The Stalin Epigram Research

Nadezhda Mandelstam

January 15, 1881 – December 27, 1938

 

In 1934, Mandelstam was arrested due to an epigram he wrote on Joseph Stalin. When he arrived to prison, he was tourtored and was of a very unique interest to Stalin. Mandelstam was supposed to have been shot to death, but something else happened that was in his favor. Mandelstam was sent to exile instead.

 

In exile at Cherdyn, Ural, with his wife, he wrote  poems about his preparedness to become a victim of an executor.

 

For the rattling glory of ages to come,
For the high tribe of men,
At the feast of the fathers I have forfeited my cup,
And my joy, and my honor as well.

A wolfhound-age leaps up on my back,
But I am not a wolf by blood.
Better stuff me inside the sleeve, like a hat,
Of the coat of Siberian steppes...

 

Let me no more look at the coward, at the mire,
At the bloody bones in the wheel,
Let the blue foxes blaze the whole night through
In their primordial beauty for me.

Lead me into the night, where the Yenisei flows
And the pine tree reaches the star,
Because I am not a wolf by blood
And only an equal will kill me.

 

Later on Mandelstam wrote for Natasha Shtempel, a friend of his, a poem in which he again gave women the role of mourning and preserving. Mandelstam was arrested on the charges of "counter-revolutionary" activities in May 1938 and sentenced to five years in a  camp. He confessed to writing a counter-revolutionary poem. The poem began as such:

 

 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

...

  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 grave. Mandelstam's widow held onto her husband's works and kept them alive against all odds.