Brief biography of Mandelstam. Brief biography of Osip Mandelstam's most important work

Osip Mandelstam was born in Warsaw on January 15, 1891 into the Jewish family of an unsuccessful businessman who was always moving from place to place due to his trading failures. Osip's father wrote and even spoke Russian poorly. And the mother, on the contrary, was an intelligent, educated woman from a literary background, despite her Jewish origin, and spoke beautiful and pure Russian speech. His grandparents preserved the “black and yellow ritual,” that is, the Jewish one, in their homes. The father wanted to see his son as a rabbi and therefore forbade him to read ordinary secular books. Only the Talmud. At the age of fourteen, Osip ran away from home to Berlin, where he briefly studied at a higher Talmudic school, and read mainly Schiller and the works of philosophers. Then he graduated from the Teneshevsky Commercial School in St. Petersburg, where his family lived at that time. There he began his first poetic attempts. Then - a trip to Paris, where he became interested in French symbolism. By the way, much later, already a mature poet, Mandelstam called symbolism “a wretched nothingness.” In 1910, Osip studied at the University of Heidelberg (only two semesters), where he studied Old French. Then - admission to St. Petersburg University at the Faculty of History and Philology. Whether he graduated from it is not known for certain.

Creation

It all started when philology student Osip Mandelstam joined a group of young, talented and cocky Acmeist poets. Their community was called the “Workshop of Poets.” They poeticized the world of primordial emotions, emphasized associations on objects and details, and preached the unambiguousness of images. Acmeism assumed perfection, sharpness of verse, its brilliance and sharpness, like a blade. And perfection can be achieved only by choosing untrodden paths and seeing the world exactly in the first and last time. These were Mandelstam’s guidelines for the rest of his life. The poet gave the same name to the first three collections - “Stone”; they were published between 1913 and 1916. He even wanted to give his fourth book the same title. once suggested that Mandelstam did not have a teacher, because his poems are some kind of new, unprecedented “divine harmony.” But Mandelstam himself called F.I. Tyutchev his teacher. In a poem in 1933, he wrote about a stone that fell from nowhere. And it seems that Mandelstam made these poems his “cornerstone.” He wrote in his article “The Morning of Acmeism” that he picked up the “Tyutchev stone” and made it the foundation of “his building.” In his later study, “Conversation about Dante,” he again talked a lot about the stone, and from his thoughts it follows that for him the stone is a symbol of the connection of times, phenomena and events; it is not only a particle of the universe, but an animated witness of history. And the world of the immortal human soul is also a tiny gem or meteorite, thrown into the universe by someone. Hence the comprehensive philosophical system of Mandelstam’s poetic creativity. In his poems live Hellenic heroes, Gothic temples of the Middle Ages, great emperors, musicians, poets, philosophers, painters, conquerors... In his poems there is a mighty force, and the power of a thinker, and encyclopedic erudition, but at the same time, they also sound gullible , the childish intonation of a simple-minded, even naive person, as he, in fact, was in ordinary life.

During the "Stalin years"

In the 30s, Mandelstam was no longer published. And at the end of May 1934 he was arrested - one of his “friends” reported to the authorities about the epigram on “Comrade Stalin”. He was exiled to Cherdyn, after which he was forced to live in Voronezh for several years, since the punishment included a ban on living in major cities. There he lived with his selfless wife and devoted friend Nadezhda Yakovlevna, who wrote two volumes of memoirs about her husband and accomplished an extremely dangerous task - she saved and organized the poet’s archive, which in those years could be equated to a feat. At the beginning of May 1938, Mandelstam was arrested again. And this time to certain death. When, how and where this amazing poet with the soul of a child died, no one knows, just as no one knows where his grave is. We only know that this is one of the common burials at some transit point near Vladivostok.

About vulture Mandelstam began writing poetry during his school years. He studied literary history, translated European classics, and published research articles and prose. The poet was repressed twice for one of his poems. The last link is to Far East- Osip Mandelstam did not survive.

"First recognition by readers"

Osip Mandelstam was born in 1891 in Warsaw. His father, Emilius Mandelstam, was a merchant of the first guild, engaged in the production of gloves. He studied on his own German, was fond of German literature and philosophy, lived in Berlin in his youth. Mother - Flora Verblovskaya - studied music.

In 1897 the family moved to St. Petersburg. Parents wanted to give their children a good education and introduce them to the cultural life of the Northern capital, so the Mandelstams lived between St. Petersburg and Pavlovsk. The governesses worked with the eldest son Osip, he and early childhood studied foreign languages.

“According to my understanding, all these French and Swiss girls fell into childhood from songs, copybooks, anthologies and conjugations. In the center of the worldview, dislocated by textbooks, stood the figure of the great Emperor Napoleon and the War of the Twelfth Year, then followed Joan of Arc (one Swiss woman, however, was a Calvinist), and no matter how much I tried, being inquisitive, to find out from them about France, nothing succeeded, except that she was beautiful.”

In 1900–1907, Osip Mandelstam studied at the Tenishevsky Commercial School, one of the best schools in the capital. The latest teaching methods were used here, students published a magazine, gave concerts, and staged plays. At the school, Osip Mandelstam became interested in theater and music and wrote his first poems. Parents did not approve of their son’s poetic experiments, but he was supported by the director and literature teacher, symbolist poet Vladimir Gippius.

After graduating from college, Mandelstam went abroad. He attended lectures at the Sorbonne. In Paris, the future poet met Nikolai Gumilyov - they later became close friends. Mandelstam was fond of French poetry, studied Romance philology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and traveled to Italy and Switzerland.

Sometimes Mandelstam came to St. Petersburg, where he met Russian poets, attended literary lectures in the Tower by Vyacheslav Ivanov, and in 1910 he first published his poems in the Apollo magazine.

Osip Mandelstam, Korney Chukovsky, Benedikt Livshits and Yuri Annenkov - farewell to the front. Photograph of Karl Bulla, 1914

Osip Mandelstam. Photo: 1abzac.ru

Osip Mandelstam. Photo: Culture.pl

In 1911, the young poet entered the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. The same year he joined Nikolai Gumilyov’s “Workshop of Poets”. The literary group included Sergei Gorodetsky, Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Kuzmin. Osip Mandelstam published poems and literary articles in St. Petersburg publications, and performed his works on stage. Especially often - in the cabaret "Stray Dog".

In 1913, the first collection of poems by the young poet was published - the book “Stone”. His brother, Evgeny Mandelstam, later recalled: “The publication of “Stone” was a “family” affair - my father gave money for the publication of the book. Circulation - only 600 copies. After much deliberation, we handed over the entire circulation for consignment to the large bookstore of Popov-Yasny. From time to time my brother sent me to find out how many copies had been sold, and when I reported that 42 books had already been sold, at home it was perceived as a holiday. On the scale of that time, in the conditions of the book market, this sounded like the first recognition of the poet by readers.”.

Before the revolution, Osip Mandelstam visited Maximilian Voloshin in Crimea several times. There he met Anastasia and Marina Tsvetaev. A short but stormy romance broke out between Marina Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam, at the end of which the poet, disappointed in love, even planned to go to a monastery.

Prose writer, translator, literary critic

After the October revolution, Mandelstam served for some time in St. Petersburg, and then moved to Moscow. However, hunger forced him to leave this city too. The poet constantly moved - Crimea, Tiflis. In Kyiv, he met his future wife, Nadezhda Khazina. In 1920, they returned to St. Petersburg together, and two years later they got married.

“He never had not only any property, but also a permanent settlement - he led a wandering lifestyle. This was a man who did not create any kind of life around himself and lived outside of any structure.”
Korney Chukovsky

In 1922, Osip Mandelstam’s second book of poems, “Tristia,” was published with a dedication to Nadezhda Khazina. The collection includes works that the poet wrote during the First World War and during the revolutionary coup. A year later, the “Second Book” was published.

Nadezhda Mandelstam (née Khazina)

In 1925, Mandelstam was denied permission to publish his poems. Over the next five years he almost abandoned poetry. During these years, Osip Mandelstam published many literary articles, an autobiographical story “The Noise of Time”, a book of prose “The Egyptian Brand”, works for children - “Primus”, “Balls”, “Two Trams”. He translated a lot - Francesco Petrarch and Auguste Barbier, Rene Schiquele and Joseph Grishashvili, Max Bartel and Jean Racine. This gave the young family at least some income. Osip Mandelstam studied Italian on his own. He read the original text of the Divine Comedy and wrote the essay “A Conversation on Dante.”

In 1933, Mandelstam’s “Journey to Armenia” was published in the Leningrad magazine “Zvezda”. He allowed himself frank, sometimes harsh descriptions of the young Soviet Republic and barbs towards famous “social activists”. Soon, devastating critical articles were published in Literaturnaya Gazeta and Pravda.

"Very sharp essay"

In the autumn of the same year, one of Mandelstam’s most famous poems today appeared - “We live without feeling the country beneath us...”. He read it to about fifteen people he knew. Boris Pasternak said: “What you read to me has nothing to do with literature or poetry. This is not a literary fact, but a fact of suicide, which I do not approve of and in which I do not want to take part.”

The poet destroyed the paper notes of this poem, and his wife and family friend Emma Gerstein learned it by heart. Gerstein later recalled: “In the morning Nadya [Mandelshtam] unexpectedly came to me, one might say she flew into me. She spoke abruptly. “Osya wrote a very harsh essay. It cannot be written down. Nobody knows him except me. Someone else needs to remember it. It will be you. We will die, and then you will pass it on to people.”.

We live without feeling the country beneath us,
Our speeches are not heard ten steps away,
And where is enough for half a conversation,
The Kremlin highlander will be remembered there.
His thick fingers are like worms, fat
And the words, like pound weights, are true,
The cockroaches are laughing,
And his boots shine.
And around him is a rabble of thin-necked leaders,
He plays with the services of demihumans.
Who whistles, who meows, who whines,
He's the only one who babbles and pokes,
Like a horseshoe, a decree forges a decree:
Some in the groin, some in the forehead, some in the eyebrow, some in the eye.
No matter what his punishment is, it’s raspberries
And a broad Ossetian chest.

They reported on Mandelstam. First he was sent to Cherdyn-on-Kama. Later - thanks to the intercession of Nikolai Bukharin and some poets - Mandelstam and his wife were able to move to Voronezh. Here he worked in magazines, newspapers, theaters, and wrote poetry. Later they were published in the collections “Voronezh Notebooks”. The money earned was sorely lacking, but friends and relatives supported the family.

When the period of exile ended and the Mandelstams moved to Kalinin, the poet was arrested again. He was sentenced to five years in the camps for counter-revolutionary activities and was sent on a convoy to the Far East. In 1938, Osip Mandelstam died, according to one version, in a hospital camp barracks near Vladivostok. The cause of his death and place of burial are not known for certain.

The works of Osip Mandelstam were banned in the USSR for another 20 years. After Stalin's death, the poet was rehabilitated on one of the cases, and in 1987 on the second. His poems, prose, and memoirs were preserved by Nadezhda Mandelstam. She carried some things with her in a “handwritten suitcase”, and kept others only in memory. In the 1970s and 80s, Nadezhda Mandelstam published several books of memoirs about the poet.

Osip Emilievich (Iosif Khatskelevich) Mandelstam is a poet and essayist of Jewish nationality who lived in Russia and the USSR. Born on January 3 (15), 1891, died presumably on December 27, 1938. [For brief information about him, see the articles Osip Mandelstam - a short biography, Mandelstam's work - briefly.]

Mandelstam was born in Warsaw (which then belonged to Russian Empire) in a wealthy family Polish Jews. His father was a glover; mother, musician Flora Verblovskaya, was related to the famous literary critic S. Vengerov. Soon after the birth of their son, the family moved to St. Petersburg. In 1900, young Osip entered the prestigious Tenishev School there.

Osip Mandelstam. Life and art

In October 1907, taking advantage of the rich funds of his parents, Osip went abroad, where he spent several years, traveled to a number of European countries, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. When his family's financial situation worsened in 1911, Mandelstam returned to Russia and continued his education at the Romano-Germanic department of the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. At this time he converted from the Jewish religion to Methodism(one of the Protestant confessions) - they say that in order to get rid of the “percentage norm” for admission to the university. In St. Petersburg, Osip studied very unevenly and did not complete the course.

During the revolution of 1905-1907, Mandelstam sympathized with the extreme left parties - the Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries, and was fond of Marxism. After a stay abroad (where he listened to lectures by A. Bergson and fell in love with poetry Verlaine, Baudelaire and Villon) he changed his worldview, became interested in idealistic aesthetics and at one time attended meetings of the Religious and Philosophical Society in St. Petersburg. In poetry, Osip Mandelstam initially gravitated towards symbolism, but in 1911 he and several other young Russian authors (Nikolai Gumilyov, Sergey Gorodetsky etc.) created the group “Workshop of Poets” and founded a new artistic movement - Acmeism. Their theories were the opposite of the Symbolists. Instead of foggy vagueness and mysterious mysticism, the Acmeists called for giving poetry, distinctness, clarity, and filling it with realistic images. Mandelstam wrote a manifesto for the new movement (“Morning of Acmeism,” 1913, published in 1919). In 1913 he published his first collection of poetry, “Stone,” whose “tangible” title was in keeping with Acmeist principles.

According to some reports, Mandelstam had a love affair with Anna Akhmatova, although she insisted all her life that there was nothing between them except close friendship. In 1910, he was secretly and unreciprocated in love with the Georgian princess and St. Petersburg socialite Salome Andronikova, to whom he dedicated the poem “The Straw” (1916). From January to June 1916, the poet had a short relationship with Marina Tsvetaeva.

During First World War Mandelstam was not mobilized into the army due to “cardiac asthenia.” During these years, he wrote “anti-militarist” poems (“Palace Square”, “The Hellenes Gathered for War...”, “The Menagerie”), blaming all powers for the bloodshed, but especially the Russian Tsar.

Jun 29 2011

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam is an outstanding Russian poet, translator, and literary critic. Mandelstam was born in Warsaw on January 15, 1891 into a merchant family. In 1897, Mandelstam moved to St. Petersburg, where in 1901 he entered the Tenishev School. After graduating from college, Mandelstam went to France, where from the autumn of 1907 to the summer of 1908 he lived in Paris and attended lectures at the Faculty of Literature of the Sorbonne.

In 1909, Mandelstam moved to Germany, where he settled in the suburbs of Berlin. He devoted the period from the autumn of 1909 to the spring of 1910 to the study of Romance philology at the University of Heidelberg. In the fall of 1910, Mandelstam went on a trip to Italy and Switzerland.

In 1911, Mandelstam returned to St. Petersburg and entered the Faculty of History and Philology at St. Petersburg University. In St. Petersburg, Mandelstam joined the literary movement of “symbolism” and visited the salon of V. I. Ivanov, where he read his works. Later, Mandelstam becomes close to Nikolai Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova and joins the new association of acmeists, the “Workshop of Poets.”

In 1913, Mandelstam released his first poetry collection, Stone. The First World War begins in 1914 World War which at first Mandelstam welcomes, and then reacts sharply negatively.

At first, Mandelstam perceives the revolution that broke out in 1917 as a catastrophe, then Mandelstam has hopes that the new system will be able to change something in human nature.

In 1919, Mandelstam left St. Petersburg to the south. In 1922 the collection “Tristia” was published, and in 1923 the collection “The Second Book” was published. In 1924, Mandelstam moved to Leningrad. Since 1925 he stopped writing poetry. In 1928, Mandelstam settled in Moscow, where he worked on translations; in the same year, his final collection “Poems” and the story “The Egyptian Stamp” were published.

In 1930 he toured Armenia and Georgia. As a result of this trip, Mandelstam created the poetic cycle “Armenia”, which was only partially published in 1933. In the 30s, Mandelstam’s relations with the Soviet government did not work out; he sharply did not accept the regime established in the country.

In 1930, Mandelstam wrote the book “The Fourth Prose,” denouncing the authorities, and in 1933 - the famous poem “We live without feeling the country beneath us...”. In 1934, Mandelstam was arrested and exiled to Cherdyn on the Kama, then, after petitions from B. Pasternak and A. Akhmatova, he was sent to Voronezh. In Voronezh exile, Mandelstam created the poetic cycle “Voronezh Notebooks,” which was published only in 1966.

After the end of his exile in 1937, Mandelstam settled in the vicinity of Moscow and tried to obtain permission to live in the capital. In May 1938, Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to 5 years of hard labor. He is sent first to Siberia and then to the Far East.

On December 27, 1938, in the Second River transit camp near Vladivostok, being in a state of severe mental disorder, Mandelstam died (according to official data from cardiac paralysis).

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 railway station Cherusti, 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 fantasizing. 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”), flowing, 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 laureate Nobel Prize According to literature, Joseph Brodsky was called “the younger Osei.” 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. On end wall of the neighboring house there was a trace of its roof. 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 she lived since 1965 last years 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 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 as many as possible large number surviving creative and biographical materials Osip Mandelstam, regardless of where they are physically" on the initiative of the Mandelstam Society was conceived and 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. Founders public organization became 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.