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Osip (Emilevich) Mandelstam (1891-1938) - also: Osip Mandel'shtam | |
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Russian poet and essayist, who is regarded alongside Boris Pastenak, Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova as one of the greatest voices of the 20th-century Russian poetry. Most of Mandelstam's works were unknown outside his own country and went unpublished during the Stalin era (1929-53). Along with Anna Akhmatova, Mandelstam was one of the foremost members of Acmeist school of poetry. His early works were impersonal but later he also analyzed his own experiences, history, and the current events. "Perhaps my whisper was already born before my lips." Osip Mandelstam was born in Warsaw but he grew up in St.Petersburg. His father was a successful leather-goods dealer and his mother a piano teacher. Mandelstam's parents were Jewish, but not very religious. At home Mandelstam was taught by tutors and governesses. He attended the prestigious Tenishev School (1900-07) and traveled then to Paris (1907-08) and Germany (1908-10), where he studied Old French literature at the University of Heidelberg (1909-10). In 1911-17 he studied philosophy at St. Petersburg University but did not graduate. From 1911, Mandelstam was member of 'Poets Guild' and had close personal ties with Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev. His first poems appeared in 1910 in the journal Apollon. As a poet Mandelstam gained fame with the collection KAMEN (Stone), which appeared in 1913. The subject matters ranged from music to such triumphs of culture as the Roman classical architecture and the Byzantine cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. It was followed by TRISTIA (1922), which confirmed his position as a major poet, and STIKHOTVORENIA 1921-25, (1928). In Tristia Mandelstam made connections with the classical world and contemporary Russia as in Kamen. A new themes was the notion of exile. The mood is sad, the poet is saying his farewells: "I have studied science of saying good-bye / in bareheaded laments at night". Mandelstam welcomed February 1917 Revolution but he was hostile at first to October 1917 Revolution. When Yakov Blyumkin, a revolutionary terrorist, boasted in a café of having a pile of presigned deat warrants, Mandelstam tore them to shreds. In 1918 he worked briefly for Anatoly Lunacharskii's Education Ministry in Moscow. With his frequent visits to the south Mandelstam managed to avoid much of the troubles that complicated everyday life during the Civil War. After Revolution his views about contemporary poetry became harsh. The poetry of young people was for him a ceaseless cry of an infant, Mayakovsky was childish and Marina Tsvetaeva tasteless. He only accepted Pasternak and also admired Akhmatova. In 1922 Mandelstam married Madezhda Iokovlevna Khazin, who accompanied him throughout his years of exile and imprisonment. In the 1920s Mandelstam supported himself by writing children's books and translating works by Upton Sinclair, Jules Romains, Charles de Coster and others. He did not compose poems from 1925 to 1930 but turned to prose. In 1930 he made a trip to Armenia. Mandelstam saw his role as an outsider and drew parallels with his fate and that of Pushkin. The importance of preserving the cultural tradition became for the poet a central concern. The Soviet cultural authorities were rightly suspicious of his loyalty to the Bolshevik rule. "What a great thing is a police station!" Mandelstam often said, repeating Khlebnikov's lines. "The place where I have my rendezvous with the State." To escape his influential enemies Mandelstam traveled as a journalist in the distant provinces. Mandelstam's Journey to Armenia (1933) was his last major work published during his life time. "We live, deaf to the land beneath us, But where there's so much as a half a conversation Mandelstam was arrested first time in 1934 for epigram he had written on Joseph Stalin. "And every killing is a treat / For the broad-chested Ossete." Stalin took a personal interst in Mandelstam and also had a telephone conversation with Boris Pasternak, asking whether he had been present when the lampoon about himself, Stalin, was recited by Mandelstam. Pasternak answered that it seemed to him of no importance but he wanted to speak with Stalin about very important matters. "Mandelstam will be all right," promised the dictator. Mandelstam was exiled to Cherdyn. After suicide attempt, his sentence was commuted to exile in Voronezh, ending in 1937. In his notebooks from Voronezh (1935-37) Mandelstam said, "He thinks in bone and feels with his brow / And tries to recall his human form" - eventually the poet identifies himself with his tormentor. During this period Mandelstam wrote for Natasha Shtempel, his brave friend in the hard conditions, a poem in which he again gave women the role of mourning and preserving: "To accompany the resurrected and to be the first / To welcome the dead is their vocation. / And to demand caresses from them is criminal." Mandelstam was arrested for "counter-revolutionary" activities in May 1938 and sentenced to five years in a labour camp. Interrogated by Nikolay Shivarov, he confessed that he had authored a counter-revolutionary a poem which started with the lines: "We live without sensing the country beneath us, / At ten paces, our speech has no sound / And when there's the will to half-open our mouths / The Kremlin crag-dweller bars the way." In the transit camp, Mandelstam was already so weak that he couldn't stand. He died in the Gulag Archipelago in Vtoraia rechka, near Vladivostok, on December 27, 1938. His body was taken to a common grave. International fame Mandelstam started to acclaim in the 1970s, when his works began to appear in the West and in the Soviet Union. His widow Nadezhda Mandelstam published memoirs HOPE AGAINST HOPE (1970) and HOPE ABANDONED (1974), which depicted their life and Stalin era. Mandelstam's Voronez poems, published in 1990, are the closest approximation what the poet planned to write if he had survived. Mandelstam wrote a wide range of essays. 'Conversations about Dante' has been considered a masterpiece of modern criticism with its fanciful use of analogies. 'I compare, therefore I am,' so Dante might have put it. He was the Descartes of metaphor. Because matter is revealed to our consciousness (and how could we experience someone else's?) through metaphor alone, because there is no existence outside comparison, because existence itself is comparion." Mandelstam says that Pushkin's "splendid white teeth are the masculine pearls of Russian poetry", he sees the Divine Comedy as a "journey with conversations", and draws attention to Dante's use of colors. Writing is constantly compared to making music. " For further reading: Vospominaniia by Nadexhda Mandel'shtam (1970, transl. Hope Against Hope); Osip Mandelstam by Clarence Brown (1973); Osip Emilievich Mandelstam by Arthur A. Cohen (1974); A Concordance to the Poems of Osip Mandelstam by Demetrius J. Koubourlis (1974); Osim Mandelstam and His Age by Steven Broyde (1975); Mandelstam: The Later Poetry by Jennifer Baines (1976); Osip Mandelstam by Nikita Struve (1982); Osip and Nadeza Mandelstam by Seamus Heaney (in The Government of the Tongue, 1988); Osip Mandelstam by Jane Gary Harris (1988); Zhizn i tvorchestvo O.E. Mandel'shtama, ed. by O.G. Lasunskii et al (1990); Slovo i sud'ba: Osip Mandel'shtam, ed. by Z.S. Papernyui et al (1991); Mandel'shtam i antichnost', ed. by O. Lekmanov (1995); The Achemist Movement in Russian Poetry by Justin Doherty (1995); Mandelstam the Reader by Nancy Pollak (1995); The KGB's Literary Archive by Vitaly Shentalinsky (1995) - ACMEIST SCHOOL: Small group of Russian poets reacting against Symbolism, associated with the review Apollon (1909-17) Members: Sergey Gorodetsky, Nikolay S. Gumilyov (executed in 1921), Osip Mandelstam (died in a labour camp 1938), Anna Akhmatova, silenced during the most productive years of her life. - Suom.: Mandelstamin runoja on julkaistu myös teoksessa Neuvostolyriikkaa 3. Hänen puolisonsa Nadezda Mandelstamin muistelmat Ihmisen toivo ilmestyi 1970. SELECTED WORKS:
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