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OSIP MANDELSTAM, c 1921
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CONCERT AT THE RAILWAY STATION
Can't breathe. And the firmament seething with worms,
and not one star speaking.
But as God's our witness, there's music above us—
The Aeonian maids, at whose song the station trembles,
and again the violin-laden air is sundered
and fused together by the whistles of trains.
Immense park. The station a glass sphere.
A spell cast again on the iron world.
The train carriage is borne away in state
to the echoing feast in misty Elysium.
Peacocks crying, a piano's bass notes—
I'm late. I'm afraid. This is a dream.
And I enter the station, the glass forest.
The harmony of violins is dishevelled and weeping.
The savage life of the night choir,
a smell of roses from rotting beds,
where the beloved shade passed the night
under the glass sky, among the travelling clouds.
And I think, how like a beggar the iron world
shivers, covered with music and froth.
And I go out through the glass passage. The steam
blinds the pupils of the violin bows. Where are you off to?
It's the funeral feast of the beloved shade.
It's the last time the music sounds for us.
1921
from Poems (1928)
Translated by
CLARENCE BROWN
and
WS MERWIN
'Only in Russia is poetry respected,' the poet Osip Mandelstam once observed. 'Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?'
Like his former lover Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) and his close friend (and possible lover) Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), Mandelstam was ruthlessly persecuted by the Soviet state for no better reason than that his poetry was considered a threat to the popularity of its leader Josef Stalin. Like his fellow poets, Mandelstam fell under the personal scrutiny of Stalin who treated him, as he treated many of Russia's greatest creative artists, as a disposable plaything whose fate was entirely subject to his own unpredictable whims.
Mandelstam first ran afoul of the authorities in May 1934 when he was arrested by the NKVD (the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs which functioned, essentially, as both the everyday and the 'secret' police responsible for overseeing and implementing all forms of political repression and torture) for having written a satirical poem known as the Stalin Epigram the previous November. This four stanza poem, which had never appeared in print, had been committed to memory by several of Mandelstam's friends as was common practice at the time in order to avoid the risks associated with trying to publish and distribute unsanctioned works of literature. Scholars now believe that one of the poet's friends — someone whose identity remains unknown to this day — was responsible for providing the NKVD with a written copy of the poem.
Mandelstam, who was born to Jewish parents in the Polish capital Warsaw on 14 January 1891 and taken by them to the Russian capital St Petersburg soon afterwards, was considered one of Russia's most important poets in 1934, a founding member of the Acmeist movement which prized 'compactness of form and clarity of expression' and was loosely affiliated with the contemporaneous Symbolist movement.
Mandelstam, who had converted to Methodism in 1911 so he could attend St Petersburg University, had become, by the end of the 1920s, the well-regarded and well-known author of five poetry collections and several works of prose including collections of autobiographical and travel sketches plus a short novel. He fully expected to be executed for having dared to criticize the Soviet dictator in verse form. But in typically capricious fashion, Stalin defied Mandelstam's expectations by exiling him to the small town of Cherdyn in the remote Northern Ural region of the eastern USSR rather than condemning him to death or sending him to the gulag (a slightly more prolonged but no less effective form of death sentence).
The psychological strain of being arrested and exiled proved too much for Mandelstam who, shortly after his arrival in Cherdyn, attempted suicide by jumping from the window of a hospital room he was sharing with his wife Nadezhda. Following a heartfelt appeal by his brother to the Soviet authorities, the distraught poet was granted permission to choose his own place of exile on condition that he not ask to reside in any of the country's twelve largest cities. Mandelstam and his wife — who made it her mission in life to memorize as much of his work as she could and lived long enough to supervise the first clandestine printings of it in the 1970s — eventually chose the southwestern town of Voronezh as their new home, allegedly because the poet found its name appealing. It was here that Mandelstam wrote his Ode to Stalin, a laudatory work he hoped would protect him from further persecution by showing him to be a loyal Soviet citizen.
Mandelstam was allowed to remain in Voronezh and write virtually whatever he liked until May 1937 when Stalin, seeking to consolidate his increasingly tyrannical grip on power, was in the midst of carrying out what came to be known as the 'Great Purge' of Soviet society. Designed to permanently eliminate the threat posed to his rule by his former ally Leon Trotsky, it saw a wave of mass arrests and show trials occur throughout the USSR, with many prominent political and cultural figures either being executed or sent to correction camps in Siberia or other, equally desolate locations.
One of the more notable victims of Stalin's wrath was Nikolai Bukharin, a revolutionary and renowned Marxist economist who had served as Mandelstam's protector prior to his own arrest in March 1938. Bukharin recived a sentence of death, prompting Vladimir Stavsky, head of the all-powerful Soviet Writer's Union, to denounce his former protégé Mandelstam — now living in hiding with friends on the outskirts of Moscow — as a traitor and have him arrested on 5 May for supporting 'counter-revolutionary activities.'
In August, with no powerful friends left to speak up on his behalf, Mandelstam was sentenced to five years in a correction camp and transported east, arriving in a transit camp near the city of Vladivostok shortly afterwards. He died here, a few days before what would have been his forty-eighth birthday, on 27 December 1938, his fellow inmates preferring not to immediately report his death so they could continue to receive and share his meagre ration of food for as long as possible.
The poet was survived by his wife Nadezdha who, as noted, devoted the rest of her life to memorizing his work and preserving as many of his original manuscripts as she could, all the while living a perilously nomadic life that saw her narrowly evade arrest and almost certain execution on several occasions. She also wrote two harrowing but historically important memoirs of her life with her husband titled Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned that were translated into English and first published in the West in 1970 and 1974 respectively. Nadezdha lived until 29 December 1980, seven years before Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev officially exonerated Mandelstam of treason and all the other crimes Stalin had accused him of having committed against the people of the Soviet Union.
