Synopsis

Osip Mandelstam, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, died in a prison camp somewhere in Siberia in the 1930s: no one knows precisely how or when. He was imprisoned not for his political activity but for writing a poem. All we know of the life of this remarkable man comes from two classic books by his widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam : Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. In tonight's Arena, poet and novelist D. M. Thomas , author of The White Hotel, traces the the career of this great lyric poet, with the help of Joseph Brodsky , exiled Russian poet, and Nadezhda Mandelstam. filmed secretly in her Moscow flat in 1973 and seen here for the first time on British tv.