1. 'Unknown friend of the poet', from Anna Akhmatova's poem 'The Reader' in the cycle Secrets of the Craft. 'Our life passes quickly on this earth/and the predestined circle is tight/ and the unknown friend of the poet/is faithful, eternal'. (Anna Akhmatova Selected Poems, translated by Richard McKane, Bloodaxe Books, London, p141.)

2. OGPU: precursors of the NKVD then KGB. On the long train journey into exile from Moscow to Cherdyn, Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, who were unable to sleep for three days, were accompanied by three OGPU guards. The main guard, Oska, read aloud Pushkin's 'Gipsies', that Nadezhda Mandelstam had brought along (see next quotation of poem in the text).

3. Nadezhda Mandelstam's moving memoirs Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. Translated by Max Hayward, now published by Collins Harvill (and in Russian in the Soviet Union), 1990. The passages relevant to this article are especially the early chapters in Hope Against Hope (for the first arrest and exile) and the later chapters, for the second arrest and death. Nadezhda Mandelstam also wrote Third Book, published as yet only in Russian, which included a commentary on the later poetry.

4. Akhmatova also believed that the warrant had been signed by Yagoda;see her interesting memoir on Osip Mandelstam (Vol. II Collected Works of Anna Akhmatova, Ed. Struve and Fillipoff, Inter Language Literary Associates. Also in Russian (with commentary) Zvezda (1989).

5. In her cycle of poems Requiem on repression, which succeeds both on a personal and universal level (unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1987), in the poem 'To Death' Akhmatova describes an arrest: 'or come with a denunciation invented by you/and known ad nauseam to everyone, so that I may see the peak of the blue cap, and the janitor's fear-whitened face.' Some of the poems in Requiem must have been written about the time Mandelstam said to Akhmatova 'Nowadays poetry should deal with the theme of the state,' and then read her the satire to Stalin.

6. Nikolai Kluyev (1887-1937): peasant poet, self-styled 'bard of old Russia', descended from the Archpriest Avvakum, emerges as a green-style conservationist in his poetry, as well as a realistic prophet of doom, yet still searching for life and eternal spiritual values, in a time when the peasants and kulaks and nature he loved were being annihilated. (See Ogonyok and Index 8/1991 p26).

7. Andrei Platonov(1891-1951):one of the most original prose writers of the Soviet period. He was virtually banned in the later Stalin years. For his 'case' see Ogonyok.

8. Emma Gerstein: Pushkinist scholar, and friend of the Mandelstams and Akhmatova, has written a book Novoe o Mandelstame (Atheneum, Paris, 1986). Also new materials on Mandelstam concentrating on the late period, with interesting insights into Mandelstam's period of exile.

9. Lev Gumilyov: son of Akhmatova and the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, Mandelstam's friend and, with Akhmatova and Mandelstam, fellow poets in the Acmeist schools founded in the 1910s as a more pragmatic counterweight to Symbolism and Futurism. Nikolai Gumilyov was the first writer victim after the revolution (he was shot in 1921 for not passing on information about a counter-revolutionary plot). Lev Gumilyov, partly in his capacity as son of Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilyov, was to spend years in the camps in the 30s and 40s and 50s, where he first learnt Turkic languages. He became a professor in Oriental languages at Leningrad University in the 70s.

10. Boris Kuzin: a biologist with whom the Mandelstams became friends on their trip to Armenia, which had been arranged by their powerful ally in the Kremlin, Bukharin. As a critical listener, friend and expert naturalist, with a deep love of German poetry, he played a vital role, acknowledged by Osip Mandelstam, in keeping Mandelstam's 'mature poetry' going. He left a memoir of Mandelstam.

11. Maria Petrovykh: poet and translator to whom Osip Mandelstam dedicated the last poem written, in February 1934, before his arrest. The satire to Stalin was composed (but not written) probably in November 1933. The penultimate verse of this love poem is filled with a terror of the times: 'Don't be angry with me, dear Turkish woman/ I'll sew myself up in a sack with you,/ swallowing your dark words,/ drinking the crooked water for you.' Osip Mandelstam Moscow Notebooks, translated by Richard and Elizabeth McKane (Bloodaxe Books p86).

12. Boris Sinani was a confidant of the leading Social Revolutionaries in Petersburg. Described in Mandelstam's semi-autobiographical prose The Noise of Time. Translated by Clarence Brown (Quartet).

13. Eser: Socialist Revolutionary.

14. Kerensky (1881-1971): head of the Provincial Government in 1917.

15. Narkompros: Committee for the Peoples' Enlightenment.

16. Narbut was a minor Acmeist poet.

17. 'Miracle': 'The only good life is one in which there is no need for miracles'. Nadezhda Mandelstam Hope against Hope p93.

18. Pasternak: his wife says Mandelstam had actually read the 'Satire [literally, 'Lampoon'] to Stalin' to Boris Pasternak (and the critic Shklovsky) though he did not admit this in his interrogation, presumably because he wanted to keep Pasternak out of the process at this level so that Pasternak could intervene at the highest level with greater freedom. As for the phone call with Stalin, Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam gave Pasternak four out of five. Boris Pasternak did not say to Stalin he had 'long wanted to talk to himabout life, death and love'; Akhmatova writes in her memoir of Mandelstam that Pasternak wanted to speak with him about 'life and death'.

19. Yezhov (1894-1939?): member of the Central Committee from 1934 and chief of the NKVD, 1936-1938. Stalin's great purge reached its heights in those years, called 'Yezhoyism' by Akhmatova in Requiem. He was made a scapegoat and probably executed in 1939.

20. The Poem or Ode to Stalin (completed in March 1937, and sent to several publishing houses) has now been published in Russian in the West in 1975 and 1981, and in the Soviet Union, 1989. It is a complex, far from purely adulatory poem designed to save the Mandelstams' skins. Mandelstam, a poet who usually worked 'with his lips moving', uncharacteristically sat down at a table to write this at one remove. A string of very fine poems of a completely different order was generated from it. The fact that Mandelstam expressed the wish that the Ode be destroyed (Nerler p587: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, Moscow 1990, the most recent and best Mandelstam edition, where the Ode is printed with Commentary), should caution readers and editors, as should Mandelstam's own words to Akhmatova on the Ode, 'I now realise that this was an illness'.

21. Faddei Bulgarin (1789-1859). Writer, best remembered as a police informer during the reign of Nicolas I.

22. 'Spring': presumably the poem quoted in the article 'It's a cold spring'.

23. Yakhontov: in Savelovo near the Volga, Mandelstam wrote his last surviving poems, a number of which have been found and published recently. They also, in parts, treat the Stalin theme in a dialogue with Yelihonida Popova, a theatre director and wife. of the actor Yakhontov.

24. Tynyanov (1895-1943): formalist critic and Pushkinist.

25. Chukovsky (1882-1969): eminent Russian man of letters.

26. Zoshchenko (1895-1958): satirical short story writer whom Mandelstam was fond of. He was singled out for attack with Akhmatova by Zhdanov in 1946.

27. Stenich: poet and translator of, among others, James Joyce; evidently arrested and shot in 1938.

28. Journey to Armenia, Mandelstam's vivid prose piece on Armenia, was published in Zvezda. It contained an attack on tyranny in the closing passages. It has been translated by Clarence Brown (boxed set), and by Jane Gary Harris in Osip Mandelstam: the Collected Critical Prose and Letters (Collins Harvill).

29. ITL and USVITL: Directorate for North-Eastern Corrective Labour Camps.

30. Lavrenty Beria (1899-1953): succeeded Yezhov as head of the secret police. Executed after Stalin's death.

31. According to their young friend in Voronezh, Natasha Shtempel, the Mandelstams lived in that town off 2nd Lineyny Ul, (Straight-line Street), now called Shveinikov Street, which is near Lenin Street.

The case against Mandelstam,poet

Abstract