This precisely executed image of Stalin and his reign of terror led to Osip Mandelstam’s arrest and exile and ultimately to his death in the gulag.

After sharing this poem (“My zhivem, pod soboiu ne chuia strany”) with a small group of friends, Mandelstam was denounced in 1934 by an acquaintance and consequently was banished from all major urban centers; subsequent arrests and sentences resulted in his death in transit to a labor camp.

The Stalin Epigram is a 16-line lyric in the tradition of Russian acmeism (akin to American imagism) in its clarity and articulates Mandelstam’s repulsion over the horrors he observed. It is exemplary of the sense of responsibility among many Russian poets to record what they had seen.

The poem opens with remarks on the effects of the oppression experienced by political dissidents and displaced peasants. Mandelstam writes that people speak in muted tones because of their constant fear of the state, in conversations that cannot be overheard even by those nearby. He then paradoxically and at great risk reveals what those whispered conversations entail and that Stalin is their subject. Readers understand that Stalin is a constant concern for the dissidents.

One of Mandelstam’s tactics is to underscore Stalin’s origins and lack of refinement, which are in contrast to Mandelstam’s middle-class intellectual background. Stalin, born in the mountains of Georgia, is depicted with the hands of a laborer and wearing work boots; his edicts are the work of a blacksmith, hammered out on an anvil instead of eloquently composed at a desk.

Mandelstam also includes in his picture a glimpse of the groveling minions who attach themselves to anyone in a position of power, dehumanizing the wheedling parasites through his visual and aural images. Stalin plays with the obsequious behavior of these sycophants. Stalin and Mandelstam both know that total power resides in Stalin’s whim, needing only his gesture to determine anyone’s fate.

Along with the filth Mandelstam skillfully associates with Stalin in his descriptions of Stalin’s hands and moustache, the most chilling effect is saved for the poem’s conclusion.

The final two lines of the portrait reveal Stalin’s sensual pleasure in exercising his power, savoring the sweetness of each death as though it were summer fruit, rich with flavor and juice. These deaths are of Stalin’s intimates, his long-time compatriots, and he metaphorically embraces each one. The poem’s last lines nearly eroticize Stalin’s relationship with death and in so doing expose him as an extraordinarily sinister figure.

Bibliography

Cavanagh, Clare. Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Doherty, Justin. The Acmeist Movement in Russian Poetry: Culture and the Word. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.

Mandelstam, Osip. Osip Mandelstam: 50 Poems. Translated by Bernard Meares, introduced by Joseph Brodsky. New York: Persea Books, 2000.

———. Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam. Translated by W. S. Merwin and Clarence Brown. New York: Atheneum, 1974; reissued New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2004.

Categories: Literature, Russian Literature, World Literature

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