It’s the Only Face I Have

One of the big mistakes we make when we think about fear is to oppose fear to hope. Hope against fear, that’s the credo. And it’s badly mistaken. Nadezdha Mandelstam was one of the great writers on Stalinism. Her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, was murdered in 1938. She survived the purges and went on to write a miracle of a memoir titled, aptly, Hope Against Hope. This is what she had to say on the topic of hope and fear: Until a short time before, I had been full of concern for all my friends and relatives, for my work, for everything I set store by. Now this concern was gone—and fear, too…Having entered a realm of non-being, I […]