Osip Mandelstam - Career

Career

In 1922, Mandelstam and Nadezhda 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, Russian: Шум времени, Shum vremeni; Феодосия, Feodosiya - both 1925; Noise of Time (1993 in English) and small-format prose (The Egyptian Stamp, Russian: Египетская марка, Yegipetskaya marka - 1928). As a day job, he translated literature into Russian (19 books in 6 years), then worked as a correspondent for the newspaper.

Mandelstam's non-conformist, anti-establishment tendencies were not heavily disguised. He opposed the increasingly totalitarian government under Joseph Stalin. In the autumn of 1933, he composed the poem "Stalin Epigram", which he read at a number of small gatherings in Moscow. The poem was a sharp criticism of the "Kremlin highlander" (or, in some translations, the "Kremlin mountaineer".) It was likely inspired by Mandelstam's having seen the effects of the Great Famine that year, during his vacation in the Crimea. This was the result of Stalin's collectivisation in the USSR and his drive to exterminate the "kulaks".

Six months later, Mandelstam was arrested. But, after the customary pro forma inquest, he was sentenced not to death or the Gulag, but to exile in Cherdyn in the Northern Ural with his wife. It was considered nearly a miraculous event, usually explained by historians as owing to Stalin's personal interest in the poet's fate. 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 the 5th May (ref. camp document of 12. October 1938, signed by Mandelstam) and charged with "counter-revolutionary activities". Four months later, 2 August 1938, Mandelstam was sentenced to five years in correction camps. He arrived at the Vtoraya Rechka (Second River) transit camp near Vladivostok in Russia's Far East and managed to get a note out to his wife asking for warm clothes; he never received them. The official cause of his death is an unspecified illness.

Mandelstam's own prophecy was fulfilled: "Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?" Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote memoirs about her life with her husband and the times in Hope against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned She also managed to preserve a significant part of Mandelstam's unpublished work.

In 1956, during the Khrushchev thaw, Osip Mandelstam was rehabilitated and declared exonerated from the charges brought against him in 1938. On October 28, 1987, during the administration of Mikhail Gorbachev, Mandelstam was exonerated from the 1934 charges as well and thus fully rehabilitated. 1977, a minor planet 3461 Mandelshtam, discovered by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh, was named after him.