Nadezhda Mandelstam has told the story. In Strunino, after her husband’s arrest. working the night shift in a textile factory, she runs, sleepless and distraught, among the machines, chanting his forbidden poems to herself to preserve them. And so for twenty-five rears in Perm, in Moscow, in Voronezh. Leningrad, Ulianovsk, Samatikha . . .