Remembering the murderous nineteen-thirties, Nadezhda Mandelstam reports her husband's answer to a question about Acmeism, the poetic alliance he had belonged to in his youth, a group that included Anna Akhmatova and her husband Nicolay Gumilyov:

As his wife's collocated quotations imply, the terms for Osip Mandelstam's nostalgia were his inability to travel. The chapter in which this is reported is entitled ‘Italy’, and she notes that he had been there briefly in his youth but had almost forgotten it by the time he made these remarks. Mandelstam's response to the poetry of Dante and Ariosto is a part of his St Petersburg ambience: a Russia opened up to the world. The word ‘nostalgia’, a ‘disease of the soul’ (as a Soviet party member defined the word for me in 1980), implies a desired homecoming to world culture on the part of the poet whose exile in Stalin's Soviet Union was both real and soon-to-be fatal.