Osip Mandelstam

Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam[1] (Russian: О́сип Эми́льевич Мандельшта́м, IPA: [ˈosʲɪp ɪˈmʲilʲjɪvʲɪtɕ məndʲɪlʲˈʂtam]; 14 January [O.S. 2 January] 1891 – 27 December 1938) was a Russian and Soviet poet. He was the husband of Nadezhda Mandelstam and one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets. He was arrested by Joseph Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife.

Osip Mandelstam
Osip Mandelstam in 1914
BornOsip Emilyevich Mandelstam
14 January [O.S. 2 January] 1891
Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire
Died27 December 1938(1938-12-27) (aged 47)
Transit Camp "Vtoraya Rechka" (near Vladivostok), Soviet Union
OccupationPoet, Essayist
Literary movementAcmeist poetry

Given a reprieve of sorts, they moved to Voronezh in southwestern Russia. In 1938 Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to five years in a corrective-labour camp in the Soviet Far East. He died that year at a transit camp near Vladivostok.[2]

Life and work

Mandelstam was born in Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire to a wealthy Polish-Jewish family.[3] His father, a leather merchant by trade, was able to receive a dispensation freeing the family from the Pale of Settlement. Soon after Osip's birth, they moved to Saint Petersburg.[3] In 1900, Mandelstam entered the prestigious Tenishev School. His first poems were printed in 1907 in the school's almanac. As a schoolboy, he was introduced by a friend to members of the illegal Socialist Revolutionary Party, including Mark Natanson, and the terrorist Grigory Gershuni.[4]

In April 1908, Mandelstam decided to enter the Sorbonne in Paris to study literature and philosophy, but he left the following year to attend the University of Heidelberg in Germany. In 1911, he decided to continue his education at the University of Saint Petersburg, from which Jews were excluded. He converted to Methodism and entered the university the same year.[5] He did not complete a formal degree.[6]

Mandelstam's poetry, acutely populist in spirit after the first Russian revolution in 1905, became closely associated with symbolist imagery. In 1911, he and several other young Russian poets formed the "Poets' Guild", under the formal leadership of Nikolai Gumilyov and Sergei Gorodetsky. The nucleus of this group became known as Acmeists. Mandelstam wrote the manifesto for the new movement: The Morning Of Acmeism (1913, published in 1919).[7] In 1913 he published his first collection of poems, The Stone;[8] it was reissued in 1916 under the same title, but with additional poems included.

Marriage and family

In 1916, Mandelstam was passionately involved with the poet Marina Tsvetayeva. According to her biographer, "Of the many love affairs with men that Marina embarked upon with such intensity during this period, it was probably the only one that was physically consummated."[9] Mandelstam was said to have had an affair with the poet Anna Akhmatova. She insisted throughout her life that their relationship had always been a very deep friendship, rather than a sexual affair.[10] In the 1910s, he was in love, secretly and unrequitedly, with a Georgian princess and St. Petersburg socialite Salomea Andronikova, to whom Mandelstam dedicated his poem "Solominka" (1916).[11]

In 1922, Mandelstam married Nadezhda Mandelstam in Kiev, Ukraine, where she lived with her family,[12] but the coupled settled in Moscow.[3] He continued to be attracted to other women, sometimes seriously. Their marriage was threatened by his falling in love with other women, notably Olga Vaksel in 1924-25 and Mariya Petrovykh in 1933–34.[13] Nadezha Mandelstam formed a lifelong friendship with Anna Akhmatova, who was a guest in the Mandelstam's apartment when he was arrested for the first time, but complained that she could never be friendly with Tsvetayeva, partly because "I had decided on Akhmatova as 'top' woman poet". She also complained that Tsvetayeva could not take her eyes off her husband, and that "she accused me of being jealous of her."[14]

During Mandelstam's years of imprisonment, 1934–38, Nadezhda accompanied him into exile. Given the real danger that all copies of Osip's poetry would be destroyed, she worked to memorize his entire corpus, as well as to hide and preserve select paper manuscripts, all the while dodging her own arrest.[15] In the 1960s and 1970s, as the political climate thawed, she was largely responsible for arranging clandestine republication of Mandelstam's poetry.[14]

Career, political persecution and death
See also: Stalin Epigram

In 1922, Mandelstam and Nadezhda moved to Moscow. At this time, his second book of poems, Tristia, was published in Berlin.[8] For several years after that, he almost completely abandoned poetry, concentrating on essays, literary criticism, memoirs The Noise Of Time, Feodosiya - both 1925; (Noise of Time 1993 in English) and small-format prose The Egyptian Stamp (1928). As a day job, he translated literature into Russian (19 books in 6 years), then worked as a correspondent for a newspaper.

Silver Age poets Mandelstam, Chukovsky, Livshits and Annenkov in 1914. Photo of Karl Bulla

First arrest

In the autumn of 1933, Mandelstam composed the poem "Stalin Epigram", which he recited at a few small private gatherings in Moscow. The poem deliberately insulted the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. In the original version, the one that was handed in to the police, he called Stalin the "peasant slayer", as well as pointing out that he had fat fingers. Six months later, on the night of May 16–17, 1934, Mandelstam was arrested by three NKVD officers who arrived at his flat with a search warrant signed by Yakov Agranov.[16] His wife hoped at first that this was over a fracas that had taken place in Leningrad a few days earlier, when Mandlestam slapped the writer Alexei Tolstoy because of a perceived insult to Nadezhda, but under interrogation he was confronted with a copy of the Stalin Epigram, and immediately admitted to being its author, believing that it was wrong in principle for a poet to renounce his own work. Neither he nor Nadezhda had ever risked writing it down, suggesting that one of the trusted friends to whom he recited it had memorised it, and handed a written copy to the police. It has never been established who it was.[17]

Mandelstam anticipated that insulting Stalin would carry the death penalty, but Nadezhda and Anna Akhmatova started a campaign to save him, and succeeded in creating "a kind of special atmosphere, with people fussing and whispering to each other." The Lithuanian ambassador in Moscow, Jurgis Baltrušaitis warned delegates at a conference of journalists that the regime appeared to be on the verge of killing a renowned poet.[18] Boris Pasternak - who disapproved of the tone of the Epigram - nonetheless appealed to the eminent Bolshevik, Nikolai Bukharin, to intervene. Bukharin, Who had known the Mandelstams since the early 1920 and had frequently helped them, approached the head of the NKVD, and wrote a note to Stalin.

Exile

On 26 May, Mandelstam was sentenced neither to death, nor even the Gulag, but to three years' exile in Cherdyn in the Northern Ural, where he was accompanied by his wife. This escape was looked upon as a "miracle"[18] - but the strain of his interrogation had driven Mandelstam to the verge of insanity. He later wrote that "at my side, my wife did not sleep for five nights"[19] - but when they arrived at Cherdyn, she fell asleep, in the upper floor of a hospital, and he attempted suicide by throwing himself out of the window. His brother, Alexander, appealed to the police for his brother to be given proper psychiatric care, and on 10 June, there was a second "miracle", which banished Mandelstam from the twelve largest Soviet cities, but otherwise allowed him to choose his place of exile.[18]

Mandelstam and his wife chose Voronezh, possibly, partly, because the name appealed to him. In April 1935, he wrote a four line poem that included the pun - Voronezh - blazh', Voronezh - voron, nozh meaning 'Voronezh is a whim, Voronezh - a raven, a knife.'. Just after their arrival, Boris Pasternak was startled to receive a phone call from Stalin - his only conversation with the dictator, in which Stalin wanted to know whether Mandelstam really was a talented poet. "He's a genius isn't he?" he is reputed to have asked Pasternak.[20]

NKVD photo after the second arrest, 1938

During these three years, Mandelstam wrote a collection of poems known as the Voronezh Notebooks, which included the cycle Verses on the Unknown Soldier. He and his wife did not know about Stalin's phone call to Pasternak until months after it took place, and did not feel safe from arrest. When Akhmatova was paying them a visit, a couple of other friends unexpectedly knocked on the door. All of them thought it was the police. This inspired the lines written by Akhmatova in March 1936:

But in the room of the poet in disgrace

Fear and the Muse keep watch by turns.

And the night comes on

That knows no dawn.[21]

Actually, the fact that Stalin had given an order to "isolate and preserve" Mandelstam meant that he was safe from further persecution, temporarily. In Voronezh, he was even granted a face-to-face meeting with the local head of the NKVD, Semyon Dukelsky, who told him "write what you like", and turned down an offer by Mandelstam to send in every poem he wrote to police headquarters. After that meeting, police agents ceased shadowing the couple.[22] There is a story, possibly apochryphal, that Mandelstam even rang Dukelsky to recite poetry over the phone.[23]

Second arrest and death

Mandelstam three-year period of exile ended in May 1937, when the Great Purge was under way. The previous winter, he had forced himself to write his "Ode to Stalin", hoping it protect him against further persecution. The couple no longer had the right to live in Moscow, so lived in nearby Kalinin (Tver), and visited the capital, where they relied on friends to put them up. In spring 1938, Mandelstam was granted an interview with the head of the Writers' Union Vladimir Stavsky, who granted him a two-week holiday for two in a rest home outside Moscow. This was a trap. The previous month, on 16 March - the day after the Mandelstams' former protector, Nikolai Bukharin had been sentenced to death - Stavsky had written to head of the NKVD, Nikolay Yezhov, denouncing Mandelstam. Getting him out of Moscow made it possible to arrest him without setting off a reaction.[24] He was arrested while on holiday, on 5 May. (ref. camp document of 12 October 1938, signed by Mandelstam) and charged with "counter-revolutionary activities". Four months later, on 2 August 1938,[25] Mandelstam was sentenced to five years in correction camps. He arrived at the Vtoraya Rechka (Second River) transit camp near Vladivostok in Russia's Far East and managed to get a note out to his wife asking for warm clothes; he never received them. He died from cold and hunger. His death was described later in a short story "Sherry Brandy" by Varlam Shalamov.

Mandelstam's own prophecy was fulfilled: "Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?" Nadezhda wrote memoirs about her life and times with her husband in Hope against Hope (1970) [15] and Hope Abandoned.[14] She also managed to preserve a significant part of Mandelstam's unpublished work.

Posthumous reputation and influence
  • In 1956, during the Khrushchev thaw, Mandelstam was rehabilitated and exonerated from the charges brought against him in 1938.
  • The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired Hope Against Hope, a radio dramatization about Mandelstam's poetry based on the book of the same title by Nadezhda Mandelstam, on 1 February 1972. The script was written by George Whalley, a Canadian scholar and critic, and the broadcast was produced by John Reeves.
  • In 1977, a minor planet, 3461 Mandelstam, discovered by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh, was named after him.[26]
  • On 28 October 1987, during the administration of Mikhail Gorbachev, Mandelstam was also exonerated from the 1934 charges and thus fully rehabilitated.[27]
  • In 1998, a monument was put up in Vladivostok in his memory.[2]
  • In 2020, Noemi Jaffe, a Brazilian writer, wrote a book about his persecution and how his wife managed to preserve his work, called "What she whispers" (O que ela sussurra).
  • In 2021, the album Sokhrani moyu rech' navsegda (Russian: «Сохрани мою речь навсегда», lit. 'Keep My Words Forever') was released in honor of the 130th anniversary of Mandelstam's birth. The album is a compilation of songs based on Mandelstam's poems by artists such as Oxxxymiron, Leonid Agutin, Ilya Lagutenko, Shortparis, and Noize MC.[28]

Selected poetry and prose collections
  • 1913 Kamen (Stone)
  • 1922 Tristia
  • 1923 Vtoraia kniga (Second Book)
  • 1925 Shum vremeni (The Noise Of Time) Prose
  • 1928 Stikhotvoreniya 1921–1925 (Poems 1921–1925)
  • 1928 Stikhotvoreniya (Poems)
  • 1928 O poesii (On Poetry)
  • 1928 Egipetskaya marka (The Egyptian Stamp)
  • 1930 Chetvertaya proza, (The Fourth Prose). Not published in Russia until 1989
  • 1930-34 Moskovskiye tetradi (Moscow Notebooks)
  • 1933 Puteshestviye v Armeniyu (Journey to Armenia)
  • 1933 Razgovor o Dante, (Conversation about Dante); published in 1967[29]
  • Voronezhskiye tetradi (Voronezh Notebooks), publ. 1980 (ed. by V. Shveitser)

Selected translations
  • Ahkmatova, Mandelstam, and Gumilev (2013) Poems from the Stray Dog Cafe, translated by Meryl Natchez, with Polina Barskova and Boris Wofson, hit & run press, (Berkeley, CA) ISBN 0936156066
  • Mandelstam, Osip and Struve, Gleb (1955) Sobranie sočinenij (Collected works). New York OCLC 65905828
  • Mandelstam, Osip (1973) Selected Poems, translated by David McDuff, Rivers Press (Cambridge) and, with minor revisions, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York)
  • Mandelstam, Osip (1973) The Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, translated by Burton Raffel and Alla Burago. State University of New York Press (USA)
  • Mandelstam, Osip (1973) The Goldfinch. Introduction and translations by Donald Rayfield. The Menard Press
  • Mandelstam, Osip (1974). Selected Poems, translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin. NY: Atheneum, 1974.
  • Mandelstam, Osip (1976) Octets 66-76, translated by Donald Davie, Agenda vol. 14, no. 2, 1976.
  • Mandelstam, Osip (1977) 50 Poems, translated by Bernard Meares with an Introductory Essay by Joseph Brodsky. Persea Books (New York)
  • Mandelstam, Osip (1980) Poems. Edited and translated by James Greene. (1977) Elek Books, revised and enlarged edition, Granada/Elek, 1980.
  • Mandelstam, Osip (1981) Stone, translated by Robert Tracy. Princeton University Press (USA)
  • Mandelstam, Osip (1991) The Moscow Notebooks, translated by Richard & Elizabeth McKane. Bloodaxe Books (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK) ISBN 978-1-85224-126-1
  • Mandelstam, Osip (1993, 2002) The Noise of Time: Selected Prose, translated by Clarence Brown, Northwestern University Press; Reprint edition ISBN 0-8101-1928-5
  • Mandelstam, Osip (1996) The Voronezh Notebooks, translated by Richard & Elizabeth McKane. Bloodaxe Books (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK) ISBN 978-1-85224-205-3
  • Mandelstam, Osip (1991) The Moscow & Voronezh Notebooks, translated by Richard & Elizabeth McKane. Bloodaxe Books (Tarset, Northumberland, UK) ISBN 978-1-85224-631-0
  • Mandlestam, Osip (2012) "Stolen Air", translated by Christian Wiman. Harper Collins (USA)
  • Mandelstam, Osip (2018) Concert at a Railway Station. Selected Poems, translated by Alistair Noon. Shearsman Books (Bristol)

References
  1. Also romanized Osip Mandelstam, Ossip Mandelstamm
  2. Delgado, Yolanda; RIR, specially for (2014-07-18). "The final days of Russian writers: Osip Mandelstam". www.rbth.com. Retrieved 2020-06-08.
  3. "1938: A poet who mocked Stalin dies in the gulag". Haaretz.com. Retrieved 2020-06-08.
  4. McSmith, Andy (2015). Fear and the Muse Kept Watch, The Russian Masters - from Akhmatova and Pasternak to Shostakovich and Eisenstein - Under Stalin. New York: The New Press. p. 101. ISBN 978-1-62097-079-9.
  5. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2012-03-16. Retrieved 2011-08-27.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  6. Vitaly Charny, "Osip Emilyevich Mandelshtam (1889-1938) Russian Poet"
  7. Brown, C.; Mandelshtam, O. (1965). "Mandelshtam's Acmeist Manifesto". Russian Review. 24 (1): 46–51. doi:10.2307/126351. JSTOR 126351.
  8. ""It gets people killed": Osip Mandelstam and the perils of writing poetry under Stalin". www.newstatesman.com. Retrieved 2020-06-08.
  9. Feinstein, Elaine (1989). Marina Tsvetayeva. London: Penguin. p. 56.
  10. Feinstein, Elaine. Anna of All the Russias, New York: Vintage Press, 2007.
  11. Zholkovsky, Alexander (1996), Text Counter Text: Rereadings in Russian Literary History, p. 165. Stanford University Press, ISBN 0-8047-2703-1.
  12. Morley, David (1991) Mandelstam Variations Littlewood Press p75 ISBN 978-0-946407-60-6
  13. Clarence Brown, Mandelstam, Cambridge University Press, 1973
  14. Nadezhda Mandelstam Hope Abandoned ISBN 0-689-10549-5
  15. Nadezhda Mandelstam (1970, 1999) Hope against Hope ISBN 1-86046-635-4
  16. Shentalinsky, Vitaly (1995). The KGB's Literary Archive, The Discovery of the Ultimate Fate of Russia's Suppressed Writers. London: The Harvill Press. pp. 168–69. ISBN 1 86046 072 0.
  17. Shentalinksy. The KGB's Literaty Archive. p. 172.
  18. McSmith, Andy. Fear and the Muse. pp. 110–11.
  19. Mandelstam, Osip (translated by Richard & Elizabth McKane) (2003). 'Kama' The Moscow & Voronezh Notebooks. Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books. p. 128. ISBN 978 1 85224 631 0.
  20. Mandelstam, Nadezhda. Hope Against Hope. p. 146.
  21. Akhmatova, Anna (translated by Judith Hemschemeyer (2006). "Voronezh", The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova. Boston: Zephyr. p. 381. ISBN 0-939010-27-5.
  22. Mandelstam, Nadezhda. Hope Against Hope. pp. 206–209.
  23. Nerler, Pavel. "Пусти меня, отдай меня, Воронеж ("Let me GO, Give me Back Voronezh"". Izvestya. Retrieved 12 December 2020.
  24. McSmith, Andy. Fear and the Muse. pp. 194–195.
  25. Extract from court protocol No. 19390/Ts
  26. Dictionary of Minor Planet Names, p. 290
  27. Kuvaldin, Y. (Юрий Кувалдин): Улица Мандельштамa Archived 2007-10-17 at the Wayback Machine, повести. Издательство "Московский рабочий", 1989, 304 p. In Russian. URL last accessed 20 October 2007.
  28. "Оксимирон, Агутин, Лагутенко, Shortparis, Noize MC написали песни на стихи Осипа Мандельштама. Премьера трибьюта «Сохрани мою речь навсегда» на «Медузе»". Meduza (in Russian). 2021-01-14. Retrieved 2021-01-15.
  29. Freidin, G.: Osip Mandelstam, Encyclopædia Britannica, 2001. Accessed 20 October 2007.

Further reading
  • Coetzee, J.M. "Osip Mandelstam and the Stalin Ode", Representations, No.35, Special Issue: Monumental Histories. (Summer, 1991), pp. 72–83.
  • Davie, Donald (1977) In the Stopping Train Carcanet (Manchester)
  • Freidin, Gregory (1987) A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London
  • Анатолий Ливри, "Мандельштам в пещере Заратустры", - в Вестнике Университета Российской Академии Образования, ВАК, 1 – 2014, Москва, с. 9 – 21. http://anatoly-livry.e-monsite.com/medias/files/mandelstam-livry026.pdf Copie of Nietzsche.ru : http://www.nietzsche.ru/influence/literatur/livri/mandelstam/%5B%5D. Version française : Anatoly Livry, Nietzscheforschung, Berlin, Humboldt-Universität, 2013, Band 20, S. 313-324 : http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/nifo.2013.20.issue-1/nifo.2013.20.1.313/nifo.2013.20.1.313.xml
  • Dr. Anatoly Livry, « Mandelstam le nietzschéen: une origine créative inattendue » dans Журнал Вісник Дніпропетровського університету імені Альфреда Нобеля. Серія «Філологічні науки» зареєстровано в міжнародних наукометричних базах Index Copernicus, РИНЦ, 1 (13) 2017, Університет імені Альфреда Нобеля, м. Дніпро, The Magazine is inscribed by the Higher Certifying Commission on the index of leading reviewing scientific periodicals for publications of main dissertation of academic degree of Doctor and Candidate of Science, p. 58-67. http://anatoly-livry.e-monsite.com/medias/files/1-13-2017.pdf%5B%5D
  • MacKay, John (2006) Inscription and Modernity: From Wordsworth to Mandelstam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press ISBN 0-253-34749-1
  • Nilsson N. A. (1974) Osip Mandel’štam: Five Poems. (Stockholm)
  • Platt, Kevin, editor (2008) Modernist Archaist: Selected Poems by Osip Mandelstam [1]
  • Riley, John (1980) The Collected Works. Grossteste (Derbyshire)
  • Ronen, O. (1983) An Аpproach to Mandelstam. (Jerusalem)
  • Mikhail Berman-Tsikinovsky (2008), play "Continuation of Mandelstam" (published by Vagrius, Moskow. ISBN 978-5-98525-045-9)
  1. Modern Archaist: Selected Poems by Mandelstam
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