and N.M. were not yet permanently together. ‘Our relationship must have aroused in him a keen awareness of his Jewish roots, a tribal feeling, a sense of kinship with his people – I was the only Jewess in his life. He thought of the Jews as being one family, hence the theme of incest … Leah was the name he had given to a daughter of Lot … One night, thinking about me, he had suddenly seen that I would come to him, as Lot’s daughters had to their father’ (N.M., Hope Abandoned.)

(113) ‘The word grows, bearing a green branch like the dove released from Noah’s ark’ (Lidija Ginzburg, ‘The Poetics of Osip Mandelshtam’, Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism, edited by Victor Erlich, Yale University Press, 1975).

(116) Bees were sacred to Persephone, ‘her messengers to Man’ (N. A. Nilsson, Mandelshtam: Five Poems).

‘The poetic word, metaphorically transformed into a kiss as a source of joy, is simultaneously a small, hairy bee which … has the orphic power of transmutation’; the necklace ‘is a special artefact, composed of “dead bees”, words which have perished in their normal usage; these “apian” words have reversed the normal process by converting honey into sunlight’ (Tom Stableford, The Literary Appreciation of Russian Writers).

‘The dense night forest of Taigetos’: the high mountain overlooking Sparta, the domain of Artemis and Apollo, where the bees produce ‘not the sweet honey of Hymettos but a honey with … a darker and wilder taste’ (Nilsson).

(119) Line 16: See the Odyssey, Book IV, lines 219–84.

(124) Stanza 4: In a poem written in 1916, Mandelshtam alludes to Rome, Byzantium and Moscow – ‘the three meetings of mankind and Providence … Byzantium had perished and the Grace of God had passed over to Russia’ (K. Taranovsky).

Stanza 6: Henry Gifford (private communication): ‘The slave who has overcome his fear is free – to endure unhappiness …’

POEMS (1928)

‘Mandelshtam’s Poems register a disintegration so absolute that the magnificent tragedy of Tristia is no longer possible, for tragedy presupposes the existence of generally accepted values’ (Robert Chandler).

(127) Stanza 5 – ‘conspirators’: the Soviet edition substitutes ‘dark people’.

(128) ‘Tender Europa’ is N.M.; the poem was written after their marriage.

(135) The question asked in the first stanza is answered in the second: the artist, the creator, can do these things.

O. Ronen refers to Hamlet as one of the subtexts:

The time is out of joint; O cursed spite

That ever I was born to set it right!

The original has four eight-line stanzas.

(136) ‘this is an ode (Mandelshtam first subtitled it “a Pindaric fragment”), and, typically of the ode, it is concerned with itself, that is to say, with poetry. The world in which poetry must now exist is as turbulent as that of the forest and ship; everything cracks and shakes … The principal image of the poem, the horseshoe itself, is what is left of the stormy animal, now dead … This is human life frozen in its last attitudes, as though surprised in Herculaneum. The speaker himself now speaks in a resurrected voice, turned to stone, and time, the element that erupted … at line 55, finally flows like lava over everything, obliterating the very self of the speaker at the end’ (Clarence Brown, Mandelshtam.)

‘A “poem” is uniquely able to remain intact while all else changes, and hence to contact an unknown future recipient of an expected gift in which is preserved also a part of the poet’ (S. Broyde).

(140) ‘A crucial “New Year”. Lenin is mortally ill …’ (S. Monas, Notes to Complete Poetry of Mandelshtam). O. Ronen’s An Approach to Mandelshtam includes a commentary on this poem: ‘Clay’: Ronen refers to Job (‘Thou hast made me as the clay; and wilt thou bring me into dust again’).

Three and half stanzas are untranslated.

Line 16: Ronen: ‘but the singing lips of the age are sealed …’

Line 21: Ronen: ‘The theme of the forgotten or lost word of no. 113 … is reinterpreted here and in other poems of 1921–25 (nos. 130, 131 and 136, etc.) in historical terms: the word becomes the heirloom, passed from one generation to another, or lost in transmission.’

Line 35 – ‘Fourth Estate’: Ronen: ‘not the press, but the razochintsy or classless intelligentsia (to which Mandelshtam felt that he belonged).’

Line 40 – ‘the little bone of a pike’: Ronen: ‘Just as the horseshoe is, in Whoever finds a horseshoe, a talisman against hungry time, so the pike’s bone … becomes … a talisman against … the hungry State.’

Line 42 – ‘Blissful laughter’: ‘the holiday laughter of the Saturnalia …’ etc.

Line 44 – ‘the mighty sonatas’: Ronen points to a passage from Mandelshtam’s prose work The Noise of Time in which Herzen is mentioned, ‘whose stormy political thought will always sound like a Beethoven sonata’.

(261) The original has six four-line stanzas.

POEMS PUBLISHED POSTHUMOUSLY

(222) Lady Godiva: ‘In 1040 Leofric, Earl of Mercia and Lord of Coventry, imposed certain exactions on his tenants, which his Lady besought him to remove. He said he would do so if she would ride naked through the town’ (Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable).

(227) My version has benefited from Nabokov’s salutary, scholastic savaging of Robert Lowell’s adaptation of this poem (New York Review of Books, 4 December 1969).

(258) ‘The paintings he most likely had in mind were Monet’s Lilas au soleil and Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre and Place du Théâtre Français, Printemps’ (J. Baines).

(From 267 and 268) My abbreviated version combines two poems on Ariosto. ‘The manuscripts and drafts [of the first] were taken away when we were searched in May 1934. In Voronezh, O.M. tried to remember the text, but his memory failed him and he wrote a second Ariosto. Soon, on a trip to Moscow, I found the 1933 Ariosto in one of my hiding-places. So there were now two poems with the same theme and material. This is a story in the spirit of the times – and I present it to future commentators’ (N.M., from Chapter 42, translated by Donald Rayfield).

Line 2 – Peter the Great learnt how to shave beards, pull teeth and chop off heads. Through Peter, O.M. is alluding to Stalin.

(286) The poem that led to O.M.’s first arrest, in 1934. As he said to N.M.: ‘Above all, I detest … fascism.’

Line 4 – ‘man of the mountains’: for this see the version by Richard and Elizabeth McKane in Osip Mandelshtam: The Moscow Notebooks (Bloodaxe, 1991).

From Journey to Armenia: Akhmatova wondered how, in 1933, this passage got past the censor. In fact, the editor of Star, a Leningrad literary journal, disobeyed the censor; it cost him his job, but he was not arrested.

Arshak – O.M.; Shapukh – Stalin; Darmastat – Bukharin (executed 1938), who was O.M.’s protector and responsible for his being able to journey to Armenia.

(296) Lament inspired by O.M.’s contemplation of N.M.’s fate. In 1934 O.M.