通过诗人曼德施塔姆的个人遭遇来折射俄国知识分子在二十世纪的悲惨命运，来反衬当时社会的反人道、反文化本质，曼德施塔姆夫人娜杰日达·曼德施塔姆于是成了一个大恐怖时代的文学见证人。《曼德施塔姆夫人回忆录》是一份历史的证词，更是一段文学的记忆。 《曼德施塔姆夫人回忆录》体现了二十世纪俄国“遗孀文学”的几个主要特征：首先是作者的遗孀身份，这类作品大多写于作者的丈夫去世之后，是孤独中的寡妻们回忆往事、记忆亡夫的途径和结果；其次，此类作品的内容几乎全都是关于逝去丈夫的，它们作为一种回忆录体裁所体现出的形式特征，即它们大多并非自传，而是“他传”；最后，则是此类作品中所渗透着的作者的奉献和牺牲精神，女性作者们写作此类作品的目的大多仍在于为亡夫树碑立传，或正名申冤。

Osip Mandelstam is a central figure not only in modern Russian but in world poetry, the author of some of the most haunting and memorable poems of the twentieth century. A contemporary of Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Boris Pasternak, a touchstone for later masters such as Paul Celan and Robert Lowell, Mandelstam was a crucial instigator of the "revolution of the word" that took place in St. Petersburg, only to be crushed by the Bolshevik Revolution. Mandelstam's last poems, written in the interval between his exile to the provinces by Stalin and his death in the Gulag, are an extraordinary testament to the endurance of art in the presence of terror. This book represents a collaboration between the scholar Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin, one of contemporary America's finest poets and translators. It also includes Mandelstam's "Conversation on Dante," an uncategorizable work of genius containing the poet's deepest reflections on the nature of the poetic process.