The Long Killing of Osip Mandelstam (1938) | Bill Peschel

On December 27, 1938 Osip Mandelstam, poet and writer, died at the age of 47. From the article:

"The Long Killing of Osip Mandelstam (1938) | Bill Peschel
Some men die quickly. Some can take years.


NKVD mug shot of Osip Mandelstam

For Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam, who died on this day in a labor camp in 1938, he killed himself in November 1933, with a poem.
Angered at the growing repression under leader Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, he mocked him in “The Kremlin Highlander”:

We are living, but can’t feel the land where we stay,
More than ten steps away you can’t hear what we say.
But if people would talk on occasion,
They should mention the Kremlin Caucasian.

His thick fingers are bulky and fat like live-baits,
And his accurate words are as heavy as weights.
Cucaracha’s moustaches are screaming,
And his boot-tops are shining and gleaming.

But around him a crowd of thin-necked henchmen,
And he plays with the services of these half-men.
Some are whistling, some meowing, some sniffing,
He’s alone booming, poking and whiffing.

He is forging his rules and decrees like horseshoes –
Into groins, into foreheads, in eyes, and eyebrows.
Every killing for him is delight,
And Ossetian torso is wide.

(The “Ossetian torso” is a double insult, implying not only that he is fat, but was born from a father of Ossetian ethnicity — from the Caucasus Mountains, hence the “Highlander” in the title — rather than the official story that he is Georgian.)

The poem horrified Boris Pasternak, not only for its content, but that it was so unlike Mandelstam’s style. “This is not a literary fact but an act of suicide,” he said, “of which I do not approve and in which I do not want to take part.”

But Mandelstam’s anti-establishment feelings were so strong he didn’t want to help himself. He was arrested the next year after someone hearing him declaim his poems told authorities. Nikolai Bukharin, the revolutionary and politician (who would later be tried and executed for opposing Stalin) pleaded for his life, and Stalin ordered “Isolate but preserve.”

He was sent into exile, but this unexpected act of mercy didn’t do Mandelstam any favors. He had been beaten savagely, and the torture broke him. He repeatedly attempted suicide, once by slitting both wrists, and another by leaping from a second-story window. He was saved both times.

Finally, in 1938, he was arrested again and charged with “counter-revolutionary activities,” and sentenced to five years in the correction camps, where he died.

Yet Osip he lived on in the memoirs of his widow, Nadezhda, who also preserved much of his unpublished work. Her book, with its account of Mandelstam’s arrest, torture and death, didn’t stand a chance of being published, but copies of the manuscript were circulated, until a copy escaped to the West, where it was published in the 1970s.

In 1987, Mandelstam was “exonerated” by the Soviet Union, an absurd notion unless you believe a repressive government that eagerly kills its citizens has the moral authority to rehabilitate the reputation of one of its victims."