8 March 2007

seventeenth

Thanks to ESWN:
Nadezhda Mandelstam
Anna Akhmatova
I love Russian literature.

It's a pity, though, that Clive James doesn't seem to get the obvious word play in the titles of Mandelstam's two books, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. 'Nadezhda' means 'hope'. I would've thought it would be necessary to point that out. I think one can assume quite safely that the majority of Slate's readers have never studied Russian. And it's strange, because he does seem to have studied Russian himself.

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