- Person
- Osip Mandelstam
- Lived
- 1891–1938
- Field
- Poetry
- From
- Russian (Soviet)
The story
Osip Mandelstam was born in Warsaw in 1891 to a Jewish family from Lithuania and grew up in Saint Petersburg. His father, a leather merchant, had obtained permission for the family to live outside the Pale of Settlement. Osip entered the prestigious Tenishev School in 1900, and his first poems were printed in its almanac in 1907. In 1908 he went to the Sorbonne in Paris to study literature and philosophy, then moved to the University of Heidelberg, before enrolling at the University of Saint Petersburg in 1911.
At that time Russian poetry was dominated by the Symbolists, such as Andrei Bely and Vyacheslav Ivanov, who sought mystical meanings and hidden correspondences behind the visible world. In 1910 the poet Mikhail Kuzmin called instead for beautiful clarity. In 1911 Mandelstam and several other young poets formed the Poets' Guild, led by Nikolai Gumilyov and Sergei Gorodetsky. Its core became known as the Acmeists, from the Greek word akme, the peak or best age of a person. Their ideals were compact form and clear expression, and they often met at the Stray Dog Cafe in Saint Petersburg.
Mandelstam wrote the movement's manifesto, The Morning of Acmeism, in 1913; it was published in 1919. In it he defined Acmeism as a longing for world culture. Rather than looking past things toward the beyond, the Acmeists embraced the weight and solidity of this world. Mandelstam wrote that each stone seems to thirst to be built into the arch of a cathedral, an image that gave his first book, Stone, its title.
Unlike the Futurists, who wanted to throw the cultural treasures of the past overboard, the Acmeists cherished tradition and counted poets such as Alexander Pope, Théophile Gautier, Rudyard Kipling and Innokenty Annensky among their predecessors. The movement's leading poets included Mandelstam, Gumilyov, Kuzmin, Anna Akhmatova and Georgy Ivanov, and Mandelstam became one of its foremost members. He regarded himself above all as a poet of Saint Petersburg.
The Acmeists fared badly under the Bolsheviks. Gumilyov was shot, and Akhmatova and Mandelstam fell out of favour. Yet their belief in clarity, craft and continuity with world culture shaped much of the finest Russian poetry of the century.
Why it matters
Acmeism shaped twentieth-century Russian poetry, and Mandelstam's manifesto remains a key statement of its ideals.
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 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
- Acmeism Wikipedia
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