Early on in “Hope against Hope”, Nadezhda describes her early relationship with M., “Whenever they met they were cheerful and carefree like children, as in the old days at the Poets’ Guild. ‘Stop it,’ I used to shout, ‘I can’t live with such chatterboxes!’”(4). Returning to this sentence after having read the whole piece, the notion of any of these characters as “chatterboxes” seems utterly out of place. This stark contrast is clear at the end, when she writes, “An existence like this leaves its mark. We all became slightly unbalanced mentally—not exactly ill, but not normal either: suspicious, mendacious, confused and inhibited in our speech, at the same time putting on a show of adolescent optimism” (88). “Adolescent optimism” replaces their previous “cheerful and carefree like children” behavior. Similarly, instead of being “chatterboxes” they have become “inhibited in our speech”.

The effect of terror and its influence on speech really struck me in this piece. The fact that writers and poets, those who clung to words and speech for their livelihood, were most targeted and silenced was particularly striking when Nadezhda writes, “But a poet, after all, is just a human being like any other, and he is bound to end up in the most ordinary way, in the way most typical for his age and his times, meeting the fate that lies in wait for everyone else. None of the glamour and thrill of special destiny, but the simple path along which all were ‘herded in a herd’” (10). The realization of these dejected poets that they will likely die without “glamour and thrill” goes hand in hand with the realization that poets, too, are vulnerable and can be silenced by the government. The pain of a deflated artist is particularly poignant and representative of the pervasiveness of the terror.