Ossip Mandelstam

Ossip Mandelstam (1891–1938) was a Russian poet and a leading representative of Acmeism. Born in Warsaw on January 15, 1891, into a Jewish family, he studied in Saint Petersburg, Paris, and Heidelberg. His major works include the poetry collections The Stone (1913) and Tristia (1922), the autobiographical prose works The Noise of Time (1925) and The Egyptian Stamp (1928), and the essays in On Poetry (1928). Persecuted for his writing, he was arrested and exiled in 1934 after composing a satirical epigram about Stalin. Arrested again in 1938, he was sentenced to forced labor and died on December 27 of that year in a labor camp near Vladivostok. His wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, preserved many of his poems by memorizing them.