Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam was a Russian Jewish poet and essayist.
Background
Osip (Joseph) Emilyevich Mandelstam was born in Warsaw (then part of the Russian Empire) to a wealthy Polish-Jewish family. His father, a leather merchant by trade, was able to receive a dispensation freeing the family from the pale of settlement. Soon after Osip's birth, they moved to Saint Petersburg.
Education
In 1900, Mandelstam entered the prestigious Tenishev School. His first poems were printed in 1907 in the school's almanac. In April 1908, Mandelstam decided to enter the Sorbonne in Paris to study literature and philosophy, but he left the following year to attend the University of Heidelberg in Germany. In 1911, he decided to continue his education at the University of Saint Petersburg, from which Jews were excluded. He converted to Methodism and entered the university the same year. He did not complete a formal degree.
Career
In 1911, Osip Emilyevich and several other young Russian poets formed the "Poets' Guild", under the formal leadership of Nikolai Gumilyov and Sergei Gorodetsky. The nucleus of this group became known as Acmeists. Mandelstam wrote the manifesto for the new movement: The Morning Of Acmeism (1913, published in 1919).
In 1913 he published his first collection of poems, The Stone; it was reissued in 1916 under the same title, but with additional poems included.
In 1922, Mandelstam moved to Moscow. At this time, his second book of poems, Tristia, was published in Berlin. For several years after that, he almost completely abandoned poetry, concentrating on essays, literary criticism, memoirs The Noise Of Time, Feodosiya - both 1925; (Noise of Time 1993 in English) and small-format prose The Egyptian Stamp (1928). As a day job, he translated literature into Russian (19 books in 6 years), then worked as a correspondent for a newspaper.
In the autumn of 1933, Mandelstam composed the poem "Stalin Epigram", which he read at a few small private gatherings in Moscow. Six months later, in 1934, Mandelstam was arrested. But, after interrogation about his poem, he was not immediately sentenced to death or the Gulag, but to exile in Cherdyn in the Northern Ural, where he was accompanied by his wife. After he attempted suicide, and following an intercession by Nikolai Bukharin, the sentence was lessened to banishment from the largest cities. Otherwise allowed to choose his new place of residence, Mandelstam and his wife chose Voronezh. This proved a temporary reprieve. In the next years, Mandelstam wrote a collection of poems known as the Voronezh Notebooks, which included the cycle Verses on the Unknown Soldier. He also wrote several poems that seemed to glorify Stalin (including "Ode To Stalin"). However, in 1937, at the outset of the Great Purge, the literary establishment began to attack him in print, first locally, and soon after from Moscow, accusing him of harbouring anti-Soviet views.
Early the following year, Mandelstam and his wife received a government voucher for a vacation not far from Moscow upon their arrival in May 1938, he was arrested on 5 May and charged with "counter-revolutionary activities". Four months later, on 2 August 1938, Mandelstam was sentenced to five years in correction camps. He died from cold and hunger. His death was described later in a short story "Cherry Brandy" by Varlam Shalamov. On 28 October 1987, during the administration of Mikhail Gorbachev, Mandelstam was also exonerated from the 1934 charges and thus fully rehabilitated.
Views
Quotations:
Only in Russia poetry is respected - it gets people killed.
Everything is moved by love.
Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.
Logic is the kingdom of the unexpected. To think logically means to be continually amazed.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Korney Chukovsky: "He never had not only property, but also any permanent settlement - he led a vagrant lifestyle... It was a man who didn't create around himself any way of life, and lived beyond that all".