Osip Mandelstam

Osip Mandelstam wrote sixteen lines about Stalin in 1933, recited them to about a dozen people, and died in a transit camp near Vladivostok five years later. He was born in Warsaw to a Jewish leather merchant, raised in St Petersburg, and with Akhmatova and Gumilev founded Acmeism, the movement that set craftsmanship and concrete things against the vagueness of the Symbolists. Stone appeared in 1913 and Tristia in 1922. The Stalin epigram called the leader a Kremlin mountaineer with fingers like fat worms and described his pleasure in executions; someone in the room reported it, and Mandelstam was arrested in May 1934. The sentence was unexpectedly mild - internal exile to Cherdyn, then Voronezh - after Stalin personally telephoned Boris Pasternak to ask whether Mandelstam was a master, a conversation Pasternak handled badly by his own account and never stopped regretting. In Voronezh he wrote the notebooks that are generally considered his best work, including an ode to Stalin that reads as either capitulation or parody and has been argued about ever since. He was arrested again in May 1938 for counter-revolutionary activity, sentenced to five years, and died of what the certificate called heart failure at the Vtoraya Rechka transit camp on 27 December; the location of his body is unknown. His widow Nadezhda Mandelstam memorised the unpublished poems, kept them alive through decades in which possession of them was dangerous, and published two volumes of memoirs in the West in the 1970s that are among the primary accounts of the terror. Almost nothing of his late work was printed in the Soviet Union until the 1970s and full publication waited for perestroika. Paul Celan translated him into German and regarded him as a brother poet. Voronezh, where the notebooks were written, now has a monument to him.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history