22 Facts About Osip Mandelstam

1.

Osip Mandelstam was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school.

2.

Osip Mandelstam was arrested during the repression of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam.

3.

In 1938 Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to five years in a corrective-labour camp in the Soviet Far East.

4.

Osip Mandelstam died that year at a transit camp near Vladivostok.

5.

Osip Mandelstam was born on 14 January 1891 in Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire to a wealthy Polish-Jewish family.

6.

Osip Mandelstam converted to Methodism and entered the university the same year.

7.

Osip Mandelstam wrote the manifesto for the new movement: The Morning Of Acmeism.

8.

Osip Mandelstam's 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.

9.

Osip Mandelstam later wrote that "at my side, my wife did not sleep for five nights" - but when they arrived at Cherdyn, she fell asleep, in the upper floor of a hospital, and he attempted suicide by throwing himself out of the window.

10.

Just after their arrival, Boris Pasternak was startled to receive a phone call from Stalin - his only conversation with the dictator, in which Stalin wanted to know whether Osip Mandelstam really was a talented poet.

11.

Actually, the fact that Stalin had given an order to "isolate and preserve" Osip Mandelstam meant that he was safe from further persecution, temporarily.

12.

In Voronezh, he was even granted a face-to-face meeting with the local head of the NKVD, Semyon Dukelsky, who told him "write what you like", and turned down an offer by Osip Mandelstam to send in every poem he wrote to police headquarters.

13.

Four months later, on 2 August 1938, Osip Mandelstam was sentenced to five years in correction camps.

14.

Osip Mandelstam arrived at the Vtoraya Rechka transit camp near Vladivostok in Russia's Far East.

15.

On 27 December 1938, before his 48th birthday, Osip Mandelstam died in a transit camp of typhoid fever.

16.

Osip Mandelstam's death was described later in a short story "Sherry Brandy" by Varlam Shalamov.

17.

Osip Mandelstam's body lay unburied until spring, along with the other deceased.

18.

Osip Mandelstam managed to preserve a significant part of Mandelstam's unpublished work.

19.

In 1916, Osip Mandelstam was passionately involved with the poet Marina Tsvetayeva.

20.

In 1922, Osip Mandelstam married Nadezhda Osip Mandelstam in Kyiv, Ukraine, where she lived with her family, but the couple settled in Moscow.

21.

Osip Mandelstam continued to be attracted to other women, sometimes seriously.

22.

Nadezha Osip Mandelstam formed a lifelong friendship with Anna Akhmatova, who was a guest in the Osip Mandelstam's apartment when he was arrested for the first time, but complained that she could never be friendly with Tsvetayeva, partly because "I had decided on Akhmatova as 'top' woman poet".