While literary figures such as Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam presented the bleak realities and oppression of the Stalin era, they also were able to detail the ways in which an unjust reality forced them to adapt. This involved both a tactful acceptance of life under High Stalinism and the maintenance of hope. These two aspects helped drive Akhmatova and the Mandelstam’s to produce authentic artistic works that detailed the progression of the conscious under Stalin’s tyrannical rule.

Nadezhda Mandelstam details the two arrests of her husband Osip in 1934 and 1938 in her book Hope against Hope. Her and her husband’s preparedness is striking, as she explains, “We never asked, on hearing about the latest arrest, ‘What was he arrested for?’ but we were exceptional.” She later claims that Akhmatova would answer, “‘What do you mean what for? It’s time you understood that people are arrested for nothing!'”  if anyone asked “What for?” In this way, Mandelstam reveals that some of those who knew themselves to be at risk had internalized the external threats that they faced into internal logic. How then, could they maintain the motivation of hope to carry on?

Mandelstam speaks of her role to represent something more eternal than the current turmoil that she faced. She claims: “Terror and depotism are always short-sighted.” Through frustration and suffering, Mandelstam persevered because of what she explains as the says is the task for which she has lived. She had to preserve the constrained consciousness of Osip and of the oppressed art of life under Stalin. This task proved to sustain her, as she explains, “There was nothing I could do to alter M.’s fate, but some of his manuscripts had survived and much more was preserved in my memory. Only I could save it all, and this was why I had to keep up my strength.

In “Introduction,” Anna Akhmatova says of the time, “It was a time when only the dead / smiled, happy in their peace.” The mission of Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and so many others was to capture this smile for subsequent generations to see. First they had to accept the ill-fated status of their own individuality. But the hope to capture their own suffering and artistic pursuit for sake of future peace kept them on their course.