After the arrest and death of Osip Mandelstam, his wife, Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam, dedicated the remaining half century of her life to preserving his legacy.
She memorized poetry and prose, spent almost decades in flight, in fear of arrest and trying to save the archive, wrote several volumes of memoirs about the era and comments on her husband’s poems, in the 70s she did a lot to introduce Western Slavists to the legacy of Mandelstam. Pavel Nerler’s book makes it possible to discern in the stoic, stubborn, categorical Nadezhda Mandelstam a living and vulnerable person who, by an exceptional effort of will, conquered his terrible age.
Publishing house of Elena Shubina, 736 p., 2015.