Osip Mandelstam

The life of Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938), the outstanding poet of the 20th century, vivid, brief, and tragic, continues to captivate each new generation of readers and admirers of his talent. An acmeist in the pre-revolutionary era, he had incredibly complex relations with his time. His fame spilled far beyond Russia and that epoch. In 1972, the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote: “Mandelstam… light-footed, clever, sharp-tongued… cheerful, sensual, always in love, open, clairvoyant, and happy even in the twilight of his nervous illness and political nightmare… strange and refined… — belongs to the number of the happiest poetic intuitions of the 20th century.”

In this biography of the poet, Oleg Lekmanov draws in a broad historical and creative context, new archival and recently discovered documents, without bypassing even the posthumous fate of Osip Mandelstam.