Biography

OSIP MANDELSHTAM was born in Warsaw on January 15, 1891, mostly lived in St. Petersburg until the Russian Revolution, and then became a wanderer. At times a resident of Moscow, he was a political exile in Voronezh from 1934-1937 (he had written a poem that compared Stalin to a cockroach), and was a prisoner in the Gulag from May 1938 until his death on December 27, 1938. He died in a transit camp near Vladivostok on the way to Kolyma.

His last great poem, unfinished when he died (“Lines on the Unknown Soldier”), ends with a self-portrait of Mandelshtam as victim and master (“and centuries/encircle me with fire”), Mandelshtam’s response, perhaps, to the question Stalin asked Pasternak in 1934, “But isn’t he [Mandelshtam] the master, isn’t he master?” For a brief time in 1916, Mandelshtam was a lover of Tsvetaeva’s. He was also Akhmatova’s lifelong friend. During his last public reading in the early 1930s when a provocateur asked which contemporary poets most influenced him, he answered, “I am the friend of my friends. I live in the age of Akhmatova.” His poem for Tsvetaeva was published in his second volume, Tristia (1923).

Joseph Brodsky believed that Mandelshtam’s uniqueness emerged from the “overloaded quality of his otherwise regular verse.” In articulating his overdeterminations, there may be no poet on whom a Jewish sense of blessing has been more powerfully and dangerously conferred.

TONY BRINKLEY teaches at the University of Maine and is a member of the Flat Bay Collective. He also collaborates with RAINA KOSTOVA, who teaches at Jacksonville State University. Their translations of Mandelshtam’s poetry have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Shofar, The New Review of Literature, and Stalin’s Eyes (Puckerbrush Press, 2002).