Osip Mandelstam — a Russian poet who could not be silent

In March 1934, Osip Mandelstam bumped into his fellow Russian poet Boris Pasternak on Tverskoy Boulevard in Moscow and recited a poem to him. What would have passed for an innocent encounter between two friends in most countries at most times counted as a suicidally reckless act as the whirlwind of Stalinist repression was beginning to blow.

Terrified by the implications of Mandelstam’s poem, Pasternak replied: “I heard nothing, you recited nothing. You know, strange and terrible things are happening now, people are disappearing; I fear the walls have ears, and perhaps even the paving-stones can hear and speak. Let us be clear: I heard nothing.”

Pasternak’s alarm, recorded by his last partner Olga Ivinskaya in her memoirs, was well founded. Even though Mandelstam had never committed his poem to paper, the secret police of the NKVD inevitably heard about its seditious content and arrested him. Fastidious poet that he was, Mandelstam insisted on correcting the NKVD’s imperfect copy while incarcerated in the Lubyanka. Miraculously, Mandelstam was released with the official instruction to “isolate but preserve”.

Exiled to the provincial Russian city of Voronezh, Mandelstam wrote more than 100 poems in the shadow of death before being rearrested in 1938. He perished in a transit camp in the far east from heart failure, his naked body dumped in a mass grave, a piece of wood with his inmate number wrapped around his big toe. The poem that cost him his life, the “Epigram Against Stalin”, still resonates today as a devastating portrait of a dictator and a testimony to those terrible times:

“We live, deaf to the land beneath us

Ten steps away no one hears our speeches

All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,

The soul-corrupter 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.”

Few poets have been so defined by the manner of their death as Mandelstam. “More than any other Russian poet, Mandelstam fills the bill of a legendary literary saint,” the poet and translator Ralph Dutli writes.

But it is the wonder of this biography, translated by Ben Fowkes, that Dutli provides a fully rounded portrait of Mandelstam as an individual who had a “boundless love of life”, as his wife attested, and a fearless obsession with speaking his artistic truth. “I cannot be silent,” the poet wrote.

Dutli also deftly examines his literary legacy and explains why, in the opinion of the Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, Mandelstam can be considered the greatest Russian poet of the 20th century, who personified global civilisation in defiance of Stalinist tyranny. In his essay, “The Child of Civilisation”, Brodsky explains how Mandelstam’s poetry reflected his “nervous, high-pitched, pure voice shot through with love, terror, memory, culture, faith — a voice trembling, perhaps, like a match burning in a high wind, yet utterly inextinguishable.”

Born into a Jewish family in 1891 in Warsaw, Mandelstam was educated in St Petersburg and lived abroad in Paris and Heidelberg. At an early age, the budding poet was infected with a “literary fury” and won acclaim for his lyrical verse. The main drawback of Dutli’s book, originally written in German, is that the luminosity of Mandelstam’s poetry is poorly captured in the accompanying English translations. (A better glimpse of Mandelstam’s magic is provided by the just-published edition of Tristia, translated into English by my friend Thomas de Waal.)

‘Poetry is a power, because people are killed for it’

Caught in the maelstrom of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent civil war, Mandelstam was arrested by the White army in Crimea as a suspected Bolshevik spy. After being expelled to Soviet-occupied Georgia, he was then arrested as a suspected White agent. “You’ve got to let me out, I wasn’t made for prison!” he hammered on his cell door.

To a large extent, Mandelstam’s creative life was shaped by three extraordinary women: the two poets Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova and his wife Nadezhda Khazina, whom he met when she was an impulsive 19-year-old art student. On the night they met, they went to bed together. “It simply happened so,” she explained in her idiosyncratic English in a 1973 television interview.

Osip and Nadezhda became a remarkably resilient and devoted couple, welded together by the tragedy of circumstance and their love for literature and for each other. After composing his poems in his head, Mandelstam would recite them to his wife, who became his human Dictaphone. Married for 19 years, and widowed for 42, Nadezhda ferociously protected her husband’s legacy, preserving his poems in her memory and concealing his manuscripts — which still bore the bootmarks of the police officers who had trampled on his papers — in saucepans as she travelled between obscure provincial cities. Her own magnificent, and harrowing, memoirs serve as a tribute to her husband, as well as an explosive stick of “intellectual dynamite” that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991, according to Dutli.

“Poetry is a power, because people are killed for it,” Mandelstam once told his friend Akhmatova, with frightening prescience. In spite of Stalin’s attempts to shred his works and stamp on his memory, the power of Mandelstam’s poetry survived and was poignantly recalled at Nadezhda’s own burial in Moscow in 1981. At the funeral meal, without any invitation or prompting, the mourners stood up one by one to recite Mandelstam’s poems by heart.

As Mandelstam wrote about his yearning for freedom and the constraints of his times: “Oh for an inch of blue sea, for just enough to go through the eye of a needle!”

Osip Mandelstam: A Biography by Ralph Dutli, translated by Ben Fowkes Verso £25, 432 pages

John Thornhill is the FT’s innovation editor and a former Moscow correspondent

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