Mandelshtam, Osip Emilyevich

▪ Russian poet

Mandelshtam also spelled  Mandelstam  

born Jan. 3 [Jan. 15, New Style], 1891, Warsaw, Pol., Russian Empire [now in Poland]

died Dec. 27, 1938?, Vtoraya Rechka, near Vladivostok, Russia, U.S.S.R. [now in Russia]

      major Russian poet and literary critic. Most of his works went unpublished in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era (1929–53) and were almost unknown outside that country until the mid-1960s.

      Mandelshtam grew up in St. Petersburg in a cultured Jewish household. After graduating from the elite Tenishev School in 1907, he studied at the University of St. Petersburg as well as in France at the Sorbonne and in Germany at the University of Heidelberg.

      His first poems appeared in the avant-garde journal Apollon (“Apollo”) in 1910. Together with Nikolay Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova, Mandelshtam founded the Acmeist school of poetry, which rejected the mysticism and abstraction of Russian Symbolism and demanded clarity and compactness of form. Mandelshtam summed up his poetic credo in his manifesto Utro Akmeizma (“The Morning of Acmeism”). In 1913 his first slim volume of verse, Kamen (“Stone”), was published. During the Russian Civil War (1918–20), Mandelshtam spent time in the Crimea and Georgia. In 1922 he moved to Moscow, where his second volume of poetry, Tristia, appeared. He married Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina in 1922.

      Mandelshtam's poetry, which was apolitical and intellectually demanding, distanced him from the official Soviet literary establishment. His poetry having been withdrawn from publication, he wrote children's tales and a collection of autobiographical stories, Shum vremeni (1925; “The Noise of Time”). A second edition of this work, augmented by the tale “Yegipetskaya marka” (“The Egyptian Stamp”), was published in 1928. That year, a volume of his collected poetry, Stikhotvoreniya (“Poems”), and a collection of literary criticism, O poezii (“On Poetry”), appeared. These were his last books published in the Soviet Union during his lifetime.

      In May 1934 he was arrested for an epigram on Joseph Stalin he had written and read to a small circle of friends. In addition to describing Stalin's fingers as “worms” and his moustache as that of a cockroach, the draft that fell into the hands of the police called Stalin “the murderer and peasant slayer.”

      Shattered by a fierce interrogation, Mandelshtam was exiled with his wife to the provincial town of Cherdyn. After hospitalization and a suicide attempt, he won permission to move to Voronezh. Though suffering from periodic bouts of mental illness, he composed a long cycle of poems, the Voronezhskiye tetradi (“Voronezh Notebooks”), which contain some of his finest lyrics.

      In May 1937, having served his sentence, Mandelshtam returned with his wife to Moscow. But the following year he was arrested during a stay at a rest home. In a letter to his wife that autumn, Mandelshtam reported that he was ill in a transit camp near Vladivostok. Nothing further was ever heard from him. Soviet authorities officially gave his death date as Dec. 27, 1938, although he was also reported by government sources to have died “at the beginning of 1939.” 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 copies.

      After Stalin's death the publication in Russian of Mandelshtam's works was resumed.

Additional Reading

Nadezhda Mandelstam (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.

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