Mandelshtam, Osip

Mandelshtam, Osip (Emilyevich)

 or Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam

(born Jan. 15, 1891, Warsaw, Pol., Russian Empire—died Dec. 27, 1938, Vtoraya Rechka, near Vladivostok, Russia, U.S.S.R.) Russian poet and critic. He published his first poems in 1910. A leader of the Acmeist poets, who rejected the mysticism and abstraction of Russian Symbolism, he wrote intellectually demanding, apolitical verse in such volumes as Tristia (1922). In 1934 he was arrested for an epigram about Joseph Stalin. While suffering from mental illness, he composed the Voronezh Notebooks, which contain some of his finest lyrics. Arrested again in 1938, he died in custody at age 47. Most of his works went unpublished in the Soviet Union until after Stalin's death, and he was almost unknown to generations of Russians and in other countries until the mid 1960s.