- Person
- Osip Mandelstam
- Lived
- 1891–1938
- Field
- Poetry
- From
- Russian (Soviet)
The story
In May 1934 Osip Mandelstam was arrested for his poem mocking Stalin and sentenced to three years' exile in Cherdyn in the northern Urals. Nadezhda went with him. The strain of interrogation had left him in a fragile mental state, and his brother Alexander appealed for proper medical care. On 10 June the sentence was eased: he was barred from the twelve largest Soviet cities but otherwise allowed to choose his place of exile.
The couple chose Voronezh in southwestern Russia, possibly in part because the name appealed to him. In April 1935 he wrote a short poem punning on it, linking Voronezh with the Russian words for a whim, a raven and a knife. Soon after their arrival Stalin telephoned Boris Pasternak to ask whether Mandelstam really was a talented poet. An order to isolate and preserve the poet left him, for the moment, relatively safe. The local head of the NKVD, Semyon Dukelsky, told him to write what he liked and turned down his offer to submit every poem to the police, after which agents stopped following the couple.
During these three years, from 1934 to 1937, Mandelstam wrote the collection known as the Voronezh Notebooks, which includes the cycle Verses on the Unknown Soldier. After years of near-silence in the 1920s, his poetic voice had returned. Nadezhda later wrote that it was henceforth the voice of an outsider who knew he was alone and prized his isolation. The poems were written in poverty and uncertainty, yet they are among his greatest.
The exile ended in May 1937, and a year later Mandelstam was arrested again and sent to the camps, where he died in December 1938. The Voronezh poems survived largely thanks to Nadezhda, who memorised them and hid manuscripts while dodging her own arrest. Decades later she arranged for them to circulate in secret.
Today the Voronezh Notebooks are widely translated. Richard and Elizabeth McKane published an English version in 1996, and Alistair Noon's translation, The Voronezh Workbooks, appeared in 2022. They are read as one of the great achievements of twentieth-century poetry, written under the shadow of terror.
Why it matters
The Voronezh Notebooks show the power of poetry to survive and grow even under persecution.
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.
- 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 dared to mock Stalin in a poemIn 1933 Osip Mandelstam composed a poem mocking Stalin and, when arrested, refused to disown it, believing a poet must never renounce his work.
- 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
- Nadezhda Mandelstam Wikipedia
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