserted Daphne

Pages: 320

The narrator of Delecroix’s fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls

Hope Against Hope - Nadezhda Mandelstam Translator: Susan BernofskyIn 1933 the poet Osip Mandelstam friend to Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova wrote a spirited satire denouncing Josef Stalin. It proved to be a sixteen line death sentence. For his one act of defiance he was arrested by the Cheka, the secret police, interrogated, exiled and eventually re arrested. He died en route to one of Stalin's labour camps. His wife, Nadezhda, was with him on both occasions when he was arrested, and she loyally accompanied him