Osip Mandelstam - Selected Poetry & Essays (2 books)

OSIP EMILYEVICH MANDELSTAM (1891-1938) was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets. He was arrested by Joseph Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife Nadezhda. Given a reprieve of sorts, they moved to Voronezh in southwestern Russia. In 1938 Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to a camp in Siberia. He died that year at a transit camp.

Mandelstam's own grim prophecy was thus fulfilled: "Only in Russia is poetry respected; it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?"


The following books are in ePUB and MOBI formats:

* SELECTED ESSAYS (University of Texas Press, 1977). Translated by Sidney Monas.

* SELECTED POEMS (Penguin Classics, 1991). Selected and translated by James Greene, with Forewords by Nadezhda Mandelstam and Donald Davie.