Nadezdha Yakovlevna Mandelstam was born in Saratov in 1899, but spent her early life in Kiev, studying art and travelling widely with her family. She learnt English, French and German fluently enough to be able to take on extensive translation work, which at a later period allowed her and her husband to survive. She met the poet Osip Mandelstam in Kiev in 1919, and they were married in 1922. From that point on until Mandelstam's death in 1938, her life was so closely bound up with her husband's that without her quite extraordinary courage and memory and will, a great part of his work would have died with him. She spent much of the Second World War in Tashkent, teaching English at the University of Central Asia and sharing a house for part of that time with her friend Anna Akhmatova. After the war she managed to survive by leading an inconspicuous existence as a teacher of English in remote provincial towns. In 1964 she was at last granted permission to reutrn to Moscow, where she began to write her memoir of the life she had shared with perhaps the greatest Russian poet of the century, and where she continued her determined attempt to preserve his works and memory against official discouragement. She died in 1980.

In the second volume of her autobiography, this book describes the life of Nadezhda and her husband Osip Mandelstam, providing an interpretive background for his poetry. The book also describes some distinguished contemporaries, including Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak and Nikolai Bukharin.