Simple Promesse

Osip Mandelstam was born in Warsaw in January 1891 into a lower-middle-class Jewish family. In 1894 the family moved to the outskirts of St. Petersburg, and then, in 1897, to the city itself, where Mandelstam attended the famous Tenichev school. It was there that the future poet entered the world of Russian poetic tradition and the new aesthetic culture. After finishing school, he traveled through Europe, lived for two years in Paris (1907-1908), and visited Switzerland, Italy, and Germany. In 1913 his first book of poems was published. StoneStill heavily influenced by the dominant Symbolist trend, in 1911 Mandelstam joined the new literary group that included, among others, the poets Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, and Sergei Gorodetsky. A year later, the new literary movement, which emerged as a logical overcoming of Symbolism, was named "Acmeism." Mandelstam was one of the many victims of Stalinist repression. The poet, who initially had great enthusiasm for the first Russian Revolution of 1905 and the political activity of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, could no longer reconcile himself with the political doctrine of a regime that executed Nikolai Gumilyov in 1921. Thus, he spent several years in exile, serving sentences for "anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary activities," eventually dying in a transit camp near Vladivostok in December 1938.