Osip Mandelstam

Osip Mandelstam

NKVD photo after the first arrest
Born January 15 [O.S. January 3] 1891
Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire
Died December 27, 1938(1938-12-27) (aged 47)
transit camp "Vtoraya Rechka" (near Vladivostok), USSR
Occupation poet, essayist, political prisoner
Ethnicity Jewish
Literary movement Acmeist poetry

Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (also spelled Osip Mandelshtam, Ossip Mandelstamm) (Russian: О́сип Эми́льевич Мандельшта́м) (January 15 [O.S. January 3] 1891 – December 27, 1938) was a Russian and Soviet poet and essayist, one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets.

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Life and work

Mandelstam was born in Warsaw to a wealthy Jewish family. His father, a leather merchant by trade, was able to receive a dispensation freeing the family from the pale of settlement, and soon after Osip's birth, they moved to Saint Petersburg. In 1900, Mandelstam entered the prestigious Tenishevsky school, which also counts Vladimir Nabokov and other significant figures of Russian and Soviet culture among its alumni. His first poems were printed in the school's almanac in 1907.

In April 1908, Mandelstam decided to enter the Sorbonne to study literature and philosophy, but he left the following year to attend the University of Heidelberg. In 1911, in order to continue his education at the University of Saint Petersburg, he converted to Methodism (which he did not practice) and entered the university the same year [1][2].

Mandelstam's poetry, acutely populist in spirit after the first Russian revolution in 1905, became closely associated with symbolist imagery, and in 1911, he and several other young Russian poets formed the "Poets' Guild" (Russian: Цех Поэтов, Tsekh Poetov), under the formal leadership of Nikolai Gumilyov and Sergei Gorodetsky. The nucleus of this group would then become known as Acmeists. Mandelstam had authored the manifesto for the new movement: The Morning Of Acmeism (1913, published in 1919). 1913 also saw the publication of his first collection of poems, The Stone (Russian: Камень, Kamyen), to be reissued in 1916 in a greatly expanded format, but under the same title. He had an affair with Anna Akhmatova.

In 1922, Mandelstam arrived in Moscow with his newly-wed wife Nadezhda. At this time, his second book of poems, Tristia, was published in Berlin. For several years after that, he almost completely abandoned poetry, concentrating on essays, literary criticism, memoirs (The Din Of Time, Russian: Шум времени, Shum vremeni; Феодосия, Feodosiya - both 1925) and small-format prose (The Egyptian Stamp, Russian: Египетская марка, Yegipetskaya marka - 1928). As a day job, he translated (19 books in 6 years), then worked as a correspondent for the newspaper The Irish Times. Their marriage was threatened by Mandelstam's falling in love with other women, notably Olga Vaksel in 1924-25 and Mariya Petrovykh in 1933-34.[3]

Mandelstam's non-conformist, anti-establishment tendencies were not heavily disguised, and in the autumn of 1933, they broke through in form of the famous "Stalin Epigram". The poem, sharply criticizing the "Kremlin highlander", was described elsewhere as a "sixteen line death sentence," likely prompted by Mandelstam's seeing (in the summer of that year, while vacationing in Crimea) the effects of the Great Famine, a result of Stalin's collectivisation in the USSR and his drive to exterminate the "kulaks". Six months later, Mandelstam was arrested.

Anna Akhmatova
NKVD photo after the second arrest

However, after the customary pro forma inquest, he not only was spared his life, but the sentence did not even include being sent to the Gulag — a miraculous event, usually explained by historians as owing to Stalin's personal interest in his fate. Mandelstam was "only" exiled to Cherdyn in Northern Ural with his wife. After his attempt to commit suicide, the sentence was softened, and he was banished from the largest cities, but otherwise allowed to choose his new place of residence. He and his wife chose Voronezh.

This proved a temporary reprieve. In the coming years, Mandelstam would (as was expected of him) write several poems which seemed to glorify Stalin (including Ode To Stalin), but in 1937, at the outset of the Great Purge, the literary establishment began a systematic assault on him in print — first locally, and soon after from Moscow — accusing him of harboring anti-Soviet views. Early the following year, Mandelstam and his wife received a government voucher for a vacation not far from Moscow; upon their arrival in May 1938, he was promptly arrested again the 5th May (ref. camp document of 12. October 1938, signed by Mandelstam) and charged with "counter-revolutionary activities".[4]

Four months later, the 2nd August 1938 (ref. extract from court protocol No. 19390/Ts), Mandelstam was sentenced to five years in correction camps. He arrived at a transit camp in Vladivostok at the Second River and managed to pass a note to his wife back home with a request for warm clothes; he never received them. The official cause of his death is an unspecified illness.

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 Mandelstam presented her account of the events surrounding her husband's life in Hope against Hope (ISBN 1-86046-635-4) and later continued with Hope Abandoned (ISBN 0-689-10549-5).

In literature

Varlam Shalamov's short story "Sherry Brandy" was written as a fictional description of Mandelstam's death in a Soviet Union GULAG transit camp near Vladivostok.

Robert Littell's 2009 novel, The Stalin Epigram, narrated by the poet, his wife, his friends Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, along with several invented characters, relates the events leading up to Mandelstam's first arrest, his internal exile, his second arrest and death.

Rehabilitation

In 1956, during the Khrushchev thaw, Osip Mandelstam was rehabilitated and declared exonerated from the charges brought against him in 1938. On October 28, 1987, he was also exonerated from the 1934 charges and thus fully rehabilitated.[5]

Legacy

A minor planet 3461 Mandelshtam discovered by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh in 1977 is named after him.[6]

Mandelshtam's poem "I returned to my city" was later put to music by Alla Pugacheva who had the courage to address the theme of 30s repression and terror long after Khrushchev Thaw ended and before Perestrojka made this topic front and center. The song, renamed Leningrad, soared to popularity in 1980 and became a standard on the repertoire of many artists since then.

Ossip Mandelstam in original stamp, 1991

Selected works

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ http://www.aalto.vbg.ru/Unit3/contacts5.shtm
  2. ↑ Vitaly Charny, "Osip Emilyevich Mandelshtam (1889-1938) Russian Poet"
  3. ↑ Clarence Brown, Mandelstam (Cambridge UP, 1973).
  4. ↑ N.N.: Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, PoemHunter.com. URL last accessed 20 October 2007.
  5. ↑ Kuvaldin, Y. (Юрий Кувалдин): Улицa Мандельштамa, повести. Издательство "Московский рабочий", 1989, 304 p. In Russian. URL last accessed 20 October 2007.
  6. ↑ Dictionary of Minor Planet Names - p.290
  7. ↑ Freidin, G.: Osip Mandelstam, Encyclopædia Britannica, 2001. URL last accessed 20 October 2007.

External links