This remarkable novel is built round real people caught up in Stalin's Great Terror. Its central character is the martyred poet Osip Mandelstam and his heroic wife Nadezhda whose great memoir Hope Against Hope defines the period. As does this powerful book encapsulating the triumph of the human spirit over a perverted ideology masquerading as the socialist promised land. I cannot praise it too highly.
(David Graham - bwl 61 Summer 2011 ) |
