Mandelstam, Osip Emilyevich

Mandelstam, Osip Emilyevich

Mandelstam, Osip Emilyevich, 1892-1938, Russian poet. Mandelstam was a leader of the Acmeist school. He wrote impersonal, fatalistic, meticulously constructed poems, the best of which are collected in Kamen [stone] (1913) and Tristia (1922). Although he opposed the Bolsheviks, he remained in Russia after the revolution but published no poetry after 1925. He was arrested in 1934 and died in a concentration camp. His widow preserved a large number of poems from the early period of his exile.

See his complete works, tr. by B. Raffel and A. Burago (1973); memoirs by N. Mandelstam (2 vol., 1970 and 1974); study by C. Brown (1973).

or Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam

(born Jan. 15, 1891, Warsaw, Pol., Russian Empire—died Dec. 27, 1938, Vtoraya Rechka, near Vladivostok, Russia, U.S.S.R.) Russian poet and critic. He published his first poems in 1910. A leader of the Acmeist poets, who rejected the mysticism and abstraction of Russian Symbolism, he wrote intellectually demanding, apolitical verse in such volumes as Tristia (1922). In 1934 he was arrested for an epigram about Joseph Stalin. While suffering from mental illness, he composed the Voronezh Notebooks, which contain some of his finest lyrics. Arrested again in 1938, he died in custody at age 47. Most of his works went unpublished in the Soviet Union until after Stalin's death, and he was almost unknown to generations of Russians and in other countries until the mid 1960s.

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Mandelstam or Mandelshtam (Мандельштам) is a Russian surname which may refer to:

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