Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938)

Osip Mandelstam was born to a prosperous Jewish family in Warsaw, and grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia. He received his early education from tutors and governesses at home, and attended the prestigious Tenishev School from 1900 to 1907. Continuing his education abroad, he studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and the the University of Heidelberg in Germany. From 1911 to 1917, he studied philosophy at the University of St. Petersburg, something rarely permitted for Jews. Mandelstam gave up his studies to become a poet, and began publishing in the literary journal Apollon. His first collection, Kamen (Stone), appeared in 1913. In the 1920s, as the Bolsheviks began to exert power over Russian artists, it became increasingly difficult for Mandelstam, a nonconformist, to maintain himself as a poet. He also wrote children's books and translated works by Upton Sinclair, Jules Romains, Charles de Coster, and others. In 1930, he made a trip to Armenia, which provided material for his book Journey to Armenia (1933), the last major work he published during his lifetime. He was arrested the first time in 1934 for a poem he had written on Joseph Stalin, tortured, and exiled to the Ural Mountains. Arrested again in 1938, he was sentenced to forced labor, and arrived at the Vtoraia Rechka transit camp, near Vladivostok, in very poor health. He died there shortly afterwards. Mandelstam achieved international fame in the 1970s, when his works were published in the West as well as in the Soviet Union thanks to the efforts of his wife Nadezhda Mandelstam, who also wrote two memoirs about their lives together, Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974).