Mandelstam’s father was a merchant, and his mother was born into the intelligentsia. He spent his youth in St. Petersburg, where he studied in a school of commerce and wrote his first verse. In 1907 he visited Paris and became enamored of the French Symbolists. In 1911 he studied at the University of Heidelberg and then the University of St. Petersburg, though he never graduated.
Mandelstam is one of the truly outstanding Russian poets of his or any time, highly esteemed by such important writers as Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, and Boris Pasternak. Georgy Ivanov wrote of the initial impact of Mandelstam’s poetry: “His poems were astonishing. Above all, they astonish.” Ilya Erenburg’s regard for Mandelstam bordered on the religious.
Mandelstam’s poetry has an extraordinary sense of balance. The free association of ideas appears at times chaotic, but what remains above all is a feeling of harmony. Mandelstam does not paint on an epic canvas — he is a lyric poet to the marrow — but his most successful works form an important part of the objective reality of Russian history.
In his youth Mandelstam was associated with Acmeism, but this association was perhaps more stated than real. He had his own path to follow. In his work, extreme inner refinement is linked with simple colloquialism. European elements that he had assimilated in a natural, untheoretical way fuse in his poetry with the Russian classical tradition. The verbal fabric of Mandelstam’s poetry is intricate, like a mosaic, and at the same time the flow of images never detracts from the authenticity of feeling. At times his writing seems as fragile as the colors on the wings of butterflies, but there is an adamantine, Hellenic hardness about it. Besides poetry Mandelstam also wrote remarkable articles on art.
In the 1930s Mandelstam’s grotesque poem about Stalin, “We live not feeling...”, led to his arrest; he died in prison. His life and times are extraordinarily documented in the two brilliant volumes of memoirs by his wife, Nadezhda.
