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| 1/15/1891 |
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The Mandelstams: Hope Against Hope
On this day in 1891 the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam was born. While by no means the only writer driven to death by Stalin's Reign of Terror, Mandelstam became the symbol of all those so destroyed. This is partly because of his poetry -- most rank him among the best Russian poets, some among the best of all 20th century poets -- and partly because of his wife, who salvaged his work and told his story in her memoir, Hope Against Hope. |
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"A Coat of Many Colors"
Find Gregory Freidin's critical analysis, "A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and his Mythologies of Self-Presentation." Each chapter considers a different stage of the poet's life and career. With poems in English and Russian, photographs, and an appendix concerning Boris Pasternak.
"He worked consistently at designing a figure that could serve as a unifying epic or dramatic center for a variety of lyric gestures. He was thus able to satisfy a major condition for being a lyric poet in contemporary Russia, namely, to compose poetry capable of projecting a powerful, integrative self." |  | Academy of American Poets
Find a biography and recommended links.
"He published his first collection, Kamen, or Stone (1913), when Russian Symbolism was the dominant persuasion. Like Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, who cleared the ground for Russian Futurism, Mandelstam departed from this old mode of expression in favor of a more direct treatment of thoughts, feelings, and observations under the aegis of Acmeism, a programme that included Nikolay Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova." | | Europe: A Twentieth Century Journey
The history of the twentieth century, told through the works of writers, including Mandlestam. Find a brief biography and an untitled poem about Stalin for which he was exiled to the gulag.
"His thick fingers are like fat worms
And his words have the heavy weight of truth. He laughs through his bushy cockroach moustache,
And the polish gleams from the tops of his boots." | | Oldpoetry
Offers a biography and poems including "A flame is in my blood," "Brothers, let us glorify freedom's twiling," "Insomnia. Homer. Taut canvas," "Rome," "Silentium," "Sisters," "The Age," and "This."
"He was the Descartes of metaphor. Because matter is revealed to our consciousness (and how could we experience someone else's?) through metaphor alone, because there is no existence outside comparison, because existence itself is comparion [sic]." | |
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The TinL masthead features photography by
Natasha D'Schommer
, and the book art featured is by Jim Rosenau.
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