Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (Осип Эмильевич Мандельштам, ; 14 January 1891 – 27 December 1938) was a Russian and Soviet poet.
He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school.
Mandelstam was born on 14 January 1891 in Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire, to a wealthy Polish-Jewish family.
His father, a leather merchant by trade, was able to receive a dispensation freeing the family from the Pale of Settlement.
Soon after Osip's birth, they moved to Saint Petersburg.
1900
In 1900, Mandelstam entered the prestigious Tenishev School.
1905
Mandelstam's poetry, acutely populist in spirit after the first Russian revolution in 1905, became closely associated with symbolist imagery.
1907
His first poems were printed in 1907 in the school's almanac.
As a schoolboy, he was introduced by a friend to members of the illegal Socialist Revolutionary Party, including Mark Natanson, and the revolutionary Grigory Gershuni.
1908
In April 1908, Mandelstam decided to enter the Sorbonne in Paris to study literature and philosophy, but he left the following year to attend the University of Heidelberg in Germany.
1911
In 1911, he decided to continue his education at the University of Saint Petersburg, from which Jews were excluded.
He converted to Methodism and entered the university the same year.
He did not complete a formal degree.
In 1911, he and several other young Russian poets formed the "Poets' Guild", under the formal leadership of Nikolai Gumilyov and Sergei Gorodetsky.
The nucleus of this group became known as Acmeists.
1913
Mandelstam wrote the manifesto for the new movement: The Morning Of Acmeism (1913, published in 1919).
In 1913 he published his first collection of poems, The Stone; it was reissued in 1916 under the same title, but with additional poems included.
1922
In 1922, Mandelstam and Nadezhda moved to Moscow.
At this time, his second book of poems, Tristia, was published in Berlin.
1925
For several years after that, he almost completely abandoned poetry, concentrating on essays, literary criticism, memoirs The Noise Of Time, Feodosiya - both 1925; (Noise of Time 1993 in English) and small-format prose The Egyptian Stamp (1928).
As a day job, he translated literature into Russian (19 books in 6 years), then worked as a correspondent for a newspaper.
1930
Osip Mandelstam was arrested during the repressions of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam.
Given a reprieve of sorts, they moved to Voronezh in southwestern Russia.
1933
In the autumn of 1933, Mandelstam composed the poem "Stalin Epigram", which he recited at a few small private gatherings in Moscow.
The poem deliberately insulted the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin:
... His thick fingers are bulky and fat like live-baits,
And his accurate words are as heavy as weights.
Cucaracha’s moustaches are screaming,
And his boot-tops are shining and gleaming.
...
In the original version, the one that was handed in to the police, he called Stalin the "peasant slayer", as well as pointing out that he had fat fingers.
1934
Six months later, on the night of 16–17 May 1934, Mandelstam was arrested by three NKVD officers who arrived at his flat with a search warrant signed by Yakov Agranov.
His wife hoped at first that this was over a fracas that had taken place in Leningrad a few days earlier, when Mandlestam slapped the writer Alexei Tolstoy because of a perceived insult to Nadezhda, but under interrogation he was confronted with a copy of the Stalin Epigram, and immediately admitted to being its author, believing that it was wrong in principle for a poet to renounce his own work.
Neither he nor Nadezhda had ever risked writing it down, suggesting that one of the trusted friends to whom he recited it had memorised it, and handed a written copy to the police.
It has never been established who it was.
Mandelstam anticipated that insulting Stalin would carry the death penalty, but Nadezhda and Anna Akhmatova started a campaign to save him, and succeeded in creating "a kind of special atmosphere, with people fussing and whispering to each other."
The Lithuanian ambassador in Moscow, Jurgis Baltrušaitis warned delegates at a conference of journalists that the regime appeared to be on the verge of killing a renowned poet.
Boris Pasternak - who disapproved of the tone of the Epigram - nonetheless appealed to the eminent Bolshevik, Nikolai Bukharin, to intervene.
1938
In 1938, Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to five years in a corrective-labour camp in the Soviet Far East.
He died that year at a transit camp near Vladivostok.
