Mandelstam's work message. Osip Mandelstam - biography, photos, poems, personal life of the poet

One of the most tragic fates was prepared by the Soviet authorities for such a great poet as O. Mandelstam. His biography has developed so largely because of the irreconcilable nature of Osip Emilievich. He could not tolerate untruth and did not want to bow before the mighty of this world. Therefore, his fate could not have been otherwise in those years, which Mandelstam himself was aware of. His biography, like the work of the great poet, teaches us a lot ...

The future poet was born in Warsaw on January 3, 1891. Osip Mandelstam spent his childhood and youth in St. Petersburg. His autobiography, unfortunately, was not written by him. However, his memoirs formed the basis of the book "The Noise of Time". It can be considered largely autobiographical. Note that Mandelstam's memories of childhood and youth are strict and restrained - he avoided revealing himself, did not like to comment on both his poems and his life. Osip Emilievich was an early maturing poet, or rather, an enlightened one. Strictness and seriousness distinguish his artistic style.

We believe that the life and work of such a poet as Mandelstam should be considered in detail. A short biography in relation to this person is hardly appropriate. The personality of Osip Emilievich is very interesting, and his work deserves the most careful study. As time has shown, one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century was Mandelstam. A brief biography presented in school textbooks is clearly insufficient for a deep understanding of his life and work.

The origin of the future poet

Rather, the few that can be found in Mandelstam's memoirs about his childhood and the atmosphere surrounding him are painted in gloomy tones. According to the poet, his family was "difficult and confused." In the word, in speech, this was manifested with special force. So, at least, Mandelstam himself thought. The family was different. Note that the Jewish family of Mandelstam was ancient. Since the 8th century, since the time of the Jewish enlightenment, he has given the world famous doctors, physicists, rabbis, literary historians and Bible translators.

Mandelstam Emily Veniaminovich, father of Osip, was a businessman and self-taught. He was completely devoid of a sense of language. Mandelstam in his book "The Noise of Time" noted that he had absolutely no language, there was only "lack of language" and "tongue-tiedness". Another was the speech of Flora Osipovna, the mother of the future poet and music teacher. Mandelstam noted that her vocabulary was "compressed" and "poor", the turns were monotonous, but it was sonorous and clear, "great Russian speech." It was from his mother that Osip inherited, along with musicality and a predisposition to heart disease, the accuracy of speech, a heightened sense of his native language.

Education at the Tenishevsky Commercial School

Mandelstam studied at the Tenishevsky Commercial School from 1900 to 1907. It was considered one of the best among private educational institutions in our country. At one time, V. Zhirmunsky and V. Nabokov studied there. The atmosphere that prevailed here was intellectual-ascetic. The ideals of civic duty and political freedom were cultivated in this educational institution. In the years 1905-1907 of the first Russian revolution, Mandelstam could not but fall into political radicalism. His biography is generally closely connected with the events of the era. The catastrophe of the war with Japan and the revolutionary time inspired him to create the first verse experiments that can be considered student's. Mandelstam perceived what was happening as a vigorous universal metamorphosis, renewing the elements.

Trips abroad

He received a college diploma on May 15, 1907. After that, the poet tried to join the combat organization of the Socialist-Revolutionaries in Finland, but he was not accepted there due to infancy. Parents, concerned about the future of their son, hurried to send him away from sin to study abroad, where Mandelstam went three times. The first time he lived in Paris from October 1907 to the summer of 1908. Then the future poet went to Germany, where he studied Romance philology at Heidelberg University (from autumn 1909 to spring 1910). From 21 July 1910 until mid-October he lived in Zehlendorf, a suburb of Berlin. Up to the very last works in Mandelstam's poems, there is an echo of his acquaintance with Western Europe.

Meeting with A. Akhmatova and N. Gumilyov, creation of acmeism

The meeting with Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilyov determined the formation of Osip Emilievich as a poet. Gumilyov in 1911 returned from the Abyssinian expedition to St. Petersburg. Soon the three of them began to see each other often at literary evenings. Many years after the tragic event - the execution of Gumilyov in 1921 - Osip Emilievich wrote to Akhmatova that only Nikolai Gumilyov managed to understand his poems, and that he still talks to him, conducts dialogues. How Mandelstam treated Akhmatova is evidenced by his phrase: "I am a contemporary of Akhmatova." Only Osip Mandelstam (his photo with Anna Andreevna is presented above) could have publicly stated this during the Stalinist regime, when Akhmatova was a disgraced poetess.

All three (Mandelstam, Akhmatova and Gumilyov) became the creators of acmeism and the most prominent representatives of this new trend in literature. Biographers note that friction arose between them at first, since Mandelstam was quick-tempered, Gumilyov was despotic, and Akhmatova was wayward.

First collection of poems

In 1913 he created his first collection of poems by Mandelstam. By this time, his biography and work had already been marked by many important events, and even then there was more than enough life experience. The poet published this collection at his own expense. At first he wanted to call his book "Sink", but then he chose another name - "Stone", which was quite in the spirit of acmeism. Its representatives wanted, as it were, to rediscover the world, to give everything a courageous and clear name, devoid of a foggy and elegiac flair, as, for example, among the Symbolists. Stone is a solid and durable natural material, eternal in the hands of a master. For Osip Emilievich, it is the primary building material of spiritual culture, and not just material.

Osip Mandelstam converted to Christianity back in 1911, making the "transition into European culture." And although he was baptized in (in Vyborg on May 14), the poems of his first collection captured the passion for the Catholic theme. Mandelstam was captivated in Roman Catholicism by the pathos of the world organizing idea. Unity under Rome Christendom The West is born from a chorus of peoples that are dissimilar to each other. Also, the "stronghold" of the cathedral is made up of stones, their "unkind gravity" and "spontaneous labyrinth".

Relation to the revolution

In the period from 1911 to 1917 at St. Petersburg University, at the Romano-Germanic department, Mandelstam studied. His biography at that time was marked by the appearance of the first collection. His attitude to the revolution that began in 1917 was complex. Any attempts by Osip Emilievich to find a place in the new Russia ended in scandal and failure.

Tristia compilation

Mandelstam's poems from the period of revolution and war make up the new collection Tristia. This "Book of Sorrows" was published for the first time in 1922 without the participation of the author, and then, in 1923, under the title "Second Book" was republished in Moscow. It is cemented by the theme of time, the flow of history, which is directed towards its death. Until the last days, this theme will be a cross-cutting one in the poet's work. This collection is marked by a new quality lyrical hero Mandelstam. For him, there is no longer a personal time that is not involved in the general flow of time. The voice of the lyrical hero can only be heard as an echo of the rumble of the era. What happens in a big story is perceived by him as the collapse and construction of a "temple" of his own personality.

The collection Tristia also reflected a significant change in the poet's style. The figurative texture is moving more and more towards encrypted, "dark" meanings, semantic shift, irrational language moves.

Wanderings in Russia

Osip Mandelstam in the early 1920s wandered mainly in the southern part of Russia. He visited Kiev, where he met his future wife N. Ya. Khazina (pictured above), spent some time with Voloshin in Koktebel, then went to Feodosia, where the Wrangel counterintelligence arrested him on suspicion of espionage. Then, after his release, he went to Batumi, he was marked by a new arrest - now by the Menshevik Coast Guard. Osip Emilievich was rescued from prison by T. Tabidze and N. Mitsishvili, Georgian poets. In the end, extremely exhausted, Osip Mandelstam returned to Petrograd. His biography continues with the fact that he lived for some time in the House of Arts, then went south again, after which he settled in Moscow.

However, by the mid-1920s, there was no trace of the former balance of hopes and anxieties in understanding what was happening. The consequence of this is the changed poetics of Mandelstam. "Darkness" now increasingly outweighs clarity in it. In 1925, there was a short creative surge, which was associated with a passion for Olga Vaksel. After that, the poet falls silent for a long 5 years.

For Mandelstam, the second half of the 1920s was a period of crisis. At this time, the poet was silent, did not publish new poems. Not a single work of Mandelstam appeared in 5 years.

Appeal to prose

In 1929, Mandelstam decided to turn to prose. He wrote the book "The Fourth Prose". It is not large in volume, but Mandelstam's contempt for the opportunistic writers who were members of MASSOLIT was fully splashed out in it. For a long time this pain accumulated in the soul of the poet. Mandelstam's character was expressed in The Fourth Prose - quarrelsome, explosive, impulsive. Very easily, Osip Emilievich made enemies for himself, he did not conceal his judgments and assessments. Thanks to this, Mandelstam always, almost all the post-revolutionary years, was forced to exist in extreme conditions. In anticipation of imminent death, he was in the 1930s. There were not very many admirers of Mandelstam's talent, his friends, but they still were.

Life

The attitude to everyday life in many ways reveals the image of such a person as Osip Mandelstam. Biography, interesting facts about him, the work of the poet are associated with his special attitude towards him. Osip Emilievich was not adapted to settled life, to everyday life. For him, the concept of a house-fortress, which was very important, for example, for M. Bulgakov, had no meaning. The whole world was a home for him, and at the same time Mandelstam was homeless in this world.

Recalling Osip Emilievich in the early 1920s, when he received a room in the House of Arts in Petrograd (like many other writers and poets), K. I. Chukovsky noted that there was nothing in it that would belong to Mandelstam, except for cigarettes. When the poet finally received an apartment (in 1933), B. Pasternak, who visited him, said when he left that now you can write poetry - there is an apartment. Osip Emilievich was furious at this. O. E. Mandelstam, whose biography is marked by many episodes of intransigence, cursed his apartment and even offered to return it to those to whom it was apparently intended: artists, honest traitors. It was the horror of realizing the price that was required for her.

Work at Moskovsky Komsomolets

Are you wondering what went on life path such a poet as Mandelstam? The biography by dates smoothly approached the 1930s in his life and work. N. Bukharin, the patron of Osip Emilievich in power circles, arranged him at the turn of the 1920s and 30s in the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets as a proofreader. This gave the poet and his wife at least a minimal livelihood. But Mandelstam refused to accept the "rules of the game" of the Soviet writers who served the regime. His extreme impulsiveness and emotionality greatly complicated Mandelstam's relationship with his colleagues. He was at the center of a scandal - the poet was accused of translation plagiarism. In order to save Osip Emilievich from the consequences of this scandal, in 1930 Bukharin organized a trip to Armenia for the poet, which made a great impression on him, and was also reflected in his work. In the new verses, hopeless fear and the last courageous despair are already more clearly heard. If Mandelstam in prose tried to get away from the storm hanging over him, now he finally accepted his share.

Awareness of the tragedy of one's fate

Awareness of the tragedy of his own fate, the choice he made, probably strengthened Mandelstam, gave a majestic, tragic pathos to his new works. It consists in opposing the personality of a free poet to the "age-beast". Mandelstam does not feel like a miserable victim, an insignificant person in front of him. He feels his equal. In a 1931 poem "For explosive prowess centuries to come", which was called "The Wolf" in the home circle, Mandelstam predicted both the impending exile to Siberia, and his own death, and poetic immortality. This poet understood much earlier than others.

The ill-fated poem about Stalin

Yakovlevna, the widow of Osip Emilievich, left two books of memoirs about her husband, which tell about the sacrificial feat of this poet. Mandelstam's sincerity often bordered on suicide. For example, in November 1933, he wrote a sharply satirical poem about Stalin, which he read to many of his acquaintances, including B. Pasternak. Boris Leonidovich was alarmed by the fate of the poet and declared that his poem was not a literary fact, but nothing more than an "act of suicide", which he could not approve of. Pasternak advised him not to read this work any more. However, Mandelstam could not remain silent. Biography, interesting facts from which we have just given, from this moment becomes truly tragic.

Surprisingly, Mandelstam's sentence was rather mild. At that time, people died for much less significant "offences." Stalin's resolution read only: "Isolate, but preserve." Mandelstam was sent into exile in the northern village of Cherdyn. Here Osip Emilievich, suffering from a mental disorder, even wanted to commit suicide. Friends helped again. Already losing influence, N. Bukharin wrote to Comrade Stalin for the last time that poets are always right, that history is on their side. After that, Osip Emilievich was transferred to Voronezh, in less harsh conditions.

Of course, his fate was sealed. However, in 1933, severely punishing him meant advertising a poem about Stalin and thus as if settling personal scores with the poet. And this would, of course, be unworthy of Stalin, the "father of peoples." Iosif Vissarionovich knew how to wait. He understood that there was a time for everything. In this case, he expected the great terror of 1937, in which Mandelstam, along with hundreds of thousands of other people, was destined to disappear without a trace.

Years of life in Voronezh

Voronezh sheltered Osip Emilievich, but hostilely sheltered him. However, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam did not stop fighting the despair that was steadily approaching him. His biography of these years is marked by many difficulties. He had no means of subsistence, they avoided meeting him, his further fate was unclear. Mandelstam felt with all his being how the "age-beast" was overtaking him. And Akhmatova, who visited him in exile, testified that in his room "fear and muse" were alternately on duty. The verses went on unceasingly, they demanded an exit. Memoirists testify that Mandelstam once rushed to a pay phone and began to read his new works to the investigator, to whom he was attached at that time. He said there was no one else to read. The poet's nerves were bare, in verse he splashed out his pain.

In Voronezh, from 1935 to 1937, three "Voronezh Notebooks" were created. For a long time, the works of this cycle were not published. They could not be called political, but even "neutral" verses were perceived as a challenge, since they were Poetry, unstoppable and uncontrollable. And for the authorities it is no less dangerous, since, according to I. Brodsky, "it shakes the whole lifestyle and not just the political system.

Return to the capital

A sense of imminent death permeated many of the poems of this period, as well as the works of Mandelstam in the 1930s as a whole. The term of the Voronezh exile expired in May 1937. Osip Emilievich spent another year in the vicinity of Moscow. He wanted to get permission to stay in the capital. However, the editors of magazines categorically refused not only to publish his poems, but also to talk to him. The poet was begging. He was helped at this time by friends and acquaintances: B. Pasternak, V. Shklovsky, V. Kataev, although they themselves had a hard time. Anna Akhmatova later wrote about 1938 that it was an "apocalyptic" time.

Arrest, exile and death

It remains for us to tell quite a bit about such a poet as Osip Mandelstam. His brief biography is marked by a new arrest, which took place on May 2, 1938. He was sentenced to five years hard labor. The poet was sent to Far East. He never returned from there. On December 27, 1938, near Vladivostok, in the Second River camp, the poet died.

We hope you would like to continue your acquaintance with such a great poet as Mandelstam. Biography, photo, creative way- all this gives some idea about him. However, only by referring to the works of Mandelstam, one can understand this person, feel the strength of his personality.

XX century brought unheard-of suffering to man, but even in these trials he taught him to value life, happiness: you begin to appreciate what is torn out of your hands.

Under these circumstances, the latent, secret, primordial property of poetry, without which all others lose their strength, manifested itself with renewed vigor. This property is the ability to evoke an idea of happiness in a person’s soul. This is how verses are arranged, such is the nature of verse speech.

Annensky, Kuzmin, Akhmatova, Mandelstam returned to the word its objective meaning, and to poetry - the materiality, colorfulness, volume of the world, its living warmth.

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam is a poet, prose writer, critic, translator, whose creative contribution to the development of Russian literature requires careful historical and literary analysis.

Osip Mandelstam was born in 1891 into a Jewish family. From his mother, Mandelstam inherited, along with a predisposition to heart disease and musicality, a heightened sense of the sounds of the Russian language.

Mandelstam recalls: “What did the family want to say? I don't know. She was tongue-tied from birth - and meanwhile she had something to say. Over me and over many of my contemporaries weighs the tongue-tiedness of birth. We learned not to speak, but to babble - and only by listening to the growing noise of the century and whitened by the foam of its crest, we found a language.

Mandelstam, being a Jew, chooses to be a Russian poet - not just "Russian-speaking", but precisely Russian. And this decision is not so self-evident: the beginning of the century in Russia is a time of rapid development of Jewish literature, both in Hebrew and Yiddish, and, to some extent, in Russian. The choice was made by Mandelstam in favor of Russian poetry and "Christian culture".

All Mandelstam's work can be divided into six periods:

1908 - 1911 - these are the "years of study" abroad and then in St. Petersburg, poems in the traditions of symbolism;

1912 - 1915 - St. Petersburg, acmeism, "material" poetry, work on "Stone";

1916 - 1920 - revolution and civil war, wanderings, outgrowth of acmeism, development of an individual manner;

1921 - 1925 - an interim period, a gradual departure from poetry;

1926 - 1929 - dead poetic pause, translations;

1930 - 1934 - a trip to Armenia, a return to poetry, "Moscow poems";

1935 - 1937 - the last, "Voronezh" poems.

The first, earliest, stage of Mandelstam's creative evolution is associated with his "study" from the Symbolists, with participation in the acmeist movement. At this stage, Mandelstam appears in the ranks of acmeist writers. But how obvious is his specialness in their midst! Not looking for ways to revolutionary circles, the poet came to an environment that was in many ways alien to him. He was probably the only acmeist who so clearly felt the lack of contact with the "sovereign world." Subsequently, in 1931, in the poem “I was only childishly connected with the sovereign world ...” Mandelstam said that in his youth he forcibly forced himself to “assimilate” in an alien literary circle, merged with the world, which did not give Mandelstam real spiritual values :

And I don't owe him a grain of my soul,

No matter how I tortured myself in someone else's likeness.

In the early poem “The cloudy air is damp and booming ...” it is directly said about alienation, dissociation, which oppresses many people in the “indifferent homeland”, - tsarist Russia:

I participate in the gloomy life

Where one to one is lonely!

This awareness of social loneliness gave rise to deeply individualistic moods in Mandelstam, led him to search for “quiet freedom” in individualistic being, to an illusory concept of a person’s self-delimitation from society:

Dissatisfied standing and quiet

I am the creator of my worlds…

(“The thin ashes are thinning…”)

Mandelstam, a sincere lyricist and a skilled master, finds extremely precise words here that define his state: yes, he is dissatisfied, but also quiet, humble and humble, his imagination draws him some illusory, fantasized world of peace and reconciliation. But the real world stirs his soul, hurts his heart, disturbs his mind and feelings. And hence, in his poems, the motives of dissatisfaction with reality and oneself are so widely “spilled” in their lines.

In this "denial of life", in this "self-abasement" and "self-flagellation", early Mandelstam has something in common with the early symbolists. Young Osip Mandelstam is also close to the early Symbolists with a sense of catastrophic modern world, expressed in the images of the abyss, the abyss surrounding its emptiness. However, unlike the symbolists, Mandelstam does not attach any ambiguous, polysemantic, mystical meanings to these images. It expresses a thought, a feeling, a mood in “unambiguous” images and comparisons, in exact words, sometimes acquiring the character of definitions. His poetic world is material, objective, sometimes “puppet”. In this one cannot help but feel the influence of those requirements that, in search of "overcoming symbolism", put forward pre-Acmeist and Acmeist theorists and poets - the requirements of "beautiful clarity" (M. Kuzmin), objectivity of details, materiality of images (S. Gorodetsky).

On lines like:

A little red wine

A little sunny May, -

And, breaking a thin biscuit,

The whiteness of the thinnest fingers, -

(“Unspeakable sadness…”)

Mandelstam is unusually close to M. Kuzmin, to the colorfulness and concreteness of details in his poems.

There was a time - the years 1912-1916 - when Mandelstam was perceived as an "orthodox" acmeist. The poet at that time himself contributed to such a perception of his literary position and creativity, behaved like a disciplined member of the association. But in fact, he did not share all the principles declared by the acmeists in their scenery. One can very clearly see the differences between him and such a poet of acmeism as N. Gumilyov was, comparing the work of both poets. Mandelstam was alien to the emphasized aristocracy of Gumilyov, his anti-humanist ideas, coldness, soulless rationalism of a number of his works. Not only politically - in relation to the war, revolution - Mandelstam parted ways with Gumilyov, but also creatively. As you know, Gumilyov, who claimed to overcome symbolism, its philosophy and poetics, capitulated to it, returned to symbolic mysticism and social pessimism. Mandelstam's development was different, the opposite: religiosity and mysticism were never characteristic of him, the path of his evolution was the way of overcoming the pessimistic worldview.

The literary sources of Mandelstam's poetry are rooted in Russian poetry of the 19th century, in Pushkin, Batyushkov, Baratynsky, Tyutchev.

The cult of Pushkin begins in the work of Mandelstam already on the pages of the book "Stone". The Petersburg theme is fanned with the "breath" of Pushkin's "The Bronze Horseman": here is admiration for the genius of Peter, here is the image of Pushkin's Eugene, sharply opposed to the "sovereign world", the image of pre-revolutionary, bourgeois-noble St. Petersburg:

A string of motors flies into the fog,

Proud, modest pedestrian,

Eccentric Eugene, he is ashamed of poverty,

Gasoline inhales and curses fate!

("Petersburg stanzas")

Tyutchev is also one of Mandelstam's favorite Russian poets, one of his teachers. In one of his early articles, "Morning of Acmeism," the author of "Stone" directly pointed out that the title of his first book was brought to life by Tyutchev's influence. “... Tyutchev’s stone that, “having rolled down from the mountain, lay down in the valley, torn off by itself or overthrown by hand” - there is a word, ”wrote Mandelstam.

Poet in love with national history and in his native Russian language, Osip Mandelstam, like his great teachers, was an excellent connoisseur and receiver of a number of the best traditions of world literature. He knew and loved ancient mythology well and generously used its motives and images, knew and loved the poets of ancient times - Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, Catullus.

In 1915 and 1916, distinct anti-tsarist and anti-war motifs appeared in the poetry of Osip Mandelstam. Censorship did not allow the poet to publish the 1915 poem "Palace Square", in which she rightfully saw a challenge to the Winter Palace, a double-headed eagle. In 1916, the poet wrote two anti-war poems, one of which appeared in print only in 1918. This poem "The Hellenes Gathered in War ..." is directed against the insidious, predatory policy of Great Britain. Another anti-war work - "The Menagerie" - was published after the revolution, in 1917. The demand for peace sounded in it expressed the mood of the broad masses of the people, as well as the call to curb the governments of the warring countries.

So even on the eve of the revolution, a social theme entered the work of Osip Mandelstam, solved on the basis of general democratic convictions and sentiments. Hatred for the “powerful world”, for the aristocracy, for the military was combined in the mind of the poet with hatred for the bourgeois governments of a number of belligerents European countries and to the domestic bourgeoisie. That is why Mandelstam took an ironic attitude towards the leaders of the Provisional Government, these enemies of peace, who stood for the continuation of the war "to a victorious end."

The historical experience of the war years, perceived by the sympathetic heart of the poet, prepared Mandelstam for a political break with the old world and the adoption of October. At the same time, the poet's disgust for the heart-cold intellectual elite, for snobbery also contributed to his departure from the acmeist group. The writers from the "Workshop of Poets" became spiritually alien to him. Morally devastated aesthetes caused him irritation and indignation.

“The October Revolution could not but affect my work, as it took away my “biography”, a sense of personal significance. I am grateful to her for putting an end to spiritual security and existence on cultural rent once and for all ... I feel like a debtor to the revolution ... ”, Mandelstam wrote in 1928.

Everything written by the poet in these lines was said with complete, with the utmost sincerity. Mandelstam was really burdened by the "biography" - the traditions of the family environment, which were alien to him. The revolution helped cut the fetters that fettered his spiritual impulses. The refusal to feel personal significance was not self-abasement, but that spiritual well-being that was characteristic of a number of intellectual writers (Bryusov, Blok, etc.) and expressed a willingness to sacrifice personal interests for the sake of the common good.

Such sentiments were expressed on the pages of the second book of the poet - the collection "Tristia", - in poems written during the revolution and civil war.

Compared with the book "Stone", the book "Tristia" represents a fundamentally new stage in Mandelstam's aesthetic development. The structure of his poems is still architectural, but the prototypes of his "architecture" now lie not in medieval Gothic, but in ancient Roman architecture, in Hellenistic architecture. This feature is also shown by the very motives of many poems, the motives of appeals to the cultures of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, to the search for a reflection of the Hellenistic traditions in Taurida, in the Crimea.

The poems included in the collection "Tristia" are emphatically classic, some of them even in their size, their poetic "gait": "A stream of golden honey flowed from a bottle ...", "Sisters - heaviness and tenderness, your signs are the same ...".

In "Stone" a person often appeared as a toy of fate, fate, "not real", a victim of an all-consuming emptiness. In "Tristia" a person is the center of the universe, a worker, a creator. A small, eight-line poem with the accuracy of words inherent in Mandelstam - "definitions" expresses the humanistic foundations of his worldview:

May the names of flowering cities

They caress the ear with the significance of the mortal.

It is not the city of Rome that lives among the ages,

And the place of man in the universe.

The kings are trying to take over

Priests justify wars

And without it worthy of contempt,

Like miserable rubbish, houses and altars.

This admiration for a person, faith in him, love for him, is also imbued with poems about St. Petersburg, created during the years of the civil war. These poems are tragic, Petersburg - Petrograd - Petropol seemed to Mandelstam a dying city, perishing "in beautiful poverty." And no longer words - "definitions", but words - metaphors, this time expressed Mandelstam's faith in man, immortal, like nature:

Everyone sings blessed wives native eyes,

All bloom immortal flowers.

(“In St. Petersburg we will meet again ...”)

The love theme occupies a small place in Mandelstam's lyrics. But she, too, in Tristia is essentially different from that in Stone. If in “Stone” the beloved is filled with sadness, remoteness from the world, incorporeality (the poem “Tenderer than tender ...”), then in “Tristia” he is earthly, carnal, and love itself, although painful, tragic, is earthly, carnal (poem "I'm on a par with others...").

Osip Mandelstam went through a certain path of development from "Stone" to "Tristia", he accepted the revolution, welcomed the new modernity, but, being brought up in the traditions of the idealist philosophy of history, did not comprehend its socialist content and character, and this, of course, became an obstacle to that. to open the pages of his works to new themes and new images born of a new era.

Meanwhile, revolutionary modernity entered the life of the country and the people more and more powerfully. Osip Mandelstam undoubtedly felt that his poetry, sincere and emotional, often turns out to be aloof from the present. More and more he began to think about the possibilities and ways of overcoming the well-known alienation of his poetry from modern life. There is no doubt that he seriously thought about his own spiritual growth, but this growth was hampered by the remnants of general democratic ideas and illusions, the overcoming of which was still not given to the poet with due fullness and thoroughness. He also thought about the linguistic "restructuring" of his lyrics, about the possibilities and ways of updating the language.

The poems of the first half of the twenties are marked by a desire to "simplify" the language, to "secularize" the word - in language, imagery, genre features and poetic structure, they differ significantly from the poems of the collection "Tristia". The renewal of Mandelstam's language went in different directions - to the utmost simplicity, to truly wonderful clarity, and to unexpected, "unprecedented", complicated comparisons and metaphorical constructions.

So, great simplicity and clarity, the simplicity of the simplest narration, song, romance:

Tonight, I won't lie

Waist up in melting snow

I was walking from someone else's stop,

I look - a hut, entered the senets -

Chernets drank tea with salt,

And a gypsy spoils with them.

Mandelstam, a poet with a heightened interest in history, in historical parallels, with a desire to think in broad historical generalizations, sometimes thinks intensely about the past, about the present, about the future, about the connections of the past with the future, about the relationship of modernity to the past and to the historical perspective.

In reflections on the present, Mandelstam the poet for the first time has such a clearly “formulated” theme of acute ideological conflicts. In the poem "January 1, 1924" she appears in the form of a strong, dramatic conflict. The poet feels like a prisoner of the dying 19th century, his “sick son” with a “lime layer” hardening in his blood. He feels lost in modernity, which has nurtured him - his now "aging son":

O clay life! O death of the age!

I'm afraid only he will understand you

In which is the helpless smile of a man,

who lost himself.

However, Mandelstam did not want to surrender to the "power of legend", to submit to the pressure of the past. He contrasts this fatal power, this heavy pressure, with the voice of conscience and loyalty to the oath that he gave to the new world that won the revolution:

I want to run from my doorstep.

Where? It is dark outside,

And, as if pouring salt on a paved road,

White conscience before me.

At the dawn of a new decade, the thirties, Mandelstam rushed into life. He made an extremely important trip to Armenia for him, which gave a plentiful "harvest" in his work - poetic and prosaic. A cycle of poems about Armenia appeared, as well as an essay novel "Journey to Armenia". These works became the great successes of the writer, and to this day they are read with loving attention.

A lot of things excited the poet in Armenia – its history, its ancient culture, its colors and its stones. But most of all, he was pleased with his meetings with people, with the people of the young Soviet republic.

Mandelstam did not dissemble, never in anything. His poetry more and more frankly expressed the state of his spiritual world. And she said that the surge of vivacity he experienced in Armenia was just a surge. But pretty soon the wave of cheerful feelings subsided, and the poet again plunged into painful, nervous thoughts about his attitude to the present, to the new century.

Arrival in Leningrad at the end of 1930 - arrival in the city of his childhood and youth, in the city of the revolution - caused the poet to have very different poems: both clear, enlightened, and bitter, mournful. The theme of calculation with the past sounded strongly in the poem "I was only childishly connected with the sovereign world ...". But a few weeks earlier, Mandelstam wrote the poem “I returned to my city, familiar to tears ...”, which expresses the feeling of a tragic connection with the past - a connection of emotional memory, where there was no room for the perception of the new, modern.

In the early 1930s, Mandelstam's poetry became the poetry of defiance, anger, indignation:

It's time for you to know, I'm also a contemporary,

I am a man of the era of Moskvoshveya, -

Look how my jacket is bulging

How can I walk and talk!

Try to tear me away from the century, -

I bet you - wring your neck!

In the middle of 1931, in the poem "Midnight in Moscow ..." Mandelstam again continues the conversation with the era. He again wrestles with the thought of what may not be understood by the new age. He writes about loyalty to democratic traditions.

Chur! Don't beg, don't complain, poof!

Don't whine!

Is it for the raznochintsy

Dry trampled boots,

Should I betray them now?

In November 1933, Mandelstam wrote poems against Stalin

We live, not feeling the country under us,

Our speeches are not heard for ten steps,

And where is enough for half a conversation,

They will remember the Kremlin highlander there ...

In her memoirs about the poet Mandelstam, Anna Andreevna Akhmatova cited a significant phrase he uttered in Moscow at the beginning of 1934: “Poems should now be civil” and read her his “seditious” poem about Stalin - “We live, not feeling the country under us ... ".

On May 13, 1934, Mandelstam was arrested and exiled to Cherdyn. The arrest had a very hard effect on Mandelstam, at times he experienced clouding of consciousness. Not recognizing and yet feeling every day that he is a “shadow” cast out from the world of people, the poet goes through his last temptation: to succumb to the illusory temptation to return to life. This is how “Ode to Stalin” appears. And yet, the work on the "Ode" could not but be a clouding of the mind and self-destruction of a genius.

The poem "If our enemies took me ..." was also conceived for the glory of Stalin under the influence of the ever-tightening noose around the neck of the still living poet. However, assuming to compose something like a laudatory ode, Mandelstam was carried away by the power of resistance and wrote a solemn oath in the name of Poetry and the people's Truth. And only the final looks in this context as a fastened and false addition:

If our enemies took me

And people stopped talking to me

If they took away everything in the world,

Rights to breathe and open doors

And to assert that being will be,

And that the people, as a judge, judge;

If they dared to keep me as a beast,

My food would be thrown on the floor,

I will not be silent, I will not drown out the pain,

And swinging the naked bell of the walls,

And awakening the enemy's darkness corner,

And I will lead my hand in the darkness with a plow,

And compressed into the ocean of fraternal eyes,

I will fall with the weight of all the harvest

With the conciseness of all the oath torn into the distance,

And in the depths of the guard night

Laborers will flare up the earth's eyes.

And a flock of fiery years will flash by,

Lenin will rustle with a ripe thunderstorm,

And on the earth that will avoid decay,

Stalin will awaken the mind and life.

In spite of the constant worldly disorder, in spite of the ever-developing nervous illness, the poet's ideological and aesthetic growth continued. Thoughts, feelings, and images accumulated, expressing not only Mandelstam's determination to be friends with the century, but also his real, inseparable spiritual connection with it.

The so-called "Voronezh notebooks" (1935-1937) are undoubtedly a major poetic phenomenon. Despite the incompleteness, fragmentation of a number of poems, the "notebooks" present us with high examples of heartfelt patriotic lyrics. Many of those noble thoughts and feelings that accumulated and grew in the mind and heart of Mandelstam received their poetic embodiment in the lines of the "Voronezh notebooks", which remained unknown to Soviet readers for a long time, until the 60s.

Confessional motifs, motifs of self-disclosure of the poet's spiritual world dominate in Voronezh poems. But at the same time, epic features, features of the appearance of modernity, illuminated by the author's attitude, appear in them much wider than before.

How much clearer, more definite, politically more specific became the poet's lyrical confessions:

I must live, breathing and growing...

("Stans")

In the face of the troubles that have befallen him, the sick poet retains strength and courage in order to declare in the same Stanzas:

And I'm not robbed, and not broken,

But just overreacted.

Like "The Word of the Shelf", my string is tight ...

In March 1937, ill, foreseeing his imminent death, the poet wrote about his friendship with life, about his devotion to people:

And when I die, having served,

Lifetime friend of all living,

To resound wider and higher

The answer of the sky in all my chest!

("I got lost in the sky - what should I do? ..")

May 2, 1938 re-arrest. Osip Mandelstam died in a camp near Vladivostok on December 27, 1938. Everything was over.

An epoch, a century expected more from Osip Mandelstam than he did - he knew about it, knew and was tormented by it. He did not manage to quickly part with all the "birthmarks" of the past. But everything that was written by him, everything was created honestly, with conviction, sincerely, with talent. Everything was written by a smart, quivering, searching master.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

1.M.L. Gasparov "Evolution of Mandelstam's Metric".

2. E.G. Gershtein "On Mandelstam's Civic Poetry".

3. Alexander Kushner "Rectifying sigh".

4. Alexander Dymshits "Notes on the work of O. Mandelstam."

"I enter the world..."

(creativity of O. Mandelstam)

Osip 1 Emilievich Mandelstam was born on January 3, 1891 in Warsaw, he spent his childhood and youth in St. Petersburg. Later, in 1937, Mandelstam wrote about the time of his birth:

I was born on the night of the second to the third of January in the ninety-one Unreliable year ... ("Poems about the unknown soldier")

Here "in the night" contains an ominous omen of the poet's tragic fate in the 20th century and serves as a metaphor for the entire 20th century, according to Mandelstam's definition, "the century-beast".

Mandelstam's memories of his childhood and youth are reserved and strict; he avoided revealing himself, commenting on himself and his poems. He was an early mature, or rather, a poet who had seen his light, and his poetic manner is distinguished by seriousness and rigor.

The little that we find in the poet's memoirs about his childhood, about the atmosphere that surrounded him, about the air that he had to breathe, is rather painted in gloomy tones:

From the pool of evil and viscous I grew up, rustling with a reed, And passionately, and languidly, and affectionately Breathing the Forbidden life. ("From the pool of evil and viscous...")

"Forbidden Life" is about poetry.

The Mandelstam family was, in his words, "difficult and confusing," and this was manifested with particular force (at least in the perception of Osip Emilievich himself) in the word, in speech. The speech "element" of the family was peculiar. Father, Emily Veniaminovich Mandelstam, a self-taught merchant, was completely devoid of a sense of language. In the book The Noise of Time, Mandelstam wrote: “Father had no language at all, it was tongue-tied and speechless ... A completely abstract, invented language, ornate and twisted self-taught speech, a bizarre Talmudic syntax, an artificial, not always agreed upon phrase.” The speech of the mother, Flora Osipovna, a music teacher, was different: "Clear and sonorous, great literary Russian speech; her vocabulary is poor and concise, the turns are monotonous - but this is a language, there is something fundamental and confident in it." From his mother, Mandelstam inherited, along with a predisposition to heart disease and musicality, a heightened sense of the Russian language, accuracy of speech.

In 1900-1907, Mandelstam studied at the Tenishevsky Commercial School, one of the best private educational institutions in Russia (V. Nabokov and V. Zhirmunsky studied there at one time).

After graduating from college, Mandelstam travels abroad three times: from October 1907 to summer 1908 he lives in Paris, from autumn 1909 to spring 1910 he studies Romance philology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, from July 21 to mid-October he lives in Zehlendorf, a suburb of Berlin. The echo of these meetings with Western Europe resounds in Mandelstam's poems right up to his last works.

The formation of Mandelstam's poetic personality was determined by his meeting with N. Gumilyov and A. Akhmatova. In 1911, Gumilyov returned to St. Petersburg from the Abyssinian expedition, and then all three often met at various literary evenings. Subsequently, many years after the execution of Gumilyov, Mandelstam wrote to Akhmatova that Nikolai Stepanovich was the only one who understood his poems and with whom he talks, conducts dialogues to this day. Mandelstam's attitude to Akhmatova is most clearly evidenced by his words: "I am a contemporary of Akhmatova." In order to publicly declare this during the years of the Stalinist regime, when the poetess was in disgrace, one had to be Mandelstam.

All three, Gumilyov, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, became the creators and most prominent poets of a new literary trend - acmeism. Biographers write that at first friction arose between them, because Gumilyov was despotic, Mandelstam was quick-tempered, and Akhmatova was wayward.

Mandelstam's first collection of poetry came out in 1913; it was published at his own expense 2 . It was assumed that it would be called "Sink", but the final name was chosen differently - "Stone". The name is quite in the spirit of acmeism. Acmeists strove, as it were, to rediscover the world, to give everything a clear and courageous name, devoid of an elegiac foggy flair, like the Symbolists. Stone is a natural material, durable and solid, eternal material in the hands of a master. For Mandelstam, stone is the primary building material of spiritual culture, and not just material.

In 1911-1917, Mandelstam studied at the Romano-Germanic department of the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University.

Mandelstam's attitude to the 1917 revolution was complex. However, any attempts by Mandelstam to find his place in the new Russia ended in failure and scandal. The second half of the 1920s for Mandelstam were years of crisis. The poet was silent. There were no new verses. In five years, none.

In 1929, the poet turns to prose, writes a book called "The Fourth Prose". It is not large in volume, but it fully spilled out that pain and contempt of the poet for opportunistic writers ("members of MASSOLIT"), which had accumulated for many years in Mandelstam's soul. "The Fourth Prose" gives an idea of the poet's character - impulsive, explosive, quarrelsome. Mandelstam very easily made enemies for himself, he did not conceal his assessments and judgments. From the "Fourth Prose": "I divide all works of world literature into permitted and written without permission. The first are scum, the second are stolen air. I want to spit in the face of writers who write pre-authorized things, I want to beat them on the head with a stick and put everyone at the table in the Herzen House, placing a glass of policeman's tea in front of each and giving each one an analysis of Gornfeld's urine.

I would forbid these writers to marry and have children - after all, children must continue for us, for us the most important thing to finish - while fathers are sold to the pockmarked devil for three generations to come.

One can imagine what intensity the mutual hatred reached: the hatred of those whom Mandelstam rejected and those who rejected Mandelstam. The poet always, almost all the post-revolutionary years, lived in extreme conditions, and in the 1930s - in anticipation of imminent death. There were not so many friends, admirers of his talent, but they were.

Mandelstam early realized himself as a poet, as creative person, which is destined to leave its mark on the history of literature and culture, moreover, "to change something in its structure and composition" (from a letter to Yu.N. Tynyanov). Mandelstam knew his worth as a poet, and this manifested itself, for example, in an insignificant episode that V. Kataev describes in his book "My Diamond Crown":

“Having met the nutcracker (i.e. Mandelstam) on the street, one writer I knew very friendly asked the nutcracker a traditional secular question:

What's new you wrote?

To which the nutcracker suddenly, quite unexpectedly, just fell off the chain:

If I wrote something new, then all of Russia would have known about it for a long time! And you are ignorant and vulgar! - shouted the nutcracker, shaking with indignation, and defiantly turned his back on the tactless novelist.

Mandelstam was not adapted to everyday life, to settled life. The concept of a house, a house-fortress, very important, for example, in the artistic world of M. Bulgakov, was not significant for Mandelstam. For him, the house is the whole world, and at the same time in this world he is homeless.

K.I. Chukovsky recalled Mandelstam in the early 1920s, when he, like many other poets and writers, received a room in the Petrograd House of Arts: "There was nothing in the room that belonged to him, except for cigarettes - not a single personal item. And then I I understood its most striking feature - non-existence. In 1933, Mandelstam finally received an apartment - a two-room apartment! B. Pasternak, who visited him, said on leaving: "Well, now there is an apartment - you can write poetry." Mandelstam was furious. He cursed the apartment and offered to return it to those for whom it was intended: honest traitors, artists. It was horror before the payment that was required for the apartment.

Consciousness of the choice made, awareness of the tragedy of his fate, apparently, strengthened the poet, gave him strength, gave a tragic, majestic pathos to his new poems 4 . This pathos lies in the opposition of a free poetic personality to its age - the "age-beast". The poet does not feel himself insignificant before him, a miserable victim, he realizes himself equal:

... The age-wolfhound throws itself on my shoulders, But I'm not a wolf by my blood, Stuff me better, like a hat, into the sleeve of the Hot fur coat of the Siberian steppes, Take me into the night, where the Yenisei flows, And the pine reaches the star, Because I am not a wolf by my blood And only an equal will kill me. March 17-28, 1931 ("For the explosive valor of the coming centuries...")

In the home circle, this poem was called "The Wolf". In it, Osip Emilievich predicted both his future exile to Siberia, and his physical death, and his poetic immortality. He understood much earlier than others.

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam, whom E. Yevtushenko called "the greatest poet's widow in the 20th century," left two books of memoirs about Mandelstam - about his sacrificial feat of the poet. From these memoirs, one can understand, "even without knowing a single line of Mandelstam, that these pages recall a really great poet: in view of the quantity and strength of evil directed against him."

Mandelstam's sincerity bordered on suicide. In November 1933, he wrote a sharply satirical poem about Stalin:

We live, not feeling the country beneath us, Our speeches are not heard ten paces away, And where there is enough for half a conversation, - They will remember the Kremlin highlander. His thick fingers, like worms, are fat, And his words, like pood weights, are true. The cockroach's whiskers laugh, And its tops shine. And around him is a rabble of thin-necked leaders, He plays with the services of half-humans. Who whistles, who meows, who whimpers, He alone babachet and pokes. As a horseshoe forges a decree for a decree - To whom in the groin, to whom in the forehead, to whom in the eyebrow, to whom in the eye. Whatever his execution, then raspberries And the wide chest of Ossetians.

And Osip Emilievich read this poem to many acquaintances, including B. Pasternak. Anxiety for the fate of Mandelstam prompted Pasternak to say in response: “What you read to me has nothing to do with literature, poetry. This is not a literary fact, but an act of suicide, which I do not approve of and in which I do not want to take part. You tell me didn’t read anything, I didn’t hear anything, and I ask you not to read them to anyone.” Yes, Pasternak is right, the value of this poem is not in its literary merits. At the level of the best poetic discoveries here are the first two lines:

We live without smelling the country beneath us, Our speeches are not heard ten paces away...

Surprisingly, Mandelstam's sentence was rather lenient. People at that time died for much smaller "offences". Stalin's resolution only read: "Isolate, but preserve," and Osip Mandelstam was sent into exile in the distant northern village of Cherdyn. In Cherdyn, Mandelstam, suffering from a mental disorder, tried to commit suicide. Friends helped again. N. Bukharin, already losing his influence, wrote to Stalin for the last time: "Poets are always right; history is on their side"; Mandelstam was transferred to less harsh conditions - to Voronezh.

Of course, Mandelstam's fate was sealed. But to severely punish him in 1933 would have meant to advertise that ill-fated poem and, as it were, to settle the personal scores of the tyrant with the poet, which would be clearly not worthy of the "father of nations." There is a time for everything, Stalin knew how to wait, in this case - the great terror of 1937, when Mandelstam was destined to disappear without a trace along with hundreds of thousands of others.

Voronezh sheltered the poet, but hostilely sheltered him. From Voronezh notebooks (unpublished during lifetime):

Let me go, give me back, Voronezh, - Will you drop me or will you miss me, Will you drop me or will you return - Voronezh is a whim, Voronezh is a raven, a knife! 1935 Voronezh This, what street? 5 Mandelstam street. What a damn name! - No matter how you twist it, it sounds crooked, not straight. There was little linearity in it. He was not of a lily disposition, And that is why this street, Or rather, this pit, is called by the name of This Mandelstam. April, 1935 Voronezh

The poet fought with the approaching despair: there was no means of subsistence, they avoided meeting him, his further fate was unclear, and with all his being as a poet, Mandelstam felt: the “age-beast” was overtaking him. A. Akhmatova, who visited Mandelstam in exile, testifies:

And in the room of the disgraced poet Fear and the muse are on duty in their turn. And the night is coming, Which does not know the dawn. ("Voronezh")

"Fear and muse are on duty..." Poems went on unstoppably, "irrecoverably" (as M. Tsvetaeva said at the same time - in 1934), they demanded an exit, demanded to be heard. Memoirists testify that once Mandelstam rushed to a pay phone and read new poems to the investigator to whom he was attached: "No, listen, I have no one else to read!" The poet's nerves were exposed, and he splashed out his pain in verse.

The poet was in a cage, but he was not broken, he was not deprived of the inner secret freedom that lifted him above everything even in prison:

Depriving me of the seas, takeoff and expansion And giving my foot the emphasis of violent land, What have you achieved? Brilliant calculation: You couldn't take away the moving lips.

The poems of the Voronezh cycle remained unpublished for a long time. They were not, as they say, political, but even "neutral" poems were perceived as a challenge, because they were Poetry, uncontrollable and unstoppable. And no less dangerous for the authorities, because "the song is a form of linguistic disobedience, and its sound calls into question much more than a specific political system: it shakes the whole way of life" (I. Brodsky).

Mandelstam's poems stood out sharply against the background of the general flow of official literature of the 1920s and 30s. Time demanded the verses he needed, like the famous poem by E. Bagritsky "TVS" (1929):

A century is waiting on the pavement, Focused like a sentry. Go - and do not be afraid to stand next to him. Your loneliness to match the age. You look around - and there are enemies around; Stretch out your hands - and there are no friends. But if he says, "Lie," lie. But if he says, "Kill," kill.

Mandelstam understood: he could not stand "next to the century", his choice was different - opposition to the cruel time.

Poems from Voronezh notebooks, like many of Mandelstam's poems of the 1930s, are imbued with a sense of imminent death, sometimes they sound like incantations, alas, unsuccessful:

I haven't died yet, I'm not alone yet, As long as with a beggar-girlfriend I enjoy the greatness of the plains And darkness, and hunger, and blizzard. In beautiful poverty, in luxurious poverty I live alone - calm and comforted - Blessed are those days and nights, And the mellifluous work is sinless. Unfortunate is he who, like his shadow, Is frightened by barking and the wind mows down, And poor is he who, half-dead himself, Asks for alms from the shadow. January 1937 Voronezh

In May 1937, the Voronezh exile expired. The poet spent another year in the vicinity of Moscow, trying to obtain permission to live in the capital. Magazine editors were even afraid to talk to him. He begged. Friends and acquaintances helped: V. Shklovsky, B. Pasternak, I. Ehrenburg, V. Kataev, although it was not easy for them themselves. Subsequently, A. Akhmatova wrote about 1938: "The time was apocalyptic. Trouble was on the heels of all of us. The Mandelstams had no money. They had absolutely nowhere to live. Osip breathed badly, caught the air with his lips."

On May 2, 1938, before sunrise, as was customary then, Mandelstam was arrested again, sentenced to 5 years of hard labor and sent to Western Siberia, to the Far East, from where he would never return. The poet’s letter to his wife has been preserved, in which he wrote: “Health is very poor, exhausted to the extreme, emaciated, almost unrecognizable, but I don’t know if it makes sense to send things, food and money. Try it all the same. I’m very cold without things” .

The poet's death overtook him in the transit camp Vtoraya Rechka near Vladivostok on December 27, 1938... One of the poet's last poems:

The mounds of people's heads go into the distance, I decrease there - they won't notice me anymore, But in the books of tenderness and in the games of the children I will rise again to say that the sun is shining. 1936-1937?

M. Gorka

Introduction

The work of O.E. Mandelstam is a rare example of the unity of poetry and fate. Life in poetry is what biography was subordinated to, acquiring true significance only in the light of aesthetic eternity. Moreover, the very fate of Mandelstam becomes a symbol of the time and acquires a generalizing meaning. Being under constant suspicion "a renegade in the people's family", living in fear of arrest and eventually crushed by the ruthless machine of suppression of freedom, O. Mandelstam really deserved the right to "speak for everyone." His work is interesting as an eyewitness to the events, who shared the pain of his country to the end and defended the right to freedom of creativity in the face of imminent death.

O. Mandelstam is a poet who reflected in his heritage the true searches of the 20th century. In his lyrics, the modernist trend is combined with the classic style, themes, and motives. The most complex poet, deep thinker, atypical prose writer, Mandelstam will never cease to be relevant.

Despite the abundance of works on Mandelstam's work that have appeared over the past fifteen years, he still remains a rather mysterious figure. Understanding his work requires a certain key, and many poems are still not "deciphered". Particularly relevant for study is the concept of Mandelstam's creativity, multifaceted and truly unique. Her research can shed light on many difficult-to-interpret semantic passages in Mandelstam's works.

The concept of Mandelstam's creativity in its depth and unusualness is one of the most striking in Russian literature of the 20th century. It is of particular interest for research due to the fact that it occupies a central place in the worldview and artistic system of Mandelstam.

The creative heritage of O. Mandelstam, in all its depth and multidimensionality, does not seem to be fully and comprehensively studied. At the moment, more questions arise in Mandelyaitamology than answers are given. Until now, there are many ambiguities related to the lack of sources: they relate to the facts of the poet's biography (especially his stay in the camp), the establishment of the final version of many poems. At present, O. Mandelstam's archive is kept at Princeton University in the USA, which creates additional difficulties for studying his work.

Life and work of O.E. Mandelstam

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam is a poet, prose writer, critic, translator, whose creative contribution to the development of Russian literature requires careful historical and literary analysis.

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam was born on January 3 (15), 1891 in Warsaw in the family of a businessman who never managed to create a fortune. But St. Petersburg became the hometown for the Poet: here he grew up, graduated from one of the best in Russia at that time, the Tenishevsky School. Here he survived the revolution of 1905. It was perceived as "the glory of the century" and a matter of valor. Mandelstam, being a Jew, chooses to be a Russian poet - not just "Russian-speaking", but Russian. And this decision is not so self-evident: the beginning of the century in Russia is a time of rapid development of Jewish literature, both in Hebrew and Yiddish, and, to some extent, in Russian. The choice was made by Mandelstam in favor of Russian poetry and "Christian culture".

O. E. Mandelstam.

Voronezh. 1935

He was pushed to poetry by the lessons of the symbolist V.V. Gipplus, who read Russian literature at the school. Then Mandelstam studied at the Romano-Germanic department of the philological faculty of the university. Shortly thereafter, he left the city on the Neva. Mandelstam will still return here, "to a city familiar to tears, to veins, to children's swollen glands." Meetings with the "Northern capital", "Transparent Petropolis", where "the narrow canals under the ice are even blacker", will be frequent in the poems generated by the feeling of involvement of one's fate in the fate hometown, and bow before its beauty.

All Mandelstam's work can be divided into six periods:

1908 - 1911 - these are the "years of study" abroad and then in St. Petersburg, poems in the traditions of symbolism;

1912 - 1915 - St. Petersburg, acmeism, "material" poetry, work on "Stone";

1916 - 1920 - revolution and civil war, wanderings, outgrowth of acmeism, development of an individual manner;

1921 - 1925 - an interim period, a gradual departure from poetry;

1926 - 1929 - dead poetic pause, translations;

1930 - 1934 - a trip to Armenia, a return to poetry, "Moscow poems";

1935 - 1937 - the last, "Voronezh" poems.

And I don't owe him a grain of my soul,

No matter how I tortured myself in someone else's likeness.

In an early poem, “The cloudy air is damp and booming ...” it is directly said about alienation, dissociation, which oppresses many people in the “indifferent homeland”, - tsarist Russia:

I participate in the gloomy life

Where one to one is lonely!

Dissatisfied standing and quiet

I am the creator of my worlds...

(“The thin ashes are thinning…”)

Mandelstam, a sincere lyricist and a skilled master, finds here extremely precise words that define his state: yes, he is dissatisfied, but also quiet, humble and humble, his imagination draws for him some illusory, fantasized world of peace and reconciliation. But the real world stirs his soul, hurts his heart, disturbs his mind and feelings. And hence, in his poems, the motives of dissatisfaction with reality and oneself are so widely “spilled” in their lines.

In this "denial of life", in this "self-abasement" and "self-flagellation", early Mandelstam has something in common with the early symbolists. Young Osip Mandelstam is also close to the early Symbolists with a sense of the catastrophic nature of the modern world, expressed in the images of the abyss, the abyss surrounding its emptiness. However, unlike the symbolists, Mandelstam does not attach any ambiguous, polysemantic, mystical meanings to these images. It expresses a thought, a feeling, a mood in “unambiguous” images and comparisons, in exact words, sometimes acquiring the character of definitions. His poetic world is material, objective, sometimes “puppet”. In this one cannot help but feel the influence of those requirements that, in search of "overcoming symbolism", put forward pre-Acmeist and Acmeist theorists and poets - the requirements of "beautiful clarity" (M. Kuzmin), objectivity of details, materiality of images (S. Gorodetsky).

On lines like:

A little red wine

A little sunny May, -

And, breaking a thin biscuit,

The whiteness of the thinnest fingers, -

(“Unspeakable sadness…”)

Mandelstam is unusually close to M. Kuzmin, to the colorfulness and concreteness of details in his poems. In 1910, the "crisis of symbolism" becomes indisputable - the exhaustion political system. In 1911, young poets from the students of symbolism, wanting to look for new ways, form the "Workshop of Poets" - an organization chaired by N. Gumilyov and S. Gorodetsky. In 1912, within the Workshop of Poets, a core of six people was formed who called themselves acmeists. These were N. Gumilyov, S. Gorodetsky, A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam, M. Zenkevich and V. Narbut. More dissimilar poets could hardly be imagined. The group lasted two years and broke up with the outbreak of World War II; but Akhmatova and Mandelstam continued to feel like "Acmeists" until the end of their days, and among literary historians the word "Acmeism" increasingly began to mean a combination of both creative features these two poets.

Acmeism for Mandelstam is "the complicity of beings in a conspiracy against emptiness and non-existence. Love the existence of a thing more than the thing itself and your being more than yourself - this is the highest commandment of acmeism." And the second is the creation of timeless art.

It was very important for Osip Emilievich to feel himself in a circle of like-minded people, even if it was a very narrow one. He flashed in the Workshop of Poets at discussions and exhibitions, in the bohemian cellar "Stray Dog". Thrown up crest, solemnity, childishness, enthusiasm, poverty and constant living on loan - this is how he was remembered by his contemporaries. In 1913 he printed a book of poems, in 1916 it was republished, doubled in size. Of the early poems, the book included only a small part - not about "eternity, but about the sweet and insignificant." The book was published under the title "Stone". Architectural poetry is the core of Mandelstam's "Stone". It is there that the acmeic ideal is expressed as a formula:

But the more attentively, the stronghold of Notre-Dame,

I studied your monster ribs

The more often I thought: from the gravity of the unkind

And someday I will create something beautiful.

The last poems of "Stone" were written already at the beginning of the World War. Like everyone else, Mandelstam met the war enthusiastically, like everyone else, he was disappointed a year later.

He accepted the revolution unconditionally, linking with it the idea of the beginning of a new era - the era of the establishment of social justice, a genuine renewal of life.

Well, let's try: huge, clumsy

Squeaky steering wheel.

The earth is floating. Take heart, men

Like a plow, dividing the ocean.

We will remember in the cold of life,

That the earth cost us ten heavens.

In the winter of 1919, an opportunity opens up to travel to the less hungry south; he leaves for a year and a half. He then devoted his first trip to the essays "Theodosius". In essence, it was then that the question was decided for him: to emigrate or not to emigrate. He did not emigrate. And about those who preferred emigration, he wrote in an ambiguous poem "Where the night anchors ...": "Where are you flying? Why have you fallen away from the tree of life? Bethlehem is alien and terrible to you, And you have not seen a manger ..."

In the spring of 1922, Mandelstam returned from the south and settled in Moscow. With him is his young wife, Nadezhda Yakovlevna. Osip Emilievich and Nadezhda Yakovlevna were completely inseparable. She was on a par with her husband in intelligence, education, and tremendous spiritual strength. She, of course, was a moral support for Osip Emilievich. His difficult tragic fate became her fate. She herself took on this cross and carried it in such a way that it seemed that it could not be otherwise. "Osip loved Nadia incredibly and implausibly," said Anna Akhmatova.

In the autumn of 1922, a small book of new poems by Tristia was published in Berlin. (Mandelstam wanted to call it "New Stone".) In 1923 it was republished in a modified form in Moscow under the title "Second Book" (and with a dedication to Nadia Khazina). The verses of "Tristy" are sharply unlike the verses of "Stone". This is the new second poetics of Mandelstam.

In the poem "On the Sledges ..." the theme of death replaced the theme of love. In the verses about your favorite voice on the phone ("Your wonderful pronunciation ...") there are unexpected lines: "let them say: love is winged, - death is winged a hundred times." The theme of death came to Mandelstam also from his own spiritual experience: in 1916 his mother died. An enlightening conclusion is only the poem "Sisters - heaviness and tenderness ...": life and death are a cycle, a rose is born from the earth and goes into the earth, and it leaves the memory of its single existence in art.

But much more often and more disturbingly, Mandelstam writes not about the death of a person, but about the death of the state. This poetics was a response to the catastrophic events of war and revolution. Three works sum up this revolutionary period of Mandelstam's work - three and one more. The prologue is a small poem "Century":

My age, my beast, who can

look into your pupils

And glue with his blood

Two centuries of vertebrae?

The spine of the century was broken, the connection of times was interrupted, and this threatens with death not only for the old century, but also for the newborn.

Of Mandelstam's contemporaries, perhaps only Andrei Platonov could already then feel just as keenly the tragedy of the era when the foundation pit that was being prepared for the construction of the majestic building of socialism became a grave for many working there. Among the poets, Mandelstam was perhaps the only one who could so early consider the danger that threatens a person who is completely subjugated by time. “A century-wolfhound throws itself on my shoulders, But why am I not a wolf by my blood ...” What happens to a person in this era? Osip Emilievich did not want to separate his fate from the fate of the people, the country, and finally, from the fate of his contemporaries. He spoke about it insistently and loudly:

It's time for you to know: I'm also a contemporary,

I am a man of the Moskvoshvey era,

See how my jacket is bulging,

How can I walk and talk!

Try to tear me away from the century! -

I bet you break your neck!

In life, Mandelstam was neither a wrestler nor a fighter. He was aware of ordinary human feelings, and among them - the feeling of fear. But, as the clever and venomous V. Khodasevich noted, the poet coexisted "hare cowardice with almost heroic courage." As for the verses, they reveal only that property of the poet's nature, which is named by the latter. The poet was not a courageous person in the common sense of the word, but stubbornly repeated:

Chur! Do not ask, do not complain! Hush!

Don't whine!

Is it for the raznochintsy

The dry trampled boots, so that I now betray them?

We'll die like foot soldiers

But let us not glorify theft, day labor, or lies!

However, it is in vain to look for a uniform attitude to the events of 1917 in Mandelstam's poetry. And in general, certain political opinions are rare among poets: they perceive reality too in their own way, with a special flair. Mandelstam considered inconsistency to be an indispensable property of lyrics.

Between 1917 and 1925, we can hear several contradictory voices in Mandelstam's poetry: here are fatal forebodings, and the courageous acceptance of the "creaky steering wheel", and an increasingly aching longing for a bygone time and a golden age.

In the first poem, inspired by the February events, Mandelstam resorts to the medium of a historical symbol: collective portrait Decembrist, combining the features of an ancient hero, a German romantic and a Russian master, is undoubtedly a tribute to the bloodless revolution:

To this the testimony of the pagan Senate -

These things don't die.

But there is already a hint of concern for the future:

About the sweet liberty of citizenship!

But victims don't want blind skies:

Rather work and constancy.

This uneasy feeling was destined to be justified soon. The death of the Social Revolutionary, Commissar Linde, who was killed by a crowd of rebellious Cossacks, inspired Mandelstam to write angry verses, where the "October temporary worker" Lenin, preparing the "yoke of violence and malice", is contrasted with the images of pure heroes - Kerensky (Like Christ!) and Linda, "a free citizen, guided by Psychia."

And if for others enthusiastic people

Wreaths knock down gold -

Bless you in a distant hell will descend

Pillars light Russia.

Akhmatova, unlike most poets, was not for a moment tempted by the intoxication of freedom: behind the "merry, fiery March" (Z. Gippius), she foresaw the fateful outcome of a hangover. Addressing the contemporary Kasandra, Mandelstam exclaims:

And in December of the seventeenth year

We lost everything, loving ... -

And, in turn, becoming a herald of disasters, predicts the future tragic fate"Tsarskoye Selo merry sinner":

Someday in the small capital,

At the Scythian holiday, on the banks of the Neva,

At the sounds of a disgusting ball

They will tear the scarf from the beautiful head.

Mandelstam refuses to passively perceive the revolution: he, as it were, gives his consent to it, but without illusions. Political tonality - however, with Mandelstam it always changes. Lenin is no longer an "October temporary worker", but a "people's leader who, in tears, takes upon himself the fatal burden" of power. The ode serves as a continuation of the lament over Petersburg, it reproduces the dynamic image of a ship going to the bottom, but also answers it. Following the example of Pushkin's "Feast during the Plague", the poet builds his poem on the contrast of unthinkable glorification:

Let us glorify, brothers, the twilight of freedom, -

Great twilight year.

Let us glorify the power of the twilight burden,

Her unbearable oppression.

The glorious is glorified. The rising sun is invisible: it is hidden by the swallows, bound "in the fighting legions", "the forest is snaring" means the abolition of freedoms. The central image of the "time ship" is dual, it goes to the bottom, while the earth continues to swim. Mandelstam takes "a huge clumsy, creaky turn of the helm" out of "compassion for the state", as he later explains, out of solidarity with this land, when it would cost "ten heavens" to save it.

Despite this duality and vagueness, the ode introduces a new dimension to Russian poetry: an active attitude towards the world, regardless of the political setting.

Having reduced this calculation over time, he falls silent: after "January 1" - four poems in two years, and then a five-year silence. He switched to prose: in 1925, the memoirs "The Noise of Time" and "Theodosius" appeared (also settling scores over time), in 1928 - the story "Egyptian Mark". The style of this prose continues the style of poetry: the same multiplicity, the same ultimate figurative load of each word.

Since 1924 the poet has been living in Leningrad, since 1928 in Moscow. You have to earn a living by translating: 19 books in 6 years, not counting the editors. Trying to save himself from this exhausting work, he leaves to work for the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper. But it turns out to be even harder.

With the return to poetry, Mandelstam regained a sense of personal significance. In the winter of 1932-33, several of his author's evenings were held, the "old intelligentsia" received him with honor; Pasternak said: "I envy your freedom." For ten years, Osip Emilievich aged very much and seemed to young listeners to be a "gray-bearded patriarch." With the help of Bukharin, he receives a pension and concludes an agreement for a two-volume collected works (which never came out).

But this only emphasized its incompatibility with totalitarian regime in literature. Rare luck - getting an apartment - causes him to rush to Nekrasov's rebellion, because apartments are given only to opportunists. His nerves are all in suspense, in verses they collide “I want to live to death” and “I don’t know why I live,” he says: “Now every poem is written as if tomorrow is death.” But he remembers: the death of an artist is "the highest act of his creativity," he once wrote about this in Scriabin and Christianity. The impetus was the confluence of three circumstances in 1933. In the summer in the Old Crimea, he saw a pestilence, a consequence of collectivization, and this stirred up the Socialist-Revolutionary love of the people.

Now, in November 1933, Osip Mandelstam wrote a small but bold poem, from which his martyr's journey through exiles and camps began.

We live, not feeling the country under us,

Our speeches are not heard for ten steps,

And where is enough for half a conversation, -

There they will remember the Kremlin mountaineer

His thick fingers, like hearts, are fat,

And the words, like pood weights, are true.

Cockroaches are laughing mustaches,

And his bootlegs shine.

And around him is a rabble of thin-necked leaders,

He plays with the services of demihumans.

Who whistles, who meows, who whimpers,

He's just babbling and poking.

Like a horseshoe bush for a decree decree -

Who in the groin, who in the forehead, who in the eyebrow, who in the eye.

Whatever his execution, then raspberries

And the broad chest of an Ossetian.

He reads this epigram on Stalin under great secrecy to no less than fourteen persons. "This is suicide," Pasternak told him, and he was right. It was a voluntary choice of death. Anna Akhmatova remembered for the rest of her life how Mandelstam soon after told her: "I am ready for death." On the night of May 13-14, Osip Emilievich was arrested.

Friends and relatives of the poet realized that there was nothing to hope for. Osip Mandelstam said that from the moment of his arrest he had been preparing for execution all the time: "After all, this happens with us for lesser reasons." The investigator directly threatened to shoot not only him, but also all his accomplices. (That is, those to whom Mandelstam read the poem).

And suddenly a miracle happened.

Not only was Mandelstam not shot, but he was not even sent "to the channel." He escaped with a relatively easy exile to Cherdyn, where his wife was allowed to go with him. And soon this link was canceled. The Mandelstams were allowed to settle anywhere except in the twelve largest cities. Osip Emilievich and Nadezhda Konstantinovna named Voronezh at random.

The reason for the "miracle" was Stalin's phrase: "Isolate, but preserve."

Nadezhda Yakovlevna believes that Bukharin's efforts had their effect here. After receiving a note from Bukharin, Stalin called Pasternak. Stalin wanted to get from him a qualified opinion on the real value of the poet Osip Mandelstam. He wanted to know how Mandelstam was listed on the poetic exchange, how he was valued in his professional environment.

Mandelstam tells his wife: "Poetry is respected only here. They kill for it. Only here. Nowhere else..."

Stalin's respect for poets was manifested not only in the fact that poets were killed. He perfectly understood that the opinion of his descendants about him would largely depend on what poets write about him.

Upon learning that Mandelstam was considered a major poet, he decided not to kill him for the time being. He understood that the action of poetry cannot be stopped by killing a poet. To kill a poet is nothing. Stalin was smarter. He wanted to force Mandelstam to write other poems. Poems glorifying Stalin.

Poems glorifying Stalin were written by many poets. But Stalin needed Mandelstam to sing him.

Because Mandelstam was a "stranger". The opinion of "strangers" was very high for Stalin. Being himself an unsuccessful poet, in this area Stalin was especially unconsciously ready to listen to the opinion of the authorities. It was not for nothing that he so persistently harassed Pasternak: "But he is a master, isn't he? A master?" The answer to that question was everything for him. A great poet meant a great master. And if the master, then, will be able to glorify "at the same level of skill" that he exposed.

Mandelstam understood Stalin's intentions. Driven to despair, driven into a corner, he decided to try to save his life at the cost of a few forced lines. He decided to write the "ode to Stalin" expected from him.

Here is how Nadezhda Yakovlevna recalls this: “There was a square table by the window in the dressmaker’s room, which served for everything in the world. Osip, first of all, took possession of the table and laid out poems and paper ... and he needed paper only at the very end of the work. Every morning he sat down at the table and picked up a pencil: a writer as a writer¼ But before half an hour passed, he jumped up and began to curse himself for his lack of skill. "

As a result, the long-awaited "Ode" was born, ending with such a solemn ending:

And six times I am conscious of the coast

Witness of slow labor, struggle and harvest,

His great path through the taiga

And Lenin's October - until the fulfillment of the oath.

¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼

There is no truer truth than the sincerity of a fighter:

For honor and love, for valor and steel.

There is a glorious name for the strong lips of a reader -

We hear him and we caught him.

It would seem that Stalin's calculation was fully justified. Poems have been written. Now Mandelstam could be killed. But Stalin was wrong.

Mandelstam wrote poems glorifying Stalin. Nevertheless, Stalin's plan suffered a complete collapse. To write such poems, one did not have to be Mandelstam. To get such verses, it was not worth playing all this complicated game.

Mandelstam was not a master. He was a poet. He wove his poetic fabric not from words. He couldn't do this. His poems were woven from other material.

An involuntary witness to the birth of almost all of his poems (unwitting, because Mandelstam never had either a “study”, or even a kitchenette, a closet where he could retire). Nadezhda Yakovlevna testifies:

"The poems begin like this: in the corners, an annoying, at first unformed, and then an accurate, but still wordless musical phrase sounds. I have seen more than once how Osip tries to get rid of prv, shake it off, leave. like a drop of water that fell into the ear while bathing. I got the impression that poetry exists before they are composed. (Osip Mandelstam never said that poetry was "written". He first "composed", then wrote it down.) the process of composing consists in intense capture and manifestation of an already existing and unknown from where transforming harmonic and semantic unity, gradually embodied in words.

To try to write poems glorifying Stalin meant for Mandelstam, first of all, to find somewhere at the very bottom of his soul at least some kind of support for this feeling.

In "Ode" not entirely dead, faceless lines. There are also those where an attempt at glorification seems to have even succeeded:

He hung from the podium as if from a mountain

In the mounds of heads. The debtor is stronger than the claim.

Powerful eyes are decidedly kind,

A thick eyebrow shines close to someone¼

These lines seem to be alive, because an artificial grafting of living flesh has been made to their dead island. This tiny piece of living tissue is the phrase "bumps of heads." Nadezhda Yakovlevna recalls that, painfully trying to compose "Ode", Mandelstam repeated: "Why, when I think about him, all the heads, mounds of heads are in front of me? What does he do with these heads?" Trying his best to convince himself that he is doing with "them" not what he imagined, but something opposite, i.e. kind, Mandelstam involuntarily bursts into a cry:

Powerful eyes are decidedly kind¼

"Ode" was not the only attempt at forced, artificial glorification of the "father of nations."

In 1937, in the same place, in Voronezh, Mandelstam wrote a poem "If our enemies took me¼", ending with the following ending:

And a flock of fiery years will flash,

Rustles like a ripe thunderstorm - Lenin,

But on earth that will avoid decay,

Will wake the mind and life-Stalin.

There is a version according to which Mandelstam had another, opposite in meaning, version of the last, ending line:

Will destroy the mind and life-Stalin.

There is no doubt that it was this version that reflected the true idea of the poet about the role in the life of his homeland played by the one whom he once called the "murderer."

Of course, Stalin, not without reason, considered himself the greatest specialist on questions of "life and death." He knew that you can break any person, even the strongest. And Mandelstam was by no means one of the strongest.

But Stalin did not know that to break a man does not mean to break a poet. He did not know. That it is easier to kill a poet than to force him to sing what is hostile to him. A month has passed since Mandelstam's failed attempt to compose an ode to Stalin. And then something amazing happened - a poem came to light:

Among the people's noise and rush

At stations and squares

The mighty milestone looks for centuries,

And the eyebrows begin to wave.

I found out, he found out, you found out -

Now take it wherever you want.

In the talkative jungle of the station,

Waiting by the mighty river.

Far now that parking lot

The one with water boiled tank -

Book-tin on a chain

And dark eyes.

There was a power of Permyak dialect,

Passenger force fight,

And caressed me and drilled

From the wall of these eyes chirping.

……………………………………

Don't remember what happened

Frying lips, callous words -

curtain white beat,

Carrying the sound of iron leaves.

……………………………………

And to him - to his core -

I entered the Kremlin without a pass,

Tearing the canvas of distance,

A guilty head is heavy.

Like heaven from earth, they differ from those official glorifying rhymed lines that Mandelstam squeezed out of himself so hard, envying Aseev, who, unlike him, was a "master".

This time the poems came out completely different: burning with sincerity, the certainty of the feeling expressed in them.

Was Stalin really right in his assumptions? Did he know better than anyone else the measure of the strength of the human soul and had every reason not to doubt the results of his experiment?

Deciding for the time being not to shoot Mandelstam, ordering him to "isolate but preserve", Stalin, of course, did not know about any artificial clouding of some sources of harmony unknown to him.

In order for him to succeed in his attempt to glorify Stalin, a poet like Mandelstam could have only one way: this attempt had to be sincere. For Mandelstam, only one feeling could be the fulcrum for a more or less sincere attempt to reconcile with the reality of the Stalinist regime: hope.

If it were only a hope for a change in his personal destiny, there would still be no self-deception. But, by the very nature of his soul, preoccupied not only with his personal fate, the poet tries to express some public hopes. And then the self-deception, self-persuasion begins.

Once upon a time (in an article of 1913) Mandelstam wrote that a poet should under no circumstances justify himself. This, he said, "... is unforgivable! Unacceptable for a poet! The only thing that cannot be forgiven! After all, poetry is the consciousness of being right." O. Mandelstam openly proclaimed his readiness to accept a martyr's crown "for the explosive valor of the coming centuries, for the high tribe of people." Defiantly, he glorified everything that he never had, just to assert his innocence, his completely conscious hostility to the “wolfhound age”.

For Pasternak, Peter's rack, the ghost of which unexpectedly resurrected in the 20th century, was just a moral barrier to spiritual development. The question was: does he have the moral right to cross this barrier? After all, blood and dirt - all this will pay off with future wealth, "happiness of hundreds of thousands"!

These reasons were bad for Mandelstam's soul, because he invariably saw himself prophetically as an object of torture and execution.

I live on a black staircase, and in the temple

The bell torn out with meat strikes me.

And all night long waiting for dear guests,

Moving the shackles of door chains.

Even more terrible was that which brought death to his soul, his life's work, poetry. Can there be a more terrible prospect for the poet than "executioners sitting on a school bench to learn how to twitter." Mandelstam did not want to be "like everyone else." And yet, paradoxical as it may seem, at some point he also wanted to "go there together with everyone." Contrary to his usual sobriety and lack of illusion, he was even more acute than Pasternak, ready to feel in his heart love and tenderness for life, which was previously alien to him. Because he was forcibly thrown out of this life. Realizing that he had been deprived of the right to feel like a "Soviet man," Mandelstam suddenly felt this with horror as a loss. The feeling was real. And he clutched at it like a drowning man at a straw. He didn't understand yet. What happened to him. He thought he was the same unbroken one. Meanwhile, the "brilliant calculation" was already giving its first shoots in his soul. And lips sculpted completely different words:

Yes, I'm lying in the ground, moving my lips,

But what I say, every schoolboy will memorize:

On Red Square, the earth is round

And its slope hardens voluntary ...

Stalin's prison (or exile) was a special case. Here, the very fact of forcible removal from life immediately deprived the prisoner of the right to sympathy. Even took away the right to pity. Mandelstam encountered this on the way to Cherdyn, immediately after his arrest. Mandelstam felt with horror that by the fact of his arrest he was doomed to complete, absolute renegade.

Meanwhile, life went on. People laughed and cried, loved. Metro was built in Moscow.

Well, how's the subway? Be silent, melting in yourself,

Do not ask how the kidneys swell ...

And you, hours of Kremlin battles -

The language of space compressed to a dot.

Nadezhda Yakovlevna considers these moods to be the consequences of a traumatic psychosis that Osip Emilievich suffered shortly after his arrest. The disease was very severe, with delirium, hallucinations, and a suicide attempt. Osip Emilievich from time to time had a desire to come to terms with reality and find its justification. This happened in bursts and was accompanied by a nervous state. It is very difficult for a person to live with the consciousness that the whole company is out of step and only he, the ill-fated ensign, knows the truth. Especially if this "company" is the entire multi-million people. To remain outside the people has always been more terrible for him than to remain outside the truth. That is why this bogey - the "enemy of the people" - acted on the soul of the Russian intellectual so unmistakably and so terribly. The worst thing was that the people also believed in this formula, accepted it and unconsciously legitimized it.

The present was the foundation upon which the beautiful tomorrow was built. To feel like a stranger to the Stalinist present meant to erase oneself not only from life, but also from the memory of posterity. That is why Mandelstam could not stand it. With the last of his strength, he is trying to convince himself that that "miraculous builder" was right, and he, Mandelstam, was mistaken.

And I am not robbed and not broken,

But just over-engineered -

Like a word about a shelf, my string is tight,

The earth sounds - the last weapon -

Dry humidity of chernozem ha.

Robbed and broken, he tries to convince himself otherwise. The worst happened to him. He lost consciousness of his rightness. The rubber club of the Stalinist state hit Mandelstam in the most painful place: in his conscience. Everything went to ensure that the vague complex of guilt that tormented the soul of the poet took on clear and definite outlines of guilt before Stalin. Stalin spoke on behalf of eternity, on behalf of history, on behalf of the people. Everything changed instantly, as soon as Mandelstam's conscience was hurt. It happened "among the people's noise and haste at railway stations and squares", where "there was power in the Permyak dialect, the passenger struggle was going on" features, in his appearance, in his portrait, which all this hungry, impoverished crowd absorbed into its soul, accepted and legitimized just as unconsciously as it accepted and legitimized the phrase "enemy of the people."

The feeling of contiguity with the country, with its many millions of people was so powerful, so all-consuming that it imperceptibly turned over, turned all Mandelstam's ideas about truth, his entire universe upside down:

My country spoke to me

Mirvolila, scolded, did not read,

But indignant me, as an eyewitness,

I noticed - and suddenly, like lentils,

I lit it with an Admiralty ray.

He suddenly saw the country, which had previously been a kind of abstraction for him, with his own eyes, joined her, her daily life, drank with her from the same mug. And through the range of its distances, through these crowds of people yelling, hurrying somewhere, through this great migration of peoples, he suddenly, as through a giant glass lentil, saw anew a tiny ray of the Admiralty's needle.

Once, before the arrest of Mandelstam, the thought of the inevitable end of the Petersburg period of Russian history was terrifying. His soul could not come to terms with the end of St. Petersburg, the city " Bronze Horseman"and" White Nights ". And suddenly, far away from his former life, amid the "popular noise and haste", it seemed to Mandelstam that the St. Petersburg period of Russian history was continuing. The ray of the Petrovsky Admiralty did not die out, he entered integral part in this bloody fire. Mandelstam instinctively seized on this hope as the last opportunity for salvation.

To accept it meant to admit that the "murderer and muzhik fighter" was right, that he was truly a "wonderful builder." But not to accept it was even more terrible: after all, it meant "falling out" of history, staying away from this "people's noise and haste", from the great historical cause.

At a meeting dedicated to the 84th anniversary of Pushkin's death, where Blok spoke about the poet's appointment, Vladislav Khodasevich suggested that the desire to annually celebrate Pushkin's anniversary was born of a premonition of impending impenetrable darkness. “It is not we who agree,” he said, “by what name we should go around, how we should call to each other in the approaching darkness.”

Even this was not left to Mandelstam. He was convinced that even Pushkin did not belong to him, but to his escorts.

An inch of the blue sea for me, only the eye of a needle,

So that the deuce of escort time rushes with sails, it’s good.

Dry Russian fairy tale. Wooden spoon - wow!

Where are you, three glorious guys from the iron gates of the GPU?

So that Pushkin's wonderful goods do not go through the hands of parasites,

A tribe of Pushkin scholars is literate in overcoats with revolvers -

Young lovers of white-toothed rhymes,

An inch of blue sea for me, only the eye of a needle!

The same Mandelstam, who resisted the longest, who would never agree to "executioners sitting on the school bench to teach chirping", suddenly felt the need to enter into spiritual contact with his executioners. Wanting, like Khodasevich, to come around with someone in the approaching darkness, he did not find anything better than to shout "ay!" three glorious guys from the "iron gates of the GPU."

Everything was taken away from him, leaving not the slightest clue, not even a tiny island where he could establish his untouched, not destroyed consciousness. The only thing he could still grab onto was this, newly acquired: a white curtain flying in the wind, a tin mug, "the one with boiled water tank." And can he be reproached for clinging to this curtain as if it were the last thread connecting him to life?

In Mandelstam's verses about his guilt before Stalin ("And caressed me, and the chatter drilled from the wall of these eyes"), for all their sincerity, the connection of this particular feeling with the very foundations of the artist's personality is almost imperceptible. As if all his previous life impressions, familiar to us "to the veins, to the children's swollen glands", were erased to the ground. In a certain sense, these sincere poems by Mandelstam testify against Stalin even more strongly than those written under direct pressure. They testify to the invasion of the Stalinist machine into the very soul of the poet. Mandelstam was held in Voronezh as a hostage. Taking him in this capacity, Stalin wanted to dictate his terms to eternity itself. He wanted the driven, hunted poet to testify to his, Stalin's, historical correctness before the court of distant descendants.

What should I say! He achieved a lot, prudent Kremlin highlander. At his disposal were the army and navy, and the Lubyanka, and the world's most advanced machine of psychological influence, officially called the moral and political unity of the Soviet people. And all this was opposed by such a small thing - a weak, crushed, bleeding human soul.

But the main victory of the Stalinist state over the soul of the artist was achieved almost without the use of brute force. The hostage of eternity was convinced that there is no and never will be another eternity, except for the one in whose name Stalin spoke.

According to the verdict, passed without trial, the poet was deprived of elementary human rights, doomed to the position of an exile. In addition, he was deprived of his livelihood, doing odd jobs in the newspaper, on the radio, living on the meager help of friends. “I am by nature a waiter. That is why it is even more difficult for me here,” he said in Voronezh to A. Akhmatova.

And, however, he fell in love with Voronezh: here the free spirit of the Russian outskirts was still felt, here the expanses of his native land opened up to his gaze:

Like a plowshare, a fat layer is pleasant,

How the steppe is silent in the April turn...

And the sky, the sky is your Buonarotti!"

The name of the brilliant Italian architect, sculptor and painter naturally appears in the verse: chained to the place of his exile, the poet feels with particular acuteness how great and beautiful the world in which a person lives. It is worth emphasizing: he lives in a world as familiar to him as his native home, city, and finally, the country:

From the still young Voronezh hills

To the all-human - clarifying in Tuscany.

Bought in Voronezh, simple school notebooks were filled with lines of poetry that quickly fell. The impetus for their emergence was the details of the life surrounding the poet. In these verses, human destiny was revealed: suffering, longing, the desire to be heard by people. But not only that: the horizons here were rapidly expanding, even space and time were subject to the poet. Voronezh "... alleys barking stockings And streets warped closets", "icy water pump", at the whim of the imagination are replaced by other visions of St. turn, make you remember Florence, sung by the great Dante.

When Mandelstam composed a poem, it seemed to him that the world had been renewed. He read it to friends, acquaintances - whoever turns up. He led the verses like a melody - from forte to piano, with ups and downs. Nadezhda Yakovlevna knew all the Voronezh poems by heart. Osip Emilievich read poetry admirably. He had a very beautiful voice. He read energetically, without a hint of sweetness and howling, emphasizing the rhythmic side of the poem. Once Osip Emilievich wrote new poems, he was in an excited state. He rushed across the road from the house to the city machine, dialed some number and began to read poetry, then angrily shouted to someone: "No, listen, I have no one else to read!" It turned out that he was reading to the NKVD investigator, to whom he was attached. Mandelstam always remained himself, his uncompromising nature was absolute. Anna Akhmatova also writes about this: “In Voronezh, with not very pure motives, he was forced to read a report on acmeism. He replied:“ I do not renounce either the living or the dead. ”(Speaking of the dead, Osip Emilievich meant Gumilyov) And when asked what acmeism is, Mandelstam replied: "Longing for world culture."

In Voronezh, the Mandelstams soon moved to another apartment. In a small one-story house they rented a room from a theatrical dressmaker. There were no amenities, the heating was stove. The decoration of the room differed little from the previous one: two beds, a table, some kind of ridiculous long black wardrobe and an old couch upholstered in dermantine. Since there was only one table, there were books and papers, Dymkovo toys and some dishes on it. The closet kept those few books with which Osip Emilievich did not part. He often read the poems of his favorite poets: Dante, Petrarch, Kleist. Batyushkov was one of Mandelstam's favorite Russian poets. In the wonderful poem "Batyushkov", written by Mandelstam back in 1932, he speaks of him as a contemporary, feeling his presence:

Like a reveler with a magic cane

The tender father lives with me.

He walks like poplars in the bridge,

He smells a rose and sings to Daphne.

Not for a moment believing in separation,

I think I bowed to him.

In a light glove, a cold hand

I press with feverish envy ...

This is understandable; Tasso and Petrarch were Batyushkov's teachers. Plasticity, sculptural quality and, in particular, a euphony that we have not heard before him, "Italian harmony of verse" - all this, of course, is very close to Mandelstam. Of his contemporaries, he most appreciated Pasternak, whom he constantly remembered. In a New Year’s letter, Osip Emilievich wrote to Pasternak: “Dear Boris Leonidovich, when you remember the whole great volume of your life’s work, all its incomparable scope, you won’t find words for gratitude. I want your poetry, with which we are all spoiled and undeservedly gifted, to burst further to the world, to the people, to children... For once in my life, let me tell you: thank you for everything and for the fact that this "everything" is not yet "everything".

Natalya Shtempel recalls: “I remember well the first impression that Osip Emilievich made on me. His face was nervous, the expression was often self-deep, inwardly concentrated, his head was somewhat thrown back, very straight, almost with a military bearing, and this was so conspicuous that as the boys shouted: “The General is coming!” He is of medium height, in his hands is an invariable stick, on which he never leaned, it simply hung on his arm and for some reason suited him, and an old, rarely ironed suit that looked elegant on him. He looked independent and laid-back. He certainly attracted attention - he was born a poet, nothing else could be said about him. He seemed much older than his years. I always had the feeling that there were no people like him." Mandelstam never on circumstances, conditions of life. He said it beautifully:

You haven't died yet, you're not alone yet,

While with a beggar friend

You enjoy the majesty of the plains

And haze, and cold, and blizzard.

In luxurious poverty, in mighty poverty

Live calmly and calmly, -

Blessed are those days and nights

And sweet-voiced labor is sinless.

He didn't have the petty, day-to-day desires that everyone has. Mandelstam and, say, a car, a dacha are completely incompatible. But he was rich, rich, like a fairy-tale king: both "the breathing miracle of the plains", and the black earth "in the April twist", and the earth, "the mother of snowdrops, maples, oak trees", - everything belonged to him.

Where there is more sky for me - there I am ready to wander,

And clear longing does not let me go

From still young, Voronezh hills -

To the all-human, clarifying in Tuscany.

He could stop enchanted in front of a basket of spring purple irises and ask in his voice a plea: "Nadya, buy it!" And when Nadezhda Yakovlevna began to select individual flowers, she exclaimed bitterly: "All or nothing!" “But we don’t have money, Osya,” she reminded.

So the irises were not bought. There was something childishly touching in this episode. Osip Emilievich was very fond of painting, this is evidenced by his poems - "Impressionism" and Voronezh: "Smile, angry lamb from Raphael's canvas ..." or "Like chiaroscuro martyr Rembrandt ...". Nadezhda Yakovlevna believed that in "Rembrandt" Mandelstam speaks of himself ("the sharpness of my burning rib") and of his Calvary, "devoid of any grandeur."

The poem "Smile, angry lamb ..." Pasternak called a pearl. What was the reason for its creation, what kind of realities, it is difficult to say. There are no paintings by Raphael in the Voronezh Museum. Perhaps, by some association, Mandelstam remembered a reproduction from Raphael's painting "Madonna with a Lamb". There is a lamb, and "folds of turbulent calm" on the knees of the kneeling Madonna, and a landscape, and some amazing blue general background of the picture. As a rule, Mandelstam was precise in his poetry.

Osip Emilievich admired Delacroix's illustrations for Goethe's Faust. He also attended symphony concerts of the Voronezh orchestra, and especially solo concerts, when one of the famous violinists or pianists came from Moscow and Leningrad. Music Mandelstam, perhaps, loved most of all. It is no coincidence that after the concert of the violinist Galina Barinova, he wrote and sent her a poem "For Paganini with long fingers ...". In it, Osip Emilievich directly addresses her:

Girl, upstart, proud,

Whose sound is as wide as the Yenisei,

Comfort me with your game -

On your head, Pole,

Marina Mnishek hill of curls,

Your bow is suspicious, violinist ...

In addition to concerts, Osip Emilievich also went to the cinema with pleasure. It had attracted him before. He has written several interesting film reviews. In one of them, Mandelstam wrote: “The more perfect the film language, the closer it is to that yet unrealized thinking of the future, which we call film prose with its powerful syntax, the more important is the work of the operator in the film.”

The strong impression that one of the first sound pictures, "Chapaev," made on Mandelstam, was reflected in the poem "From the damp sheet, speaking ..."

With great interest he watched the picture of Charlie Chaplin "Lights big city". Mandelstam loved and highly appreciated Chaplin and the films he created:

And now in Paris, in Chartres, in Arles

Sovereign good Chaplin Charlie, -

In an ocean pot with bewildered precision

On hinges, he swaggers with a flower girl ...

"Osip Emilievich read a lot. He borrowed books from the university's fundamental library, which he had access to even before we met," writes Natalia Shtempel. Mandelstam highly valued this library and said more than once that one can find the rarest books in it, which one does not always see in the libraries of the capital. There was another joy in his life - communication with books. Despite isolation, servitude and complete ignorance of what the future will turn out, Osip Emilievich lived spiritually active, active life He was interested in everything. He was worried about the Spanish events. He even began to study Spanish and got the hang of it very quickly.

Apathy was not characteristic of Osip Emilievich's character, and bilious irritation was alien to him, but he fell into anger more than once. He could be preoccupied, concentrated, self-absorbed, but even in those conditions he knew how to be carefree cheerful, crafty, knew how to joke.

In January 1937, Mandelstam felt especially anxious, he was suffocating ... And yet, in these January days, he wrote many wonderful poems. They recognized our Russian winter, frosty, sunny, bright:

In the face of frost I look alone, -

He is nowhere, I am nowhere.

And everything is ironed, flattened without wrinkles

The plains are a breathing miracle.

And the sun squints in the corner of poverty,

His squint is calm and comforting.

Ten-digit forests - almost those ...

And the snow crunches in the eyes, like pure bread, sinless.

But the anxiety grew, and in the next poem, Mandelstam writes:

Oh, this slow breathing expanse -

I'm fed up with them!

And breathed open horizons -

A bandage for both eyes!

And everything is resolved with a wonderful and terrible poem:

Where should I go this January?

The open city is extravagantly tenacious.

From closed I, perhaps, drunk doors?

And I want to moo from all the locks and paper clips ...

If Mandelstam was not particularly oppressed by the lack of means of subsistence, then the isolation in which he found himself in Voronezh, with his active, active nature, was sometimes unbearable for him, he rushed about, could not find a place for himself. It was in one of these acute attacks of anguish that Mandelstam wrote this tragic poem.

How terrible is the sense of impotence here! Here, a person is suffocating before our eyes, he does not have enough air, and you just look and suffer for him and with him, without even having the right to show it. In this poem you recognize the external signs of the city. At the junction of several streets - Myasnaya Gora, Dubnitskaya and Seminarskaya Gora - there really was a water pumping station (a small brick house with a window and a door), there was also a wooden box for draining water, and still people splashed it, everything around was icy.

And into the pit, and into the warty darkness

I slide to the icy water tower

And I stumble, I eat dead air.

And the rooks fly away in a fever,

And I gasp after them, screaming

In some frozen wooden box...

“These days I somehow came to the Mandelstams,” recalls Natalia Shtempel. - “My arrival did not cause the usual excitement. I don’t remember who, Nadezhda Yakovlevna or Osip Emilievich said:“ We decided to go on a hunger strike. ”I became scared. Perhaps, seeing my despair, Osip Emilievich began to read poetry. First his poems, then Dante. And after half an hour there was nothing in the world but the all-powerful harmony of verses.

Only such a sorcerer as Osip Emilievich could take him to another world. There is no exile, no Voronezh, no this wretched room with a low ceiling, no fate of an individual. The vast world of feelings, thoughts, divine, all-powerful music of words captures the whole, and apart from it nothing exists. He recited poetry in a unique way, he had a very beautiful voice, chesty, exciting, with an amazing richness of intonations and with an amazing sense of rhythm. He often read with a kind of growing intonation. And, it seems, it is unbearable, it is impossible to withstand this rise, take-off, you are suffocating, you are out of breath, and suddenly, at the very maximum volume, your voice spills into a wide, free wave. It is difficult to imagine a person who would be able to get away from his fate in such a way, becoming spiritually free. This freedom of spirit raised him above all the circumstances of life, and this feeling was transmitted to others.

Anna Akhmatova, who visited the poet in exile in February 1936, conveyed her impression of his life in the famous poem "Voronezh" dedicated to Mandelstam:

And in the room of the disgraced poet

Fear and muse are on duty in their turn.

And the night is coming, which will bring dawn.

But she visited here when there were still some connections with writers' organizations. Mandelstam, talking about the arrival of Anna Akhmatova, laughingly said: "Anna Andreevna was offended that I did not die." It turns out that he gave her a telegram that he was dying. And she came, remained true to the old friendship.

“Our prosperity ended in the fall of 1936, when we returned from Zadonsk. The radio committee was abolished, centralizing all transmissions, there was no work in the theater, newspaper work also disappeared. Everything collapsed at once,” Nadezhda Yakovlevna wrote. The Mandelstams were isolated.

In April 1937, Mandelstam wrote to Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky: “I have been put in the position of a dog, a dog ... I am gone. I am a shadow. I only have the right to die. .

In April, an article directed against Mandelstam appeared in the regional newspaper Kommuna. Somewhat later, in the same 1937, in the first issue of the almanac "Literary Voronezh", the attack against Mandelstam was even sharper.

On May 1, 1938, in Samatikha, in a rest home where the Mandelstams received vouchers, Osip Emilievich was arrested a second time.

On September 9 (that is, four months later), Mandelstam was sent to the camp. This time Nadezhda Yakovlevna no longer intended to accompany him. Through Shura, Mandelstam's brother, she received a letter from Osip Emilievich from a transit camp near Vladivostok with a request to send a package. She did it right away, but Osip Emilievich did not manage to get anything. The money and the parcel were returned with a note: "For the death of the addressee."

Osip Emilievich wrote a lot, and no vicissitudes of fate were an obstacle to intense creative work, he literally burned and, paradoxically, was truly happy. An epoch, a century expected more from Osip Mandelstam than he did - he knew about it, knew and was tormented by it. He did not manage to quickly part with all the "birthmarks" of the past. But everything that was written by him, everything was created honestly, with conviction, sincerely, with talent. Everything was written by a smart, quivering, searching master

LITERATURE

1. Aksakov A. Osip Emilievich Mandelstam. - P.112-131.

2. Russian literature of the twentieth century (ed. Pronina E.P.). - M., -1994. - P.91-106.

3. Karpov A. Osip Emilievich Mandelstam. - M.

5. Mandelstam, N.Ya. Memoirs / N.Ya. Mandelstam-M.: Book, 1989.-480s.-p.222

6. Averintsev, S.S. The fate and message of Osip Mandelstam / S.S. Averintsev // Averintsev S.S. Poets. - M .: School "Languages of Russian Culture", 1996-S. 189-276-S. 207

7. Mandelstam, O.E. Poems. Prose / O.E. Mandelstam. - M .: RIPOL CLASSIC, 2002, - 704 e. - S. 433

Among the many amazing stories of great compatriots, the biography of Osip Mandelstam, although not particularly rich, is still remembered due to its tragedy. During his short life, he witnessed two revolutions, which was reflected not only in his worldview, but also in his poems. In addition to them, the work of Osip Mandelstam includes prose, numerous essays, essays, translations and literary criticism.

Childhood

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, a Jew by origin, was born in January 1891 in the capital of Poland, which at that time was assigned to Russia. Almost immediately after the birth of his son, the family moves to St. Petersburg. Emilius Veniaminovich, the boy's father, made a living from a glove business, and also, as a merchant, was in the first guild, thanks to which he occupied a good position in society. And her mother, Flora Verblovskaya, was engaged in music, the love for which the younger Mandelstam inherited from her. Osip Emilievich in the period from 1900 to 1907 studied at the prestigious Tenishevsky School, where Nabokov had once received his education. After graduation, the parents send their son to Paris, and later to Germany (due to financial security). At the Sorbonne, he attends many lectures, gets acquainted with French poetry and meets his future friend, Nikolai Gumilyov.

Homecoming

Unfortunately, the Mandelstam family goes bankrupt by 1911, and Osip returns to St. Petersburg. In the same year, he was enrolled at the Faculty of History and Philology at St. Petersburg University, but he never managed to complete his studies due to frivolity, and in 1917 he was expelled. During this period, his political sympathies were given to the Left SRs and the Social Democrats. He also actively preaches Marxism. The work of Osip Mandelstam was formed back in the French period of his life, and the first poems were published in 1910 in the Apollo magazine.

"Workshop of poets"

It is so accepted that poets always need like-minded people and belonging to a certain trend. The Poets Workshop group consisted of such famous personalities as Gumilyov, Akhmatova, and, of course, Mandelstam often attended meetings. Osip Emilievich in his early years gravitated towards symbolism, but later became a follower of acmeism, like his closest friends from the club. The grain of this trend is clear, distinct images and realism. Thus, in 1913, the first collection of poems by Mandelstam called "Stone" absorbed precisely the spirit of acmeism. In those same years, he speaks publicly, visits the Stray Dog, and also meets Blok, Tsvetaeva and Livshits.

Wandering years

The biography of Osip Mandelstam during this period is very stormy. When the First World War begins, due to health problems, the poet does not get to the front. But the revolution of 1917 was very clearly reflected in his lyrics. His worldview and political views are changing again, now in favor of the Bolsheviks. He writes many poems directed against the king and the army. During this period, he gains more and more fame and success, actively travels around the country and is published in many publications. Unknown reasons prompt him to move to Kyiv, where the future wife of Osip Khazin lived at that moment. Before the marriage, concluded in 1922, he manages to live for some time in the Crimea, where he is arrested on suspicion of Bolshevik intelligence. A year after his release, fate sends him to Georgia. However, even there an unpleasant surprise awaits the poet. He is again put behind bars, but thanks to the efforts of local colleagues, he manages to quickly free himself.

Immediately after serving his sentence in Georgia, the biography of Osip Mandelstam again returns him to his native Petrograd. His attitude to the revolution is reflected in the next collection of poems called Tristia, which is published in 1922 in Berlin. Then he binds himself with sacred bonds with Nadezhda Yakovlevna. Sweet tragedy reigns in the works of that time, accompanied by longing for parting with values, people and places. After that, the poet Osip Mandelstam goes into a deep and protracted poetic crisis, at first delighting his admirers with only rare verses in which he expresses regret over the death of the old culture. And in the five-year period (from 1925 to 1930) he does not write anything at all, except for prose. In order to somehow live in harsh conditions, he is engaged in translations. The third and last collection with the simple title "Poems" comes out in 1928. In this he is greatly assisted by Bukharin, who occupies far from the last place in the Kremlin. However, supporters of Stalin, who is actively gaining strength, are looking for any excuse to frame the poet.

last years of life

The biography of Osip Mandelstam in the 30s brings him and his wife to the Caucasus, which also did not go without the help and trouble of Bukharin. This is rather an excuse to hide from persecution than a rest. Trips help Osip Emilievich to regain interest in poetry, resulting in a collection of essays "Trip to Armenia", which, however, were rejected by the ideology. After 3 years, the poet returns home. His views are again undergoing changes, and disappointment in the previously revered communism completely obscures his mind. From under his pen comes the scandalous epigram "Kremlin Highlander", which he reads to the curious public. Among these people is an informer who hurries to report to Stalin. In 1934, Osip was awaited by another arrest and exile to the Perm Territory, where he was accompanied by his faithful wife. There he tries to commit suicide, but the attempt turns out to be a failure. After that, the spouses are sent to Voronezh. It was there that the best and last poems were written with the signature "Osip Mandelstam", whose biography and work ends in 1938.

Death

In 1937 the poet and his wife returned to Moscow. However, a year later he was again arrested in Samatih. He is sentenced to five years in penal camps. Unfortunately, he falls ill with typhus while working somewhere near Vladivostok, as a result of which he dies. Most of his poems have survived to this day thanks to the efforts of his wife. During travels and exiles, she hid her husband's works or memorized them. Mandelstam was buried in a mass grave.