Osip Emilevich Mandelstam

Donald Rayfield (Queen Mary, University of London)

Ed. by Andrei Rogatchevski, UiT - The Arctic University of Norway
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 2.2.2.00: Post-1917 Writing and Culture in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, 1917-present.
Vol. editors: Neil Cornwell (University of Bristol), Roman Koropeckyj (University of California, Los Angeles), Andrei Rogatchevski (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway)

Dates

Born 15 Jan 1891
Died 27 Dec 1938
Activity 1911-1938

Places

Born in Poland
Active in Russia

Cultural Identities

Jewish European

Activities

Primary

Poet

Resources

Mandelstam's Works

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Indisputably one of the four greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century, Osip Èmilievich Mandelshtam was born in 1891 in Warsaw, the son of a Jewish glove-maker and pianist. Despite the ban on Jews, he moved to Petersburg in early childhood, was brought up in Russian and (like Vladimir Nabokov) spent 8 years at the very liberal Tenishev school. He had some desultory university education in Heidelberg, Paris and St Petersburg, and made an impression before he was 20 with finely wrought poems in

Apollon

, which in 1912 became the journal of the Acmeists (notably the couple Nikolai Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova), whose poetry emphasized precision, objectivity, craftsmanship and continuity with the past. Like other Acmeist titles (Gumilyov’s

Pearls

, Akhmatova’s

Beads,

Zenkevich’s

The

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Citation: Rayfield, Donald. "Osip Emilevich Mandelstam". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 February 2015 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2907, accessed 26 November 2024.]

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