Osip
Mandelstam, the son of wealthy Jewish
parents, was born in Warsaw, on 3rd January, 1891. He studied at
the University of St. Petersburg, the Sorbonne in France, and the
University of Heidelberg in Germany.
Mandelstam
began writing poetry and his work first appeared in the journal
Apollon in 1910. The following
year he joined with Nikolai Gumilev
and Sergey Gorodetsky to form the
Guild of Poets. Formed as a reaction to the Symbolist movement,
the Acmeists, as they became known, called for a return to the use
of clear, precise and concrete imagery.
His first
volume of poetry, Stone, appeared
in 1913. This was followed by Tristia
(1922), The Noise of Time
(1925) and a collection of essays, The
Egyptian Stamp (1928). Maldelstam was hostile to the
Communist government and his poetry never conformed to the official
doctrine of Socialist Realism.
In 1934
Mandelstam was arrested for writing an epigram that was critical
of Joseph Stalin and described him as
"the murderer and peasant slayer". Mandelstam and his
wife, Nadezhda Khazina, were eventually
exiled to Cherdyn.
Mandelstam
was allowed to return to Moscow in May, 1937. However, soon after
he was re-arrested and sent to a labour camp. The Soviet government
reported that Osip Mandelstam died at Vtoraya Rechka, on 27th December,
1938.
(1)
Osip Mandelstam's poem on Joseph Stalin
(the Kremlin mountaineer) was
written in November, 1933. Ossette was a reference to the rumour
that Stalin was from a people of
Iranian stock that lived in an area north of Georgia.
We live,
deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,
All we
hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,
The murderer and peasant-slayer.
His fingers
are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,
His cockroach
whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.
Around
him a rabble of thin-necked leaders -
fawning half-men for him to play with.
The whinny,
purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,
One by
one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, to the eye or the groin.
And every
killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete.
(2)
When Osip Mandelstam was being investigated by the Secret
Police he went to see the short-story writer, Isaac
Babel, a leading figure in the Union
of Soviet Writers. The meeting was later recorded by Mandelstam's
wife, Nadezhda
Khazina.
The next
person we consulted was Babel. We told him our troubles, and during
the whole of our long conversation he listened with remarkable intentness.
Everything about Babel gave an impression of all-consuming curiosity
- the way he held his head, his mouth and chin, and particularly
his eyes. It is not often that one sees such undisguised curiously
in the eyes of a grown-up. I had the feeling that Babel's main driving
force was the unbridled curiously with which he scrutinized life
and people.
With
his usual ability to size things up, he was quick to decide on the
best course for us. "Go out to Kalinin," he said, "Nikolai
Erdman is there - his old woman just love him." This was Babel's
cryptic way of saying that all Erdman's female admirers would never
have allowed him to settle in a bad place. He also thought we might
be able to get some help from them - in finding a room there, for
instance. Babel volunteered to get the money for our fare the next
day.
(3)
Osip Mandelstam managed to send this letter to his wife while waiting
at a transit labour camp in October, 1937. It was the last letter
that she received from him.
My darling
Nadia - are you alive, my dear?
I was
given five years for counter-revolutionary activity by the Special
Tribunal. The transport left Butyrki on September 9, and we got
here October 12. My health is very bad, I'm extremely exhausted
and thin, almost unrecognizable, but I don't know whether there's
any sense in sending clothes, food and money. You can try, all the
same, I'm very cold without proper clothes.
I am
in Vladivostok. This is a transit point. I've not been picked for
Kolyma and may have to spend the winter here.
(4)
After Osip Mandelstam's death, Nadezhda
Khazina wrote about their experiences of living in the Soviet
Union during the 1930s in her book, Hope Against Hope (1971)
In the period of the Yezhov terror - the mass arrests
came in waves of varying intensity - there must sometimes have been
no more room in the jails, and to those of us still free it looked
as though the highest wave had passed and the terror was abating.
After each show trial, people sighed, "Well, it's all over
at last." What they meant was: "Thank God, it looks as
though I've escaped. But then there would be a new wave, and the
same people would rush to heap abuse on the "enemies of the
people."
Wild
inventions and monstrous accusations had become an end in themselves,
and officials of the secret police applied all their ingenuity to
them, as though reveling in the total arbitrariness of their power.
The principles
and aims of mass terror have nothing in common with ordinary police
work or with security. The only purpose of terror is intimidation.
To plunge the whole country into a state of chronic fear, the number
of victims must be raised to astronomical levels, and on every floor
of every building there must always be several apartments from which
the tenants have suddenly been taken away. The remaining inhabitants
will be model citizens for the rest of their lives - this was true
for every street and every city through which the broom has swept.
The only essential thing for those who rule by terror is not to
overlook the new generations growing up without faith in their elders,
and keep on repeating the process in systematic fashion.
Stalin
ruled for a long time and saw to it that the waves of terror recurred
from time to time, always on even greater scale than before. But
the champions of terror invariably leave one thing out of account
- namely, that they can't kill everyone, and among their cowed,
half-demented subjects there are always witnesses who survive to
tell the tale.
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