I don't remember exactly when I first picked up a copy of Nadezhda Mandelstam's book Hope Against Hope. Penguin published it in paperback in 1975, and my second-hand copy presumably dates from shortly after that. Perhaps 1979? 1980? I recall mentioning Mandelstam in a poem around then, and I'd really known nothing about him until I read his wife's memoir.
I'd already read Solzhenitsyn, and reams of other Russian dissident literature. I must have assumed that Hope Against Hope would be along much the same lines: yet another harrowing account of the camps and the security apparatus - a kind of personalised version of The Gulag Archipelago, or perhaps an analogue to Yevgenia Ginsburg's Into the Whirlwind (1967).
And so, in a sense, it is - but it's also, I think, the most insightful book about how poets actually ferment and compose their poems I've ever read. Nadezhda Mandelstam is no poet, but she's a very insightful and observant critic of writing in general.
She doesn't theorise idly. Instead, she presents complex deductions from plain, straightforward facts: How did Osip Mandelstam compose his poems? What exactly was the physical process? When did he write them down - or, latterly, dictate them to his long-suffering wife? What was his understanding of a poetry book as opposed to a gathering of poems all composed at the same time?
All that may sound a little tedious but, in practice, it's anything but. Nadezhda Mandelstam is a master of the deadpan, yet instinctively suspenseful narrative. She leaps straight into her story as follows:
After slapping Alexei Tolstoi in the face, M. immediately returned to Moscow.Huh? Wha'? You may or may not know who Aleksei Tolstoy, the infamous Soviet "Red Count" was, but it's hard not to wonder just why Osip Mandelstam slapped him in the face. Nadezhda doesn't tell us. Instead, we get a long, intricate account of the poet's return to Moscow - from where? you may ask; from Leningrad, actually, but we don't find out about that for quite some time - culminating in his first arrest by the security services.
If you still want to know what led to the slap, you can read the details here. Suffice it to say, Mandelstam was defending the honour of his wife, who'd been physically assaulted by another writer, Sergey Borodin, when she asked him to return some sorely needed money which the couple had lent him. Alexei Tolstoy presided over the internal "writers' tribunal" which judged the case. He decided to take no action against Borodin, except for a vague instruction to pay back the money "when he felt able to."
When Mandelstam ran into Tolstoy in the street some eighteen months later, he slapped him, proclaiming (allegedly): "I have struck the hangman who ordered the public beating of my wife." Tolstoy hissed "What are you doing? I will destroy you!"
The point of outlining this story is to explain just why Nadezhda ["Надежда" means "hope" in Russian] hoped for so long that the arrest of her husband was due to this assault on one of the puffed-up dignitaries of Soviet literature. In reality, she knew better.
It was, of course, far more likely to be due to Mandelstam's terminally indiscreet epigram on Stalin, which called attention, among other things, to his fingers "fat as grubs", his "cockroach whiskers," and the fact that "every kiling is a treat" to the "murderer and peasant-slayer." He'd read it out loud to a number of friends after writing it in late 1933.
Further down in this post, you can find a series of different translations of this most famous (though probably least representative) of Mandelstam's poems.
I imagine you must already be getting a sense of the peppery, mercurial Osip Mandelstam by now. Courageous and honourable to the point of folly - very much on his dignity - but also a mad jokester, Mandelstam was determined to die on his feet rather than living on his knees.
He was almost alone among his contemporaries in this, and he paid a heavy price for it. The long, agonising story of his gradual breakdown and death is told in grim detail in Nadezhda Mandelstam's book - also, as it turns out, one of the most sustained hymns to the glory and richness of life in world literature:
It seems to me that for any artist eternity is something tangibly present in every fleeting fraction of time, which he would gladly stop and thus make even more tangible. What causes anguish in an artist is not longing for eternity, but a temporary loss of his feeling that every second of time is, in its fullness and density, the equal of eternity itself.She goes on to quote her husband as follows:
“...the earth is not an encumbrance or an unfortunate accident, but a God-given palace."Here's one of his late poems, written in exile in Voronezh in the late 1930s:
Не сравнивай: живущий несравним ... Не сравнивай: живущий несравним, Я с чувством страха, нежности и боли Взял равенство равнин. И ширь небес мне стала болезнью. Я вызвал воздух, слугу моего, Ожидал от него услуг или вестей, Готов был пуститься, поплыть по дуге Экспедиций, которые никогда не начнутся. Где у меня больше неба, я рад бродить, И светлая печаль не дает мне покинуть Воронеж и его подростковые холмы Ради ясных человеческих холмов Тосканы. ... - Осип Мандельштам (Voronezh, 1934-37)• Do not compare: what lives is incomparable. I felt a a kind of tender fear as I took on the plains' equality and the wide sky became my malady. I summoned the air, my serving man, expected from him services or news, made ready to set out, sail on the arc of expeditions that could never start. Where I have most sky I am glad to roam, and a bright sadness will not let me leave Voronezh and its adolescent hills for the clear human hills of Tuscany.
- trans. Peter France (2021)
Stalin may have won his battle with the poet in the end, but at what price? The great despot died choking on his own blood because none of his lackeys dared to enter the bedroom where he'd just suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke. Instead, a complete meeting of the Politburo had to be convened before the audacious step of opening the door and summoning a doctor without permission could be risked. By then, of course, it was far too late.
Mandelstam died in a transit camp, probably of spotted typhus, before he could be sent on to the work-camps of Kolyma. His luminous, magical verse has survived him. By a combination of guile and sheer good fortune, Nadezhda was able to preserve the lion's share of all that he'd written, including the poems he composed in their three years of internal exile before his second arrest.
It's hard to say who comes out as the greater hero: the defiant, lively, abundantly gifted poet, or the indomitable, practical, patient Nadezhda. For a foreign reader, the choice is a particularly difficult one. Osip's mastery was of the Russian language - and only a limited amount of that can come through in translation. Nadezhda's complex, intertwined, brilliantly written memoirs can be appreciated in any language.
Perhaps, in the end, it's she who's the true literary immortal of the pair. At the very least, she must certainly be rated as the Boswell to his Doctor Johnson. As she herself put it:
I decided it is better to scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.
But who exactly was this man? To start with, he was a close friend and poetic ally of Anna Akhmatova and her first husband Lev Gumilev. They were all founding members of the "Acmeist" movement, defined by Mandelstam as "nostalgia for world culture." In his article "The Morning of Acmeism," Mandelstam emphasised the need for "poetic craft and cultural continuity" in their particular branch of modernism, rather than the "Dionysian frenzy" propagated by the earlier Russian symbolist poets.
His first book, Stone (republished in enlarged editions in 1916, 1923, and 1928), already showed his intense engagement with material things: fields, trees, the sea, alongside the cultural remnants of antiquity. It really has to be read in full, but some of the poems have become very famous.
Here's one I translated myself a few years ago:
Бессоница, Гомер, тугие паруса ... Бессоница, Гомер, тугие паруса. Я список кораблей прочел до середины ... Сей длинный выводок, сей поезд журавлиный, Что над Элладою когда-то поднялся. Как журавлиный клин в чужие рубежи На головаx царей божественная пена ... Куда плывете вы? Когда бы не Элена, Что Троя вам одна, аxейские мужи? И море и Гомер все движимо любовью. Куда же деться мне? И вот, Гомер молчит. И море Черное витийствуя шумит И с страшным гроxотом подxодит к изголовью ... - Осип Мандельштам (Crimea, August 1915)• Insomnia. Homer. Reefed sails. I've read halfway through the ship catalogue; this inbred tribe, this siege of cranes which once took flight from Hellas. A wedge of cranes into foreign shores drenching your kings with spray ... Where are you going? If not for Helen, what would Troy matter to you, men of Achaea? The sea and Homer are moved by love. Where should I turn? Homer is silent. The Black Sea roars, booms up the beach to my bed.
- trans. Jack Ross (24-27/12/22)
As you can see, Mandelstam - unlike, say, Boris Pasternak - is not really, by instinct, a landscape poet or pastoralist. He likes classical settings with their own imbedded history. His models were Homer and the Greeks - Ovid, too, as befits a writer whose second book, Tristia, was named after the Roman poet's famous collection of poems from exile.
Shortly after that, the iron curtain of Soviet censorship fell over Mandelstam's poetry. It wasn't that he stopped writing - simply that his work stopped being published in journals, let alone in book form.
Frustrated by this, he turned to prose: a book of memoirs, Шум времени [The Noise Of Time] (1925); literary essays, О поэзии [On Poetry] (1928); and a novella , Египетская марка [The Egyptian Stamp] (1928) ... By now, however, it was apparent to him that the problem was not the genre he wrote in, but the things he wanted to say. He poured all this anguish into Четвёртая проза [The Fourth Prose] (1930), an unpublishable cri-de-coeur against the dehumanising regime he and his contemporaries were forced to bow to.
His collection of travel sketches Путешествие в Армению [Journey to Armenia] (1930) appeared in the Soviet magazine Звезда [Star] in 1933. That was his last substantial publication in his lifetime - and for many years after that.
He returned to writing poetry at the beginning of the 1930s. His new work was simpler and more personal - less laden with references, and more direct in its impact. The authorities hated it. Here's one characteristic example:
Ленинград ... Я вернулся в мой город, знакомый до слез, До прожилок, до детских припухлых желез. Ты вернулся сюда, — так глотай же скорей Рыбий жир ленинградских речных фонарей. Узнавай же скорее декабрьский денек, Где к зловещему дегтю подмешан желток. Петербург, я еще не хочу умирать: У тебя телефонов моих номера. Петербург, у меня еще есть адреса, По которым найду мертвецов голоса. Я на лестнице черной живу, и в висок Ударяет мне вырванный с мясом звонок. И всю ночь напролет жду гостей дорогих, Шевеля кандалами цепочек дверных. - Осип Мандельштам (Leningrad, December 1930)• I've come back to my city. These are my own old tears, my own little veins, the swollen glands of my childhood. So you're back. Open wide. Swallow the fish-oil from the river lamps of Leningrad. Open your eyes. Do you know this December day, the egg-yolk with the deadly tar beaten into it? Petersburg! I don't want to die yet! You know my telephone numbers. Petersburg! I've still got the addresses: I can look up dead voices. I live on back stairs, and the bell, torn out nerves and all, jangles in my temples. And I wait till morning for guests that I love, and rattle the door in its chains.
- trans. Clarence Brown & W. S. Merwin (1973)
Poems like this, read out to his friends, and circulated in manuscript in the first faint flickers of the samizdat publications of the 1960s, already foreshadowed his doom. There was limited space in the world for a writer who insisted in talking this way.
All of which brings us to the famous Stalin epigram - though it could perhaps be seen more as a suicide note than a poem. Certainly Mandelstam doesn't seem to have tried very hard to conceal it from his contemporaries. Nadezhda estimated that he must have read it to 16 or 17 people before the authorities took notice. And even then they waited another six months before they arrested him.
It's a relentlessly over-translated poem. Wherever you look, there are versions of it: Robert Lowell published an "adaptation" in the Atlantic Monthly in 1963; Max Hayward included a version in his translation of Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope in 1970. After that it became fair game for virtually anyone writing about the poet.
Here are a few of the most prominent attemmpts:
[Mandelstam’s autograph copy of his poem about Stalin, ‘Appended to the record of O. Mandelstam’s interrogation, 25 May 1934, and countersigned by Shivarov.’
– Vitaly Shentalinsky, The KGB’s Literary Archive, trans. John Crowfoot (London: Harvill Press, 1997) 174.]
-
Мы живем, под собою не чуя страны ...
- Stalin
- Stalin
- We live without feeling the country beneath us ...
- The Stalin Epigram
- The Stalin Ode
- Stalin epigram
- We live, but feel no land at our feet ...
- Осип Мандельштам (November, 1933)
Мы живем, под собою не чуя страны, Наши речи за десять шагов не слышны, А где хватит на полразговорца, Там припомнят кремлевского горца. Его толстые пальцы, как черви, жирны, И слова, как пудовые гири, верны, Тараканьи смеются глазища И сияют его голенища. А вокруг него сброд тонкошеих вождей, Он играет услугами полулюдей. Кто свистит, кто мяучит, кто хнычет, Он один лишь бабачит и тычет. Как подкову, дарит за указом указ — Кому в пах, кому в лоб, кому в бровь, кому в глаз. Что ни казнь у него — то малина И широкая грудь осетина.
- trans. Robert Lowell (1963)
[This poem is said to have caused
Mandelstam's arrest in 1934]
We live. We are not sure our land is under us. Ten feet away, no one hears us. But wherever there’s even a half-conversation, we remember the Kremlin’s mountaineer. His thick fingers are fat as worms, his words reliable as ten-pound weights. His boot tops shine, his cockroach mustache is laughing. About him, the great, his thin-necked, drained advisors. He plays with them. He is happy with half-men around him. They make touching and funny animal sounds. He alone talks Russian. One after another, his sentences hit like horseshoes! He pounds them out. He always hits the nail, the balls. After each death, he is like a Georgian tribesman, putting a raspberry in his mouth.
- trans. Max Hayward (1970)
We live, deaf to the land beneath us, Ten steps away no one hears our speeches, But where there's so much as half a conversation The Kremlin's mountaineer will get his mention.[1] His fingers are fat as grubs And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips, His cockroach whiskers leer And his boot tops gleam. Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders - Fawning half-men for him to play with. They whinny, purr or whine As he prates and points a finger, One by one forging his laws, to be flung Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin. And every killing is a treat For the broad-chested Ossete.[2]
Notes:
1. In the first version, which came into the hands of the secret police, these two lines read:
All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer, The murderer and peasant-slayer.
2. 'Ossete'. There were persistent stories that Stalin had Ossetian blood. Ossetia is to the north of Georgia in the Caucasus. The people, of Iranian stock, are quite different from the Georgians.
- trans. David McDuff (1973)
We live without feeling the country beneath us,
our speech at ten paces inaudible,
and where there are enough for half a conversation
the name of the Kremlin mountaineer is dropped.
His thick fingers are fatty like worms,
but his words are as true as pound weights.
his cockroach whiskers laugh,
and the tops of his boots shine.
Around him a rabble of thick-skinned leaders,
he plays with the attentions of half-men.
Some whistle, some miaul, some snivel,
but he just bangs and pokes.
He forges his decrees like horseshoes —
some get it in the groin, some in the forehead.
some in the brows, some in the eyes.
Whatever the punishment he gives — raspberries,
And the broad chest of an Ossete.
- trans. Clarence Brown & W. S. Merwin (1973)
Our lives no longer feel ground under them. At ten paces you can’t hear our words. But whenever there’s a snatch of talk it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer, the ten thick worms his fingers, his words like measures of weight, the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip, the glitter of his boot-rims. Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses he toys with the tributes of half-men. One whistles, another meows, a third snivels. He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom. He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes, One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye. He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.
- trans. Jack Ross and Sasha Loukine (2001)
We live, not knowing the land beneath us, our speeches are inaudible ten feet away, but where there’s enough for half a conversation – there we remember the Kremlin mountain-man. His fat fingers are as slimy as worms, but his words as reliable as forty-pound weights. His cockroach moustache laughs, and his leather boot-tops shine. Around him presses a pack of thick-skinned bosses, he toys with the favours of such submen. One whistles, one meows, another one whimpers, He alone points at us in thunder. Tossing off decree after decree like horseshoes – one in the groin, one in the head, one in the brow, one in the eye. For him, every killing is – a raspberry and the Ossetian’s chest is wide.
- trans. Meryl Natchez (2013)
We live, but cannot feel the earth, And if we speak, we can’t be heard. But wherever you hear a half-conversation, They talk of that backwoods lout in the Kremlin. Ten fat fingers like greasy worms, Each of his words weighs fifty pounds. His moustache bristles in cockroach laughter, And his polished jackboots glitter. His gang surrounds him, a spineless crew, Half-men who do what he tells them to. Some growl, some whimper, some yowl and hiss, But he alone rages and bangs his fists. Decree on decree like horseshoes fly At groin, forehead, eyebrow, eye. Each execution — sweet as a berry, To this broad-chested thug from Gori.
- trans. Alistair Noon (2018)
We live, but feel no land at our feet, nor ten steps off any whisper of speech. Where half a conversation finds enough lips, it’s the Kremlin-Climber our thoughts are with. His weighty fingers as greasy as worms, true as a dumbbell tumble his words. His laughing moustache is cockroach-huge, there’s a gleam from the tops of his boots. Around him, the rabble of slim-necked princes, half-human officials, their labours his playthings. One whines like a cat, one whistles or snivels as he blabs and jabs at them; the gifts he gives, decree by decree, he pounds like iron into groin, into crown, into brow, into eye — lemons, no matter what capital offence, and it’s broad, that Ossetian chest.
In Ian Probstein's interesting article "Three translations of Osip Mandelstam's 'Stalin's Epigram'" (2014), he compares Clarence Brown & W. S. Merwin's version with David McDuff's - then with a new version of his own.
He's certainly correct to note of the opening couplet, that in "Clarence Brown’s and W. S. Merwin’s translation active voice is changed into passive: Mandelstam: we do not feel (hear); Brown and Merwin: our lives don’t feel." He also points out that "in McDuff’s translation such words as 'inaudible, 'conversation' destroy, in my view, rhythm and music from the start, making it a literal translation."
It's hard, however, to see a great deal of improvement in the word choices in his own attempt:
We live without feeling our country’s pulse,Perhaps because it's the one I encountered first, my own favourite among all these versions is Max Hayward's powerful rhymed translation from 1970 (Did he get some help with it from his collaborator on Akhmatova's poems, Stanley Kunitz, I wonder?) There's something wonderfully incantatory about it which is lost in the more careful wording of Brown & Merwin's, which I would myself rank as next in order of merit.
We can’t hear ourselves, no one hears us.
I think the point is that this epigram, or ode, or whatever one might call it, was never intended to be taken seriously as a piece of poetic art: it's more like flyting - a scathing put-down, with more of Juvenal or Martial in it than the more urbane Horace or Ovid. The embodied animal noises, the decrees flung out like horseshoes at the groin, are not the normal, more subtle effects of Mandelstam's verse.
When I tried my own hand at translating it with my friend Sasha Loukine in 2001, I had in mind a dual-text, with a transparent copy of the poet's original manuscript from the KGB files on top, and our own literal version showing through underneath. On the facing page I was planning to print a poem of praise for Ceaușescu, who seems to have inspired more bad verse than virtually any other dictator since Stalin.
Alas, it was not to be. I hope it's a useful crib to measure some of the more artful versions against, though.
The truth is, we're unusually lucky that so much of Mandelstam's verse - not to mention the details of his complex life-story - has come down to us at all. Most of it is due to his wife Nadezhda, his friend and colleague Anna Akhmatova, and their small band of helpers. But it also has something to do with the strange Russian reverence for poetry and poets.
Shortly after Mandelstam was arrested, Boris Pasternak received a strange phone call from Stalin himself. The facts of just exactly what was said remain controversial. Nadezhda, who got the story straight from Pasternak himself, probably tells it best:
Stalin began by telling Pasternak that Mandelstam's case had been reviewed, and that everything would be all right. This was followed by a strange reproach: why hadn't Pasternak approached the writers' organizations or him (Stalin), and why hadn't he tried to do something for Mandelstam: "If I were a poet, and a poet friend of mine were in trouble, I would do anything to help him."Did Pasternak do well or badly in this conversation? Nadezhda thought he did pretty well, considering the complete unexpectedness of the call. "When I gave M. an account of the whole business, he was entirely happy with the way Pasternak had handled things, particularly with his remark about the writers' organizations."
Pasternak's reply to this was: "The writers' organizations haven't bothered with cases like this since 1927, and if I hadn't tried to do something, you probably would never have heard about it." Pasternak went on to say something about the word "friend," trying to define more precisely the nature of his relations with M. [Mandelstam] which were not, of course, covered by the term "friendship." This digression was very much in Pasternak's style and had nothing to do with the matter in hand. Stalin interrrupted him: "But he's a genius, he's a genius, isn't he?" To this Pasternak replied: "But that's not the point." "What is it, then?" Stalin asked. Pasternak then said that he would like to meet him and have a talk. "About what?" said Stalin. "About life and death," Pasternak replied. Stalin hung up.
Mandelstam went on to say that Pasternak "was quite right to say that whether I'm a genius or not is beside the point ... Why is Stalin so afraid of genius? It's like a superstition with him. He things we might put a spell on him, like shamans."
Whether or not that was the reason, the word went down from high that Mandelstam was to be "isolated, but preserved", and as a result he enjoyed another three precious years of life before the inevitable second arrest and sentence to hard labour in the Gulag.
Victor Hugo used to goad French President - then (self-elected) Emperor - Louis Napoléon by referring to him as "Napoléon le Petit." Donald Trump, too, seems intent on aping the pretentions of notorious dictators in a kind of comic-opera fashion. I'm afraid that I couldn't resist taking the notion further and composing the following parody of Mandelstam's unfortunately deadly serious poem.
You mightn't believe it, but the painting above, with its little hommage to Ayn Rand, was apparently meant seriously by its creator - unless he has a greater talent for deadpan humour than the rest of his website would suggest:
Cut-price Stalin:
An Ode to Trump
(after Osip Mandelstam)
We live deaf to the land beneath us ten feet away no one hears our speeches wherever there’s space for idle chatter in tramps the White House auctioneer his fingers are as fat as fish bait his words punch like a heavyweight his threadbare orange toupée gleams tuxedo straining at the seams around him bay a pack of submen struggling to match their master’s venom one pouts one whimpers another mews he tosses off tweets like tennis shoes marking his victims one by one tummy forehead eyebrow groin but every bombing is a treat for the convicted property cheat
- Jack Ross (10/3/26)
Books I own are marked in bold:
-
Poetry:
- Камень [Stone] (1913)
- Stone. Trans. Robert Tracy. 1981. Collins Harvill. London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 1991.
- Tristia (1922)
- Вторая книга [Second Book] (1923)
- Стихотворения 1921-1925 [Poems 1921–1925] (1928)
- Стихотворения [Poems] (1928)
- Московские тетради [Moscow Notebooks] (1930–34)
- The Moscow Notebooks. Trans. Richard & Elizabeth McKane. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 1991.
- Included in: The Moscow & Voronezh Notebooks: Poems 1930-1937. Trans. Richard & Elizabeth McKane. Introduction by Victor Krivulin. 1991 & 1996. Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 2003.
- Воронежские тетради [Voronezh Notebooks] (1934–37)
- The Voronezh Notebooks. Trans. Richard & Elizabeth McKane. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 1996.
- Included in: The Moscow & Voronezh Notebooks: Poems 1930-1937. Trans. Richard & Elizabeth McKane. Introduction by Victor Krivulin. 1991 & 1996. Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 2003.
- The Voronezh Workbooks. Trans. Alistair Noon. Swindon: Shearsman Books, 2022.
- "Утро акмеизма" [Morning of Acmeism] (1919)
- Included in: The Collected Critical Prose and Letters. Ed. Jane Gary Harris. Trans. Jane Gary Harris & Constance Link. 1979. Collins Harvill. London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 1991.
- "Пшеница человеческая" [The Wheat of Humanity] (1922)
- "Гуманизм и современность" [Humanism and the Present] (1923)
- Included in: The Collected Critical Prose and Letters. Ed. Jane Gary Harris. Trans. Jane Gary Harris & Constance Link. 1979. Collins Harvill. London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 1991.
- Шум времени [The Noise Of Time] (1925)
- Included in: The Noise of Time and Other Prose Pieces. Trans. Clarence Brown. 1965 & 1986. Quartet Encounters. London: Quartet Books Limited, 1988.
- О поэзии [On Poetry] (1928)
- Included in: The Collected Critical Prose and Letters. Ed. Jane Gary Harris. Trans. Jane Gary Harris & Constance Link. 1979. Collins Harvill. London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 1991.
- Египетская марка [The Egyptian Stamp] (1928)
- Included in: The Noise of Time and Other Prose Pieces. Trans. Clarence Brown. 1965 & 1986. Quartet Encounters. London: Quartet Books Limited, 1988.
- Четвёртая проза [The Fourth Prose] (1930)
- Included in: The Noise of Time and Other Prose Pieces. Trans. Clarence Brown. 1965 & 1986. Quartet Encounters. London: Quartet Books Limited, 1988.
- Included in: The Collected Critical Prose and Letters. Ed. Jane Gary Harris. Trans. Jane Gary Harris & Constance Link. 1979. Collins Harvill. London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 1991.
- Путешествие в Армению [Journey to Armenia] (1933)
- Included in: The Noise of Time and Other Prose Pieces. Trans. Clarence Brown. 1965 & 1986. Quartet Encounters. London: Quartet Books Limited, 1988.
- Included in: The Collected Critical Prose and Letters. Ed. Jane Gary Harris. Trans. Jane Gary Harris & Constance Link. 1979. Collins Harvill. London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 1991.
- "Разговор о Данте" [Conversation about Dante] (1933)
- Included in: The Collected Critical Prose and Letters. Ed. Jane Gary Harris. Trans. Jane Gary Harris & Constance Link. 1979. Collins Harvill. London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 1991.
- Собрание сочинений [Collected works]. Ed. Gleb Struve (1955)
- Собрание сочинений в трёх томах [Collected works in 3 vols]. Ed. Gleb Struve & B. A. Filippova (1967)
- Сочинения [Works]. 2 vols. Ed. S. S. Averintseva (1990)
- Собрание сочинений [Collected works]. 4 vols (1993—1999)
- Избранное [Selections]. Библиотека Поэзии (2002)
- Избранное. Библиотека Поэзии. Смоленск: «Русич», 2002.
- Сочинения: Стихотворения / Шум времении: Проза / Слово и культура: Эссе [Works: Poetry / The Sound of Time: Prose / Language & Culture: Essays] (2004)
- Сочинения: Стихотворения / Шум времении: Проза / Слово и культура: Эссе. Екатеринбург: У-Фактория, 2004.
- Полное собрание сочинений и писем [Collected works & letters]. 3 vols. Ed. A. G. Metsa (2009—2011)
- Selected Poems. Trans. David McDuff (1973)
- Selected Poems. Trans. David McDuff. Cambridge: Rivers Press Ltd., 1973.
- The Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam. Trans. Burton Raffel & Alla Burago (1973)
- The Goldfinch. Trans. Donald Rayfield (1973)
- Selected Poems. Trans. Clarence Brown & W. S. Merwin (1974)
- Selected Poems. Trans. Clarence Brown & W. S. Merwin. Introduction by Clarence Brown. 1973. Penguin Modern European Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
- 50 Poems. Trans. Bernard Meares with an Introductory Essay by Joseph Brodsky (1977)
- Poems. Trans. James Greene (1977)
- Poems. Trans. James Greene. Forewords by Nadezhda Mandelstam & Donald Davie. Paul Elek. London: Elek Books Limited, 1977.
- The Collected Critical Prose and Letters. Trans. Jane Gary Harris & Constance Link (1979)
- The Collected Critical Prose and Letters. Ed. Jane Gary Harris. Trans. Jane Gary Harris & Constance Link. 1979. Collins Harvill. London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 1991.
- The Noise of Time: Selected Prose. Trans. Clarence Brown (1993)
- The Noise of Time and Other Prose Pieces. Trans. Clarence Brown. 1965 & 1986. Quartet Encounters. London: Quartet Books Limited, 1988.
- "Stolen Air". Trans. Christian Wiman. (2012)
- [with Akhmatova & Gumilev] Poems from the Stray Dog Cafe. Trans. Meryl Natchez, with Polina Barskova & Boris Wofson (2013)
- Concert at a Railway Station. Selected Poems. Trans. Alistair Noon (2018)
- Black Earth: Selected Poems and Prose. Trans. Peter France (2021)
- Occasional and Joke Poems. Trans. Alistair Noon (2022)
- Mandelstam, Nadezhda. Hope Against Hope: A Memoir. Trans. Max Hayward. Introduction by Clarence Brown. 1970. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
- Mandelstam, Nadezhda. Hope Abandoned: A Memoir. 1972. Trans. Max Hayward. 1973. London: Collins & Harvill Press, 1974.
- Brown, Clarence. Mandelstam. 1973. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
- Littell, Robert. The Stalin Epigram. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010.
Prose:
Works:
Translations:
Secondary:
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William Roberts: The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel (1961-62)Modern Poets in English
- C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933)
- Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)
- Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938)
- Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)
- Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
- Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918)
- Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935)
- Eugenio Montale (1896-1981)
- Federico García Lorca (1898-1938)
- Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968)
- Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)
- Paul Celan (1920-1970)
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