Search results for ""author osip mandelstam""

CONTENTS Acknowledgments. A Note on the Text. List of Abbreviations. Introduction. Mandelstam: The Poet as Builder. STONE. Notes.Originally published in 1981.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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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. 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. The Moscow Notebooks cover his years of persecution, from 1930 to 1934, when he was arrested for writing an unflattering poem about Stalin, and subjected to gruelling interrogations and torture. The Notebooks include that fatal poem – with its clinching line ‘His cockroach moustache laughs, perching on his top lip’ – and present a shattering portrait of Moscow before the Great Terror. He attempted suicide twice, slashing his wrists in prison, and jumping from a hospital window. 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, writing the 90 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’. With an introduction by Victor Krivulin, this edition combines the two previous separate editions of The Moscow Notebooks and The Voronezh Notebooks published by Bloodaxe.

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Osip Mandelstam visited Armenia in 1930, and during the eight months of his stay he rediscovered his poetic voice and was inspired to write an experimental meditation on the country and its ancient culture. 'Armenia brought him back to his true self, a self depending on the "inner ear" which could never play a poet false. There was everything congenial to him in this country of red and ochre landscape, ancient churches, and resonant pottery.' (Henry Gifford). Conversation about Dante, Mandelstam's incomparable apologia for poetic freedom and challenge to the Bolshevik establishment, was dictated by the poet to his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, in 1934-35, during the last phase of his itinerant life. It has close ties to the Journey.

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