Word: mandelstams
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...TIME'S story on Russian Poet Osip Mandelstam [Jan. 7], you quote Mandelstam's line about Stalin's "putting a raspberry in his mouth" after each death, and then later, in describing the poet's arrest, you say that Stalin "who was known to like raspberries, put a ripe one in his mouth." Mandelstam's reference to raspberries was in a very special, nonliteral, slang sense. As for Stalin's actual craving for the fruit, who knows? I certainly am unaware of much evidence. Moreover, it is not true that Mandelstam was exiled...
...gloomy afternoon in 1934, a Russian poet named Osip Mandelstam made the worst mistake of his life. He dropped in on Boris Pasternak at his Moscow apartment. Pasternak he knew he could trust, but there were four other Russian writers in the room. But Mandelstam was too wrought up to be wary. He passionately recited an "epigram" he had written about Stalin...
...days later, the Georgian tribesman in the Kremlin, who was known to like raspberries, put a ripe one in his mouth. Betrayed by one of the writers in Pasternak's parlor, Mandelstam was arrested on Stalin's personal order and banished to Siberia. His poetry was suppressed and is still almost entirely unknown in the Soviet Union, while in the West his reputation has been obscured by trite translations...
...three decades after his death, the world is beginning to realize that the man Stalin destroyed was an extraordinary writer and possibly even a great one. In The Prose of Osip Mandelstam (Princeton University; $5). Slavonist Clarence Brown recently provided accurate and arresting translations of the poet's principal stories, and in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Poet Robert Lowell has published renditions of nine poems that sometimes in raw power and sometimes in fine artistry support comparison with the best poetry of the century...
Hard Choice. Mandelstam could have had an easy life if he had wanted one. Born in 1891, he was the only son of a wealthy Jewish merchant. His father treated him to a grand tour of Western Europe before sending him to the University of St. Petersburg and offered young Osip a safe future in the leather business. But Osip opted for the dangerous life of letters, and his father cut him off without a ruble. Nothing daunted, Osip moved in with the Acmeists, a stubborn little literary sect centered in St. Petersburg and set up in opposition...