Quote by Nadezhda Mandelstam: “Hope is the one thing that cannot be taken from us.”

Everything else can be removed by force: freedom, property, people you love, your name. But an internal orientation toward the future — the bare capacity to imagine things might be different — resists external suppression. This is not naive optimism; coming from a survivor of Stalinist terror, it is a statement of radical human endurance.

Hope Against Hope was published abroad in 1970, the year after her second memoir Hope Abandoned. Nadezhda Mandelstam spent decades after her husband's death in the Gulag evading surveillance, living in provincial cities, and carrying the texts of his poems in her memory. Her books were circulated in samizdat — self-published underground form — inside the Soviet Union.

Russian memoirist who preserved the poetry of her husband Osip Mandelstam by memorizing it during the Stalinist terror, when written copies were too dangerous to keep. Her memoir Hope Against Hope is one of the most important testimonies of life under Soviet totalitarianism. The Russian title plays on her name, which means 'hope.'