Ossip Mandelshtam

Mandelstam's own prophecy was fulfilled: "Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?" Nadezhda wrote memoirs about her life and times with her husband in Hope against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned. She also managed to preserve a significant part of Mandelstam's unpublished work.

Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (Russian: О́сип Эми́льевич Мандельшта́м , IPA: [ˈosʲɪp ɨˈmʲilʲjɪvʲɪtɕ mənʲdʲɪlʲˈʂtam] ; 14 January [O.S. 2 January] 1891 – 27 December 1938) was a Russian and Soviet poet. He was the husband of Nadezhda Mandelstam and one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets. He was arrested by Joseph Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife.

During these three years, Mandelstam wrote a collection of poems known as the Voronezh Notebooks, which included the cycle Verses on the Unknown Soldier. He and his wife did not know about Stalin's phone call to Pasternak until months after it took place, and did not feel safe from arrest. When Akhmatova was paying them a visit, a couple of other friends unexpectedly knocked on the door. All of them thought it was the police. This inspired the lines written by Akhmatova in March 1936:

Mandelstam and his wife chose Voronezh, possibly, partly, because the name appealed to him. In April 1935, he wrote a four line poem that included the pun - Voronezh - blazh', Voronezh - voron, nozh meaning 'Voronezh is a whim, Voronezh - a raven, a knife.'. Just after their arrival, Boris Pasternak was startled to receive a phone call from Stalin - his only conversation with the dictator, in which Stalin wanted to know whether Mandelstam really was a talented poet. "He's a genius isn't he?" he is reputed to have asked Pasternak.

During Mandelstam's years of imprisonment, 1934–38, Nadezhda accompanied him into exile. Given the real danger that all copies of Osip's poetry would be destroyed, she worked to memorize his entire corpus, as well as to hide and preserve select paper manuscripts, all the while dodging her own arrest. In the 1960s and 1970s, as the political climate thawed, she was largely responsible for arranging clandestine republication of Mandelstam's poetry.

In the autumn of 1933, Mandelstam composed the poem "Stalin Epigram", which he recited at a few small private gatherings in Moscow. The poem deliberately insulted the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. In the original version, the one that was handed in to the police, he called Stalin the "peasant slayer", as well as pointing out that he had fat fingers. Six months later, on the night of May 16–17, 1934, Mandelstam was arrested by three NKVD officers who arrived at his flat with a search warrant signed by Yakov Agranov. His wife hoped at first that this was over a fracas that had taken place in Leningrad a few days earlier, when Mandlestam slapped the writer Alexei Tolstoy because of a perceived insult to Nadezhda, but under interrogation he was confronted with a copy of the Stalin Epigram, and immediately admitted to being its author, believing that it was wrong in principle for a poet to renounce his own work. Neither he nor Nadezhda had ever risked writing it down, suggesting that one of the trusted friends to whom he recited it had memorised it, and handed a written copy to the police. It has never been established who it was.

In 1922, Mandelstam married Nadezhda Mandelstam in Kiev, Ukraine, where she lived with her family, but the coupled settled in Moscow. He continued to be attracted to other women, sometimes seriously. Their marriage was threatened by his falling in love with other women, notably Olga Vaksel in 1924-25 and Mariya Petrovykh in 1933–34. Nadezha Mandelstam formed a lifelong friendship with Anna Akhmatova, who was a guest in the Mandelstam's apartment when he was arrested for the first time, but complained that she could never be friendly with Tsvetayeva, partly because "I had decided on Akhmatova as 'top' woman poet". She also complained that Tsvetayeva could not take her eyes off her husband, and that "she accused me of being jealous of her."

Mandelstam anticipated that insulting Stalin would carry the death penalty, but Nadezhda and Anna Akhmatova started a campaign to save him, and succeeded in creating "a kind of special atmosphere, with people fussing and whispering to each other." The Lithuanian ambassador in Moscow, Jurgis Baltrušaitis warned delegates at a conference of journalists that the regime appeared to be on the verge of killing a renowned poet. Boris Pasternak - who disapproved of the tone of the Epigram - nonetheless appealed to the eminent Bolshevik, Nikolai Bukharin, to intervene. Bukharin, who had known the Mandelstams since the early 1920 and had frequently helped them, approached the head of the NKVD, and wrote a note to Stalin.

In 1916, Mandelstam was passionately involved with the poet Marina Tsvetayeva. According to her biographer, "Of the many love affairs with men that Marina embarked upon with such intensity during this period, it was probably the only one that was physically consummated." Mandelstam was said to have had an affair with the poet Anna Akhmatova. She insisted throughout her life that their relationship had always been a very deep friendship, rather than a sexual affair. In the 1910s, he was in love, secretly and unrequitedly, with a Georgian princess and St. Petersburg socialite Salomea Andronikova, to whom Mandelstam dedicated his poem "Solominka" (1916).

In April 1908, Mandelstam decided to enter the Sorbonne in Paris to study literature and philosophy, but he left the following year to attend the University of Heidelberg in Germany. In 1911, he decided to continue his education at the University of Saint Petersburg, from which Jews were excluded. He converted to Methodism and entered the university the same year. He did not complete a formal degree.

Mandelstam's poetry, acutely populist in spirit after the first Russian revolution in 1905, became closely associated with symbolist imagery. In 1911, he and several other young Russian poets formed the "Poets' Guild", under the formal leadership of Nikolai Gumilyov and Sergei Gorodetsky. The nucleus of this group became known as Acmeists. Mandelstam wrote the manifesto for the new movement: The Morning Of Acmeism (1913, published in 1919). In 1913 he published his first collection of poems, The Stone; it was reissued in 1916 under the same title, but with additional poems included.

Mandelstam was born in Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire to a wealthy Polish-Jewish family. His father, a leather merchant by trade, was able to receive a dispensation freeing the family from the Pale of Settlement. Soon after Osip's birth, they moved to Saint Petersburg. In 1900, Mandelstam entered the prestigious Tenishev School. His first poems were printed in 1907 in the school's almanac. As a schoolboy, he was introduced by a friend to members of the illegal Socialist Revolutionary Party, including Mark Natanson, and the terrorist Grigory Gershuni.