Osip Mandelstam
The greatest Russian poet of the Stalin years; he died in a camp
The circumstances of the baptism—Vyborg, May 1911, a Methodist pastor chosen because the Finnish Methodists would baptise without catechism and the Lutheran clergy of the capital would not—are what the scholarship reports (Nadezhda Mandelstam, Clarence Brown, Ralph Dutli); no one has seen the register itself. The place and the day are to be printed as reported, not as established.
His Jewishness is the "Judaic chaos" of The Noise of Time: a household world he called chaos and returned to all his life. He died as a poet: arrested on the night of 16–17 May 1934 for the epigram on Stalin, arrested again on 5 May 1938, sentenced on 2 August to five years, dead on 27 December 1938 in the Vtoraya Rechka transit camp near Vladivostok. The official cause was heart failure; typhus is reported by Shalamov; his fellow prisoners concealed his death to draw his rations.
That date is worth marking: for decades Western reference works printed 1940, 1942 and "date unknown". It is established from camp documents.
Sources
Documents of the period
- The Vtoraya Rechka camp records; N. Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope — the death date of 27 December 1938 against the earlier 1940 and 1942
Basis: documents and evidence.