About the Work

by matvei yankelevich

Osip Mandelstam was born in Warsaw on January 3, 1891 in an assimilated, middle-class Jewish family, and spent most of his childhood in St. Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire. He studied at the Sorbonne and at Heidelberg before finishing his education in St. Petersburg. As a young poet he attended the salons of the Russian Symbolists where he met the likeminded poets (including Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev) with whom he co-founded a movement called Acmeism, which polemicized with both Symbolism and Futurism. In 1913, at the age of 22, he published his first book, Stone. After the Russian Revolution and Civil War, Mandelstam put out a second collection, Tristia  (1922), a memoir, The Noise of Time  (1925), a collected volume of prose writings (including a novella, The Egyptian Stamp), and published prolifically in the Soviet press as an essayist, cultural journalist, and translator. Though he had powerful supporters (from writers like Boris Pasternak to members of the ruling elite like Nikolai Bukharin), he had also made many enemies through his polemical reviews, particularly among the proletarian writers, and by the late ’20s and early ’30s he was increasingly disparaged in the press as a formalist versifier and an aging remnant of bourgeois literary culture. 

At the same time, though he had been awarded an apartment and a government pension for his contributions to Soviet literature, several public scandals as well as a few privately circulated poems criticizing the regime—including one ad hominem attack on Stalin himself (known as the “Stalin Epigram”), which he read aloud to friends and was leaked to the authorities—led to his arrest in 1934 and the cancellation of a multi-volume collected works. After prison interrogations, transfer by train and riverboat to the northern village of Cherdyn, and two suicide attempts, Mandelstam served out a commuted sentence—three years of internal exile in a provincial city of his choice—in the Southern Russian city of Voronezh, where, from 1935 to 1937, he composed his major unpublished opus known as the Voronezh Notebooks. Though not permitted to reside in the major cities of the Soviet Union after his exile, Mandelstam traveled frequently to Moscow and Leningrad in search of work, publication, and financial assistance from his friends. On May 2, 1938, he was re-arrested during his stay at a rural Writers Union resort, and died in a transit camp near Vladivostok on December 27, 1938, just shy of 48 years old. 

Mandelstam’s Voronezh poems, more than ninety in all, are divided into three notebooks, corresponding to three distinct periods of intense poetic production. The five poems from December 1936 presented here are taken from the second notebook. Though in most critical reception, Mandelstam is figured as a liberal humanist poet whose work revolves around an Acmeist “longing for world culture,” the present selection bears witness to the poet’s interest in local culture, speech, lore, and topography—especially of the southern “black earth” region around Voronezh. Mandelstam lends his ear to the southern Russian dialect and its proximity to Ukrainian, as well as its toponyms, and to current events in the political and cultural life of the Soviet Union.

In “From village lanes…”, the first poem in this selection, Mandelstam merges the fairytale of the musician-merchant Sadkó with Soviet industrial productivity. At the time of its composition (December 6–9, 1936), the Soviet press was buzzing with the news of a new constitution (ratified on December 5) and ensuing celebrations, accompanied—in Voronezh as elsewhere—by factory whistles or horn-blasts (gudki). In light of the local and national press of those days, Mandelstam biographer Oleg Lekmanov suggests that this poem “can be read as a sound-greeting to the new constitution from the depths of fairy-tale, operatic Russian antiquity.” (Coincidentally, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko, a popular opera based on the tale, played in Moscow at the Bolshoi on the tenth of that month—Mandelstam could easily have heard announcements.)

Russian folklore appears again in the poem beginning “From this all my misfortunes come….” Inspired by the fiery black house cat of one of his few friends in Voronezh, Natasha Shtempel, the poem spins a yarn in which the cat lives with the immortal sorcerer Koshchei, antagonist of many folk tales. The cat’s eye is compared to “a merchant of seawater” which we read as an invocation of Sadkó, already mentioned in the earlier poem of the same month. Some suggest that the sorcerer Koshchei who awaits his guests while hording his treasure of “golden nails” and “talking stones” must be a figure for Stalin, but the proposition is complicated by a biographical detail: as a child, Mandelstam collected nails and liked to pour his “prickly treasure” from one hand to another, “like [Pushkin’s] miserly knight” (cf. Mandelstam’s memoir Noise of Time). The poet did enjoy the ironic resemblance of his given name to that of the Soviet hegemon—Osip and Iosif are variants of Joseph. Just weeks after the cat’s eye poem, in the ode titled “Verses on Stalin,” Mandelstam will suggest an interdependence between the poet and the national leader whose praise he sings, and, in the same period, their names’ shared syllable—os—will become a catalyst for poems about wasps (osy) and a broken axle (os’). However, scholar Omry Ronen’s rebuttal of the Koshchei-Stalin connection allows us to contemplate the poem’s fantastical images untwined from purely political allegory, and thus suggestive of magical, creative processes more generally.

Another poem from late December 1936, “Milestones of the distant transport...,” describes the view from the window of a sanatorium in Tambov (a town within 150 miles of Voronezh) where Mandelstam had stayed a year earlier (from December 18, 1935 to January 5, 1936) on account of an acute nervous condition or panic attack. In Peter France’s translation—in Black Earth  (New Directions, 2021)—the former manor or villa (osobniak) on the high bank of the Tsna River housing the neurological clinic becomes a “cabin,” apparently to avoid presenting the exiled Mandelstam living in any sort of luxury. At that time, however, the poet was employed as a dramaturg at the Voronezh repertory theater, and the trip was paid for by the writers’ union or another Soviet cultural agency. Writing to his wife from Tambov, Mandelstam had remarked on the “deep pleasure” with which he took in the landscape—the “softness and harmony of the Russian winter,” the Volga-like breadth of the Tsna, the “inky, blue forests.” 

As with “Milestones...” (where the forest become “prose of airy ink”), the poem beginning “Darkwater district...,” builds on his recollections of Tambov (described here as “puffing snow”) and the journey there by train. This poem layers other landscapes and memories of the region, including a July 1935 tour (for a press assignment) of the sovkhozy [soviet farms] of the Vorobyovka district where the Mandelstams took a liking to an educated local administrator (the “polit-chief”) who didn’t seem to belong in this backwater. The poem begins with wordplay that intertwines allusions to the biblical flood and the story of heavenly manna—both invoking the theme of exile—with the rain and mud of the fertile “black earth” of the Voronezh region, whose “outline” appears on a display at the intercity telephone station frequented by the Mandelstams. Backlighting or tiny lightbulbs behind the board would make “moonlets” of the cut out circles near the printed names of towns—“Róssosh, Ánna, and Gremiáchye” would have appeared on the map. At the end of the poem, Mandelstam traces tangents of Voronezh history—its pre-revolutionary wealth as a city of noble landowners, and its literary son, the Romantic poet Alexei Koltsov, who made lyric heroes of his peasants. 

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osip mandelstam (1891–1938) is widely regarded as one of Russia’s most important modernist poets. During his lifetime, he published two poetry collections (Stone  and Tristia), a memoir (The Noise of Time), a collection of essays and prose works (including the novella, The Egyptian Stamp), and numerous works of journalism, travel writing, and translation in the Soviet press. Arrested in 1934 on account of several poems critical of the Soviet regime—including one that depicted the horrific effects of collectivization and another that caricatured Stalin himself—Mandelstam spent three years in exile in a southern Russian city. There he composed a significant body of work known as the Voronezh Notebooks, which includes his longest poem, “Verses on the Unknown Soldier” (1937). Re-arrested a year after his return from exile, Mandelstam died in a transit camp near Vladivostok. Much of his 1930s writing remained unpublished in the Soviet Union until its collapse, though it circulated through the underground press and foreign publishers. 

Poet, translator, novelist, and Zen monk, john high (ninso) has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and four Fulbright fellowships. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including Scrolls of a Temple Sweeper  (Wet Cement Press). A co-founder and former director of LIU Brooklyn’s MFA Program in NYC, he has taught at universities in Istanbul, Moscow, Hangzhou, and San Francisco, and facilitated workshops in creative transformation with children, teachers, social workers, incarcerated youth, and writers in Asia, Europe, and the U.S. His co-translation (with Matvei Yankelevich) of Osip Mandelstam’s Voronezh Notebooks is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. He lives in Lisbon.

matvei yankelevich is a poet, translator, and editor. His translations include Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms  (Overlook) and Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think  (NYRB Poets; with Eugene Ostashevsky), winner of the 2014 National Translation Award. His co-translation (with John High) of Osip Mandelstam’s Voronezh Notebooks is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is editor of World Poetry Books, a nonprofit publisher of poetry in translation and proprietor-publisher of the small press Winter Editions. He teaches translation at Columbia University and elsewhere.

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