Osip Mandelstam

A Biography

Ralph Dutli, Ben Fowkes

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781839761584
• eBook ISBN:
  9781839761607
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Literature

This is the first full-scale biography of Osip Mandelstam to combine an analysis of his poetry with a description of his personal life, from his beginnings as a young intellectual in pre-revolutionary Russia to his final fate as a victim of Stalinism.

The myth has grown up that Mandelstam was a gloomy, miserable figure; Dutli deconstructs this, stressing Mandelstam's enjoyment of life. There are several underlying themes here. One is Mandelstam's Jewish background in pre-1914 Russia, which he rejected as a young man, but reaffirmed in later life. Another is the inescapable impact of Russia's political and social transformation.

His evolution as a poet naturally occupies a large place in the biography, which quotes many of his most famous poems, including his devastating anti-Stalin epigram. He produced wonderful poetry before the October Revolution, but did not reach his full poetic stature until the 1930s when in exile in Voronezh. He was never an official Soviet poet, and it was only thanks to the intervention of Bukharin that he was brought back from utter impoverishment.

The biography gives full weight to his emotional life, beginning with his friendship with two other Russian poets, Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova, followed by love and marriage to Nadezhda Khazina.

"One of the century's greatest lyric poets." - Elaine Feinstein, Sunday Times
"Mandelstam's poems are both bold and delicate. His imagery can seem both profoundly startling yet entirely natural". - Robert Chandler
"Mandelstam was a tragic figure. Even while in exile in Voronej, he wrote works of untold beauty and power. And he had no poetic forerunners. In all of world poetry, I know of no other such case. We know the sources of Pushkin and Blok, but who will tell us from where that new, divine harmony, Mandelstam's poetry, came from?" - Anna Akhmatova
"Russia's greatest poet in the twentieth century." - Joseph Brodsky

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1. Of Myself I Will Not Speak: (The Pulverisation of Biography)
• 2. Journey to Raspberry Town: (Warsaw 1891 and Pavlovsk 1892–1896)
• 3. Mother Tongue and Unfamiliar Sounds: (Petersburg Childhood 1897–1904)
• 4. Awakening the Beast of Literature: (Petersburg 1905–1906, Paris 1907–1908)
• 5. The Fruit which Falls from the Tree: (Heidelberg 1909–1910, Finland 1911)
• 6. No, Not the Moon, but the Bright Face of a Clock: (Petersburg 1912–1913)
• 7. Rome and Inner Freedom: (Petrograd and Koktebel 1914–1915)
• 8. Florence in Moscow: (Moscow, Koktebel, Petrograd 1916)
• 9. Nightingale Fever: (Petrograd, the Crimea, Moscow 1917–1918)
• 10. A Girl’s Forehead in the Civil War: (Kyiv, Feodosiia, Tbilisi 1919–1920)
• 11. I Shall Pray in the Soviet Night: (Petrograd, Tbilisi, Batumi 1920–1921)
• 12. My Time, My Beast: (Moscow 1922–1923)
• 13. No, Never Was I Anyone’s Contemporary: (Moscow 1923–1924)
• 14. Nadezhda by the Black Sea: (Leningrad and Yalta 1925–1926) 186
• 15. The Brassy Taste in My Mouth: (Detskoe Selo 1927–1928)
• 16. Ulenspiegel’s Chewed-Up Heart: (Kyiv and Moscow 1929)
• 17. One Additional Day: (Armenia 1930)
• 18. I Too Am a Man of My Time: (Leningrad and Moscow 1931)
• 19. Power Is Repulsive, Like the Barber’s Fingers: (Moscow and the Crimea 1932–1933)
• 20. Accursed Dwelling: (Moscow and Cherdyn 1933–1934)
• 21. The Miracle of Voronezh: (Voronezh 1934–1936)
• 22. I Am a Shadow: (Voronezh 1936–1937)
• 23. Descent into the Hell of Gulag: (Savyolovo and Kalinin 1937, Samatikha and Vladivostok 1938)
• 24. Nadezhda Makes Herself Invisible: (The Second Life 1938–1980)
• 25. Return from the Underground: (The Verdict of Posterity, 1956 to the Present)
• Appendixes
• References
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index of Names
• Acknowledgements