Osip Mandelstam
Overview
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (also spelled Osip Mandelshtam, Ossip Mandelstamm) ( – December 27, 1938) was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist
Acmeist poetry
Acmeism, or the Guild of Poets, was a transient poetic school which emerged in 1910 in Russia under the leadership of Nikolai Gumilyov and Sergei Gorodetsky. The term was coined after the Greek word acme, i.e., "the best age of man"....

 school of poets. He was arrested by Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...

's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife Nadezhda
Nadezhda Mandelstam
Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam was a Russian writer and educator, and the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in 1938 in a transit camp to the gulag of Siberia...

.
Quotations

Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?

Quoted in Nadezhda Mandelstam|Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir (1970), ch. 35

 
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