What trend does Mandelstam belong to. Fate into revolution and civil war. The beginning of creative activity

    Mandelstam Osip Emilievich- (1891-1938), poet. In St. Petersburg since 1897. Studied at the Tenishevsky School (1900-07), in 1911-17 - at the Department of Romance Languages ​​of the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University (did not graduate). The family moved frequently, not ... Encyclopedic reference book "St. Petersburg"

    - (1891 1938), Russian. owls. poet. In M.'s poetry and prose, there are repeated references to L., reminiscences from his works. In the essay “The Bookcase” (published in 1925), M. wrote about L.: “He never seemed to me a brother or relative of Pushkin. But Goethe and... Lermontov Encyclopedia

    - (1891 1938) Russian poet. He started as a representative of acmeism. Poetry is saturated with cultural historical images and motifs, marked specifically by the material perception of the world, the tragic experience of the death of culture. Collections Stone (1913), Tristia ... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

    Russian Soviet poet. Born in Warsaw in the family of a merchant. He studied at the Romano-Germanic department of St. Petersburg University. Began to be printed in 1910. The first book of poems - "Stone" (1913; 2nd, revised edition, ... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia

    - (1891 1938), poet. In St. Petersburg since 1897. Studied at the Tenishevsky College (1900 07), in 1911 17 at the Department of Romance Languages ​​of the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University (did not graduate). The family often moved, not lingering on ... St. Petersburg (encyclopedia)

    Mandelstam, Osip Emilievich- Mandelstam Osip Emilievich (1891–1938; repressed) directed his experimentation primarily to the rhythm of verse; the refined play of skips and shifts of stress was already appreciated by contemporaries. In metrics, he was guided by classical forms ... Russian poets of the Silver Age

    The term "Mandelstam" has other meanings. Osip Mandelstam Birth name: Iosif Emilievich Mandelstam Date of birth: January 3 (15), 1891 Place of birth: Warsaw, Russian Empire Date of death ... Wikipedia

    - (1891 1938), Russian poet. He started as a representative of acmeism. In the semantically complex, saturated with literary associations and cultural images of various eras of Mandelstam's poetry, the conjugation of the eternal meaning of the "word", culture and the history of being, ... ... encyclopedic Dictionary

    Acmeist poet, b. Jan 3 1891 in merchant. family, student Ptg. un. (Vengerov) Mandelstam, Osip Emilievich Rod. January 3 (15), 1891, in Warsaw, d. December 27, 1938, in the camp. Symbolist poet, prose writer, translator, essayist. He made his debut in literature in ... Big biographical encyclopedia

    Mandelstam Osip Emilievich- (1891 1938) one of the largest Russian. poets of the 20th century Genus. in Warsaw, in the family of a merchant tanner. He graduated from the Tenishevskoe school in St. Petersburg. (1907), studied at the Sorbonne (1907-08), Heidelberg (1909-10) and St. Petersburg. (1911 17) untah. Youthful poems that reflected ... ... Russian humanitarian encyclopedic dictionary

Books

  • Osip Mandelstam. Complete Works and Letters. In 3 volumes. Volume 1. Poems, Mandelstam Osip Emilievich. Volume 1. The poetry of Osip Mandelstam belongs to the classics of Russian culture of the Silver Age. Alexander Blok called Osip Mandelstam the 'Artist'. 'Charm' and 'magic' are the words that define ...
  • Poems, Mandelstam Osip Emilievich. Mandelstam Osip Emilievich is one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century. His lyrics are a kind of world, built according to the laws of imagination, based on the harmony of the architectonics of music and words.…

(1891-1938) Russian poet

Mandelstam Osip Emilievich belonged to the older generation of Soviet poets who began their career in the pre-revolutionary years. The name of Osip Mandelstam is usually associated with acmeism, but the true scope and significance of his poetic heritage goes far beyond the scope of this literary movement.

Osip Mandelstam was born in Warsaw into the family of a small merchant who worked in the processing and sale of leather. He graduated from the Tenishev School, one of the best St. Petersburg art schools. Osip spent his holidays in Pavlovsk, in Finland, in the Baltic states. The school gave him solid knowledge, especially in the humanities.

Later, in the mid-twenties, in the story The Noise of Time, Osip Mandelstam spoke about what life impressions of his school time were like. Already at the beginning of the century, he heard about revolutionary events: in the capital, at the Kazan Cathedral, students spoke, who were supported by the workers. Then came the revolutionary year of 1905. "Tenishevets" Mandelstam read out to Herzen, about whom two decades later he wrote in "The Noise of Time" that his "political thought will always sound like a Beethoven sonata."

Already in his school years, Osip began to get involved in poetry, music, theater. The director of the Tenishevsky School, Vl. Gippius. Living in Pavlovsk, Osip Mandelstam attended musical evenings in the railway station concert hall. In the theater, he was greatly impressed by the performance of Vera Fedorovna Komissarzhevskaya.

The youthful years of Osip Mandelstam coincided with a period of political reaction. At that time, seized by an interest in literature, history, philosophy, he went abroad, listened to lectures at the Sorbonne, at the University of Heidelberg, perfectly mastered French and German. He also knew English very well. In order to write the literary-critical essay "A Conversation about Dante", Mandelstam thoroughly studied the Italian language and re-read the works of numerous interpreters of the works of the great Florentine.

From 1907 to 1910, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam lived in the West, sometimes visiting St. Petersburg, where he made his first connections with the literary environment. In 1911, he entered the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University, seeking to systematize his knowledge. By this time, he was firmly established in the literary environment. In 1913, Osip Mandelstam's first book of poems, The Stone, was published. This collection immediately placed the author in the ranks of mature and significant poets. Mandelstam, in his "student years", managed to develop a strict exactingness towards his own work and made his debut not as a seeking neophyte, but as an established master.

He makes new acquaintances. Osip Mandelstam exchanged poems with Marina Tsvetaeva, collaborated with Larisa Reisner in the Rudin magazine, in 1915 in the Crimea he met with M. Voloshin, who described their first meeting as follows: “Accompanying his mother, a fat, middle-aged Jewess, there was a boy with dark , shifted to the bridge of his eyes, with haughtily thrown back head, in a black jacket of a private gymnasium ... He behaved very independently, a lot of shyness was felt. “Here the future Bryusov is growing,” I formulated my impression to someone. He then read his poems.

At the end of 1920, Osip Mandelstam settled in Petrograd, where he received a room in the House of Arts, then he became a tenant of the House of Scientists, where Maxim Gorky helped him get a job. Korney Chukovsky, who visited the poet at that time, subtly noticed a characteristic feature of his way of life: “ ... in the room, - he wrote, - there was nothing that belonged to him, except for cigarettes, - not a single personal item. And then I understood its most striking feature - the non-existence. This was a man who did not create any kind of life around him and lived outside of any way of life.».

From Petrograd, Osip Mandelstam moves to Moscow, lives in the same “lifeless”, ascetic way, and often travels to Petrograd, where he earns money with translations.

The twenties were for the poet a time of intense and varied literary work. New poems were created, new poetry collections were published. The poet continued to publish articles on literature, and his selected critical articles made up the collection On Poetry. Two books of prose were published - The Noise of Time and The Egyptian Mark. During these years, Mandelstam often appeared in the press and as a journalist, responding to current political problems. So, in the magazine "Ogonyok" his report was published about a conversation with the outstanding Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh. The poet actively collaborated in the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper.

Arrival in Leningrad at the end of 1930, in the city of his childhood and youth, in the city of the revolution, evoked very different poems from Osip Mandelstam: 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 ...". Mandelstam wrote the poem “I returned to my city, familiar to tears ...”, where the feeling of connection with the past is tragically expressed - the connection of emotional memory, where there is no room left for the perception of the new, modern:

I returned to my city, familiar to tears.

To the veins, to the swollen glands of children ...

Petersburg, I don't want to die yet:

You have my phone numbers.

Petersburg, I still have addresses.

Poems about the change of centuries arise again - this is a poem about a break with the bygone, "wolf" century, about relationships with the new century - the "wolfhound century", clearing the way for bright, future centuries.

Osip Mandelstam continues the conversation with the era in other poems. He again struggles with the idea that the new century may not understand, while appealing to loyalty to democratic traditions. In his later poems, the poet already firmly declares himself as a contemporary, writes about his inseparable fusion with the era, with the century:

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

- I am a man of the era of Moskvoshveya,

See how my jacket is bulging.

How can I walk and talk!

Try to tear me away from the century,

- I promise you, you will break your neck!

The ideological and aesthetic growth of the poet continued, thoughts, feelings, images accumulated, expressing not only his determination to be friends with the century, but also his real, inseparable connection with it. However, the life of Osip Emilievich Mandelstam was not easy. He was already married, but did not have his own corner, wandered from apartment to apartment, was often sick. Physical ill health was exacerbated by emotional experiences. The poet could not put up with what he saw around him, and even more so did not want to glorify this world of violence against a person in his poems. Osip Mandelstam published little, rarely, lived apart from the literary and social environment, communicating only with a small circle of poets and prose writers close to him in spirit, among whom was Anna Akhmatova.

His relationship with the authorities became more and more complicated. The poet often left Moscow, trying to avoid the inevitable arrest. For some time he lived in Cherdyn-on-Kama, then settled in Voronezh. In this last, Voronezh period of his life, Mandelstam wrote to his father that he was trying to live a social life: “I am engaged in literary consultation, I am working with the local youth. I participate in various meetings, I see a lot of people and I try to help them. The other day, with a group of delegates and the editor of a regional newspaper, I went to the state farm for 12 hours to open a village theater. There is still a trip to a large collective farm and acquaintance with one of the Voronezh factories.

But by that time, Osip Mandelstam's health was deteriorating more and more, he often experienced nervous depression, tried to be treated, and even cheered up physically, but not for long. Meanwhile, in his work, in the verses of the handwritten "Voronezh Notebook", Mandelstam tried to overcome pessimistic moods, wanted to understand the present and, perhaps, change himself.

But the poet already had a premonition of an imminent death, and in March 1937 he wrote about his friendship with life, about his devotion to people:

Don't put it on me, don't put it on me

Ostrolaskovy laurel on whiskey,

Better break my heart

You are on the blue ringing pieces!

And when I die, having served.

All living lifetime friend.

To resound wider and higher

The answer of the sky in all my chest!

The creative path of the poet was tragically cut short. He was arrested and sent to camps, where he died in December 1938. It is still unknown where the grave of Osip Emilievich Mandelstam is located, but there is a monument in the form of volumes of his poems and prose. Everything that Osip Mandelstam left belongs to Russian artistic culture.

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam is a Russian poet of the 20th century, essayist, translator and literary critic. The influence of the poet on contemporary poetry and the work of subsequent generations is multifaceted; literary critics regularly arrange round tables on this issue. Osip Emilievich himself spoke about his relationship with the literature surrounding him, admitting that he "floats on modern Russian poetry."

Creativity and biography of Mandelstam as a representative of the Silver Age are studied in schools and universities. Knowledge of the poet's poems is considered a sign of a person's culture along with knowledge of creativity or.

In Warsaw, on January 3, 1891, a boy was born into a Jewish family. They named him Joseph, but later he would change his name to "Osip". Father Emil Mandelstam was a glove maker, a merchant of the first guild. This gave him the advantage of living outside the settled way of life. Mother Flora Ovseevna was a musician. She had a great influence on her son. In maturity, Mandelstam will perceive the art of poetry as related to music.

After 6 years, the family leaves Warsaw for St. Petersburg. Osip enters the Tenishevsky School and studies there from 1900 to 1907. This school is called the "forge of cultural personnel" of the beginning of the 20th century.


In 1908, Osip went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. There he spends two years. Mandelstam gets acquainted with, passionately interested in French poetry and epic. It reads , and . And in between trips to Paris, he attends Vyacheslav Ivanov's poetry lectures in St. Petersburg, learning the wisdom of versification.

During this period, Mandelstam wrote a touching short poem "Tender Tender", dedicated to. This work is significant for the poet's work as one of the few representatives of love lyrics. The poet rarely wrote about love, Mandelstam himself complained about "love dumbness" in his work.

In 1911, Emil Mandelstam suffers financial difficulties, so Osip can no longer study in Europe. To enter the University of St. Petersburg, he is baptized by a Protestant pastor. From this year until 1917, his studies continued intermittently at the Romano-Germanic department of the Faculty of History and Philology. He doesn't study very hard and never gets a diploma.


He often visits Gumilyov's house, gets acquainted with. Subsequently, he considers friendship with them one of the greatest successes in life. He began to publish in the journal "Apollo" in 1910 and continued in the journals "Hyperborea" and "New Satyricon".

In 1912 he recognizes Blok and shows sympathy for the Acmeists, adding to their group. Becomes a participant in the meetings of the "Workshop of Poets".

In 1915, Mandelstam wrote one of his most famous poems, Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails.

Literature

Osip Mandelstam's debut book was called "Stone" and was reprinted in 1913, 1916 and 1923 with different content. At this time, he leads a stormy poetic life, being at its epicenter. How Osip Mandelstam reads his poems could often be heard in the literary and artistic cabaret Stray Dog. The period of "Stone" is characterized by the choice of serious, heavy, "severe Tyutchev" themes, but by the ease of presentation, reminiscent of Verlaine.


After the revolution, popularity came to the poet, he actively published, collaborated with the newspaper "Narkompros" and traveled around the country, speaking with poetry. During the civil war, he had a chance to escape with the Whites to Turkey, but he chose to stay in Soviet Russia.

At this time, Mandelstam wrote the poems “Telephone”, “Twilight of Freedom”, “Because I could not hold your hands ...” and others.

The mournful elegies in his second book "Tristia" in 1922 are the fruit of the unrest caused by the revolution and the First World War. The face of the poetics of the Tristios period is fragmentary and paradoxical, it is the poetics of associations.

In 1923, Mandelstam wrote the prose work The Noise of Time.


In the period from 1924 to 1926, Mandelstam wrote poems for children: the cycle "Primus", the poem "Two trams Click and Tram", the book of poems "Balls", which included the poems "Kalosha", "Royal", "Avtomobilishche" and others.

From 1925 to 1930, Mandelstam takes a poetic pause. He earns a living mainly by translations. Writes prose. During this period, Mandelstam creates the story "Egyptian stamp".

In 1928, the last collection of the poet "Poems" and a collection of articles "On Poetry" were published.

In 1930, he traveled around the Caucasus, where the poet went on a business trip at the request of Nikolai Bukharin, a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. In Erivan, he meets the scientist Boris Kuzin, who had a great influence on the poet. And, although Mandelstam almost never published, he writes a lot in these years. His article "Journey to Armenia" is published.


Upon returning home, the poet writes the poem "Leningrad", which Mandelstam begins with the winged line "I returned to my city, familiar to tears" and in which he confesses his love for his native city.

In the 30s, the third period of Mandelstam's poetics begins, in which the art of metaphorical cipher predominates.

Personal life

In 1919, in Kyiv, Osip Mandelstam falls in love with Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina. She was born in 1899 in Saratov to a Jewish family that converted to Orthodoxy. At the time of her meeting with Mandelstam, Nadezhda had an excellent education. They met at the H.L.A.M cafe. Everyone spoke of them as a clearly in love couple. The writer Deutsch writes in his memoirs how Nadezhda walked with a bouquet of water lilies next to Osip.


Together with Mandelstam, Khazina wanders around Russia, Ukraine, Georgia during the civil war. In 1922 they get married.

She does not leave him even during the years of persecution, following him into exile.

Arrests and death

In 1933, according to Mandelstam, he actually commits an act of suicide by reading an anti-Stalinist work in public. After the poet witnessed the Crimean famine, Mandelstam wrote the poem “We live without smelling the country beneath us,” which the listeners called the “Epigram on Stalin.” Out of a dozen people, there were those who denounced the poet.


A premonition of future repressions was the poem "For the explosive valor of the coming centuries ...", in which Mandelstam described the tragic fate of the poet.

On the night of May 14, 1934, he was arrested, followed by exile in Cherdyn, Perm Territory. There, despite the support of his wife, he already makes a real suicide attempt, throwing himself out of the window. Nadezhda Mandelstam is looking for ways to save her husband and writes to all authorities, friends and acquaintances. They are allowed to move to Voronezh. There they live in complete poverty until 1937. After the exile ends, they return to Moscow.


Meanwhile, the "Mandelstam question" is not yet closed. Discussed at the level of People's Commissar of Internal Affairs and the Union of Writers poems of the poet, called "well-wishers" obscene and slanderous. Clouds were gathering, and in 1938 Mandelstam was again arrested and sent to the Far East by stage.

On December 27, 1938, the poet died. He died of typhus and, along with other unfortunate people, was buried in a mass grave. The burial place of Mandelstam is unknown.

Article from an unreleased dictionary

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam (1891-1938) was born into the family of Emil Veniaminovich Mandelstam and Flora Osipovna Verblovskaya, after whose father he was apparently named. He was educated at the St. Petersburg Tenishevsky School (1900-1907), where since 1904 V.V. Gippius taught literature, which is described in detail in Mandelstam's autobiographical prose The Noise of Time (1923). Communication with Gippius, one of the first Russian decadents, “a comrade of Konevsky and Dobrolyubov, militant young monks of early symbolism” (“The Noise of Time”) shaped Mandelstam’s literary tastes. “The power of V.V. continues over me to this day” (“The Noise of Time”). A general idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe "symbolist" predilections of the young Mandelstam can be obtained from his letter to Gippius dated April 14 (28), 1908 from Paris. Distancing himself from the “meonism” of N.M. Minsky, Mandelstam informs his recent teacher, “forever poisoned by Sologub, wounded by Bryusov” (“The Noise of Time”), about his passion for these two poets.

In Bryusov, the young Mandelstam was "captivated by the brilliant audacity of negation, pure negation", which was refracted in a peculiar way some time later in the poetic experiments of Mandelstam himself. “Nothing needs to be talked about, / Nothing should be taught, / For if there is no meaning in life, / There is no trace for us to talk about life” - from a 1909 poem by Mandelstam. Wed with Mandelstam's later assessment of Bryusov's work: "This wretched" nothingness "will never be repeated in Russian poetry" ("On the Nature of the Word", 1922). In the work of F.K. Sologub Mandelstam saw the revival of the Tyutchev tradition: “Sologub’s poems flowed from the Alpine Tyutchev peak in transparent mountain streams” (“To the Anniversary of F.K. Sologub”, 1924). Under the direct influence of "Sologub's concept of a ghostly world" (L. Ya. Ginzburg), the poetics of early Mandelstam took shape. It is more difficult to identify the no less significant influence on the early Mandelstam of the poetry of I.F. Annensky, perceived, as can be seen from Mandelstam's later essay "On the Nature of the Word", with an eye on the work of P. Verlaine. Probably, it was Annensky’s influence that predetermined the “humanization” (“On the nature of the word”) of the realities of the material world in Mandelstam’s poems (“Fabric, intoxicated with itself, / Coddled with the caress of light, / It experiences summer. / As if untouched in winter” from Mandelstam’s 1910 poem ) and his philologism, which contributed to the understanding of "world culture" as a "continuous quotation and quotation marks" (from Mandelyptam's characterization of Annensky's poetics). It is characteristic that Mandelstam names the names of the “predecessors” of Annensky and Sologub in a poem of 1909, formulating his creative credo: “In the ease of creative exchange / The severity of Tyutchev with the childishness of Verlaine / Tell me - who could skillfully combine, / Giving their seal to the connection?”.

Annensky, whom Mandelstam visited in the summer of 1909, “received him very friendly and attentively” (N.Ya. Mandelstam), as did Sologub, which is indirectly evidenced by the final note of Mandelstam in 1924 “On the anniversary of F.K. Sologub": "Fyodor Kuzmnch Sologub - like a few - loves everything truly new in Russian poetry." However, the poet did not develop personal and creative relationships with many other symbolists for a long time. “The Symbolists never accepted him” (A.A. Akhmatova).

From September 1909 to April 1910, Mandelstam attended classes at the University of Heidelberg. At the beginning of his stay in Heidelberg, the poet pays a visit to D.S. Merezhkovsky and Z.N. Gippius, who refuse to listen to his poems. Similarly, the Merezhkovsky couple reacted to the first literary experiments of two other future acmeists - S.M. Gorodetsky and N.S. Gumilyov. The attitude of Z.N. Gippius to Mandelstam was little shaken by her subsequent acquaintance with Mandelstam's poems, received from a friend of the poet S.P. Kablukov, who saw in the works of Mandelstam traces of the influence of the works of Gippius. V.Ya. Bryusov, to whom Mandelstam passes his poems in October 1910, also speaks of them dismissively. Mandelstam's poems of the 1910s by A.A. Blok, despite the possible mediation of a friend and connoisseur of the work of both poets V.A. Piasta. Blok's images of "motor", "bends of the soul", "heart going to the bottom" were adopted by Mandelstam.

In a letter to M.A. Voloshin, left unanswered, the 18-year-old Mandelstam reacts as follows to the neglect of his poems in the symbolist environment: “I am forced to make a clear judgment about myself. Those who refuse me attention only help me in this.

The motives of loneliness and the melancholy provoked by loneliness are extremely strong in Mandelstam's poems included in the "symbolist" part (poems of 1909 - early 1912) of his first book "Stone" (1913). “I don’t want my soul bends, / And I don’t want reason and Muse ...” - from a poem by Mandelstam in 1910 included in the first edition of “Stone”.

“The idea-image of Music with a capital letter” (N.S. Gumilyov) becomes another dominant motif of Mandelstam’s work of the symbolist period. This motif appears in Mandelstam's poems under the influence of the "Dionysian" concept of art developed by Vyacheslav Ivanov. Like all acmeists, Mandelstam was deeply influenced, if not by the poetics, then by the ideas of Vyacheslav Ivanov. In Ivanov's articles it is easy to find the main categories that Mandelstam used when building his own picture of the world. “Your seeds have sunk deep into my soul, and I get scared looking at the huge sprouts,” Mandelstam wrote to Vyacheslav Ivanov on June 20, 1909. It is significant that here Mandelstam uses the same “botanical” imagery as in one of his 1909 program poems of the year. "Breathing", which is dedicated to self-awareness as a person: "I am a gardener, I am also a flower."

A new stage in Mandelstam's attitude to symbolism was outlined with his entry into the first "Workshop of Poets", headed by N.S. Gumilyov and S.M. Gorodetsky, in 1911. “There were people with whom he could unite himself with the word “we”” (N.Ya. Mandelstam). Some time later, in the bowels of the "Workshop" "talks arose about the need to dissociate themselves from symbolism, which, by the way, already a year ago (in 1910) declared itself in a state of crisis" (A.A. Akhmatova), which is officially formalized by publication in 1 th issue of "Apollo" for 1913 of acmeist manifestos written by Gumilyov and Gorodetsky. The transformation of Mandelstam "from the most refined symbolist into a faithful acmeist" (Vas.V. Gippius) falls on the middle of 1912, when the poet writes the poem "No, not the moon, but a bright dial ...", which is considered to be a turning point in the evolution of Mandelstam's work from symbolism to acmeism. However, already in this poem, Mandelstam renounces not the symbolist commitment to mysticism, but the mystical extremes of symbolism. “Touching” the “milkyness of the stars”, he brings the traditional mystical image closer to the “earth”, arguing with the program poem “Stars” (1912) by S. Gorodetsky, which expresses the unwillingness to “read in starry, incomprehensible letters”. In the second half of 1912 - 1913, Mandelstam wrote and printed in the first and second editions of "Stone" (1915) a number of anti-symbolist "poetic manifestos" (poems "Pedestrian", "Casino", "Golden", "Lutheran" - 1912; " Maidens of midnight courage…”, “Valkyries are flying, bows are singing…” - 1913), partly compensating for the refusal of Gumilyov and Gorodetsky to publish his program article “Morning of Acmeism”. Acutely reacting in these poems to the “inflation” of sacred concepts in the works of the Symbolists (cf., for example, in Mandelstam’s poem “Golden”: “Just don’t give me papers - / I can’t stand three-ruble notes” and in a later review of “Notes of an Eccentric” Andrei Bely: “Russian symbolism screamed so much and loudly about the inexpressible” that this “inexpressible” went from hand to hand like paper money”), Mandelstam, nevertheless, actively saturates his poems with symbolist realities (see, for example, the color palette the first "Stone", where the traditionally used by Russian poets "red" and "black" side by side with the renewed symbolists "white", "blue", "lilac", "gray", "gold" and already completely with the "symbolist" "turquoise" and "azure").

Characteristic in this sense is Mandelstam's attitude towards Andrei Bely. Severely criticizing Bely's prose and poetry in the articles "On the Nature of the Word", "Something About Georgian Art", "Letter on Russian Poetry", "Literary Moscow", "Storm and Onslaught", Mandelstam makes full use of Bely's stylistic discoveries, and often just the ones he makes fun of. So, Mandelstam's characterization of the plot of Bely's novel "Notes of an Eccentric": "In a book, you can peel the plot by raking a bunch of verbal garbage, but the plot in this book is just a shambles", it would be appropriate to refer to Mandelstam's own story "Egyptian Mark" (1927), in which deviations from the plot are elevated to a principle. It was Mandelstam who was destined to subsequently write Poems in Memory of Andrei Bely (1934).

A series of anti-symbolist articles by Mandelstam opens with an essay "On the Interlocutor" (1913), in which the poet, imitating the manner of K.I. Chukovsky-critic, represented by K.D. Balmont condemns the “priestly” position of early symbolism: “The poet immediately declares definitely that we are not interesting to him. Unexpectedly for him, we pay him the same coin: if you are not interested in us, and you are not interested in us. Later, Mandelstam admits that in “his best poems “O Night, Stay with Me”, “The Old House” - Balmont extracts new and non-repeating sounds of foreign, some kind of seraphic phonetics from Russian verse.

The First World War and the revolution put aside the struggle between literary currents for some time. However, Mandelstam's personal contact with the Symbolists, of course, continues. Since 1915, Mandelstam spends almost every summer with M.A. Voloshin in Koktebel, until July 1920, when the relationship between the two poets is interrupted. The Crimean landscape was reflected in a number of Mandelstam's poems of 1915-1920.

At an evening in the club of poets on October 21, 1920, Mandelstam's poems, later included in the book "Tristia" (1922), were for the first time favorably received by Blok. On the contrary, V. Bryusov, in a review of "Tristia" written in 1923, true to his previous assessments, calls Mandelstam's poems "meager."

Mandelstam himself tries to "summarize the symbolic period" of Russian literature in his articles of 1922-1923: "On the Nature of the Word", "Badger Hole", "Lunge", "Letter on Russian Poetry", "Storm and Onslaught". Some of them were later included in Mandelstam's book of articles On Poetry (1928).

Speaking negatively about the inclination of the Russian Symbolists to “big themes and abstract concepts poorly captured in the word” (even in a 1913 poem, symbolism is ironically compared with a “cumbersome opera”), Mandelstam pays tribute to symbolism, “the bosom of all new Russian poetry”, precisely thanks to symbolism "joined to a wide range of interests of European thought." Pointing out that by the 1910s “individually finished poetic phenomena emerged from the “wide bosom of symbolism”, Mandelstam highly appreciates the work of Sologub, Annensky, Blok, noting individual successes of Balmont and Bryusov. The nullification of the literary struggle between symbolism and acmeism made it possible to remove the traditional opposition between the two currents: in the article "Storm and Onslaught", Mandelstam even suggested calling the acmeists "junior symbolists".

“Unconventional” (Yu.I. Levin) Mandelstam’s poetry of the 1930s developed according to its own laws, experiencing almost no literary influences (with the possible exception of the influence of V. Khlebnikov, especially his theoretical article “Our Foundation”). However, in the memoirs of Mandelstam's fellow camper, who brought to us the last literary assessments of the poet, the names of Balmont, Bryusov, Blok and A. Bely appear, "whom Mandelstam considered a genius."

Osip Mandelstam was born on January 15, 1891 in Warsaw in the family of a tanner and glove maker Emil Veniaminovich Mandelstam and Flora Osipovna Verblovskaya.

The story of his parents was described in detail in his memoirs by Evgeny Emilievich Mandelstam, the younger brother of Osip Emilievich: “I will begin with the origins of the family. Little is known about the mother's family, the Verblovskys. The only thing that is certain is that the mother's family belonged to the intelligentsia, involved in European culture. So, the Vengerovs were close relatives of the mother: Semyon Afanasevich - the largest historian of literature, Pushkinist, his sister Isabella Afanasyevna, professor of the St. Petersburg Conservatory in the piano class. A large branched family of the Kopelyanskys, wealthy businessmen, was also related to his mother. One of the Kopelyansky sisters, the beautiful Lydia, was married to a certain Cassirer, who lived in Berlin. His son Ernst is a well-known philosopher, a prominent representative of the Marburg school of neo-Kantians. The mother herself graduated from the Russian gymnasium in Vilna. The origins of the Mandelstam clan come from Zhagory, the city of Shavelsky district, Dvina province in the Baltic. This clan was gifted, and its most talented and active representatives made their way and left Zhagory. The name of the physicist, Academician Mandelstam, is widely known. In Kyiv, old-timers still remember the ophthalmologist professor and public figure who bore this surname. In the Leningrad medical world, a place of honor was taken by my peers and also the Emilievichs - two brothers Moritz and Alexander Mandelstam. One of the Mandelstams headed a department at the University of Helsingfors. The other was a dragoman and a connoisseur of Arabic culture, he worked in the Russian embassy in Constantinople ... The father's childhood and youth were not easy. A capable and inquisitive person, he sought to escape from the closed world of the Jewish family. Secretly from his parents at night in the attic, by the light of a candle, he joined in knowledge - he studied the language, and not Russian, but German. The desire to master German literature and philosophy runs through the whole life of his father. To some extent, this reflected the historically established ties between the Baltic States and the Germans. Soon my father could not stand the domestic oppression and fled to Berlin. Here, far from his family, he could freely read Schiller and Goethe, Herder and Spinoza. However, his father's occupation did not last long. Cramped material circumstances, a half-starved existence soon prompted him to abandon his studies and return to the Baltic in search of work. The marriage of my parents took place on January 19, 1889 in Dinaburg (Dvinsk). Father, Emil Veniaminovich Mandelstam, was then thirty-three years old, and mother, Flora Osipovna Verblovskaya, twenty-three ... Soon after the wedding, my father acquired the specialty of a glove-maker and leather sorter. A large paper that has yellowed over eighty-five years has been preserved - a certificate issued to my father on February 27, 1891 "by decree of His Imperial Majesty." The newly formed family soon ended up in Warsaw. And, as follows from the certificate issued on January 2/14, 1891, here, in the city above the Vistula, the first-born Osip was born - a favorite, and later the pride of his parents. After the birth of their second son, Alexander, the family moved to St. Petersburg, where they lived all their lives. There, on Officerskaya Street (now Dekabristov Street), above the Eilers flower shop, in an old St. Petersburg house, in 1898, I was born - the third one, Eugene. According to the mother's stories, the main reason for the parents to move and live in the capital was the desire to give their children a good education, to introduce them to the culture, the center of which was St. Petersburg. As a Jew, the father could obtain the right to reside in this city only by joining the merchant guild, which he did. Now in his office there was a diploma of the first guild flaunted on the wall ... ".

Family life flowed between St. Petersburg and Pavlovsk. Osip hired governesses who taught him mainly foreign languages. Subsequently, in his memoirs The Noise of Time, Osip Mandelstam wrote: “I remember well the deaf years of Russia - the nineties, their slow creep, their painful calmness, their deep provincialism - a quiet backwater: the last refuge of a dying age. Over morning tea, talk about Dreyfus, the names of Colonels Esterhazy and Picard, vague arguments about some kind of "Kreutzer Sonata" and a change of conductors at the high console of the glass Pavlovsky station, which seemed to me a change of dynasties. Motionless newspapermen on the corners, without shouting, without moving, clumsily rooted to the sidewalks, narrow spans with a small folding bench for a third, and, one to one, the nineties are composed in my imagination of pictures torn apart, but internally connected by quiet squalor and painful doomed by the provinciality of a dying life... The days of student riots at the Kazan Cathedral were always known in advance. Each family had its own informant student. It turned out that to look at these riots, though at a respectful distance, a mass of the public converged: children with nannies, mothers and aunts who could not keep their rebels at home, old officials and all sorts of idlers. On the day of the appointed riot, the sidewalks of Nevsky were swaying with a dense crowd of spectators from Sadovaya to Anichkov Bridge. All this mob was afraid to approach the Kazan Cathedral. The police were hidden in courtyards, for example, in the courtyard of the Catherine's Church. Kazanskaya Square was relatively empty, small groups of students and real workers were walking around, pointing fingers at the latter. Suddenly, from the direction of Kazanskaya Square, a drawn-out, ever-increasing howl was heard, something like an unceasing “y” or “y”, turning into a menacing howl, getting closer and closer. Then the audience shied away, and the crowd was crushed by horses. “Cossacks - Cossacks,” flashed like lightning, faster than the Cossacks themselves flew. Actually, the "riot" was cordoned off and taken to the Mikhailovsky Manege, and Nevsky was empty, as if it had been swept away with a broom ... So many French women were hired to me that all their features got mixed up and merged into one common portrait spot. According to my understanding, all these French and Swiss women from songs, copybooks, anthologies and conjugations themselves fell into childhood. At the center of the worldview, dislocated by reading books, stood the figure of the great Emperor Napoleon and the war of the twelfth year, followed by Joan of Arc (one Swiss, however, I caught a Calvinist), and no matter how much I tried, being inquisitive, to find out from them about France, nothing succeeded, besides the fact that she is beautiful. The French women appreciated the art of talking a lot and quickly, the Swiss women valued the knowledge of songs, of which the crown one is “a song about Malbrook”. These poor girls were imbued with the cult of great people: Hugo, Lamartine, Napoleon and Moliere... On Sundays they were allowed to listen to Mass, they were not supposed to make any acquaintances...”.

The Mandelstam family lived a complex and contradictory life, in which the father worked hard and hard, not being able to participate in family life. The children were raised and brought into life by their mother and, to some extent, by their maternal grandmother, S.G. Verblovskaya, who always lived with her daughter's family. The boys owed everything to their mother, especially Osip. The world of music and books has always been inextricably linked with Flora Osipovna. Mandelstam said: “Mother's Russian books - Pushkin in Isakov's edition - the seventy-sixth year. I still think that this is a great edition, I like it more than academic. There is nothing superfluous in it, the fonts are arranged harmoniously, the columns of poetry flow freely, like soldiers in flying battalions, and lead them like generals, reasonable, clear years, inclusive, thirty-seven. Pushkin's color? Every color is random - what color to choose for the murmur of speeches? Oh, Rimbaud's idiotic color alphabet!.. My Isakov's Pushkin was in a duckweed of no color, in a gymnasium calico binding, in a faded black-brown duckweed with an earthy, sandy tint; he was not afraid of stains, ink, fire or kerosene. For a quarter of a century, the black sandy duckweed has lovingly absorbed everything - the spiritual, shabby beauty, the almost physical charm of my mother's Pushkin is so clearly felt by me. On it is an inscription in red ink: "To a student of the third grade for diligence." With Isakov's Pushkin, a story about ideal, with a consumptive blush and holey shoes, teachers and teachers is knitted: the eighties in Vilna. The word "intellectual" mother and especially grandmother pronounced with pride. Lermontov's binding was green-blue and some kind of military one, it was not for nothing that he was a hussar. He never seemed to me a brother or relative of Pushkin. But I considered Goethe and Schiller to be twins. Here I recognized what was alien and consciously separated it. After all, after the thirty-seventh year, both blood and poetry murmured differently ... ".

Mandelstam's path to the laurels of one of the greatest poets of the 20th century passed through painful attempts to expand the boundaries of the utterable, to curb the "inexpressible" by innate rhythm and the search for the "lost word". From his early youth, Mandelstam's consciousness was the consciousness of a raznochintsy, not rooted in the age-old soil of national culture and patriarchal life: “I could never understand Tolstoy and Aksakovs, the Bagrovs-grandchildren, who were in love with family archives with epic home memories ... A raznochintsy does not need memory , it is enough for him to tell about the books that he has read - and the biography is ready. But out of this lack of rootedness in the national way of life grew the participation in the world being, the acmeist “yearning for world culture”, the ability to perceive Homer, Dante and Pushkin as contemporaries and “companions” at the free “feast” of the universal spirit.

From 1900 to 1907, Osip Mandelstam studied at the Tenishevsky Commercial School, one of the best educational institutions in Russia at that time, which Vladimir Nabokov and the outstanding philologist V. Zhirmunsky also graduated a little later. A special intellectual-ascetic atmosphere reigned here, lofty ideals of political freedom and civic duty were cultivated. Mandelstam said: “In Zagorodny, in the courtyard of a huge apartment building, with a blank wall, visible from a distance, and a Shustov sign, about three dozen boys in short pants, woolen stockings and English shirts played football with a terrible cry. Everyone looked like they were taken to England or Switzerland and dressed up there, not at all in Russian, not in a gymnasium, but in some kind of Cambridge way ... we were brought up in high glass boxes, with window sills heated by steam heating, in spacious classrooms for twenty-five people and not in the corridors, but in high parquet arenas, where there were slanting columns of solar dust and smelled of gas from physics laboratories. Illustrative methods included cruel and unnecessary vivisection, pumping air out of a glass cap so that a poor mouse would suffocate on its back, tormenting frogs, boiling water scientifically, with a description of this process, and melting glass rods on gas burners ... Here is a brief portrait gallery of my class: Vanyusha Korsakov, nicknamed cutlet (loose zemstvo, hairstyle in a bracket, Russian shirt with a silk belt, family zemstvo tradition: Petrunkevich, Rodichev); Barats, - the family is friends with Stasyulevich ("Bulletin of Europe"), a passionate mineralogist, dumb as a fish, speaks only of quartz and mica; Leonid Zarubin, - large coal industry of the Don basin; first dynamos and batteries, then only Wagner; Przesetsky - from a poor gentry, a specialist in spitting. The first student Slobodzinsky is a man from the second part of "Dead Souls" burnt by Gogol, a positive type of Russian intellectual, a moderate mystic, a truth-seeker, a good mathematician and a reader according to Dostoevsky; then ran a radio station. Nadezhdin is a commoner: the sour smell of the apartment of a small official, fun and carelessness, because there is nothing to lose. The twins are the Krupensky brothers, Bessarabian landowners, connoisseurs of wine and Jews. And, finally, Boris Sinani, a man of the current generation, ripe for big events and historical work. He died just after finishing. And how it would have surfaced during the years of the Revolution!

During the years of the first Russian revolution of 1905-1907, Mandelstam could not help but become infected with political radicalism. The revolutionary events and the catastrophe of the Russo-Japanese War inspired the first student poetic experiments of the poet. What was happening was perceived by him as a renewing element and a vigorous universal metamorphosis: “The boys of nine hundred and five went into the revolution with the same feeling with which Nikolenka Rostov went into the hussars,” he said much later.

Having received a diploma from the Tenishevsky School on May 15, 1907, Mandelstam tried to join the combat organization of the Social Revolutionaries in Finland, but was not accepted there because of his age. Concerned about the future of their son, the parents hurried to send him to study outside of Russia. In 1907 and 1908, Mandelstam listened to lectures at the Faculty of Literature of the University of Paris, in 1909 and 1910 he studied Romance philology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and traveled to Switzerland and Italy. The echo of these meetings with Western Europe never left Mandelstam's poetry. It was then that European Gothic entered the sum of Mandelstam's architectural impressions - a through symbol of the figurative system of his future poetry.

In Paris, in Osip, an internal turning point took place during these years: Mandelstam left politics for the sake of poetry, turned to intensive literary work. He was carried away by the lyrics of the leader of Russian symbolism, Bryusov, and the French "damned" poets for the boldness of "pure negation", for the "music of life", caused by the lack of attachment to a specific life content, as Mandelstam wrote in one of his letters to his former teacher of literature and literary mentor Vl. Gippius. In Paris, Mandelstam met Gumilyov, who later became his closest friend and associate. It was Gumilyov who “dedicated” Mandelstam to the “rank” of the poet. This acquaintance was destined to take root in 1911 already in St. Petersburg, when Mandelstam met Gumilyov's wife for the first time at an evening in the "tower" of Vyacheslav Ivanov. All three were united not only by deep friendship, but also by the similarity of poetic aspirations.

Around 1910, in the most sensitive literary circles, the crisis of symbolism as a literary trend, claiming to be the total language of the new art and new culture, became obvious. The desire for artistic release from the power of too intrusive and didactic symbolism dictated the intention of Gumilyov, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, as well as S. Gorodetsky, V. Narbut, M. Zenkevich and some other authors to form a new poetic direction. So at the beginning of 1913, acmeism came to the forefront of the literary struggle.

In the 1910s, Osip Mandelstam, with all the fervor of youth, shared the acmeist aspirations to oppose the endless symbolist impulses "to the sky", into indiscriminate mysticism, the golden balance of the earthly and heavenly. In his work, the fruit of the near-Acmeist magazine controversy of 1913 appeared - the article "Morning of Acmeism", which, for unknown reasons, was rejected as an acmeist manifesto and was published only in 1919. However, it was in this article that the essence of the acmeist view of the world and art, the principles of the poetics of acmeism were formulated with the utmost clarity and depth.

More than any other literary movement of the 20th century, acmeism resisted its exact definition. His bosom included too different artistic systems, introduced by too different poets, who were united, first of all, by friendly relations and a desire to move away from symbolism. But acmeism entered the history of Russian literature of the 20th century, first of all, as an integral poetic system that unites three poets - Mandelstam, Akhmatova and Gumilyov. And Mandelstam in this series for the majority of modern researchers is almost the first.

Acmeism has become a counterpoint to the endless symbolist speculations on the themes of "metaphysical", transcendent miracles. The word of Mandelstam the Acmeist did not call for an escape from the "blue prison" of the real world to the world "even more real", "higher", "heavenly" (as among the romantics and their heirs - the symbolists). The world was a single, God-given palace. The earthly and the heavenly did not oppose each other. They merged together thanks to the miracle of the word - the divine gift of naming simple earthly things. And such a poetic word - "the word as such" (the formula from "The Morning of Acmeism", developed in Mandelstam's later articles "Word and Culture" in 1922 and "On the Nature of the Word" in 1922) - was transformed into a "monstrously condensed reality phenomena." By uniting the earthly and heavenly, the poetic word, as it were, took on flesh and turned into the same fact of reality as the surrounding things - only more durable.

Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails.
I read the list of ships to the middle:
This long brood, this crane train,
That over Hellas once rose.

Like a crane wedge in foreign borders, -
Divine foam on the heads of kings, -
Where are you sailing? Whenever not Elena,
What is Troy to you alone, Achaean men?

Both the sea and Homer - everything is moved by love.
Who should I listen to? And here Homer is silent,
And the black sea, ornate, rustles
And with a heavy roar, he approaches the headboard.

The initial prerequisite for the aesthetics of Mandelstam the Acmeist was the memory of the poetic texts of past eras and their recognition - or rethought repetition in quotations, often transformed and encrypted. Many critics, not quite rightly, considered acmeism - including Mandelstam's poetry - to be a conservative neoclassical (or "false classical") direction. However, the acmeists themselves erected the word "classical" to the Latin "classicum", which means "signal of the battle horn." And Mandelstam, who defined the classics in the article “Word and Culture” not as what has already been, but as what should be, contrasted the unfading novelty of the “silver trumpet of Catullus” (the ancient Roman poet) of two thousand years ago with rapidly becoming obsolete futuristic riddles:

And more than one treasure, perhaps
Bypassing the grandchildren, he will go to the great-grandchildren,
And again the skald will lay down someone else's song
And how to pronounce it
(“I have not heard the stories of Ossian ..”, 1914)

Osip Mandelstam always sought to connect and compare his poetic existence with the indelible mark left by his great predecessors, and present the result of this merger to a distant reader already in posterity, a “providential interlocutor” (article “Morning of Acmeism”). Thus, the contradiction between the past, present and future was removed. Mandelstam's poetry could be clothed in clear classical forms, referring the reader to the art of bygone eras. But at the same time, it always hid the explosive power of ultra-modern, avant-garde artistic techniques that endowed stable traditional images with new and unexpected meanings. It was up to the "ideal reader" of the future to guess these meanings. For all the impeccable, classical logic of its "architecture", the meaning of Mandelstam's text was as unpredictable as the key to the riddle. At the center of Mandelstam's figurative language were complex analogies hidden in subtext between sometimes distant phenomena. And to make out these analogies was only possible for a very prepared reader who lived and lives in the same cultural space as Mandelstam himself.

For example, when Mandelstam in "Summer Stans" in 1913 called fate a gypsy, this image could be explained in two ways: fate is as fickle as a gypsy, and - gypsies predict fate. However, Mandelstam's poetics also required a third motivation for the image - beyond the boundaries of the poem. And here you can turn to Pushkin's poem "Gypsies", ending with the words: "And there is no protection from fate." Such a hint through a hidden quote and the imposition of different motivations for the image is a characteristic example of Mandelstam's poetics, which researchers call "semantic" (that is, developing semantic nuances, shifts in meaning due to context and subtext). And therefore, according to S.S. Averintsev, Mandelstam’s poems are “so tempting to understand - and so difficult to interpret.”

Osip Mandelstam, Korney Chukovsky, Benedict Livshits and Yuri Annenkov, seeing them off to the front. Photograph by Karl Bulla. 1914

In the poetry of Osip Mandelstam, the semantic potential accumulated by the word over the entire history of its existence in other poetic contexts acquired significance thanks to such hidden riddle quotes. They forced the reader to turn to their sources in order to find a coordinate system, a subtext with which the text could be deciphered. The main features of this method were fully manifested already in the first published collection of the poet "Stone" in 1913. It included 23 poems written from 1908 to 1913 (later the collection was supplemented with texts from 1914 and 1915 and republished at the end of 1915 (the title page says 1916)). Evgeny Mandelstam spoke about the history of the publication of this collection: “The history of the publication of the first “Stone” is interesting - a thin book with twenty-three poems written from 1909 to 1913. The publication of "Stone" was "family" - the money for the release of the book was given by the father. Circulation - only 600 copies. I remember the day when Osip took me with him and went to the printing house on Mokhovaya, and we received a finished print run. The author took one pack, I took the other. Our task was to sell the books. The fact is that in St. Petersburg book sellers did not buy collections of poems, but only took them on commission. An exception was made for a very few already known poets. For example, for Block. After a long deliberation, we handed over the entire circulation on commission to the large Popov-Yasnoy bookstore, the corner of Nevsky and Fontanka, where the pharmacy is now. From time to time my brother sent me to find out how many copies had been sold, and when I reported that forty-two books had already been sold out, it was taken at home as a holiday. On the scale of that time in the conditions of the book market, it sounded like the first recognition of the poet by readers. Those who study the poetry of Osip Mandelstam note that in the verses of this collection, the first "Stone", he already appears as a great artist, with a well-formed poetic credo. He immediately took a prominent place among the poets of that time ... ".

And indeed, the early poems of 1908-1910 included in the collection were a combination of the immature psychology of a young man, almost a teenager, with the perfect maturity of intellectual observation and poetic description of this particular psychology, unique for all world poetry:

From the pool of evil and viscous
I grew up with a rustling reed, -
And passionately, and languidly, and affectionately
Breathing forbidden life...
I am happy with a cruel insult,
And in a life like a dream
I secretly envy everyone
And secretly in love with everyone.

Back in 1911, Osip Mandelstam committed an act of "transition to European culture" - he converted to Christianity. And although the poet was baptized in the Methodist Church on May 14 in Vyborg, the verses of "Stone" captured the capture of the Catholic theme, the image of the eternal Rome of the Apostle Peter. In Roman Catholicism, Mandelstam was captivated by the pathos of a single world organizing idea.

Like a lark, Jamm sings
After all, the Catholic priest
Gives him advice.

Another example is related to Mandelstam's perception of the image of the "first Russian Westerner" - Chaadaev. The 1915 article “Pyotr Chaadaev” was dedicated to him, and the poem “Staff” created at the same time was inspired by his image. In Chaadaev’s Catholic sympathies, in his devotion to the idea of ​​Rome as the center of the spiritual unity of the Christian universe, Mandelstam saw not betrayal, but deep loyalty to the Russian national path: “Chadaev’s thought, national in its origins, is also national where it flows into Rome. Only a Russian person could discover this West, which is more concentrated, more concrete than the historical West itself. Chaadaev, precisely by the right of a Russian person, entered the sacred land of tradition, with which he was not connected by succession ... ". Yes, and the poet himself at that time was a sort of Western dandy - he loved exquisite white shirts, which he would certainly hand over only to Chinese laundries. Evgeny Mandelstam wrote about his brother: “The brother began to feel his talent very early, and in the atmosphere that had developed at home, traits of egocentrism began to appear in him, there was an idea that everyone around should serve him. So from childhood spoiled threads stretched to his later life. And life was difficult, stressful, full of hardships. And in the years of recognition and poetic glory, and in the years of turmoil and troubles, Osip remained true to himself and very often in communication with people asserted his right to exclusivity, transferring this not only to everyday life, but also to business relations with publishing houses, editorial offices, the Writers' Union . I could write and say a lot of insulting, insulting things to people at such moments. It was "explosive", quickly ignited, but also cooled down easily. Some characteristic features in Osip's behavior in a number of cases armed people against him and gave enemies material for criticism, hostility and condemnation. But all this was of no significant importance to those who knew the rich spiritual world of his brother, appreciated his poetic gift and understood the path of the Cross he condemned himself to in life and in literature. Nothing prevented his relatives and friends from respecting him and loving him the way he was and remained in the memory of his contemporaries. After all, despite the complexity of Osip's character, one must not forget that the great kindness inherent in his brother, selflessness towards other people were the main things in his actions ... ".

With the outbreak of the First World War, eschatological notes sounded louder and louder in Mandelstam's poetry - a feeling of the inevitability of a catastrophe, some kind of temporary end. These notes were associated, first of all, with the theme of Russia and endowed the image of the Motherland, squeezed in the grip of an inexorable history, with the gift of special freedom.

Are we, thrown into space,
Doomed to die
About beautiful constancy
And regret loyalty.
(“On Unprecedented Freedom...”, 1915).

The place of "stone", the building material of poetry, was replaced by the "tree" subject to fire - at the same time a symbol of a tragic fate, an expression of the Russian idea and a reminder of the Cross Tree of the Passion of the Lord ("Destroys the flame ...", 1915). The desire to join this kind of tragic national experience in practical life forced Mandelstam in December 1914 to go to front-line Warsaw, where he wanted to join the troops as an orderly. But nothing came of this, the poet returned to the capital, and created a whole series of poems that can be called a requiem for the doomed imperial Petersburg. It was precisely as the imperial capital that Petersburg was similar to Mandelstam's holy, apostate and perishing Jerusalem. The Russian Empire was related to the “petrified” Judea by the “sin” of national messianism. The recompense for it was an inevitable catastrophe (the subject of a later article, Human Wheat, 1923). Statehood, too densely, unconditionally and self-satisfiedly aware of its holiness, was doomed to perish. The outgoing sovereign world evoked a complex intertwining of feelings in the poet: it was almost physical horror, and solemnity, and even pity. Mandelstam was probably the first in world literature to speak of "compassion" for the state, for its "hunger". In one of the chapters of The Noise of Time, an autobiographical prose of 1925, a surrealistic image of a “sick eagle”, pitiful, blind, with broken paws, a two-headed bird swarming in the corner “under the hiss of a primus stove”, arose. The blackness of this heraldic bird - the coat of arms of the Russian Empire - was seen by him as the color of the end back in 1915.

In 1915, Mandelstam met Anastasia and Marina Tsvetaeva. In 1916, Marina Tsvetaeva entered Mandelstam's life.

Chulkov Georgy, Petrovykh Maria, Akhmatova Anna and Mandelstam Osip.

In Alexandrov, at Tsvetaeva's dacha, he spent eight days. There, Osip Mandelstam received news of a stroke that had happened to his mother. The poet was no longer able to catch a living mother. He barely made it to the funeral. Evgeny Mandelstam said: “Each of us experienced this grief in our own way. With her death, about which - Osip's poem "In the bright temple the Jews buried my mother ...", the collapse of the Mandelstam family began. We immediately felt disorder and emptiness, tormented by the understanding of our guilt before our mother, our selfishness, insufficient attention to her; the fact that we, children, did not notice the hard things in her life, her dedication to the family, did not care about her, even as adults. The death of the mother left its mark on the mental warehouse of all the sons. She especially struck the most reactive of us, Osip. Over time, he fully understood what he owed to his mother, what she did for him. And the older he got, the more he felt his own guilt. Especially often he returned to thoughts about this in the last years of his life, in the difficult days of his exile ... ".

This night is unique
And you still have light.
At the gates of Jerusalem
The black sun has risen.
The yellow sun is scarier, -
Hush, Little Baby, Do not Say a Word,-
In the bright temple of the Jews
They buried my mother.

Grace not having
And deprived of the priesthood
In the bright temple of the Jews
Burial of wife's ashes
And they rang over the mother
Israeli voices.
I woke up in the cradle -
Illuminated by the black sun.
(1916)

After the October Revolution, Osip Mandelstam worked in newspapers, in the People's Commissariat for Education, traveled around the country, published in newspapers, spoke with poetry, gaining success. Osip Mandelstam's poems from the time of the war and revolution were included in the collection "Tristia" ("the book of sorrows", first published without the participation of the author in 1922 and republished under the title "Second Book" in 1923 in Moscow). The basis of the book was the theme of time, the grandiose flow of history, striving towards death. This theme has become a cross-cutting in all the work of the poet until his last days. The internal unity of "Tristia" was provided with a new quality of the lyrical hero, for whom nothing personal existed anymore.

Let us glorify, brothers, the twilight of freedom,
Great twilight year!
In the boiling night waters
The heavy forest is lowered.
You rise in deaf years -
O sun, judge, people.

Let's glorify the fatal burden
Which the people's leader takes in tears.
Let us glorify the power of the gloomy burden,
Her unbearable oppression.
Who has a heart - he must hear the time,
As your ship sinks.

We are fighting legions
They tied the swallows - and now
The sun is not visible, the whole element
Twittering, moving, living;
Through the nets - thick twilight -
The sun is not visible and the earth is floating.

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 letey cold,
That the earth cost us ten heavens.
("The Twilight of Freedom", 1918).

In the poetry and biography of Mandelstam in the 1920s and 1930s, despair was redeemed by a courageous readiness for high sacrifice, and in distinctly Christian tones. The lines of 1922: “Again they sacrificed the crown of life like a lamb,” Akhmatova responded in the words spoken by the poet, who had already written disastrous poems for himself about Stalin, in February 1934: “I am ready for death.” And in the early 1920s, Mandelstam wrote his renunciation of the temptation of emigration and contrasted the promises of political freedom with the freedom of a different - spiritual order, the freedom of self-overcoming, which could only be bought at the cost of loyalty to Russian Golgotha:

Zane is a free slave who has overcome fear,
And preserved beyond measure
In cool granaries in deep bins
A grain of deep, complete faith.

The book "Tristia" captured a significant change in the poet's style: the texture of the image moved more and more towards a semantic shift, "dark", encrypted meanings and irrational language moves. However, Mandelstam departed from the former acmeist clarity in theory as well. He developed the concept of a “blissful meaningless word”, which was losing its objective significance, “thingness”. But the law of equilibrium also reigned in the theory of the word: the word gained freedom from the objective meaning, but did not forget about it. So the best works of the poet of the beginning of the decade were built (“Sisters - heaviness and tenderness ...”, “Swallow”, “A ghostly scene flickers a little ...”, “Take it for joy from my palms ...”). And, of course, the poem "For the fact that I could not hold your hands ...":

For the fact that I could not hold your hands,
For the fact that I betrayed salty tender lips,
I must wait for dawn in the dense Acropolis.
How I hate odorous, ancient log cabins!

Achaean men in the darkness equip a horse,
Serrated saws bite into the walls firmly,
The dry fuss will not settle down in any way,
And there is no name for you, no sound, no cast.

How could I think that you would return, how dare I?
Why did I break away from you prematurely?
The darkness has not yet dissipated and the rooster has not crowed,
Even the hot ax did not crash into the wood.

Resin stood out like a transparent tear on the walls,
And the city feels its wooden ribs,
But blood rushed to the stairs and went on an attack,
And three times the husbands dreamed of a seductive image.

Where is dear Troy? Where is the royal, where is the girl's house?
It will be destroyed, the tall birdhouse of Priam.
And arrows fall like dry wooden rain,
And other arrows grow on the ground like hazel.

The last star painlessly extinguishes the injection,
And the morning will knock on the window like a gray swallow,
And a slow day, like an ox awakened in straw,
On the stacks, rough from a long sleep, he stirs.

In the early 1920s, Osip Mandelstam wandered around the southern regions of Russia, visited Kyiv, where he met his future wife, Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina. Nadezhda Yakovlevna was born on October 30, 1899 in Saratov in the family of a barrister, Nadezhda Yakovlevna's mother was a doctor. As a child, Nadezhda visited Germany, France and Switzerland, received a good gymnasium education. In 1919, Nadezhda Yakovlevna became the wife of Osip Mandelstam. “My life,” she wrote, “begins with a meeting with Mandelstam.” Later, Nadezhda Mandelstam devoted her life to preserving her husband's poetic heritage. In the 1960s, she wrote the book "Memoirs", then, in the early 1970s, the next volume of memoirs was published - "Second Book", and six years later - "Book Three".

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina (Mandelstam).

Mandelstam and his wife lived for a short time in Koktebel with Voloshin, then moved to Feodosia, where he was arrested by the Wrangel counterintelligence on suspicion of espionage. After his release, he ended up in Batumi, where he was again arrested, this time by the Menshevik Coast Guard. Georgian poets N. Mitsishvili and T. Tabidze rescued him from prison. Exhausted to the extreme, Mandelstam returned to Petrograd, and for some time lived in the House of Arts, where almost all the famous writers who remained in the city found shelter. Then he again went to the south, then settled in Moscow. By the mid-1920s, there was not a trace left of the former balance of anxieties and hopes in comprehending what was happening. As a result, Mandelstam's poetics also changed. In her now uncertainty more and more outweighed clarity. He was very worried about the execution of Gumilyov in 1921. His recent hopes for a "separation of the church-culture from the state" and the establishment of new, organic relations between them along the lines of the connection between ancient Russian "specific princes" and "monasteries" were not justified. Culture was increasingly put in its place. Mandelstam, like Akhmatova, found himself in an ambiguous position. For the Soviet authorities, he was clearly a stranger, a relic of the bourgeois past, but, unlike the generation of symbolists, he was deprived of even indulgence for the "solidity" of past merits, and therefore was out of work.

Mandelstam was increasingly afraid of losing his sense of inner rightness. Increasingly, the image of "human lips that have nothing more to say" arose in Mandelstam's poetry. At the same time, an ominous shadow of the ruthless "age-Beast" appeared in the themes of Mandelstam's poems. Behind him, the encrypted features of Gogol's Viy with his deadly gaze were visible (through a hidden paronym, that is, the consonance of the words "century" and "eyelid" - in the appeal of the demon Viy to evil spirits: "raise my eyelids"). This is how the language of the biblical Apocalypse was rethought, which called the coming Antichrist the “beast”. The fate of the poetic word in a duel with the most bloodthirsty predator, hungry time devouring all human creations, was reflected in the Slate Ode (1923, 1937), where a remarkable dense darkness of images was created, devoid of the slightest transparency.

In 1925, there was a short creative surge associated with Osip Mandelstam's passion for Olga Vaksel. Later, a television program was prepared about their relationship from the cycle “More than love. Osip Mandelstam and Olga Vaksel.

Then the poet fell silent for five years. These years were busy with translations and work on prose - the autobiography "The Noise of Time", the story "Egyptian Mark" in 1928 and the essay "The Fourth Prose" in 1930. The tone of the books was set by the tragic tension between the "great", historical, epic time and the personal, biographical time. The author was afraid to get stuck in his past, to lose the absolute freedom of rootlessness and groundlessness. He renounced himself, from his biography, tried to overcome himself and win. In the "Egyptian stamp" these motives were brought to an anguish. Mandelstam portrayed his double as the main character, endowing him with the condensed features of the “little man” of Russian literature in the spirit of Gogol and Dostoevsky, and betraying him with a semblance of ritual abuse. Never giving free rein to the "nerves" in his poetry, Mandelstam here, according to the literary critic N. Berkovsky, "hounds the greyhounds of the game style to the last strength." So the author dealt with the most important topics for himself - fear, honor and dishonor, in order, like a jester or a holy fool, to gain the right to shout out the last truth without shame.

At the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, Nikolai Bukharin, Mandelstam's patron in power circles, arranged for him to work as a proofreader for the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, which gave the poet and his wife minimal livelihood. However, Mandelstam's unwillingness to accept the "rules of the game" of the "well-mannered" Soviet writers serving the regime and extreme emotional impulsiveness sharply complicated relations with "colleagues in the shop." The poet found himself at the center of a public scandal related to accusations of translation plagiarism (he delivered his rebuke to literary enemies in the “Fourth Prose”, where he rejected “writing” as “prostitution” and spoke unequivocally about the “bloody Soviet land” and its “slashed socialism” ).

In order to save Mandelstam from the consequences of the scandal, Bukharin organized for him a trip to Armenia in 1930, which left a deep mark on the poet's artistic work. After a long silence in the daze of the "Soviet night", the desire to write poetry again came to him. They were clearer and more transparent than the "Slate Ode", but the last courageous despair and hopeless fear already clearly sounded in them. If in prose Mandelstam convulsively tried to escape from the threat, now he finally accepted fate, renewing his inner consent to the victim:

And life could whistle like a starling,
Eat a nut pie
Yes, apparently it is not possible.

Since the beginning of the 1930s, the poetry of Osip Mandelstam has accumulated the energy of defiance and "high" civil indignation, dating back to the ancient Roman poet Juvenal:

Human pitiful charred mouth
He is indignant and says “no”.

This is how a masterpiece of civic lyrics was born - "For the explosive valor of the coming centuries ...".

For the explosive valor of the coming centuries,
For the high tribe of people
I lost the cup at the feast of the fathers,
And fun, and his honor.
A wolfhound age throws itself on my shoulders,
But I'm not a wolf by my blood,
Stuff me better, like a hat, in a sleeve
Hot fur coat of the Siberian steppes.

So as not to see a coward or a flimsy filth,
No bloody blood in the wheel
So that blue foxes shine all night
Me in my primeval beauty,

Take me to the night where the Yenisei flows
And the pine reaches the star
Because I'm not a wolf by my blood
And only an equal will kill me.

Meanwhile, the poet increasingly felt like a hunted beast and, finally, decided on a civil act - in November 1933 he wrote poems against Stalin "We live, not smelling the country under us ...".

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 mountaineer there.
His thick fingers, like worms, 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 alone babachet and pokes,
Like a horseshoe, a decree forges a decree:

Who in the groin, who in the forehead, who in the eyebrow, who in the eye.
Whatever his punishment is raspberry
And the broad chest of an Ossetian.

Poems quickly gained fame, went hand in hand in the lists, they were memorized. The fate of Mandelstam was sealed. Boris Pasternak called this act suicide. One of the listeners wrote a denunciation of Mandelstam. On the night of May 13-14, 1934, he was arrested and soon sent into exile in Cherdyn in the Perm Territory, where Osip Mandelstam was accompanied by his wife, Nadezhda Yakovlevna.

In Cherdyn, Mandelstam attempted suicide by throwing himself out of a window, but survived. Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam wrote to all Soviet authorities, all acquaintances and with the assistance of Nikolai Bukharin, Mandelstam was allowed to independently choose a place for settlement. The Mandelstams chose Voronezh. There they lived in poverty, occasionally they were helped with money by a few persistent friends. From time to time, Mandelstam worked part-time in a local newspaper and theater. Close people visited them, the mother of Nadezhda Yakovlevna, the artist V.N. Yakhontov and Anna Akhmatova. Here Mandelstam experienced the last, very bright flowering of his poetic genius. From 1935 to 1937 he wrote three Voronezh Notebooks. The crown of the "Voronezh lyrics" - "Poems about the unknown soldier", were written by him in 1937. The poet penetrated into the new "reveal" - the ahistorical and despiritual continent of time, where he was filled with a deep will "to be like everyone else", "according to the choice of personal conscience" to live and die with the "crowd" and "herd" of millions "killed cheaply", to dissolve in the infinite the outer space of the universe and the human mass that fills it - and thereby defeat the evil time. Late Mandelstam's poetics became even more "closed", "dark", multi-layered and complicated by various subtextual levels. This was the poetics of the “dropped links”, when in order to restore the plot of the poem, it was necessary to restore the mediator image that could be hidden in a hidden and reworked quotation, an encrypted subtext that was very difficult to restore by an unprepared reader. But it could also be hidden in the purely individual irrational logic of the author's thinking, cracking the finished word and extracting its hidden semantic depths, often archaic, dating back to ancient mythological models.

And yet, the darkness could suddenly lighten up: the Voronezh land, the land of exile, was perceived by the poet as a chaste miracle of the Russian landscape. The harsh and pure landscape served as a backdrop for the triumphant theme of human dignity, not subject to the blows of fate:

Unhappy is the one whom, like his shadow,
Barking frightens and the wind mows,
And poor is he who is half-dead himself,
He asks for alms from the shadow.

Rejecting the fate of the "shadow", feeling himself a "shadow", the poet went through the last temptation - to ask for alms from the one on whom his "return to life" depended. Thus, at the beginning of 1937, “Ode to Stalin” appeared - an ingeniously compiled catalog of stamped glorifications of the “leader”. However, Mandelstam's "Ode" did not save him. Her hero - cunning and vengeful - could start a crafty game with his offenders and, for example, give life and even hope - as happened with Mandelstam, who in May 1937 served the appointed term of Voronezh exile and returned to Moscow. In a statement by the Secretary of the Union of Writers of the USSR V. Stavsky in 1938, addressed to the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs N.I. Yezhov, it was proposed to "solve the issue of Mandelstam", and his poems were called "obscene and slanderous." Iosif Prut and Valentin Kataev were named in the letter as "speaking sharply" in defense of Osip Mandelstam. At the beginning of March 1938, the Mandelstam couple moved to the Samatikha trade union health resort (Egoryevsky district of the Moscow region, now referred to as the Shatursky district). In the same place, on the night of May 1-2, 1938, Osip Emilievich was arrested a second time and taken to the Cherusti railway station, which was located 25 kilometers from Samatikha. After that, according to the stage, he was sent to a camp in the Far East.

Mandelstam died on December 27, 1938 in the Second River transit camp near Vladivostok, driven to the brink of insanity. According to the testimony of some prisoners - on a weed heap. He was posthumously rehabilitated. In the case of 1938 - in 1956, and in the case of 1934 - in 1987. The location of the poet's grave is still unknown.

The exact date and circumstances of Mandelstam's death were unknown for many years. “In June of the fortieth year, Osip Mandelyptam’s brother, Shura, was summoned to the registry office of the Baumansky district of Moscow and handed him a death certificate for me, O. M.,” wrote the poet’s widow. - Age - 47 years old, date of death - December 27, 1938. The cause of death was heart failure. It can be paraphrased: he died because he died. After all, paralysis of the heart is death ... and more added: arteriosclerosis ... According to Khazin, Mandelstam died during typhus.

According to the stories of another camp inmate, Kazarnovsky, Mandelstam died like this: “Once, despite screams and prodding, O. Mandelstam did not leave the bunk. In those days, the frost grew stronger ... Everyone was driven to clean the snow, and O. Mandelstam was left alone. A few days later he was removed from the bunk and taken to the hospital. Soon Kazarnovsky heard that O. Mandelstam had died, and they buried him, or rather, threw him into a pit ... They buried, of course, without coffins, undressed, if not naked, so that the good would not be lost, several people in one pit - there were always enough dead , - and a tag with a number was tied to each leg.

Biologist Merkulov said that Mandelstam died in the very first year of his stay in the camp before the opening of navigation, that is, before May or June 1939. Merkulov gave Nadezhda Mandelstam a detailed account of his conversation with the camp doctor. The doctor, in particular, said that O. Mandelstam could not be saved due to incredible exhaustion. This version agrees with the statements of Kazarnovsky that Mandelstam ate almost nothing in the camp, fearing that he would be poisoned.

Someone R., also a poet, cited a third version of Mandelstam's death. “At night,” R. said, “they knocked on the barracks and demanded a“ poet ”. R. was afraid of the night guests - what does the punks want from him? It turned out that the guests were quite friendly and simply called him to the dying, also a poet. R. found the dying man, that is, Mandelstam, in the barracks on the bunk. He was either delirious or unconscious, but at the sight of R. he immediately came to his senses, and they talked all night. By morning, O. Mandelstam died, and R. closed his eyes. Of course, there are no dates, but the place is indicated correctly - “Second River”, a transit camp near Vladivostok.

And, finally, according to the testimony of the physicist D., Mandelstam most likely died in the isolation ward between December 1938 and April 1939. With regard to the date on the official death certificate, it must be said that such dates were often arbitrarily set; often deaths were attributed to the war period - in order to attribute the actions of the NKVD to the war. As Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam wrote: “The issuance of a death certificate was not the rule, but the exception. Civil death - exile, or, more precisely, arrest, because the very fact of arrest meant exile and condemnation - was obviously equated with physical death and was a complete withdrawal from life. No one told relatives when a camp inmate or a prisoner died: widowhood and orphanhood began from the moment of arrest. Sometimes women in the prosecutor's office, having informed about the ten-year exile of her husband, were told: you can get married ... ". That is, a ten-year sentence without the right to correspondence actually meant a death sentence.

Only in 1989 did the researchers manage to get to the personal file of Osip Mandelstam "on the arrested Butyrskaya prison" and establish the exact date of the poet's death. In the personal file there is an act on the death of Mandelstam, drawn up by the correctional labor camp doctor and the paramedic on duty. On the basis of this act, a new version of the death of the poet was proposed.

On December 25, when the weather deteriorated sharply and a snowy wind swept up at a speed of up to 22 meters per second, the weakened Mandelstam could not go out to clear the snow blockages. He was admitted to the camp hospital on December 26, and died on December 27 at 12.30. An autopsy was not performed. The deceased was fingerprinted on December 31, and buried in early 1939. All the dead, according to the testimony of a former prisoner, were stacked like firewood near the right wall of the infirmary, and then taken out in carts outside the zone in batches and buried in a ditch that stretched around the camp territory.

At the end of 1990, art critic Valery Markov stated that he had found the place where Mandelstam was buried. He said that after the liquidation of the camp in Vladivostok, its territory was given to the marine crew of the Pacific Fleet, and the military unit mothballed, saved the configuration of the camp, which was considered an object of special national importance. Thus, all camp burials were preserved. But no one began to investigate and identify the remains of the dead prisoners.

Obviously, the version of Yu. Moiseenko (coinciding with the version of Khazin) is closest to the truth.

The legacy of Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, saved from destruction by his widow, from the beginning of the 1960s began to actively enter the cultural life of the intelligentsia of the thaw era.

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam.

Soon the name of the poet became a password for those who kept or tried to restore the memory of Russian culture, and it was perceived as a sign not only of artistic, but also of moral values. The words of the famous literary critic Yu.I. Levin, a representative of the generation that “discovered” Mandelstam, are indicative: “Mandelstam is a call for the unity of life and culture, for such a deep and serious ... attitude towards culture, to which our century, apparently, is not yet able to rise ... Mandelstam - ... an intermediate link, a harbinger, a formula for the transition from our modernity to what "is not yet", but what "should be". Mandelstam must “change something in the structure and composition” of not only Russian poetry, but also world culture.”

About Osip Mandelstam, a documentary film “Scattering Stars. Mandelstam. inevitability."

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Text prepared by Tatyana Khalina

Used materials:

Life and work of O. E. Mandelstam: Memoirs. Materials for the biography. "New Poems". Comments. Research. - Voronezh: VSU Publishing House, 1990
Musatov V. V. Lyrics of Osip Mandelstam. - Kyiv, 2000.
Mandelstam, Nadezhda Yakovlevna. Memories. M.: Book, 1989
Mandelstam, Nadezhda Yakovlevna. Second book. - M.: Moskovsky worker, 1990.
Site materials www.magazines.russ.ru

Leningrad

I returned to my city, familiar to tears,
To veins, to children's swollen glands.

You're back here - so swallow quickly
Fish oil from Leningrad river lanterns.

Get to know the December day,
Where the yolk is mixed with the sinister tar.

Petersburg, I don't want to die yet:
You have my phone numbers.

Petersburg, I still have addresses
By which I will find the voices of the dead.

I live on the black stairs, 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.

December 1930.

I'm lost in the sky - what should I do?
The one to whom it is close, answer!
It was easier for you, Dante's nine
Athletic discs, jingle.

Do not separate me from life - she dreams
Kill and caress now
To the ears, eyes and eye sockets
Florentine longing beat.

Don't put it on me, don't put it on me
Ostrolaskovy laurel on whiskey,
Better break my heart
You are on the blue ringing pieces!

And when I die, having served,
Lifetime friend of all living,
To resound wider and higher
The response of the sky in all my chest.

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