The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants - Plot & Excerpts
After her husband Osip Mandelstam perished in the gulag, she made it her mission to preserve his poetry and tell his story. She could not understand people’s obsession with their childhood, saying that her life began when she met Mandelstam on May 1, 1919. Her pampered childhood with an English governess did not prepare her for life as a poet’s helpmate and homeless wanderer in one of the most violent eras in Russian history. And it was not until her late seventies that she began to reminisce. “Why, at the dawn of the new era, at the very beginning of the fratricidal twentieth century, was I given the name Nadezhda [Hope]?”358 Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina was born on October 31, 1899, in Saratov, a port city on the Volga in southern Russia. Saratov was a multicultural city populated by Germans, Russians, Ukrainians, Tartars, and Jews. Her family had Jewish origins, but the children absorbed little Jewish culture. Nadezhda’s grandfather, on her father’s side, was forcefully converted to Orthodoxy under Nicholas I.
What do You think about The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants?
