Osip Mandelstam, a Russian poet who could not be silent.

Osip Mandelstam was one of the most important and inspiring Russian poets in the 20^th century. He was born in Poland but moved to St Petersburg where he was educated.
He was introduced to me in one of Bishop Richard Holloway’s books. He was writing about how ideas for sermons develop and he likened the process to the way Osip approached his poetry. According to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Osip’s wife, in her memoirs Hope against Hope and Hope Abandoned, Mandelstam he began his poetry process by listening to the ether and the words came to him. He acted as a midwife bringing those words to birth. Quite often, he didn’t write them down. He recited the poems to his wife who acted ‘like a Dictaphone.’ This Process , minus the dictaphone, is not dissimilar to that of writing a sermon, hence the illustration by Richard Holloway.

As well as learning that insight, I brushed against the poetry itself and the revelation of his life. It has been written of him that he had a prophetic understanding of the suffering  of the twentieth century ‘which he transformed into luminous poetry. The same commentator said of him that he was, ‘childish and wise, joyous and angry, complex and simple. He was outspoken and brave which bordered on foolishness. He was unhappy about the way Russian Society was developing under Stalin and he felt a prophetic need to use his poetry to warn people of how dangerous it all was.
Needless to say, he became a person of interest to the authorities and he suffered persecution at a time when the dictator, Stalin, was growing in power.
In view of this, it was probably unwise to write a poem, a lampoon about the dictator. In  May 1934 he wrote, of Stalin,

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.
But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,
the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,
the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.
One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom
He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.
He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

It was, of course, the most dangerous thing he wrote. When he chanced to meet his fellow poet, Boris Pasternak, he recited the poem to him. Pasternak was filled with dread and fear. Stalinism had eyes and ears everywhere. It was even suggested that the very pavements had ears! Russia was fast becoming a heinous dictatorship. Pasternack immediately told Mandelstam, “I heard nothing, Strange and terrible things are happening right now, You said nothing!”

Though the poem remained unpublished, the authorities, proving Pasternack right, got wind of it.
Stalin began to play with Mandelstam as a cat plays with a mouse.
He was arrested, interrogated, tortured and labelled a subversive to the State.
He was imprisoned in Moscow and then exiled to the provincial city of Voronezh. Here and previously in Moscow, he was at his most creative. The Voronezh and Moscow notebooks, published still today are the outpourings of the poetic genius of a man who perhaps sensed he had little time but with much to say.

Eventually Stalin’s insecurity got the better of him. Like so many dictators,  he fed only on hatred, fear, lust and an inner weakness which needed power to sustain it. It is hard to get into the inner being of such a person. Perhaps poets manage it because so many who challenge society do so through the medium of poetry (alongside art and music). A generalization, I know!
At the age of 48, in a transit camp in the east, he died of a ‘heart attack’, His body was dumped in an open grave, identified only by a tag marked on his big toe with his prison number. Stalin could rest, at last. easy in his bed! Or could he?Nadezhda took up her pen. Osip would be remembered. His words would be read, quoted, pondered over. His creativity would be celebrated. His desire for justice, light and peace would be struggled for.
Stalin? Only the suffering he inflicted is remembered. Who he was as a human being was never fully known whilst he was alive and certainly is not of interest now.

This week, along with many, I am thinking of another Russian. He was 47 when he died. There are similarities in his story and that of Osip Mandelstam. Not least that what he stood for lives on through his wife, Yulia.  Osip Mandelstam / Alexei Navalny cannot be silent and nor  must we.

One day people will forget Putin. Dictators fade away but those who stand up against them for goodness, kindness, generosity and love. They will always matter. So Mandelstam wrote:

Having deprived me of seas, of running and flying away,
and allowed me only to walk upon the violent earth,
what have you achieved? A splendid result:  
you could not stop my lips from moving.

[Osip Mandelstam. May 1935]

Maya Angelou said that birds sing because they have a song. Mandelstam & Navalny have much still to sing to us.

[Mr G]

From Mr G: There are quite a number of translations of the poem, the Stalin Epigram. The one here is from Against Forgetting, edited by Carolyn Forché, translated by W.S. Merwin and Clarence Brown, published by W.W. Norton & Co. Copyright © 1989 by W.S. Merwin.

The photo of the Robin is from the collection left to us by my friend Joyce Smith. A remembrance that she was one of those who never failed to sing of God’s love.