Nadezhda Mandelstam was the wife of the great poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in the Gulag after criticizing Stalin. Her memoir, Hope Against Hope (1970), is a brilliant account of the collapse of intellectual life and the terror and bleakness of everyday existence at the height of ideological tyranny. More, it is a morally incandescent epic: the story of a poet doomed by his absolute refusal to let his tongue be cut out, and of his wife’s heroic dedication to the preservation, in the face of isolation, poverty, and official anti-Semitism, of verse that she carried for decades only in her memory.

Of Hope Against Hope, the poet Joseph Brodsky writes: “[Mandelstam’s] memoirs are something more than a testimony to her times; they are a view of history in the light of conscience and culture. In that light, history winces, and an individual realizes his choice: between seeking that light’s source and committing an anthropological crime against himself.” This course will explore the impact of totalitarian regimes on art and the role of intellectual resistance under tyranny.

Image: Pyotr Alekseyevich Belov, Dandelions, 1987 | Image Asset Management / Superstock

Jacob Howland on Hope Against Hope

Faculty

Jacob Howland

Jacob Howland is Chief Academic Officer and Director of the Intellectual Foundations Program at UATX. His research focuses on ancient Greek philosophy, history, epic, and tragedy; the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud; Kierkegaard; and literary and philosophical responses to the Holocaust and Soviet totalitarianism.

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