Osip Mandelstam and the Stalin Ode

Abstract

The poem was never written down, but was recited to a small gathering of friends. In May of 1934 the security police searched Mandelstam's apartment; it is generally assumed that they were looking for a copy of the poem. Arrest, interrogation, incarceration, and eventually exile to the city of Voronezh followed. In Voronezh, isolated, spied upon, in poor health, unable to earn a living, Mandelstam yielded to pressure and wrote an ode to Stalin.2 The ode did not save him from re-arrest as the Terror mounted or from death in a Siberian camp in 1938, though it may have saved his wife.3 For long it was accepted that the ode had not survived. In 1975, however, a truncated version supplied by an anonymous contributor appeared in an American journal.4 A full version was published in 1976. Together with the full ode came evidence-again from sources who did not wish to be named-that Mandelstam had not been ashamed of the ode, as Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam had claimed, but on the contrary had several times read it to gatherings. The prehistory and history of the composition of the ode, together with its textual history and the history of its interpretation, therefore constitute an unusually complex case of control over the spoken/written word. Let me spell out some of the forces at work: