Mandelstam. Osip Emilievich Mandelstam was one of the great Russian poets of the early 20th Century. He stands alongside Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, and Marina Tsetayava, as part of that group of poets whose work responded to the Stalinist terror. There’s a famous story told about Mandelstam that reflects just how highly regarded poetry was in Russia during this time. Mandelstam had written a poem, ‘The Kremlin Mountaineer’, in which he calls Stalin a ‘Peasant Slayer’. He read this aloud at a literary gathering, popular in those days amongst the intelligentsia. Someone reported back to Stalin, and Mandelstam predictably was arrested. He was held in the infamous Lubiyanka, headquarters of the secret police, where he was intensively interrogated. It is said that Mandelstam was actually brought before Stalin himself to answer questions. In addition, while he was still in prison, Stalin phoned Pasternak to ask: is he, Mandelstam, a good poet? Stalin’s respect for poetry was such that Mandelstam was not killed, but released into internal exile, an ‘inner emigre’. He settled in Voronezh, a village outside Moscow, and there composed what have come to be known as the poems from the Voronezh Notebook. From this point onwards he experienced symptoms of mental illness. He lived in a state of nervous anxiety punctuated by bouts of paranoia, with at least one well attested suicide attempt. He must have known that the respect Stalin held towards poetry and poets would only preserve him for so long, that, sooner or later, his henchmen would return to finish the job. The most sensible thing would be to shut up, but Mandelstam suffered from what he called in one poem ‘nightingale fever’: an inability to stop singing. Furthermore, his poems of this time show a strong faith in the everyday and domestic, an awareness of the beauty of being at home in the world that is not diminished by the threat of mortality. He believed that poetry had a truth-telling function, and he accepted the fate that such an obligation entailed in times like his. The poem below reflects this. Written after the revolution had already turned sour, and after the first flush of his own literary fame, and youth, has passed, he predicts the inevitable, but eschews lamentation and tears. Poem 129 (as numbered in the Collected Works)