The New York Times called Osip Mandelshtam “probably the greatest Russian poet of [the 20th] century”. Anna Akhmatova once asked, “Who will tell us from where that new, divine harmony, Mandelshtam’s poetry, came from?”
Osip Mandelshtam was born into a Jewish family in Warsaw in 1891, but grew up in St Petersburg. His father was a leather merchant, and their existence was comfortable, in spite of the widespread persecution of Jews in turn-of-the-century Russia. Mandelshtam abandoned his studies early on to devote himself to writing. His first collection, Stone, published in 1913 when he was only 22, immediately established him as one of Russia’s foremost poets.
In 1922, he and his Jewish wife Nadezhda moved to Moscow. She later wrote, “Our relationship must have aroused in him a keen awareness of his Jewish roots, a tribal feeling, a sense of kinship with his people – I was the only Jewess in his life.”
He continued to write, releasing another major collection, Tristia (1922), and entrusting poems to his wife Nadezhda and his literary friends, who kept many of his works hidden from the authorities. Increasingly critical of Stalin, he was sent into exile for three years in the late 1930s and then, on his way to a prison camp in Siberia, Mandelshtam died of heart failure in 1938. His widow went on to write two of the greatest memoirs about life under Stalin, Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974). She died in 1980.
Sadly, their terrible experiences could now be compared with the life of dissident writers under the terrible Putin regime.
Pushkin Press has now published a collection of Mandelshtam’s poetry, translated by James Greene, The Meadow Where Time Stands Still. This volume collects the best of his work, including poems he was unable to publish in his lifetime. They cover almost 30 years, including selections from his two great early collections, Stone and Tristia. The last part of the book consists of many of the poems that his widow and friends had to hide and which were published posthumously.
These poems follow his development and major themes: the beauty of human creation, the agony of exile and the courage it takes to speak the truth in dark times.
The book is superbly annotated and offers fascinating insights from great critics such as Robert Chandler and Donald Davie. Perhaps best of all, it shows how Mandelshtam was soaked in European culture from Greece, Rome and Jerusalem to Pushkin’s St Petersburg and how his admirers ranged from Paul Celan and Nabokov to Joseph Brodsky.
It is a fascinating introduction to one of the great modern poets.
The Meadow Where Time Stands Still: Essential Poems, by Osip Mandelshtam
Pushkin Press
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