Books and writers / Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes

 Langston Hughes 

(1902-1967)

African-American poet, novelist, and playwright, who became one of the foremost interpreters of racial relationships in the United States. Influenced by the Bible, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Walt Whitman, Hughes depicted realistically the ordinary lives of black people. Many of his poems, written in rhythmical language, have been set to music. Hughes's poems were meant "to be read aloud, crooned, shouted and sung."

"Rest at pale evening...

A tall slim tree...

Night coming tendrerly

Black like me.

(from Dream Variations, 1926)

James Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri. His mother was a school teacher, she also wrote poetry. His father, James Nathaniel Hughes, was a storekeeper. He had wanted to become a lawyer, but he had been denied to take the bar exam. Hughes's parents separated and his mother moved from city to city in search of work.

In his rootless childhood, Hughes lived in Mexico, Topeka, Kansas, Colorado, Indiana and Buffalo. Part of his childhood Hughes lived with his grandmother. At the age of 13 he moved back with his mother and her second husband. Later the family settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where Hughes's stepfather worked in the steel mills. During this period Hughes found the poems of Carl Sandburg, whose unrhymed free verse influenced him deeply.

Langston Hughes

After graduating from a high school in Cleveland, Hughes spent a year in Mexico with his light-skinned father, who had found there a release as a successful cattle rancher from racism of the North. On the train, when he returned to the north, Hughes wrote one of his most famous poems, 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers.' It appeared in the African-American journal Crisis (1921). As an adolescent in Cleveland he participated in the activity of Karamu Players, and published in 1921 his first play, The Golden Piece.

Supported by his father, Hughes entered in the early 1920s the Columbia University, New York. For the disappointment of his family, Hughes soon abandoned his studies, and participated in more entertaining jazz and blues activities in nearby Harlem. Disgusted with life at the university and to see the world, he enlisted as a steward on a freighter bound to West Africa. He traveled to Paris, worked as a doorman and a bouncer of a night club, and continued to Italy.

After his return to the United States, Hughes worked in menial jobs and wrote poems, which earned him scholarship to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. His first play, The Gold Piece (1921) was published in the children's magazine The Brownies' Book. According an anecdote, Hughes was "discovered" by the poet Vachel Lindsay in Washington. Lindsay was dining at the Wardman Park Hotel, where Hughes worked as a busboy, and dropped his poems beside the Lindsay's dinner plate. Lindsay included several of them in his poetry reading. It prompted interviews of the "busboy poet." Hughes quit his job and moved to New York City.

In 1929 Hughes received his bachelor's degree. He was celebrated as a young promising poet of the generation, publishing his poetry in Crisis (1923-24) and in Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro (1925). His first book of verse, The Weary Blues, supported by Carl Van Vechten, came out in 1926. "My news is this: that I handed The Weary Blues to Knopf yesterday with the proper incantations. I do not feel particularly dubious about the outcome: your poems are too beautiful to escape appreciation. I find they have a subtle haunting quality which lingers in the memory and an extraordinary sensitivity to all that is kind and lovely." (from Van Vechten's letter to Hughes in Remember me to Harlem, ed. by Emily Bernard, 2001)

Hughes valued Van Vechten's criticism and dedicated him his second collection of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). Their correspondence, which lasted until Van Vechten's death in 1964, was published in 2001. The Weary Blues assimilated techniques associated with the secular music with verse, while its content reflected the lives of African-Americans. "Drowning a drowsy syncopated tune, / Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, / I heard a Negro play. / By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light / He did a lazy sway... / He did a lazy sway..." (from 'The Weary Blues,' the title poem of the collection)

Hughes was considered one of the leading voices in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s  Not Without Laughter (1930), his first novel, Hughes wrote with the financial support of Charlotte Mason, a wealthy white woman. The book had a cordial reception and Hughes bought a Ford. He toured the colleges of southern America as a teacher and poet.

Noteworthy, Hughes was one of the first black authors, who could support himself by his writings. In the 1930s Hughes traveled in the Soviet Union, Haiti, and Japan. During his visit in the Soviet Union, to write the English dialogue for a film about black American workers, he had also an affair with an Afro-Chinese ballerina, Sylvia Chen, whose father Eugene Chen had served as a secretary to Sun Yat-Sen, the founder of the Chinese republic and then worked as foreign minister of China. "He was such a jolly person and so natural," Sylvia recalled. "Langston had been a sailor and he walked like one; I remember him sloshing around in white corduroy pants in the middle of a Russian winter." While in Moscow, Hughes completed his translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poems 'Black and White' and 'Syphilis' with the help of the critic Lydia Filatova. He also met Boris Pasternak and translated some of his poems.

'Goodbye, Christ,' a poem written during his world tour, was attacked by a right-wing religious group in the 1940s. Although Hughes decided to repudiate the work publicly, he also embraced radical politics, publishing a collection of satiric short stories, The Ways of White Folks (1943), and returned to satire and racial prejudices later in Laughing to Keep from Crying (1952) and Something in Common (1963). Hughes emphasized the importance of African culture and shared Du Bois's belief that renewal could only come from an understanding of African roots.

"My old man died in a fine big house.

My ma died in a shack.

I wonder where I'm gonna die,

Being neither white nor black?"

(from 'Cross')

Hughes's play The Mulatto (1935) premiered in 1935 with great success on Broadway at the Vanderbilt Theatre. To maximize sex and violence in the drama, the producer Martin Jones had added a scene in which a white overseer rapes the hero's sister. Alterations were made without Hughes's knowledge, but the fact that his first professionally developed play had opened on Broadway made him feel less disappointed with the production. Moreover, the same year Hughes won a Guggenheim Fellowship, which gave him some financial security for a period of time.

During the Spanish Civil War (1937) Hughes served as a newspaper correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American, reporting on the African American volunteers fighting for the Loyalists in the International Brigades. While in Madrid, he became a friend of Ernest Hemingway, with whom he attended bullfights. From circa 1942 onwards, Hughes made Harlem his permanent home, but continued lecturing at universities around the country.

Hughes wrote children's stories, non-fiction, and numerous works for the stage, including lyrics for Kurt Weill's and Elmer Rice's opera Street Scene, which opened at the Delphi Theatre on January 9, 1947, screenplay for the Hollywood film Way Down South with the actor Clarence Muse, and translated the poetry of Federico García Lorca and Gabriela Mistral. Hughes's Christmas play, Black Nativity, has been produced every year by major black theaters. Street Scene was Rice's drama of tenement life in the lower east side of Manhattan. Chicago Daily News compared the Broadway musical adaptation to the Gershwin classic Porgy and Bess. Hughes also founded black theatre groups in Harlem, Chicago, and Los Angeles. 

When the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace was arranged in March 1949, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, Hughes was one of the attendees. The event gathered left-leaning American artists of all disciples to meet their Soviet counterparts. On the final night of the conference, Dmitri Shostakovich played a piano arrangement of the Scherzo of his Fifth Symphony at Madison Square Garden. Several days later Life magazine published a photo essay headlined "RED VISITORS CAUSE RUMPUS: DUPES AND FELLOW TRAVELERS DRESS UP COMMUNIST FRONTS," in which the attendees were said to be aiding the Communist cause. Hughes, who was a member-at-large of the National Council and one of the sponsors of the conference,  appeared as a "fellow traveler"  alongside Charles Chaplin, Aaron Copland, Albert Einstein, Lillian Hellman, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets, Dorothy Parker, and a number of other delegates.

Hughes's inaccurate reputation for being a Communist dates from his poems in the 1930s. Lines from 'Goodbye, Christ' were presented as proof that he was a professed Communist: Goodbye, / Christ Jesus Lord God Jehovah, / Beat it on away from here now. / Make way for a new guy with no religion at all— / A real guy named / Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin worker ME . . . ."In 1953, during the era of McCarthyism, Hughes tested to the Senate committee that he was not, and never had been, a Communist. He named no names, well aware of blacklisting and its effects on such radicals as Paul Robeson. In several of his poems, Hughes had expressed with ardent voice sociopolitical protests. He portrayed people, whose lives were impacted by racism and sexual conflicts, he wrote about southern violence, Harlem street life, poverty, prejudice, hunger, hopelessness. But basically he was a conscientious artist, kept his middle-of-the road stance and worked hard to chronicle the black American experience, contrasting the beauty of the soul with the oppressive circumstance.

"Wear it

Like a banner

For the proud –

Not like a shroud."

(from Color, 1943)

In the 1950s Hughes published among others Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), which included his famous poem 'Harlem,' A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (1956), and edited The Book of Negro Folklore (1958) with Arna Bontemps. Hughes's autobiographicals books include The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander (1956). For juveniles he did a series of biographies, beginning with Famous American Negroes (1954). His popular comic character Jesse B. Semple, or "Simple," appeared in columns for the Chicago Defender and the New York Post. Hughes had met the prototype of the character in a bar. The ironic comments of the street-wise Harlem dweller were first collected into Simple Speaks His Mind  (1950). In the last Simple collection, Simple's Uncle Sam (1965), Hughes wrote: "My mama should have named me Job instead of Jesse B. Semple. I have been underfed, underpaid, undernourished, and everything but undertaken – yet I am still here. The only thing I am afraid of now – is that I will die before my time."

In his later years Hughes held posts at the Universities of Chicago and Atlanta. The poet also witnessed that doctoral dissertations already begun to be written about him – the earliest book on his work appeared already in the 1930s. At a White House lunch in 1961, hosted by President John F. Kennedy in honor of Leopold Sédar Senghor, the poet and president of Senegal specially mentioned Hughes as a major early source of inspiration. A Tennessee newspaper spoke about his presence in the White House as "an affront to every man and woman in this country, of all creeds." Hughes, with his gift of good humour, was an excellent dinner guest. Once when he sat next to the bored Carson McCullers, they had fun translating the French menu into jive English. 

Hughes never married and there has been unrelevant speculations about his sexuality. Several of his friends were homosexual, among them Carl Van Vechten, who wrote the controversial novel Nigger Heaven (1926) – Hughes had recommended the choice of the title – but several were not. When the actress and playwright Elsie Roxborough had proposed Hughes in 1936, he pleaded poverty as his reason for bachelorhood. After black papers began to report that they were about to marry, Hughes stated in the Baltimore Afro-American, that "I am a professional poet and while poetry is so frequently associated with romance, there seems to be little compatibility between poetry and marriage, especially where one must depend on it to support a wife."

Langston Hughes died in Polyclinic Hospital in New York, on May 22, 1967, of complications after surgery. His collection of political poems, The Panther and the Lash (1967), reflected the anger and militancy of the 1960s. The book had been rejected first by Knopf in 1964 as too risky. Hughes's own history of NAACP came out in 1962; he had received a few year's earlier the NAACP'S Spingarn Medal.

Hughes published more than 35 books, he was a versatile writer, but he hated "long novels, narrative poems," as he once said. Although the Harlem Renaissance faded away during the Great Depression, its influence is seen in the writings of later authors, such as James Baldwin, who, however, criticized Hughes's poetic achievement. From the late 1940's through the 1950's Hughes revised under pressure his poems – many of them became less tough.

For further reading: To Make a Black Poet by S. Redding (1939); Langston Hughes by J. Emanuel (1967); Black Genius: A Critical Evaluation, ed. by T. O'Daniel (1971); A Biobibliography of Langston Hughes 1902-1967 by D.C. Dickinson (1972); Langston Hughes: The Poet and His Critics by R.K. Barksdale (1977); The Life of Langston Hughes: 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America by Arnold Rampersad (1986); The Life of Langston Hughes, 1941-1967: I Dream a World by Arnold Rampersad (1988); The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes by R. Baxter Miller (1990); Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. by Henry Louis Gates (1993); Langston Hughes: A Study of the Short Fiction by Hans Ostrom (1993); Coming Home: From the Life of Langston Hughes by Floyd Cooper (1994; note: for ages 4-8); Free to Dream by Audrey Osofsky (1996; note: for ages 9-12); Langston Hughes by Joseph McLaren et al. (1997); Langston Hughes: Poet of the Harlem Renaissance by Christine M. Hill (1997); Langston Hughes: Comprehensive Reserach and Study Guide, ed. by Harold Bloom (1999); Remember me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964, edited by Emily Bernard (2001); The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume I: 1902-1941, I, Too, Sing America by Arnold Rampersad (2002); The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume II: 1914-1967, I Dream a World by Arnold Rampersad (2002); Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture by W. Jason Miller (2010); Langston Hughes, edited by R. Baxter Miller (2013); Race in the Poetry of Langston Hughes, edited by Claudia Durst Johnson (2014); Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism by Mark Steven (2017) - See also: Countee Cullen. Harlem literature: (novels) Jean Toomer's experimental Cane (1923), Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928); Countee Cullen's One Way to Heaven (1932), Anna Bontemps's Black Thunder (1936); (poems and plays) Abraham Hill's On Striver's Row (1933), Langston Hughes's Shakespeare in Harlem (1942). Harlem Renaissance, see This Was Harlem by Jervase Anderson (1981), Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance by Houston A. Baker Jr (1987). Note 1: Hughes's 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers,' written on a train taking him to Mexico, has been among the most quoted of all poems by black poets. Note 2: According to the Kansas poet Eric McHenry, Hughes was born a year earlier than generally assumed. (The Guardian, 10 Aug 2018)

 

Selected works:

• The Negro Speaks of Rivers, 1921 (poem published in the journal Crisis)
• The Gold Piece, 1921 (play; publ. in The Brownies' Book)
  
• The Weary Blues, 1926 (incl. the poem Dream Variation; with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, 1929)
• Fine Clothes to the Jew, 1927
• Not Without Laughter, 1930
• Dear Lovely Death, 1931
• The Negro Mother, and Other Dramatic Recitations, 1931 (with decorations by Prentiss Taylor)
• Mule Bone, 1931 (with Zora Neale Hurston)
• Dear Lovely Death, 1931
• The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, 1932 (with illustrations by Helen Sewell)
• Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play in Verse, 1932 (with illustrations by Prentiss Taylor)
• Popo and Fifina, Children of Haiti, 1932 (with Arna Bontemps, illustrations by E. Simms Campbell)
• The Ways of White Folks, 1934
• Little Ham, 1935 (play)
• The Mulatto, 1935 (play)
• Emperor of Haiti, 1936 (play)
• Troubled Island, 1936 (play, with William Grant Still)
• When the Jack Hollers, 1936 (play)
• Front Porch, 1937 (play)
• Joy to My Soul, 1937 (play)
• Soul Gone Home, 1937 (play)
• Don't You Want to be Free?, 1938 (play)
• A New Song, 1938 (introd. by Michael Gold; frontispiece by Joe Jones)
• The Em-Fuehrer Jones, 1938 (play)
• Limitations of Life, 1938 (play)
• Little Eva's End, 1938 (play)
• The Organizer, 1939 (musical play, with James P. Johnson)
• The Big Sea: An Autobiography, 1940
• Shakespeare in Harlem, 1941 (with drawings by E. McKnight Kauffer)
• The Sun Do Move, 1942 (play)
• Way Down South, 1942 (screenplay)
• For This We Fight, 1943 (play)
• Freedom's Plow, 1943
• Jim Crow's Last Stand, 1943
• Laments for Dark Peoples, 1944
• Street Scene, 1946 (musical; lyrics by Langston Hughes, music by Kurt Weill, based on a book by Elmer Rice)
• Fields of Wonder, 1947
• Masters of Dew / Jacques Roumain, 1947 (translator, with M. Cook)
• Cuba Libre / Nicholas Guillen, 1948 (translator, with F. Carruthers)
• One-Way Ticket, 1949 (illustrated by Jacob Lawrence)
• The Poetry of the Negro, 1949 (ed.)
• Simple Speaks His Mind, 1950
• The Barries, 1950 (play)
• Montage of a Dream Deferred, 1951 (incl. poem Harlem)
• Laughing to Keep from Crying, 1952
• The First Book of Negroes, 1952 (pictures by Ursula Koering)
• Simple Takes a Wife, 1953
• Famous American Negroes, 1954
• The First Book of Rhythms, 1954 (pictures by Robin King)
• Famous Negro Music Makers, 1955
• The First Book of Jazz, 1955 (pictures by Cliff Roberts, music selected by David Martin)
• Sweet Flypaper of Life, 1955 (photographs by Roy DeCarava)
• I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey, 1956
• The First Book of the West Indies, 1956 (pictures by Robert Bruce)
• A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, 1956 (with Milton Meltzer)
• Selected Poems of Gabriel Mistral, 1957 (translator)
• Simple Takes a Claim, 1957
• Simply Heavenly, 1957 (play)
• Tambourines to Glory: A Novel, 1958
• Famous Negro Heroes of America, 1958 (illustrated by Gerald McCann)
• The Book of Negro Folklore, 1958 (ed. with Arna Bontemps)
• The Langston Hughes Reader, 1958
• Selected Poems, 1959 (drawings by E. McKnight Kauffer)
• The First Book of Africa, 1960
• The Best of Simple, 1961 (illustrated by Bernhard Nast)
• Ask Your Mama, 1961
• The Prodigal Son: A Gospel Song-Play, 1961
• Black Nativity, 1961 (play)
• Gospel Glory, 1962
• Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP, 1962
• Five Plays, 1963 (plays, edited with an introd. by Webster Smalley)
• Jericho-Jim-Crow-Jericho: A Song-Play, 1963
• Something in Common, and Other Stories, 1963
• New Negro poets, U.S.A., 1964 (edited by Langston Hughes, foreword by Gwendolyn Brooks)
• Simple's Uncle Sam, 1965
• Soul Yesterday and Today, 1965 (play)
• The Book of Negro Humor, 1966 (selected and edited by Langston Hughes)
• Angelo Herdnon-Jones, 1966 (play)
• Mother and Child, 1966 (play)
• Outshines the Sun, 1966 (play)
• Trouble with Angels, 1966 (play)
• The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times, 1967
• The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers: An Anthology from 1899 to the Present, 1967 (ed.)
• Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment, 1967 (with Milton Meltzer)
• Black Misery, 1969 (illus. by Arouni)
• Three Negro Plays, 1969 (with an introduction by C. W. E. Bigsby)
• Don’t You Turn Back: Poems, 1969 (selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins, woodcuts by Ann Grifalconi)
• Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings, 1973 (edited and with an introd. by Faith Berry, foreword by Saunders Redding)
• Langston Hughes in the Hispanic World and Haiti, 1977 (edited by Edward J. Mullen)
• Jazz, 1982 (3rd ed., updated and expanded by Sandford Brown)
• Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters, 1925-1967, 1990 (selected and edited by Charles H. Nichols)
• The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, 1994 (edited by Arnold Rampersad)
• The Return of Simple, 1994 (edited by Akiba Sullivan Harper, introduction by Arnold Rampersad)
• Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942-62, 1995 (edited by Christopher C. De Santis)
• Short stories, 1996 (edited by Akiba Sullivan Harper, with an introduction by Arnold Rampersad)
• The Pasteboard Bandit, 1997 (illustrated by Peggy Turley)
• Carol of the Brown King: Nativity Poems, 1998 (illustrated by Ashley Bryan)
• Sunrise Is Coming after While, 1998 (poems selected by Maya Angelou, silkscreens by Phoebe Beasley)
• Poems, 1999 (selected and edited by David Roessel)
• The Political Plays of Langston Hughes, 2000 (with introductions and analyses by Susan Duffy)
• Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964, 2001 (edited by Emily Bernard)
• Collected Works of Langston Hughes, 2001-2004 (v. 1-6, 8-16, edited with an introduction by Arnold Rampersad)
• Let America be America again and Other Poems, 2004 (preface by John Kerry)
• My People, 2009 (photographs by Charles R. Smith Jr.)
• Langston Hughes and the South African Drum Generation: The Correspondence, 2010 (edited by Shane Graham and John Walters, introduction by Shane Graham)
• I, too, Am America, 2012 (illustrated by Bryan Collier)
• Selected Letters of Langston Hughes Hardcover, 2015 (edited by Arnold Rampersad, David Roessel, Christa Fratantoro)
  
• Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond, 2016 (edited by Evelyn Louise Crawford and MaryLouise Patterson; with a foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley)

BOOKS AND WRITERS

Books and writers / Anna Akhmatova

 

Anna Akhmatova

 

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)  Pseudonym of Anna Andreyevna Gorenko

One of the greatest Ukrainian poets of the 20th-century, who became a legend in her own time as a poet and symbol of artistic integrity. Anna Akhmatova's work is characterized by precision, clarity, and economy. She wrote with apparent simplicity and naturalness and her rhyming was classical compared to such radical contemporary writers as Marina Tsvetaeva and Vladimir Mayakovsky. No foreign sky protected me, no stranger's wing shielded my face. I stand as witness to the common lot, survivor of that time, that place. (in Requiem) Anna Akhmatova was born Anna Gorenko in Bolshoy Fontan, near Odessa, Ukraine, the daughter of a naval engineer. She began writing poetry at the age of 11, and adopted a pseudonym to allay her father's fears that as a"decadent poetress" she would dishonour the family. The pseudonym was the Tatar name of Akhmatova's great-grandmother. When she was sixteen, her father abandoned his family. Akhmatova attended a girls' gymnasium in Tsarskoe Selo and the famous Smolnyi Institute in St. Petersburg. She continued her studies in Kiev in Fundukleevskaia gymnasium (1906) and in a law school (1907) before moving to St. Petersburg to study literature. Among her teachers were the poet, dramatist and essayist Innokenty Annensky (1856-1909), who influenced her deeply. Anna Akhmatova At the age of 21 Akhmatova became a member of the Acmeist group of poets, whose leader, the poet and literature critic Nikolai Gumilyov she married in April 1910, in a church near Kiev. Nikolai was also friend of Annensky, and from Tsarskoe Selo. Nikolai, three years her senior, had fallen in love with Akhmatova when she was just fourteen. Akhmatova become "Gumi-lvitsa" (Gumi-lioness) and her husband was "Gumi-lev" (Gumi-lion).

Books and writers / Osip Mandelstam

Osip Mandelstam

 Osip (Emilevich) Mandelstam 

(1891-1938)

also: Osip Mandel'shtam

Russian poet and essayist, who is regarded alongside Boris Pastenak, Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova as one of the greatest voices of the 20th-century Russian poetry. Most of Mandelstam's works were unknown outside his own country and went unpublished during the Stalin era (1929-53). Along with Anna Akhmatova, Mandelstam was one of the foremost members of Acmeist school of poetry. His early works were impersonal but later he also analyzed his own experiences, history, and the current events.

"Perhaps my whisper was already born before my lips."

Osip Mandelstam was born in Warsaw, but he grew up in St.Petersburg, the city which he celebrated in many of his poems. Mandelstam's parents were Jewish, but not very religious. Mandelstam himself was baptized a Lutheran in Finland. Emil Veniaminovich Mandelstam, his father, was a successful leather-goods dealer, who had broken with religious beliefs in his youth.  "My father had absolutely no language; his speech was tongue-tie and languagelessness," he recalled. "The Russian speech of a Polish Jew? No. The speech of a German Jew? No again." (The Noise of Time and Other Prose Pieces, 1988, p. 85) Mandelstam's mother, Flora Osipovna Verblovskaya, came from Vilno; she was a piano teacher. "The speech of my mother was clear and sonorous without the least foreign accent." (Osip Mandelstam by Clarence Brown, 1978, p. 13)

At home Mandelstam was first taught by tutors; French and and Swiss governesses succeeded one another in the nursery. He then attended the prestigious Tenishev School (1900-07),  which was educationally very advanced, and traveled then to Paris (1907-08) and Germany (1908-10), where he studied Old French literature and the philosophy of Kant at the University of Heidelberg (1909-10). In 1911-17 he studied philosophy at St. Petersburg University but did not graduate. From 1911, Mandelstam was member of 'Poets Guild' and had close personal ties with Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev. His first poems appeared in 1910 in the journal Apollon.

As a poet Mandelstam gained fame with the collection Kamen (1913, Stone). The subject matters ranged from music to such triumphs of culture as the Roman classical architecture and the Byzantine cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. It was followed by Tristia (1922), which confirmed his position as a major poet, and Stikhotvorenia  1921-25, (1928). In Tristia Mandelstam made connections with the classical world and contemporary Russia as in Kamen. A new themes was the notion of exile. The mood is sad, the poet is saying his farewells: "I have studied science of saying good-bye / in bareheaded laments at night".

Mandelstam welcomed February 1917 Revolution but he was hostile at first to October 1917 Revolution. When Yakov Blyumkin, a revolutionary terrorist, boasted in a café of having a pile of presigned deat warrants, Mandelstam tore them to shreds. In 1918 he worked briefly for Anatoly Lunacharskii's Education Ministry in Moscow. With his frequent visits to the south Mandelstam managed to avoid much of the troubles that complicated everyday life during the Civil War. After Revolution his views about contemporary poetry became harsh. The poetry of young people was for him a ceaseless cry of an infant, Mayakovsky was childish and Marina Tsvetaeva tasteless. He only accepted Pasternak and also admired Akhmatova. Critics classified Mandelstam and Akhmatova as "guardians of tradition" – first with a positive attitude, then their association with the "old world" was turned against them. 

In 1922 Mandelstam married Nadezhda Iokovlevna Khazin, who accompanied him throughout his years of exile and imprisonment. In the 1920s Mandelstam supported himself by writing children's books and translating works by Upton Sinclair, Jules Romains, Charles de Coster and others. He did not compose poems from 1925 to 1930 but turned to prose.

With the help of the influetial Soviet politician Nikolai Bukharin, Mandelstam made in 1930 a trip to Armenia. He had published some poems for children in 1926, he  then lapsed into silence as a poet. This journey ended his dry period. Mandelstam saw his role as an outsider and drew parallels with his fate and that of Pushkin. The importance of preserving the cultural tradition became for the poet a central concern. The Soviet cultural authorities were rightly suspicious of his loyalty to the Bolshevik rule. "What a great thing is a police station!" Mandelstam often said, repeating lines by nthe poet Velim  Khlebnikov. "The place where I have my rendezvous with the State." (Face to the Village: The Riazan Countryside Under Soviet Rule, 1921-1930 by Tracy McDonald, 2011, p. 51) To escape his influential enemies Mandelstam traveled as a journalist in the distant provinces. Mandelstam's Journey to Armenia was his last major work published during his life time. Heavily censored, it appeared in a journal in 1933.

"Whenever he's got a victim, he glows like a broadchested

Georgian munching a raspberry."

(composed in November 1933; translated by Burton Raffel and Alla Burago)

For the first time Mandelstam was seized by security police in 1934 for epigram he had made on Joseph Stalin, the "Kremlin mountaineer, the murderer and peasant-slayer" as he called him in his mixture of praise and satire. "And every killing is a treat / For the broad-chested Ossete." What were Mandelstam's intentions and the state of his mind at the time he composed the poem have been under debate. It was not written down but recited  in gatherings of his friends. Possibly Mandelstam thought that his days were numbered or believed that the dangerous lines, which would lead to his death, would be the spark that would ignite a radical political change. Nadezhda Mandelstam even submitted the piece to the Writers' Union to be considered for publication. A truncated version of the 'Stalin Ode' was published in 1974 in an American journal, a full version appeared in 1976.

Mandelstam was arrested on a warrant signed by Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda, the head of the Soviet Secret Police, known as the Cheka. (Yagoda himself was shot in 1938.) At prison Mandelstam was tortured tortured physically and mentally. Stalin took a personal interst in Mandelstam, with whom he played cat and mouse. He also had a telephone conversation with Boris Pasternak, asking whether he had been present when the lampoon about himself, Stalin, was recited by Mandelstam. Pasternak answered that it seemed to him of no importance. "Mandelstam's case in being reviewed. Everything will be all right," Stalin promised. (Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore, 2004, p. 133) When Pasternak wanted to speak with the dictator about very important matters, "about life and death," the phone was hung up.

After being signed out from Lubyanka, Mandelstam asked Nadezhda, is the future behind them or ahead of them. Half insane from the prison experience, he was exiled with his wife to Cherdyn, the oldest city of Ural. After suicide attempt, his sentence was commuted to exile in Voronezh, ending in 1937. There he wrote an ode to Stalin. It did not save him from re-arrest. In his notebooks from Voronezh (1935-37) Mandelstam said, "He thinks in bone and feels with his brow / And tries to recall his human form" - eventually the poet identifies himself with his tormentor.

During this period Mandelstam gave to Natasha Shtempel, his brave friend in the hard conditions, a poem in which women carried the role of mourning and preserving: "To accompany the resurrected and to be the first / To welcome the dead is their vocation. / And to demand caresses from them is criminal." Mandelstam was arrested for "counter-revolutionary" activities in May 1938 and sentenced to five years in a labour camp. Interrogated by Nikolay Shivarov, he confessed that he had authored a counter-revolutionary a poem which begins with the lines: "We live without sensing the country beneath us, / At ten paces, our speech has no sound / And when there's the will to half-open our mouths / The Kremlin crag-dweller bars the way." In the transit camp, Mandelstam was already so weak that he couldn't stand. He died of starvation and madness in the Gulag Archipelago in Vtoraia rechka, near Vladivostok, on December 27, 1938. His body was taken to a common grave.

Mandelstam's widow kept her husband's legacy alive against all odds. Nearly homeless, she had virtually as much material possessions as a convict; the most expensive item in her one-room apartment on the outskirst of Moscow was a cuckoo clock. During the war years Anna Akhmatova helped her to escape to Tashkent, where she taught Englist at the Central Asian State University.

International fame Osip Mandelstam started to acclaim in the 1970s, when his works began to appear in the West and in the Soviet Union. Nadezhda Mandelstam memoirs,  Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned  (1974), depicted their life and Stalin era. They first circulated underground, excerpts appeared in official journals, and eventually  they were published abroad. Mandelstam's Voronez poems, which came out in 1990, are the closest approximation what the poet planned to write if he had survived.

Mandelstam's essays dealt with a wide range of topics. 'Conversations about Dante' has been considered a masterpiece of modern criticism with its fanciful use of analogies. 'I compare, therefore I am,' so Dante might have put it. He was the Descartes of metaphor. Because matter is revealed to our consciousness (and how could we experience someone else's?) through metaphor alone, because there is no existence outside comparison, because existence itself is comparion." Mandelstam says that Pushkin's "splendid white teeth are the masculine pearls of Russian poetry", he sees the Divine Comedy as a "journey with conversations", and draws attention to Dante's use of colors. Writing is constantly compared to making music. "

 

For further reading: Vospominaniia by Nadezhda Mandel'shtam (1970, translated by Max Hayward as Hope Against Hope, 1970); Osip Mandelstam by Clarence Brown (1973); Osip Emilievich Mandelstam by Arthur A. Cohen (1974); A Concordance to the Poems of Osip Mandelstam by Demetrius J. Koubourlis (1974); Osim Mandelstam and His Age by Steven Broyde (1975); Mandelstam: The Later Poetry by Jennifer Baines (1976); Osip Mandelstam by Nikita Struve (1982); 'Osip and Nadeza Mandelstam'  in The Government of the Tongue by Seamus Heaney (1988); Osip Mandelstam by Jane Gary Harris (1988); Zhizn i tvorchestvo O.E. Mandel'shtama, ed.  O.G. Lasunskii et al. (1990); Slovo i sud'ba: Osip Mandel'shtam, ed. Z.S. Papernyui et al. (1991); Mandel'shtam i antichnost', ed. O. Lekmanov (1995); The Achemist Movement in Russian Poetry by Justin Doherty (1995); Mandelstam the Reader by Nancy Pollak (1995); The KGB's Literary Archive by Vitaly Shentalinsky (1995); Surviving the Censor: the Unspoken Words of Osip Mandelstam by Rafi Aaron (2006); The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell (2010); A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation by Gregory Freidin (2010); Mandelstam, Blok, and the Boundaries of Mythopoetic Symbolism by Stuart Goldberg (2011); Under the Sign of Contradiction: Mandelstam and the Politics of Memory by Anna Razumnaya (2019); Mandelstam's Worlds: Poetry, Politics, and Identity in a Revolutionary Age by Andrew Kahn (2020) - Acmeist school: Small group of Russian poets reacting against Symbolism, associated with the review Apollon (1909-17). Members: Sergey Gorodetsky, Nikolay S. Gumilyov (executed in 1921), Osip Mandelstam (died in a labour camp 1938), Anna Akhmatova, silenced during the most productive years of her life.  Suom.: Mandelstamin runoja on julkaistu myös teoksessa Neuvostolyriikkaa 3,Kivitauluoodi (1997). Nadezda Mandelstamin muistelmat Ihmisen toivo ilmestyi 1970. toim. Natalia Baschmakoff, Pekka Pesonen, Raija Rymin (1978) sekä Marja-Leena Mikkolan suomentamassa valikoimassa

 

Selected works:

• Kamen, 1913
  - Stone (translated by Robert Tracy, 1981; partial translation in The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin, 2004)
• Tristia, 1922
  - Tristia (translated by Bruce McClelland, 1987; partial translation in The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin, 2004)
• Sum vremeni, 1925
  - The Noise of Time (translated by Clarence Brown, in The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, 1965)
  - Ajan kohina (suom. Aarno Peromies, 1972)
• Stikhotvoreniia 1921-25
• O poezii, 1928
• Stikhotvoreniia, 1928
• Egipetskaia marka, 1928
  - The Egyptian Stamp (translated by Clarence Brown, in The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, 1965)
• Chetvertaia proza, 1930
  - Fourth Prose (translated by Clarence Brown, in The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, 1965)
• Moskovskie Tetradi, 1930-34
  - The Moscow Notebooks (translated by Richard and Elizabeth McKane, 1991)
• Puteshestvie v Armeniiu, 1933
  - Journey to Armenia (translated by Clarence Brown, 1973)
• Razgovor O Dante, 1933
  - Conversation about Dante (translated by Jane Gary Harris, in The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, 1979)
  -  Keskustelu Dantesta (suom. Jukka Mallinen, 2011)
• Sobranie sochinenii, 1955 (ed.  Gleb Struve)
• Sobranie sochinenii, 1964-71 (3 vols., edited by Gleb Struve and Boris Filippov)
• The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, 1965 (translated by Clarence Brown, rev. The Noise of Time of Osip Mandelstam, 1967)
• Sobranie sochinenii, 1967-81 (edited by Gleb Struve and Boris Filippov)
• Razgovor O Dante, 1967
• The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, 1973 (translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin)
• Complete Poetry, 1973 (translated by Burton Raffel and Alla Burago)
• Selected Poems, 1973 (translated by David McDuff)
• Stikhotvoreniia, 1974 (edited by A.L. Dymshitz and N.U. Khardzhiev)
• 'Chapter 42 by Nadezhda Mandel'shtam and 'The Goldfinch' and Other Poems by Osip Mandel'shtam, 1973 (translated by Donald Rayfield)
• Octets, 1976 (translated by John Riley)
• 50 Poems, 1977 (translated by Bernard Meares, introductory essay by Joseph Brodsky)
• Poems, 1977 (translated by James Greene, rev. ed. 1980)
• Journey to Armenia, 1977
• Selected Essays, 1977 (translated by Sidney Monas)
• The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, 1979 (translated by Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link)
• Voronezhskie tetradi, 1980 (edited by V. Shveitser)
  - The Voronezh Notebooks (edited by Richard and Elizabet McKane, 1996) / The Voronezh Notebooks (translated and with an introduction by Andrew Davis, 2015)
• Proza, 1983
• Slovo i kul'tura, 1987 (edited by Pavla Nerlera)
• Poems from Mandelstam, 1990 (translated by R.H. Morrison)
• Sochineniia, 1990 (2 vols., edited by P. Nerler)
• Sokhrani moi u rech, 1991 (edited by B.S. Miagkova)
• Chetvertaia proza, 1991
• A Necklage of Bees, 1992 (translated by Maria Enzensberger)
• Sobranie proizvedenii, 1992 (edited byS.V. Vasilenko)
• Sobranie sochinenii, 1993-94 (4 vols.)
• Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, 1995 (edited by A.G. Metsa)
• Ob iskusstve, 1995 (edited by B.V. Sokolov, B.S. Miagkov)
• Stikhotvoreniia, 1998 (edited by L. Bykova)
• Shum vremeni, 2002
• The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, 2004 (translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin)
• Modernist Archaist: Selected Poems, 208 (with new and selected translations by Charles Bernstein ... [et al.]; edited and with introductory essay by Kevin M.F. Platt)
  
• Journey to Armenia & Conversation about Dante, 2011 ('Mandelstam and the Journey' by Henry Gifford; 'Journey to Armenia' translated by Sidney Mona; 'Conversation about Dante' translated by Clarece Brown and Robert Hughes) .
  
• Stolen Air: the Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, 2012 (selected and translated by Christian Wiman; introduction by Ilya Kaminsky)
  
• Poems of Osip Mandelstam, 2014 (selected and translated from the Russian by Peter France)
  
• The Voronezh Notebooks, 2015 (translated and with an introduction by Andrew Davis)
  
• Concert at a Railway Station : a Selection of Poems, 2018 (translated from Russian by Alistair Noon)
  
• Poems, 2020 (2nd edition, corrected and updated; translated by Ilya Bernstein)

BOOKS AND WRITERS