Osip Mandelstam is an iconic figure. In Russia, and all over the world, he is seen as a martyr for poetry, someone who paid with his life for his verses. He is known, above all, as the victim of political persecution and the author of a trenchant poem exposing Stalin as the “corrupter of the human soul.” His death in 1938 under appalling circumstances, in a forced labor camp, also contributed significantly to his worldwide fame. Mandelstam, victim of twentieth-century totalitarianism, imprisoned in a Kolyma gulag: this is often the only way in which he is portrayed.

More than any other Russian poet, Mandelstam fills the bill of a legendary literary saint. All the elements of hagiography are ready to hand: his early vocation; his experience of poverty; his persecution; his martyrdom; and, finally, his triumph in the eyes of posterity. Mandelstam is seen as the embodiment of poesy, conforming to the cliché of the true poet’s path of bitter suffering on earth. The proud and self-confident, sharp-tongued and confrontational, witty and sensual Mandelstam, who loved life, and had absolutely no wish to become a martyr, is usually left out of the picture.

His posthumous fate also forms part of his legend. His widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam, played a leading role in this. Almost miraculously, she survived the Stalin epoch. She learned Mandelstam’s poems by heart, so as to preserve them from suppression by the dictator’s bloodhounds. She hid his papers in the attics and cellars of a few friends and accomplices. She finally had his work smuggled out of the country to the United States, and, in the first volume of her monumental memoirs, Hope Against Hope (1970), she revealed to an astonished world the extent of Mandelstam’s isolation and persecution, but also the courageous way he stuck to his convictions through the darkest years of the Stalin terror.