![]() Only chance could save you.” Osip, arrested by the secret police, exiled, and later arrested again, eventually dies during the Great Purge of 1938. Soon enough their fates were brought under what she describes as “the same category marked down for absolute destruction” - where many “went to concentration camps or died, but some survived. ![]() Under the Soviet regime in the 1930s, with Stalin’s persecution of the literary intelligentsia underway, Nadezhda and her husband, Osip Mandelstam, one of Russia’s greatest poets at the time, were amongst those who chose not to leave. Early this fall, left with no memory of what I had read during this year of disproportionate panic and disillusionment, I returned to Nadezhda Mandelstam’s 20th century masterpiece - Hope Against Hope (translated by Max Hayward). ![]()
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