<b>Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir of life with her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, is a vital eyewitness account of Stalin's Soviet Union and one of the most moving testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written.</b> <p/> In 1933, Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) wrote a satiric poem about Joseph Stalin, and the result of his defiance was arrest, interrogation, and exile, followed by re-arrest and death in a transit camp of the Siberian gulag in 1938. Osip's wife, Nadezhda (1899-1980), loyally accompanied him into exile in the Urals and later worked courageously to rescue the manuscripts of his poems and to discover the truth about his death. <i>Hope Against Hope</i> is her harrowing account of their last years together and a window into Stalin's persecution of Russia's literary intelligentsia in the 1930s and beyond. But it is also a profoundly inspiring love story that relates their determination to keep both love and art alive in the most desperate circumstances. <p/> After years of circulating privately in the Soviet Union, <i>ope Against Hope </i>was smuggled out and published in the West in 1970 and has since achieved the status of a classic, not only for its essential testimony to a dramatic period of history but also for the enduring brilliance of Mandelstam's writing. <p/>Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribb