The Presidential Library stock unfolds new Mandelstam - not only the lyric, but also the researcher-polemicist

Shortly before the 126-th anniversary of Russian poet Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (1891-1938) the Presidential Library is featuring on its website his research essay of 1922 On the nature of the word, which finds in the brilliant lyric a unique analytics expertise in the field of literature and philology.

A poet was born on the 15th of January in Warsaw in the family of the master-tanner, a small trader. In 1897 the family moved to St. Petersburg. In there Osip graduated from a famous Private College of Tenishev, which gave him a solid knowledge in the language arts; his love fore poetry, music, theater, which has grabbed his mind, originates from here.

In 1907, Mandelstam listens the lectures at the Sorbonne, meets in Paris Nikolai Gumilev. Interest in literature, history, and philosophy leads him to the University of Heidelberg, which he attends for a year. Upon his return to St. Petersburg he establishes his first connection with the literary environment.

During these years he is interested in the poetics and the ideas of the Symbolist poets. However, once systematized his knowledge on the historical-philological faculty of St. Petersburg University, the poet realizes that he rather in tune with organized by Nikolai Gumilev “Tsekh Poetov” (means “poets foundry”) which cultivated Acmeism (from the Greek word “acme” means the highest degree of achieving something, a blooming force). Here he is in close contact with Akhmatova, Gorodetsky, Kuzmin, in the Crimea, in the house of Maximilian Voloshin, where he visited several times, he meets Marina Tsvetaeva. “He has never possessed any property, but aside from it he has never resided permanently - he led a vagabond life,” - wrote Korney Chukovsky.

In 1913 the first book of poems by Mandelstam named “Kamen” (Stone) was released, immediately placing the author in a number of significant Russian poets.

Mandelstam begins to appear in the press, not only with the verses, but also with translations, with articles on literary topics, such as the essay On the nature of the word. In his essay Mandelstam raises a question, whether Russian literature is being the whole? “In fact, whether the contemporary Russian literature of the same, that the literature of Nekrasov, Pushkin, Derzhavin or Simeon of Polotsk? What is the essential principle of Russian literature?”

The answer to his own question the essayist found in the very nature of the Russian language, the elements of which he possessed like no one else: “A criterion of unity of the literature of particular people can be recognized only by the language of these people, since any other characteristics are conditional, temporary and arbitrary - we could read in the book On the nature the word. – The language although it changes… within the limits of all its changes remains a constant, remains internally unified.”

With complete fluency in French, German and English Osip Emilyevich to earn some money was taking the translation works of contemporary foreign prose writers. And, of course, had a great care toward poetic translations, in which he ranked second to none. In 1930, when the persecution on Mandelstam has begun, and it was getting more and more difficult to get published, the translation remained the only vent through which Osip Emilyevich could upkeep himself.

“Who could interfere this poet with skinny body and with such music of the verse, which inhabits the nights? - Ilya Ehrenburg grieves in his “People, Years, Life” book. - Yes, Osip Emilyevich was afraid to drink a glass of not boiled water, but a real courage lived in him, which has passed through his whole life – up to the sonnets at a campfire…”

It seemed that courage is not among the first qualities of this touching, childishly naive man. But once a number of his fellow poets were taken away in the pie wagons, and even earlier Nikolai Gumilyov that gunned down, that was him, Mandelstam, who has written his famous poem in November 1933, on which no one of his equally great fellows in the field could dare to: “We are living, but can’t feel the land where we stay, More than ten steps away you can’t hear what we say. But if people would talk on occasion,They should mention the Kremlin Caucasian.”

After Mandelstam was reported there were two exiles - in the Perm region and in Voronezh. “Voronezh Notebooks” cycle of poems was recognized as the pinnacle of his poetry, but the affiliated with ideology “literary historians” were only encouraged to further provocations. They didn’t let the poet healing the mental and physical injuries after Voronezh, and he was arrested again in May 1938. The arrest was followed by the sentence: five years in a labor camp for “counter-revolutionary activities.”

According to unconfirmed reports Mandelstam died on December 27, 1938, of typhus in a transit camp near Vladivostok. The friends stored his poetries with a risk to get under Stalin’s press, to get them published only with the advent of the Khrushchev Thaw of the 60th…