Warsaw, St Petersburg, Paris
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam was born in Warsaw, then part of the Russian empire, on January 14, 1891 (January 2 in the Old Style calendar). His father, Emil Mandelstam, was a leather merchant who had left a traditional Jewish education behind and taught himself German culture; his mother, Flora Verblovskaya, came from an educated, assimilated Jewish family in Vilna and taught the piano. Soon after Osip’s birth the family moved to St Petersburg, the imperial capital, where the boy grew up among the city’s granite embankments and classical facades.
In his memoir The Noise of Time, Mandelstam described the bookcase of his childhood home as a map of his family’s journey: Jewish books lying “like ruins” on the bottom shelf, his father’s German classics, Schiller and Goethe, above them, and his mother’s Russian books, Pushkin among them, at the top. He recalled the Hebrew primer that repelled him, a language he never learned, and visits to his grandparents in Riga, and he wrote of “the chaos of Judaism” that he feared and fled. From 1900 he attended the Tenishev School, one of the most progressive schools in Russia.
After school, Mandelstam went abroad. In 1908 he studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he discovered French poetry, and the following year he moved to the University of Heidelberg. Back in Russia, he faced the quota that limited Jewish students at the University of St Petersburg. In 1911 he was baptised, in a Protestant church (Wikipedia names the Methodist church; other sources say Lutheran), and that year he enrolled at the university. The conversion appears to have been a practical step; it did not make him a practising Christian, though Christian, and especially Hellenic and Roman, imagery runs through his poetry.
Acmeism and Stone
In 1911 Mandelstam joined the Poets’ Guild, a circle led by Nikolai Gumilev that also included Gumilev’s wife, Anna Akhmatova, who became Mandelstam’s lifelong friend. Its members, who became known as the Acmeists, rejected the misty mysticism of the Symbolist poets in favour of clarity, concrete objects and the weight of words. Mandelstam’s essay The Morning of Acmeism compared the poet to an architect, building with words as with stone.
His first collection was fittingly called Stone (1913). It contained poems on Notre-Dame, on Hagia Sophia, on the Admiralty in St Petersburg, poems in which architecture and history became vessels of meaning. In 1916 he had an intense love affair with the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, which left its mark on the poems of both. His next major collection, Tristia, published in Berlin in 1922 and written through war and revolution, mourned the passing of a civilisation and confirmed him as one of the finest poets of his generation.
Prose and isolation in the 1920s
In 1922 Mandelstam married Nadezhda Khazina, a young art student he had met in Kiev in 1919. She lived there with her family; after their marriage the couple settled in Moscow, where they lived precariously in borrowed rooms. The Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin, who had known them since the early 1920s, helped them repeatedly. As the new Soviet literary establishment grew more hostile to independent voices, Mandelstam largely stopped writing poetry for several years and turned to prose, criticism and translation to earn a living; in one six-year stretch he translated nineteen books, and he later worked as a newspaper correspondent. His Second Book appeared in 1923, and a collected Poems in 1928.
His prose is as original as his verse. The Noise of Time (1925) recreated the St Petersburg of his youth; The Egyptian Stamp (1928) was a short, dreamlike novel; Fourth Prose (1930) was a furious denunciation of the literary bureaucracy, in which he declared that the writer’s profession, as it had developed in Europe and Russia, was incompatible with the honourable title of Jew, of which he was proud. A journey to Armenia in 1930 revived his poetry, and his Journey to Armenia (1933) is one of the great travel books in Russian.
The Stalin Epigram
In the autumn of 1933, at the height of the famine caused by forced collectivisation, Mandelstam wrote a sixteen-line poem about Stalin. It described a “Kremlin mountaineer” with fingers fat as worms and a cockroach moustache, surrounded by a rabble of thin-necked henchmen, who forged decrees like horseshoes and relished each execution. He recited it to small gatherings of friends in Moscow. Boris Pasternak, on hearing it, reportedly called it an act of suicide and said he had not heard it. Someone among the listeners passed a written copy to the secret police; the informer has never been identified.
On the night of May 16–17, 1934, NKVD officers arrested Mandelstam in his Moscow apartment. Pasternak appealed to Nikolai Bukharin, who intervened on Mandelstam’s behalf, and Stalin himself telephoned Pasternak to ask whether Mandelstam was really a master. Stalin’s reported instruction was to “isolate but preserve” the poet.
“The honourable title of Jew”
Mandelstam’s relationship to his Jewish origins changed over his life. His parents had given him the name Osip, the Russian form of Joseph, and the scholar Gregory Freidin has shown how he came to identify with the biblical Joseph, the exiled dreamer and interpreter of dreams. As a young man, he wanted to leave Jewish tradition behind and to see himself as a poet without a past, Russian or Jewish. Some critics read the “Jewish” poems of Tristia as an attempt to define, and turn away from, origins he feared.
In his last years he turned the other way. In Fourth Prose he claimed his Jewishness as a badge of honour against the literary establishment, and he described the true poet as a master of evasion, as Jews so often had to be. His friend Marina Tsvetaeva had written that in a Christian world all poets are outcasts, “Yids.” For Mandelstam, exile, persecution and an unbreakable inner freedom became one story.
Exile in Voronezh
On May 26, 1934, Mandelstam was sentenced to three years’ exile in Cherdyn, in the northern Urals. Mentally broken, he tried to kill himself by jumping from a hospital window. On June 10 the sentence was softened: he was banned from the twelve largest Soviet cities but allowed to choose his place of exile, and he and Nadezhda went to Voronezh in southern Russia.
There, poor, sick and watched, he wrote some of the greatest poems of the century, collected as the Voronezh Notebooks (1934–37): poems of breath and earth, of the black soil of Russia and the voice of an exile who knows his fate. In a desperate attempt to save himself he also wrote an “Ode to Stalin” which did not save him. His exile ended in May 1937, but he was barred from living in Moscow.
Second arrest and death
In early May 1938 Mandelstam was arrested again, at a rest home outside Moscow where he had been sent with Nadezhda. On August 2, 1938, he was sentenced to five years in a labour camp for “counter-revolutionary activities.” He was sent east by train to a transit camp near Vladivostok, where prisoners waited to be shipped to the camps of Kolyma.
Weak, starving and terrified of being poisoned, he died there on December 27, 1938, aged 47; the official cause was given as typhoid. His body lay unburied through the winter with others and was buried in spring in a mass grave. Nadezhda learned of his death months later, when a parcel she had sent was returned.
The poems that survived
That any of Mandelstam’s later work survives is due to Nadezhda. With the help of friends, including Akhmatova, she hid manuscripts and, fearing they would be found, memorised his poems and prose so that they could not be destroyed. For decades she moved between provincial towns, working as a teacher and translator and keeping the poems alive. In 1970, in the West, she published Hope Against Hope, followed by Hope Abandoned: memoirs that are among the most powerful accounts of Stalin’s terror ever written.
Mandelstam was partly rehabilitated in 1956, when he was cleared of the 1938 charges, and fully exonerated of the 1934 charges on October 28, 1987, under Gorbachev. Only then could his complete work be published freely in his own country.
Legacy
Today Mandelstam is ranked with Akhmatova, Pasternak and Tsvetaeva as one of the four great Russian poets of the twentieth century. His poetry, dense with allusion to classical antiquity, Christianity and Russian history, and increasingly to the Jewish fate he had once fled, has been translated into many languages and inspired poets from Paul Celan to Joseph Brodsky.
Varlam Shalamov imagined his last days in the story “Cherry Brandy.” An asteroid, 3461 Mandelshtam, was named for him in 1977, and a monument was erected in Vladivostok in 1998, near the site of the camp where he died. His sixteen lines on Stalin, which cost him his life, are now among the most famous poems in the Russian language, a testament to the power of a single voice against tyranny.
Sources & further reading
Osip Mandelstam, Wikipedia · The Russian Joseph, Jewish Review of Books · Osip Mandelstam reclaimed his Jewish heritage, Mosaic · Remembering Osip Mandelstam, Litvak Poet, Lithuanian Jewish Community · Osip Mandelstam, Wikiquote · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.