andelshtam also spelled MANDELSTAM, major Russian poet, prose writer, and
literary essayist. Most of his works went unpublished in the Soviet Union during
the Stalin era (1929-53) and were almost unknown to generations of Russian
readers until the mid-1960s but have become influential since.
Mandelshtam grew up in St. Petersburg in a middle class Jewish household; his
father was a well-off leather merchant, who abandoned rabbinical training for a
secular education in Germany; his mother was a cultivated member of the Russian
Jewish intelligentsia.. After graduating from the private elite Tenishev School
in 1907 and an unsuccessful atempt to join a socialt-revolutionary terrorist
organization, Mandelstam travelled to France to study at the Sorbonne and later
to Germany to enrol
l
at the University of Heidelberg. After returning to Russia in 1911, he converted
to Christianity (baptized by the Finnish Methodists) and, thus exempted from the
Jewish quota, went on to study at the University
of St. Petersburg, He left it in 1915 before receiving a degree.
His first poems appeared in the St.
Petersburg journal Apollon ("Apollo") in 1910. In response to the early
Futurist manifestoes, Mandelshtam, together with Nikolay Gumilyov, Anna
Akhmatova, and Sergey Gorodetsky founded the
Acmeist school of poetry, an attempt at codifying the poetic practice of the
new generation of Petersburg poets. They rejected the vague mysticism of Russian
Symbolism and demanded clarity and concreteness of representation, precision of
form and meaning -- combined with a broad-ranging erudition (classical
antiquity, European history, especially, cultural and including art and
religion). Mandelshtam summed up his poetic credo in his manifesto Utro
Akmeizma ("The Morning of Acmeism," 1913, though not published until 1919).
In 1913, he underwrites the publication of his first slim volume of verse,
Kamen ("Stone"), to be followed by the larger volume with the same name in
1916 and 1923. The title was emblematic of the Acmeist and especially
Mandelshtam’s identification with the cultural essence of St. Peters-burg, the
classical tradition of Western European civilization and the architectural
expression of its spiritual and political heritage. The first two editions of
Kamen (1913 and 1916) established Mandelshtam as a full-fledged member of
the glorious cohort of Russian poets. His subsequent collections (Vtoraia
kniga [Book Two], 1923, and Stikhotvoreniia [Poems],
1928) earned him the reputation of a leading poet of his generation.
Disinclined to serve as a mouthpiece for
political propaganda (unlike Vladimir Mayakovsky), Mandelshtam considered “a
dialogue with his time” a moral imperative for a poet. He responded to WWI and
the revolution with a series of historical-philosophical, meditative poems that
are among the best and most profound in the corpus of Russian civic poetry. By
temperament and conviction a supporter of the Socialist Revolutionary party, he
welcomed the collapse of the old regime in 1917 and was opposed to the Bolshevik
seizure of power. However, his experiences during the Civil War left little
doubt that he had no place in the White movement. As a Russian poet, he felt he
had to share the fate of his country and could not opt for emigration. Like many
Russian intellectuals at the time (sympathizers of the Change of Landmarks
movement or “fellow travelers”), he made peace with the Soviets without
identifying himself wholly with Bolshevik methods or goals. During the Civil War
(1918-21), Mandelshtam lived alternately in Petrograd, Kiev, the Crimea, and
Georgia under a variety of regimes. In 1922, after the publication of his new
volume of poetry, Tristia, he decided to settle in Moscow and married
Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina, whom he had met in Kiev in 1919.
Mandelshtam's poetry, erudite,
resonating with historical analogies and classical myths, set him on the outer
margins of Soviet literary establishment but did not diminish his standing as a
premier poet of his time both among the literary elite and the most astute
readers of poetry in the Bolshevik government (Mandelshtam was patronized by
Nikolay Bukharin). After Tristia, Mandelshtam’s poetic output gradually
diminished, and although some of his most significant poems were composed in
1923-24 (“Slate Ode” and “1 January 1924”), it came to a complete halt in 1925.
As he was turning away from poetry, Mandelshtam produced some of the 20th-century’s
best memoir prose (The Noise of Time and Theodosia, 1923) and a
short experimental novel (The Egyptian Stamp, 1928). During the
1920s, he also published a series of brilliant critical essays (“The End of the
Novel,” “The 19th Century,” “The Badger’s Hole: Alexander Blok,” and
others). Included in a collection O poezii (On Poetry, 1928),
these essays, along with his Conversation about Dante (1932,
published in 1967)), were to have a
lasting impact on Russian literary scholarship (Mikhail Bakhtin, the
Formalists).
Like many of his fellow poets and
writers, Mandelshtam earned his living in the 1920s by literary translation. In
1929, in the tense, politicized atmosphere of the Stalin revolution, Mandelshtam
became enmeshed in a copyright scandal which further estranged him from the
literary establishment. In response, Mandelshtam produced Fourth Prose
(1930), a stream of consciousness monologue mocking the servility of Soviet
writers, brutality of the cultural bureaucracy, and the absurdity of “socialist
construction.” Fourth Prose was not published in Russia until 1989. In
1930, thanks to the Nikolay Bukharin’s still powerful patronage, Mandelshtam was
commissioned to travel to Armenia to observe and record the progress of the
first
Five-Year Plan. The result was Mandelshtam’s return to poetry (the cycle
“Armenia” and subsequent “Moscow Notebooks”) and Journey to Armenia, a
powerful example of modernist travel prose. Some of the poetry of the period,
along with the Journey, were published in periodical press in 1932-33 and
were to be the last publications in his lifetime. Cleansed of the earlier
scandal, Mandelshtam settles back in Moscow as a prominent member of the
writers’ community, a development facilitated by a brief thaw in cultural policy
in 1932-34.
Mandelshtam’s independence, however, his aversion to moral
compromise, his sense of civic responsibility and the horror he felt at the
repression of the peasantry set him on a collision course with the Stalinist
party-state. In November 1933, Mandelshtam produced a searing epigram on Stalin
which he subsequently read to many of his friends (“We live unable to sense the
country under our feet”). Aware of a mounting opposition to Stalin within the
party -- it reached its crescendo in January 1934 at the 17th Party
Congress -- Mandelstam hoped that his poem would become urban folklore and broaden
the base of the anti-Stalin opposition. In the poem, Stalin, “a slayer of
peasants” with worm-like fingers and cock-roach mustachios, delights in
wholesale torture and executions. Denounced by someone in his circle, Mandelshtam was arrested for the epigram in May 1934 and sent into exile, with
Stalin’s verdict “isolate but protect.” The lenient verdict was dictated by
Stalin’s desire to win over the intelligentsia to his side and to improve his
image abroad, a policy in line with his staging of the First Congress of Soviet
Writers (August 1934).
The stress of the arrest,
imprisonment and interrogations, which forced Mandelstam to divulge the names of
the friends who had heard him recite the poem, led to a protracted bout of
mental illness. While in the hospital in Cherdyn’ (the Urals), Mandelstam
attempted suicide by jumping out of the window but survived and was re-assigned
to a more hospitable city of Voronezh where he managed to regain some of his
mental balance. An exile afforded the highest “protection,” he was allowed to
work in the local theater and radio station but the imposed isolation from his
milieu was becoming unbearable. Mandelshtam became obsessed with the idea of
redeeming his offense against Stalin and transforming himself into a new Soviet
man. This Voronezh period (1934-37) is, perhaps, the most productive in
Mandelshtam career as a poet, yielding three remarkable cycles, the Voronezh
Notebooks, along with his longest ever poem, “Ode to Stalin.” In a way the culmination of the Voronezh Notebooks, it is at once a brilliant Pindaric
panegyric to his tormentor and a Christ-like plea to the “father of all people”
to be spared the Cross. Composed by a great poet, it stands as a unique monument
to the mental horror of Stalinism and the tragedy of the intelligentsia’s
capitulation before the violence and ideological diktat of the Stalinist
regime.
In May 1937, his sentence completed, Mandelshtam
left Voronezh but as a former exile, was not allowed a residence permit within a
100 km radius of Moscow. Destitute, homeless, suffering from asthma and heart
disease, Mandelshtam persisted in trying to rehabilitate himself, making rounds
of the writers’ apartments and Writers’ Union’s offices, reciting the “Ode,”
pleading for work and a return to a normal life. The poet’s friends in Moscow
and Leningrad took up a collection to save the Mandelshtams from starvation. The
Writers' Union officialdom could not tolerate such an expression of a grass
roots support for an exiled poet. In
March 1938, the General Secretary of the Writer’s Union, Vladimir Stavksy,
denounced Mandelshtam to the head of the secret police, Nikolay Yezhov, as
someone stirring up trouble in the writers’ community. The denunciation included
an expert review of Mandelshtam’s oeuvre by a writer Peter Pavlenko who
dismissed Mandelshtam as a mere versifier, reserving grudging praise but for a few
lines of the “Ode to Stalin.” A month later, on 3 May 1938, Mandelshtam was arrested.
Sentenced to five years of labor camps for anti-Soviet activity, he died in a
transit camp near Vladivostok on 27 December 1938. The “Ode” remained
unpublished until 1976.
Perhaps more
than any other poet of his glorious generation, with the exception of Velemir
Khlebnikov, Mandelshtam was distinguished by a complete commitment to his
vocation as a poet-prophet, poet-martyr. Without permanent residence or steady
employment but for a brief interlude in the early 1930s, he lived the life of an
archetypal poet, dispersing manuscripts among his friends and relying on their
memory for “archiving” his unpublished poetry. It was primarily through the
efforts of his widow, who died in 1980, that little of the poetry of Osip
Mandelshtam was lost; she kept his works alive during the repression by
memorizing them and by collecting dispursed manuscript copies.
After Stalin's
death the publication in Russian of Mandelshtam's works resumed, with the first
volume of Mandelshtam’s poetry coming out in 1973. But it was the early American
two-volume annotated edition of Mandelshtam by Gleb Struve and Boris Filippov
(1964), along with the books of memoirs by Nadezhda Mandelshtam, that brought
the poet’s oeuvre to the attention of the new generations of readers, scholars,
and fellow poets. In Russia at the turn of the twenty first century, Mandelshtam
has remained one of the most quoted poets of his day.
Bibliography
Osip Mandelshtam: Poems, chosen and
translated by James Greene ; forewords by Nadezhda Mandelshtam & Donald Davie.
(1978). The Prose of Osip Mandelshtam: The Noise of Time, Theodosia, The
Egyptian stamp. Translated, with a critical essay, by Clarence Brown (1965,
1989). The complete critical prose and letters / Mandelshtam ; edited by Jane
Gary Harris ; translated by Jane Gary Harris. (1979) Nadezhda Mandelshtam
(Nadezhda Mandelshtam), Hope Against Hope (1970, reissued 1989;
originally published in Russian, 1970), and Hope Abandoned (1974,
reissued 1989; originally published in Russian, 1972), memoirs by his wife, were
published in the West in Russian and English. Clarence Brown, Mandelshtam
(1976). Ronen, Omry. An Approach to Mandel’shtamtam (1983). Gregory Freidin, A
Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelshtam and His Mythologies of Self‑Presentation.
(1987).
Gregory Freidin for
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Copyright
© 2001 by
Encyclopaedia Britannica
last updated:
01/22/2006
