Osip Mandelstam: A Biography

Poet Dutli (Soutine’s Last Journey) delivers a penetrating biography of the Russian-Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam. Born in Warsaw in 1891, Mandelstam grew up in St. Petersburg until his unsuccessful attempt at age 16 to join a militant arm of the Socialist Revolutionary Party convinced his parents to send him to study in Paris, and then the University of Heidelberg in Germany. He returned to Russia in 1912 and joined the Acmeist poets, whose concern with “the dark and unrestrained soul,” Dutli suggests, pushed back on the Russian Symbolism movement’s focus on religious themes. In the decade following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Mandelstam’s “defiant and vigorous rebelliousness” put him at odds with the Bolsheviks’ repressive regime and in 1934, a poem criticizing Stalin that Mandelstam insisted on reciting to friends and acquaintances resulted in his arrest and a sentence of internal exile in rural Cherdyn, Russia. Four years later, Mandelstam’s old criticisms of the Bolsheviks led to his second and final arrest, after which he was sentenced to a labor camp in Vladivostok, where he died several months later. The scrupulous research illuminates how Mandelstam’s politics animated his life and work, as when Dutli describes how the “nightmarish atmosphere” of Mandelstam’s 1928 novel, The Egyptian Stamp, was inspired by his disapproval of Stalin’s violent consolidation of power in the 1920s. Russian literature aficionados will want to seek this out. (May)