Biography Osip Mandelshtam

Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (1891-1938), the great modern Russian poet, essayist, and translator was born in Warsaw in 1891. In 1897, the family moved to Saint Petersburg. He received his formal education in the Tenishev School, in part at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, but never took an academic degree. He knew English, French, and German perfectly.

In St. Petersburg, he attended Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Proacademia, the St. Petersburg Society of Philosophy. Later he joined Gumilyov’s poetic school of Acmeism, The Guild of Poets.  His first published poems appeared in August 1910 in Apollon. His first book of poems Stone came out in 1913 and brought him instant recognition as one of Russia’s finest talents.

As Monas wrote, “When the Russian Revolution came, he welcomed it with certain hopes, not unmixed with dread and apprehension.” In his literary prose he discussed the relationship of the artist to society. Following The Noise of Time (1922-23), Mandelshtam’s four major works of literary prose are The Egyptian Stamp(1927), Fourth Prose(1928-30), Journey to Armenia (1931-32), and Conversation about Dante (spring-summer 1933).  As Freidin suggested, his attitude toward the entire Soviet project including Stalin’s role in it, was far more complex than has often been assumed and cannot be reduced to a romantic notion of a poet as David continuously fighting his Goliath (Freidin 2001). 

During the Civil War (1918-21), Mandelstam lived alternately in Petrograd, Kyiv, Crimea, and Georgia under a variety of regimes. In 1922, he published volume of poetry, Tristia. According to Freidin, “Mandelstam’s poetry, erudite, resonating with historical analogies and classical myths, set him on the outer margins of Soviet literary establishment” (Freidin 1987). He had a very hard time publishing and sustaining himself in the Soviet context. 

In 1922, he settled in Moscow and married Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina, whom he had met in Kiev in 1919. In the 1920s, like many of his fellow poets and writers, Mandelstam earned his living by literary translation. In 1929, wrongfully accused of plagiarism, and in the tense, politicized atmosphere of the Stalin terror he was banned from publishing. In 1930, he wrote poem The Wolf (with the final line added in 1935)  that exemplifies the state of mind of an intellectual, “beastly” nature of modern existence at the beginning of the 1930s. In the literature on Mandelstam, this poem has been perceived as an indictment of the times. The metaphors volkodav (which is not a wolf but a wolfhound), “bloody bones in the wheel” are corresponding to the nature of the times depicted. As considered by some literary historians, sequence of powerful images and metaphors, a feeling of mortal danger to the poet at “the wolfhound age” evokes the events of Mandelstam’s life in the late 1920s and early 1930s (Lekmanov 2010). This poem like many of Osip Mandelstam’s verses, presents an image of the violent, oppressive, and torturous world, which became unbearable for the poet.

In 1933, the poet wrote an epigram on Stalin, which he subsequently read to many of his friends (We live unable to sense the country under our feet). In the poem, Stalin, “a slayer of peasants, with worm-like fingers and cock-roach mustachios, delights in wholesale torture and executions” (Freidin 2001). The epigram reached Stalin’s ears and Mandelstam was arrested in May 1934.  That was his first arrest resulted in exile (together with his wife) in the southern city of Voronezh. The Voronezh Notebooks, which contain all his poems from 1930 to 1937. Those poems were orally preserved by Mandelstam’s wife — she memorized every word of his poems when it was too dangerous to put pen to paper (Mandelshtam 1970). She later published them under the title The Voronezh Notebooks. In 1937, Mandelstam was arrested for the second time as ”enemy of the people,” and sentenced to five years in the Gulag. He died in a transit camp near Vladivostok, in the winter of 1938. 

For thirty years, his name virtually disappeared from print in the USSR. Osip Mandelstam was rehabilitated after Stalin’s death and a collection of his poetry was published in 1974 in Leningrad. Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote memoirs Hope Against Hope in which she recounted the efforts she made to protect, replicate and disseminate the prohibited poetry of her husband. In early 1970, some copies of this book were smuggled out to the West and appeared in English translation.

Sources

Freidin, Gregory. Osip Mandelstam: The Modernist Paradigm and the Russian Experience. 2001.

Freidin, Gregory, A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation, University of California Press, 1987.

Lekmanov, Oleg. Mandelstam (Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures, and History). Translated by Tatiana Retivov. 2010.

Mandelstam, Nadezhda. Hope Against Hope: A Memoir. Introduction by Clarence Brown. Translated by Max Hayward. Random House. 1970.

Monas, Sidney. Introduction to Osip Mandelstam’s Essays. New Literary History History and Criticism: II. Vol. 6, No. 3, 1975, pp. 629-632.