Osip Mandelstam

Born in Warsaw but raised in St. Petersburg in a well-to-do and Russified family, Osip Mandelstam became in his short and tragic life one of the great figures of Russian poetry. After studying at the Sorbonne and Heidelberg University, he returned to St. Petersburg and rapidly emerged as one of the most talented Russian poets of his generation. Shaped by fellow poets Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev, Mandelstam’s poetry helped free Russian verse from the metaphysical opacity and spiritualism of long-dominant symbolist poetics, allowing it to express individual thought, feeling, and experience through rigorous clarity of image and expression. From sources like Mandelstam’s great 1920s poetic memoir The Noise of Time, it seems that his childhood connections to Jewishness were minimal, and in 1911, he converted to Lutheranism. Mandelstam engaged with dimensions of the Jewish experience seriously at various junctures in his career, particularly in his prose works: The Noise of Time and The Egyptian Stamp. Though he remained in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution and tried to make his way in the new revolutionary society, his political and aesthetic alienness aroused suspicion and pressure. Protected, it seems, by the personal support of a leading Bolshevik, Nikolai Bukharin, he managed to publish a good deal of prose, both fictional and journalistic, during his Soviet years, including work based on a seven-year sojourn in Soviet Armenia, away from the increasingly dangerous cultural center in Moscow. His shocking choice to write openly in his new poetry about the murderousness of Stalin and the regime precipitated his arrest and exile in 1934. During exile in Voronezh, a city in southwestern Russia, and thereafter, under unbearable mental stress, Mandelstam attempted to convince the regime that he was ‘‘rehabilitated,’’ but in 1938, in the midst of the Terror, he was denounced by his colleagues in the Writers’ Union and sentenced to five years of labor. Mandelstam died in a transit camp that same year. His widow and fellow writer, Nadezhda Mandelstam, memorized his work and preserved it through decades of repression until its eventual publication beginning in the 1960s.