Osip Mandelstam wrote an epigram on Stalin in 1933 and read it to ten people. That was enough. Arrest, exile, a second arrest. He died in a transit camp near Vladivostok in 1938; the exact date, and the place of his grave, are unknown.
He was born in Warsaw in 1891. Then Petersburg, the Tenishev School, the Sorbonne, Heidelberg. Acmeism — clarity, solidity, concreteness against the Symbolist fog. Stone and Tristia were his first collections.
"We live, not feeling the country beneath us" — the epigram on Stalin. The "Kremlin mountaineer," a portrait of the leader with fingers "fat as worms."
His wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, preserved the poems by memorizing them. Her two books of memoirs, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, stand as her testimony to the age.