Osip Mandelshtam, the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century, died in a Stalinist camp fifty years ago at the age of forty-seven. The survival of many of his poems in desperate hiding-places and in the memories of those closest to him has been described by his widow Nadezhda in her memoirs Hope against Hope. Dense and sonorous, his poetry magnificently merges the European past at its best with Russian experience at its worst.