Nadezhda Mandel'shtam earned her place in Russian literature as the foremost "widow of Russia," one of the female survivors of the Stalinist era who, in Carl R. Proffer's tribute, "preserved that genuine Russian culture which was locked up, blotted out, censored and unmentionable not only in the official press, but everywhere that the Party rules." Through her unceasing labors as an archivist and interpreter of the life and work of her husband, the great poet Osip Emil'evich Mandel'shtam, labors that at last "surfaced" in the post-Stalin samizdat-tamizdat press and her own Moscow "salon," she emerged as a vital, compelling, and provocative source for her husband's work as well as for many figures of and trends in Soviet culture. The repressions and forced silences of the Stalinist period catalyzed and shaped her celebrated memoirs, Vospominaniia (1970, Recollections; translated as Hope Against Hope, 1970) and Vtoraia kniga (1972, Second Book; translated as Hope...