Hope Against Hoperecounted the last four years in the life of the great
Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, and gave a hair-raising account of Stalin's
terror. Hope Abandonedcomplements that earlier masterpiece, and in it
Nadezhda Mandelstam describes their life together from 1919, and her own
after Mandelstam's death in a labour camp in 1938. She also sets out his
system of values and beliefs, and provides striking portraits of many of
their contemporaries including Boris Pasternak and their champion till his
own downfall, Nikolai Bukharin, as well as an astonishingly candid picture
of Anna Akhmatova.