The tragic fate of the poet Osip Mandelstam. Osip Mandelstam: biography and personal life Osip Mandelstam brief biography and creativity

Osip Mandelstam was born on January 3 (January 15, new style) 1891 in Warsaw into a Jewish family. His father, Emilius Mandelstam (1856-1938), was a master glove maker and was a member of the first guild of merchants, which gave him the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement, despite his Jewish origin. Mother, Flora Ovseevna Verblovskaya (1866-1916), was a musician.

Osip Emilievich's parents wanted to give their children a good education, and soon the family moved to Pavlovsk near St. Petersburg, and then to St. Petersburg, to Kolomna. Osip Mandelstam recalled: “We often moved from apartment to apartment, we lived in Maximilianovsky Lane, where at the end of the arrow-shaped Voznesensky you could see Nikolai galloping, and on Ofitserskaya, not far from “Life for the Tsar”, above Eilers’ flower shop. We went for a walk along Bolshaya Morskaya in the deserted part of it, where there is a red Lutheran kirk and the end embankment of the Moika. So we quietly approached the Kryukov Canal, the Dutch St. Petersburg of boathouses and Neptune arches with naval emblems, and the barracks of the guards crew.”

“The entire massif of St. Petersburg, the granite and end quarters, all this tender heart of the city, with the flood of squares, with curly gardens, islands of monuments, the caryatids of the Hermitage, the mysterious Millionnaya, where there were never passers-by and only one small shop was huddled among the marbles, especially the arch I considered the General Headquarters, Senate Square and Dutch Petersburg to be something sacred and festive... I raved about the Horse Guards armor and Roman helmets of the cavalry guards, the silver trumpets of the Preobrazhensky Orchestra, and after the May parade my favorite pleasure was the Horse Guards holiday at the Annunciation... The ordinary life of the city was poor and monotonous. Every day at five o'clock there was a party on Bolshaya Morskaya - from Gorokhovaya to the arch of the General Staff. Everything that was idle and polished in the city moved slowly back and forth along the sidewalks, bowing: the clink of spurs, French and English speech, a lively exhibition of the English store and jockey club. Bonnies and governesses… brought their children here: to sigh and compare it with the Champs Elysees.”

In 1900, Osip’s family moved to Liteiny Prospekt, and he himself entered the Tenishev School. Since September 1900, the school was located on Mokhovaya in a building built at the expense of Prince Tenishev.

The first director was the famous teacher A.Ya. Ostrogorsky, Russian literature was taught by V.V. Gippius is a poet, author of poetry books and studies about Pushkin. He was the first critic of the poems of the young Mandelstam, which were published in the school magazine.

“An intellectual is building a temple of literature with motionless idols... V.V. taught to build literature not as a temple, but as a clan. In literature, he valued the patriarchal paternal origin of culture.” This first meeting with great literature turned out to be “irreparable” for Mandelstam. Twenty years later he would write: “The power of V.V.’s assessments. continues over me to this day. The great, complete journey through the patriarchy of Russian literature with him... remained the only one.”

The school preferred visual teaching methods to textbooks. There were many excursions: the Putilov Plant, the Mining Institute, the Botanical Garden, Lake Seliger with a visit to the Iversky Monastery, the White Sea, the Crimea, Finland (Senate, Seimas, museums, Imatra Falls).

The school also had excellent laboratories, an observatory, a greenhouse, a workshop, two libraries, published its own magazine, and studied German and French. Physical exercises and outdoor games were conducted daily. There were no punishments, grades or exams at the school. The large auditorium often hosted public lectures, meetings of the Literary Fund, and meetings of the Law Society, “where constitutional poison was poured out with a quiet hiss.”

Mandelstam recalls his classmates: “Still, there were good boys in Tenishevsky. From the same meat, from the same bone as the children in Serov’s portraits. Little ascetics, monks in their children’s monastery.” Among his peers, Osip Emilievich singles out Boris Sinani, the son of the famous St. Petersburg psychiatrist Boris Naumovich Sinani. Young people gathered in Sinani’s house on Pushkinskaya and political discussions were held. “I was confused and restless. All the excitement of the century was transmitted to me. Strange currents were running all around... The boys of 1905 went into the revolution with the same feeling with which Nikolenka Rostov went into the hussars.” In the house on Pushkinskaya, Mandelstam could observe determined young people - members of the fighting organizations of social revolutionaries, and in his words about Boris Sinani one can understand that at the same time his own rejection of political radicalism was taking shape: “he deeply understood the essence of Socialist Revolutionaryism and internally, even as a boy, he outgrew it "

In those years, Mandelstam became interested in reading Herzen and Blok, attended concerts in the Assembly of the Nobility and wrote poetry.

After graduating from the Tenishev School, Mandelstam spent a lot of time abroad, visiting France and Italy. In 1909 - 1910, at the University of Heidelberg, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam became interested in philosophy and philology. In St. Petersburg, he attends meetings of the Religious and Philosophical Society, whose members were the most prominent thinkers and writers N. Berdyaev, D. Merezhkovsky, D. Filosofov, Vyach. Ivanov.

Osip Emilievich is getting closer to the St. Petersburg literary environment. In 1909, he first appeared on Tavricheskaya with Vyacheslav Ivanov. Ivanov’s apartment was located in a round tower superstructure. Poets, actors, painters, and scientists gathered there. Blok, Bely, Sologub, Remizov, Kuzmin often appeared. They read and discussed poetry. And for young poets Innokenty Fedorovich Annensky, Vyacheslav Ivanov and Andrei Bely gave lectures.

There, within the walls of the “Tower,” Mandelstam first met Akhmatova. Their friendship was perhaps the greatest gift of fate for both of them.

Annensky's articles and unprecedented poetry had a strong influence on Mandelstam and Akhmatova. They called Annensky their teacher. This is what Annensky wrote in the first issue of Apollo magazine in the introductory article: “The era of aspirations is coming... towards a new truth, towards deeply conscious and harmonious creativity: from isolated experiences - to natural mastery, from vague effects - to style. Only a strict search for beauty, only free, harmonious and clear, only strong and vital art beyond the limits of the painful disintegration of the spirit and false innovation.” This was a program of a new direction, which meant a break with symbolism.

In August 1910, the ninth issue of Apollo was published; five poems by Mandelstam were published there, including “Silentium”.

In 1911, the association “Workshop of Poets” was formed. It included Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Lozinsky, Zenkevich. The “workshop” met three times a month. Blok was at the first meeting. According to Akhmatova, in the “Workshop of Poets” Mandelstam “very soon became the first violin.” Akhmatova said after one of the meetings: “Ten or twelve people are sitting, reading poetry, sometimes good, sometimes mediocre, attention scatters, you listen out of duty, and suddenly, as if a swan flies up above everyone - Osip Emilievich reads!”

The “Workshop of Poets” was not a homogeneous association; its composition changed quite a lot. But it formed a group of talented poets - like-minded people who developed an aesthetic program, which they called Acmeism. The core of the Acmeists were Gumilyov, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam. “Undoubtedly, symbolism is a phenomenon of the 19th century,” Akhmatova wrote. “Our rebellion against symbolism is completely legitimate, because we felt like people of the 20th century and did not want to remain in the previous one.” Mandelstam said that “Acmeism is a longing for world culture,” that Acmeism is characterized by “a courageous will to poetry and poetics, at the center of which stands a person, not flattened into a flat cake by false symbolic horrors, but as the master of his own home. Everything has become heavier and larger, therefore man must become stronger, since man must be firmer than anything else on earth.”

In 1911, Mandelstam entered the Romano-Germanic department of the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. He listens to lectures by prominent scientists A.N. Veselovsky, V.R. Shishmareva, D. Ainalova, attends S.A. Pushkin’s seminar. Vengerova.

In 1913, Mandelstam's first book, “Stone,” was published. With this book, twenty-two-year-old Mandelstam declared himself a mature poet: there are no things in it that need to be discounted for the author’s age. The verses from “The Stone” have long become classics: “I have been given a body - what should I do with it,” “Sileritilim,” “Today is a bad day,” “I hate the light of monotonous stars.” Almost simultaneously with the publication of “The Stone,” “Petersburg Stanzas” were published in the Acmeist journal “Hyperborea.” The Petersburg theme in Russian poetry is inseparable from the name of Pushkin, and here it is necessary to say about Pushkin’s influence on Mandelstam. As a Russian poet, Mandelstam could not help but experience the powerful force field of Pushkin's poetry. However, the “formidable attitude” and special chastity are also associated with biographical reasons. Mandelstam spent his childhood in Kolomna, where Pushkin’s first St. Petersburg apartment was located after the Lyceum. Here young Pushkin visited the Bolshoi Theater, in the Church of the Intercession, mentioned by him in the poem “Little House in Kolomna”. The Tenishev School, with its humanistic educational system, with outstanding teachers and poetry evenings, was for Mandelstam to a large extent what the Lyceum was for Pushkin; here he first felt like a poet. We find parallels in the early awareness of his talent, and in the unanimous recognition of his primacy by his fellow poets, and in his innate wit. Contemporaries even noted the external resemblance of the young Mandelstam to Pushkin. In Mandelstam's poems and prose there is a lot of evidence of a deep comprehension of Pushkin's poetry and his fate. Only taking all this into account can one imagine what the St. Petersburg theme meant to him.

In the artistic life of St. Petersburg in the 1910s, the literary and artistic cabaret “Stray Dog” became a notable phenomenon. Its owner and soul was Boris Pronin, a theater enthusiast who managed to work both at the Moscow Art Theater and at the Komissarzhevskaya Theater. “Stray Dog” opened on New Year’s Eve 1912 in the basement of a house on the corner of Italianskaya Street and Mikhailovskaya Square. The cabaret was conceived within the framework of the Intimate Theater Society. It hosted concerts, poetry evenings, and improvised performances, in the design of which artists sought to connect the hall and the stage.

Contemporaries describe the environment of “The Dog” as follows: “There were no windows in the basement. Two low rooms are painted with bright, variegated colors, and there is a sideboard on the side. Small stage, tables, benches, fireplace. Colored lanterns are burning. The basement is stuffy, smoky, but fun.”

The “Workshop of Poets” has loved the basement since its inception. Already on January 13, 1912, at an evening dedicated to Balmont, Gumilyov, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and V. Gippius performed.

The Acmeists loved "The Dog". Their poetry evenings and debates were held there, jokes and impromptu ideas were born there. The emergence of one of Mandelstam’s best poems, “Half-Turn, Oh, Sadness...” is connected with “Stray Dog.”

Mandelstam's thoughts about the historical path of Russia were connected with the ideas of Chaadaev and Herzen. In 1914, in an article about Chaadaev, he wrote: “With a deep, ineradicable need for unity, a higher historical synthesis, Chaadaev was born in Russia... He had the courage to tell Russia in the face the terrible truth - that it is cut off from world unity, excommunicated from history , this “educator of the nations by God.” The fact is that Chaadaev’s understanding of history excludes the possibility of any entry onto the historical path. There is a lack of continuity and unity. Unity cannot be created, it cannot be invented, it cannot be learned. The conversation with Chaadaev continues in the article “On the Nature of the Word”: “Chaadaev, asserting his opinion that Russia has no history, that is, that Russia belongs to an unorganized, unhistorical circle of cultural phenomena, missed one circumstance, namely: language. Such a highly organized, such an organic language is not only a door to history, but history itself. For Russia, a falling away from history, separation from the realm of historical necessity and continuity, from freedom and expediency, would be a falling away from language. The “numbness” of two or three generations could lead Russia to historical death... Therefore, it is absolutely true that Russian history is on the edge... and is ready every minute to collapse into nihilism, that is, into excommunication from the word.”

With the beginning of the war, evenings began to be held in Petrograd for the benefit of the wounded. Together with Blok, Akhmatova, Yesenin, Mandelstam performs at the Tenishevsky and Petrovsky schools. His name appears more than once in newspaper reports about these evenings.

In December 1915, Mandelstam published the second edition of “The Stone,” almost three times the volume of the first. The second “Stone” includes such masterpieces as “Half Turn, O Sadness” (“Akhmatova”), “Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails”, “I will not see the famous Phaedra.” The collection also included new poems about St. Petersburg: “The Admiralty”, “Running out into the square, I am free”, “Maidens of midnight courage”, “There is snow in the calm suburbs”.

At the beginning of 1916, Marina Tsvetaeva came to Petrograd. At a literary evening she met with Petrograd poets. From this “unearthly” evening her friendship with Mandelstam began.

The Russian ship moved inexorably towards October of the seventeenth year. Since the beginning of the century, the country has lived in anticipation of great changes. The reality turned out to be harsher than all assumptions. Few then retained a sober outlook in the face of grandiose events, and only Mandelstam responded to the challenge of history by writing “Let us glorify, brothers, the twilight of freedom.”

In the early spring of 1918, Mandelstam left for Moscow. Apparently, the last poem written before leaving, “At a terrible height, will-o’-the-wisp,” begins Mandelstam’s wanderings around Russia: Moscow, Kyiv, Feodosia...

In 1919, in Kyiv, Mandelstam met twenty-year-old Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina, who became his wife. Waves of civil war rolled through Kyiv. The townspeople lost count of the changes in power. Mandelstam was drawn to the south. It seemed that one could survive terrible times there.

After a number of adventures, having been in Wrangel’s prison, Mandelstam returned to Petrograd in the fall of 1920.

Mandelstam settled in the “House of Arts” - the Eliseevsky mansion, turned into a hostel for writers and artists. Gumilev, Shklovsky, Khodasevich, Lozinsky, Lunts, Zoshchenko, Dobuzhinsky and others lived in the “House of Arts”.

“We lived in the wretched luxury of the House of Arts,” writes Mandelstam, “in the Eliseevsky House, which overlooks Morskaya, Nevsky and the Moika, poets, artists, scientists, a strange family, half crazy about rations, wild and sleepy... It was a harsh and the wonderful winter of 20 - 21... I loved this Nevsky, empty and black, like a barrel, enlivened only by big-eyed cars and rare, rare passers-by, registered by the night desert.”

Mandelstam's short months in Petrograd in 1920-21 turned out to be extremely fruitful. At this time, he created such pearls as poems addressed to the actress of the Alexandria Theater Olga Arbenina “The ghostly stage flickers slightly”, “Take joy from my palms”, “Because I could not hold your hands”, Lethean poems “ When Psyche-life descends to the shadows" and "I forgot the word."

“As a memory of Osip’s stay in St. Petersburg in 1920,” writes Akhmatova, “besides the amazing poems to O. Arbenina, there are still living, faded, like Napoleonic banners, posters of that time about poetry evenings, where the name of Mandelstam stands next to Gumilyov and Blok."

In February 1921, the Mandelstams left for Moscow. Nadezhda Yakovlevna explains the reasons for leaving: “In St. Petersburg in 1920, Mandelstam did not find his “we”. The circle of friends thinned out... Gumilyov was surrounded by new and strangers... Old people from the religious and philosophical society were quietly dying out in their corners...”

The Mandelstams spent the summer and autumn of 1921 in Georgia. There they were caught by the news of Gumilyov's death. Mandelstam’s tragic poems “Concert at the Station” (“At the funeral funeral of the dear shadow, music sounds to us for the last time”) and “I washed my face in the yard at night” are connected with this. The last of these poems echoes Akhmatova’s “Fear, sorting through things in the darkness...”.

In 1922-23, Mandelstam published three collections of poetry: “Tristia” (1922), “Second Book” (1923), “Stone” (3rd edition, 1923).

His poems and articles are published in Petrograd, Moscow, and Berlin. At this time, Mandelstam wrote a number of articles on the most important problems of history, culture and humanism: “Word and Culture”, “On the Nature of Word”, “The Nineteenth Century”, “Human Wheat”, “The End of the Novel”.

In the summer of 1924, Mandelstam arrived in Leningrad. Apparently, this visit was connected with publishing matters: it was planned to publish Mandelstam’s notes in the new magazine “Leningrad”. The notes were published in March 1925 as a separate book, “The Noise of Time,” by the Leningrad publishing house “Vremya.” As Akhmatova put it, it was “Petersburg, seen through the shining eyes of a five-year-old child.”

The following year Mandelstam was again in Leningrad. “In 1925,” writes Akhmatova, “I lived with the Mandelstams in the same corridor in Zaitsev’s boarding house in Tsarskoye Selo. Both Nadya and I were seriously ill, we were lying there, taking our temperatures.”

The Mandelstams spent most of 1930 in Armenia. The result of this trip was the prose “Journey to Armenia” and the poetic cycle “Armenia”. From Armenia at the end of 1930, the Mandelstams arrived in Leningrad. We stayed with Mandelstam's brother, Evgeny Emilievich, on Vasilyevsky Island. They were worried about an apartment, but the writers’ organization said that they would not be allowed to live in Leningrad. The reasons were not explained, but the change in atmosphere was already felt in everything. It was then that the poems “How scared you and I are,” “I returned to my city,” “Help, Lord, help me get through this night,” “You and I will sit in the kitchen” were written. For the first time he found himself a stranger in his city.

In January 1931, the Mandelstams left for Moscow. The very first thing written after leaving was dedicated to his hometown, which would appear in poetry more than once.

Mandelstam writes a lot to Moscow. In addition to poetry, he is working on a long essay, “A Conversation about Dante.” But it becomes almost impossible to print. Editor Caesar Volpe was fired for publishing the last part of “Travels to Armenia” in the Leningrad Zvezda.

In 1933, Mandelstam visited Leningrad, where two of his evenings were organized. Akhmatova writes about this in her memoirs: “In Leningrad he was greeted as a great poet, persona grata, and the whole literary Leningrad (Tynyanov, Eikhenbaum, Gukovsky) went to bow to him at the European Hotel (Tynyanov, Eikhenbaum, Gukovsky), and his arrival and evenings were an event about which remembered for many years."

Russian poet, prose writer and translator, essayist, critic, literary critic; one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century

Joseph Mandelstam

short biography

early years

Osip Mandelstam born on January 15, 1891 in Warsaw into a Jewish family. Father, Emil Veniaminovich (Emil, Khaskl, Khatskel Beniaminovich) Mandelstam (1856-1938), was a master glove maker and a member of the first guild of merchants, which gave him the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement, despite his Jewish origin. Mother, Flora Ovseevna Verblovskaya (1866-1916), was a musician. In 1896 the family was assigned to Kovno.

In 1897, the Mandelstam family moved to St. Petersburg. Osip was educated at the Tenishevsky School (graduated in 1907), a Russian forge of “cultural personnel” at the beginning of the 20th century.

In August 1907, he applied for admission as a volunteer to the natural department of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University, but, having taken the documents from the office, he left for Paris in October.

In 1908-1910, Mandelstam studied at the Sorbonne and the University of Heidelberg. At the Sorbonne he attends lectures by A. Bergson and J. Bedier at the Collège de France. He meets Nikolai Gumilyov and is fascinated by French poetry: Old French epic, François Villon, Baudelaire and Verlaine.

In between trips abroad, he visits St. Petersburg, where he attends lectures on poetry at the “tower” by Vyacheslav Ivanov.

By 1911, the family began to go bankrupt and studying in Europe became impossible. In order to bypass the quota for Jews when entering St. Petersburg University, Mandelstam was baptized by a Methodist pastor in Vyborg.

Studies

On September 10, 1911, he was enrolled in the Romano-Germanic department of the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University, where he studied intermittently until 1917. He studies carelessly and does not complete the course.

Poems from the time of the First World War and the Revolution (1916-1920) made up the second book “Tristia” (“Sorrowful Elegies”, the title goes back to Ovid), published in 1922 in Berlin.

In 1923, the “Second Book” was published with a general dedication to “N. X." - to my wife. In 1922, the article “On the Nature of Word” was published as a separate brochure in Kharkov.

From May 1925 to October 1930 there was a pause in poetic creativity. At this time, prose was written, to the “Noise of Time” created in 1923 (the title plays on Blok’s metaphor “music of time”), the story “The Egyptian Brand” (1927), varying Gogol’s motifs, was added. He makes his living by translating poetry.

In 1928, the last lifetime collection of poetry, “Poems,” was published, as well as a book of his selected articles, “On Poetry.”

Business trips to the Caucasus

In 1930 he finished work on the “Fourth Prose”. N. Bukharin is concerned about Mandelstam’s business trip to Armenia. In Erivan, the poet meets the scientist, theoretical biologist Boris Kuzin, and a close friendship develops between them. The meeting is described by Mandelstam in “Travel to Armenia.” N. Ya. Mandelstam believed that this meeting turned out to be “fate for all three. Without her, Osya often said, perhaps there would be no poetry.” Mandelstam later wrote about Kuzin: “My new prose and the entire last period of my work are imbued with his personality. To him and only to him I owe the fact that I introduced the so-called period into literature. "mature Mandelstam." After traveling to the Caucasus (Armenia, Sukhum, Tiflis), Osip Mandelstam returned to writing poetry.

Mandelstam's poetic gift reaches its peak, but it is almost never published. The intercession of B. Pasternak and N. Bukharin gives the poet small breaks from everyday life.

He independently studies the Italian language, reads the Divine Comedy in the original. The programmatic poetological essay “Conversation about Dante” was written in 1933. Mandelstam discusses it with A. Bely.

In Literaturnaya Gazeta, Pravda, and Zvezda, devastating articles were published in connection with the publication of Mandelstam’s “Travel to Armenia” (Zvezda, 1933, No. 5).

Arrests, exile and death

In November 1933, Osip Mandelstam wrote an anti-Stalin epigram, “We live without feeling the country beneath us,” which he reads to fifteen people.

Boris Pasternak called this act suicide:

One day, while walking along the streets, they wandered into some deserted outskirts of the city in the Tverskiye-Yamskiye area; Pasternak remembered the creaking of dray carts as the background sound. Here Mandelstam read to him about the Kremlin highlander. After listening, Pasternak said: “What you read to me has nothing to do with literature or poetry. This is not a literary fact, but an act of suicide that I do not approve of and in which I do not want to take part. You didn’t read anything to me, I didn’t hear anything, and I ask you not to read them to anyone else.”

One of the listeners reported on Mandelstam. The investigation into the case was led by Nikolai Shivarov.

On the night of May 13-14, 1934, Mandelstam was arrested and sent into exile in Cherdyn (Perm region). Osip Mandelstam is accompanied by his wife, Nadezhda Yakovlevna. In Cherdyn, Osip Mandelstam attempts suicide (throws himself out of a window). Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam writes to all Soviet authorities and to all her acquaintances. With the assistance of Nikolai Bukharin, as a result of interference in the matter of Stalin himself, Mandelstam is allowed to independently choose a place for settlement. The Mandelstams choose Voronezh. They live in poverty, and are occasionally helped financially by a few friends who have not given up. From time to time O. E. Mandelstam works part-time at a local newspaper and in the theater. Close people visit them, Nadezhda Yakovlevna’s mother, artist V.N. Yakhontov, Anna Akhmatova. Here he writes the famous cycle of poems (the so-called “Voronezh notebooks”).

In May 1937, the term of exile ends, and the poet unexpectedly receives permission to leave Voronezh. He and his wife return to Moscow for a short while. In a 1938 statement by the secretary of the USSR Writers' Union, Vladimir Stavsky, addressed to the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs N.I. Yezhov, it was proposed to “resolve the issue of Mandelstam”; his poems were called “obscene and slanderous.” Joseph Prut and Valentin Kataev were named in the letter as having “spoken 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 assigned to the Shatura district). There, 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. From there he was taken to the NKVD Internal Prison. Soon he was transferred to Butyrka prison.

The investigation into the case established that Mandelstam O.E., despite the fact that he was forbidden to live in Moscow after serving his sentence, often came to Moscow, stayed with his friends, tried to influence public opinion in his favor by deliberately demonstrating his “distress » position and painful condition. Anti-Soviet elements among writers used Mandelstam for the purposes of hostile agitation, making him a “sufferer”, and organized money collections for him among writers. At the time of his arrest, Mandelstam maintained close contact with the enemy of the people Stenich, Kibalchich until the latter was expelled from the USSR, etc. A medical examination recognized O. E. Mandelstam as a psychopathic person with a tendency to obsessive thoughts and fantasies. Accused of conducting anti-Soviet agitation, that is, of crimes provided for under Art. 58-10 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. The case against O. E. Mandelstam is subject to consideration by the Special Meeting of the NKVD of the USSR.

On August 2, a Special Meeting of the NKVD of the USSR sentenced Mandelstam to five years in a forced labor camp.

From the Vladperpunkt transit camp (Vladivostok), he sent the last letter in his life to his brother and wife:

Dear Shura!

I am located in Vladivostok, SVITL, barrack 11. Got 5 years for k.r. d. by decision of the CCA. The stage left Moscow, Butyrki, on September 9, and arrived on October 12. Health is very poor. Extremely exhausted. He's emaciated, almost unrecognizable. But I don’t know if it makes sense to send things, food and money. Try it anyway. I’m very cold without things. Dear Nadinka, I don’t know if you’re alive, my darling. You, Shura, write to me about Nadya right now. This is the transit point. They didn’t take me to Kolyma. Possible wintering.

My dear ones, I kiss you.

Shurochka, I’m still writing. I've been going to work the last few days and it's lifted my spirits.

They send us from our camp as a transit camp to permanent camps. I obviously fell into the “dropout” category, and I need to prepare for the winter.

And I ask: send me a radiogram and money by telegraph.

On December 27, 1938, just short of his 48th birthday, Osip Mandelstam died in a transit camp. (Varlam Shalamov indicates that Mandelstam could have died on December 25-26. In Shalamov’s story “Sherry Brandy” we are talking about the last days of the unnamed poet. After the poet’s death, for about two more days, prisoners in the barracks received rations for him as if he were alive - common at that time time in the camps practice Based on indirect signs and the title of the story, we can conclude that the story was written about the last days of Osip Mandelstam). Until spring, Mandelstam’s body, along with the other deceased, lay unburied. Then the entire “winter stack” was buried in a mass grave.

Researchers of the poet’s work noted “a concrete foresight of the future, so characteristic of Mandelstam,” and that “a sense of tragic death permeates Mandelstam’s poems.” A foreknowledge of his own fate was a poem by the Georgian poet N. Mitsishvili translated by Mandelstam back in 1921:

When I fall to die under a fence in some hole,
And there will be nowhere for the soul to escape from the cast-iron cold -
I will politely leave quietly. I'll blend in with the shadows imperceptibly.
And the dogs will take pity on me, kissing me under the dilapidated fence.
There will be no procession. Violets will not decorate me,
And the maidens will not scatter flowers over the black grave...

I ask you: 1. To assist in the review of the case of O. E. Mandelstam and find out whether there were sufficient grounds for arrest and exile.

2. Check the mental health of O. E. Mandelstam and find out whether the exile was natural in this sense.

3. Finally, check to see if there was any personal interest in this link. And also - to find out not a legal, but rather a moral question: whether the NKVD had enough grounds to destroy the poet and master during the period of his active and friendly poetic activity.

The death certificate of O. E. Mandelstam was presented to his brother Alexander in June 1940 by the Civil Registry Office of the Baumansky district of Moscow.

Rehabilitated posthumously: in the case of 1938 - in 1956, in the case of 1934 - in 1987.

The location of the poet's grave is still unknown exactly. The probable burial place is the old fortress moat along the Saperka River (hidden in a pipe), now an alley on the street. Vostretsova in the urban district of Vladivostok - Morgorodok.

Mandelstam's poetics

Periodization of creativity

L. Ginzburg (in the book “On Lyrics”) proposed to distinguish between three periods of the poet’s work. This point of view is shared by the majority of Mandelstam scholars (in particular, M. L. Gasparov):

1. The period of “Stone” - a combination of “Tyutchev’s severity” with “Verlaine’s childishness”.

“Tyutchev’s severity” is the seriousness and depth of poetic themes; “Verlaine’s childishness” is the ease and spontaneity of their presentation. The word is a stone. The poet is an architect, builder.

2. The “Tristian” period, until the end of the 1920s - the poetics of associations. The word is flesh, soul, it freely chooses its objective meaning. Another face of this poetics is fragmentation and paradox.

Mandelstam wrote later: “Any word is a bundle, the meaning sticks out from it in different directions, and does not rush to one official point.” Sometimes, in the course of writing a poem, the poet radically changed the original concept, sometimes he simply discarded the initial stanzas that served as the key to the content, so that the final text turned out to be a difficult-to-understand construction. This way of writing, producing explanations and preambles, was associated with the very process of creating a poem, the content and final form of which were not “predetermined” by the author. (See, for example, the attempt to reconstruct the writing of the “Slate Ode” by M. L. Gasparov.)

3. The period of the thirties of the XX century - the cult of creative impulse and the cult of metaphorical cipher.

“I alone write from my voice,” Mandelstam said about himself. First, the meter “came” to him (“movement of the lips,” muttering), and from the common metric root, poems grew in “twos” and “threes.” This is how the mature Mandelstam created many poems. A wonderful example of this style of writing: his amphibrachs of November 1933 (“The apartment is quiet as paper”, “At our holy youth”, “Tatars, Uzbeks and Nenets”, “I love the appearance of fabric”, “Oh butterfly, oh Muslim”, “ When, having destroyed the sketch”, “And the maple’s jagged paw”, “Tell me, draftsman of the desert”, “In needle-shaped plague glasses”, “And I leave space”).

N. Struve proposes to distinguish not three, but six periods:

• Belated Symbolist: 1908-1911
• Militant Acmeist: 1912-1915
• Akmeist deep: 1916-1921
• At the crossroads: 1922-1925
• On the return of breath: 1930-1934
• Voronezh notebooks: 1935-1937

Evolution of the Mandelstam metric

M. L. Gasparov described the evolution of the poet’s metrics as follows:

• 1908-1911 - years of study, poetry in the tradition of Verlaine’s “songs without words.” The metric is dominated by iambics (60% of all lines, iambic tetrameter predominates). Choreans - about 20%.
• 1912-1915 - St. Petersburg, Acmeism, “material” poems, work on “The Stone”. Maximum iambicity (70% of all lines, but iambic 4-meter shares the dominant position with iambic 5- and 6-meter).
• 1916-1920 - revolution and civil war, development of an individual manner. Iambics are slightly inferior (up to 60%), trochees increase to 20%.
• 1921-1925 - transition period. The iambic recedes another step (50%, mixed-foot and free iambs become noticeable), making room for experimental meters: logaeda, accented verse, free verse (20%).
• 1926-1929 - pause in poetic creativity.
• 1930-1934 - interest in experimental meters continues (dolnik, taktovik, five-syllable, free verse - 25%), but a violent passion for three-syllables breaks out (40%). Yamba −30%.
• 1935-1937 - some restoration of metric balance. Iambics increase again to 50%, experimental dimensions drop to nothing, but the level of trisyllabics remains elevated: 20%

Mandelstam and music

As a child, at the insistence of his mother, Mandelstam studied music. Through the eyes of the poet of high book culture that was born in him, he saw poeticized visual images even in the lines of musical notation and wrote about this in the “Egyptian Stamp”: “ Musical writing pleases the eye no less than music itself pleases the ear. The little blacks of the piano scale, like lamplighters, climb up and down... The mirage cities of musical notes stand like birdhouses in boiling resin..."In his perception came to life" concert descents of Chopin's mazurkas" And " parks with curtains Mozart", " music vineyard Schubert" and " low-growing bush of Beethoven sonatas», « turtles"Handel and " militant pages Bach”, and the musicians of the violin orchestra are like mythical dryads, mixed up " branches, roots and bows».

Mandelstam's musicality and his deep connection with musical culture were noted by his contemporaries. " Osip was at home in music“- wrote Anna Akhmatova in “Leaves from the Diary”. Even when he was sleeping it seemed " that every vein in him listened and heard some kind of divine music».

Composer Arthur Lurie, who knew the poet closely, wrote that “ live music was a necessity for him. The element of music fed his poetic consciousness" I. Odoevtseva quoted Mandelstam’s words: “ Since childhood, I fell in love with Tchaikovsky, I fell in love with Tchaikovsky for the rest of my life, to the point of painful frenzy... From then on I felt myself forever connected with music, without any right to this connection...“, and he himself wrote in “The Noise of Time”: “ I don’t remember how this reverence for the symphony orchestra was cultivated in me, but I think that I correctly understood Tchaikovsky, guessing in him a special concert feeling».

Mandelstam perceived the art of poetry as akin to music and was confident that in his creative self-expression, true composers and poets are always on the way, “ which we suffer, like music and words ».

He heard and reproduced the music of real poems when reading them in his own intonation, regardless of who wrote them. M. Voloshin felt this in the poet “ musical charm»: « Mandelstam doesn't want talk verse, is a born singer... Mandelstam's voice is unusually sonorous and rich in shades...»

E. G. Gershtein talked about Mandelstam’s reading of the last stanza of the poem “Summer” by B. Pasternak: “ What a pity that it is impossible to make a musical notation to convey the sound of the third line, this rolling wave of the first two words (“and the harp makes noise”), pouring, like the growing sound of an organ, into the words “Arabian hurricane”... He generally had his own motive. Once, in Shchipka, it was as if some wind lifted him from his place and carried him to the piano; he played a sonatina by Mozart or Clementi, familiar to me from childhood, with exactly the same nervous, soaring intonation... How he achieved this in music, I don’t understand , because the rhythm was not broken in any measure...»

« Music contains the atoms of our being", wrote Mandelstam and is " fundamental principle of life" In his article “The Morning of Acmeism” Mandelstam wrote: “ For the Acmeists, the conscious meaning of the word, Logos, is as beautiful a form as music is for the Symbolists" A quick break with symbolism and a transition to the Acmeists was heard in the call - “ ...and return the word to music"(Silentium, 1910).

According to G. S. Pomerants “ Mandelstam's space... is like the space of pure music. Therefore, it is useless to read Mandelstam without understanding this quasi-musical space.»:

You can't breathe, and the firmament is infested with worms,
And not a single star says
But God knows, there is music above us...
...And it seems to me: all in music and foam,
The iron world trembles so miserably...
...Where are you going? At the funeral funeral of the dear shadow
This is the last time we hear music!

"Concert at the Station" (1921)

In literature and literary criticism of the 20th century

An exceptional role in preserving Mandelstam’s poetic heritage of the 1930s was played by the life feat of his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and the people who helped her, such as Sergei Rudakov and Mandelstam’s Voronezh friend Natalya Shtempel. The manuscripts were kept in Nadezhda Yakovlevna’s boots and in pots. In her will, Nadezhda Mandelstam actually denied Soviet Russia any right to publish Mandelstam's works.

In the circle of Anna Akhmatova in the 1970s, the future Nobel Prize winner in literature Joseph Brodsky was called “the younger Axes.” According to Vitaly Vilenkin, of all the contemporary poets, “Anna Andreevna treated only Mandelstam as some kind of miracle of poetic primordiality, a miracle worthy of admiration.”

According to Nikolai Bukharin, expressed in a letter to Stalin in 1934, Mandelstam is “a first-class poet, but absolutely out of date.”

Before the start of perestroika, Mandelstam’s Voronezh poems of the 1930s were not published in the USSR, but circulated in copies and reprints, as in the 19th century, or in samizdat.

World fame comes to Mandelstam's poetry before and regardless of the publication of his poems in Soviet Russia.

Since the 1930s, his poems have been quoted, and allusions to his poems have multiplied in the poetry of completely different authors and in many languages.

Mandelstam is translated into German by one of the leading European poets of the 20th century, Paul Celan.

The French philosopher Alain Badiou, in his article “The Century of Poets,” ranked Mandelstam among the six poets who also took on the function of philosophers in the 20th century (the other five are Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Trakl, Pessoa and Celan).

In the United States, Kirill Taranovsky, who conducted a seminar on Mandelstam’s poetry at Harvard, studied the poet’s work.

Vladimir Nabokov called Mandelstam “the only poet of Stalin’s Russia.”

According to the modern Russian poet Maxim Amelin: “During his lifetime, Mandelstam was considered a third-rate poet. Yes, he was appreciated in his own circle, but his circle was very small.”

Addresses

In St. Petersburg - Petrograd - Leningrad

• 1894 - Nevsky Prospekt, 100;
• 1896-1897 - Maximilianovsky Lane, 14;
• 1898-1900 - apartment building - Ofitserskaya street, 17;
• 1901-1902 - apartment building - Zhukovsky Street, 6;
• 1902-1904 - apartment building - Liteiny Avenue, 49;
• 1904-1905 - Liteiny Avenue, 15;
• 1907 - apartment building of A. O. Meyer - Nikolaevskaya street, 66;
• 1908 - apartment building - Sergievskaya street, 60;
• 1910-1912 - apartment building - Zagorodny Avenue, 70;
• 1913 - apartment building - Zagorodny Avenue, 14; Kadetskaya Line, 1 (from November).
• 1914 - apartment building - Ivanovskaya street, 16;
• 1915 - Malaya Monetnaya Street;
• 1916-1917 - parents' apartment - Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt, 24A, apt. 35;
• 1917-1918 - apartment of M. Lozinsky - Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt, 75;
• 1918 - Palace Embankment, 26, dormitory of the House of Scientists;
• autumn 1920 - 02.1921 - DISK - 25th October Avenue, 15;
• summer 1924 - the Maradudins’ apartment in the courtyard wing of the mansion of E.P. Vonlyarlyarsky - Herzen Street, 49, apt. 4;
• end of 1930 - 01.1931 - apartment building - 8th line, 31;
• 1933 - hotel "European" - Rakova street, 7;
• autumn 1937 - writer's housing cooperative (former house of the Court Stables Department) - Griboedov Canal embankment, 9.

In Moscow

• Teatralnaya Square, Metropol Hotel (in 1918 - “2nd House of Soviets”). In number 253 no later than June 1918, after moving to Moscow, O. M. settled as an employee of the People's Commissariat for Education.
• Ostozhenka, 53. Former Katkovsky Lyceum. In 1918-1919 The People's Commissariat for Education was located here, where O.E. worked.
• Tverskoy Boulevard, 25. Herzen House. O. E. and N. Ya. lived here in the left wing from 1922 to August 1923, and then in the right wing from January 1932 to October-November 1933.
• Savelyevsky lane, 9 (formerly Savelovsky. Since 1990 - Pozharsky lane). Apartment of E. Ya. Khazin, brother of Nadezhda Yakovlevna. O. E. and N. Ya. lived here in October 1923.
• B. Yakimanka 45, apt. 8. The house has not survived. Here the Mandelstams rented a room at the end of 1923 - in the first half of 1924.
• Profsoyuznaya, 123A. Sanatorium TSEKUBU (Central Commission for Improving the Living Life of Scientists). The sanatorium still exists today. The Mandelstams lived here twice - in 1928 and 1932.
• Kropotkinskaya embankment, 5. TSEKUBU dormitory. The house has not survived. In the spring of 1929, O. E. lived here (the building is mentioned in the “Fourth Prose”).
• M. Bronnaya, 18/13. From the autumn of 1929 to the beginning of 1930 (?) O. E. and N. Ya. lived in the apartment of the “ITR worker” (E. G. Gershtein)
• Tverskaya, 5 (according to the old numbering - 15). Now in this building there is a theater named after. M. N. Ermolova. The editorial offices of the newspapers “Moskovsky Komsomolets”, “Pyatidenevka”, “Evening Moscow” where O.E. worked.
• Pinch, 6-8. O. E. and N. Ya. lived in the service apartment of their father E. G. Gershtein. There is no data on the safety of the house.
• Starosadsky lane 10, apt. 3. A.E. Mandelstam's room in a communal apartment. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Mandelstams often lived and visited here.
• Bolshaya Polyanka, 10, apt. 20 - from the end of May until October 1931 at the architect Ts. G. Ryss’s apartment overlooking the Kremlin and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.
• Pokrovka, 29, apt. 23 - from November to the end of 1931 in a rented room, for which Mandelstam was never able to pay.
• Lavrushinsky lane 17, apt. 47. Apartment of V. B. and V. G. Shklovsky in the “writer’s house”. In 1937-1938 O. E. and N. Ya. always found shelter and help here. At this address N.Ya. was again registered in Moscow in 1965.
• Rusanovsky lane 4, apt. 1. The house has not survived. Apartment of the writer Ivich-Bernstein, who gave shelter to O. Mandelstam after the Voronezh exile.
• Nashchokinsky lane 3-5, apt. 26 (formerly Furmanov St.). The house was demolished in 1974. There was a trace of its roof on the end wall of the neighboring house. O. Mandelstam's first and last own apartment in Moscow. The Mandelstams probably moved into it in the fall of 1933. Apparently, the poem “We live without feeling the country beneath us…” was written here. Here in May 1934 O.E. was arrested. The Mandelstams stayed here again for a short time, returning from exile in 1937: their apartment was already occupied by other residents. In 2015, a “Last Address” sign was installed on a nearby building (Gagarinsky Lane, 6) in memory of Mandelstam.
• Novoslobodskaya 45. Butyrskaya prison. Now - Pre-trial detention center (SIZO) No. 2. O. E. was kept here for a month in 1938.
• Lubyanskaya sq. The building of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD. Now the building of the FSB of the Russian Federation. During his arrests in 1934 and 1938. O.E. was kept here.
• Cheremushkinskaya st. 14, building 1, apt. 4. Moscow apartment N.Ya., where, starting in 1965, she lived the last years of her life.
• Ryabinovaya st. Kuntsevo Cemetery. Old part. Area 3, burial 31-43. The grave of N. Ya. and the cenotaph (memorial stone) of O. E. The soil taken from the mass grave of prisoners of the Second River camp was brought here and buried.

In Voronezh

• Revolution Avenue, 46 - the Mandelstams stayed here at the Central Hotel after arriving in Voronezh in June 1934.
• St. Uritsky - O. E. managed to rent a summer terrace in a private house in the village near the station, where he and his wife lived from July to October, before the onset of cold weather.
• St. Shveinikov, 4b (formerly 2nd Linenaya Street) - the so-called “Mandelshtam’s pit” (according to a poem he wrote in 1935). Since October 1934, the Mandelstams rented a room from agronomist E. P. Vdovin.
• Corner of Revolution Avenue and st. 25 years of October - a room (“furnished room” - according to the memoirs of N. Ya. Mandelstam) they rented from an NKVD employee from April 1935 to March 1936. In this room in February 1936, the poet A. A. Akhmatova visited. A high-rise building was built on the site of the old house.
• St. Friedrich Engels, 13. Since March 1936, the Mandelstams rented a room in one of the apartments of this house. In 2008, a bronze monument to the poet was erected opposite the house.
• St. Pyatnitskogo (formerly 27 February street), no. 50, apt. 1 - Mandelstam's last address in Voronezh. From here Mandelstam left for Moscow in May 1937, after the expiration period ended. The house is destroyed.

Legacy and memory

The fate of the archive

The living conditions and fate of O. E. Mandelstam were also reflected in the preservation of his archival materials.

OSIP MANDELSHTAM

Your image, painful and unsteady,
I couldn't feel in the fog.
Lord! - I said by mistake,
Without even thinking about saying it.

God's name is like a big bird
It flew out of my chest.
There's a thick fog ahead,
And an empty cell behind.

WOMEN IN THE LIFE OF OSIP MANDELSHTAM

NADEZHDA KHAZINA

The artist Nadenka Khazina became the wife of Osip Mandelstam in May 1919. They met in Kyiv when she was nineteen years old.

“We easily and madly got together on the first day, and I stubbornly insisted that two weeks would be enough for us, if only “without worries,” she later recalled. “I didn’t understand the difference between a husband and a casual lover... From then on, we never parted... He didn’t like to part so much because he felt how short the time was allotted to us - it flew by like an instant.”

Nadenka Khazina (according to Anna Akhmatova, ugly, but charming) was born in Saratov in the family of a lawyer; her childhood and teenage years were spent in Kyiv. Her parents (apparently, not poor people at all) took her to Germany, France and Switzerland. Nadenka knew French and English perfectly, spoke German, and learned Spanish later - she needed to read something...

After graduating from high school, the girl took up painting. But everything was ruined by her meeting with Osip Mandelstam. After getting married, they alternately lived in Leningrad, Moscow, Ukraine and Georgia.

“Osip loved Nadya incredibly, unbelievably,” recalled A. Akhmatova. – When she had her appendix cut out in Kyiv, he did not leave the hospital and lived all the time in the closet of the hospital porter. He did not let Nadya leave his side, did not allow her to work, was furiously jealous, asked her advice about every word in poetry. In general, I have never seen anything like this in my life. Mandelstam’s surviving letters to his wife fully confirm this impression of mine.”

In the fall of 1933, Osip Mandelstam finally received a Moscow apartment - two rooms on the fifth floor, the ultimate dream for that time. Before that, he and Nadya had to push around in different corners. It hasn’t been published for many years and no work has been given. Once Osip Emilievich said to his wife: “We need to change our profession - now we are beggars.”

You haven't died yet, you're not alone yet,
While with a beggar friend
You enjoy the grandeur of the plains
And darkness, and cold, and blizzard.

In luxurious poverty, in mighty poverty
Live calm and comforted, -
Blessed are those days and nights
And sweet-voiced work is sinless...

“When Mayakovsky arrived in St. Petersburg in the early 1990s, he became friends with Mandelstam, but they were quickly pulled apart in different directions,” Nadezhda Yakovlevna later recalled in her book. “It was then that Mayakovsky told Mandelstam his life wisdom: “I eat once a day, but it’s good...” In the years of famine, Mandelstam often advised me to follow this example, but the fact of the matter is that in times of famine people don’t have enough to this “once a day.”

And - nevertheless... As the poet Viktor Shklovsky recalled: “Living in very difficult conditions, without boots, in the cold, he managed to remain spoiled.” As a rule, Mandelstam took for granted any help provided to him and his Nadya. Here is a quote from the memoirs of another contemporary of his, Elena Galperina-Osmerkina:

“Osip Emilievich looked at me casually, but also arrogantly. This could be translated into words as follows: “Yes, we are hungry, but don’t think that feeding us is a courtesy. This is the duty of a decent person."

Many people remember Osip Emilievich’s young wife as a quiet and inconspicuous woman, the silent shadow of the poet. For example, Semyon Lipkin:

“Nadezhda Yakovlevna never took part in our conversations, she sat with a book in the corner, raising her bright blue, sad, mocking eyes at us... Only in the late 40s at Akhmatova’s on Ordynka I was able to appreciate Nadezhda Yakovlevna’s brilliant, caustic mind.”

Nadezhda Yakovlevna had a hard time with her husband. He was a lively person, amorous and quite spontaneous. He got carried away often and a lot, and, very jealous of his wife, brought his girlfriends to the house. Stormy scenes took place. Nadya, whose health left much to be desired, was treated, apparently, with disdain. It got to the point that the poet’s father, visiting his son and finding him with two women - his wife and another mistress with the affectionate nickname Buttercup, said: “It’s good: if Nadya dies, Osya will have Buttercup...”

Fate decreed otherwise: Buttercup, that is, Olga Vaksel, a passionate and emotional person, committed suicide in 1932. And Nadya... Nadya stayed with Osip.

Today, in most publications, the family life of the Mandelstam couple is shown in a rosy light: a loving husband, a devoted wife... Nadezhda Yakovlevna was truly devoted to the poet. And one day, exhausted by the duality of her position and leaving her husband with a hastily packed suitcase, she soon came back... And everything returned to normal. “Why did you get it into your head that you must be happy?” - Mandelstam responded to his wife’s reproaches.

...Reading his new poems to his wife, Osip Emilievich was angry that she did not immediately remember them. “Mandelshtam could not understand how I could not remember the poem that was in his head and not know what he knew. Dramas about this occurred thirty times a day... In essence, he did not need a wife-secretary, but a dictaphone, but from a dictaphone he could not demand additional understanding, as from me, she recalled. “If he didn’t like something that was written down, he wondered how I could meekly write down such nonsense, but if I rebelled and didn’t want to write something down, he said: “Tsits! Don’t interfere... If you don’t understand anything, keep quiet.” And then, having dispersed, he sarcastically advised sending to Shanghai... a telegram with the following content:

"Very clever. I give advice. I agree to come. To China. To the Chinese."

The story of the poet's exile in Voronezh is widely known. In May 1934, for the poem “We live without feeling the country beneath us...” he was exiled to Cherdyn-on-Kama for three years. They said that the nervous, weak Osya “betrayed” at the Lubyanka those nine or eleven people to whom he read his poems - among them his close friend Anna Akhmatova, and her son Lev Gumilyov, and the poetess Maria Petrovykh, with whom he was very keen. During a prison meeting with his wife, he listed the names of the people involved in the investigation (that is, those he named among the listeners) so that Nadezhda Yakovlevna could warn everyone.

After the efforts of Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova and other writers, the Mandelstams were allowed to travel to Voronezh. By the way, they chose this place themselves, obviously because of the warm climate; they were forbidden to live only in twelve cities of Russia.

After the first arrest, Osip Emilievich fell ill, according to Nadezhda Yakovlevna, with traumatic psychosis - with delusions, hallucinations, and a suicide attempt. Back in Cherdyn, the poet jumped out of a hospital window and broke his arm. Obviously, his mind was really clouded: Osip Emilievich considered the arches in honor of the Chelyuskinites to be erected... in connection with his arrival in Cherdyn.

In May 1937, the Mandelstams returned home to Moscow. But one of their rooms turned out to be occupied by a man who wrote denunciations against them, and the poet did not receive permission to stay in the capital. However, there was not much time left before the next arrest...

During these terrible years, hiding from the watchful eye of the Chekist, Nadezhda Yakovlevna carefully kept everything that was written by her husband: every line, every piece of paper that his hand touched. Like hundreds of thousands of wives of “Rus', writhing innocently under the bloody boots” (A. Akhmatova), she knocked on all doorsteps, stood in long lines in order to find out at least something about her husband. At that time she was lucky. She found out “for what” and how many years her husband received, but did not know where he was sent from Butyrka prison.

Still not knowing about her husband’s death, Nadezhda Yakovlevna asked Beria for intercession...

What remains is her letter addressed to Osip Emilievich, “a human document of piercing power,” as defined by Primorye local historian Valery Markov.

“Osya, dear, distant friend! My dear, there are no words for this letter, which you may never read. I write it into space. Maybe you'll come back and I'll be gone. Then this will be the last memory.
Oksyusha - our childhood life with you - what happiness it was. Our quarrels, our squabbles, our games and our love... And the last winter in Voronezh. Our happy poverty and poems...
Every thought is about you. Every tear and every smile is for you. I bless every day and every hour of our bitter life, my friend, my companion, my blind guide...
A life of duty. How long and difficult it is to die alone - alone. Is this fate for us, the inseparable ones?..
I didn’t have time to tell you how much I love you. I don’t know how to say even now. You are always with me, and I, wild and angry, who never knew how to just cry, I cry, I cry, I cry. It's me, Nadya. Where are you? Goodbye. Nadia".
“In those days when this letter was written, O. Mandelstam was already in Vladivostok in a transit camp (the area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe present Morskoy town),” says V. Markov. – He probably felt when the lines of an unsent letter were born. How else can one explain that it was on these days, in the twentieth of October, that he wrote a letter to his brother Alexander (Shura), which, fortunately, reached the addressee.
“Dear Nadenka, I don’t know if you’re alive, my dove...” Mandelstam asked in a letter. These were the last lines of the poet read by his wife... On December 27, 1938, on a day filled with a blizzard, Osip Mandelstam died on a bunk in barracks No. 11. His frozen body with a tag on his leg, lying for a whole week near the camp infirmary along with the bodies of other “goneers” "was thrown into the former fortress moat in the new year - 1939."

By the way, according to the latest archival research, the poet died in the Magadan camps...

In June 1940, Nadezhda Yakovlevna was presented with Mandelstam’s death certificate. According to this document, he died in the camp on December 27, 1938 from cardiac paralysis. There are many other versions of the poet’s death. Someone said that they saw him in the spring of 1940 in a party of prisoners going to Kolyma. He looked about seventy years old, and he gave the impression of being mentally ill...

Nadezhda Yakovlevna settled in Strunino, a village in the Moscow region, worked as a weaver in a factory, then lived in Maloyaroslavets and Kalinin. Already in the summer of 1942, Anna Akhmatova helped her move to Tashkent and settled her. Here the poet’s wife graduated from the university and received a diploma as an English teacher. In 1956 she defended her Ph.D. thesis. But only two years later she was allowed to live in Moscow...

“Her character is capricious,” recalls Tashkent writer Zoya Tumanova, who studied English with Nadezhda Yakovlevna as a child. “She’s kinder to me than to the boys, sometimes she gently ruffles my hair, and she pokes my friends in every possible way, as if testing their strength.” In revenge, they look for lines in the book of poems by Innokenty Annensky - “Well, right about Nadezhda! Listen":
I love the resentment in her, her terrible nose,
And the legs are clenched, and the rough knot of braids..."

Seeing the teacher’s thick tome in Italian, the children asked: “Nadezhda Yakovlevna, do you read Italian too?” “Children, we are two old women, we have been studying literature all our lives, how can we not know Italian?” - she answered.

Nadezhda Yakovlevna lived to see the time when Mandelstam’s poems could already be transferred to paper. And poetry, and “The Fourth Prose”, and “Conversation about Dante” - all that she memorized. Moreover, she also managed to write three books about her husband... Her memoirs were first published in Russian in New York in 1970. In 1979, the poet’s widow donated the archives to Princeton University (USA).

When Nadezhda Yakovlevna received fees from abroad, she gave away a lot, or she simply took her friends and took them to Beryozka. She gave Father Alexander Menu a fur hat, which in her circle was called “Abram the Prince.” Many women she knew wore “mandelshtamkas” - that’s what they themselves called the short sheepskin coats from “Beryozka”, given by Nadechka. And she herself wore the same fur coat...

From archival publications in recent years, it is known that Nadezhda Yakovlevna tried to arrange her life on a personal level even at the time when her husband was in prison, and even after that. It didn’t work out... One day she admitted:

“I want to tell the truth, only the truth, but I won’t tell the whole truth. The last truth will remain with me - no one but me needs it. I think even in confession no one gets to this final truth.”

Mandelstam was completely rehabilitated only in 1987. According to the Russian tradition, there are some extremes - the works of an author, albeit gifted, but still not fully revealing his creative potential, are often put on a par with Pushkin’s masterpieces...

The widow of Osip Emilievich did not live to see either complete rehabilitation or the glorification of the deceased poet. Before she left, she often returned to the thought that Osya was calling and waiting for her. Nadezhda Yakovlevna died at the end of December 1980.

OLGA VAXEL

"I cherish your painful memory..."

What remains are five immortal poems dedicated to her and Akhmatova’s note in the margins of the book’s manuscript: “We don’t know who Olga Vaksel is...”

Olga Vaksel is the recipient of five poems by Osip Mandelstam: “Life has fallen like lightning...”, “I will rush around the camp of a dark street...”, “I will tell you with the last directness...”, “On dead eyelashes Isaac froze. ...”, “Is it possible for a woman to praise a dead woman?...”
Olga Vaksel wrote poetry herself. True, Mandelstam did not know about this - she did not show them to him - or to anyone. About 150 of her poems have survived.
There is some kind of mystery in the fate of this beautiful and extraordinary woman, something unsaid and incomprehensible, some striking, stunning contrast between her life - for everyone - and her poems - for herself.
Olga included the story of meeting the man who made her name immortal among her troubles. The pages of her memoirs dedicated to Mandelstam are full of bitterness and sarcasm.

Before the revolution, an amazing girl Olga Vaksel lived in Tsarskoye Selo.
She still played with dolls, but she was already writing poems that were older than her age.
As it turned out later, this Tsarskoye Selo period in her life was the happiest. Her further fate turned out to be painful, sometimes even pitch-black. Neither her beauty (Akhmatova said that such beauties appear once in a century) nor her numerous talents (she not only wrote poetry, but also painted) helped.

And even played in films and theater). In 1932, having left for Oslo with her last husband, a Norwegian diplomat, she committed suicide.
A strange fate, a complex, contradictory character... She herself provoked many of her sorrows, hastened breakups. It seemed that misfortune was more familiar to her than luck and, even more so, prosperity.
And yet there was something about this woman that literally fascinated many people. In 1925, she experienced a whirlwind romance with Osip Mandelstam. Like most stories in her life, this romance also did not turn out to be happy...

Olga Vaksel, or Buttercup, as her family called her, met Mandelstam in Voloshin’s Koktebel house when she was still a twelve-year-old girl, long-legged, precocious.

In the evenings, she quietly climbed the tower of the house, sat in a corner on the floor, tucked her legs under her, and listened to everything the adults were talking about. And among them, as always with Voloshin, there were interesting people...

Despite the age difference, Osip and Olga became friends, and he even visited her in Tsarskoe Selo, where she studied in a closed institution with visiting days on Sundays.

In the alleys of the Tsarskoye Selo park, Olga once met the sovereign.

Later, during meetings, he recognized her, asked about her school successes, about her mother’s health.
During the October Revolution, classes stopped. The establishment closed when Nicholas II and his family left Tsarskoye Selo forever.

From the poems of Olga Vaksel:

Trees were cut down, houses were destroyed,
There is a carpet of green grass along the streets...
This is the poor town where I became in love,
Where I believed in myself.

Here is a sad garden city, where many years later
I will see you again, who has not fallen out of love,
I will share myself with the city that has become obsolete,
Here, leading a careless child by the hand.

And maybe behind that white building
We will meet a ghostly girl - me,
Rushing along the dead stones
On dates that have never been before.

Olga Alexandrovna Vaksel was born on March 18, 1903 in Panevezys (Lithuania). She belonged to the old St. Petersburg intelligentsia, to a noble family, in both branches of which - maternal and paternal - there were people involved in art, and they all left her a legacy of their talent: she played the piano and violin, painted, skillfully embroidered, acted in cinema, wrote poetry.

I love flowers in old books,
the dull smell of withered leaves.
How they resurrect traits
sweet faces of unlived dreams...

Daughter of Yu.Ya. Lvova, a highly educated and versatile woman, lawyer, composer, pianist, and A.A. Vaksel, a brilliant St. Petersburg cavalry guard, Olga grew up in an atmosphere of intellectual interests and diverse cultural traditions.

Her ancestor was the famous Swede Sven Waxel, a sailor, an associate of Vitus Bering, her maternal grandfather was a Petrashevite, her father’s grandfather was a violinist and composer, the author of the music for the hymn “God Save the Tsar” (Waxel remembers Mandelstam in his poem on his death: “and your family was proud of your great-grandfather’s violin”), the famous architect N.A. also belonged to Olga’s ancestors. Lvov, who built a lot in St. Petersburg.
The gymnasium in Tsarskoe Selo (she was taught drawing and sculpting there by Olga Forsh, the future Soviet writer), the privileged Catherine Institute for Noble Maidens - her future seemed quite cloudless and certain. Trips with his mother to Koktebel, Maximilian Voloshin’s dacha, the world of poets, musicians, artists, actors, half-childhood love...

And when Olga turned 14, everything collapsed overnight. Everything - all life values, standards, guidelines and authorities. Instead of a privileged institute - a Soviet school. Instead of music and poetry - getting food and firewood. A saleswoman in a bookstore, a timekeeper at a construction site, a fashion model, (they called it “mannequin” back then) a proofreader, a waitress...
New life, new authorities, new values. She could only rely on herself.

They asked me yesterday:
"You are happy?" - I answered,
What to think about first.
(I think all evenings.)

They said: “Well, that’s not it”...
They are not happy with this answer.
I felt funny and hurt
A little bit. But it's spilled

There is subtle excitement here,
In a chest that has not known life.
In my unhappy homeland
They don't grow up happy.

Don't be born beautiful...

From the memories of Olga Vaksel’s friends and acquaintances:

“There seemed to be nothing special about Buttercup, but everything together was surprisingly harmonious; not a single photograph conveys her charm” (Evgeny Mandelstam, brother of the poet).

"Buttercup was beautiful. Light brown hair, combed back, dark eyes... None of the photographs convey her subtle, spiritual beauty... She was an extraordinary, extraordinary woman. One could feel her intelligence, her decisive character. And at the same time, she felt some kind of tragedy" (Irina Chernysheva - Olga’s close friend)

"She liked the spice of life. She could easily get carried away, fall in love... She fell in love without memory and at first everything was fine. And then melancholy, complete disappointment and a very quick breakup. It was her nature that she could not cope with... Marriages she quickly ended. She left and left everything. Her strong character influenced others. Somehow forced them to catch up, or something. Buttercup did a lot of stupid things, but it was always felt that she was several heads taller than those around her... There was no nothing like what is called philistinism... I never chased fashion, but everything about her seemed fashionable and full of grace... "(Elena Timofeeva, also one of her close friends, who until the end of her life preserved the memory of her, her poems and student notebooks...)

Anna Akhmatova called her “a dazzling beauty.”
In June 1921, Olga got married. The happy chosen one is Arseny Smolyevsky, a mathematics teacher, also Tsarskoye Selo, with whom she was in love since childhood, and to whom she dedicated her first poems. But the marriage was unsuccessful.

From the notes of Olga Vaksel:

“Three days later, when A.F.’s renovation was completed, I moved in with him. On the first evening he declared that he would appear to me as a formidable husband. And, indeed, he appeared. I cried with disappointment and disgust and thought with horror: is this really happening among all people? I felt so alone in my small room; A.F. wisely left..."

We have plants and dogs.
But there will be no children... What a pity.
Every passer-by will take pity on me,
And most of all the doctor, dear Natalka.

I wipe the palm tree with a damp sponge,
There is a chocolate Zorka by the stove.
And there is no one to hide under a fluffy shawl
And there is nothing to cry long and bitterly about.

For flowers and animals - the sun in the world,
And for adults - yellow evening candles.
Other people's children are playing in the yard...
Their cries are carried by the gusty wind.

“Other people’s children are playing in the yard”... Olga really wanted a child, naively believing that this would bring her closer to her husband. Finally, in November 1923, Olga Vaksel had a son, who was named after his father - Arseny.
But after the birth of her son, she no longer had any illusions: it was impossible to save her marriage with A. Smolyevsky.

How few words, and yet how many,
How heavy and joyful the melancholy is...
Live and dry, and with the ease of a leaf
Faded slide onto the dusty road.

How few words there are to convey more accurately
Subtle shades, movement and peace,
Or describe the evening, at least like this:
In silence when the window turns blue,

The restless silence of my beloved rooms,
And the measured sound is water flowing from the roofs...
Those happiness returned to me forever,
That they don’t pray for me, but they remember me.

The husband turned out to be a despotic, jealous man who kept his wife a prison recluse: when leaving home, he locked her away. His “sultanism” was also manifested in the fact that he not only was not interested in his wife’s spiritual life, but even interfered with her attempts to continue her education. After the wedding, Olga was forced to stop taking all kinds of courses that she attended. Olga’s too bright appearance attracted the attention of others. The husband demanded her constant presence at home, although he himself was busy for days at the institute.

I remembered winter with its calm slumber,
With the gentle buzzing of my cheerful bees.
I have no one to tell that my husband is not at home,
That I'm afraid alone, that someone will come.

Staying alone in the house, Olga did housework and checked the papers that her husband’s students wrote. And when I had free time, I took my treasured notebook and wrote poetry. This was her personal life.

Winter midday amber rays,
Like the trembling fibers of steppe grass,
The frosted windows stretched out,
And suddenly faded in the blue shadow
All life looking into opal glass.
How slow the glances and hot hands!..

Arseny Fedorovich was alien to her enthusiastic and subtle inner world, he laughed at her poems, for a long time he did not want to have a child, but Olga insisted, hoping that the child would strengthen their union, bring her closer to her husband, and bring some meaning to her life. However, after the birth of her son, she suffers from a severe infectious disease, the consequence of which is frequent bouts of depression. Family discord worsened.

You are happy: your world is lawful,
And life flows in a calm direction,
And if I look back at the ground,
Or will I meet new people?

Everything is sorrow, everything is anxiety,
A long way through thorns,
And there is nowhere, nowhere to rest,
And there is no one, no one to remember God with...

Still, contrary to her husband’s wishes, Olga entered the evening department of the Institute of the Living Word in the group of N. Gumilyov, to whom she was a distant relative. Evenings of collective creativity, exercises for the development of artistic taste and the selection of rhymes very soon grew into a much closer acquaintance of Olga with the famous poet and even individual lessons at his home.

“...I liked separate classes with N. Gumilyov much more... He lived alone in several rooms, in which only one had a residential appearance. There was a terrible mess everywhere, the kitchen was full of dirty dishes, and an old woman came to him only once a week to clean. Without ceasing to talk and grab books to read this or that excerpt, we fried lamb in the oven and baked apples. Then we swallowed it with great pleasure. Gumilyov had a great influence on my work, he laughed at my timid poems and praised those that I did not dare show to anyone. He said that poetry requires sacrifice, that only one who makes his dreams come true can be called a poet. He and A.F. could not stand each other, and when they met with us, they said barbs..."

I had to quit classes in Gumilyov’s circle.

I won't blame you
It's all my fault,
Only in the heart there is such longing
And my bright home is not dear to me.

I don't know how, why
I killed your love.
I'm standing on the threshold into darkness,
Where I asked for shelter.

How no one helped me live,
They won't help me leave either.
I wander from lie to lie
Along an unknown path.

I don't know what to look for
I killed your love.
And I have such longing.
And such birds sing.

Both made mistakes in the marriage story. Olga made a mistake when she mistook her long-standing crush on Smolyevsky for love. He also made a mistake in trying to keep Olga using the traditional methods of jealous husbands. The scale of personality, outlook and interests were incomparable. Olga could not deceive herself for a long time. She was unable to lead the measured life of a housewife with an unloved husband, to live the way millions of other women live.

Well, let's be silent for a minute until goodbye,
Let's sit down, dignified ones, at the end of the sofa.
It's not good to say goodbye too soon
And there is no need to continue this silence.

So the separation will be hot in the memory,
So the soon meeting will be more trembling,
So I won’t interrupt the wait with a message.
Don't come, you're out of love, you're nobody's.

This is how I preserve dried flowers,
What did you put behind my dress while laughing?
And the arms will keep the hugs desired,
And distant gazes will remain clear.

Olga left her husband and got a divorce, which was not easy: Smolyevsky did not give a divorce, pursued Olga with letters of repentance, petty spied on her, started violent scandals and in the end, dealt the final blow, kept his son, forbidding his mother to come to him. Only a year later, in 24, will he finally come to terms with the inevitable and leave her alone, returning the child.

Studio "FEKS"

For Olga, the struggle for survival begins. To support herself and her son, she gets a job as a waitress. At the same time, he entered the production studio "FEKS" ("Factory of Eccentric Actor"). Writing critical notes about cinema for newspapers and filming as extras from time to time provided a small income.

From the memoirs of Olga Vaksel:
“In the fall (1924) I entered a film production workshop under the strange name “FEKS”, which meant “Factory of Eccentric Actor”. Its leaders were very young, one was 20 years old, the other 22.”
Grigory Kozintsev was twenty (almost) years old, and Leonid Trauberg was twenty-two years old.

In 1922, it was they who organized the theater workshop “FEKS”, which in 1924 was transformed into a film workshop with the same “strange name”. In the 30s, Kozintsev and Trauberg created the famous film trilogy about Maxim (“The Youth of Maxim”, “The Return of Maxim” and “The Vyborg Side”), for which they together became laureates of the Stalin Prize of the first degree (1941).

Olga Vaksel, for all her artistry, never became a famous film actress; by nature she was unable and unwilling to break herself and change her facial expression at the director’s request, although she starred in several films.
Here is what she herself wrote about studying with Kozintsev and Trauberg:
“I liked all this, it was new to me, but my directors did not want to work with me, sending me to the old men Ivanovsky and Viskovsky, saying that I was too beautiful and feminine for them to act in comedies. This upset me, but when I saw myself on screen in the comedy “Mishki vs. Yudenich,” I became convinced that this was really the case. At the end of 1925, I left FEKS and went to film at the Sovkino factory. Here I was busy mainly with historical films, and I was completely in my place. Stylish hairstyles suited me very well, I moved perfectly in these dresses with crinolines, I rode perfectly in riding habits that went down to the ground, but not once did I have to act in a headscarf and barefoot. That’s what it said in the file cabinet under my photographs: “type - socialite beauty.” I never had to act in comedies, which is what I terribly dreamed of.”
In 1925, Kozintsev and Trauberg released the eccentric film “Bears against Yudenich”, in which students of the FEKS film workshop starred, in particular: Sergei Gerasimov (later our outstanding film actor, film director and teacher), Yanina Zheimo (future all-Union “Cinderella” ) and - and Olga Vaksel.

Some of her brightest moments could be attributed not even to the screen and stage, but to the circus. Consider the trick of turning a curtain into a dress or riding a bicycle through the central streets of St. Petersburg!

From the documentary story “Angel Flying on a Bicycle” by Alexander Laskin:
“...In the twenty-third year, Olga became an actress in a small theater.

“Our company,” writes Buttercup further, “consisted of young people as frivolous as I was... We were among the first who dared to set out on this long journey after the whites left. Our journey to Chita lasted ten days. There, tired from the road, unwashed, hungry, we gave three performances in one evening. How it really happened, only God knows... As a farewell, they threw us a sumptuous dinner; it was fun, if not for the gloomy thought of how we would get back. In the midst of the toasts and when everyone was in a very cheerful mood, I took off my lace panties, climbed out onto the table and, waving them like a flag, announced that I was opening an auction ... "
Buttercup winced, seeing that the auction participants were hesitating. She clapped her hands when a voice from the audience announced the new amount...
“Everyone really liked this game,” she wrote with secret pride, “they tried to imitate my invention, but it was unsuccessful, I earned so much for my pants that I was able to buy myself a fawn fur coat...”
However, she is not given big roles. Her acting skills are very average. And small roles are not for Waxel. She leaves the studio, quits her job as a waitress, and gets a job as a film reviewer for the Leningradskaya Pravda newspaper. But in the evenings, locked in his room, he continues to write poetry.

For a whole year I looked at the poor land,
Kissed the earth's lips.
Why is it always clean inside?
And will I so joyfully listen to the words of revelations?

Was it because I carried pain in my chest,
Or were the saints guarding my soul?
It just seems like golden clouds
They will bring unprecedented rains.

Triangle

Soon after the start of classes at the Fax film workshop, Osip Mandelstam again appeared on Olga Vaksel’s path. Again - because she met him as a girl, at Maximilian Voloshin’s dacha in Koktebel.
Osip Emilievich was literally blinded by Olga in 1924. From the thirteen to fourteen-year-old angular teenager as the poet remembered her, she turned into a harmoniously beautiful woman who charmed with her poetry and spirituality of appearance, naturalness and simplicity of address. At the same time, according to many who knew her, she bore the mark of something tragic.

We will meet again in St. Petersburg.
It’s as if we buried the sun in it.
And the blessed, meaningless word
Let's say it for the first time.

Who was she - one in a series of numerous hobbies, the second after Nadezhda, or the only one - if not Laura or Beatrice, then Mignon (as Osip Mandelstam himself called Buttercup after her tragic suicide - in one of the five poems dedicated to her)? This can hardly be said with complete certainty.

From the memoirs of Olga Vaksel:

“About this time (autumn 1924) I met a poet and translator who lived in the house of Max Voloshin during the two summers when I was there. A contemporary of Blok and Akhmatova, from the group of “Acmeists,” having married a prose artist, he almost stopped writing poetry. He took me to his wife (they lived on Morskaya), I liked her, and I spent my leisure time with them. She was very ugly, tubercular-looking, with straight yellow hair.

But she was so smart, so cheerful, she had so much taste, she helped her husband so well, doing all the grunt work on his translations!
We became such friends, I trustingly and openly, she was like an elder, protectively and tenderly.”

And everything would be very nice if a shadow had not appeared between the spouses. Osip began to become interested in Olga. This passion turned out to be so strong that Nadezhda realized that her relationship with her husband was on the verge of breaking.

“Olga began to come to us every day, complained about her mother all the time, kissed me desperately - institute habits, I thought - and took Mandelstam away from under my nose. And he suddenly stopped looking at me, didn’t come closer, didn’t talk about anything except current affairs, composed poems, but didn’t show them to me...
It all started almost immediately; Mandelstam was truly carried away and did not see anything around him. This was his only hobby in our entire life together, but then I learned what a breakup was...

There was a lot of charm in Olga, which even I, offended, could not help but notice - a girl lost in a terrible, wild city, beautiful, helpless, defenseless ... "

From the memoirs of Olga Vaksel:

“I, of course, was entirely on her side; I didn’t need her husband in any way. I respected him very much as a poet... Or rather, he was a poet in life, but a big loser. I was very sorry to ruin my relationship with Nadyusha, at that time I didn’t have a single friend, I warmed up so much to this smart and warm-hearted woman, but still Osip managed to get ahead of her in something: he began writing poetry again, secretly, because that they were dedicated to me."
She probably did not remain indifferent to the manifestations of the poet’s feelings, to his lines, written secretly and dedicated to her. But she couldn't take what didn't belong to her. She could not betray a woman whom she considered a friend and who was already beginning to see everything, be jealous and suffer...
“I remember how, seeing me off, he asked me to come with him to Astoria, where he dictated them to me at the table. They were recorded only on scraps of paper, and even on a gramophone record.”
The second time Mandelstam met with Olga was at a completely different time. Olga Vaksel's memories concerning this second meeting aroused rage among Mandelstam's widow and those close to her. These memoirs have not yet been published in full, without cuts. Nadezhda Yakovlevna can be understood; she was the suffering party in this whole story, but one cannot help but note the bias and injustice of her memoirs. She was no angel either. In her diary, Olga Vaksel reports that Mandelstam’s wife was bisexual and described the following scenes:
“Sometimes I stayed overnight with them, and Osip was sent to sleep in the living room, and I went to bed with Nadyusha in the same bed under a colorful garus blanket. She turned out to be a bit of a lesbian and tried to seduce me down this path. But I was still equally cold to both male and female caresses. She was alternately jealous of me for him, then of him for me.”

The enraged Nadezhda, naturally, renounces this and calls Vaksel’s diaries “wild erotic memoirs”:
“Before her death, Olga dictated wild erotic memoirs to her husband, who knew Russian. The page dedicated to our drama is full of hatred towards both me and Mandelstam...
She accuses Mandelstam of lying, but this is not true. He really deceived both her and me in those days, but it cannot be otherwise in such situations. I don’t understand Olga’s anger towards me either...
And yet I will never forget the wild weeks when Mandelstam suddenly stopped noticing me and, not knowing how to hide anything and lie, ran away with Olga and at the same time begged all his acquaintances not to give him away and not to tell me about his hobby, about meeting with Olga and about poetry... These conversations with strangers were, of course, stupid and disgusting, but who doesn’t do stupid things and disgusting in such situations?..”
Did he lie?.. It's not true! Yes, he lied... But it’s still not true, because in his position everyone lies!.. Such is women’s logic...
As a matter of fact, Olga does not accuse anyone of anything. She only states dryly:
“In order to tell me about his love, or rather, about love for me for himself and about the need for love for Nadyusha for her, he looked for all sorts of ways to see me once again. He was so entangled in contradictions, so desperately clung to the remnants of common sense that it was pathetic to watch...”

Life fell like lightning,
Like an eyelash in a glass of water.
Lying on the vine,
I don't blame anyone.

Do you want a night apple?
Sbitnyu fresh, cool,
If you want, I’ll take off my felt boots,
I'll pick it up like a feather.

Angel in a light web
In golden sheepskin,
Flashlight beam light -
Up to high shoulder.

Is the cat, having perked up,
Turning into a black hare,
Suddenly he blazes a path,
Disappearing somewhere.

How the raspberry's lips trembled,
How I gave my son tea,
She spoke at random
There's no point and it's out of place.

How I accidentally stumbled
She lied, smiled -
So that the features flashed
Clumsy beauty.

There is behind the palace doll
And behind the boiling garden
Zaresnichnaya country, -
There you will be my wife.

Choosing dry felt boots
And golden sheepskin coats,
Together, holding hands,
Let's go down the same street

Without looking back, without hindrance
To shining milestones -
From dawn to dawn
Poured lanterns.

“Having lied at the root / I don’t blame anyone” - Mandelstam admits that he himself is to blame for his situation, in the complicated relationship between him, his wife and Olga. “Features flashed / Of clumsy beauty” - can be understood as a memory of a former awkward, embarrassed teenager, whose image suddenly appeared in the features of a young woman. The palace cupola and garden boiler - perhaps this refers to the dome of the Tauride Palace and the Tauride Garden, next to which Olga Vaksel and her mother lived.
In the “land behind the eyelashes” - through the looking glass - it turns out that what never happens in reality is possible. Only there can the poet be happy with her - without looking back and without interference:

Choosing dry felt boots
And golden sheepskin coats,
Together hand in hand
Let's go down the same street...

The poem “Isaky froze on dead eyelashes...” was also addressed to her: Isaac, the architectural dominant of the area, the place where the poet’s meetings with O.V. most often took place. – hotels “Astoria” and “Angleterre”, Morskaya Street (now Herzen), where the poet and his wife lived.

In the poem “I will tell you with final directness...” the image of Olga only flashes; translations of four sonnets by Petrarch “Sonnets on the Death of Laura” are also, according to N. Mandelstam, associated with memories of her.

N. Ya. Mandelstam
"Second Book":

“... On the days when Olga Vaksel came to me to cry, the following conversation took place: I said that I love money. Olga was indignant - what vulgarity! She explained so sweetly that the rich are always vulgar and that poverty is much dearer to her than wealth, that Mandelstam, in love, beamed and understood the difference between her nobility and my vulgarity...”
Yes, one loved money, the other did not, but both, alas, vegetated in poverty. Only Olga, walking around in an absurd fur coat, which she herself called an overcoat, “bloomed with beauty,” and Nadya could not boast of this. And besides, it was to her, his wife, that the careless Mandelstam repeatedly said that he had not promised a happy life. Perhaps he promised it to Olga.
“I was confused,” Nadya writes about this time. “Life hangs by a thread...”

In a word, Nadya fell ill. She had a fever, and she discreetly placed a thermometer under her husband’s nose so that he would be afraid for her. But he calmly left with Olga. But his father came, and, one day, finding Olga, he said: “It’s good: if Nadya dies, Osya will have Buttercup”...

From the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam:

“Once Osip agreed with Olga that he would come to her after Gosizdat. Olga demanded that the phone be handed over to me and said: “In the evening, Osya and I will come to visit you.” After that, Osip demanded clean linen, changed clothes and left. This was the final impetus. I called the artist Vladimir Tatlin.”

V. Tatlin, a constructivist artist, had been courting Nadezhda for a long time, and was very persistent. This time she agreed. Perhaps in this way she wanted to make her husband jealous, or maybe she was simply afraid to be left alone.
Nadya packed her suitcase and wrote that she was leaving for someone else. But, having forgotten something, Mandelstam returned, saw the suitcase, became furious and began to call Olga: “I’m staying with Nadya, we won’t see each other again, no, never...”

Then he will tell Nadya what he would do if she left him. “He decided to take out a gun, ... she writes, ... and shoot himself, but not seriously, but by pulling back the skin on his side... The wound would have looked scary - so much blood! - there’s no danger - just torn skin... But, of course, I couldn’t stand it, I felt sorry for the suicide and returned... Even I didn’t expect such idiocy from him!..”

Meeting in Angleterre

From the memoirs of Olga Vaksel:

“In order to sometimes see me, Osip rented a room in Angleterre, but he did not have to see me there often. All this comedy began to really bore me. In order to listen to his poems and confessions, it was enough to see him off in a cab from Morskaya to Tavricheskaya. I felt like a fool when he made me swear not to tell Nadyusha anything, but I left myself the opportunity to talk about him with her in his presence. She called him a “Mormon” and was very approving of his fantastic plans for the three of them to go to Paris.
One day he told me that he had something important to tell me, and invited me, so that no one would interfere, to his Angleterre. When asked why this cannot be done with them, he replied that this concerns only me and him. I could have said in advance that this would happen, but I wanted to end it once and for all. He was waiting for me in the most banal hotel room, with a burning fireplace and dinner laid out.

I asked in a dissatisfied tone what all this comedy was about, he begged me not to ruin his holiday by seeing me alone. I told them about my intention not to visit them again, he was so horrified, cried, knelt down, persuaded me to feel sorry for him, assured me for the hundredth time that he could not live without me, etc. I soon left and never visited them again. But a couple of days later Osip rushed to us and repeated all this in my room, to the indignation of my mother, who knew him and Nadyusha, whom he brought to visit my mother. I barely managed to persuade him to leave and calm down. How she and Nadyusha figured it all out, I don’t know...”

I will rush around the camp of the dark street
Behind a bird cherry branch in a black spring carriage,
Behind the hood of snow, behind the eternal, behind the mill noise...

I just remembered the misfired chestnut strands,
Smoky with bitterness, no - with formic sourness,
They leave an amber dryness on the lips.

At such moments the air seems brown to me,
And the rings of the pupils are dressed with light edging,
And what I know about apple, pink skin...

But still the runners of the carriage sleigh creaked,
The prickly stars looked into the wickerwork of the matting,
And they beat their hooves in rhythm on the frozen keys.

And only the light that is in the starry prickly untruth,
And life will float past the theater hood like foam;
And there is no one to say: “From the camp of a dark street...

Judging by the verses, the breakup occurred not so long ago, the signs of the beloved face are still fresh and distinct. Such a piercing memory - in smells, touches - it happens only in the first moment of loss, then everything becomes dull, and different words are needed to describe it. So, the first three stanzas are just about this, when any involuntary reminder - a flashing silhouette, a profile, a familiar style of hat, or just a certain place and time - and you rush “through the camp of a dark street”...

“My brother’s meeting with Buttercup in 1927 was the last. Relations between them were never resumed..."

From the poems of Olga Vaksel:

Pressing the flowers of separation to your lips,
And yet I can still leave,
Like a wounded dove flies away,
And you won’t throw away the unfinished cup,

You won't stop on your fast track.
“The source of grace has not dried up,”
Said the monk, flipping through the missal...
A church minister is a magician for me,
And you are an almost exposed magician.

And the pain that is far from over,
I'll turn it into madness. Force
Growing... I haven’t extinguished my spirit,
But I tried my best, and now I’m almost empty.

"Treasonous" verses

Mandelstam called the poems dedicated to Olga Vaksel “treasonous” and could not write them in front of his wife. He didn’t read these poems to her, but he read them to his friends. “Ah, Osip Emilievich’s last poem is simply wonderful!” - What could she answer to this? This uncertain situation was unbearable for all three of them.
“Treasonous verses” frightened Mandelstam very much. He threw the sheets of poetry into the bucket on his desk. He knew that Nadezhda always checked this basket, and he threw them there, not daring to show her himself.

From the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam:

“In Olga Vaksel’s poems, a “country of eyelashes” is invented, where she will be his wife, and the painful consciousness of a lie - life has been “lied at the root.” He could not stand double life, duality, discord, combining incompatible things and always felt “responsible”... He did not want to publish “treasonous” poems during his lifetime: “We are not troubadours”... I saw them only in Voronezh, although knew about their existence from the very beginning, when he dictated to Akhmatova “under great secrecy” and gave it to Livshits for safekeeping. In my opinion, the very fact of betrayal meant much less to him than “treasonous poems.” And at the same time, he defended his right to them: “I only have poems. Leave them alone. Forget about them."
It pains me that they exist, but, respecting Mandelstam’s right to his own world, closed from me, I preserved them along with others. I would have preferred that he keep them himself, but for this he had to stay alive.”
“But the story with Olga gave me new knowledge: terrible blind power over a person of love. Because with Olga there was something more than passion.”
Nadezhda Mandelstam far outlived her husband. She preserved his poems, even the “treasonous” ones, dedicated not to her, and published several books in which she described their life together and her thoughts.

“I only suspect one thing: if at the moment when he found me with a suitcase, the poems had not yet been written, he might have let me go to T. This is one of the questions that I did not have time to ask him.
Many years later, he told me that in his life he only knew true love-passion twice - with me and with Olga...
I have one more question that has no answer: why at that moment did Mandelstam choose me and not Olga, who was incomparably better than me? After all, I only have hands, I told him, and she has everything... I have one completely unflattering explanation for why the choice fell on me. A person is free, and builds not only his destiny, but also himself. It builds, not chooses. I didn’t stop him from building and being himself.”

“I give forgiveness to everyone who tormented me...”

Osip Mandelstam’s brother, Evgeny, also seriously courted Olga, was even engaged to her, traveled to the Caucasus, where she went to rest with her little son, but it all ended in a quarrel and later regrets that “Buttercup eluded him...”
Yes, she slipped away and fled from many, but was her life as easy and carefree as it seemed at first glance to her friends, even her closest ones?

From the memoirs of Evgeny Mandelstam:

“In those years I was a widower. The absence of a woman in my life, loneliness made itself felt and contributed to my rapprochement with Buttercup. Without prejudging anything, I invited her to travel together. I wanted to give her a break from life’s difficulties and hardships. Buttercup agreed, and her son and I set off on our journey. We visited the Caucasus, Crimea, and Ukraine. There were many impressions, especially from sailing in the Black Sea...
But our relationship still remained unclear and tense. Dandelion's spiritual world was hidden from me. An incident led to me being convinced of this with my own eyes: in Batum, under some pretext, she left me in a hotel with her son, and she went on a date with my classmate at the Mikhailovsky School, whom I introduced her to on the ship. After I found them on the boulevard, I acutely felt how strangers we were to each other... We returned to Leningrad. I took her to the apartment, and we never met again...”

From the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam:

“Several years passed, Olga still managed to go south, but not with Mandelstam, but with his brother Evgeniy. Apparently, women had already fallen in price even then, if such a beauty did not immediately find a replacement...
Then there were other marriages. I remember there was a doctor, then a sailor, then a violinist. These marriages quickly ended. She left and left everything..."
“After this trip, Olga came to us again, for the last time. She cried, reproached Osya and called with her. All this happened in my presence. Mandelstam listened silently to Olga, then politely and coldly said: “My place is with Nadya.”

From the poems of Olga Vaksel:

I cried for living joy,
Blessing the truth's return;
I give forgiveness to everyone who tormented me
For this day. Once upon a time, blue
Deceived, I flew into the abyss,
And the bottom greeted my brave flight...

“I didn’t live long on earth...”

From a friend's memoirs:

“I remember I met Buttercup on Nevsky. She was wearing a fashionable dress—long collars were in fashion back then. I noticed in passing that such collars will probably go out of fashion in a year. “And I will only live to be thirty,” said Buttercup. “I won’t live anymore.”
Olga would have turned thirty years old in March 1933. And in 1932, Olga Vaksel married again. For what time already? To the last one.
For some time she served at the newly opened Astoria Hotel, where the staff was required to know foreign languages ​​and strict rules of etiquette, as well as an attractive appearance. There, at a party, she met a Norwegian diplomat, former vice-consul in Leningrad. His name was Christian-Iergens Winstendahl. He was tall, handsome, and knew Russian well. He fell in love with Olga at first sight and proposed to her.

From the memoirs of Evgeny Mandelstam:

“In 1932, her Norwegian husband took her to Oslo to live with her wealthy parents. Buttercup left her son with her mother in Leningrad. There was a villa waiting for Buttercup near Oslo, built especially for her. She was not denied anything..."
Shortly before leaving, Olga took a photo and, picking up her blurry, fuzzy image, said: “This is a photo from the other world.”

Back in Leningrad, one day she pointed to a group at the next table and introduced these people to her future husband:
- Each of them was my lover.

***
I didn't say I love you
And I didn't think about it
But with some warm light
You have filled my life.

I can write poetry again
Not remembering anyone's hugs;
Take care of new dresses
And buy yourself perfume.

And now, having looked younger again,
And throwing off the years of heels for a while,
I'm in the water with bird pride
I look at my back.

And with the dim deceit of mirrors
The face seemed to reconcile.
All because you caressed
Me, sad, but sweet.

Not a favorite, just “darling”, probably that’s why he’s “unhappy”...
The Norwegian relatives warmly accepted the new relative, her husband treated her with love and admiration - it would seem that life had finally entered a different, happy direction. But despite the well-being and peace, Olga was again overcome by an attack of severe melancholy, which was layered with painful nostalgic moods. As can be seen from one of the last poems she wrote in October 1932, everything - the language she heard every day, the nature she saw around her, and even a loved one - began to feel like strangers and irreparably hostile:

I have forgotten how to enjoy you
Huge fields, blue distances,
Listening to words that are alien to me,
Overflowing with woeful sadness.

Already blind to eternal beauty,
I curse the scorched sky
Tormenting little children
Those who piteously ask for a crust of bread.

And this world is a terrible prison for me,
Because my heart is incinerated,
When and how, without knowing myself,
She followed the hated infidel.

After living there for only three weeks, Olga Vaksel passed away: having found a revolver in her husband’s desk drawer, she shot herself on October 26, 1932.

In 1928, Anatoly Mariengof, a close friend of Yesenin, wrote a novel called Cynics. By a strange coincidence, the main character there is also named Olga.

Anatoly Mariengof, novel “Cynics” (1928):

By the phone.
- Good evening, Vladimir.

Good evening, Olga.
- Sorry to bother you. But I have important news.

I'm listening.
- I'm shooting in five minutes.

Cheerful wheezes spill out of the black ear of the tube.

What stupid jokes, Olga!

My fingers squeeze the bony throat of the laughing apparatus:

Stop laughing, Olga!
- I can’t cry if I’m having fun. Goodbye

Vladimir.

Olga!..
Goodbye...

It was an ordinary Wednesday, October 26, 1932. The next morning, after a night of love, after seeing her husband off, Olga took a revolver from his table and shot herself in the mouth...
When they ran into the room at the shot, she was already dead. It’s strange, her thin, charming features were almost not distorted by death... They just became even thinner, but now serenity seemed to shine through them... Maybe in Death she finally found what she was looking for? The husband, distraught with grief, will later find in the drawer of his office desk a piece of paper with the following verses:

I paid generously until the end
For the joy of our meetings, for the tenderness of your gazes,
For the charm of your lips and for the damned city,
For the roses of an aged face.

Now you will drink all the bitterness of my tears,
In sleepless nights slowly shed...
You will read my long, long scroll
You'll change your mind every single verse.

But the paradise in which I live is too small,
But the poison I feed on is too sweet.
So, every day I outgrow myself.
I see miracles in dreams and in reality,

But what I love is not available now,
And only one temptation: to fall asleep and not wake up,
Everything is clear and easy - I judge without getting excited,
Everything is clear and easy: leave so as not to return...

The shot was calculated in such a way that only the right side of the neck was blown apart. The face retained its beauty. And on the lips about which the poet wrote poetry, a half-smile froze. She was only 29 years old.

What do I care? I'm not in pain, I'm not scared -
I didn't live long on earth.
For me, like a year, yesterday is -
Coal in grayish ash.

And what about others, homeless,
Lonely, lost, yes!
I’m not seduced by theatrical patchwork,
Ephemeral, empty, never.

What is the burden to me? Cold chains.
I carry them with difficulty, barely breathing,
But shackles that are a hundred times more absurd,
Even though it’s easier, the soul won’t accept it...

For others, for the same blind people,
I would pray - I can’t find the words...
And in forever ardent aspirations
I would come to the beginning of the path.

PLAN.

1. The first creative years

· Mandelstam and Acmeism.

· First book of poems.

· “Tristia” – the second book.

· Theme of love by Osip Mandelstam.

· Mandelstam's perception of revolution and civil war.

2. Prose of Mandelstam.

5. Epigram on Stalin.

· Reaction of contemporaries.

· “But he’s a master.”

· A tortured “ode to Stalin.”

· A turning point in the poet’s soul.

· An attempt to justify the leader.

7. Voronezh.

· Mandelstam's favorite poets.

· Love of art.

· Anxious January.

8. The end of prosperity.

· Complete insulation.

· Second arrest of Mandelstam.

· Death of the poet.

In the twentieth of October 1938, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam wrote to his brother Alexander and his wife Nadezhda Yakovlevna: “Dear Shura! I am in Vladivostok, USVITL, barrack 11. From Moscow from Butyrki the stage was on September 9, we arrived on October 12. My health is very poor, I am extremely exhausted , emaciated, almost unrecognizable, but sending money, things and food - I don’t know if it makes sense. Try it anyway. I’m very cold without things...” These are apparently the last lines of the poet that have reached us. On December 27, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam died in hospital in a transit camp near Vladivostok. He was forty-seven years old. Fate gave him less than half a century, but he devoted thirty years of his life entirely to poetry. He never betrayed his calling in any way; the poet preferred the position of living with people, creating what people urgently need. His reward was persecution, poverty, and finally death. But the poems, paid at such a price, not published for decades, cruelly persecuted, remained to live - and now enter our consciousness as high examples of dignity and the strength of human genius.

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam was born on January 3 (15), 1891 in Warsaw into the family of a businessman who was never able to create a fortune. But Petersburg became the Poet’s hometown: here he grew up and graduated from one of the best schools in Russia at that time, the Tenishev School. Here he survived the 1905 revolution. It was perceived as the “glory of the century” and a matter of valor. Mandelstam’s first two poems, published in the school magazine in 1907, are conscientiously populist in style, fiery revolutionary in spirit: “Blue peaks will embrace pitchforks and be stained with blood...”

He was pushed towards poetry by the lessons of the symbolist V.V. Gipplus, who read Russian literature at the school. Then Mandelstam studied at the Romano-Germanic department of the university's philological faculty. Soon after this he left the city on the Neva. Mandelstam will return here again, “to a city familiar to tears, to veins, to children’s swollen glands.” Meetings with the “northern capital”, “Transparent Petropolis”, where “the narrow canals under the ice are even blacker”, will be frequent in poems generated by both the feeling of involvement of one’s fate in the fate of one’s native city, and admiration for its beauty.

In 1910, the “crisis of symbolism”—the exhaustion of the political system—became indisputable. In 1911, young poets from students of symbolism, wanting to look for new paths, formed the “Workshop of Poets” - an organization chaired by N. Gumilyov and S. Gorodetsky. In 1912, within the Workshop of Poets, a core of six people was formed who called themselves Acmeists. These were N. Gumilyov, S. Gorodetsky, A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam, M. Zenkevich and V. Narbut. It would be difficult to imagine more dissimilar poets. The group existed for two years and disbanded with the outbreak of World War II; but Akhmatova and Mandelstam continued to feel like “Acmeists” until the end of their days, and among literary historians the word “Acmeism” increasingly began to mean the combination of both creative features of these two poets.

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

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

But the more carefully, the stronghold Notre Dame ,

I studied your monstrous ribs

The more often I thought: out of unkind heaviness

And someday I will create something beautiful.

The last poems of "Stone" were written at the beginning of the World War. Like everyone else, Mandelstam greeted the war with enthusiasm; like everyone else, he was disappointed a year later.

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

Well, let's try: huge, clumsy

Creaky steering wheel.

The earth is floating. Take courage, men,

Dividing the ocean like a plow.

We will remember in the cold of life,

That the earth cost us ten heavens.

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

In the spring of 1922, Mandelstam returned from the south and settled in Moscow. With him is his young wife, Nadezhda Yakovlevna. Osip Emilievich and Nadezhda Yakovlevna were completely inseparable. She was equal to her husband in intelligence, education, and enormous spiritual strength. She, of course, was a moral support for Osip Emilievich. His difficult tragic fate became her fate. She took this cross upon herself and carried it in such a way that it seemed that it could not have been otherwise. “Osip loved Nadya incredibly and unbelievably,” said Anna Akhmatova.

In the fall of 1922, a small book of new poems by Tristia was published in Berlin. (Mandelshtam wanted to call it “The New Stone.”) In 1923, it was republished in a modified form in Moscow under the title “The Second Book” (and with a dedication to Nadya Khazina). The poems of "Tristius" are sharply different from the poems of "Stone". This is the new second poetics of Mandelstam.

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

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

My age, my beast, who can

Look into your pupils

And with his blood he will glue

Two centuries of vertebrae?

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

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

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

I am a man of the Moscow seamstress era,

Look how my jacket is puffing up on me,

How can I walk and talk!

Try to tear me away from the eyelid! –

I guarantee you, you will break your neck!

In life, Mandelstam was neither a fighter nor a fighter. He knew ordinary human feelings, and among them was the feeling of fear. But, as the smart and poisonous V. Khodasevich noted, the poet combined “hare cowardice with almost heroic courage.” As for poetry, they reveal only that property of the poet’s nature that is named last. The poet was not a courageous man in the conventional sense of the word, but he stubbornly insisted:

Chur! Don't ask, don't complain! Tsits!

Don't whine!

Is it for this reason that commoners

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

We'll die like foot soldiers

But we will not glorify either robbery, day labor, or lies!

However, it is in vain to look for a uniform attitude towards the events of 17 in Mandelstam’s poetry. And in general, certain political opinions are rare among poets: they perceive reality too much in their own way, with a special flair. Mandelstam considered inconsistency an indispensable property of lyrics.

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

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

The pagan Senate testifies to this -

These things don't die.

But concern for the future is already creeping in:

About the sweet liberty of citizenship!

But the blind skies do not want victims:

Or rather, work and consistency.

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

And if for others the enthusiastic people

Knocks down golden wreaths -

To bless you will descend to a distant hell

Russia is like pillars of light.

Akhmatova, unlike most poets, was not for a moment seduced by the intoxication of freedom: behind the “cheerful, fiery March” (Z. Gippius), she foresaw the fatal outcome of the summer’s hangover. Addressing modern Kasandra, Mandelstam exclaims:

And in December of the seventeenth year

We lost everything, loving... -

And, in turn, becoming a herald of disasters, he predicts the future tragic fate of the “cheerful sinner of Tsarskoye Selo”:

Someday in the small capital,

At a Scythian festival, on the banks of the Neva,

At the sounds of a disgusting ball

They will tear the scarf from her beautiful head.

Mandelstam refuses a passive perception of the revolution: he seems to give consent to it, but without illusions. Political tone - however, with Mandelstam it always changes. Lenin is no longer an “October temporary worker”, but a “people’s leader who, in tears, takes upon himself the fatal burden” of power. The ode serves as a continuation of the cry over St. Petersburg; it reproduces the dynamic image of a ship going to the bottom, but also responds to it. Following the example of Pushkin’s “Feast during the Plague,” the poet builds his poem on the contrast of unthinkable glorification:

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

The Great Twilight Year.

Let us glorify the authorities for the twilight burden,

Her unbearable oppression.

The unglorified is glorified. The rising sun is invisible: it is hidden by swallows bound “in fighting legions”; “the forest is shadowed” means the abolition of freedoms. The central image of the “ship of time” is dual, it is sinking while the earth continues to float. Mandelstam accepts “a huge, clumsy, creaky turn of the steering wheel” out of “compassion for the state,” as he will later explain, out of solidarity with this land, when its salvation would cost “ten heavens.”

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

Having brought this calculation together over time, he falls silent: after “January 1” - four poems in two years, and then five years of silence. He switches to prose: in 1925 the memoirs “The Noise of Time” and “Theodosius” appear (also settling scores with time), in 1928 - the story “The Egyptian Stamp”. The style of this prose continues the style of poetry: the same frequency, the same maximum figurative load of each word.

Since 1924, the poet has lived in Leningrad, since 1928 - in Moscow. I have to make a living from translations: 19 books in 6 years, not counting editing. Trying to escape from this debilitating work, he goes to work for the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets. But it turns out to be even harder.

With his return to poetry, Mandelstam regained his sense of personal significance. In the winter of 1932-33, several of his author’s evenings took place, the “old intelligentsia” received him with honor; Pasternak said: “I envy your freedom.” Over the course of ten years, Osip Emilievich grew very old and seemed to young listeners to be a “gray-bearded patriarch.” With the help of Bukharin, he receives a pension and enters into an agreement for a two-volume collected works (which was never published).

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

Now, in November 1933, Osip Mandelstam wrote a small but brave poem, which began his martyrdom through exile and camps.

We live without feeling the country beneath us,

Our speeches are not heard ten steps away,

And where is enough for half a conversation, -

The Kremlin highlander will be remembered there

His thick fingers are like worms, fat

And the words are as true as weights.

The cockroaches are laughing,

And his boots shine.

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

He plays with the services of demihumans.

Who whistles, who meows, who whines,

He's the only one who babbles and pokes.

Like a horseshoe bush behind a decree -

Some in the groin, some in the forehead, some in the eyebrow, some in the eye.

No matter what his punishment is, it’s a raspberry

And a broad Ossetian chest.

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

The poet's friends and relatives realized that there was nothing to hope for. Osip Mandelstam said that from the moment of his arrest he was constantly preparing for execution: “After all, this happens with us on lesser occasions.” The investigator directly threatened to shoot not only him, but all his accomplices. (That is, to those to whom Mandelstam read the poem).

And suddenly a miracle happened.

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

The reason for the “miracle” was Stalin’s phrase: “Isolate, but preserve.”

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

Mandelstam tells his wife: “Poetry is respected only here. People kill for it. Only here. Nowhere else...”

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

Having learned that Mandelstam was considered a major poet, he decided not to kill him for the time being. He understood that killing the poet could not stop the effect of poetry. Killing a poet is nothing. Stalin was smarter. He wanted to force Mandelstam to write other poems. Poems exalting Stalin.

Many poets wrote poems glorifying Stalin. But Stalin needed Mandelstam to sing his praises.

Because Mandelstam was a “stranger.” The opinion of “strangers” was very high for Stalin. Being himself a failed poet, in this area Stalin was especially willing to listen to the opinion of authorities. It was not for nothing that he so persistently pestered Pasternak: “But he’s a master, isn’t he? A master?” The answer to this question meant everything to him. A major poet meant a major master. And if the master is, then he will be able to exalt “at the same level of skill” that he exposed.

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

This is how Nadezhda Yakovlevna recalls this: “At the window in the dressmaker’s room there was a square table that served for everything in the world. Osip, first of all, took possession of the table and laid out poems and paper... For him this was an extraordinary act - after all, he composed poems from his voice and he needed paper only at the very end of the work. Every morning he sat down at the table and picked up a pencil: a writer as a writer¼ But not even half an hour passed before he jumped up and began to curse himself for his lack of skill."

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

And six times in my consciousness I shore

Witness of slow labor, struggle and harvest,

His huge path through the taiga

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

¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼¼

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

For honor and love, for valor and steel.

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

We hear him and we caught him.

It would seem that Stalin’s calculations were completely justified. Poems were written. Now Mandelstam could be killed. But Stalin was wrong.

Mandelstam wrote poems glorifying Stalin. Nevertheless, Stalin's plan was a complete failure. To write such poetry, you didn’t have to be Mandelstam. To get such verses, it was not worth playing this whole complex game.

Mandelstam was not a master. He was a poet. He did not weave his poetic fabric from words. He couldn't do that. His poems were woven from a different material.

An involuntary witness to the birth of almost all of his poems (involuntary, because Mandelstam never had so much as an “office”, but not even a kitchenette, a closet where he could retire). Nadezhda Yakovlevna testifies:

“The poems begin like this: in the corners sounds an annoying, at first unformed, and then precise, but still wordless musical phrase. More than once I saw Osip trying to get rid of the prv, shake it off, leave. He shook his head, as if he could throw it out, like a drop of water falling into the ear while swimming. I got the impression that poems exist before they are composed. (Osip Mandelstam never said that poems were “written.” He first “composed”, then wrote them down.) All the process of composing consists in the intense capture and manifestation of an already existing and, from nowhere, transforming harmonic and semantic unity, gradually embodied in words."

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

The “Ode” is not entirely dead, faceless lines. There are also those where the attempt at glorification seems to have even been a success:

He hung from the podium as if from a mountain

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

Mighty eyes are decidedly kind,

A thick eyebrow shines close to someone ¼

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

Mighty eyes are decidedly kind ¼

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

In 1937, there, in Voronezh, Mandelstam wrote the poem “If our enemies took me,” ending with the following ending:

And a flock of fiery years will flash by,

Will rustle like a ripe thunderstorm - Lenin,

But on earth that will escape decay,

Stalin will awaken reason and life.

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

Will destroy reason and life - Stalin.

There is no doubt that it was this version that reflected the poet’s true understanding of the role in the life of his homeland played by the one whom he had already once called “murderer.”

Of course, Stalin, not without reason, considered himself the greatest expert on issues of “life and death.” He knew that anyone, even the strongest, could be broken. But Mandelstam was not at all one of the strongest.

But Stalin did not know that breaking a person does not mean breaking a poet. He did not know. That it is easier to kill a poet than to force him to sing what is hostile to him. A month passed after Mandelstam’s failed attempt to compose an ode to Stalin. And then something amazing happened - a poem was born:

Among the people's noise and rush

At train stations and squares

A mighty milestone looks through the centuries,

And the eyebrows begin to wave.

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

Now take it wherever you want:

In the talkative jungle of the station,

Waiting by the mighty river.

That parking lot is far away now,

The one with the boiled water -

A tin book on a chain

And darkness covered my eyes.

There was power in the Permian dialect,

Passenger power struggle,

And caressed me and drilled me

From the wall of these eyes there is a lot.

……………………………………

Can't remember what happened -

Lips are hot, words are callous -

The white curtain was breaking,

Carrying the sound of iron leaves.

……………………………………

And to it - to its core -

I entered the Kremlin without a pass,

Tearing apart the canvas of distances,

The guilty head is heavy.

They differ like heaven from earth from those official-glorifying rhymed lines that Mandelstam so difficultly squeezed out of himself, envying Aseev, who, unlike him, was a “master.”

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

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

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

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

If it were only hope for changes in his personal destiny, there would still be no self-deception. But, by the very nature of his soul, concerned not only with his personal fate, the poet tries to express certain social hopes. And this is where self-deception and self-persuasion begin.

Once upon a time (in an article in 1913) Mandelstam wrote that a poet should under no circumstances make excuses. This, he said, “... is unforgivable! Inadmissible for a poet! The only thing that cannot be forgiven! After all, poetry is the consciousness of one’s rightness.” O. Mandelstam openly proclaimed his readiness to accept the crown of martyrdom “for the explosive valor of the coming centuries, for the high tribe of people.” He demonstratively glorified everything that he never had, just to confirm his innocence, his fully realized hostility to the “wolfhound century.”

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

Mandelstam's soul did not understand these reasons well, because he invariably prophetically saw himself as an object of torture and execution.

I live on the black stairs, and to my temple

A bell torn out with meat hits me.

And all night long I wait for my dear guests,

Moving the shackles of the door chains.

Even more terrible was the fact that it brought destruction to his soul, his life’s work, and poetry. Could there be a more terrible prospect for a poet than “teaching executioners crouched on a school bench to chirp?” Mandelstam did not want to be “like everyone else.” And yet, paradoxically, at some point he also wanted to “go there with everyone together.” Despite his usual sobriety and carelessness, he was even more keenly ready than Pasternak to feel in his heart love and tenderness for a life that was previously alien to him. Because he was forcibly thrown out of this life. Realizing that he had been deprived of the right to feel like a “Soviet person,” Mandelstam suddenly felt with horror this as a loss. This feeling was real. And he grabbed onto it like a drowning man clutches at a straw. He didn't understand yet. What happened to him? He thought that he was still the same unbroken one. Meanwhile, the “brilliant calculation” was already giving its first shoots in his soul. And the lips molded completely different words:

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

But what I say, every schoolchild will memorize:

The earth is roundest on Red Square

And her slope hardens voluntarily...

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

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

How's the metro? Be silent, conceal yourself,

Don't ask how the buds swell...

And you, hours of Kremlin battles -

The language of space compressed to a point.

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

The present was the foundation on which a beautiful tomorrow was built. To feel like a stranger to the Stalinist present meant to erase oneself not only from life, but also from the memory of posterity. That's why Mandelstam couldn't stand it. With the last of his strength he tries to convince himself that that “miraculous builder” was right, and he, Mandelstam, was mistaken.

And I am not robbed and not broken,

But just overwhelmed by everything -

Like the Word of a Shelf, my string is tight,

The earth sounds - the last weapon -

Dry humidity of chernozem hectares.

Robbed and broken, he tries to convince himself otherwise. The worst happened to him. He lost consciousness of his rightness. The rubber baton of the Stalinist state hit Mandelstam where it hurt most: his conscience. Everything was leading to the fact that the unclear complex of guilt that tormented the poet’s soul took on the clear and definite outlines of guilt before Stalin. Stalin spoke on behalf of eternity, on behalf of history, on behalf of the people. Everything changed instantly as soon as Mandelstam’s conscience was hurt. It happened “among the people’s noise and rush at stations and squares,” where “the Permian dialect was going on, the power was going on, the passenger fight was going on.” The point here was no longer about Stalin himself, not about the short, low-browed highlander with fat fingers, but about his ideal features, in his appearance, in his portrait, which this entire hungry, impoverished crowd absorbed into their souls, accepted and legitimized just as unconsciously as they accepted and legitimized the phrase “enemy of the people.”

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

My country spoke to me

She misled, scolded, didn’t read,

But who outraged me as an eyewitness,

I noticed - and suddenly, like lentils,

She lit it with an Admiralty ray.

He suddenly saw the country, which had previously been a kind of abstraction for him, with his own eyes, became familiar with it, with its everyday life, and drank with it from the same mug. And through the vastness of its distances, through these screaming crowds of people hurrying somewhere, through this great migration of peoples, he suddenly, as through a giant glass lentil, saw again the tiny ray of the Admiralty needle.

Once upon a time, before Mandelstam’s arrest, he was frightened by the thought of the inevitable end of the St. Petersburg period of Russian history. His soul could not come to terms with the end of St. Petersburg, the city of the Bronze Horseman and the White Nights. And suddenly, far away from his former life, in the midst of “people’s noise and haste,” it seemed to Mandelstam that the St. Petersburg period of Russian history was continuing. The ray of the Petrovsky Admiralty did not go out; it became an integral part of this bloody fire. Mandelstam instinctively seized on this hope as the last possibility of salvation.

To accept it meant to admit that the “murderer and man-fighter” was right, that he was truly a “miraculous builder.” But not accepting it was even worse: after all, it meant “falling out” of history, staying away from this “popular noise and haste,” from the great historical cause.

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

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

I would like an inch of the blue sea, just an eye of a needle,

It’s good for the two convoy time sails to rush.

Dry-mint Russian fairy tale. Wooden spoon - oh!

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

So that Pushkin’s wonderful goods do not go into the hands of parasites,

The tribe of Pushkin scholars is literate in greatcoats with revolvers -

Young lovers of white-toothed rhymes,

I wish I had an inch of blue sea, just the eye of a needle!

The same Mandelstam, who resisted the longest, who never agreed to “teach executioners sitting on a school bench to twitter,” suddenly felt the need to enter into spiritual contact with his executioners. Wanting, like Khodasevich, to come back to haunt someone in the approaching darkness, he found nothing better than to shout “ay!” to three nice guys from the “iron gates of the GPU”.

Everything was taken away from him, without leaving the slightest clue, not even a tiny island where he could establish his untouched, undestroyed consciousness. The only thing he could still grab onto was this, newly acquired one: a white curtain flying in the wind, a tin mug, “that tank with boiled water.” And can one blame him for clinging to this curtain as the last thread connecting him to life?

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

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

But the main victory of the Stalinist state over the artist’s soul was achieved almost without the use of brute force. The hostage of eternity was convinced that there is and never will be another eternity other than the one in whose name Stalin spoke.

According to the sentence passed without trial, the poet was deprived of basic human rights and doomed to the position of an exile. Moreover, deprived of a means of subsistence, eking out odd jobs in a newspaper, on the radio, living on the meager help of friends. “I’m a waiter by nature. That’s why it’s even more difficult for me here,” he told A. Akhmatova in Voronezh.

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

How a fat layer is pleasant on a ploughshare,

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

And the sky, the sky is your Buonarotti!

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

From the still young Voronezh hills

To the all-human ones - becoming clearer in Tuscany.

Simple school notebooks purchased in Voronezh were filled with quickly written lines of poetry. The impetus for their emergence was the details of the life surrounding the poet. These poems revealed human destiny: suffering, melancholy, the desire to be heard by people. But not only this: the horizons here were rapidly expanding, and even space and time were subject to the poet’s control. Voronezh's "...alleys of barking stockings And streets of skewed closets", "icy water pumping station", at the whim of the imagination, are replaced by other St. Petersburg visions ("I hear, I hear the early ice, rustling under the bridges, I remember how the Light hops float above our heads"), which in their turn, they make us remember Florence, glorified by the great Dante.

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

In Voronezh, the Mandelstams soon moved to another apartment. In a small one-story house they rented a room from a theater dressmaker. There were no amenities, the heating was stove. The decoration of the room was little different from the previous one: two beds, a table, some kind of ridiculous long black wardrobe and an old couch upholstered in dermantine. Since there was only one table, there were books, papers, Dymkovo toys and some dishes on it. The few books that Osip Emilievich never parted with were kept in the closet. He often read poems by his favorite poets: Dante, Petrarch, Kleist. One of Mandelstam’s favorite Russian poets was Batyushkov. In the wonderful poem “Batyushkov,” written by Mandelstam back in 1932, he speaks of him as a contemporary, feeling his presence:

Like a reveler with a magic cane,

Gentle Batyushkov lives with me.

He walks through the poplars in the bridge,

He smells a rose and sings to Daphne.

Not for a minute believing in separation,

I think I bowed to him.

Cold hand in a light glove

I press with feverish envy...

This is understandable; Batyushkov’s teachers were Tasso and Petrarch. Plasticity, sculpture, and especially the euphony that we had never heard before, the “Italian harmony of verse” - all this, of course, is very close to Mandelstam. Of his contemporaries, he valued Pasternak most of all, whom he constantly recalled. In a New Year’s letter, Osip Emilievich wrote to Pasternak: “Dear Boris Leonidovich. When you remember the entire great volume of your life’s work, all its incomparable scope, you cannot find words for gratitude. I want your poetry, with which we are all spoiled and undeservedly gifted, to be torn further to the world, to the people, to the children... At least once in my life let me tell you: thank you for everything and for the fact that this “everything” is not “everything” yet.

Natalya Shtempel recalls: “I remember well the first impression that Osip Emilievich made on me. The face is nervous, the expression is often self-absorbed, internally concentrated, the head is thrown back somewhat, very straight, almost with a military bearing, and this was so striking that -the boys shouted: “The general is coming!” He was of medium height, in his hands was a constant stick, which he never leaned on, it just hung on his hand and for some reason suited him, and an old, rarely ironed suit that looked elegant on him. "He had an independent and relaxed air. He certainly attracted attention - he was born a poet, nothing else could be said about him. He seemed much older than his years. I always had the feeling that there were no people like him." Mandelstam never paid attention to circumstances or living conditions. He said it perfectly:

You are not dead yet, you are not alone yet,

While with a beggar friend

You enjoy the grandeur of the plains

And darkness, and cold, and blizzard.

In luxurious poverty, in mighty poverty

Live calm and peaceful, -

Blessed are those days and nights

And sweet-voiced labor is sinless.

He didn't have the small, everyday desires that everyone else has. Mandelstam and, say, a car, a dacha are completely incompatible. But he was rich, rich, like a fairy-tale king: the “plains are a breathing miracle”, and the black soil “in the April twist”, and the earth, “the mother of snowdrops, maples, oaks” - everything belonged to him.

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

And clear melancholy does not let me go

From the still young, Voronezh hills -

To the all-human ones, becoming clearer in Tuscany.

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

The irises were never purchased. There was something childishly touching in this episode. Osip Emilievich loved painting very much, his poems speak about this - “Impressionism” and Voronezh: “Smile, angry lamb from Raphael’s canvas...” or “Like chiaroscuro martyr Rembrandt...”. Nadezhda Yakovlevna believed that in “Rembrandt” Mandelstam speaks about himself (“the sharpness of my burning rib”) and about his calvary, “devoid of all greatness.”

Pasternak called the poem “Smile, angry lamb...” a pearl. It is difficult to say what was the reason for its creation, what exactly were the realities. There are no paintings by Raphael in the Voronezh museum. Perhaps, by some association, Mandelstam remembered a reproduction of Raphael’s painting “Madonna and the Lamb.” There is a lamb, and “folds of stormy peace” on the knees of the kneeling Madonna, and a landscape, and some amazing blueness in the general background of the picture. As a rule, Mandelstam was precise in his poetry.

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

Girl, upstart, proud,

Whose sound is as wide as the Yenisei,

Comfort me with your play, -

On your head, Polish girl,

Marina Mnishek hill of curls,

Your bow is suspicious, violinist...

In addition to concerts, Osip Emilievich enjoyed going to the cinema. It had attracted him before. He has written several interesting film reviews. In one of them, Mandelstam wrote: “The more perfect the film language, the closer it is to that not yet realized thinking of the future, which we call film prose with its powerful syntax, the more important the cameraman’s work becomes in the film.”

The strong impression that one of the first sound paintings, Chapaev, made on Mandelstam was reflected in the poem “Speaking from a damp sheet...”

With great interest he watched Charlie Chaplin's "City Lights". Mandelstam loved and highly appreciated Chaplin and the films he created:

And now in Paris, in Chartres, in Arles

Sovereign good Chaplin Charlie, -

In an ocean cauldron with confused precision

On hinges he swaggers with the flower girl...

“Osip Emilievich read a lot. He borrowed books from the university fundamental library, which he had access to even before we met,” writes Natalya Shtempel. Mandelstam highly valued this library and more than once said that in it you can find the rarest books that you don’t always see in capital libraries. There was another joy in his life - communication with books. Despite the isolation, servitude and complete ignorance of how the future would turn out, Osip Emilievich lived a spiritually active, active life, he was interested in everything. He was worried about Spanish events. He even began to study Spanish and mastered it very quickly.

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

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

I look into the face of frost alone, -

He is nowhere, I am nowhere.

And everything is ironed and flattened without wrinkles

The plains are a breathing miracle.

And the sun squints in the cornerstone poverty,

His squint is calm and comforting.

Ten-digit forests are almost the same...

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

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

Oh, this slow, breathless space -

I'm completely fed up with it!

And those who have caught their breath will open their horizons -

A blindfold for both eyes!

And everything is resolved with a wonderful and terrible poem:

Where should I go this January?

The open city is extraordinarily tenacious.

Am I drunk because of the closed doors?

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

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

How terrible is the feeling of powerlessness here! Here, in front of your eyes, a man is suffocating, he lacks air, and you just watch and suffer for him and with him, without even having the right to show it. In this poem you recognize the external signs of the city. At the junction of several streets - Myasnaya Gora, Dubnitskaya and Seminarskaya Gora - there really was a water pump (a small brick house with a window and a door), there was also a wooden box for draining water, and still people splashed it, everything around was icy.

And into the pit and into the warty darkness

I slide towards the icy water pump

And I stumble, eating dead air.

And the rooks fly away in a fever,

And I gasp after them, screaming

In some frozen wooden box...

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

Only a sorcerer like Osip Emilievich could take you to another world. There is no exile, no Voronezh, no this wretched room with a low ceiling, no fate of an individual. The vast world of feeling, thought, divine, all-powerful music of words captures you completely, and apart from it nothing exists. He read poetry uniquely; he had a very beautiful voice, chesty, exciting, with an amazing richness of intonation and an amazing sense of rhythm. He often read with a kind of rising intonation. And it seems that this is unbearable, it is impossible to withstand this rise, take-off, you are suffocating, your breath is taken away, and suddenly, at the very maximum volume, the voice spreads out in a wide, free wave. It is difficult to imagine a person who could escape his destiny in such a way, becoming spiritually free. This freedom of spirit raised him above all the circumstances of life, and this feeling was passed on to others.

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

And in the room of the disgraced poet

Fear and the muse are on duty in their turn.

And the night comes, which will bring the dawn.

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

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

In April 1937, Mandelstam wrote to Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky: “I am put in the position of a dog, a dog... I am not there. I am a shadow. I only have the right to die. My wife and I are being pushed to commit suicide... I will not bear a new sentence of exile. I cannot.” .

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

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

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

Osip Emilievich wrote a lot, and no vicissitudes of fate were an obstacle to intense creative work, he was literally on fire and, paradoxically, was truly happy.

LITERATURE.

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

2. New world. - 1987. - No. 10.

3. Light. - 1988. - No. 11.

4. Russian literature of the twentieth century (edited by Pronina E.P.). - M., -1994. - P.91-106.

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

6. Russian literature of the twentieth century (edited by L.P. Batakov). - M., - 1993.

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam was born on January 3 (15), 1891 in Warsaw into a Jewish family. The father of the future poet was a glove maker and merchant. In 1897, the future Osip Emilievich moved to St. Petersburg with his family.

In 1900, Mandelstam entered the Tenishev School. In 1907, he attended lectures at St. Petersburg University for several months. In 1908, Osip Emilievich left for France and entered the Sorbonne and Heidelberg University. During this period, Mandelstam, whose biography as a writer was just beginning, attended lectures by J. Bedier, A. Bergson, and became interested in the works of C. Baudelaire, P. Verlaine, F. Villon.

In 1911, due to the difficult financial situation of the family, Mandelstam had to return to St. Petersburg. He entered the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University, but did not take his studies seriously, so he never completed the course.

The beginning of creative activity

In 1910, Osip Emilievich's poems were first published in the St. Petersburg magazine Apollo. Mandelstam's early work gravitates towards the symbolist tradition.

Having met Nikolai Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova, Mandelstam becomes a regular participant in the meetings of the “Workshop of Poets”.

In 1913, the poet’s debut collection of poems, “Stone,” was published, which was then completed and republished in 1916 and 1921. At this time, Mandelstam took an active part in the literary life of St. Petersburg, met B. Livshits, Marina Tsvetaeva.

In 1914, an important event occurred in Mandelstam’s short biography - the writer was elected a member of the All-Russian Literary Society. In 1918, the poet collaborated with the newspapers “Strana”, “Evening Star”, “Znamya Truda”, and worked at “Narkompros”.

Years of the Civil War. Mature creativity

In 1919, while traveling to Kyiv, Mandelstam visited the poetic cafe “HLAM”, where he met his future wife, artist Nadezhda Khazina. During the civil war, the writer wandered with Khazina throughout Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia. Osip Emilievich had a chance to escape with the White Guards to Turkey, but he chose to stay in Russia. In 1922, Mandelstam and Khazina got married.

Mandelstam's poems during the Revolution and Civil War were included in the collection “Tristia” (1922). In 1923, the collections “The Second Book” and the third edition of “The Stone” were published. In 1925, the writer’s autobiographical story “The Noise of Time” was published. In 1927, the story “The Egyptian Stamp” was completed. In 1928, Mandelstam’s last lifetime books, “Poems” and “On Poetry,” were published.

Last years and death

In 1933, Mandelstam wrote an anti-Stalin epigram, for which he was sent into exile. From 1934 to 1937, the writer was in exile in Voronezh, lived in poverty, but did not stop his literary activity. After permission to leave, he was arrested again, this time exiled to the Far East.

On December 27, 1938, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam died of typhus in a transit camp on the Second River (now the outskirts of Vladivostok). The poet's burial place is unknown.

Chronological table

Other biography options

• The future poet’s grandmother, Sofya Verbovskaya, brought young Mandelstam to V. Ivanov’s poetry circle.
• Mandelstam was fluent in French, English and German, translated the works of F. Petrarch, O. Barbier, J. Duhamel, R. Schiquele, M. Bartel, I. Grishashvili, J. Racine and others.
• Mandelstam was in love with Marina Tsvetaeva and was very upset about the breakup - because of the unsuccessful romance, the writer was even going to go to a monastery.
• The works and personality of the poet Mandelstam were under the strictest ban in Russia for almost 20 years. His wife, Nadezhda Yakovlevna, published three books of memoirs about her husband.