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[MANDELSTAM’S HEAVILY CENSORED, LAST LIFETIME COLLECTION OF POEMS] Stikhotvoreniya [i.e. Poems]

Mandelstam, O.

Item #2376

Moscow; Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1928. In original publisher’s cardboard binging. Cardboards are slightly rubbed, otherwise very good.

Extremely rare. First and only lifetime edition. 1 of 2,000 copies. Text in Russian.

The fourth and final lifetime collection of Osip Mandelstam’s poems, as well as the last appearance of anything by the author in Soviet print for the next twenty years. After Mandelstam’s arrest in 1934, his works were banned and actively eradicated, yet this collection remarkably survived the widespread purge. The edition was issued under the State Publishing House imprint in May 1928, during Mandelstam’s prolonged poetic silence. Its release came as a surprise, even to the author, who had already fallen out of favor with the Soviet authorities. Editors had repeatedly rejected his works, and just two years earlier, Mandelstam’s attempt to publish Stikhotvoreniya had been outright denied. In a letter to his wife, he lamented, “My volume of poetry has been done to death.” The book’s eventual publication owed entirely to the influence of Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938), Mandelstam’s close friend and prominent political figure, who would later fall victim to the Great Purge.

The edition is divided into three sections and includes over 110 poems from Mandelstam’s first two poetry collections, Kamen’ [i.e. Stone] and Tristia, along with 20 previously unpublished verses written between 1921 and 1925 (widely considered his third poetry collection). The book’s notable differences from earlier editions
of Kamen’ and Tristia clearly underscore the extent of stricter censorship. For example, in the poem “In Petersburg, We Shall Meet Again” [В Петербурге мы сойдемся снова], the original lines — “And in the Soviet night I will pray / For the blessed meaningless word” [За блаженное, бессмысленное слово/ Я в ночи советской помолюсь.] (p. 97) — were altered to read “And in the January night I pray.” Similarly, most of “To Cassandra,” [Кассандре] written shortly after the revolution, was excised, leaving only the first stanza and removing its ominous title. In the contents page, the poem is listed by its opening line, Я не искал в цветущие мгновения [i.e. I did not seek the blooming moments]. Additionally, “The Twilight of Freedom” [Сумерки свободы], Mandelstam’s ambiguous poem from May 1918 about the revolution, was printed without its title or first two stanzas, as the word «twilight» was seen as a metaphor for «fall.» Self-censorship is also evident—Mandelstam appears to have deliberately omitted his 1921 religious poem about Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in Petrograd, likely recognizing that its inclusion would be problematic under the regime.
Despite its troubled path to publication, the collection deeply impressed Mandelstam’s fellow poets. On September 24, 1928, Boris Pasternak wrote to him in admiration: «Yesterday I got hold of your book. How fortunate you are, how proud you must be to share a name with its author—I know of nothing equal or comparable to it! All these poems—except perhaps Dawn with the Novices in the Cloisters, which I already knew—grew and deepened with every reading. But now, a complete re-reading, with the author’s knowledge and even his brief participation—what a humbling delight!»
Official critics, however, were far less enthusiastic. The journal Book and Revolution dismissed Mandelstam as a “bourgeois poet through and through… already fully Europeanized” and “extremely aggressive.”
The collection marked Mandelstam’s final farewell, not only to poetry but to literature itself. His works were removed from Soviet circulation from the 1930s to the late 1950s and reintroduced only after Stalin’s death, but they were still rarely published. It wasn’t until the 1970s and 1980s that his complete works were finally made available to the public.

Overall, an extremely rare last lifetime collection of verses by the banned Soviet author.

Price: $950.00