Osip Mandelʹshtam

A central figure not only in modern Russian but in world poetry, Osip Mandelstam was a crucial instigator of the "revolution of the word" that took place in St. Petersburg, only to be crushed by the Bolshevik revolution. His last poems, written on the run in the interval between his exile to the provinces by Stalin and his death in the gulag, provide an extraordinary testament to the enduring power of art in the presence of state terror.

Selected Poems

Osip Mandelstam has come to be seen as a central figure in European modernism. This volume includes his autobiographical sketches, The Noise of Time; his novella The Egyptian Stamp; Fourth Prose; and his travel memoirs. There are essays by Clarence Brown.

Selected Prose

The Noise of Time

Poems 1930-1937

The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks

Critical Prose and Letters

Journey to Armenia

Osip Mandel'shtam

Osip Mandelstam was one of the great poets of the twentieth century, with a prophetic understanding of its suffering, which he transformed into luminous poetry. Childish and wise, joyous and angry, at once complex and simple, he was sustained for 20 years by his wife and memoirist Nadezhda Mandelstam, who became, with Anna Akhmatova, the saviour of his poetry.In May 1934, after years of persecution, Mandelstam was arrested for writing an unflattering poem about Stalin, and subjected to gruelling interrogations and torture. He attempted suicide twice, slashing his wrists in prison, and jumping from a hospital window in Cherdyn. Exiled to Voronezh, he seemed crushed. A friend described him then as 'in a state of numbness. His eyes were glassy. His eyelids were inflamed, and this condition never went away. His eyelashes had fallen out. His arm was in a sling.'But it was to be four more years before Mandelstam was completely beaten. In Voronezh he broke a silence of 18 months after a concert by the young violinist Galina Baranova. Her music released him into the most fertile phase of his writing, his last two years in exile, when he wrote the ninety poems of the three Voronezh Notebooks. Nadezhda's memoir Hope Against Hope includes a moving account of their time in Voronezh, and Anna Akhmatova's poem 'Voronezh' describes her visit there in 1936, when 'in the room of the exiled poet / fear and the Muse stand duty in turn / and the night is endless / and knows no dawn.'This edition is now out of print but the whole book is reprinted as part of The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks.

Poems 1935-1937

The Voronezh Notebooks

Mandelstam was one of the great Russian poets of the twentieth century, with a prophetic understanding of its suffering. This contains the poems of his years of persecution, from his journey to Armenia in 1930 until 1934, when he was arrested and exiled to the Urals for writing an unflattering poem about Stalin. Written and preserved by a miracle, his poems have become in Peter Levi's description "all gems and ingots" in the McKanes' translations. This edition is now out of print but the whole book is reprinted as part of The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks.

The Moscow Notebooks

Translated from the Russian. A collection of poems by the Russian poet in both English and Russian.

Tristia

Pemmican Press

Borshevsky, Margaret

Translated by Margaret Borshevsky

Osip Mandelstam - a Selection

Demetrius J. Koubourlis

A Concordance to the Poems of Osip Mandelstam

Osip Ėmilʹevič Mandelʹštam

The Noise of Time, Theodosia, The Egyptian Stamp

The Prose of Osip Mandelstam

Osip Mandelshtam

Briefly traces the Russian poet's life and presents translations of his poems about mortality, silence, nature, chance, politics, and exile

Poems

The Eyesight of Wasps

Osip Mandelstam

Clarence Brown

Osip Mandelʹshtam

Books

Your next favorite book is out there