An illustrated narrative in English, with readings from Mandelstam’s poetry in English and Russian
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The Pushkin Club is devoting this evening’s event to a celebration of the life and work of Osip Emilievich Mandelstam (1891-1938).
The Evening, conducted via Zoom, will be introduced by David Brummell. In his illustrated narrative he will describe the main events in Mandelstam’s life and explain his unique importance as a poet.
Mandelstam was one of the four great Russian poets of the 20th century. Together with Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilyev, in 1913 he founded what would become known as the Acmeist movement, which proclaimed clarity and precision as a reaction to the mysticism and vagueness of the reigning Symbolist school.
Years later Mandelstam described Acmeism as “a yearning for world culture”.
In the words of the Australian author and translator, Roger Pulvers: “Mandelstam’s poems are beautifully constructed, like exquisite jewellery with jewels of many facets... Words seem to be organic entities that sprout meanings and throw off spores, taking on a new life of their own.”
In his life-time Mandelstam was able to publish only three books/collections of his poems.
He was arrested for the first time in May 1934 for having written a satirical epigram about Stalin: “Мы живём, под собою не чуя страны” (“We live, but no longer feel the land under our feet”. After imprisonment and interrogation in the Lyubanka, he was exiled first to Cherdyn, a town east of the Urals, and then to Voronezh.
In 1938 he was re-arrested, sentenced to forced labour in Kolyma prison-camp and, in harrowing circumstances, died of cold and starvation in a transit-camp near Vladivostok.
His body was thrown into an unmarked, communal pit.
His wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, heroically preserved his works by hiding manuscripts and memorising the whole corpus of his unpublished poems until she was able to transfer his archive to the West and submit poems for the first publication of Mandelstam's poetic works in the Soviet Union in 1974.
Through the “black velvet of the Soviet night” – сквозь «чёрный бархат советской ночи» – Osip Mandelstam shines as a beacon of civilisation, and of the very highest cultural, aesthetic and moral values. His life and work are a triumphant affirmation of the human spirit, and his verse resonates just as powerfully today.
In the course of the Evening a total of 14 of Mandelstam's poems will be read, from different periods in the poet’s life, including poems from his collections, Stone (1913), Tristia (1922) and Poems (1925), as well as poems which were never published in his life-time from The Moscow Notebooks (1930-1934) and The Voronezh Notebooks (1934-1937).
The poems will be read in translation by Lucy Daniels (a former Co-Chairman of the Pushkin Club) and David Brummell, and Alla Gelich will recite them in the Russian original.
The translations are by the late Richard McKane (a former Co-Chairman of the Pushkin Club) and David Brummell.