- Person
- Osip Mandelstam
- Lived
- 1891–1938
- Field
- Poetry
- From
- Russian (Soviet)
The story
By the early 1930s the Soviet Union was growing ever more repressive. Forced collectivisation and the mass deportation of peasants had devastated the countryside, and Osip Mandelstam had seen hungry, ghost-like peasants with his own eyes. In November 1933 he composed the poem now known as the 'Stalin Epigram', which openly ridiculed the Soviet leader and described the climate of fear around him. In its original version he called Stalin a peasant slayer and mocked his fat fingers.
Mandelstam recited the poem only to a few friends at small private gatherings in Moscow, among them Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova. Neither he nor Nadezhda ever risked writing it down. Nadezhda later explained that the main reason he wrote it was a feeling that he could no longer be silent.
On the night of 16 to 17 May 1934, three NKVD officers arrived at the couple's flat with a search warrant and arrested him. Under interrogation he was confronted with a written copy of the poem, apparently made by someone who had memorised it after hearing him recite it. Who that was has never been established. Mandelstam immediately admitted that he was the author, believing it was wrong in principle for a poet to renounce his own work. He expected to be executed.
Instead, a campaign by Nadezhda and Akhmatova created what was described as a special atmosphere of people fussing and whispering on his behalf. Lithuania's ambassador in Moscow, the poet Jurgis Baltrušaitis, warned delegates at a conference of journalists that the regime seemed about to kill a renowned poet, and Pasternak appealed to the Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin, who wrote to Stalin. On 26 May Mandelstam was sentenced not to death or the Gulag but to three years' exile in Cherdyn in the northern Urals, a result his friends called a miracle.
The reprieve did not last, and the poem eventually cost him his life. Mandelstam had once remarked that only in Russia was poetry respected so much that it got people killed. His short poem, preserved in the memories of those who heard them, became one of the most famous acts of literary defiance against tyranny in the twentieth century.
Why it matters
Mandelstam's poem became one of the most famous acts of literary defiance against tyranny in the twentieth century.
About Osip Mandelstam
Warsaw-born Jewish poet, one of the greatest in the Russian language, whose sixteen-line epigram on Stalin led to exile and death in a Gulag transit camp in 1938.
More about Osip Mandelstam
- Osip Mandelstam's first book Stone appeared in 1913Osip Mandelstam published his first collection, Stone, in 1913, followed by Tristia in 1922, establishing him as a leading Russian poet.
- Osip Mandelstam translated 19 books in six yearsIn the 1920s, while he had almost stopped writing poetry, Osip Mandelstam translated 19 books into Russian in six years.
- In exile, Osip Mandelstam wrote the Voronezh NotebooksDuring his 1934 to 1937 exile in Voronezh, Osip Mandelstam wrote the Voronezh Notebooks, including the cycle Verses on the Unknown Soldier.
- Osip Mandelstam wrote the manifesto of AcmeismOsip Mandelstam helped found the Acmeist movement in Russian poetry and wrote its manifesto, The Morning of Acmeism (1913).
- Osip Mandelstam's poems survived in his wife's memoryAfter the secret police seized Osip Mandelstam's manuscripts, his wife Nadezhda memorised his poems and later arranged for them to be published.
Sources
- Osip Mandelstam Wikipedia
- The Russian Joseph Jewish Review of Books
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.