The Voronezh Notebooks: Poems 1935-1937

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Bloodaxe, 1996 - Fiction - 126 pages
Osip Mandelstam was one of the great poets of the twentieth century, with a prophetic understanding of its suffering, which he transformed into luminous poetry. Childish and wise, joyous and angry, at once complex and simple, he was sustained for 20 years by his wife and memoirist Nadezhda Mandelstam, who became, with Anna Akhmatova, the saviour of his poetry.In May 1934, after years of persecution, Mandelstam was arrested for writing an unflattering poem about Stalin, and subjected to gruelling interrogations and torture. He attempted suicide twice, slashing his wrists in prison, and jumping from a hospital window in Cherdyn. Exiled to Voronezh, he seemed crushed. A friend described him then as 'in a state of numbness. His eyes were glassy. His eyelids were inflamed, and this condition never went away. His eyelashes had fallen out. His arm was in a sling.'But it was to be four more years before Mandelstam was completely beaten. In Voronezh he broke a silence of 18 months after a concert by the young violinist Galina Baranova. Her music released him into the most fertile phase of his writing, his last two years in exile, when he wrote the ninety poems of the three Voronezh Notebooks. Nadezhda's memoir Hope Against Hope includes a moving account of their time in Voronezh, and Anna Akhmatova's poem 'Voronezh' describes her visit there in 1936, when 'in the room of the exiled poet / fear and the Muse stand duty in turn / and the night is endless / and knows no dawn.'This edition is now out of print but the whole book is reprinted as part of The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks.

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Contents

Translators Preface by RICHARD McKANE
11
Introduction by VICTOR KRIVULIN
15
FIRST VORONEZH NOTEBOOK
20
Copyright

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About the author (1996)

Osip Mandelstam was born in Warsaw, Poland and grew up in St.Petersburg, Russia Mandelstam was taught by tutors and governesses at his home. He attended the prestigious Tenishev School from 1900 to 1907 and traveled then to Paris from 1907 to 1908 and Germany from 1908 to 1910, where he studied Old French literature at the University of Heidelberg. In 1911 till 1917, he studied philosophy at St. Petersburg University but did not graduate. Mandelstam was a member of the 'Poets Guild' from 1911 and had close personal ties with Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev. His first poems appeared in 1910 in the journal Apollon. In 1918 he worked briefly for Anatoly Lunacharskii's Education Ministry in Moskow. In the 1920s Mandelstam supported himself by writing children's books and translating works by Upton Sinclair, Jules Romains, Charles de Coster and others. He did not compose poems from 1925 to 1930 but turned to prose. In 1930 he made a trip to Armenia to escape his influential enemies. Mandelstam's Journey to Armenia (1933) became his last major work published during his life time. Mandelstam was arrested the first time in 1934 for an epigram he had written on Joseph Stalin. In the transit camp, Mandelstam was already so weak that he couldn't stand. He died in the Gulag Archipelago in Vtoraia rechka, near Vladivostok, on December 27, 1938.His body was taken to a common grave. International fame came to Mandelstam in the 1970s, when his works were published in the West and in the Soviet Union.

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