Osip Mandelstam
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (1891 – 1938) is an outstanding Russian poet and
essayist who lived in Russia during the 1917 Revolution and the rise of the USSR.
Mandelstam was born in Warsaw (before the Second World War it was part of
Russia) into a Jewish family. As typical of the Russian intelligentsia of that time,
he went abroad to study and attended Sorbonne and the University of
Heidelberg. In order to attend the University of St. Petersburg, Mandelstam had to
convert to Methodism since Jews were not allowed to study there. Mandelstam
published his first collection of poems in 1913.
When Stalin came to power, Mandelstam opposed the increasingly totalitarian government. In 1933, he composed the poem Stalin Epigram which he read at some private gatherings. Soon after that, he was arrested and sent into exile together with his wife Nadezda. After Mandelstam attempted suicide, his sentence was lessened to banishment from the big cities; however, in 1938, the second arrest followed. Osip Mandelstam perished in one of the Gulag camps; neither the cause nor date of his death is known.
Mandelstam's own prophecy was fulfilled: "Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?"
Poems
Marina Tsvetaeva
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (1892 - 1941) is one of the greatest Russian poets.
Her father was a professor of Fine Art at the Moscow University and the founder of
the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. Marina Tsvetaeva received an excellent
education, knew several European languages, and studied literary history at the
Sorbonne. She self-published her first collection of poems when she was only 18.
Marina Tsvetaeva lived through the Russian Revolution of 1917 and, like many
Russians belonging to intelligentsia, had to suffer its tragic consequences. Having lost her younger daughter to famine, Tsvetaeva, together with her husband Sergei Efron and their other daughter, Ariadna, left Russia in 1922. The family lived in Berlin, Prague, and finally, in Paris. They lived in utmost poverty; writing poetry did not bring any income. In 1937, Tsvetaeva's husband Efron, who had sympathized with the Soviet Union, decided to return to Moscow, which was a tragic mistake; it was the time of Stalin’s terror. Efron and Ariadna were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; and then Sergei Efron was executed. Tsvetaeva’s poetry was not published; she had no job and could barely survive on meagre money from translations. Marina Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941. Much of her poetry was published in the Soviet Union after 1961; it was only then that her poetry became known to many readers.
Anna Akhmatova
Anna Akhmatova (1889 – 1966) was a pen name of Anna Andreyevna Gorenko.
She is one of the most acclaimed poets of the Silver Age and definitely the most
well-known Russian female poet. Akhmatova was born near Odessa, but soon
after her birth, the family moved to the suburb of St. Petersburg. Both her
parents descended from the Russian nobility. She studied literature in Kiev and
St. Petersburg Universities. Akhmatova’s first book of verse Evening (Vecher) was
published in 1912, and her second collection, The Rosary (Chetki) appeared in 1914.
In 1910, Akhmatova married the young poet Nikolai Gumilev. Together, they went to Paris where Akhmatova befriended the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani, who created at least 20 paintings of her.
Like many of Russian intelligentsia, Anna Akhmatova had an option to leave Russia after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution; however, she chose to stay. In 1921, Akhmatova's husband Nikolai Gumilev was prosecuted as a participant in anti-Bolshevik conspiracy and shot. Soon after, Akhmatova's work was unofficially banned by the new regime, but she kept writing poetry. Like many prominent Russian poets of that time, whose work was banned from publishing, Akhmatova resorted to translation. She made acclaimed translations of works by V. Hugo, R. Tagore, and also was engaged in literary research on A. Pushkin and F. Dostoyevsky.
During the terror of the 1930-ies Akhmatova’s son Lev Gumilev (who later became a famous historian) was arrested and imprisoned several times. Her second husband, Nikolai Punin also perished in Gulag. It is no wonder that Anna Akhmatova’s most famous poem is Requiem (1935–40), her masterpiece about the terror under Stalin rule. Although officially banned, Akhmatova's work continued to circulate in secret.
Akhmatova’s work became recognised after Stalin's death; her poems began to re-appear in 1956. In the last decade of her life Anna Akhmatova was widely honoured in the USSR and the West.
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899-1977) was a Russian novelist. He was born
in 1899 in St. Petersburg into a wealthy family of Russian nobility.The five children
were raised by English and French governesses and were trilingual since an early age.
In fact, Nabokov could read and write in English before he mastered these skills in
Russian.
After the 1917 Revolution, the family left for the Crimea, in the hopes that the
Bolsheviks' rule would not last long. Nabokov's father was a minister of justice of the Crimean provisional government. However, after the defeat of the White Army in early 1919, the Nabokovs fled to England. Nabokov entered Cambridge University; first he studied zoology; later, his career as an entomologist proved to be no less distinguished than his career in writing. Then he turned to Slavic and Romance languages.
In 1920, Nabokov's father started an émigré newspaper in Berlin, and the family moved there. In Berlin, Nabokov became an acclaimed poet and writer within the émigré community and published under the pseudonym V. Sirin. One of his best-known novels The Luzhin Defense was written in Berlin. Nabokov's first works were in Russian; later, he translated many of his own early writing into English.
In 1940, Nabokov with his wife and son left for the United States. The family settled in New York, where Nabokov began volunteer work as an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History.
In 1941, Nabokov started working at Wellesley College as a lecturer in comparative literature and became the founder of Wellesley's Russian Department. From 1948 till 1959 Nabokov taught Russian and European literature at Cornell University. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a future U.S. Supreme Court Justice, happened to be a student of Nabokov at Cornell; she noted a major influence of Nabokov's teaching style on her development as a writer. Nabokov's novel Pnin, about a Russian expatriate teaching in an American college, is to a large extent autobiographical.
Nabokov's novel Lolita (1955), often considered his finest work in English, made him famous in the USA. The novel was ranked fourth in the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels. Due to its great financial success, Nabokov was able to return to Europe and devote himself to writing. Nabokov lived in Switzerland till the end of his life in 1977.
Sasha Chorny
Sasha Chorny (1880-1932) was the pen name of Alexander Mikhailovich Glickberg, a
poet, a satirist and a children's writer.
He was born into a Jewish family of pharmacists in Odessa, in 1880. Since Jewish
children could not enter a gymnasium due to the quota restriction for enrollment of
Jews in Imperial Russia, the Glikbergs baptized their children. However, Alexander
never had any success with formal gymnasium education. He ran away from home at
the age of 15, and for some time lived with his aunt in St. Petersburg. Alexander attended the gymnasium there, but was soon expelled for failing an exam. One of his stories was published in a popular newspaper and impressed K. Rochet, a French-Russian who adopted the boy. He lived in Zhitomir, and Alexander moved there. For a while, he attended Zhitomir gymnasium, from which he was also eventually expelled after a conflict with the principal. After serving two years in the Army, Alexander returned to his adoptive family in Zhitomir and worked as a journalist for the local magazine. Then he continued his journalistic career in St. Petersburg.
In 1905, he published a collection of verse titled Nonsense using the pen name Sasha Chorny. The effect of his satirical verse on the readers was so huge that the verses were often rewritten by hand. Chorny soon became a popular author.
Between 1906 and 1907, Sasha Chorny lived in Germany and studied at the University of Heidelberg. In 1908, he returned to St. Petersburg and wrote for the popular magazine Satirikon. He published poetry and a few children's books.
During World War I, Sasha Chorny served at a field hospital. After the October Revolution, he emigrated to Vilnius, then to Germany, and eventually to France, where he worked for the Parisian Russian newspaper. In 1923, he published his third book of verses Thirst. He was a founder of a Russian colony in the village La Favière in Provence.
Sasha Chorny died in 1932, in the South of France, He had a heart attack while helping to put out a fire. Vladimir Nabokov, in his eulogy, said, "He left only a few books and a quiet, beautiful shadow."
Poems
Alexander Blok
Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (1880 – 1921) is a well-known Russian lyrical poet.
Blok was born in Saint Petersburg into an intellectual family. His father was a law
professor in Warsaw and one of his grandfathers the rector of St. Petersburg
University.
In 1903, Blok married Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, daughter of the outstanding
chemist Dmitri Mendeleev. Blok’s most famous cycle of poetry, Verses about
the Beautiful Lady, was dedicated to his wife. The mystical images of Blok’s poems
established him as a major poet of Russian Symbolism. During the 1910s, known as
the Silver Age of Russian Poetry, Blok was greatly admired by literary critics and
younger poets, such as Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Nabokov, and Boris Pasternak.
Quite unexpectedly for many Russian of his contemporaries, Blok accepted the 1917 October Revolution, hoping for some major transformation of the society. However, he soon became disillusioned with it and stopped writing poetry. In 1921, Blok became seriously ill, and his doctors recommended the medical treatment abroad. However, the Soviet government did not allow him to leave. Maxim Gorky, the renowned pro-Soviet writer, had to plead the authorities to give Blok a visa. Alexander Blok’s family received the permission shortly after the poet’s death.
Dmitry Usov
Dmitry Usov (1896-1944) was a Moscow philologist, translator, and poet. He graduated from Moscow State University where he studied history andphilology. His first publications were translated of prose and poetry from German and French. In 1927-29, Usov taught the translation theory and technique at the Institute of Literature. He was also a member of the team working on the compiling of Complete German Disctionary. Usov published his translations and articles in the German newspaper «Moskauer Deutsche Zeitung», published in Moscow.
In 1935, at the beginning of Stalin’s terror campaign, Usov was arrested as a member of “fashist
counter-revolutionary organization on the USSR territory” and spent 5 years in Gulag. After he was released,
he moved to Tashkent.
Dmitry Usov died in 1941 and was posthumously rehabilitated. Almost nothing of his archive has been saved.
Poems