caxtonian - IDEALS

caxtonianJOURNAL OF THE CAXTON CLUB VOLUME XIV, NO. 11 NOVEMBER 2006

Collecting MandelstamR. Eden Martin

Arguments about who was the greatestbaseball player in the history of the

game are entertaining, in part because thereare no “right” answers—only opinions. Butthere are at least data. We know how manyhome runs Ruth hit, and we can look up TyCobb’s batting average.

When it comes to the arts—painting,music, poetry—there are fewer relevantthings to measure, and no yardsticks formeasuring the things which are most rele-vant. No one would dream of judging thequality of a pianist by how fast he playsLiszt, or how many recitals he played in ayear. Whitman’s greatness as a poet cannotbe captured by measuring the length of hislists, or by counting the lines he wrote orthe books he sold.

Yet it is tempting to muse aboutrelative greatness in the creative arts.Who was the greatest poet writingin English during the 20th Century?Who was the greatest poet writingin any western language during the20th Century? Many would answer:Osip Mandelstam. But becausepoetry cannot be translated intoanother language—only recreated init—and because relatively fewpeople in the West (outside Russia)read Russian, it would be hard towork up much enthusiasm for eitherside of the argument anywhere inthe United States, except possibly at aRussian literature faculty cocktail party.

Russia produced many excellent poetsduring the past century. Cab drivers inPetersburg regularly quote Pushkin atlength. The very best Russian poets of the20th Century would certainly includeAkhmatova, Blok, Mandelstam, Pasternak,and Tsvetaeva—and one could make a casefor dozens of others. I believe that many of

these Russian poets were greater artiststhan any poet writing in America at thetime, including Frost and Stevens. Andsome experts in a position to make suchjudgments believe that Mandelstam was thegreatest of them all.

Akhmatova wrote,“Mandelstam has noteacher. That is something worth thinkingabout. I don’t know a similar case in all ofworld poetry. . . [W]ho can show us the

source of this divine new harmony, whichwe call the poetry of Osip Mandelstam?”1

Sir Isaiah Berlin, who was fluent in bothRussian and English, singled out Mandel-stam from other Russian writers as a “manof genius.”2

One of the best qualified to judge wasJoseph Brodsky, the 1987 Nobel Laureatein literature. Brodsky, like Nabokov, wassupremely accomplished in both Russianand English. In 1964 he was prosecuted inRussia for “social parasitism.” Expelled in1972, he lived in the United States until hisdeath in 1996. Because of his unique talentand perspective, it is better to quote him atlength than a dozen others. He called Man-delstam “the child of civilization” and“Russia’s greatest poet in [the 20th]century”3 :

Mandelstam was a Jew who was living inthe capital of Imperial Russia,whose dominant religion wasOrthodoxy, whose political struc-ture was inherently Byzantine,and whose alphabet had beendevised by two Greek monks.4

The Revolution brought on forhim “a terrifying acceleration”:

Its sublime, meditative, caesuraedflow changed into a swift, abrupt,pattering movement. His becamea poetry of high velocity andexposed nerves, sometimescryptic, with numerous leaps overthe self-evident with somewhatabbreviated syntax. And yet in

this way it became more a song thanever before. . . . 5

Brodsky pointed out the obvious—thattranslations of such music are utterly inade-quate:

The English-speaking world has yet tohear this nervous, high-pitched, purevoice shot through with love, terror,

See MANDELSTAM, page 2

The poet in 1910 (ABOVE) and in the mid 1930’s

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memory, culture, faith—a voice trembling,perhaps like a match burning in a high wind,yet utterly inextinguishable.

Book dealers cannot be held to the same criticalstandards as academicians; and collectors under-stand that salesmanship is an element of book-selling. Nevertheless, because book dealers havemany books to sell and they cannot all be the“greatest,” the relative level of enthusiasm about anauthor or a book may hint at some underlyingreality. John Wronoski of Lame Duck Booksprobably deals with more fine Russian literaturethan any other American book dealer. In the fallof 2005 he offered an inscribed copy of Mandel-stam’s first book, Kamen’ (“Stone”), 1913, whichhe described as follows:

The first work of the greatest Russian poetafter Pushkin (and one of the few indisputabletitans of twentieth century literature) thepathos of this rare and fragile book wouldrequire another Mandelstam to convey inwords. A holy relic.

So who was this Russian poet, Osip Mandel-stam? And why write about him for Americanreaders who do not read Russian?

Last question first. One does not have to readMandelstam’s work in the original to realize thathe led a fascinating and tragic life, which is ofinterest apart from the artistic merit of his verse.Also, the story of his books—how and when theyappeared, the difficulties of getting accurate bibli-ographic information, and the travails of trying tocollect these books today—will be familiar to col-lectors of great writers in English or any otherlanguage. But, more important, Mandelstam livedand wrote under terrible hardships—censorship,threats from Stalin’s government, incarcerationand torture, extreme poverty and hunger, andinternal exile. As awful as these conditions werefor ordinary Russians, they were probably evenworse for Jewish intellectuals. How Mandelstamwas able to create transcendent poetry in suchwretched circumstances—and how his wife wasable to preserve his work during and after theiryears of internal exile—is a story of the tri-umphant human spirit.

Osip (“Joseph”) Mandelstam was born inWarsaw on January 15, 1891.6 His father,

Emil Mandelstam, was a leather merchant. Osipwrote that his father “had absolutely no language;his speech was tongue-tied and languageless-ness. . . . a completely abstract, counterfeit lan-

guage, the ornate and twisted speech of an autodi-dact, where normal words are intertwined withthe ancient philosophical terms of Herder, Leib-nitz, and Spinoza, the capricious syntax of a Tal-mudist. . . .” Osip’s mother, Flora, was a pianoteacher and intellectual who “loved to speak andtook joy in the roots and sounds of her GreatRussian speech, impoverished by intellectualclichés.”

Osip’s father moved the family to Petersburgwhen Osip was six years old.7 (St. Petersburg wasto undergo several name transformations duringMandelstam’s lifetime—to Petrograd, thenLeningrad; today it is called Petersburg, which isthe name I use.) Although they were Jews, neitherof Osip’s parents was religious, so he rarelyattended synagogue. He remembered visiting hispaternal grandfather at his home in Riga:

My grandfather, a blue-eyed old man in a skullcap which covered half his forehead and withthe serious and rather signified features to beseen in very respected Jews, would smile,rejoice, and try to be affectionate—but did notknow how. . . . Suddenly my grandfather drewfrom a drawer of a chest a black and yellow silkcloth, put it around my shoulders, and mademe repeat after him words composed ofunknown sounds; but, dissatisfied with mybabble, he grew angry and shook his head indisapproval. I felt stifled and afraid.8

Clarence Brown, his biographer, writes thatthough Osip resisted learning the Hebrew lan-guage, his rejection of his Jewish inheritance wasnot permanent. His upbringing also “probablyintensified a striving after religious conviction.”9

During the latter part of the 1890’s, young Osipreceived tutoring at home. In 1899 at the age of 8his parents enrolled him in a fine school—theTenishev School—which offered a classical edu-cation, combined with practical scientific andcommercial courses. The tuition expenses were aburden to the family, which was far from wealthy.Osip’s program covered eight years—the Ameri-can equivalent of the last six years of K-12, andthe first two years of college. (VladimirNabokov—driven by the family chauffeur—began attending the Tenishev School four yearsafter Mandelstam had left.) Osip took the stan-dard courses—including the classical languages,German, biology and chemistry. According to oneof Osip’s classmates, his grades were generallypoor.10

But Osip found time to read the classic Russianauthors. In his own fragmented memoir, he laterremembered the family bookcase with his

MANDELSTAM, from page 1

mother’s books—Pushkin, Lermontov,Turgenev and Dostoevsky. Book collectorsmight be pleased to know that he appreci-ated the splendor of the editions, the ele-gance of the type, and the bindings inboards covered with thin leather. He wrotethat,“The bookcase of early childhood is aman’s companion for life,” and his wifewould later write that as an adult he keptthe books he had in “his childhood days.”11

Like many other educated Russians,Osip read Marx but found him boring. Anacquaintance later remembered that at theage of 16, he associated with a group ofSocialist Revolutionaries. He may evenhave worked on some kind of propagandamaterials. And Osip later admitted toCheka interrogators that he had beenfriendly with the son of Boris Sinani, awell-known SR leader. Osip later wrotethat,“My religious experiences date fromthe period of my childish attraction toMarxist dogma and cannot be separatedfrom that attraction.”12

Vladimir Gippius, one of Osip’s teachersat the Tenishev school, taught Osip Russianliterature and made a large impact on theyoung student. Perhaps more importantthan the classes were the visits to Gippius’apartment, where Osip “would come to himto wake up the beast of literature. To listento him growl, to watch him toss andturn. . . . Even now it is difficult for me tofree myself from the notion that I was thenat literature’s own house.”13

The Tenishev school published two liter-ary journals for students; faculty and stu-dents frequently gathered for discussionsand poetry readings. Osip was apparentlyan infrequent participant, but on at leastone occasion shortly after his graduation,he presented a poem—“Chariot.” A studentjournal reports that his reading “called fortha storm of applause,” and that his poem“greatly exceeds in artistic quality themajority of our school belles letters andperhaps of modern belles letters generally.”14

One of his poems appeared under a pseu-donym in one of the Tenishev journals in1907.15

At the age of 16, Osip finished his schoolwork at the Tenishev School in the springof 1907. Perhaps because of his brief flirta-tion with the radical SR political group, hisparents sent him off to Paris, where he

received his introduction to the FrenchModernists.16 Osip spent much of the nextthree years studying, writing and travelingin France, Germany (Heidelberg), thenSwitzerland. His wife later reported that hevisited Italy twice.

In Russia the prevailing “school” of poetryduring the last part of the 19th Centuryand the first decade of the 20th was theSymbolist group,“led” in a loose way byVyacheslav Ivanov and Alexander Blok.The Symbolist movement was partly aes-thetic and partly metaphysical. At oneextreme, its protagonists believed (orasserted) that symbols were the only reality.Ivanov was the principal theorist of theSymbolists. He held weekly gatherings ofwriters on Wednesday evenings in hisPetersburg apartment, called “the Tower,” atwhich leading writers—including but notlimited to leading Symbolists—read anddiscussed their most recent work.

The leading early work in English onRussian literature prior to the Soviet periodwas written by Prince D.S. Mirsky andpublished in London in 1926. Mirskydevoted many pages to Ivanov, referring tohim during the period 1905 to 1911 as “theuncrowned king of Petersburg poets”:

Ivanov’s flat on the sixth floor of a houseoverlooking the Duma building and theTaurida Park was known as “the Tower.”Every Wednesday all poetic and modernPetersburg met there, and the more inti-mate adepts stayed there, in mystical

conversation and literary readings, tilleight or nine on Thursday morning.17

In April 1909, back in Petersburg fromhis travels, Osip began attending Ivanov’slectures and discussion groups.18 AnnaAkhmatova later remembered that she firstmet him at Ivanov’s Tower.“He was a wiryboy then, with a lily of the valley in hislapel, his head thrown way back, with fieryeyes and lashes that reached almost halfwaydown his cheeks.”19 By mid-May 1909,Osip was persuaded to read some of hispoems to those in attendance.20

From the spring of 1909 to 1911—young Osip (then 18-20) composed a seriesof respectful if not worshipful letters toIvanov. From the deeply personal tone ofhis letters—addressed, for example, to“Very respected and dear VyacheslavIvanovich”—it is evident that Osip andIvanov were well acquainted, even friends,allowing for generational differences. Osipat that time was much affected by the pre-vailing literary currents, and would proba-bly have regarded himself as a “Symbolist.”He wrote to Ivanov:“Your seeds havelodged deep in my soul and it frightens mewhen I look at the enormous shootscoming out.”21 The following fall, Osipwrote a perceptive criticism of Ivanov’srecent book of poetry, Po Zvesdam (“By theStars”), saying,“Your book is splendid withthe beauty of great architectural creationsand astronomical systems. . . . Only itseemed to me that the book is too round, asit were, without angles. There’s no directionfrom which one can get at it to smash it, orsmash oneself against it.”22

Along with his letters, Osip sent Ivanovsome 15 of his own early draft poems andasked his advice about what might be donewith them. Researchers have found no evi-dence that Ivanov ever responded to theseyouthfully exuberant letters.

By 1911 Osip was studying in Petersburgat the University in the Faculty of Historyand Philology. How he got in—with hisreportedly-weak grades—is not known.Also, he faced the problem that the Univer-sity had a “quota” on the number of Jewishstudents it would accept. What is known isthat Osip was baptised in May 1911 in aMethodist Episcopal church; and Osip’sbrother later wrote in his memoirs thatSee MANDELSTAM, page 4

CAXTONIAN, NOVEMBER 2006 3

Mandelstam in 1914

Osip had joined the church to avoid theJewish “quota.” Osip evidently attached noother significance to his baptism. Hismother likewise didn’t mind, though for hisfather, it was reportedly a matter of seriousconcern.23

Osip was not an exemplary Universitystudent. Among other subjects, he studiedclassical languages and literature but wasflummoxed by Greek grammar. One of hiscontemporaries recalled a classroom experi-ence where Osip was called upon to discussAeschylus:

Again after a long silence, Mandelstamanswered: He wrote Orestes. Excellent,said [the professor]. Actually, he didwrite Orestes. But perhaps, Sir, you willbe so good as to tell us what Orestesconsists of. Is it a separate compositionor is it part of a cycle consisting ofseveral tragedies?

A long silence ensued. Proudly raisinghis head, Mandelstam silently looked atthe professor. He said nothing more.[The professor] lowered his, and withan independent demeanor, lookingstraight in front of him, Mandelstam leftthe hall.24

Though he continued on at the Univer-sity until the spring of 1917, Osip did notfinish his coursework and never received adegree.

Apollon was the greatest Russian literaryand arts journal of the pre-War era.

Published in Petersburg, it first appeared inOctober 1909 and continued until the eco-nomic and cultural devastation caused bythe Great War brought it to a whimperingclose in 1917. Turning its pages today, one

is left not only with a sense of the richnessof cultural life in Petersburg, which wasthen the capitol of Russia and home of theCzars, but also a fuller understanding ofthe enormity of the injury suffered by theRussian people as a result of the War andthe Revolution.

The work of most of Russia’s great poetsappeared in the pages of Apollon. So it isperhaps not surprising that in the summerof 1909, Mandelstam’s mother took her sonto see the editor, a man named Makovsky.Osip’s mother explained that young Osipwanted to become a poet but his parentspreferred that he go into the family leathergoods business. She wanted to know if hehad any talent as a poet, and handed theeditor a number of Osip’s poems, askingthat he read them on the spot and give herhis judgment. Osip’s feelings of embarrass-ment and fear can only be imagined. Hisfuture was on the line. Makovsky readseveral of the poems. He later wrote thatthey did “not captivate” him—but knowingthe importance of the occasion, and sensingOsip’s anxiety, the editor “went over to hisside: for poetry, against the leather business.With an air of conviction, even rathersolemnly, I said, ‘Yes Madame, your son hastalent.’ ”25 Osip was of course delighted, andhis mother was “amazed.” But she recoveredquickly enough to respond that if thepoems were that good, then they should beprinted in Apollon. Ivanov apparentlydeserves credit for helping arrange theseearly appearances of Osip’s verse.26

Osip Mandelstam’s first published poemswere the five that appeared in Apollon inAugust 1910. His work continued toappear in this journal until it withered

away—along with the Russian monarchy. IfMakovsky’s answer had been more critical,would Osip have been pressured by hisfamily to become a leather goods merchant?Perhaps not, but his career as a poet—theopportunities to publish, the people hecame to know, the experiences he had—would almost certainly have been different.

Art—like life—proceeds dialectically(except when it doesn’t); and by 1910 Sym-bolist theory and practice had called forthopposing schools or tendencies, principally(in Russia), the Futurists. In April 1910,shortly before Mandelstam’s first poems

4 CAXTONIAN, NOVEMBER 2006

Apollon, 1909-1917

(ABOVE) Apollon, 1910, bound volume;

(BELOW) Apollon, August 1910, title page


appeared in Apollon, a handful of the avant-garde poets and artists who would laterbecame known as “Futurists” publishedtheir first collection—Sadok Sudei.27

Another group opposing or contrastingwith the Symbolists were the writers withwhom Mandelstam would soon beidentified—the “Acmeists”—includingAkhmatova and her husband, Lev Gumilev.The Acmeists generally rejected the meta-physics of the Symbolists and advocated areturn to “classical” clarity of the hard andfast things of the real world, rather than theintellectual and linguistic haze of Symbol-ism. By the end of 1911, Osip was meetingwith Gumilev and a group of similarly-minded poets (Tsek Poetov—“Poets’Guild”) to share readings and criticism.28

Though Mandelstam’s poems had firstbegun to appear in 1910, his biographerBrown believed that the real start to hiscareer was in 1913, when several of hispoems were published in Apollon and othermonthly journals. Osip’s first critical prosealso appeared in 1913, in Apollon. Gumilevand Sergei Gorodetsky issued their“Acmeist manifesto” in the pages of Apollonthat same year.

The magazine thatprinted the largestnumber of Osip’spoems in 1913 wasGiperborei. It had ashort life—only 10issues from 1912 to1913. Three ofOsip’s poemsappeared in the Feb-ruary 1913 issue, andanother threeappeared in October1913. The last issue

of Giperborei—in December 1913—carriedhis short poetic tribute to his friend AnnaAkhmatova (five of whose poems alsoappeared in the same issue).

But the main event in the life of the 22-year old poet in 1913 was the appearance ofhis first book—Kamen’ (“Stone”). It was a33-page booklet containing 23 poems.Osip’s father provided the money for theprinter, and, according to Osip’s Russianbiographer, 600 copies were printed.29 Thesimple, green paper wrapper was decoratedwith the drawing of a lion and a cupid withlyre (a reference to the Acmeists’ classicalleanings), and displayed the word “Akme.”Many of the poems had previouslyappeared in journals. Akhmatova laterwrote that Mandelstam liked to rememberironically how,“an old Jew, the owner of theprint shop where Stone was printed, con-gratulated him on the book’s publication,shook his hand, and said: ‘Your writing willonly get better and better young man.’ ”30

Akhmatova may have been confused; Man-delstam remembered the remark as hashaving been made by one Goldberg,“a fatbourgeois,” who printed the verses of hisclients gratis in his little magazine, called

The Poet.31

Mandelstam’s brother remembered thathe and Osip picked up two packages of thebooklets at the print shop. Booksellers inPetersburg at the time would not buy forresale volumes of new poetry, except thoseof well-known poets such as Blok. Forunknowns like Mandelstam, they wouldonly take the books on commission. Man-delstam decided to entrust the entire lot ofhis books (other than those he gave tofriends) to a large book store at the cornerof the Nevsky and Fontanka. From time totime he would check on how sales weredoing, and when he learned that 42 copieshad been sold, the family celebrated.32

Several years ago, when I was first start-ing to collect Russian books, an Americanbook dealer offered me the copy of the firstedition of Kamen’ that Mandelstam pre-sented in October 1913 to his friendIvanov, the Symbolist poet who presidedover the literary gatherings at “the Tower”and to whom Osip had sent his own youth-ful poems a few years earlier. I gulped twoor three times and decided to buy it. It isnow one of the two anchors of my collec-tion of Mandelstam. The presentation toIvanov reads:

“Vyacheslavy Ivanovichy Ivanovy cglubokoi priznatel’nostiyu i nastoyascheilyubov’yu. Avtor. 2 oktyabrya 1913.Peterburg.”

Or:“To Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanovwith deep respect and genuine love. Theauthor. 2nd October 1913. Petersburg.”This inscription has been published.33

Kamen’ received a handful of reviews—all friendly.34 Readers were struck by thehard realities reflected in both the title ofthe book and the subjects of the poems, as


(LEFT) Cover of Mandelstam’s first book, Kamen’. First edition,

published in Petersburg, 1913. Kamen’ means “Stone.”

(ABOVE)Title page of same, with Mandelstam’s presentation to his

friend Vyacheslav Ivanov “with deep respect and genuine love. 2

October, 1913.”


contrasted with the Symbolist haze of hintsand metaphors, and also by the precision ofthe images and language, as well as the met-rical inventiveness of Mandelstam’s verse.Gumilev wrote that Mandelstam had“opened up the doors of his poetry to all oflife’s phenomena that exist in time, notmerely in eternity or the instant: to thecasino on the dunes, the parade in TsarskoeSelo, the crowd in a restaurant, a Lutheran’sfuneral.”35

Pasternak, one of the greatest poets ofthe 20th Century (as well as the author ofDr. Zhivago), later wrote Mandelstam aletter responding to a complimentaryreview:“What did you find that is good inme?. . . What was that flattery for? For youknow I shall never in my life write a booklike Kamen’!”36

A second and enlarged edition ofKamen’, at 86 pages, nearly three times thesize of the first edition, appeared in Peters-burg in late 1915 (though the title pageshows the year as 1916).37 A third edition,enlarged to 95 pages and displaying a morecolorful and modernist front cover, waspublished by the State Publishing House(Gosizdat) in 1923. A fourth appeared inPetersburg in 1926.

The years immediately after the firstappearance of Kamen’ were enor-

mously eventful for Mandelstam. The Warbegan for Russia in July 1914. The Rus-sians did not conscript soldiers, relyinglargely on peasants for their Army; andthough Gumilev enlisted, most writers andintellectuals did not. In contrast to the situ-ation in England, literate, upper-class Rus-sians rarely wound up in the front lines—either as soldiers or officers—which helpsexplain why so few of their poets wrote“war poems” of the kind composed byGraves, Sassoon, Thomas and Owen. Italso explains why so few Russian poetswere killed in the War.

Mandelstam did not enlist, probably forhealth reasons, though he evidently volun-teered for service as a hospital orderly.There is an unsubstantiated report thatabout this time he tried to kill himself.38 Itwould not be the last time.

The Revolution of 1917 was both a con-sequence of the War and one of the causes

of its termination. It set in motion changesthat would radically transform life andculture in Russia; its consequences continuetoday to ripple through the lives of civilizedpeople throughout the world. The Revolu-tion brought first excitement and upheaval,then loss of property and work, grindingpoverty, fear, sickness, homelessness,hunger, and (in the case of many writers ofintegrity) censorship and surveillance, anend to publication, repression, arrest,torture, and ultimately death. Many saw itcoming and escaped to the West. Mostprobably didn’t see it coming. A few sawbut choose not to leave. Akhmatova andMandelstam were among these.

One who saw and escaped—at least for awhile—was the great poet Marina Tsve-taeva (1892-1941). She got out in 1922,but returned in 1939 and hanged herselfthere two years later. Experts rank her asone of the greatest Russian poets.

Mandelstam had met Tsvetaeva and herhusband, S.Ya. Efron, in the Crimea in1915. In the spring of 1916 Tsvetaeva wasstaying with her sister in Aleksandrovo, notfar from Moscow, when Mandelstam camefor visits over a four-month period. Theywalked in the countryside and talked of lit-erature and life. Mandelstam wrote one ofhis finest poems,“Not Believing TheMiracle of Resurrection,” to Tsvetaeva. Itincludes these lines:

I kiss your sunburned elbowand a waxen bit of forehead.I know it has stayed whitebeneath the strand of dark gold.I kiss your hand where there is stilla white band from your bracelet.The flaming summer of Tauridaperforms such miracles.

They wrote several poems to each other.By the time Mandelstam’s were later pub-lished, he had married; and because of theunderstandable feelings of his wife,Nadezhda, the dedications to Tsvetaevawere removed.39

Akhmatova wrote in her memoir thatOsip was later in love several times—oncewith Akhmatova herself. She had to tellhim they could not continue to meet so fre-quently without giving people the wrongimpression. Osip wrote several of his bestpoems to or about the women who werethe objects of his affections. In one he

wrote,“In a cold Stockholm bed”; and inanother—“If you wish, I’ll take off my feltboots.” His wife Nadezhda later made surethat these dedications—like the earlier onesto Tsvetaeva—did not appear in his pub-lished volumes.40

Finally, Mandelstam—uncertain whetheror not he should stay with Tsvetaeva—leftfor the Crimea. Tsvetaeva did not encour-age him to stay.41 She wrote to a friend thatOsip had been so upset he spoke of enter-ing a monastery and growing potatoes.42

In the spring of 1919 Mandelstam“married” Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina

in Kiev. He had gone south to the Ukrainein March 1919 in part because of foodshortages in Moscow and Petersburg. Theircourtship could not have been long becauseNadezhda later wrote that they “first meton May Day in 1919.”43 The marriage was“formalized” three years later.44

Osip’s marriage to Nadezhda turned outto be fortunate both for him and for loversof Russian poetry, because it was largelydue to Nadezhda that most of Mandel-stam’s later great work survived. She wasalso the author of two volumes of memoirsabout Mandelstam—Hope Against Hope,and Hope Abandoned.

Mandelstam’s life thereafter seems tohave been one of wandering from city tocity, and apartment to apartment. In late1919 he was driven out of Kiev byDenikin’s White Army, whose leaders mayhave regarded him as a Bolshevik. He wentfirst to Feodosia, then to Odessa, then backto Moscow. In October 1920 he returned toPetersburg—now called “Petrograd.” Hecontinued to write poems, and gave occa-sional readings.45

The center of Acmeism after the Warwas the Guild of Poets in Petersburg,headed by Akhmatova’s husband, the poetand critic Nikolay Gumilev. Bolshevism didnot wait long to show its fangs. In August1921 Gumilev was arrested by the Chekafor complicity in an alleged plot to over-throw the new government. He was shot bya firing squad about three weeks later. Sixtyothers were executed at the same time,including wives of the so-called conspira-tors.

In 1922 Mandelstam arranged for thepublication of the poems he had accumu-



lated since 1916 (which had not earlierappeared in the second edition of Kamen’).These newer poems, as described byNadezhda, were about “the war, his presen-timent of revolution and the Revolutionitself.” In Petersburg he entrusted his“jumbled-up manuscripts”46 to a mannamed Blokh (not the great poet) withoutresolving such matters as the title, the orderof the poems, and other details. Blokhasked Mikhail Kuzmin, a prominent poet,to come up with a title. He settled onTristia, after one of the 46 poems in the col-lection. Blokh himself apparently decidedon the order of the appearance of thepoems, which turned out to be chaotic. Thebook was printed in Berlin, to gain interna-tional copyright protection, in an edition of

3000 copies. It appeared in August 1922,though the wrong year—1921—appearedon the cover.“Petropolis” is identified on thecover as the place of publication, though theFuturistic title page says “Petersburg-Berlin.”

There were fewer reviews this time, butthey were uniformly positive.47 ProfessorBrown, writing much later, concluded thatTristia was Mandelstam’s most classicalbook:“It differs from the ‘Roman’ Stone,however, in referring almost exclusively tothe classical world of Greece—a fact whichshould not be obscured by the slight ironyof its bearing a Latin title.”48

Mandelstam was unhappy with theBerlin edition of Tristia. He gave copies tofriends with notes to the effect that it had

been put together by ungrammatical peoplewithout his knowledge and against hiswill.49 He soon arranged for a secondedition of the collection—in November1922—this time in Moscow. Again, thewrong year appeared on the cover. Herenamed this new edition Vtoraya Kniga—“Second Book”—and dedicated it toNadezhda. In it Mandelstam deleted 16poems, added 14 new ones, and presentedthe poems in the order in which he hadwritten them.

The order was important to him, accord-ing to Nadezhda, because he wrote inter-linked poems in chronological sequence—his poems “came in groups, or in a singleflow, until the initial impulse was spent.” Soin arranging them for book publication, hebasically used the order in which the poemswere written.50

In this book’s final edition of 1928, thelast one Mandelstam saw through the presshimself, he reverted to the first title—Tristia. The order was slightly modified,and six of the poems were deleted—perhaps because of governmentcensorship.51

Brown believed that Mandelstam’s “fallfrom grace” started about 1923. It was


Cover of Tristia, Mandelstam’s second collection. It was published in August 1922, though the

wrong year—1921—appears on the cover.

When Tristia was republished in Moscow,

Mandelstam gave it a new name—VtorayaKniga—“Second Book.” This edition

deleted 16 poems and added 14 new ones.


during that year thatthe influential Sym-bolist poet Briusovreviewed Second Bookcritically, attacking itas not sufficientlyMarxist or “modern.”52

Nadezhda wrote laterthat,

In 1923 M.’s namewas removed fromall the lists of con-tributors to the lit-erary magazines.Since it happenedin all of themsimultaneously,this can scarcelyhave been a coinci-dence. Thatsummer theremust have beensome kind of ideo-logical conferenceat which theprocess of dividingwriters into friendand foe hadbegun.53

Political considera-tions governed whowas permitted topublish, and what gotpublished. They alsobegan to affect whowas permitted towork, housing alloca-tions, and the attitudesof writers and others sensitive to prevailingpolitical winds.

The constraints seem to have applied tojournals but not, at least not initially, tobooks. In the autumn of 1923, Osipworked on a book of autobiographicalsketches and portraits entitled ShumVremeni—“The Noise of Time.” TheEditor of Rossiia turned it down, but it waspublished as a thin book in 1925, to mixedreviews.54 This autobiographical work is thesource of many of the details of Mandel-stam’s childhood.

Osip was permitted to write children’sbooks. In 1925-26 he published four small

illustrated books ofpoems for childrenthat are now quitescarce—for thesame reason thatpopular children’sbooks frequentlyfail to survive ingood condition inthe West. I’m luckyto have a verycharming one—Primus (“Stove”),with drawings byDobuzhinsky.

During the mid-20’s, Osip was also ableto make a little money translating worksfrom other languages. His biographerreports that Mandelstam was “heavily. . .involved in the labor of turning French,German, even English works intoRussian.”55 Some of these pieces appearedin literary magazines. Several were pub-lished in book form during the period1923-1928. Most were translated fromFrench, but a few were from English (a lan-guage Mandelstam did not know well)—Upton Sinclair’s play Machine, and a fewnovels of Walter Scott. These translationshave also become scarce. I am fortunate to

have four of the French works: two by JulesRomains (Cromedeyre-le-Vieil, 1925; LesCopains, 1925), one by Georges Imann (LeFils Chebre, 1925) and one by Daudet (Tar-tarin de Tarascon, 1927). The two by Imannand Daudet were not even known to theeditors of Mandelstam’s Collected Works.56

Except for a copy of the Imann book (at theUniversity of Wisconsin), none of these islocated in any of OCLC, RLIN, or theBritish Library catalogue.

Mandelstam also wrote a number ofprose pieces that appeared in provincialnewspapers. Nadezhda later wrote that,“[F]rom the second half of the twenties itbecame much harder to obtain translatingwork, so that his right to a livelihood wasalways being contested. Nothing came ofhis books for children either.”57

No doubt the closing down of literaryoutlets affected Mandelstam’s enthusiasmfor writing poetry. From 1921 to 1925, hewrote (or retained) only 20 poems. From1926 to 1930 he wrote none at all.58 The 20poems from 1921-25 were gatheredtogether as the last section of the last col-lection published during his lifetime, in1928, entitled Stikhotvoreniia ( “Poems”). Ittook a letter from Osip’s friend and sup-porter Nikolai Bukharin, a top-ranking


(ABOVE) Mandelstam in 1922. (BELOW) The

20 poems Mandelstam wrote between 1921

and 1925 were published in the collection

Stikhotvoreniia (“Poems”) in 1928.


Mandelstam’s book for children—Primus (“Stove”), with draw-

ings by Dobuzhinsky.

member of the Communist hierarchy, toclear the way for publication by the govern-ment printing office in Petersburg.59 Thiscollection, published in an edition of 2000copies, contained selections from the earliertwo books plus the 20 poems from the1921-25 period. My copy of the 1928 col-lection contains four lines inscribed byMandelstam.

In 1928 Mandelstam also published acollection of articles, O Poezii (“AboutPoetry”), and the short Egyptian Stamp, anovella, which Professor Brown (whoedited it in 1965) called “one of the fewexamples of surrealist fiction to be found inall of Russian literature.”60 The narrativecovers one day in the life of the hero,Parnok, who spends it wandering throughPetersburg. One episode in the story—involving Parnok’s attempt to save a name-less victim from a lynch mob—may reflectin a fragmentary way an actual episodefrom the early 1920’s when Mandelstamhimself saved certain nameless victims bytearing up signed death warrants beingprocessed by a Cheka (future KGB) func-tionary.61

During the period 1928-1930, Osip was

virtually unemployable. He did a littletranslation work (which led to a bitterquarrel involving charges of plagiarism),and wrote a few articles for a Moscownewspaper. But he and Nadezhda lost theirapartment at Tsarskoe Selo, and theymoved into a small flat with Osip’s brotherin Moscow. Osip’s biographer says he wasphysically and mentally exhausted, and sickof literature and the constraints of Sovietrepression.

In 1930 his friend Bukharin arranged forthem to take a trip to Armenia. During thistrip he witnessed some of the horrors ofcollectivization and soured even more onthe violence of the Soviet regime. At theend of his stay, Osip wrote ChetvertaiaProza (“Fourth Prose”), reflecting angrily onthe events of the prior two years. Osipincluded passages that he must have knownrendered it unpublishable in the USSR.(“As for writers who write things with priorpermission, I want to spit in their faces,beat them over the head with a stick. . . Iwould forbid these writers to marry andhave children.”)62

After a decade of writing very littlepoetry, Mandelstam resumed writing

poems in 1930. Those from the period1930-34 were kept in two notebooks, andare today published as his “Moscow Note-books.” Once cycle in this group—the“Armenia” poems—was deemed publish-able, and appeared in the literary magazineNovy Mir, March 1931. A prose piece,“Journey to Armenia” containing a thinly-veiled attack on tyranny in its closing pas-sages, appeared in the journal Zvezda in1933. As a result, the editor of the journalwas fired; and no other work by Mandel-stam ever again appeared in Russia duringhis lifetime.63

On returning from Armenia, Osip triedto find a place to live and work in Peters-burg, but the writers’ organization wouldnot have him there. He and Nadezhda wereforced to go back to Moscow, where theyeventually found space in a wing of theHouse of Herzen, then controlled by theWriters’ Union.

The clouds of suspicion over Mandel-stam were darkening. He and Nadezhdawere under constant surveillance, whicheventually led to a tussle in 1932 with oneof their neighbors, a complaint, and anadministrative hearing. After the hearingand an unsatisfactory outcome, Osip con-fronted and slapped the president of the tri-bunal—a writer, Alexey Tolstoy (a distantrelative of the great novelist, Leo Tolstoy).


Cover of Mandelstam’s surrealist novella,

“Egyptian Stamp.”


Mandelstam’s translations of four French works, issued in 1925 and 1927

On May 16-27, 1934, while Akhmatovawas visiting the Mandelstams in

Moscow, three Cheka operatives enteredthe Mandelstams’ small apartment, pre-sented warrants, searched the place, rum-maged through Osip’s papers—and thenhauled him off to jail. Nadezhda later toldthe story of what she witnessed, and whatOsip told her, in Hope Against Hope. Wenow also have access to the Cheka files inVitaly Shentalinsky, Arrested Voices, NewYork, 1993.

Nadezhda later speculated that theTolstoy incident might have been the causeof what happened:

Another puzzle is: when did the poemabout Stalin become known to thepolice? It was written in the autumn of1933, and the arrest took place in May1934. Perhaps after he had slappedTolstoy in the face, the authorities hadstepped up their surveillance of M. andlearned about the poem only in thecourse of making inquiries among theiragents? Or had they kept it for sixmonths without taking any action? Thisseems inconceivable.64

“The poem” Nadezhda referred to wasone Osip had written about Stalin inNovember 1933. He had read his Stalinpoem to about ten of his acquaintances.Nedezhda wrote they were “horrified” andbegged him to forget it.65 He must haveknown the danger—the certainty, really—that someone would report him. The riskto any listener was that some other listenerwould report it first, and then all other non-reporting listeners would be endangered.Here is the poem:

We live, deaf to the land beneath us,Two steps away no one hears our

speeches,All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,The murderer and peasant-slayer,His fingers are fat as grubsAnd the words, final as lead weights, fall

from his lips,His cockroach whiskers leerAnd his boot tops gleam.Around him a rabble of thin-necked

leaders—Fawning half-men for him to play with.They whinny, purr or whineAs he prates and points a finger,One by one forging his laws, to be flung

Like horseshoes at the head, the eye orthe groin.

And every killing is a treatFor the broad-chested Ossete.66

As Ossetia is a state near Georgia in theCaucasus, the reference to Stalin, a Geor-gian, was unmistakable.

The Cheka agents were clearly lookingfor something in particular. They sortedthrough Mandelstam’s manuscripts—putting some (the more recent poems) on apile to be confiscated, and the earlier workon the floor to be left behind. They did notfind a copy of the Stalin poem becauseOsip and Nadezhda had never written itdown. It existed only in their memory, andthat of their listeners, one of whom hadpassed it on to the authorities.

The morning after Mandelstam washauled off to jail, Nadezhda and theirfriend Anna Akhmatova did what theycould. They asked Pasternak for help, andhe in turn went to Bukharin. PerhapsBukharin’s intervention helped save Osip’slife.67

The Cheka records—including tran-scripts of “testimony” extracted from pris-oners—have become available since the col-lapse of the Soviet regime. The record ofMandelstam’s interrogation and confessionis reproduced in Shentalinsky’s book. TheCheka interrogators quickly and easilyextracted from Osip the full text of theStalin poem. He was not the kind of personwho would falsely deny his authorship.

They demanded that Osip identify thepeople who had heard him read the poem,and he did so. One was Akhmatova. Theyasked him what she thought of it. He toldthem, according to the deposition he latersigned:

With her customary laconicism andpoetic acuity, Anna Akhmatova pointedout the “monumental, rough-hewed,broad-sheet character of the piece.” Thiswas a correct assessment. For while anenormous force of social poison, politi-cal hatred and even contempt for theperson depicted has been concentratedin this foul, counter-revolutionary,libelous lampoon, she recognized itsgreat power and that it possesses thequalities of a propaganda poster of greateffective force. . . 68

Mandelstam believed they were going to

kill him. He was kept in a cell with a com-panion who was evidently a governmentstool-pigeon, who tried to scare Osip intobelieving that his wife was already inprison. He was worn out by lack of sleep,and the bright lights hurt his eyes. He wasgiven salty food to eat and nothing to drink;and he was made to wear a straitjacket forat least part of the time. At some point hebecame so desperate that he slashed hiswrists with a razor blade he had kepthidden in the sole of his shoe. Nadezhdawrote later,“Bleeding to death is not theworst way of getting out of this life ofours. . . .”69

On May 26, 1934, a special board of theOGPU (formerly the Cheka) handed downOsip’s sentence. Nadezhda was called andtold that if she wanted to accompany himinto internal exile, she should come andmeet him. Akhmatova went with her to theLubyanka to get him, and Nadezhda metwith Osip’s interrogators. Osip was thenbrought in. He was in a numbed state; hiseyes were glassy and inflamed, and his armwas in a sling. Akhmatova wrote that,“Hewas in such bad shape that even theycouldn’t get him to sit in the prison cart.”70

The condition of his eyes was probably dueto non-stop interrogation and sleep depri-vation. Osip apparently never gave his wifea detailed description of what was done tohim during that two-week period.

The interrogators told them that theStalin poem was counter-revolutionary andcriminal. In these circumstances, it wasmiraculous that Osip was only to be exiledfor three years—and then not to Siberia,but to the town of Cherdyn in the Urals, farsoutheast of Moscow. Moreover, Nadezhdawas permitted to go with him. Nadezhdaremembered hearing the words,“isolate butpreserve”—the apparent instructions fromon high—no doubt from Stalin himself.71

Not long after arriving at Cherdyn andbordering on insanity, Osip again tried tocommit suicide by throwing himself from ahospital window. He succeeded only in dis-locating his shoulder.72

Then a second “miracle” happened—perhaps because the authorities, remember-ing the instructions “isolate but preserve,”feared that Osip might die and that theymight then be blamed for his death. Or itmay have happened because of Bukharin’s



intervention.73

Bukharin was later tried and executed byStalin, along with most of the rest of thetop leadership of the Party. But in 1934 hestill had influence. Bukharin “was as impul-sive as M. . . . [H]e sat down and wrote aletter to Stalin. This was an act completelyat variance with our normal code of behav-ior, and by that time there were very fewpeople left in the country who were capableof such impulsiveness. . . .”74 According toone report, Stalin read Bukharin’s letter andwrote a note:“Who gave them the right toarrest Mandelstam?”75

Stalin was evidently not entirely immuneto the views of his colleagues, or to how hewas perceived in the literary community.Bukharin had told Stalin that Pasternakwas upset at Mandelstam’s arrest. Pasternakwas a great and famous poet—one admiredby Stalin in part because he had translatedGeorgian verse.

Whatever the causes, on June 10, 1934,the authorities lightened Mandelstam’s sen-tence and permitted him to live in lessharsh surroundings, though he was not per-mitted to live in any of the twelve majorSoviet cities.

Stalin called Pasternak directly sometimearound the end of July 1934. By that time,Mandelstam’s sentence had already beencommuted—so Stalin’s motive was less oneof seeking character references than ofmaking sure he would get “credit” in literarycircles for his generous clemency.

Pasternak later told Nadezhda about histelephone conversation with Stalin:

Pasternak was called to the phone,having been told beforehand whowished to speak with him. . . . Stalinbegan by telling Pasternak that Mandel-stam’s case had been reviewed, and thateverything would be all right. This wasfollowed by a strange reproach: whyhadn’t Pasternak approached thewriters’ organizations, or him (Stalin),and why hadn’t he tried to do somethingfor Mandelstam:“If I were a poet and apoet friend of mine were in trouble, Iwould do anything to help him.”Pasternak’s reply to this was: “Thewriters’ organizations haven’t botheredwith cases like this since 1927, and if Ihadn’t tried to do something, you proba-bly would never have heard about it.”Pasternak went on to say somethingabout the word “friend”. . . . Stalin inter-

rupted him:“But he’s a genius, he’s agenius, isn’t he?” To this Pasternakreplied: “But that’s not the point.”“Whatis it, then?” Pasternak then said that hewould like to meet him and have a talk.“About what?”“About life and death,”Pasternak replied. Stalin hung up.Pasternak tried to get him back, butcould only reach a secretary.”76

The net effect of Stalin’s intervention wasthat Osip was permitted to live in internalexile somewhere other than Cherdyn. Hechose Voronezh, 250 miles south ofMoscow.

Voronezh, though not as dreadful asCherdyn, was far from a resort. Man-

delstam suffered from angina and haddifficulty breathing. He could not getwork—with the exception of occasionaljobs composing radio scripts. Nadezhdawrote that during this exile,“there could beno question at all of his publishing anyoriginal work, and neither was he giventranslations any more. Even his name wasno longer mentionable—during all thoseyears it cropped up only once or twice indenunciatory articles.”77 The Mandelstamslived on hand-outs from virtually-impover-ished friends such as Akhmatova andPasternak.

During the first year in Voronezh, Osipwrote no poetry. But in early April 1935,after attending the concert of a young visit-ing violinist, he began to write poems. Ayoung friend, Sergei Rudakov, wrote aboutit to his wife:

Yesterday we went to a concert by theviolinist Barinova. . . She has the mostextraordinary Tsvetayeva-like tempera-ment. . . . (When I said so, Mandelstamwas surprised: how could I have spotteda genuine resemblance to Tsvetayevawhen I had never seen her? But therhythms of her verse?!) And see what Iachieved. After a year or more Mandel-stam wrote his first four lines of poetry.About her, Barinova, after the things Isaid. . . . 78

Rudakov would have had no way ofknowing that Mandelstam had once beenin love with Tsvetaeva.

The poems Mandelstam wrote while hewas in internal exile in Voronezh are amonghis greatest and most difficult. To useAkhmatova’s phrase, they are his “passport

into immortality.”79

The story of how these later poems weresaved is itself worth telling. Before his firstarrest in 1934, Osip had kept his poetry inhis memory, on scraps of paper, and innotebooks. Two of these notebooks hadbeen kept in a trunk that served as Osip’sarchive.80 During the arrest in 1934, theoriginals of many of these poems wereconfiscated by the police. They were laterreconstructed by memory and writtendown in Voronezh. But the police failed tofind copies of some poems that Nadezhdahad hidden in cushions or clothing.81

After 1934, Osip and Nadezhda werenaturally far more conscious of the risk thathis work would be seized by the police andeither destroyed or used as evidence tosupport further punitive proceedings.Accordingly, they saved his work by eithermemorizing it or by scattering copiesamong relatives or close friends who couldbe trusted to keep them hidden. Nadezhdalater described how she saved Osip’s poems:

As to M.’s manuscripts, we rescued asmall number of drafts from variousyears. After this [1934 arrest] we neverkept them in the apartment again. Itook some of them out to Voronezh insmall batches in order to establish thetexts in final form and to compile lists ofthe unpublished items. I gradually gotthis done together with M. himself, whohad now changed his attitude towardmanuscripts and drafts. Previously hehad no time at all for them and wasalways angry when, instead of destroy-ing them, I threw them into the oldyellow trunk that had belonged to mymother. But after the search of ourapartment and his arrest, he understoodthat it was easier to save a manuscriptthan a man, and he no longer relied onhis memory, which, as he knew, wouldperish with him. Some of these manu-scripts have survived to the present day,but the bulk of them disappeared at thetime of his two arrests. . . . It is a miraclethat a few witnesses and a handful ofmanuscripts have survived from thosetimes.82

During the next two years while living inVoronezh, Mandelstam wrote some 90poems, filling three more school exercisebooks—or “notebooks.” The first group(“First Voronezh Notebook”) consists of 22



poems written from April toAugust 1935. The “SecondVoronezh Notebook” consists ofabout 40 “written down” in thefall of 1936 and beginning of1937. The final,“ThirdVoronezh Notebook” consists of22 poems and covers the periodMarch to May 16, 1937, whenthe Voronezh exile came to anend. Nadezhda said that, aswith some earlier poems, hewrote these in groups—withthe entire group having a single“flow.” The poems in the “ThirdVoronezh Notebook” were thus“a new departure” from those inthe second.83

During that last year inVoronezh, Mandelstam’s “isola-tion was really complete.”Nadezhda’s brother providedtheir rent money—they couldnot earn anything.“Peopleturned away from us in thestreet and pretended not to rec-ognize us.”“Everything sug-gested that the end was near,and M. was trying to take fulladvantage of his remainingdays. . . . He drove himself so hard duringthe whole of that year that he became evenmore painfully short of breath: his pulsewas irregular and his lips were blue. Hegenerally had his attacks of angina on thestreet. . .”84

Mandelstam had not given up hope ofpublication in one of Russia’s literary maga-zines. Nadezhda took the group of poemsgathered in the “First Voronezh Notebook”to Fadeyev, editor of Krasnaya Nov; but theeditor just scanned them and handed themback.85 Osip also mailed copies of some ofhis poems to literary magazines in Moscow.During late 1936 and early 1937 he wroteseveral letters to Nikolai Tikhonov, aneditor of the Leningrad journal Zvesda(“Star”). His letters were almost alwaysignored, though in one case he received ananswer—a “stilted reply” disapprovingpacifism.86

I have very few literary letters or manu-scripts in my “book collection,” but one ofthe few exceptions, which I acquired as part

of a larger collection, is one of the hand-written letters Mandelstam sent fromVoronezh to Tikhonov at Zvesda. He wrotethis particular letter on January 13, 1937(my translation):

I write to tell you about the continua-tion of my work on a new book ofpoetry, which I am writing in Voronezh.I attach a control list of poetry fromDecember to January. My precedingwork (written in Voronezh) although Iinclude it in the book—at the presenttime does not interest me. Drafts are in“Kr[asnaya] Nov.” [a literary magazine.]The remainder are with me. The poem“Birth of a Smile” is only now just com-pleted. The old text I will send for youto consider as a variant. O. Mandelstam.

Osip’s letter refers to the poems in the so-called “Second Voronezh Notebook”—which included those written in late 1936and early 1937—and confirms Nadezhda’sjudgment that these were separate and dis-tinct from those written earlier (the groupwhich Mandelstam wrote “at the present

time does not interestme”).“The Birth of aSmile,” referred to in theletter, is included in Man-delstam’s published worksas part of the “SecondVoronezh Notebook,”which contains a note thatit was written betweenDecember 9, 1936, andJanuary 17, 1937. Hisletter to the editor onJanuary 13, 1937, referredto it as “only just now com-pleted.”

Osip’s letter to Tikhonovwas passed on to a wellknown specialist in 20thCentury Russian literature,S. Poliakova, who in turnsold it to a book dealer. Itthen passed through otherhands on its way to mine.The letter—along withfour others to Tikhonovfrom the same period—was published in Glagol, aRussian-language literarymagazine published inAnn Arbor in 1981.87

One of Osip’s otherletters to Tikhonov underscores the desper-ate condition in which Mandelstam foundhimself. He wrote on March 6, 1937 (mytranslation):

To keep secret from you my positionwould be bad and unnatural. All of myattempts and those of my wife toarrange the means of living withoutprivate support have led to nothing.Neither I nor my wife can receive anykind of work. In addition, I, as before,am sick and have no ability to work.When I wrote you about the extremeundesirability of private support, Ihoped to put the matter on anotherplane. I haven’t ceased to hope this up tonow.There is no reason to live. I even havealmost no simple acquaintances here inVoronezh. Absolute need forces me toturn to people I do not know, which iscompletely intolerable and useless. Alllocal institutions are closed to me,except the hospital—but only from themoment when I finally collapse. Thatmoment hasn’t yet arrived: I continue on


Mandelstam’s letter to the Editor of Zvesda, Tikhonov, January 13, 1937, telling

him about his new Voronezh poems.


my feet, and from time to time I writepoetry and live on the fortuitous help offriends. . . .This time I ask you personally to helpme with money. With great joy I willrepay you this debt if sometime my newbook of poems will be accepted for pub-lication.88

Unfortunately, the editor either could notor would not help. If he had publishedOsip’s poems, it might have meant his ownlife.

The Voronezh poems—Mandelstam’s“passport into immortality”—did notappear in a book until the two-volume col-lection of his works, edited by ProfessorsStruve and Filipoff, appeared in the UnitedStates in 1965. (The collection was laterexpanded to four volumes.)

How did Mandelstam’s poems in thethree Voronezh Notebooks manage tosurvive? Nadezhda wrote that,

During the whole of our three years inVoronezh, I made copies of everythingand distributed them to such people as Icould find, but apart from my brotherEvgeni (who in any case kept nothing athis own home) I had nobody I couldrely on to take them. Not, that is, untilSergei Borisovich Rudakov turned up.89

Sergei Rudakov was a young poet andthe son of a Tsarist general. His father

and elder brother had been shot in the early1920’s, and he had been expelled fromLeningrad. Rudakov and Mandelstam hadmet in Voronezh in early April 1935, andRudakov had gone with Mandelstam to theviolin recital that prompted him to startwriting poems again.90 Nadezhda wrotethat Rudakov came to them for his meals.He helped them copy poems they wantedto save into a notebook. Nadezhda was notfond of him. She thought he was too arro-gant, was put off by his constant grumbling,and did not like his habit of trying to tellOsip how to improve his poems.

But Osip liked Rudakov. He read poemsto him, and he even dedicated one to him—“Black Earth” (the second poem amongthose published in the First Voronezh Note-book).91 (Akhmatova also liked him enoughto dedicate a poem to him in 1945—“Tothe Memory of a Friend.”92 ) Nadezhdareferred to him as “the young Rudakov, whoin his devotion to us spent a year and a half

in exile with us in Voronezh, where weshared every scrap of bread with himbecause he had no way of earning a livingthere.”93 Rudakov hoped to write a book onMandelstam;94 and Osip evidently thoughtthat Rudakov might be a possible editor fora future edition of his collected works.Together they filled several notebooks ofmaterials including Mandelstam’s ownexplanations (the “key”) to his poems.Nadezhda wrote that they became so closethat,“I gave him original copies of all M.’smost important work, and Akhmatova lethim have the whole of Gumilev’sarchive. . . .”95

Later, Nadezhda and Akhmatova turnedagainst Rudakov—partly because his lettersrevealed an over-developed ego, and partlybecause of their inability to recover thepapers they had entrusted to him. TheMandelstams’ friend Emma Gersteinagreed that Rudakov was arrogant but gavehim more credit: “It was Rudakov with his‘crazy talk,’ his ‘resounding nonsense,’ andhis excessive self-regard who stimulatedMandelstam to start writing poetryagain”—in April 1935, after his long silenceand shortly after Rudakov joined them inVoronezh.96 It is thus entirely possible—noone can say for sure—that if it had notbeen for Rudakov, the great poems of the“Voronezh Notebooks” would not havebeen written.

Before Rudakov went back to Petersburgin early July 1936, Mandelstam gave him acopy of the first edition of his first book—Kamen’. It was likely Osip’s personal copy—the only copy of the first edition Mandel-stam retained, because no other copies werelater found in the remains of his library.97

In the copy of Kamen’ Mandelstam gaveto Rudakov, he wrote as follows (my trans-lation):“This little book caused great dis-

tress to my deceased mother when she readN.O. Lerner’s review of it in Rech. O.M. 13[ June or July] ’36.”98

Rech (“Speech”) was a Petersburg news-paper published during the 1910’s. Lernerwas a well-known literary critic—theresearcher of the life and works of Pushkin.The review Mandelstam referred to wasactually Lerner’s review of the secondedition of Kamen’. It has been reprinted inan academic edition of Kamen’. Lerner’sreview says of Mandelstam’s work:“Hewrites the same way—it seems to us, thatyoung authors write—hundreds of youngmen and women, whose names and pseu-donyms leap out and fall without a trace,like bubbles in the rain, in countless jour-nals, newspapers and almanacs. His moodis weak, accidental, disorganized. Nowheredoes he rise to real inspiration, and every-thing he says is the fruit of ‘irritation ofcaptive thoughts’. . .” It is not surprising thatOsip’s mother was distressed at the time, orthat Lerner’s review stuck in Mandelstam’smemory all those years.

Rudakov was later arrested and sent tothe camps. Upon his release, he was sent tothe front and died in January 1944. After-wards, Rudakov’s widow told bothNadezhda and Akhmatova that theirarchives were safe and in order.99 But whenNadezhda tried to recover the manuscriptsfrom Rudakov’s widow,“she did not returnthem to us.” Akhmatova had the sameunhappy experience.100 Nadezhda had notgiven Rudakov everything, because shebelieved that the papers should be dis-persed. But she had “lost several poemsaltogether—nearly all the Voronezh roughdrafts and many copies of Tristia in M.’sown hand.”101

On the other hand, it is not clear how



Title page of Kamen’, with Mandelstam’s presentation to his friend Sergei Rudakov.

Mandelstam wrote that, “This little book caused great distress to my deceased mother

when she read [the] Lerner. . .Review of it.”

many—if any—final texts of Mandelstam’swere irretrievably lost. Nadezhda hadmanaged to memorize virtually everything:“Until 1956 I could remember everythingby heart—both prose and verse. In ordernot to forget it, I had to repeat a little tomyself each day. I did this while I thought Istill had a good while to go on living. Buttime is getting on now.”102 Also, Nadezhdalater told her friend Anna Gerstein thatNadezhda had not given anything of valueto Rudakov—that “I’ve got them all. . .”103

Whether or not any poems were irre-trievably lost, Nadezhda was understand-ably bitter. She referred to Rudakov’swidow (known as Rudakova-Finkelstein)as having “stolen” her papers, and suspectedher of having sold some of Gumilev’spapers through middlemen.104 She evensuspected that the widow was simply carry-ing out Rudakov’s own intentions. She wasprobably right about the sale of papers. ButGerstein thought Nadezhda and Akhma-tova overdid it in believing Rudakov guiltyof theft.105

Apart from sales of papers, it appearsthat many of Mandelstam’s papers weresimply lost or thrown away. Rudakov’swidow was arrested after the war in con-nection with the “Doctors’ plot” againstStalin; during the arrest some of the papersmay have been confiscated by the authori-ties.106 Also, the widow probably burned asignificant chunk of the archive.107 After thewidow died, at least one Russian bookdealer contacted her family to ask aboutbuying any remaining books or literarypapers. He was told that the family threwaway the “papers” after her death. The “key”to Mandelstam’s poems is among the itemsthat were lost.

Rudakov’s widow’s daughter did keep theletters Rudakov wrote from Voronezh, andtransferred them to the Pushkin Housemanuscript collection in Petersburg. Thesecast a light on the Mandelstam’s last yearsof life there. The letters were published bythe Russian Academy of Science, Instituteof Russian Literature, in 1997. Annual ofManuscript Department of Pushkin Housefor 1993, at 7 et seq. Large sections of theletters appear in English translation in Ger-stein’s Moscow Memoirs.

In mid-January 1937 while he was still in

Voronezh, Osip—in a last attempt to savetheir lives—composed an ode of adulationto Stalin. (Akhmatova did the same thingin 1950 in an attempt to protect her son,Lev, who was in effect being held hostage ina Soviet prison camp.) Nadezhda laterdescribed how Osip composed his “Ode”—how he changed his writing habits andcomposed it with paper and pencil, ratherthan in his head. Osip’s effort was an artis-tic failure. He told Akhmatova that he “wasill when I wrote it.”108 But Nadezhdathought the “Ode” had the practical effect ofsaving her life: “it was counted in a widow’sfavor if her husband had made his submis-sion even though it wasn’t accepted. M.knew this. By surviving I was able to savehis poetry, which would otherwise havecome down only in the garbled copies circu-lating in 1937.”109

When they later left Voronezh, Osipasked a friend to destroy the “Ode.” ButNadezhda opposed it—so the poem sur-vived. Indeed, after his return fromVoronezh, Osip gave readings of it fre-quently—no doubt to curry favor. The“Ode” was first published in a journal in1975, and now appears in Vol. IV of theCollected Works.110

At about the same time as he struggledwith his “Ode” to Stalin, Mandelstam wroteone of his great works—“Poem On anUnknown Soldier.” It confirms that theproblem with the Stalin ode was the subjectmatter, not the artistic talent of the author.

In May 1937 Osip’s term of internal exileat Voronezh came to an end, and he was

permitted to go back to Moscow. One ofhis acquaintances gave him a ride aroundMoscow in a new motor car111 and Osipfretted about where they would live. But itturned out they could not get a residencepermit for Moscow because Osip was a“convicted person.” Officials would not meetwith him—an ominous sign. He was underclose surveillance. Finally his health broke.

The authorities allowed him to leaveMoscow. He and Nadezhda lived for awhile in a village called Savelovo on theVolga. They managed to take the train toPetersburg for what turned out to be a lastvisit with family and friends there. Osip,who was sick and had almost nothing, wastold that his aging father had no warm

clothing;“Osip took off the sweater he waswearing under his jacket, so that it wouldbe given to his father.”112

In the spring of 1938, during the heightof the “Terror,” the head of the government-controlled Literary Fund, Vladimir Stavsky,permitted Osip and Nadezhda to take atwo-month vacation in a rest home atSamatikha, not far from Moscow. On thesurface, it seemed a small blessing. In fact itwas one of the last steps toward extermina-tion. Because of the opening of theKremlin’s previously-secret files, we nowknow that a couple of months earlierStavsky had written to Yezhov, the newhead of the secret police:

Part of the literary world is very nerv-ously discussing the problem of OsipMandelstam.As everyone knows, Osip Mandelstamwas exiled to Voronezh 3-4 years ago forobscene libelous verse and anti-Sovietagitation. Now his term of exile hasended. . . .It is not simply, or even primarily, aproblem of the author himself, a writerof obscene, libelous verse about theleadership of the Party and of all theSoviet people. It is a question of the atti-tude of a group of notable Soviet writersto Mandelstam. I am writing to you,Nikolay Ivanovich, to seek your help. . . .Once again let me request you to helpresolve the problem of Osip Mandel-stam.113

In other words,“You decide. . .but give usclearance to get rid of him.” Stavskyattached a critical “review” of Mandelstam’srecent poetry. The reviewer found accept-able only the “Ode to Stalin,” which had“some good lines” and “strong feeling”—butwhich, overall, was worse than its individuallines.114

Yezhov received Stavsky’s letter in midApril 1938. He “evidently discussed it withStalin and then handed the matter on to hissubordinates.”115 His subordinates puttogether a report to “paper” the conclusionthat had already been reached:

After he had completed his term of exileMandelstam turned up in Moscow andtried to play on public opinion by ademonstrative display of his “impover-ished position” and ill health.Anti-Soviet elements among writers andcritics, used Mandelstam for theirhostile agitation, making of him a figureof suffering and organizing collections of



money for him among writers. Mandel-stam himself goes begging aroundwriters’ flats.According to available information,Mandelstam has kept his anti-Sovietviews to the present. As a result of hispsychological imbalance he is capable ofaggressive acts.

The arrest warrant was signed on April28, 1938. Bukharin could no longer help;he had been executed during the “Terror”less than two months earlier.

On May 2 two uniformed agents and adoctor came to the rest home and tookOsip away. There was no search. The agentssimply dumped the contents of his suitcaseinto a bag. By now, Osip’s papers had ceasedto have any relevance to the authorities.Nadezhda hurried back to Moscow toretrieve “the basket full of manuscripts” theyhad left with a friend.“If I had delayed for afew more days, the contents of the basketwould have been thrown into a sack. . . and Imyself would have been taken away in aBlack Maria. . . But then what would havehappened to M.’s poetry?”116

Osip was again taken to the Lubyanka.Two weeks later, a single deposition wastaken to conclude the formalities. Osip wascharged with anti-Soviet agitation, and sen-tenced in early August to five years in alabor camp.117 It was, in effect, a death sen-tence.

Mandelstam was sent to Kolyma inSiberia. From the time of his arrest in Mayuntil December, nothing was heard of him.Then in mid-December 1938 his brotherreceived his last letter, written in Vladivos-tok. He wrote,“My health is very poor. I amemaciated in the extreme, I’ve become verythin, almost unrecognizable, but sendclothes, food and money—though I don’tknow if there’s any point.”

Nadezhda sent him food parcels andmoney she scraped together. But on Febru-ary 5, 1939, the money was returned,“Because of the death of the addressee.”The NKVD file contains a note that Osiphad died December 27, 1938 at a place nearVladivostok. His death certificate said hedied of “heart failure.” Nadezhda observeddryly:“This is as much as to say that hedied because he died: what is death butheart failure?” The location of his burial, ifhe had one, is not known. His body wasprobably thrown into a common grave

along with those of the others.118

Two decades later, after Stalin’s death andKhrushchev’s ascendancy, Mandelstam wascleared of the 1938 charges. Nadezhda wasgiven 5000 rubles, which she dividedamong the people who had helped them in1937 in Voronezh.

During the years after 1938, Nadezhdaoccasionally heard from people who hadbeen in the Vladistock transit camp. One ofthe ex-prisoners told of having been invitedto a small loft in the barracks to hear poetryread:

The loft was lit by a candle. In themiddle stood a barrel on which therewas an opened can of food and somewhite bread. For the starving camp thiswas an unheard-of luxury. People livedon thin soup of which there was neverenough—what they got for theirmorning meal would not have filled aglass.Sitting with the criminals was a manwith a gray stubble of beard, wearing ayellow leather coat. He was recitingverse which L. recognized. It was Man-delstam. The criminals offered himbread and the canned stuff, and hecalmly helped himself and ate. Evidentlyhe was only afraid to eat food given himby his jailers. He was listened to in com-plete silence and sometimes asked torepeat a poem.119

Years later, on the outskirts of Vladivos-

tok where the old transit camp used to be, astreet was renamed “Mandelstam Street.”Maybe the name was taken from one of thepoems he wrote in Voronezh;

What street is this?Mandelstam Street.What a devil of a name!However you turn itIt sounds crooked, not straight.There was little of the straight line in

him,His morals were not lily-whiteAnd so this street,Or rather this pit,Is named afterThis Mandelstam.

§§

All photographs are of books in the author’s

collection, photographed by Robert McCamant

or the author.

NOTES

1 Akhmatova, My Half Century, p. 107.2 Berlin,“A Note On Literature and the

Arts in the Russian Soviet Federated

Socialist Republic in the Closing Months

of 1945.”3 Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One, Selected

Essays, New York, 1986, p. 123, 145.4 Id., p. 130.5 Id., p. 134.6 For details on Mandelstam’s life, I rely

primarily on his autobiographical

sketches, The Noise of Time, Princeton,

1965 (ed. Clarence Brown) and the

memoirs of his wife, Nadezhda

Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope

(London, 1971) and Hope Abandoned

(London, 1974). No complete biography

of Mandelstam has yet appeared in the

West. An early biography is Clarence

Brown’s Mandelstam, Cambridge, 1973.

Brown did more than any other Western

scholar to establish Mandelstam’s

reputation. A fine shorter but more

recent sketch of Mandelstam was

contributed by Prof. Omry Ronen to

European Writers, The Twentieth Century,

ed. Stade, Vol 10, NY, 1990, 1619-1651.

Anna Akhmatova wrote a brief memoir

of Mandelstam, which appears in

Akhmatova, My Half Century, Evanston,

1992, p. 84 et seq. And I have struggled

through one Russian biography, by Oleg

Lekmanov, Zhisn’ Osipa Mandel’shtama,

(“Life of Osip Mandelstam”) Petersburg,


Mandelstam in the late 1930’s

See NOTES TO MANDELSTAM, page 16

2003. The best collection of

Mandelstam’s work, Sobranie Sochinenii

(“Collected Works”), edited by Professors

Struve and Filipoff, published by the

Inter-Language Literary Associates from

1964 to 1969, likewise contains

correspondence and much other

information of biographical and

bibliographic value. Emma Gerstein’s

Moscow Memoirs, Memories of Anna

Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and

Literary Russia under Russia, New York,

2004, is also well worth reading, though

it is critical of Mandelstam and

Akhmatova, and also of Nadezhda

Mandelstam and her memoirs.7 Lekmanov, p. 13.8 Quoted in Brown, p. 21.9 Brown, p. 21.10 Id., p. 46.11 Mandelstam, Noise of Time, Penguin,

1993, p. 78-9; see Hope Against Hope, p.

243.12 Quoted in Brown, p. 25; see also

Lekmanov, p. 24.13 Mandelstam, Noise of Time, p. 115.14 Brown, p. 30.15 Lekmanov, p. 23.16 Id., p. 25.17 Mirsky, Contemporary Russian Literature,

London, 1926, p. 206.18 Lekmanov, p. 29-30.19 Akhmatova. My Half Century, p. 85.20 Lekmanov, p. 30.21 June 20, 1909.22 Brown, p. 37.23 Lekmanov, p. 39.24 Id., p. 64.25 Brown, p. 44.26 Lekmanov, p. 30-31.27 “A Trap for Judges”28 Lekmanov, p. 42, 45.29 Id., p. 51.30 Akhmatova, My Half Century, p. 86.31 Mandelstam, Noise of Time, p. 107.32 Lekmanov, p. 51.33 A.A. Morozov,“Pic’ma O.E.

Mandel’stama V. I. Ivanovu,” in Zapiski

Otdela Rukopicei, Izdatel’stvo Kniga,

Moskva, 1973, p. 261. Morozov points

out that Mandelstam gave Ivanov a

second copy of his book, and that

relations between the two continued to

be warm and mutually respectful.34 Lekmanov, p. 53.35 Quoted in Brown, p. 58.36 Quoted in Brown, p. 58.37 Lekmanov, p. 67.38 Id., p. 60.39 Brown, p. 67.40 Lekmanov, p. 80; Akhmatova, p. 90.41 Tsvetaeva Memoir—Story of One

Dedication; City of Alexandrov.42 Lekmanov, p. 73.43 Hope Against Hope, p. 362.44 Lekmanov, p. 86, 99.45 Id., p. 93.46 Hope Against Hope, p. 19247 Lekmanov, p. 100.48 Brown, p. 220.49 Lekmanov, p. 102.50 Hope Against Hope, p. 190.51 Brown, p. 220; Lekmanov, p. 102.52 Brown, p. 111.53 Hope Against Hope, p. 138.54 Lekmanov, p. 108, 116.55 Brown, p. 90.56 See Vol. III, 1969 at 426-42757 Hope Against Hope, p. 138.58 Id., p. 162.59 Lekmanov, p. 123.60 Mandelstam, The Noise of Time, ed.

Brown, 1965, p. 37.61 Id., p. 50-51.62 Reprinted in Noise of Time, Penguin, p.

181.63 Mandelstam, The Moscow Notebooks, ed.

McKane, 1991, p. 10-11.64 Hope Against Hope, p. 92.65 Id., p. 160.66 Id., 13.67 Lekmanov, p. 176.68 Shentalinsky, p. 180.69 Hope Against Hope, at 76-77.70 My Half Century, p. 103.71 Shentalinsky, p. 183; Hope Against Hope,

p. 32.72 Shentalinsky, p. 182; Hope Against Hope,

p. 59.73 My Half Century, p. 102.74 Hope Against Hope., p. 112.75 Lekmanov, p. 180.76 Hope Against Hope, p. 146.77 Id., p. 139.78 Quoted in Gerstein, p. 121.79 Mandelstam, The Voronezh Notebooks,

ed. McKane, quoted in introduction, p.

12.80 Hope Against Hope, p. 270.81 Id., p. 271.82 Id., p. 20-21.83 Id., p. 191.84 Id., p. 182-183.85 Id., p. 152.86 Id., p. 183-84.87 No. 3, p. 292. I am indebted to Prof.

Omri Ronen of the University of

Michigan for referring me to this journal.88 Glagol No. 3, p. 293-294.89 Hope Against Hope, p. 271.90 Supra, footnote 78.91 P. 10192 My Half-Century, p. 376.93 Hope Against Hope, p. 9.94 Lekmanov, p. 185.

95 Id., p. 273. See Gerstein, Moscow

Memoirs, p. 94, 117, et seq.96 Gerstein, p. 111.97 Jurij Frejdin,“Ostatok Knig: Biblioteka

O.E. Mandel’stama”—Slovo i Syd’ba: Osip

Mandelstam: Issledovaniya I Materiali,

Moskva: Nayka, 1991, c. 231-239.

Professor Thomas Langerak, who kindly

referred me to this article, points out that

“The first edition of Stone is not

mentioned, so Mandelstam probably gave

Rudakov his last copy.” (This is from a

letter to the author, May 3, 2005.) If so,

the copy has special interest because it

would have been one Mandelstam kept

during the more than two decades since it

first appeared in 1913.98 The text of the inscription was published

in the “Literaturnye Pamiatniki” edition

of Kamen’, Leningrad: Nauka, 1990, note

on p.354. Again, my thanks to Professor

Omri Ronen for the reference.99 Gerstein, p. 96.100 Hope Against Hope, p. 273.101 Id., p. 275.102 Id., p. 276.103 Gerstein, p. 103.104 Id. at 9, 274.105 Id., p. 99-100, 115.106 Id., p. 101.107 Id., p. 117; Pushkin House Annual, p. 11.108 My Half-Century, p. 101.109 Hope Against Hope, p. 198-203.110 YMCA Press, 1981, p. 23.111 Hope Against Hope, p. 277.112 My Half Century, p. 108.113 Shentalinsky, p. 186.114 See Lekmanov, p. 209.115 Id., p. 188.116 Hope Against Hope, p. 361-363.117 Lekmanov, p. 211-212.118 Hope Against Hope, p. 377, 383.119 Id., p. 393.


NOTES TO MANDELSTAM, from page 15

John B. Goetz ’66died October 5, 2006

A remembrance will appear in a

future issue of the Caxtonian.

CORRECTIONWe regret that the October article on

“One Book, Many Interpretations” at theChicago Public Library omitted a sixthClub member: Sam Ellenport ofBelmont, MA exhibited a full moroccobinding of In the Time of Butterflies.

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