A poet who wrote a sixteen-line epigram mocking Stalin's moustache and fingers - and paid for it with arrest, exile, a second arrest, and death in a transit camp near Vladivostok in 1938.
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In their own words 10
We live, but we do not feel the land beneath us, Ten steps away and our words cannot be heard.
"Stalin Epigram" (November 1933) (Russian: Мы живем, под собою не чуя страны...; English: "We live, not sensing our own country beneath
Only in Russia poetry is respected - it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?
Quoted in Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir (1970), ch. 35
The October Revolution could not but influence my work since it took away my "biography," my sense of individual significance.
A POET ABOUT HIMSELF translated into English in The complete critical prose (1997)
In their orbit 1
Writers born in the 1890s 6
About this person
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam was born in 1891 and became one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school in Russian poetry. During the repressions of the 1930s he was arrested and sent into internal exile with his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam. Given a reprieve of sorts, they moved to Voronezh in southwestern Russia. In 1938 he was arrested again and sentenced to five years in a corrective-labour camp in the Soviet Far East. He died that same year at a transit camp near Vladivostok, on 27 December 1938.
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