Volume 28, Number 3 · March 5, 1981
Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899–1980)
By Joseph Brodsky
Of the eighty-one years of her life, Nadezhda Mandelstam spent nineteen as the wife of Russia's greatest poet in this century, Osip Mandelstam, and fortytwo as his widow. The rest was childhood and youth. In educated circles, especially among the literati, being the widow of a great man is enough to provide an identity. This is especially so in Russia, where in the Thirties and in the Forties the regime was producing writers' widows with such efficiency that in the middle of the Sixties there were enough of them around to organize a trade union.
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