Nadezhda Mandelstam’s account of life with the poet Osip Mandelstam under Stalin. 

It is her attempt to preserve not only a man and his work, but the texture of a world designed to make reliable memory almost impossible.

After Osip wrote a satirical poem about Stalin in 1933, he was arrested, exiled, rearrested and eventually died in a Soviet transit camp in 1938. Nadezhda survived by moving through the margins of Soviet life, committing his poems to memory and reconstructing the years of surveillance, disappearance, interrogation and fear that surrounded them. Mandelstam repeatedly returns to rumour, compromised testimony, forged records and the problem of determining truth when the archive itself has been produced by terror.

First published in English in 1970, it is simultaneously political history, literary memoir, portrait of a marriage and an argument for memory as a form of resistance. This Everyman’s Library edition includes a new introduction by Maria Stepanova, a chronology and bibliography.

Everyman’s Library / Alfred A. Knopf, London & New York, 2023. Hardcover. Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics edition. Translated from the Russian by Max Hayward, with an introduction by Maria Stepanova. Light shelf wear to boards and jacket; internally clean and unmarked, binding firm. Very good to near fine condition.