(1891-1938) poet osip
Mandelstam was born in Warsaw, Poland, but grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia. His father was a successful leather merchant, and his mother a piano teacher. Although the Mandelstams were Jewish, the family was not very religious. Mandel-stam received an excellent education at home from various tutors and later from the Tenishev Academy. He traveled extensively throughout Europe between 1907 and 1910 and studied French literature at the University of Heidelberg. Between 1911 and 1917, Mandelstam studied philosophy at the University of St. Petersburg. He published his first poem in 1910 in the journal Apollon. With the advent of revolution, Mandelstam abandoned his studies to concentrate on poetry.
Influenced by his close relationship with Anna akhmatova and Nikolay gumilev, Mandelstam readily joined the Acmeists (see achemism) and established his reputation as a poet with his collection Kamen (Stone, 1913). Like Akhmatova, Mandelstam often mixed classical images with those of contemporary Russian culture. Mandel-stam’s poetry also exalted the architectural and literary achievements of classical Greece and Rome. In his next two collections, Tristiya (1922) and Poems 1921-25 (1928), he reaffirmed his position as one of the best poets in Russia. Although both collections contained images and themes previously found in Stones, Mandelstam, influenced by political upheaval in Russia, expanded his poetic perspective to more universal themes of life, death, and exile.
In 1918, Mandelstam began to work for the education ministry of the new communist regime, but his support for the regime soured and stopped completely after the 1921 execution of his friend Gumilev. In the 1920s, he supported himself by writing children’s books and translating works by English and French writers. He married Nadezhda Kazin in 1922 and in 1928 published three books: a poetry collection, entitled simply Poems, and two collections of critical essays. After a trip to Armenia in 1930, Mandelstam published his last major collection of poetry, Journey to Armenia, in 1933. An epigram about Stalin he wrote in 1934—”And every killing is a treat / For the broad-chested Os-sete”—resulted in Mandelstam’s being arrested and exiled to voronezh. Nadezhda accompanied him and helped transcribe the agonized poems he composed there. In 1938, he was arrested again for “counterrevolutionary” activities. This time he was sentenced to five years of hard labor. Mandelstam died that year in the Gulag Archipelago and was buried in a common grave.
International acclaim for Mandelstam’s work did not come until the 1970s, when his works were published in Russia and the West. Mandelstam’s poems of exile were not published until 1990 in The Voronezh Notebooks. Their lyrical approach to almost unimaginable pain is astonishing, as in the poem “Black Candle” (1934):
It is your fate, for your narrow shoulders to turn red under the lashes, red under the lashes, to burn in the frost . . . And as for me, I burn after you like a black candle, burn like a black candle and dare not pray.
The magnificence of Mandelstam’s verse is still being rediscovered today. He is now considered to be one of the best Russian poets of the 20th century. The critic Simon Karlinsky, for example, remarked in a review of Bruce McClelland’s translation of Tristiya in the New York Times Book Review: “In Mandelstam, Russian poetry at last has a poet of stature comparable to Pushkin’s—a claim that even the most fanatical admirers of Blok, Mayakovsky or Pasternak would not dream of making.”
Other Works by Osip Mandelstam
50 Poems/Osip Mandelstam. Translated by Bernard Meares, with an introduction by Joseph Brodsky. New York: Persea Books, 2000.
The Noise of Time: The Prose of Osip Mandelstam. Translated by Clarence Brown. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986.
Osip Mandelstam’s Stone. Translated and introduced by Robert Tracy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981. Tristia. Translated by Bruce McClelland. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1987.
The Voronezh Notebooks: Poems 1935-1937. Translated by Richard McKane and Elizabeth Mc-Kane. Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1998.
Works about Osip Mandelstam
Cavanagh, Clare. Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Harris, Jane Garry. Osip Mandelstam. Boston: Twayne, 1988.
Mandelstam, Nadezhda. Hope Against Hope. Translated by Max Hayward. New York: Modern Library, 1999.
Mozart and Salieri: An Essay on Osip Mandelstam and the Poetic Process. New York: Vintage, 1994.
