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 Nadezhda Mandelstam and exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky.