Marina Yardaeva 
Scholars, being scholars, have crunched some numbers. They have calculated that the words “time” and “century” appear in Osip Mandelstam’s lyrics almost as frequently as “earth”, “air”, and “space”. This is no coincidence. The poet engaged in an endless dialogue with his epoch – or, rather, a confrontation. He “raised the century’s aching eyelids”, and the century fought back, throwing itself at him, choking him. Mandelstam lost his battle with the present. But eternity has set everything straight.
The poet was born in January 1891 – an unreliable year, as he himself called it. Why unreliable? Because the birth of a poet, like the birth of a new star, is always a challenge, always a disruption of the usual order of things? That, too. But not only that. Mandelstam gave this description of his coming into the world in 1937, when the circle of his life had almost closed, when all causes and consequences had become clear. And not only within the bounds of his biography. This biography coincided with a historical cycle that had begun precisely then, at the turn of the century, and reached its peak in the late 1930s. Mandelstam, who felt time acutely, who moved with ease from the present to antiquity, and who looked into the future with horror, could not fail to see or understand these limits.
The Deafening Nineties
So, he was born in January 1891 in Warsaw, into a Jewish family. His father, Emil Mandelstam, was a glove‑maker, a merchant of the first guild, but not a businessman at heart. His true interests were European literature and German philosophy. His mother, Flora Mandelstam, was a pianist and music teacher. Books, concerts, theatres, trips to Riga, Vyborg and St. Petersburg – such was the atmosphere of the future poet’s childhood.
In 1897, the family moved to Petersburg. Their father tried to place his sons in one of the best and most progressive schools in the country – the Tenishev School. It seemed that all he had to do was live and be glad: youth, carelessness, freedom – everything was there. But even as a child, the poet saw and felt some kind of boil festering. “I remember well the stifling years of Russia – the nineties, their slow sinking, their morbid calm, their deep provincialism – a stagnant backwater: the last refuge of a dying century,” Mandelstam later wrote in The Noise of Time.
His youthful premonitions proved right. The explosion came when Osip was fourteen. The first Russian revolution broke out. The restless teenager could not help being drawn into it. He tried to join the Socialist Revolutionaries, but was told that politics was a matter for adults. And as soon as Osip finished school, his parents sent him off to Paris, to the Sorbonne, to keep him out of trouble. Reading Baudelaire and Verlaine avidly, the poet turned his attention away from the anxieties of life in Russia. Then came studies at Heidelberg University and travels around Europe.
The Happy Nineteen-tens
Having returned to Petersburg in 1911 and entered the university, Mandelstam joined the capital’s literary circles. After meeting the poets Georgy Ivanov and Nikolai Gumilyov, he became a regular at the gatherings in Vyacheslav Ivanov’s “Tower”. There he met Alexander Blok and Anna Akhmatova. The latter recalled: “He was then a lean boy with a lily‑of‑the‑valley in his buttonhole, his head thrown back, his eyes blazing, and his eyelashes halfway down his cheeks.” Later they met in editorial offices, at friends’ homes, at the Fridays of Hyperborea at Lozinsky’s, and in the cabaret The Stray Dog…
He was immediately recognised as a fellow poet. In 1912 Mandelstam joined the “Guild of Poets”, founded by Gumilyov and Gorodetsky. In 1913 Mandelstam’s first collection of poems was published. Stone (twenty‑three early poems) was issued at his own expense, but the book did not vanish without a trace; instead it firmly lodged itself in the hearts of later generations. Who can now forget, in the winter season: “With tinsel gold the Christmas trees / are burning in the woods?” Bright, joyful verses.
And Mandelstam’s life back then was just that – bright and joyful. The first half of the nineteen‑tens was his happiest time. Perhaps the only time when the true Mandelstam was not a stranger to the age. A short time.
The First World War began. The elemental force swept Mandelstam up, too. At first he rushed to the front – if only to the medical corps. Then he served in the All‑Russian Union of Towns, an organisation that cared for the wounded, refugees and prisoners of war. Of course, he kept writing poems. He tried to make sense of what was happening through the intersection and layering of times. His canonical poem Insomnia. Homer. Taut Sails was written in 1915. The story of its creation is well‑known. The poet was visiting Maximilian Voloshin in Koktebel, saw a fragment of an ancient ship on the shore, and… was transported back to the antiquity he so loved. Perhaps he was fleeing the horrifying present, the madness of the world? But no. That was not an escape from reality; it was a confrontation with it, face to face.
But his attitude to events was ambivalent. On the one hand, the need to defend culture – the very history of world civilisation – was beyond question. On the other, the poet detested the political squabbling, the geopolitical interests, and the allies’ drive for economic gain. And to return to Homer – there was also a third aspect: the conflict between history and the individual, between fate and inner feeling.
In this whirlwind, the poet too surrendered to feeling. In 1915, Mandelstam met Marina Tsvetaeva in the Crimea; in 1916 they grew closer. He would travel from Petrograd to Moscow to see her. But neither the miles between them nor the world’s own fracture helped to forge a lasting connection. Their brief story was from the very beginning a story of separation.
The Rupture of the Era
For many, February 1917 was a breath of fresh air. Osip Mandelstam was inspired by it, too. Change was needed – they had been waiting for it. But the poet’s disillusionment came quickly. It turned out that what had happened was not the beginning of a new life, but the death throes of the old one. Very soon, after the February Revolution came the October one – and after it followed “the great twilight year”. That was no longer a slow sinking into the swamp, but a tumbling head over heels down Lamarck’s ladder – towards “low‑browed machine‑gunners” and “the yoke of violence and malice”.
And yet, somehow, one had to live and work through all of this. First, Mandelstam found a job at the Press Bureau of the Central Commission for the Relief and Evacuation of Petrograd; then he moved to the department for higher education reform at the People’s Commissariat for Education. In the summer of 1918, together with the Commissariat, the poet moved to Moscow.
Out of self‑preservation, Mandelstam kept his distance from high‑ranking officials. His wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, later recalled this. “When he arrived in Moscow, he had to spend several days in the Kremlin at Gorbunov’s place,” she later wrote. “One morning, in the common dining room where he went for breakfast, a footman – formerly a palace servant, now serving the revolutionary government, and still keeping his deferential lackey’s manners – announced that Comrade Trotsky himself was ‘about to take his coffee’. O.M. grabbed his coat and ran off, sacrificing his only chance to eat in a starving city.”
A similar incident happened with Chicherin, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Mandelstam was summoned to talk about working at the Commissariat. Chicherin himself met with him. He suggested that the poet draft a sample government telegram in French, and then left him alone. Mandelstam immediately fled. As he later explained to his wife, if some minor official had been talking to him, he would have stayed and taken the job; but this way he ran away – “better keep away from people vested with power”. He sensed everything; he understood everything.
But he could not stop being himself, either. When his patience wore thin, self‑preservation no longer helped. The story with Blyumkin, a secret police agent, alone speaks volumes. Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote that this episode had been greatly fictionalised by Georgy Ivanov; in reality, things were far less dramatic: the poet did not snatch any execution warrants from the agent’s hands and tear them up.
Nevertheless, Mandelstam declared to Blyumkin, who was brandishing a pistol, that he would not allow such arbitrary violence. After saying this, he went to a poet Larisa Reisner, and then together with her to Dzerzhinsky, who assured him that he would look into the matter. Blyumkin threatened to take revenge on the poet. To be on the safe side, Mandelstam left for Petrograd, then for Kharkov and Kiev. The poet’s wandering years had begun.
It was in Kyiv that Osip Mandelstam met his future wife. They came along quickly. And at first they parted just as quickly, due to circumstances.
In 1920, Mandelstam was arrested twice. First in Crimea by the Whites, then in Batumi – as a White himself. In the chaos of the early Soviet years, however, he always managed to extricate himself quickly.
In October 1920, Mandelstam found himself in Petrograd. He was given a room in the “House of Arts”. There was hunger and crowding, but life was filled with meaning. The “House of Arts” became both a social club and a mutual aid fund. The poet gave readings and even got published. His verses were memorised and copied out by hand. As if without his involvement, a collection of poems, Tristia, was published in Germany in 1922.
Reverse Flow of Time
In 1921, as life was gradually settling back into its banks, Mandelstam tracked down Nadezhda. From then on, they were tossed around the country together. A year later they married and settled in Moscow, where they were given a room in the Herzen House. Work, however, did not go well. In the chaos of the early post‑revolutionary years, everyone had a hard time; but when life began to stabilise, the inhumanity of the age that had taken shape and the poet’s alienation from it became even more palpable.
Conflicts, changes of editorial boards, more wandering across the country. In 1925, Mandelstam almost stopped writing poetry. He turned to prose. Over five years he wrote The Noise of Time, The Egyptian Stamp, and Fourth Prose. And all of it, essentially, about the same thing: about time, about being ill‑at‑ease within it, about the impossibility of speaking, writing, breathing freely. In Fourth Prose, the poet confessed: “The years do not turn to profit – others grow more respectable by the day, while I, on the contrary – a reverse flow of time.” But this confession is better known for its tirade about sanctioned literature and stolen air. “I want to spit in the face of writers who produce things approved in advance; I want to beat them over the head with a stick and seat them all at a table in the Herzen House, placing before each a glass of police tea and putting into their hands the analysis of Hornfeld’s urine. I would forbid these writers to marry and have children. How can they have children? – because children must continue what we began, must say the most important things for us – while their fathers have sold themselves to the devil knows whom for three generations to come,” the poet wrote at the end of the 1920s.
Here some clarification is needed. There was a story – or rather, a scandal – involving the critic Hornfeld. The publishing house Land and Factory gave Mandelstam two translations of Charles de Coster’s novel Till Eulenspiegel – one by Karyakin, the other by Hornfeld – to edit into a single version. The poet did the job, but by a mistake, the publishing house issued the translation under Mandelstam’s own name. Hornfeld accused him of plagiarism. Of course, both the poet and the publisher explained that it was all a misunderstanding, but the scandal grew into a full‑scale persecution. Fourth Prose, however, was not just a response to this particular affair; in it, everything that had been festering came pouring out. It became a verdict on the Soviet reality of the late 1920s and a prophecy of the coming 1930s.
Of course, such things could not be published. After the Hornfeld affair, Mandelstam was essentially blacklisted. Then Nikolai Bukharin intervened in the poet’s fate. He managed to get the Mandelstams a trip to the Caucasus – away from the capital. And it helped. Nadezhda Mandelstam recalled that in Armenia and Georgia the poet grew stronger, “straightened up”. He did not make peace with the age, finally acknowledging himself as the “sick son of the century”, but he saw everything for what it was, and his true place within it. He found his voice again – and the poems returned.
The Fateful Thirties
Back in Leningrad, the decline resumed. Mandelstam had a foreboding of disaster. A feeling of hopelessness, of utter darkness. Life not worth living – “sheer disgrace”, “nothing but delusions and brandy”. Only now this all emerged against a background of external well‑being. The poet was given an apartment; a pension was procured for him “for services to Russian literature”. But they did not let him get published. His contribution to Russian literature was acknowledged – they paid him off with square metres and rubles – but they shut him out of Soviet literature.
His Conversation about Dante was rejected for publication. The reason was obvious: inappropriate parallels. Who had ever heard of writing about the interpenetration of prison and the outside world, about how some rulers deliberately create an atmosphere so that “prison nightmares are sucked in with mother’s milk”? When the magazine Zvezda began publishing his cycle Journey to Armenia, the editor was dismissed. What little did manage to break into print was torn to shreds by critics. “Lackey prose”, “the unbridled malice of a man who does not understand proletarian literature” – that is how Mandelstam’s sketches were described. Indeed, how dared he see beauty not in the present, but in the “slavish” past, refusing to appreciate the sweep and pathos of socialist construction? The task was to clip his wings at takeoff – and they succeeded.
Then the lines were born: “We live without feeling the country beneath us.” Pasternak put it with deadly precision: “That’s not literature – it’s an act of suicide.” In his naivety, he still hoped to warn the poet, imploring him not to read the lines to anyone. But Mandelstam did read them. To many. In Nadezhda Mandelstam’s words, it was the blind rage of a bull being led to slaughter – the loss of fear following the loss of hope.
And in May 1934, there was the slap in the face to Alexei Tolstoy. Over an unfair ‘comradely court’. Here is how it happened. In the same building as the Mandelstams lived the poet Amir Sargidzhan. Back in 1932, he had borrowed some money from Osip Mandelstam and never returned it. A dispute arose, then a fight; Sargidzhan lunged at Mandelstam, and Nadezhda Mandelstam was also hurt. Tolstoy was asked to mediate the conflict. He ruled that both were at fault. Later, Mandelstam struck him in front of witnesses. As if this had nothing to do with literature, certainly not a challenge to a desperately unjust, cruel age. But it was precisely a challenge. A logical extension of his anti‑Stalin pronouncement. He could not reach Stalin himself. But he could reach the ‘Red Count’, the poet, personified Stalinism. The arrest was not long in coming. They burst into the Mandelstams’ apartment just a couple of weeks later. That is why at first they thought it was because of the slap. They still hoped it was not because of the poems. However, one thing was added to the other. Mandelstam confessed his guilt. What followed is known even to people far from literature. Stalin’s phone call to Pasternak. ‘Is Mandelstam a master?’ The conversation ‘about life and death’ that never took place, but the poet’s death was postponed. The leader came up with a formula for Mandelstam: ‘Isolate, but preserve.’
First, the poet was assigned exile to Cherdyn, and was allowed to go with his wife. This seemed so unbelievable that he thought it was an elaborate sadistic ploy. The poet constantly expected to be shot. This drove him almost insane, and eventually, once in Cherdyn, he himself jumped out of a hospital window. But he regained the will to live. Desperately. “Breathing and ‘growing Bolshevik’.” He wanted to believe that he could not merely survive physically, but live as a poet – and even be recognised as one. These hopes were not groundless. Soon, Mandelstam was allowed to leave Cherdyn and choose a city for the remainder of his exile. The family moved to Voronezh. There the poet was made head of the literary section at the local theatre, was occasionally allowed to be published in newspapers, and he and his wife even made a few radio programmes. The isolation was not total: Akhmatova, the actor Yakhontov, and Nadezhda Mandelstam’s mother came to visit.
But the respite was short‑lived. In the autumn of 1936, the radio committee was disbanded; the theatre somehow fell away by itself, and so did the newspaper work. For Mandelstam, this was the final blow. In the spring of 1937, he wrote to Korney Chukovsky: “I said – those who condemned me were right. I found historical meaning in everything. Fine. I worked headlong. For that I was beaten. Pushed away. They created a moral torture for me. Still, I worked. I gave up pride. I considered it a miracle that I was allowed to work. I considered our whole life a miracle. After a year and a half, my health was shattered. By then, without any guilt, they had taken everything from me: the right to live, to work, to medical care. I have been reduced to the position of a dog… I am a shadow. I do not exist. The only right I have left is to die.
The second arrest came in 1938, a logical continuation of the first. Was a reason needed? No. Nor was a pretext. All that was needed was simply “to resolve the Mandelstam question”. The new sentence: five years in the GULAG. In September, the poet was sent in a convoy to Vladivostok. In December – sick, exhausted, having lost even despair – he died at a transit point.
Later, another famous Russian prisoner, Varlam Shalamov, would write about Mandelstam’s final days. His story Cherry Brandy is not a documentary record – the poets never met in life – but it is more than a document. “He believed in the immortality of his poems. He had no disciples, but do poets tolerate them? … He was surprised at himself – how could he think about poetry when everything had already been decided, a fact he knew very well, better than anyone.” Mandelstam was buried in a common grave behind the camp barracks. The exact place of his burial is unknown.
Translated by Grigory Litvinov
