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Tristia

Osip Mandelshtam

Translated from the Russian by Kevin J. Kinsella

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Osip Mandelshtam (1891–1938) grew up in St. Petersburg in a middle-class, assimilated Jewish family. Between 1907 and 1910, he traveled in western Europe, encountering the French Symbolists and other modernist writers. Returning to Russia in 1911 to attend St. Petersburg University, he joined with poets Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilyov to establish the poetic movement Acmeism, which celebrated compactness of form and clarity of expression.

Tristia (1922), his second book, helped to establish his reputation as one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century, along with his first collection, Kamen (Stones), and Stikhotvorenia (Verses). Following the Russian Revolution, his writing came under scrutiny, and he was exiled and ultimately imprisoned. He died en route to a hard labor camp.

His wife Nadezhda Mandelshtam saved his poetry by memorizing his entire corpus. She wrote two acclaimed memoirs about their life under Stalinism, Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974).