TEHRAN – “Hope against Hope”, the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, which is about the persecution of intelligentsia under Stalin’s repressive regime, has been translated into Persian.
Translator Bijan Ashtari, who has previously translated books on the history of communism, has signed a contract with Salis, a major Iranian publishing company, to publish the book.
The memoirs were smuggled out of the Soviet Union and first published in the United States in 1970.
In reviewing the book, Russian poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Joseph Brodsky described Mandelstam’s life this way: “Of the 81 years of her life, Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899–1980) spent 19 as the wife of Russia’s greatest poet of the century, and 42 as his widow. The rest was childhood and youth.”
The book is a vivid and disturbing account of her last four years with her husband, the efforts she made to secure his release, to rescue his manuscripts from oblivion, and later, tragically, to discover the truth about his mysterious death.
It is also a harrowing, first-hand account of how Stalin and his henchmen persecuted Russia’s literary intelligentsia in the 1930s and beyond.
Ashtari has translated “Rasputin: Neither Devil Nor Saint” by Elizabeth Judas and “Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare” by Philip Short into Persian.
SB/YAW
END