The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks: Poems 1930-1937

Mandelstam (1891-1938) was one of the great Russian poets of the 20th century, with a prophetic understanding of its suffering, which he transformed into luminous poetry. The Moscow Notebooks cover his years of persecution, from 1930 to 1934, when he was arrested for writing an unflattering poem about Stalin, and subjected to grueling interrogations and torture. The Notebooks include that fatal poem-with its clinching line, ""His cockroach moustache laughs, perching on his top lip""-and present a shattering portrait of Moscow before the Great Terror. He attempted suicide twice, slashing his wrists in prison, and jumping from a hospital window. Exiled to Voronezh, he seemed crushed. A friend described him then as ""in a state of numbness. His eyes were glassy. His eyelids were inflamed, and this condition never went away. His eyelashes had fallen out. His arm was in a sling."" But it was four more years before he was completely beaten. In Voronezh he broke a silence of 18 months, writing the 90 poems of the three Voronezh Notebooks. In 1938 he was re-arrested and sentenced to five years' hard labor for ""counter-revolutionary activities."" He died that winter, of ""heart failure,"" in a freezing transit camp. These masterful and moving poems, together for the first time, now return to print,