Mandelstam, Osip Emilyevich

Mandelstam, Osip Emilyevich ôˈsĭp ĕmyēlˈyəvĭch mänˈdĭlstəm [key], 1892–1938, Russian poet. Mandelstam was a leader of the Acmeist school. He wrote impersonal, fatalistic, meticulously constructed poems, the best of which are collected in Kamen [stone] (1913) and Tristia (1922). Although he opposed the Bolsheviks, he remained in Russia after the revolution but published no poetry after 1925. He was arrested in 1934 and died in a concentration camp. His widow preserved a large number of poems from the early period of his exile.

See his complete works, tr. by B. Raffel and A. Burago (1973); memoirs by N. Mandelstam (2 vol., 1970 and 1974); study by C. Brown (1973).

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