Mandelstam Osip Emilievich (15 January 1891, Warsaw — 27 December 1938, transit camp Vtoraya Rechka, near Vladivostok (?)) — Russian poet.
Osip’s father was a merchant engaged in the leather trade; his mother was a musician. He spent his childhood in Pavlovsk near St Petersburg. From 1900 to 1907, he studied at the Tenishev School, where he became interested in Marxism and art; in 1906, he joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party. In 1907–08, he lived in Paris, attended lectures at the Sorbonne and travelled in Switzerland. In the autumn of 1908 in St Petersburg, he attended meetings of the Religious–Philosophical Society. In 1909, through the “Academy of Verse” and the so-called Tower (the apartment) of the Symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, he entered the literary milieu of St Petersburg.
He was not admitted to Russian universities because of the quota system (90 Russian students to 10 Jewish students). In 1909–10, he spent two semesters studying Romance languages and philosophy at Heidelberg University and travelled in Italy and Switzerland. In 1910, he published his first poems (the journal Apollo, No. 9). In May 1911, he was baptised in the Methodist Church in Vyborg, and in September 1911 entered the Faculty of Philology of St Petersburg University, where until the autumn of 1915 he studied Old French language and literature (in 1917 he received a certificate of incomplete course completion).
In 1912, he joined the Acmeists, became a member of the Poets’ Guild, and formed close friendships with Nikolai Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Kuzmin. His first poetry collection, Stone, was published in 1913. In 1917–18, he published in Socialist Revolutionary periodicals and was a regular contributor to the journal Znamya Truda. In 1918, he worked in cultural and educational institutions in Moscow.
Fleeing famine, in March 1919 he went south and lived in Kyiv, where he collaborated with the journal Hermes. In 1919–20, he lived in Crimea, where he was arrested by Wrangel’s counterintelligence. After his release, he fled to independent Georgia, was arrested by the Menshevik authorities and released following petitions by Georgian poets. With the assistance of Ilya Ehrenburg, he returned to Russia in the autumn of 1920 and lived in Petrograd, Moscow and other cities.
During the 1920s, Osip Mandelstam translated extensively: poetry (Old French epic, Auguste Barbier, Franz Werfel, Ernst Toller, Vazha-Pshavela, contemporary Georgian lyric poetry, among others) and prose, including the novel on a Jewish theme Radan the Magnificent by B. Lekash. In 1922, the collection Tristia (the title suggested by M. Kuzmin), comprising poems from 1916–20, was published in Berlin. In 1925–26, he attempted to write for children, without notable success. In 1928, the collections On Poetry (critical essays of 1910–24) and the summative volume Poems were published.
In the late 1920s, attempts were made to force him out of literature; a campaign of harassment was organised. In 1928, he was accused of plagiarism and became involved in court proceedings. In 1930–31, he travelled to the Caucasus and Armenia, writing the essays Journey to Armenia (after their publication in the journal Zvezda, the section editor Ts. Volpe was dismissed). In the early 1930s, he wrote a series of politically inflected lyric poems (“Leningrad”, “Lamarck”, “Let Us Sit Together in the Kitchen”, “For the Rattling Valour of Future Ages”, “The Flat Is Silent Like Paper”, “Cold Spring. Hungry Old Crimea”, and others).
In November 1933, Osip Mandelstam wrote an anti-Stalin poem. On the night of 13–14 May (according to NKVD documents, 16–17 May) 1934, he was arrested. After petitions by friends and the intervention of Nikolai Bukharin, he was exiled to Cherdyn (Northern Urals), where during a nervous breakdown he attempted suicide. He was allowed to choose the place of exile (as Joseph Stalin ordered that Mandelstam be “isolated, but preserved”); until May 1937 he lived in Voronezh, where he wrote the cycle The Voronezh Notebooks. In January 1937, in an attempt to save himself and his relatives, he composed a cycle of poems about Stalin. After returning from exile, he was forbidden to reside in Moscow. On 2 May 1938, he was arrested again and sentenced to five years in corrective labour camps for “counter-revolutionary activity”. According to unreliable data, he died on 27 December 1938 in a transit camp near Vladivostok.
Wife: Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam — teacher and writer.
Mandelstam (née Khazina) Nadezhda Yakovlevna (30 October 1899, Saratov — 29 December 1980, Moscow) — teacher and writer.
Nadezhda’ s parents were a lawyer and a physician. She was baptised in childhood. Her husband was Osip Emilievich Mandelstam. After her husband’s death, she taught English. In 1956, she defended her Candidate of Sciences dissertation in English philology (supervisor: V. Zhirmunsky). Under the pseudonym N. Yakovleva, she published a number of essays in the collection Tarusa Pages (Kaluga, 1961). She devoted literary memoirs to the fate and work of Osip Mandelstam. In 1979, she donated, free of charge, the Osip Mandelstam archive in her possession to Princeton University (USA).
Works: Memoirs. New York, 1970; 1985; Second Book. Paris, 1972; 1983; Third Book. Paris, 1987.