“It gets people killed”: Osip Mandelstam and the perils of writing poetry under Stalin

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From New Statesman:

One of the most revealing photographs of Osip Mandelstam still in existence is a mugshot taken in the Lubyanka, on the occasion of his first arrest, in 1934. In the side-on view, it’s of little significance: he looks like any balding 1930s labourer from almost anywhere. Face on, though, arms folded and lips firmly pursed, he presents another proposition entirely. In this shot Mandelstam looks directly into the lens as though he is staring down the photographer. His eyes conceal any trace of the fear that must have been coursing through him; rather, his expression is the very manifestation of contempt. It is the face of a man who has never and will never let anyone, including himself, off the hook.

By the time of this first arrest, Mandelstam had already lived for several years with the knowledge that the long-term aim of the Soviet state machine was to take his life – the method and the timescale were all that remained to be revealed. “Only in Russia is poetry respected,” he is quoted as ­saying. “It gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?”

The truth of this statement had been borne out long before Russia arrived at the great Yezhov terror of 1937-38, which was to provide Mandelstam and so many others with their end. Anna Akhmatova’s former husband, the poet and founder of the Acmeist movement, Nikolai Gumilev, had been arrested by the Cheka, the secret police, framed for participating in a fictitious tsarist plot and summarily executed in 1921. Vladimir Mayakovsky, initially a vigorous supporter of Soviet ideology and evangelical in his profound personal admiration for Lenin, had fallen from grace and been driven, by a series of public accusations, to shoot himself in 1930. Later, in 1941, after years of torment at the hands of the state, including the execution of her husband and the imprisonment of her daughter, Marina Tsvetaeva hanged herself.

Nadezhda Mandelstam – the poet’s wife and invaluable support throughout his, and their, many years of persecution and exile – wrote in her powerful memoir of both the poet and the era, Hope Against Hope, about the many instances when, confronted with the desperation of their situation, they had asked each other if this was the moment when they, too, could no longer bear to go forward. The final occasion was to be the last night they spent in their Moscow apartment before being banished, without means of providing for themselves, to a succession of rural towns situated beyond a hundred-kilometre perimeter of all major cities. She awoke to find Mandelstam standing at the open window. “Isn’t it time?” he said. “Let’s do it while we’re still together.” “Not yet,” she replied. Mandelstam didn’t argue but she later reflected, “If we had been able to foresee all the alternatives, we would not have missed that last chance of a ‘normal’ death offered by the open window of our apartment in Furmanov Street.” Opting, in that moment, for a little more life changed nothing and Mandelstam soon found himself being moved inexorably towards Stalin’s endgame in the camps.

What has now been established – with as reasonable a degree of certainty as possible for a time in which wives, upon receiving official notification of their husband’s sentence to hard labour in the Gulag, were often casually informed that they were now free to remarry – is that in the Vtoraya Rechka transit camp, en route to Vladivostok in December 1938, Mandelstam, frail and worn out from his many years of oppression, malnourished, severely mentally unstable and without adequate protective clothing for the ferocious Siberian winter, succumbed possibly to typhus, probably to a heart attack. Nadezhda Mandelstam first discovered his death when a package of warm clothing she had sent was returned unopened, bearing the stark message: “The addressee is dead.”

. . . .

In line with most of the Russian intelligentsia, Mandelstam had been initially supportive of the ideals of the Bolsheviks and sought to embrace the spirit of revolution. He soon became disillusioned, however, by the increasing demands of the regime for poetry to serve the political and collective, rather than the personal and the human. The publication in 1922 of his collection Tristia, preoccupied as it was with love and the sanctity of the Word (a reverential phrase for the composition of poetry current at the time), only contributed to the antagonism between Mandelstam and his more pragmatic peers. Over time, the internal and ­external pressures created by the situation led him to lapse into a “poetic silence” similar to that experienced by Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak.

Link to the rest at New Statesman