Osip Mandelstam

The early spring of 1913 saw publication of the first book by a poet known only within his close circle of friends. The young man in question was only 22 years old, but he had already managed quite a bit in his short life: he had studied in St. Petersburg’s prestigious Tenishev School, and then in France, at the Sorbonne, and at Heidelberg University in Germany, and then at St. Petersburg University. He was a frequent guest at the renowned “Tower,” the home of poet and philosopher Vyacheslav Ivanov. He had already developed friendships with Russia’s most insightful and groundbreaking poets. And he had become a habitué of the Stray Dog Cabaret, a gathering place for St. Petersburg’s poets, artists, and musicians, and knew all the city’s most influential “ists” – the Symbolists, the Futurists, not to mention the Acmeists, the group with which he was most closely associated.

Then again, the feverish prewar years in St. Petersburg was a time when everyone was trying their hand at poetry and everyone who was anyone wanted to hobnob with the city’s fashionable and mysterious decadents.

But not everyone was Osip Mandelstam, the young author of this book. It was titled Stone (Камень), and it was a collection of masterpieces.

Was it just posturing? Or did the poetic soul of this 22-year-old genius truly sense the approach of dreadful trials when he wrote:

We’ve lost our senses from this life of ease.
Days start with wine, and end with temples aching.
Oh drunken plague, how can we keep on taking
Our pleasures in your ruddy-faced disease?

The handshake has become a vexing rite.
The midnight kiss fills street corner and alley,
While flowing past, the river’s weight grows daily,
And street lamps now emit a torch-like light.

And death awaits, a wolf from children’s tales.
And one, I fear, will be the first to perish:
The man who’s mouth turned worrisomely reddish,
Whose bangs fall on his eyes just like a veil.

От легкой жизни мы сошли с ума,
С утра вино, а вечером похмелье.
Как удержать напрасное веселье,
Румянец твой, о пьяная чума?

В пожатьи рук мучительный обряд,
На улицах ночные поцелуи,
Когда речные тяжелеют струи,
И фонари как факелы горят.

Мы смерти ждем, как сказочного волка,
Но я боюсь, что раньше всех умрет
Тот, у кого тревожно-красный рот
И на глаза спадающая челка.

1913

The man with the bangs from Mandelstam’s poem was also a marvelous poet: Georgy Ivanov. Several years later, Mandelstam was asked by another poet, Irina Odoyevtseva: “Osip Emilyevich, is it really true that you don’t believe that you will die?” He responded, utterly serious, “It’s not that I don’t believe it. I’m just not sure that I will. I have doubts about my death. I can’t picture it. I lack the imagination.”

Mandelstam’s prophecy was not fulfilled. The “wolf from children’s tales” turned out to be very real, and it came for him in 1938, in the form of starvation in a labor camp outside Vladivostok, whereas Ivanov lived on and died in emigration in 1955, in a home for the aged and destitute in Nice, France. Irina Odoyevtseva, who was married to Ivanov for a while and spent years with him in emigration, returned to her native land in 1987. At the time of her death, in 1990, she was forgotten by all but a few admirers of her verse.