The Voronezh Notebooks: Poems 1935-1937 - Softcover

Mandelstam, Osip

4.05

149 ratings by Goodreads

9781852242053: The Voronezh Notebooks: Poems 1935-1937

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852242051 ISBN 13: 9781852242053

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 1996

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Osip Mandelstam was one of the great poets of the twentieth century, with a prophetic understanding of its suffering, which he transformed into luminous poetry. Childish and wise, joyous and angry, at once complex and simple, he was sustained for 20 years by his wife and memoirist Nadezhda Mandelstam, who became, with Anna Akhmatova, the saviour of his poetry. In May 1934, after years of persecution, Mandelstam was arrested for writing an unflattering poem about Stalin, and subjected to gruelling interrogations and torture. He attempted suicide twice, slashing his wrists in prison, and jumping from a hospital window in Cherdyn. Exiled to Voronezh, he seemed crushed. A friend described him then as `in a state of numbness. His eyes were glassy. His eyelids were inflamed, and this condition never went away. His eyelashes had fallen out. His arm was in a sling.' But it was to be four more years before Mandelstam was completely beaten. In Voronezh he broke a silence of 18 months after a concert by the young violinist Galina Baranova. Her music released him into the most fertile phase of his writing, his last two years in exile, when he wrote the ninety poems of the three Voronezh Notebooks. Nadezhda's memoir Hope Against Hope includes a moving account of their time in Voronezh, and Anna Akhmatova's poem `Voronezh' describes her visit there in 1936, when `in the room of the exiled poet / fear and the Muse stand duty in turn / and the night is endless / and knows no dawn.' This edition is now out of print but the whole book is reprinted as part of The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks.

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Review:

Nearly comatose after the horrors of repeated interrogations by Stalin's regime, Mandelstam (1891-1938) literally wrote himself back into a semblance of life while exiled 300 miles from Moscow in Voronezh....Mandelstam presents visions of the future, his own and his country's, that are steeped in necessarily coded foreboding. It is a great gift to be able to read these ninety poems together and complete in English for the first time, with explanatory notes provided for each. They form a wrenching diary of 'iron tenderness' and doomed, penetrative brilliance. * Publishers Weekly *

About the Author:

Osip Mandelstam was one of the great Russian poets of the 20th century, with a prophetic understanding of its suffering, which he transformed into luminous poetry. Born in 1891, he grew up in St Petersburg. With Akhmatova and Gumilyov he formed the Acmeist movement. Childish and wise, joyous and angry, at once complex and simple, he was sustained for 20 years by his wife and memoirist Nadezhda Mandelstam, who became, with Anna Akhmatova, the saviour of his poetry. His last poems, preserved in his notebooks, were translated by Richard and Elizabeth McKane as The Moscow & Voronezh Notebooks (Bloodaxe Books, 2003). In 1934, Mandlestam was arrested for writing an unflattering poem about Stalin, and subjected to gruelling interrogations and torture before being exiled to Voronezh. Nadezhda's Mandlestam's memoir Hope Against Hope includes a moving account of their time in Voronezh, and Anna Akhmatova's poem `Voronezh' describes her visit there. In 1938 he was re-arrested and sentenced to five years' hard labour for 'counter-revolutionary activities', and died that winter, of 'heart failure', in a freezing transit camp in Siberia.

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