Nearly comatose after the horrors of repeated interrogations by Stalin's regime, Mandelstam (1891-1938) literally wrote himself back into a semblance of life while exiled 300 miles from Moscow in Voronezh....Mandelstam presents visions of the future, his own and his country's, that are steeped in necessarily coded foreboding. It is a great gift to be able to read these ninety poems together and complete in English for the first time, with explanatory notes provided for each. They form a wrenching diary of `iron tenderness' and doomed, penetrative brilliance"" - Publishers Weekly. Childish and wise, joyous and angry, at once complex and simple, he was sustained for twenty years by his wife and memoirist Nadezhda Mandelstam, who became, with Anna Akhmatova, the savior of his poetry. After his exile to Voronezh and his sentencing to hard labor for counter-revolutionary activities, he died of `heart failure' in the winter of 1938 in Siberia.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Nearly comatose after the horrors of repeated interrogations by Stalin's regime, Mandelstam (1891-1938) literally wrote himself back into a semblance of life while exiled 300 miles from Moscow in Voronezh: "There are still plenty of martlets and swallows./ The comet has not yet given us the plague,/ and the sensible purple inks/ write with tails that carry stars." While associated with the compressed, lyrical images of Anna Akhmatova and the Acmeist movement of the Russian modernist avant-garde, Mandelstam presents visions of the future, his own and his country's, that are steeped in necessarily coded foreboding: "death will fall asleep like an owl in daytime./ The glass of Moscow burns between cut-glass ribs." Any relief that the past might provide is empty and unavailable: "Wave after wave runs on, breaking the wave's back,/ throwing itself at the moon with a prisoner's longing." Although some of the layers of word-meaning and soundplay that so influenced Paul Celan, another Jewish-born exile who struggled to forge a present out of poetry, are inevitably lost in translation, it is a great gift to be able to read these 90 poems together and complete in English for the first time, with explanatory notes provided for each. They form a wrenching diary of "iron tenderness" and doomed, penetrative brilliance.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Voronezh was where the Russian poet Mandelstam lived in exile after he was arrested and tortured by Stalin's henchmen for the crime of writing poetry. An erudite man unwilling to conform to the Soviet agenda, Mandelstam wrote poetry notable for its clarity of language and grace of form, but these poems, his last, are as full of anguish as they are of beauty. Surging with images of nature's unceasing beauty, they can barely contain the torrent of his love of life, despair in the face of evil, and insistence on freedom of expression. Mandelstam composed these poems out loud while walking the streets of Voronezh in the grip of strong emotions, later dictating them to his wife, Nadezhda, who, with the help of Anna Akhmatova, preserved them after his death in 1938 in a concentration camp. Now Mandelstam's words of defiance haunt us: "I would harness ten bulls to my voice / and pass my hand through the darkness like a plough." Donna Seaman
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must for all lovers of poetry,
This review is from: The Voronezh Notebooks: Poems 1935-1937 (Paperback)
The discovery of Mandelstam is one of that strange gifts that Life give us every since in a while and this is probably his very best book. He wrote these poems under a terrible personal experience being a prisoner of Stalin's camps and being sure he'd die very soon. These poems, and this poet, are not an easy ones but once you have entered into you feel that they are so rich that you can't almost bear it. For those who don't have read any of his poetry i'd recommend to start reading the book"Hope against hope" that his wife wrote about those years of sorrow. OM has been essential in the poetry of the second half of this century and you can follow his traces in poets of the importance of Paul Celan and Edmond Jabès.
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