Osip mandelstam biography of rory gilmore

By James Kates

The biography is a workmanlike introduction, valuable because it brings a measured understanding to Osip Mandelstam’s life and poetry as well as to the horrific decades he lived through.

Osip Mandelstam: A Biography, by Ralph Dutli.

Translated from the German by Ben Fowkes. Verso, 432 pages, $31.96.

It is generally acknowledged that four great Russian poets dominated — even as they defied in four different ways — the Soviet half-century.

Osip mandelstam biography of rory gilmore

Time and the opening of archives have given us a new perspective on these towering figures. Two men, two women, born in successive years from 1889 to 1892, and each with his or her own destiny: Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Osip Mandelstam.

Of these four, Mandelstam fell into the role of martyr in a time of purges, a role that has long defined his reputation outside Russia.

Arrested in 1934 for having written a nasty poem about Stalin, arrested again in 1937 just because, he died