Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, short biography. Brief biography of Mandelstam Osip Emilievich

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam(birth name - Joseph; January 3 (15), 1891, Warsaw - December 27, 1938, Second River camp in Vladivostok) - Russian poet, prose writer, essayist, translator and literary critic, one of the largest Russian poets of the 20th century.

Biography

Osip Mandelstam was born on January 3 (January 15, new style) 1891 in Warsaw into a Jewish family. Father, Emil Veniaminovich (Emil, Khaskl, Khatskel Beniaminovich) Mandelstam (1856-1938), was a master glove maker and a member of the first guild of merchants, which gave him the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement, despite his Jewish origin. Mother, Flora Ovseevna Verblovskaya (1866-1916), was a musician.

In 1897, the Mandelstam family moved to St. Petersburg. Osip was educated at the Tenishevsky School (from 1900 to 1907), the Russian forge of “cultural personnel” of the early twentieth century.

In 1908-1910, Mandelstam studied at the Sorbonne and the University of Heidelberg. At the Sorbonne he attends lectures by A. Bergson and J. Bedier at the College de France. Meets Nikolai Gumilyov, is fascinated by French poetry: Old French epic, Francois Villon, Baudelaire and Verlaine.

In between trips abroad, he visits St. Petersburg, where he attends lectures on poetry at the “tower” by Vyacheslav Ivanov.

By 1911, the family began to go bankrupt, and studying in Europe became impossible.

In order to bypass the quota for Jews when entering St. Petersburg University, Mandelstam was baptized by a Methodist pastor. On September 10 of the same 1911, he was enrolled in the Romance-Germanic department of the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University, where he studied intermittently until 1917. He studies carelessly and never finishes the course.

In 1911, he met Anna Akhmatova and visited the Gumilyov couple.

The first publication was the magazine “Apollo”, 1910, No. 9. He was also published in the magazines “Hyperborea”, “New Satyricon”, etc.

In 1912 he met A. Blok. At the end of the same year, he became a member of the Acmeist group and regularly attended meetings of the Workshop of Poets.

He considered his friendship with the Acmeists (Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev) to be one of the main successes of his life.

The poetic searches of this period were reflected in the debut book of poems “Stone” (three editions: 1913, 1916 and 1922, the contents varied). He is at the center of poetic life, regularly reads poetry in public, visits Stray Dog, becomes acquainted with futurism, and becomes close to Benedict Livshits.

In 1915 he met Anastasia and Marina Tsvetaev. In 1916, Marina Tsvetaeva entered the life of O. E. Mandelstam.

After the October Revolution, he worked in newspapers, in the People's Commissariat for Education, traveled around the country, published in newspapers, performed poetry, and gained success. In 1919, in Kyiv, he met his future wife, Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina.

Poems from the time of the First World War and the Revolution (1916-1920) made up the second book “Tristia” (“Sorrowful Elegies”, the title goes back to Ovid), published in 1922 in Berlin. In 1922, he registered his marriage with Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina. Meeting Boris Pasternak.

In 1923, the “Second Book” was published and with a general dedication to “N. X." - to my wife.

During the civil war he wanders with his wife throughout Russia, Ukraine, Georgia; been arrested.

From May 1925 to October 1930 there was a pause in poetic creativity. At this time, prose was written, to the “Noise of Time” created in 1923 (the title plays on Blok’s metaphor “music of time”), the story “The Egyptian Brand” (1927), varying Gogol’s motifs, was added.

He makes his living by translating poetry.

In 1928, the last lifetime collection of poetry, “Poems,” was published, as well as a book of his selected articles, “On Poetry.”

In 1930 he finished work on the “Fourth Prose”. N. Bukharin is concerned about Mandelstam’s business trip to Armenia. After traveling to the Caucasus (Armenia, Sukhum, Tiflis), Osip Mandelstam returned to writing poetry.

Mandelstam's poetic gift reaches its peak, but it is almost never published. The intercession of B. Pasternak and N. Bukharin gives the poet small breaks from everyday life.

He independently studies the Italian language, reads the Divine Comedy in the original. The programmatic poetological essay “Conversation about Dante” was written in 1933. Mandelstam discusses it with A. Bely.

In Literaturnaya Gazeta, Pravda, and Zvezda, devastating articles were published in connection with the publication of Mandelstam’s “Travel to Armenia” (Zvezda, 1933, No. 5).

In November 1933, Osip Mandelstam wrote an anti-Stalin epigram “We live without feeling the country beneath us...” (“Kremlin Highlander”), which he reads to one and a half dozen people.

B. L. Pasternak called this act suicide:

One day, while walking along the streets, they wandered into some deserted outskirts of the city in the Tverskiye-Yamskiye area; Pasternak remembered the creaking of dray carts as the background sound. Here Mandelstam read to him about the Kremlin highlander. After listening, Pasternak said: What you read to me has nothing to do with literature or poetry. This is not a literary fact, but an act of suicide that I do not approve of and in which I do not want to take part. You didn’t read anything to me, I didn’t hear anything, and I ask you not to read them to anyone else.

One of the listeners denounces Mandelstam. The investigation into the case was led by N. Kh. Shivarov.

On the night of May 13-14, 1934, Mandelstam was arrested and sent into exile in Cherdyn (Perm region). Osip Mandelstam is accompanied by his wife, Nadezhda Yakovlevna.

In Cherdyn, O. E. Mandelstam attempts suicide (throws himself out of the window). Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam writes to all Soviet authorities and to all her acquaintances. With the assistance of Nikolai Bukharin, Mandelstam is allowed to independently choose a place to settle. The Mandelstams choose Voronezh.

They live in poverty, and occasionally a few persistent friends help them with money. From time to time O. E. Mandelstam works part-time at a local newspaper and in the theater. Close people visit them, Nadezhda Yakovlevna’s mother, artist V.N. Yakhontov, Anna Akhmatova.

The Voronezh cycle of poems by Mandelstam (the so-called “Voronezh notebooks”) is considered the pinnacle of his poetic creativity.

In a 1938 statement by the Secretary of the USSR Writers' Union V. Stavsky addressed to the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs N. I. Yezhov, it was proposed to “resolve the issue of Mandelstam”; his poems were called “obscene and slanderous.” Joseph Prut and Valentin Kataev were named in the letter as having “spoken sharply” in defense of Osip Mandelstam.

At the beginning of March 1938, the Mandelstam couple moved to the Samatikha trade union health resort (Egoryevsky district of the Moscow region, now assigned to the Shatura district). There, on the night of May 1-2, 1938, Osip Emilievich was arrested a second time and taken to the Cherusti railway station, which was located 25 kilometers from Samatikha. After which he was convoyed to a camp in the Far East.

Osip Mandelstam died on December 27, 1938 from typhus in the Vladperpunkt transit camp (Vladivostok). Mandelstam’s body “along with the other deceased lay unburied until spring. Then the entire “winter stack” was buried in a mass grave.

Researchers of the poet’s work noted “a concrete foresight of the future, so characteristic of Mandelstam,” and that “a sense of tragic death permeates Mandelstam’s poems.”

Periodization of creativity

L. Ginzburg (in the book “On Lyrics”) proposed to distinguish between three periods of the poet’s work. This point of view is shared by the majority of Mandelstam scholars (in particular, M. L. Gasparov).

The “Stone” period: a combination of “Tyutchev’s severity” with “Verlaine’s childishness.” “Tyutchev’s severity” is the seriousness and depth of poetic themes; “Verlaine’s childishness” is the ease and spontaneity of their presentation. The word is a stone. The poet is an architect, builder.

The “Tristian” period, until the end of the 1920s: poetics of associations. The word is flesh, soul, it freely chooses its objective meaning. Another face of this poetics is fragmentation and paradox. Mandelstam wrote later: “Any word is a bundle, the meaning sticks out from it in different directions, and does not rush to one official point.” Sometimes, in the course of writing a poem, the poet radically changed the original concept, sometimes he simply discarded the initial stanzas that served as the key to the content, so that the final text turned out to be a difficult-to-understand construction. This way of writing, producing explanations and preambles, was associated with the very process of creating a poem, the content and final form of which were not “predetermined” by the author. (See, for example, the attempt to reconstruct the writing of the “Slate Ode” by M. L. Gasparov.)

The period of the thirties of the XX century: the cult of creative impulse and the cult of metaphorical cipher. “I alone write from my voice,” Mandelstam said about himself. First, the meter “came” to him (“movement of the lips,” muttering), and from the common metric root, poems grew in “twos” and “threes.” This is how many poems were created by the mature Mandelstam. A wonderful example of this style of writing: his amphibrachs of November 1933 (“The apartment is quiet as paper”, “At our holy youth”, “Tatars, Uzbeks and Nenets”, “I love the appearance of fabric”, “Oh butterfly, oh Muslim”, “ When, having destroyed the sketch”, “And the maple’s jagged paw”, “Tell me, draftsman of the desert”, “In needle-shaped plague glasses”, “And I leave space”).

N. Struve proposes to distinguish not three, but six periods:

1. Belated Symbolist: 1908-1911

2. Militant Acmeist: 1912-1915

3. Akmeist deep: 1916-1921

4. At a crossroads: 1922-1925

5. On the return of breath: 1930-1934

6. Voronezh notebooks: 1935-1937

Evolution of the Mandelstam metric

M. L. Gasparov described the evolution of the poet’s metrics as follows:

1908-1911 - years of study, poetry in the tradition of Verlaine’s “songs without words.” The metric is dominated by iambics (60% of all lines, iambic tetrameter predominates). Choreans - about 20%.

1912-1915 - St. Petersburg, Acmeism, “material” poems, work on “The Stone”. Maximum iambicity (70% of all lines, but iambic 4-meter shares the dominant position with iambic 5- and 6-meter).

1916-1920 - revolution and civil war, development of an individual manner. Iambics are slightly inferior (up to 60%), trochees increase to 20%.

1921-1925 - transition period. The iambic recedes another step (50%, mixed-foot and free iambs become noticeable), making room for experimental meters: logaeda, accented verse, free verse (20%).

1926-1929 - pause in poetic creativity.

1930-1934 - interest in experimental meters continues (dolnik, taktovik, five-syllable, free verse - 25%), but a violent passion for three-syllables breaks out (40%). Yamba −30%.

1935-1937 - some restoration of metric balance. Iambics increase again to 50%, experimental dimensions drop to nothing, but the level of trisyllabics remains elevated: 20%

Mandelstam and music

As a child, at the insistence of his mother, Mandelstam studied music. Through the eyes of the poet of high book culture that was born in him, he saw poeticized visual images even in the lines of musical notation and wrote about this in the “Egyptian Stamp”: “Music writing caresses the eye no less than music itself caresses the ear. The little blacks of the piano scale, like lamplighters, climb up and down... The mirage cities of musical notes stand, like birdhouses, in boiling resin...” In his perception, “concert descents of Chopin’s mazurkas” and “parks with curtains of Mozart,” “Schubert’s musical vineyard” and “the low-growing bush of Beethoven’s sonatas,” Handel’s “turtles” and “the militant pages of Bach,” and the musicians of the violin orchestra, like mythical dryads, were entangled with “branches, roots and bows.”

Mandelstam's musicality and his deep connection with musical culture were noted by his contemporaries. “Osip was at home in music,” wrote Anna Akhmatova in “Leaves from the Diary.” Even when he slept, it seemed “that every vein in him was listening and hearing some kind of divine music.”

Composer Arthur Lurie, who knew the poet closely, wrote that “live music was a necessity for him. The element of music fed his poetic consciousness.” I. Odoevtseva quoted Mandelstam’s words: “From childhood I fell in love with Tchaikovsky, I fell in love with him for the rest of my life, to the point of painful frenzy... From then on I felt myself forever connected with music, without any right to this connection...”, and he himself wrote in “Noise” time”: “I don’t remember how this reverence for the symphony orchestra was cultivated in me, but I think that I correctly understood Tchaikovsky, guessing in him a special concert feeling.”

Mandelstam perceived the art of poetry as akin to music and was confident that in their creative self-expression, true composers and poets always follow the path “by which we suffer, like music and words.”

He heard and reproduced the music of real poems when reading them in his own intonation, regardless of who wrote them. M. Voloshin felt this “musical charm” in the poet: “Mandelshtam does not want to speak in verse, he is a born singer... Mandelstam’s voice is unusually sonorous and rich in shades...”

E. G. Gershtein talked about Mandelstam’s reading of the last stanza of the poem “Summer” by B. Pasternak: “What a pity that it is impossible to make a musical notation to convey the sound of the third line, this rolling wave of the first two words (“and the harp rustles”) pouring in , like the growing sound of an organ, in the words “Arabian hurricane”... He generally had his own motive. One day in Shchipka, as if some wind lifted him from his seat and carried him to the piano, he played a sonatina by Mozart or Clementi, familiar to me from childhood, with exactly the same nervous, soaring intonation... How he achieved this in music, I don’t know I understand, because the rhythm was not broken in a single measure...”

“Music contains the atoms of our being,” Mandelstam wrote, and is “the fundamental principle of life.” In his article “The Morning of Acmeism,” Mandelstam wrote: “For Acmeists, the conscious meaning of the word, Logos, is as beautiful a form as music is for the Symbolists.” A quick break with symbolism and a transition to the Acmeists was heard in the call - “...and return the word to music” (“Silentium”, 1910).

According to G. S. Pomerantz, “Mandelshtam’s space... is similar to the space of pure music. Therefore, it is useless to read Mandelstam without understanding this quasi-musical space.”

Mandelstam in literature and literary criticism of the 20th century

An exceptional role in preserving Mandelstam’s poetic heritage of the 1930s was played by the life feat of his wife, Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam, and the people who helped her, such as S. B. Rudakov and Mandelstam’s Voronezh friend Natalya Shtempel. The manuscripts were kept in Nadezhda Yakovlevna’s boots and in pots.

In her will, Nadezhda Yakovlevna actually denies Soviet Russia any right to publish Mandelstam’s poems, and this refusal sounds like a curse on the Soviet state.

In the circle of Anna Akhmatova in the 1970s, the future Nobel Prize winner in literature I. A. Brodsky was called “the younger Osei.”

According to Nikolai Bukharin, expressed in a letter to Stalin in 1934, Mandelstam is “a first-class poet, but absolutely out of date.”

Before the start of perestroika, Mandelstam’s Voronezh poems of the 1930s were not published in the USSR, but circulated in copies and reprints, as in the 19th century, or in samizdat.

World fame comes to Mandelstam's poetry before and regardless of the publication of his poems in Soviet Russia.

Since the 1930s, his poems have been quoted, and allusions to his poems have multiplied in the poetry of completely different authors and in many languages.

Mandelstam is translated into German by one of the leading European poets of the 20th century, Paul Celan.

In the USA, K. Taranovsky, who conducted a seminar on Mandelstam’s poetry at Harvard, studied the poet’s work.

Nabokov V.V. calls Mandelstam the only poet of Stalin's Russia.

According to the modern Russian poet Maxim Amelin: “During his lifetime, Mandelstam was considered a third-rate poet. Yes, he was appreciated in his own circle, but his circle was very small.”

Books

Complete works in three volumes

Osip 1 Emilievich Mandelstam was born on January 3, 1891 in Warsaw; he spent his childhood and youth in St. Petersburg. Later, in 1937, Mandelstam wrote about the time of his birth:

Here “into the night” contains an ominous omen of the tragic fate of the poet in the twentieth century and serves as a metaphor for the entire twentieth century, according to Mandelstam’s definition - “the century of the beast.”

Mandelstam's memories of his childhood and youth are restrained and strict; he avoided revealing himself, commenting on himself and his poems. He was an early ripened, or rather, a poet who saw the light, and his poetic manner is distinguished by seriousness and severity.

What little we find in the poet’s memoirs about his childhood, about the atmosphere that surrounded him, about the air that he had to breathe, is rather painted in gloomy tones:

"Forbidden Life" is about poetry.

Mandelstam’s family was, in his words, “difficult and confused,” and this was manifested with particular force (at least in the perception of Osip Emilievich himself) in words, in speech. The speech “element” of the family was unique. Father, Emilius Veniaminovich Mandelstam, a self-taught businessman, was completely devoid of a sense of language. In the book “The Noise of Time,” Mandelstam wrote: “My father had no language at all, it was tongue-tied and tongueless... A completely abstract, invented language, the florid and twisted speech of a self-taught person, the bizarre syntax of a Talmudist, an artificial, not always agreed upon phrase.” The speech of the mother, Flora Osipovna, a music teacher, was different: “Clear and sonorous, literary great Russian speech; its vocabulary is poor and condensed, its turns are monotonous - but this is a language, there is something radical and confident in it.” From his mother, Mandelstam inherited, along with a predisposition to heart disease and musicality, a heightened sense of the Russian language and accuracy of speech.

In 1900-1907, Mandelstam studied at the Tenishevsky Commercial School, one of the best private educational institutions in Russia (V. Nabokov and V. Zhirmunsky studied there at one time).

After graduating from college, Mandelstam traveled abroad three times: from October 1907 to the summer of 1908 he lived in Paris, from the autumn of 1909 to the spring of 1910 he studied Romance philology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, from July 21 to mid-October he lived in the Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf. The echo of these meetings with Western Europe can be heard in Mandelstam's poems right up to his last works.

The formation of Mandelstam's poetic personality was determined by his meeting with N. Gumilev and A. Akhmatova. In 1911, Gumilyov returned to St. Petersburg from the Abyssinian expedition, and all three then often met at various literary evenings. Subsequently, many years after the execution of Gumilyov, Mandelstam wrote to Akhmatova that Nikolai Stepanovich was the only one who understood his poems and with whom he talks and conducts dialogues to this day. Mandelstam’s attitude towards Akhmatova is most clearly evidenced by his words: “I am a contemporary of Akhmatova.” To publicly declare this during the years of the Stalinist regime, when the poetess was disgraced, one had to be Mandelstam.

All three, Gumilyov, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, became the creators and most prominent poets of a new literary movement - Acmeism. Biographers write that at first there was friction between them, because Gumilyov was despotic, Mandelstam was quick-tempered, and Akhmatova was capricious.

Mandelstam's first collection of poetry was published in 1913; it was published at his own expense 2 . It was assumed that it would be called "Sink", but the final name was chosen differently - "Stone". The name is quite in the spirit of Acmeism. The Acmeists sought to rediscover the world, as it were, to give everything a clear and courageous name, devoid of the elegiac hazy flair of the Symbolists. Stone is a natural material, durable and solid, an eternal material in the hands of a master. For Mandelstam, stone is the primary building material of spiritual, and not just material, culture.

In 1911-1917, Mandelstam studied at the Romance-Germanic department of the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University.

Mandelstam's attitude towards the 1917 revolution was complex. However, any attempts by Mandelstam to find his place in the new Russia ended in failure and scandal. The second half of the 1920s for Mandelstam were years of crisis. The poet was silent. There were no new poems. In five years - not a single one.

In 1929, the poet turned to prose and wrote a book called “The Fourth Prose.” It is small in volume, but it fully expresses the pain and contempt of the poet for opportunistic writers (“members of MASSOLIT”) that had been accumulating for many years in Mandelstam’s soul. "The Fourth Prose" gives an idea of ​​the poet's character - impulsive, explosive, quarrelsome. Mandelstam very easily made enemies for himself; he did not hide his assessments and judgments. From “The Fourth Prose”: “I divide all works of world literature into those that were authorized and those written without permission. The former are scum, the latter are stolen air. I want to spit in the face of writers who write pre-authorized things, I want to hit them on the head with a stick and seat everyone at the table in the Herzen House, placing a glass of police tea in front of each and giving each one a Gornfeld urine test.

I would forbid these writers to marry and have children - after all, the children must continue for us, the most important thing to finish for us - while the fathers are sold to the pockmarked devil for three generations ahead."

One can imagine the intensity of mutual hatred: the hatred of those whom Mandelstam rejected and who rejected Mandelstam. The poet always, almost all the post-revolutionary years, lived in extreme conditions, and in the 1930s - in anticipation of imminent death. There weren’t many friends and admirers of his talent, but they were there.

Mandelstam early realized himself as a poet, as a creative person who was destined to leave his mark on the history of literature and culture, and moreover, “to change something in its structure and composition” (from a letter to Yu.N. Tynyanov). Mandelstam knew his worth as a poet, and this was manifested, for example, in an insignificant episode that V. Kataev describes in his book “My Diamond Crown”:

“Having met the nutcracker (i.e. Mandelstam) on the street, one writer acquaintance very friendly asked the nutcracker a traditional secular question:

What new things have you written?

To which the nutcracker suddenly, completely unexpectedly, broke free from the chain:

If I wrote something new, then all of Russia would have known about it long ago! And you are ignorant and vulgar! - the nutcracker shouted, shaking with indignation, and pointedly turned his back on the tactless fiction writer." 3

Mandelstam was not adapted to everyday life, to a settled life. The concept of home, home-fortress, very important, for example, in the artistic world of M. Bulgakov, was not significant for Mandelstam. For him, home is the whole world, and at the same time in this world he is homeless.

K.I. Chukovsky recalled Mandelstam in the early 1920s, when he, like many other poets and writers, received a room in the Petrograd House of Arts: “In the room there was nothing belonging to him, except cigarettes, not a single personal thing. And then I I understood its most striking feature - its non-existence." In 1933, Mandelstam finally received a two-room apartment! B. Pasternak, who visited him, left and said: “Well, now we have an apartment - we can write poetry.” Mandelstam was furious. He cursed the apartment and offered to return it to those for whom it was intended: honest traitors, imagers. It was terrifying in front of the payment that was required for the apartment.

The consciousness of the choice made, the awareness of the tragedy of his fate, apparently strengthened the poet, gave him strength, and imparted a tragic, majestic pathos to his new poems 4. This pathos lies in the opposition of a free poetic personality to his age - the “beast age”. The poet does not feel insignificant in front of him, a pathetic victim, he realizes himself as an equal:

In the home circle this poem was called "Wolf". In it, Osip Emilievich predicted his future exile to Siberia, his physical death, and his poetic immortality. He understood a lot earlier than others.

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam, whom E. Yevtushenko called “the greatest widow of the poet in the twentieth century,” left two books of memories about Mandelstam - about his sacrificial feat as a poet. From these memoirs one can understand, “even without knowing a single line of Mandelstam, that on these pages they remember a truly great poet: in view of the amount and power of evil directed against him.”

Mandelstam's sincerity bordered on suicide. In November 1933 he wrote a sharply satirical poem about Stalin:

And Osip Emilievich read this poem to many acquaintances, including B. Pasternak. Anxiety for the fate of Mandelstam prompted Pasternak to declare in response: “What you read to me has nothing to do with literature, poetry. This is not a literary fact, but an act of suicide, which I do not approve of and in which I do not want to take part. I didn’t read anything, I didn’t hear anything, and I ask you not to read them to anyone.” Yes, Pasternak is right, the value of this poem does not lie in its literary merits. The first two lines here are at the level of the best poetic discoveries:

Surprisingly, the sentence given to Mandelstam was rather lenient. People at that time died for much lesser “offenses.” Stalin’s resolution simply read: “Isolate, but preserve,” and Osip Mandelstam was sent into exile in the distant northern village of Cherdyn. In Cherdyn, Mandelstam, suffering from mental illness, tried to commit suicide. Friends helped again. N. Bukharin, already losing his influence, wrote to Stalin for the last time: “Poets are always right; history is on their side”; Mandelstam was transferred to less harsh conditions - to Voronezh.

Of course, Mandelstam's fate was predetermined. But to punish him severely in 1933 would have meant publicizing that ill-fated poem and, as it were, settling personal scores between the tyrant and the poet, which would have been clearly unworthy of the “father of nations.” Everything has its time, Stalin knew how to wait, in this case - the great terror of 1937, when Mandelstam was destined to perish unknown along with hundreds of thousands of others.

Voronezh sheltered the poet, but sheltered him with hostility. From Voronezh notebooks (unpublished during his lifetime):

The poet struggled with approaching despair: there was no means of subsistence, people avoided meeting him, his future fate was unclear, and with all his being as a poet, Mandelstam felt: the “beast of the century” was overtaking him. A. Akhmatova, who visited Mandelstam in exile, testifies:

“Fear and the muse are on duty...” The poems came unstoppably, “irretrievably” (as M. Tsvetaeva said at the same time - in 1934), they demanded an outlet, they demanded to be heard. Memoirists testify that one day Mandelstam rushed to a pay phone and read new poems to the investigator to whom he was assigned: “No, listen, I have no one else to read to!” The poet's nerves were exposed, and he poured out his pain in poetry.

The poet was in a cage, but he was not broken, he was not deprived of the inner secret of freedom that raised him above everyone even in captivity:

The poems of the Voronezh cycle remained unpublished for a long time. They were not, as they say, political, but even “neutral” poems were perceived as a challenge, because they represented Poetry, uncontrollable and unstoppable. And no less dangerous for the authorities, because “a song is a form of linguistic disobedience, and its sound casts doubt on much more than a specific political system: it shakes the entire way of life” (I. Brodsky).

Mandelstam's poems stood out sharply against the background of the general flow of official literature of the 1920s and 30s. Time demanded the poems it needed, like the famous poem by E. Bagritsky “TVS” (1929):

Mandelstam understood: he could not stand “next to the century”; his choice was different - opposition to the cruel time.

Poems from the Voronezh notebooks, like many of Mandelstam’s poems of the 1930s, are imbued with a feeling of imminent death; sometimes they sound like spells, alas, unsuccessful:

In May 1937, the Voronezh exile expired. The poet spent another year in the vicinity of Moscow, trying to obtain permission to live in the capital. Magazine editors were even afraid to talk to him. He was a beggar. Friends and acquaintances helped: V. Shklovsky, B. Pasternak, I. Erenburg, V. Kataev, although it was not easy for them themselves. Subsequently, A. Akhmatova wrote about 1938: “It was an apocalyptic time. Trouble followed on the heels of all of us. The Mandelstams had no money. They had absolutely nowhere to live. Osip was breathing poorly, catching air with his lips.”

On May 2, 1938, before sunrise, as was customary then, Mandelstam was arrested again, sentenced to 5 years of hard labor and sent to Western Siberia, the Far East, from where he would never return. A letter from the poet to his wife has been preserved, in which he wrote: “My health is very poor, I’m extremely exhausted, I’m emaciated, I’m almost unrecognizable, but I don’t know if it makes sense to send things, food and money. Try it anyway. I’m very cold without things.” .

The poet’s death occurred in the Vtoraya Rechka transit camp near Vladivostok on December 27, 1938... One of the poet’s last poems:

One of the most tragic fates was prepared by the Soviet government for such a great poet as O. Mandelstam. His biography developed this way largely due to the irreconcilable character of Osip Emilievich. He could not tolerate lies and did not want to bow to the powers that be. Therefore, his fate could not have worked out differently in those years, which Mandelstam himself was aware of. His biography, like the work of the great poet, teaches us a lot...

The future poet was born in Warsaw on January 3, 1891. Osip Mandelstam spent his childhood and youth in St. Petersburg. His autobiography, unfortunately, was not written by him. However, his memories formed the basis of the book “The Sound of Time.” It can be considered largely autobiographical. Let us note that Mandelstam’s memories of childhood and youth are strict and restrained - he avoided revealing himself, did not like to comment on both his poems and his life. Osip Emilievich was a poet who matured early, or rather, who saw the light. Strictness and seriousness distinguish his artistic style.

We believe that the life and work of such a poet as Mandelstam should be examined in detail. A short biography of this person is hardly appropriate. The personality of Osip Emilievich is very interesting, and his work deserves the most careful study. As time has shown, one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century was Mandelstam. The short biography presented in school textbooks is clearly insufficient for a deep understanding of his life and work.

The origin of the future poet

Rather, the little that can be found in Mandelstam’s memories of his childhood and the atmosphere that surrounded him is painted in gloomy tones. According to the poet, his family was “difficult and confusing.” In words, in speech, this was manifested with particular force. So, at least, Mandelstam himself believed. The family was unique. Let us note that the Mandelstam Jewish family was ancient. Since the 8th century, since the time of the Jewish enlightenment, he has given the world famous doctors, physicists, rabbis, literary historians and Bible translators.

Emilius Veniaminovich Mandelstam, Osip’s father, was a businessman and self-taught. He was completely devoid of any sense of language. Mandelstam in his book “The Noise of Time” noted that he had absolutely no language, there was only “languagelessness” and “tongue-tiedness.” The speech of Flora Osipovna, the mother of the future poet and music teacher, was different. Mandelstam noted that her vocabulary was “compressed” and “poor”, the phrases were monotonous, but it was ringing and clear, “great Russian speech.” It was from his mother that Osip inherited, along with musicality and a predisposition to heart disease, accuracy of speech and a heightened sense of his native language.

Training at Tenishevsky Commercial School

Mandelstam studied at the Tenishevsky Commercial School from 1900 to 1907. It was considered one of the best among private educational institutions in our country. At one time, V. Zhirmunsky and V. Nabokov studied there. The atmosphere that reigned here was intellectual-ascetic. The ideals of civic duty and political freedom were cultivated in this educational institution. In the 1905-1907 years of the first Russian revolution, Mandelstam could not help but fall into political radicalism. His biography is generally closely connected with the events of the era. The catastrophe of the war with Japan and the revolutionary times inspired him to create his first poetic experiments, which can be considered student. Mandelstam perceived what was happening as a vigorous universal metamorphosis, renewing the elements.

Travel abroad

He received his college diploma on May 15, 1907. After this, the poet tried to join the military organization of the Social Revolutionaries in Finland, but due to his youth he was not accepted there. Parents, concerned about the future of their son, hastened to send him out of harm’s way to study abroad, where Mandelstam traveled three times. The first time he lived in Paris was from October 1907 to the summer of 1908. Then the future poet went to Germany, where he studied Romance philology at the University of Heidelberg (from the fall of 1909 to the spring of 1910). From July 21, 1910 until mid-October, he lived in Zehlendorf, a suburb of Berlin. Right up to his very last works, Mandelstam’s poems echo his acquaintance with Western Europe.

Meeting with A. Akhmatova and N. Gumilev, creation of Acmeism

The meeting with Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilyov determined the development of Osip Emilievich as a poet. Gumilyov returned from the Abyssinian expedition to St. Petersburg in 1911. Soon the three of them began to see each other often at literary evenings. Many years after the tragic event - the execution of Gumilyov in 1921 - Osip Emilievich wrote to Akhmatova that only Nikolai Gumilyov managed to understand his poems, and that he still talks to him and conducts dialogues. The way Mandelstam treated Akhmatova is evidenced by his phrase: “I am a contemporary of Akhmatova.” Only Osip Mandelstam (his photo with Anna Andreevna is presented above) could publicly say this during the Stalinist regime, when Akhmatova was a disgraced poetess.

All three (Mandelshtam, Akhmatova and Gumilyov) became the creators of Acmeism and the most prominent representatives of this new movement in literature. Biographers note that friction arose between them at first, since Mandelstam was hot-tempered, Gumilyov was despotic, and Akhmatova was capricious.

First collection of poems

In 1913, Mandelstam created his first collection of poems. By this time, his biography and work had already been marked by many important events, and even then there was more than enough life experience. The poet published this collection at his own expense. At first he wanted to call his book “Sink”, but then he chose a different title - “Stone”, which was quite in the spirit of Acmeism. Its representatives wanted to open the world anew, to give everything a courageous and clear name, devoid of a vague and elegiac flair, like, for example, the Symbolists. Stone is a solid and durable natural material, eternal in the hands of a master. For Osip Emilievich, it is the primary building material of spiritual culture, and not just material.

Osip Mandelstam converted to Christianity back in 1911, making a “transition to European culture.” And although he was baptized in (in Vyborg on May 14), the poems of his first collection captured his passion for the Catholic theme. Mandelstam was captivated by the pathos of the universal organizing idea in Roman Catholicism. Under the rule of Rome, the unity of the Christian world of the West is born from a chorus of peoples dissimilar from each other. Also, the “stronghold” of the cathedral is made up of stones, their “evil heaviness” and “spontaneous labyrinth”.

Attitude to the revolution

In the period from 1911 to 1917, Mandelstam studied at St. Petersburg University, in the Romano-Germanic department. His biography at this time was marked by the appearance of the first collection. His attitude towards the revolution that began in 1917 was complex. Any attempts by Osip Emilievich to find a place for himself in the new Russia ended in scandal and failure.

Compilation Tristia

Mandelstam's poems from the period of revolution and war make up the new collection Tristia. This “book of sorrows” was published for the first time in 1922 without the participation of the author, and then, in 1923, under the title “The Second Book” it was republished in Moscow. It is cemented by the theme of time, the flow of history, which is directed towards its destruction. Until the last days, this theme will be cross-cutting in the poet’s work. This collection is marked by a new quality of Mandelstam’s lyrical hero. For him, there is no longer any personal time that is not involved in the general flow of time. The voice of the lyrical hero can only be heard as an echo of the roar of the era. What happens in big history is perceived by him as the collapse and construction of a “temple” of his own personality.

The collection Tristia also reflected a significant change in the poet’s style. The figurative texture is moving more and more towards encrypted, “dark” meanings, semantic shifts, and irrational linguistic moves.

Wandering around Russia

Osip Mandelstam in the early 1920s. wandered mainly around the southern part of Russia. He visited Kyiv, where he met his future wife N. Ya. Khazina (pictured above), spent some time with Voloshin in Koktebel, then went to Feodosia, where Wrangel’s counterintelligence arrested him on suspicion of espionage. Then, after his release, he went to Batumi and was marked by a new arrest - this time by the Menshevik coast guard. Osip Emilievich was rescued from prison by T. Tabidze and N. Mitsishvili, Georgian poets. In the end, extremely exhausted, Osip Mandelstam returned to Petrograd. His biography continues with the fact that he lived for some time in the House of Arts, then again went south, after which he settled in Moscow.

However, by the mid-1920s, not a trace remained of the former balance of hopes and anxieties in understanding what was happening. The consequence of this is the changed poetics of Mandelstam. “Darkness” now increasingly outweighs clarity in it. In 1925, there was a short burst of creativity, which was associated with Olga Vaksel’s passion. After this, the poet falls silent for 5 long years.

For Mandelstam, the 2nd half of the 1920s was a period of crisis. At this time, the poet was silent and did not publish new poems. Not a single work by Mandelstam appeared in 5 years.

Appeal to prose

In 1929, Mandelstam decided to turn to prose. He wrote the book "The Fourth Prose". It is not large in volume, but it fully expresses Mandelstam’s contempt for the opportunist writers who were members of MASSOLIT. For a long time, this pain accumulated in the poet’s soul. “The Fourth Prose” expressed Mandelstam’s character - quarrelsome, explosive, impulsive. It was very easy for Osip Emilievich to make enemies for himself; he did not hide his judgments and assessments. Thanks to this, Mandelstam was always, almost all the post-revolutionary years, forced to exist in extreme conditions. He was awaiting imminent death in the 1930s. There weren’t very many admirers of Mandelstam’s talent and his friends, but they still existed.

Life

Attitude to everyday life largely reveals the image of a person like Osip Mandelstam. The biography, interesting facts about him, and the poet’s work are connected with his special attitude towards him. Osip Emilievich was not adapted to settled life, to everyday life. For him, the concept of a fortified house, which was very important, for example, for M. Bulgakov, had no meaning. The whole world was home for him, and at the same time Mandelstam was homeless in this world.

Remembering Osip Emilievich in the early 1920s, when he received a room in the Petrograd House of Arts (like many other writers and poets), K.I. Chukovsky noted that there was nothing in it that belonged to Mandelstam, except cigarettes. When the poet finally got an apartment (in 1933), B. Pasternak, who visited him, said as he left that he could now write poetry - there was an apartment. Osip Emilievich became furious at this. O. E. Mandelstam, whose biography is marked by many episodes of intransigence, cursed his apartment and even offered to return it to those to whom it was apparently intended: artists, honest traitors. It was the horror of realizing the price that was required for it.

Work at Moskovsky Komsomolets

Are you wondering how the life of a poet like Mandelstam continued? The biography by dates smoothly approached the 1930s in his life and work. N. Bukharin, Osip Emilievich’s patron in power circles, hired him at the turn of the 1920s and 30s to work as a proofreader for the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper. This gave the poet and his wife at least a minimal means of subsistence. But Mandelstam refused to accept the “rules of the game” of the Soviet writers who served the regime. His extreme impetuosity and emotionality greatly complicated Mandelstam’s relationships with his colleagues. He found himself at the center of a scandal - the poet was accused of translation plagiarism. In order to protect Osip Emilievich from the consequences of this scandal, in 1930 Bukharin organized a trip for the poet to Armenia, which made a great impression on him and was also reflected in his work. In the new poems, hopeless fear and the last courageous despair can be heard more clearly. If Mandelstam in prose tried to escape from the storm hanging over him, now he has finally accepted his share.

Awareness of the tragedy of one's fate

The awareness of the tragedy of his own fate and the choice he made probably strengthened Mandelstam and imparted a majestic, tragic pathos to his new works. It consists in confronting the personality of a free poet with the “beast age.” Mandelstam does not feel like a pathetic victim, an insignificant person in front of him. He feels equal to him. In the 1931 poem “For the explosive valor of the coming centuries,” which was called “The Wolf” in his home circle, Mandelstam predicted his future exile to Siberia, his own death, and poetic immortality. This poet understood many things earlier than others.

An ill-fated poem about Stalin

Yakovlevna, the widow of Osip Emilievich, left two books of memoirs about her husband, which tell about the sacrificial feat of this poet. Mandelstam's sincerity often bordered on suicide. For example, in November 1933, he wrote a sharply satirical poem about Stalin, which he read to many of his acquaintances, including B. Pasternak. Boris Leonidovich was alarmed by the fate of the poet and declared that his poem was not a literary fact, but nothing more than an “act of suicide,” which he could not approve of. Pasternak advised him not to read this work anymore. However, Mandelstam could not remain silent. The biography, the interesting facts from which we have just cited, from this moment becomes truly tragic.

The sentence for Mandelstam, surprisingly, was quite lenient. At that time, people also died for much less significant “offences.” Stalin's resolution simply said: "Isolate, but preserve." Mandelstam was sent into exile in the northern village of Cherdyn. Here Osip Emilievich, suffering from mental illness, even wanted to commit suicide. Friends helped again. N. Bukharin, already losing influence, wrote for the last time to Comrade Stalin that poets are always right, that history is on their side. After this, Osip Emilievich was transferred to Voronezh, to less harsh conditions.

Of course, his fate was sealed. However, in 1933, punishing him severely meant advertising a poem about Stalin and thus, as if settling personal scores with the poet. And this would, of course, be unworthy of Stalin, the “father of nations.” Joseph Vissarionovich knew how to wait. He understood that everything has its time. In this case, he expected the great terror of 1937, in which Mandelstam was destined, along with hundreds of thousands of other people, to perish unknown.

Years of life in Voronezh

Voronezh sheltered Osip Emilievich, but sheltered him with hostility. However, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam did not stop fighting the despair that was steadily approaching him. His biography during these years was marked by many difficulties. He had no means of livelihood, people avoided meeting him, and his future fate was unclear. Mandelstam felt with his whole being how the “age-beast” was overtaking him. And Akhmatova, who visited him in exile, testified that in his room “fear and the muse were alternately on duty.” The poems flowed unstoppably, they demanded an outlet. Memoirists testify that Mandelstam once rushed to a pay phone and began reading his new works to the investigator to whom he was assigned at the time. He said that there was no one else to read. The poet's nerves were exposed; he poured out his pain in poetry.

In Voronezh, from 1935 to 1937, three “Voronezh notebooks” were created. For a long time, the works of this cycle were not published. They could not be called political, but even “neutral” poems were perceived as a challenge, since they represented Poetry, unstoppable and uncontrollable. And for the authorities it is no less dangerous, since, in the words of I. Brodsky, it “shakes the entire way of life,” and not just the political system.

Return to the capital

Many poems of this period, as well as Mandelstam’s works of the 1930s in general, are imbued with a feeling of imminent death. The Voronezh exile expired in May 1937. Osip Emilievich spent another year in the vicinity of Moscow. He wanted to get permission to stay in the capital. However, magazine editors categorically refused not only to publish his poems, but also to talk to him. The poet was a beggar. Friends and acquaintances helped him at this time: B. Pasternak, V. Shklovsky, V. Kataev, although they themselves had a hard time. Anna Akhmatova later wrote about 1938 that it was an “apocalyptic” time.

Arrest, exile and death

It remains for us to tell very little about such a poet as Osip Mandelstam. His brief biography is marked by a new arrest, which took place on May 2, 1938. He was sentenced to five years' hard labor. The poet was sent to the Far East. He never returned from there. On December 27, 1938, near Vladivostok, in the Second River camp, the poet died.

We hope you would like to continue your acquaintance with such a great poet as Mandelstam. Biography, photo, creative path - all this gives some idea about him. However, only by turning to Mandelstam’s works can one understand this man and feel the strength of his personality.

Name: Osip Mandelstam

Age: 47 years old

Place of Birth: Warsaw Poland

A place of death: Vladivostok

Activity: poet, novelist, translator

Family status: Was married

Osip Mandelstam - biography

The name of this now world-famous poet at the very beginning of his career was not so familiar and popular in literary circles. Now his poetry is memorized, his translations and critical articles are read. He is not only loved and quoted, he is imitated.

Childhood, the poet's family

At school, during literature lessons, the biography of Osip Emilievich Mandelstam is studied in detail. The boy was born in the capital of Poland, Warsaw, into a family of strict Jewish rules. His real name was Joseph, which clearly revealed his origins. His father, a merchant of the first guild, was a glove maker.

Mandelstam's first works, poems

Somehow the poet had few works about love. He has the most tender feelings for, as he speaks about in his most tender poem.

Osip Mandelstam - biography of personal life

Osip Mandelstam fell in love with a girl of his origin, Nadezhda Khazina. She was educated and brought up. The girl immediately captivated the ardent young man. He read poetry to her and gave her flowers. And she, as a sign of gratitude and love, accompanied her beloved everywhere. Three years later, the young people got married.

Call

Osip Emilievich was out of politics, but in 1933 he publicly read his poems, which were clearly not praised. The poet wrote the pure truth about the famine in Crimea, which he himself witnessed. Mandelstam was reported, and the arrest followed immediately, followed by exile to the Urals. Then poverty in Voronezh until the very end of the exile period. The family returned to the capital after serving their sentence. But the poet’s poems continued to excite the public. Another arrest followed and a transfer to the Far East. The poet did not survive this exile; he contracted typhus.

Osip Mandelstam - death of the poet

He was buried in a common grave, and it is still unknown where Osip Mandelstam’s ashes lie. Of course, the biography of a talented person, poet, publicist and translator was tragic. His character did not in any way correspond to the poetic nature of his soul. The rejection of lies largely determined Mandelstam's fate. Strong rulers did not like it when they began to be exposed. Power was in the hands of those who did not know how to appreciate talented people. The prisons were overcrowded, people lived in exile in the most difficult conditions. After all, Osip Emilievich even wanted to commit suicide.

The poet was extremely talented. He himself studied the beautiful but difficult language of Italy and read the Divine Comedy in the original. But he did not know how to get along and get along with people easily. He was able to quickly make enemies due to his impulsive nature. It’s good that the faithful shoulder of his wife Nadezhda was nearby, who completely fulfilled her destiny. The whole point is that he understood revolutions in his own way and believed that the existing government was taking incorrect, non-revolutionary actions. Unfortunately, Mandelstam did not immortalize his autobiography. That’s why some pages of his biography are still empty.

Joseph Mandelstam

Russian poet, prose writer and translator, essayist, critic, literary critic; one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century

short biography

early years

Osip Mandelstam born on January 15, 1891 in Warsaw into a Jewish family. Father, Emil Veniaminovich (Emil, Khaskl, Khatskel Beniaminovich) Mandelstam (1856-1938), was a master glove maker and a member of the first guild of merchants, which gave him the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement, despite his Jewish origin. Mother, Flora Ovseevna Verblovskaya (1866-1916), was a musician. In 1896 the family was assigned to Kovno.

In 1897, the Mandelstam family moved to St. Petersburg. Osip was educated at the Tenishevsky School (graduated in 1907), a Russian forge of “cultural personnel” at the beginning of the 20th century.

In August 1907, he applied for admission as a volunteer to the natural department of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University, but, having taken the documents from the office, he left for Paris in October.

In 1908-1910, Mandelstam studied at the Sorbonne and the University of Heidelberg. At the Sorbonne he attends lectures by A. Bergson and J. Bedier at the Collège de France. He meets Nikolai Gumilyov and is fascinated by French poetry: Old French epic, François Villon, Baudelaire and Verlaine.

In between trips abroad, he visits St. Petersburg, where he attends lectures on poetry at the “tower” by Vyacheslav Ivanov.

By 1911, the family began to go bankrupt and studying in Europe became impossible. In order to bypass the quota for Jews when entering St. Petersburg University, Mandelstam was baptized by a Methodist pastor in Vyborg.

Studies

On September 10, 1911, he was enrolled in the Romano-Germanic department of the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University, where he studied intermittently until 1917. He studies carelessly and does not complete the course.

Poems from the time of the First World War and the Revolution (1916-1920) made up the second book “Tristia” (“Sorrowful Elegies”, the title goes back to Ovid), published in 1922 in Berlin.

In 1923, the “Second Book” was published with a general dedication to “N. X." - to my wife. In 1922, the article “On the Nature of Word” was published as a separate brochure in Kharkov.

From May 1925 to October 1930 there was a pause in poetic creativity. At this time, prose was written, to the “Noise of Time” created in 1923 (the title plays on Blok’s metaphor “music of time”), the story “The Egyptian Brand” (1927), varying Gogol’s motifs, was added. He makes his living by translating poetry.

In 1928, the last lifetime collection of poetry, “Poems,” was published, as well as a book of his selected articles, “On Poetry.”

Business trips to the Caucasus

In 1930 he finished work on the “Fourth Prose”. N. Bukharin is concerned about Mandelstam’s business trip to Armenia. In Erivan, the poet meets the scientist, theoretical biologist Boris Kuzin, and a close friendship develops between them. The meeting is described by Mandelstam in “Travel to Armenia.” N. Ya. Mandelstam believed that this meeting turned out to be “fate for all three. Without her, Osya often said, perhaps there would be no poetry.” Mandelstam later wrote about Kuzin: “My new prose and the entire last period of my work are imbued with his personality. To him and only to him I owe the fact that I introduced the so-called period into literature. "mature Mandelstam." After traveling to the Caucasus (Armenia, Sukhum, Tiflis), Osip Mandelstam returned to writing poetry.

Mandelstam's poetic gift reaches its peak, but it is almost never published. The intercession of B. Pasternak and N. Bukharin gives the poet small breaks from everyday life.

He independently studies the Italian language, reads the Divine Comedy in the original. The programmatic poetological essay “Conversation about Dante” was written in 1933. Mandelstam discusses it with A. Bely.

In Literaturnaya Gazeta, Pravda, and Zvezda, devastating articles were published in connection with the publication of Mandelstam’s “Travel to Armenia” (Zvezda, 1933, No. 5).

Arrests, exile and death

In November 1933, Osip Mandelstam wrote an anti-Stalin epigram, “We live without feeling the country beneath us,” which he reads to fifteen people.

Boris Pasternak called this act suicide:

One day, while walking along the streets, they wandered into some deserted outskirts of the city in the Tverskiye-Yamskiye area; Pasternak remembered the creaking of dray carts as the background sound. Here Mandelstam read to him about the Kremlin highlander. After listening, Pasternak said: “What you read to me has nothing to do with literature or poetry. This is not a literary fact, but an act of suicide that I do not approve of and in which I do not want to take part. You didn’t read anything to me, I didn’t hear anything, and I ask you not to read them to anyone else.”

One of the listeners reported on Mandelstam. The investigation into the case was led by Nikolai Shivarov.

On the night of May 13-14, 1934, Mandelstam was arrested and sent into exile in Cherdyn (Perm region). Osip Mandelstam is accompanied by his wife, Nadezhda Yakovlevna. In Cherdyn, Osip Mandelstam attempts suicide (throws himself out of a window). Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam writes to all Soviet authorities and to all her acquaintances. With the assistance of Nikolai Bukharin, as a result of interference in the matter of Stalin himself, Mandelstam is allowed to independently choose a place for settlement. The Mandelstams choose Voronezh. They live in poverty, and are occasionally helped financially by a few friends who have not given up. From time to time O. E. Mandelstam works part-time at a local newspaper and in the theater. Close people visit them, Nadezhda Yakovlevna’s mother, artist V.N. Yakhontov, Anna Akhmatova. Here he writes the famous cycle of poems (the so-called “Voronezh Notebooks”).

In May 1937, the term of exile ends, and the poet unexpectedly receives permission to leave Voronezh. He and his wife return to Moscow for a short while. In a 1938 statement by the secretary of the USSR Writers' Union, Vladimir Stavsky, addressed to the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs N.I. Yezhov, it was proposed to “resolve the issue of Mandelstam”; his poems were called “obscene and slanderous.” Joseph Prut and Valentin Kataev were named in the letter as having “spoken sharply” in defense of Osip Mandelstam.

At the beginning of March 1938, the Mandelstam couple moved to the Samatikha trade union health resort (Egoryevsky district of the Moscow region, now assigned to the Shatura district). There, on the night of May 1-2, 1938, Osip Emilievich was arrested a second time and taken to the Cherusti railway station, which was located 25 kilometers from Samatikha. From there he was taken to the NKVD Internal Prison. Soon he was transferred to Butyrka prison.

The investigation into the case established that Mandelstam O.E., despite the fact that he was forbidden to live in Moscow after serving his sentence, often came to Moscow, stayed with his friends, tried to influence public opinion in his favor by deliberately demonstrating his “distress » position and painful condition. Anti-Soviet elements among writers used Mandelstam for the purposes of hostile agitation, making him a “sufferer”, and organized money collections for him among writers. At the time of his arrest, Mandelstam maintained close contact with the enemy of the people Stenich, Kibalchich until the latter was expelled from the USSR, etc. A medical examination recognized O. E. Mandelstam as a psychopathic person with a tendency to obsessive thoughts and fantasies. Accused of conducting anti-Soviet agitation, that is, of crimes provided for under Art. 58-10 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. The case against O. E. Mandelstam is subject to consideration by the Special Meeting of the NKVD of the USSR.

On August 2, a Special Meeting of the NKVD of the USSR sentenced Mandelstam to five years in a forced labor camp.

From the Vladperpunkt transit camp (Vladivostok), he sent the last letter in his life to his brother and wife:

Dear Shura!

I am located in Vladivostok, SVITL, barrack 11. Got 5 years for k.r. d. by decision of the CCA. The stage left Moscow, Butyrki, on September 9, and arrived on October 12. Health is very poor. Extremely exhausted. He's emaciated, almost unrecognizable. But I don’t know if it makes sense to send things, food and money. Try it anyway. I’m very cold without things. Dear Nadinka, I don’t know if you’re alive, my darling. You, Shura, write to me about Nadya right now. This is the transit point. They didn’t take me to Kolyma. Possible wintering.

My dear ones, I kiss you.

Shurochka, I’m still writing. I've been going to work the last few days and it's lifted my spirits.

They send us from our camp as a transit camp to permanent camps. I obviously fell into the “dropout” category, and I need to prepare for the winter.

And I ask: send me a radiogram and money by telegraph.

On December 27, 1938, just short of his 48th birthday, Osip Mandelstam died in a transit camp. (Varlam Shalamov indicates that Mandelstam could have died on December 25-26. In Shalamov’s story “Sherry Brandy” we are talking about the last days of the unnamed poet. After the poet’s death, for about two more days, prisoners in the barracks received rations for him as if he were alive - common at that time time in the camps practice Based on indirect signs and the title of the story, we can conclude that the story was written about the last days of Osip Mandelstam). Until spring, Mandelstam’s body, along with the other deceased, lay unburied. Then the entire “winter stack” was buried in a mass grave.

Researchers of the poet’s work noted “a concrete foresight of the future, so characteristic of Mandelstam,” and that “a sense of tragic death permeates Mandelstam’s poems.” A foreknowledge of his own fate was a poem by the Georgian poet N. Mitsishvili translated by Mandelstam back in 1921:

When I fall to die under a fence in some hole,
And there will be nowhere for the soul to escape from the cast-iron cold -
I will politely leave quietly. I'll blend in with the shadows imperceptibly.
And the dogs will take pity on me, kissing me under the dilapidated fence.
There will be no procession. Violets will not decorate me,
And the maidens will not scatter flowers over the black grave...

I ask you: 1. To assist in the review of the case of O. E. Mandelstam and find out whether there were sufficient grounds for arrest and exile.

2. Check the mental health of O. E. Mandelstam and find out whether the exile was natural in this sense.

3. Finally, check to see if there was any personal interest in this link. And also - to find out not a legal, but rather a moral question: whether the NKVD had enough grounds to destroy the poet and master during the period of his active and friendly poetic activity.

The death certificate of O. E. Mandelstam was presented to his brother Alexander in June 1940 by the Civil Registry Office of the Baumansky district of Moscow.

Rehabilitated posthumously: in the case of 1938 - in 1956, in the case of 1934 - in 1987.

The location of the poet's grave is still unknown exactly. The probable burial place is the old fortress moat along the Saperka River (hidden in a pipe), now an alley on the street. Vostretsova in the urban district of Vladivostok - Morgorodok.

Mandelstam's poetics

Periodization of creativity

L. Ginzburg (in the book “On Lyrics”) proposed to distinguish between three periods of the poet’s work. This point of view is shared by the majority of Mandelstam scholars (in particular, M. L. Gasparov):

1. The period of “Stone” - a combination of “Tyutchev’s severity” with “Verlaine’s childishness”.

“Tyutchev’s severity” is the seriousness and depth of poetic themes; “Verlaine’s childishness” is the ease and spontaneity of their presentation. The word is a stone. The poet is an architect, builder.

2. The “Tristian” period, until the end of the 1920s - the poetics of associations. The word is flesh, soul, it freely chooses its objective meaning. Another face of this poetics is fragmentation and paradox.

Mandelstam wrote later: “Any word is a bundle, the meaning sticks out from it in different directions, and does not rush to one official point.” Sometimes, in the course of writing a poem, the poet radically changed the original concept, sometimes he simply discarded the initial stanzas that served as the key to the content, so that the final text turned out to be a difficult-to-understand construction. This way of writing, producing explanations and preambles, was associated with the very process of creating a poem, the content and final form of which were not “predetermined” by the author. (See, for example, the attempt to reconstruct the writing of the “Slate Ode” by M. L. Gasparov.)

3. The period of the thirties of the XX century - the cult of creative impulse and the cult of metaphorical cipher.

“I alone write from my voice,” Mandelstam said about himself. First, the meter “came” to him (“movement of the lips,” muttering), and from the common metric root, poems grew in “twos” and “threes.” This is how the mature Mandelstam created many poems. A wonderful example of this style of writing: his amphibrachs of November 1933 (“The apartment is quiet as paper”, “At our holy youth”, “Tatars, Uzbeks and Nenets”, “I love the appearance of fabric”, “Oh butterfly, oh Muslim”, “ When, having destroyed the sketch”, “And the maple’s jagged paw”, “Tell me, draftsman of the desert”, “In needle-shaped plague glasses”, “And I leave space”).

N. Struve proposes to distinguish not three, but six periods:

• Belated Symbolist: 1908-1911
• Militant Acmeist: 1912-1915
• Akmeist deep: 1916-1921
• At the crossroads: 1922-1925
• On the return of breath: 1930-1934
• Voronezh notebooks: 1935-1937

Evolution of the Mandelstam metric

M. L. Gasparov described the evolution of the poet’s metrics as follows:

• 1908-1911 - years of study, poetry in the tradition of Verlaine’s “songs without words.” The metric is dominated by iambics (60% of all lines, iambic tetrameter predominates). Choreans - about 20%.
• 1912-1915 - St. Petersburg, Acmeism, “material” poems, work on “The Stone”. Maximum iambicity (70% of all lines, but iambic 4-meter shares the dominant position with iambic 5- and 6-meter).
• 1916-1920 - revolution and civil war, development of an individual manner. Iambics are slightly inferior (up to 60%), trochees increase to 20%.
• 1921-1925 - transition period. The iambic recedes another step (50%, mixed-foot and free iambs become noticeable), making room for experimental meters: logaeda, accented verse, free verse (20%).
• 1926-1929 - pause in poetic creativity.
• 1930-1934 - interest in experimental meters continues (dolnik, taktovik, five-syllable, free verse - 25%), but a violent passion for three-syllables breaks out (40%). Yamba −30%.
• 1935-1937 - some restoration of metric balance. Iambics increase again to 50%, experimental dimensions drop to nothing, but the level of trisyllabics remains elevated: 20%

Mandelstam and music

As a child, at the insistence of his mother, Mandelstam studied music. Through the eyes of the poet of high book culture that was born in him, he saw poeticized visual images even in the lines of musical notation and wrote about this in the “Egyptian Stamp”: “ Musical writing pleases the eye no less than music itself pleases the ear. The little blacks of the piano scale, like lamplighters, climb up and down... The mirage cities of musical notes stand like birdhouses in boiling resin..."In his perception came to life" concert descents of Chopin's mazurkas" And " parks with curtains Mozart", " music vineyard Schubert" and " low-growing bush of Beethoven sonatas», « turtles"Handel and " militant pages Bach”, and the musicians of the violin orchestra are like mythical dryads, mixed up " branches, roots and bows».

Mandelstam's musicality and his deep connection with musical culture were noted by his contemporaries. " Osip was at home in music“- wrote Anna Akhmatova in “Leaves from the Diary”. Even when he was sleeping it seemed " that every vein in him listened and heard some kind of divine music».

Composer Arthur Lurie, who knew the poet closely, wrote that “ live music was a necessity for him. The element of music fed his poetic consciousness" I. Odoevtseva quoted Mandelstam’s words: “ Since childhood, I fell in love with Tchaikovsky, I fell in love with Tchaikovsky for the rest of my life, to the point of painful frenzy... From then on I felt myself forever connected with music, without any right to this connection...“, and he himself wrote in “The Noise of Time”: “ I don’t remember how this reverence for the symphony orchestra was cultivated in me, but I think that I correctly understood Tchaikovsky, guessing in him a special concert feeling».

Mandelstam perceived the art of poetry as akin to music and was confident that in his creative self-expression, true composers and poets are always on the way, “ which we suffer, like music and words ».

He heard and reproduced the music of real poems when reading them in his own intonation, regardless of who wrote them. M. Voloshin felt this in the poet “ musical charm»: « Mandelstam doesn't want talk verse, is a born singer... Mandelstam's voice is unusually sonorous and rich in shades...»

E. G. Gershtein talked about Mandelstam’s reading of the last stanza of the poem “Summer” by B. Pasternak: “ What a pity that it is impossible to make a musical notation to convey the sound of the third line, this rolling wave of the first two words (“and the harp makes noise”), pouring, like the growing sound of an organ, into the words “Arabian hurricane”... He generally had his own motive. Once, in Shchipka, it was as if some wind lifted him from his place and carried him to the piano; he played a sonatina by Mozart or Clementi, familiar to me from childhood, with exactly the same nervous, soaring intonation... How he achieved this in music, I don’t understand , because the rhythm was not broken in any measure...»

« Music contains the atoms of our being", wrote Mandelstam and is " fundamental principle of life" In his article “The Morning of Acmeism” Mandelstam wrote: “ For the Acmeists, the conscious meaning of the word, Logos, is as beautiful a form as music is for the Symbolists" A quick break with symbolism and a transition to the Acmeists was heard in the call - “ ...and return the word to music"(Silentium, 1910).

According to G. S. Pomerants “ Mandelstam's space... is like the space of pure music. Therefore, it is useless to read Mandelstam without understanding this quasi-musical space.»:

You can't breathe, and the firmament is infested with worms,
And not a single star says
But God knows, there is music above us...
...And it seems to me: all in music and foam,
The iron world trembles so miserably...
...Where are you going? At the funeral funeral of the dear shadow
This is the last time we hear music!

"Concert at the Station" (1921)

In literature and literary criticism of the 20th century

An exceptional role in preserving Mandelstam’s poetic heritage of the 1930s was played by the life feat of his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and the people who helped her, such as Sergei Rudakov and Mandelstam’s Voronezh friend Natalya Shtempel. The manuscripts were kept in Nadezhda Yakovlevna’s boots and in pots. In her will, Nadezhda Mandelstam actually denied Soviet Russia any right to publish Mandelstam's works.

In the circle of Anna Akhmatova in the 1970s, the future Nobel Prize winner in literature Joseph Brodsky was called “the younger Axes.” According to Vitaly Vilenkin, of all the contemporary poets, “Anna Andreevna treated only Mandelstam as some kind of miracle of poetic primordiality, a miracle worthy of admiration.”

According to Nikolai Bukharin, expressed in a letter to Stalin in 1934, Mandelstam is “a first-class poet, but absolutely out of date.”

Before the start of perestroika, Mandelstam’s Voronezh poems of the 1930s were not published in the USSR, but circulated in copies and reprints, as in the 19th century, or in samizdat.

World fame comes to Mandelstam's poetry before and regardless of the publication of his poems in Soviet Russia.

Since the 1930s, his poems have been quoted, and allusions to his poems have multiplied in the poetry of completely different authors and in many languages.

Mandelstam is translated into German by one of the leading European poets of the 20th century, Paul Celan.

The French philosopher Alain Badiou, in his article “The Century of Poets,” ranked Mandelstam among the six poets who also took on the function of philosophers in the 20th century (the other five are Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Trakl, Pessoa and Celan).

In the United States, Kirill Taranovsky, who conducted a seminar on Mandelstam’s poetry at Harvard, studied the poet’s work.

Vladimir Nabokov called Mandelstam “the only poet of Stalin’s Russia.”

According to the modern Russian poet Maxim Amelin: “During his lifetime, Mandelstam was considered a third-rate poet. Yes, he was appreciated in his own circle, but his circle was very small.”

Addresses

In St. Petersburg - Petrograd - Leningrad

• 1894 - Nevsky Prospekt, 100;
• 1896-1897 - Maximilianovsky Lane, 14;
• 1898-1900 - apartment building - Ofitserskaya street, 17;
• 1901-1902 - apartment building - Zhukovsky Street, 6;
• 1902-1904 - apartment building - Liteiny Avenue, 49;
• 1904-1905 - Liteiny Avenue, 15;
• 1907 - apartment building of A. O. Meyer - Nikolaevskaya street, 66;
• 1908 - apartment building - Sergievskaya street, 60;
• 1910-1912 - apartment building - Zagorodny Avenue, 70;
• 1913 - apartment building - Zagorodny Avenue, 14; Kadetskaya Line, 1 (from November).
• 1914 - apartment building - Ivanovskaya street, 16;
• 1915 - Malaya Monetnaya Street;
• 1916-1917 - parents' apartment - Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt, 24A, apt. 35;
• 1917-1918 - apartment of M. Lozinsky - Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt, 75;
• 1918 - Palace Embankment, 26, dormitory of the House of Scientists;
• autumn 1920 - 02.1921 - DISK - 25th October Avenue, 15;
• summer 1924 - the Maradudins’ apartment in the courtyard wing of the mansion of E.P. Vonlyarlyarsky - Herzen Street, 49, apt. 4;
• end of 1930 - 01.1931 - apartment building - 8th line, 31;
• 1933 - hotel "European" - Rakova street, 7;
• autumn 1937 - writer's housing cooperative (former house of the Court Stable Department) - Griboyedov Canal embankment, 9.

In Moscow

• Teatralnaya Square, Metropol Hotel (in 1918 - “2nd House of Soviets”). In number 253 no later than June 1918, after moving to Moscow, O. M. settled as an employee of the People's Commissariat for Education.
• Ostozhenka, 53. Former Katkovsky Lyceum. In 1918-1919 The People's Commissariat for Education was located here, where O.E. worked.
• Tverskoy Boulevard, 25. Herzen House. O. E. and N. Ya. lived here in the left wing from 1922 to August 1923, and then in the right wing from January 1932 to October-November 1933.
• Savelyevsky lane, 9 (formerly Savelovsky. Since 1990 - Pozharsky lane). Apartment of E. Ya. Khazin, brother of Nadezhda Yakovlevna. O. E. and N. Ya. lived here in October 1923.
• B. Yakimanka 45, apt. 8. The house has not survived. Here the Mandelstams rented a room at the end of 1923 - in the first half of 1924.
• Profsoyuznaya, 123A. Sanatorium TSEKUBU (Central Commission for Improving the Living Life of Scientists). The sanatorium still exists today. The Mandelstams lived here twice - in 1928 and 1932.
• Kropotkinskaya embankment, 5. TSEKUBU dormitory. The house has not survived. In the spring of 1929, O. E. lived here (the building is mentioned in the “Fourth Prose”).
• M. Bronnaya, 18/13. From the autumn of 1929 to the beginning of 1930 (?) O. E. and N. Ya. lived in the apartment of the “ITR worker” (E. G. Gershtein)
• Tverskaya, 5 (according to the old numbering - 15). Now in this building there is a theater named after. M. N. Ermolova. The editorial offices of the newspapers “Moskovsky Komsomolets”, “Pyatidenevka”, “Evening Moscow” where O.E. worked.
• Pinch, 6-8. O. E. and N. Ya. lived in the service apartment of their father E. G. Gershtein. There is no data on the safety of the house.
• Starosadsky lane 10, apt. 3. A.E. Mandelstam's room in a communal apartment. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Mandelstams often lived and visited here.
• Bolshaya Polyanka, 10, apt. 20 - from the end of May until October 1931 at the architect Ts. G. Ryss’s apartment overlooking the Kremlin and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.
• Pokrovka, 29, apt. 23 - from November to the end of 1931 in a rented room, for which Mandelstam was never able to pay.
• Lavrushinsky lane 17, apt. 47. Apartment of V. B. and V. G. Shklovsky in the “writer’s house”. In 1937-1938 O. E. and N. Ya. always found shelter and help here. At this address N.Ya. was again registered in Moscow in 1965.
• Rusanovsky lane 4, apt. 1. The house has not survived. Apartment of the writer Ivich-Bernstein, who gave shelter to O. Mandelstam after the Voronezh exile.
• Nashchokinsky lane 3-5, apt. 26 (formerly Furmanov St.). The house was demolished in 1974. There was a trace of its roof on the end wall of the neighboring house. O. Mandelstam's first and last own apartment in Moscow. The Mandelstams probably moved into it in the fall of 1933. Apparently, the poem “We live without feeling the country beneath us…” was written here. Here in May 1934 O.E. was arrested. The Mandelstams stayed here again for a short time, returning from exile in 1937: their apartment was already occupied by other residents. In 2015, a “Last Address” sign was installed on a nearby building (Gagarinsky Lane, 6) in memory of Mandelstam.
• Novoslobodskaya 45. Butyrskaya prison. Now - Pre-trial detention center (SIZO) No. 2. O. E. was kept here for a month in 1938.
• Lubyanskaya sq. The building of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD. Now the building of the FSB of the Russian Federation. During his arrests in 1934 and 1938. O.E. was kept here.
• Cheremushkinskaya st. 14, building 1, apt. 4. Moscow apartment N.Ya., where, starting in 1965, she lived the last years of her life.
• Ryabinovaya st. Kuntsevo Cemetery. Old part. Area 3, burial 31-43. The grave of N. Ya. and the cenotaph (memorial stone) of O. E. The soil taken from the mass grave of prisoners of the Second River camp was brought here and buried.

In Voronezh

• Revolution Avenue, 46 - the Mandelstams stayed here at the Central Hotel after arriving in Voronezh in June 1934.
• St. Uritsky - O. E. managed to rent a summer terrace in a private house in the village near the station, where he and his wife lived from July to October, before the onset of cold weather.
• St. Shveinikov, 4b (formerly 2nd Linenaya Street) - the so-called “Mandelshtam’s pit” (according to a poem he wrote in 1935). Since October 1934, the Mandelstams rented a room from agronomist E. P. Vdovin.
• Corner of Revolution Avenue and st. 25 years of October - a room (“furnished room” - according to the memoirs of N. Ya. Mandelstam) they rented from an NKVD employee from April 1935 to March 1936. In this room in February 1936, the poet A. A. Akhmatova visited. A high-rise building was built on the site of the old house.
• St. Friedrich Engels, 13. Since March 1936, the Mandelstams rented a room in one of the apartments of this house. In 2008, a bronze monument to the poet was erected opposite the house.
• St. Pyatnitskogo (formerly 27 February street), no. 50, apt. 1 - Mandelstam's last address in Voronezh. From here Mandelstam left for Moscow in May 1937, after the expiration period ended. The house is destroyed.

Legacy and memory

The fate of the archive

The living conditions and fate of O. E. Mandelstam were also reflected in the preservation of his archival materials.

Chronic homelessness accompanied the poet in the post-revolutionary years. Some of the manuscripts that he had to carry with him were lost in Crimea already in 1920.

Personal documents and creative materials were taken away during arrests in 1934 and 1938. During his years of exile in Voronezh, Mandelstam donated part of his archive, including autographs of early poems, to S. B. Rudakov for preservation. Due to the death of Rudakov at the front, their fate remained unknown.

Some of the biographical and business documents disappeared during the war in Kalinin, where they were left by N. Ya. Mandelstam in connection with the hasty evacuation from the city on the eve of its occupation.

A significant part of the collection of rescued documents in 1973 was sent by decision of the poet’s widow to France for storage and in 1976 transferred free of charge to Princeton University.

After the death of N. Ya. Mandelstam in the summer of 1983, her archive, kept by one of her friends and containing about 1,500 sheets of documents, books with autographs, photocopies and negatives, was confiscated by the KGB.

These and other materials preserved in Russia are concentrated mainly in large repositories - RGALI (stock 1893), IMLI RAS (stock 225) and GLM (stock 241). Partial documents related to the life and work of Mandelstam are also stored in other archives and private collections in Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, France, Germany and other countries.

Taking into account the dispersal of the poet’s archival heritage and with the goal of “identifying, describing and posting on the Internet all or the largest possible number of surviving creative and biographical materials of Osip Mandelstam, regardless of where they are physically located”, on the initiative of the Mandelstam Society, it was conceived and is being implemented jointly with Oxford University Internet project " Reunited virtual archive of Osip Mandelstam" The volume of documents to be scanned and made publicly available to all researchers is estimated at 10-12 thousand sheets.

Mandelstam Society

In 1991, in order to preserve, study and popularize the poet’s creative heritage, it was founded Mandelstam Society, which brought together professional researchers and connoisseurs of O. E. Mandelstam’s work. The founders of the public organization were the Russian Pen Center and the Memorial Society. The first chairmen were S.S. Averintsev, and after his death - M.L. Gasparov.

Members of the society hold thematic meetings and conferences. Among the famous publications of the Mandelstam Society is the publication in 1993-1999. collected works of Mandelstam in 4 volumes, serial editions - “ Notes of the Mandelstam Society», « Library of the Mandelstam Society", collections of articles and conference materials.

In the mid-1990s, the Mandelstam Society came up with the idea of ​​creating Mandelstam Encyclopedia, the concept of which was supported by the Russian State University for the Humanities and the publishing house "Russian Political Encyclopedia" (ROSSPEN). The editorial board of the upcoming publication also included the alleged authors of the key articles, Averintsev and Gasparov. The latter, before his death in 2005, managed to prepare about 130 articles about individual poems of the poet.

Work on the encyclopedia continues in the Mandelstam Society, the Mandelstam Studies Cabinet of the Scientific Library of the Russian State University for the Humanities and the State Literary Museum, which took upon itself the selection of illustrations from its own collections for the 2-volume edition. In 2007, the publishing house of the Russian State University for the Humanities published a collection of selected methodological and dictionary materials from the encyclopedia project - “O. E. Mandelstam, his predecessors and contemporaries"

Memory

Mandelstam- anniversary card with original stamp. USSR, 1991

• On February 1, 1992, in Paris, a memorial plaque was installed on the Sorbonne building in honor of the 100th anniversary of Osip Mandelstam. Sculptor Boris Lejeune
• In 1998, a monument to Osip Mandelstam (author Valery Nenazhivin) was unveiled in Vladivostok. Later it was moved to the VSUES park.

Streets of Mandelstam

Poem by O. Mandelstam, written in 1935:

• In 2011, in Voronezh, the possibility of renaming one of the streets to Mandelstam Street was considered. However, due to protests from residents who did not want to deal with re-registration of registration and documents, they decided to abandon the renaming.
• In May 2012, the world's first Mandelstam Street appeared in Warsaw.
• In 2016, in honor of the 125th anniversary of the poet’s birth, it was planned to name one of the streets in Moscow after him.