Biography

OSIP MANDELSHTAM was born in Warsaw on January 15, 1891, mostly lived in St. Petersburg until the Russian Revolution, and then became a wanderer. At times a resident of Moscow, he was a political exile in Voronezh from 1934-1937 (he had written a poem that compared Stalin to a cockroach), and was a prisoner in the Gulag from May 1938 until his death on December 27, 1938. He died in a transit camp near Vladivostok on the way to Kolyma.

His last great poem, unfinished when he died (“Lines on the Unknown Soldier”), ends with a self-portrait as victim and master (“and centuries / encircle me with fire”), Mandelshtam’s response, perhaps, to the question Stalin asked Pasternak in 1934, “But isn’t he [Mandelshtam] the master, isn’t he master?” For Mandelshtam, one of the costs of exile in Voronezh was the loss of access in his “Mediterranean,” the Black Sea and its link to Aegean and Mediterranean culture. In 1935, he had written (as if he were one of Dante’s souls in the Inferno: “You took the sea from me — I could not run or / fly — and propped my crushed feet in the violent ground.”

TONY BRINKLEY teaches at the University of Maine and is a member of the Flat Bay Collective. He also collaborates with RAINA KOSTOVA, who teaches at Jacksonville State University. Their translations of Mandelshtam’s poetry have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Shofar, The New Review of Literature, and Stalin’s Eyes (Puckerbrush Press, 2002).