Customer Reviews

Hope Abandoned

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I read this astonishing book awhile back, but it stands out in my mind as a lucid, insightful account of the destruction of an entire generation of intellectual life and how this stunts the psyche of the following generation. If I achieve even a small measure of the insight in my old age that Nadezdha Mandelstam displays in hers I will feel blessed. You won't take your intellectual freedoms for granted after reading this one. If you are a devotee of the poetry of Anna Akhmatova you will like this book. Her life and Ms. Mandelstam's were intertwined.

I've read HOPE AGAINST HOPE by Nadezhda Mandelstam and am now halfway through HOPE ABANDONED. Few if any writers can match her calm but stunning insight into a world blown apart and rebuilt by Joseph Stalin and Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin--though only Stalin appears offstage herein and the others are dead. This is a life-changing book. You will not be the same person once you finish it as you were when starting it, although reading HOPE AGAINST HOPE first offers great reward in reading this followup. We watch generations die and art and morality go into the trash barrel as "engineers of the human soul" take over and remold the people of the Soviet Union via mass murder into trembling zombies of the Revolution. Nadezhda's writing beggars belief for its historical grasp and for her depth of understanding of her personal life in hell. One can only sigh with despair at what is happening in China under the stunting of freedom of thought and of the future generations of Chinese who will pay (unknowingly!) for what they are denied. The smog over China from industry is the moral and artistic equivalent of what has taken place in the people. I'll add that Nadezhda's sense of what poetry is will take the ground away from under you. You thought you knew what poetry is. Read this and find out how little you know.