Nadezhda Mandelstam - Hope Against Hope

Russian Poetry"

(Mandelstam), 184, 259 Vinaver ("Red Cross" deputy), 23-24, 214

on M.'s case, ^0-51,93 Vinogradov, Victor Vladimirovich, 350 Vishnevski, Sonia, 28, 261-62 Vishnevsky Vsevolod, 101, 181

illusory power of, 261 Vladivostok, transit camp near, 228, 378, 379, 385, 391 "L.'s" account of, 391-96 letter written in, 373 Volpe, Caesar Samoiiovich, 139Г315 Volpin, Mikhail Davidovich (Misha), 327

Voronezh, see Mandelstam, Osip—

Voronezh period of "Voronezh" (Akhmatova), 217-18 Voronski, Alexander Konstantinovich 252

Fellow Travelers published by, 11 x M.'s work rejected by, 138, 258 Vitoraya Rechka, transit camp at, 391 M.'s death at, 228, 385

Vyshinski, Andrei Yanuarievich, 82, 325

White Sea Canal, 32,46-47, 364

M.'s poem about, 46-47, 300 "With the World of Empire"

(Mandelstam), 173 "Wolf, The" (Mandelstam), 8, 17, 85, 152

copy of, requested by police agent, 35 variants of, 189 "Wolf' poetry cycle (Mandelstam), 12, 193-94 chronology of, 191 exile theme of, 194 Wrangel, Baron Peter Nikolayevich, 117 "Writing," new meaning of, 37-38

Yagoda, Genrikh Grigorievich, 9, 23 forced-labor camps under, 211-12 laboratory experiments of, 77 Stalin poem memorized by, 82 warrant signed by, 91 Yakhontov, Lilia, 32-33

as sentimental Stalinist, 199, 220 Yakhontov, Vladimir Nikolayevich, 33, 90, 220, 292, 300 identity papers of, 120 stage performance of, 121 visits Voronezh, 123,131,199 Yarkho, Boris Isaakovich, 47 Yazykov, Nikolai Mikhailovich, 238 "Yeast of the World" (Mandelstam), 199-201

Yenukidze, Abel Sofronovich ("Red

Abel"), 24, 309-" Yesenin, Sergei Alexandrovich, 343 Yezhov, Nikolai lvanovich, 321-25, 35⁶« Babel's curiosity about, 321 dismissal of, 78, 131, 376 labor camps under, 228 period of terror under, 72,84, 160, 241,

244, 298 Stalin photographed with, 339 in Sukhumi, 113, 322-25 Yezhov, Tonia, 113, 323 Yudina, Maria Veniaminovna, 142, 216 Yttnost (monthly), 280

Zadonski, Tikhon, 130, 195 Zalka, Mate, 136 Zaslavski, David I., 178 Zenkevich, Mikhail Alexandrovich (Misha), 45-47, 88,120

Zhdanov, Andrei Alexandrovich, 386 Zhirmunski, Victor Maximovich, 37, 306-

307

Zhukovski, Vasily Andreyevich, 73 Zoo (Shklovski), 166 Zoshchenko, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 87, 178»,279, 317 Decree on, 18 Zubov Institute, 167, 276 Zvezda (magazine), 139, 184, 233, 235

Nadezhda Mandelstam

Mrs. Mandelstam was born in Saratov in 1899 and now lives in Moscow. The "external facts of her life" are recounted in Clarence Brown's in­troduction to this book.

Max Hay ward

A Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford, Max Hayward is a specialist in Russian literature. His previous translations include Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago (with Many a Harari), Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denis- ovich, and Isaac Babel's You Must Know Every­thing.

Critics praise for

Hope Against Hope

by Nude&hdu Mandelstam

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"...Hope Against Hope..As so churning in its impact, so tearfully brave and enduring, so horrifying and yet so intelligent that no one of sensibility dare deny himself knowing it." Faubion Bowers, Village Voice

"...it is well-nigh impossible to approach this book as a 'literary' work....It is a vast and painstaking document of two people's lives in a doomed society ruled by fear and paranoia, a record astonishing in its essential sanity."

The Nation

"...an important, absorbing and moving memoir...a shuddering panorama of Russia under the stamp of terror..." Newsweek

"Nothing one can say will either communicate or affect the genius of this book. To pass judgment on it is almost insolence—even judgment that is merely celebration and homage.... It leaves one richer, more hopeful than one has a right to be." George Steiner, The New Yorker

"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

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