Osip
Mandelstam (1891-1938) was perhaps Russian poetry's central figure in the twentieth century.
Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and his refusal to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature made him well known in the West, but he was also a tragic figure, whose sudden silence on a phone call with Stalin may have contributed to the death of Osip
Mandelstam. The story goes that
Mandelstam, who'd written a poem mocking Stalin, shared it with a small circle of friends including Pasternak.
What I hanker for is a less straightforward portrait of any such dictator enlivened through taking into account the writers they tried to punish and obliterate, yet who managed to outlive them: Lenin's ascent to power through the fictions of Mikhail Bulgakov and Boris Pasternak; Stalin viewed from the poetry of Anna Akhmatova and Osip
Mandelstam, who wrote a biting poem making fun of the despot's moustaches and ended his life in Siberia.
In the opening lines of narration in Ellie Ga's two-channel video installation Strophe, a Turning, 2017, the artist discusses Russian poet Osip
Mandelstam's comparison, in a 1912 essay, between writing a poem and lobbing a bottled message into the sea.
Osip
Mandelstam is faced with a similar question, as he wakes up one morning, sees a colorful flowery pattern before his eyes, and does not know how it got there.
In April 1934, the poet Osip
Mandelstam bumped into Boris Pasternak on a Moscow street.
In his book, Wiman includes a few translations, according to Lund, of poems written by Russian poet Osip
Mandelstam, known especially for the "The Stalin Epigram," which provoked his internment in a gulag prison camp where he eventually died.
His poem "The Blessed Word: A Prologue" begins with this quote from Osip
Mandelstam: "We shall meet again, in Petersburg."
Mandelstam, a Jewish poet living under the Soviet Regime (and dying under it too, incidentally) wrote that line at the very time when Petersburg had been renamed Leningrad by the regime he unambiguously detested through his poetry.
often better at theology than theology is." So he fills his rambling notebook with lines from Emily Dickinson, Patrick Kavanagh, Rilke, Hopkins, Osip
Mandelstam, D.H.
Flynn delves into the material borrowed from Maria Tsvetaeva and Osip
Mandelstam in On Ballycastle Beach (1988) uncovered by Shane Alcobia-Murphy, pointing out that the source texts, rather than serving as some kind of secret code that explains the poem, actually highlight the folly of attempting to interpret a poem this way.