Osip Mandelstam

January 3, 1891 (January 15, New Style) saw the birth of one of Russia’s most subtle, exquisite, complex, and insightful poets – Osip Mandelstam. A strange man – half mad, quarrelsome, and considered unpleasant by some – he was also a remarkable genius.

Mandelstam was not an easy man to get along with. He was an abrasive fault-finder who lived much of his life in penury. Before being arrested and sent into exile, he was denied the right to publish. He lost his mind from desperation and horror, all the while continuing to write poetry of stunning grandeur.

Despite being plagued by terror of the regime, he boldly tore into Stalinism with lines like

We can no longer feel our country beneath us....
Take me into the night, where the Yenisey reigns
And the pine trees reach up to the skies,
For it is not wolf blood that runs through my veins
And my own kind will bring my demise.

This man, whose words painted pictures of transcendent refinement –

A little red wine
A little May sun
And breaking a slender biscuit,
Slender fingers of white.

– met his end in a transit camp outside Vladivostok, done in by hunger or typhus, or perhaps by both.

The camp has since been replaced with a memorial, a frequent target of vandals.

Photo above: A defiant Osip Mandelstam, upon his first arrest, in 1934, for writing (and openly reciting) a poem unflattering to Stalin after witnessing the horrors of the famine in Ukraine. This led to exile in the North and then Voronezh. He was arrested again in 1938 and died soon thereafter.