was arrested and spent two weeks in the Lubianka prison, where he was interrogated and tortured. As a supreme and miraculous act of clemency on the part of the ‘Boss’, he was sentenced to only three years’ exile; Stalin ordered that O.M. should be ‘isolated but preserved’.

The rest of the poems in this book were composed in exile in Voronezh

Of the Voronezh poems D. Rayfield has said: ‘The poet as a thinker, as an incarnation of the Hellenic spirit, barely functions. He is only an eye bewildered by forests, rivers, earth, wooden houses, the open spaces and the boundless sky of the steppes, which itself seems to him to be an eye on a cosmic plane. His thoughts are paralysed by an instinctive feeling of a predator’s presence, the Kremlin which is now the axis on which the poet’s world rotates’ (‘Mandelshtam’s Voronezh poetry’, Russian Literature Triquarterly, 1975); ‘the poetry of 1933 and afterwards has a posthumous quality, breathing borrowed air on borrowed time’ (Grosseteste Review; Vol. 7, Nos. 1–3. ‘Deaths and Resurrections: the Later Poetry of Osip Mandelshtam’).

(306) Curvature, like that of the earth’s surface, is a curious feature of Red Square, both as viewed from one side to the other, and also along the other axis, as it slopes down to the River Moskva. ‘Red Square symbolizes the rotten core of the system … [The] Stalinist Terror … knows no limits’ (J. Baines).

(307) ‘foot’: ‘the human and the metric foot which must both walk the black earth’ (D. Rayfield).

‘muttering lips’: ‘the symbol of [his] poetry’ (J. Baines).

(318) N.M. brought O.M. ‘a souvenir of the past, a small bag of stones from Koktebel … [O.M.] affirms his predilection for the more prosaic pebbles from the sea’ (J. Baines). There is an untranslatable pun in the second line: opal means ‘opal’, opala ‘disgrace’ in Russian.

(319) O.M. ‘was beginning to see the soldiers as victims rather than oppressors, as vassals in the power of oriental-style despots, with their exotic retinues … of janissaries and eunuchs’ (J. Baines).

‘Lines on Stalin’: O.M.’s ‘positive’ ode to Stalin. The original consists of seven twelve-line stanzas.

In January 1937, in exile, with the rope around his neck, O.M. tried to write an ode in praise of Stalin to save his wife’s life and his own. The attempt failed: this is part of the remarkably ambiguous result.

See Slavic Review, 1975; Bengt Jangfeldt: ‘O.M.’s “Ode” to Stalin’, Scando-Slavica, 1976; Clarence Brown: ‘Into the Heart of Darkness: Mandelshtam’s Ode to Stalin’, Slavic Review, 1967; and J. Baines: Mandelshtam: The Later Poetry.

(350) ‘The historical perspective which caused Mandelshtam to see [Stalin] as the Judas not so much of present but of future generations was seldom achieved by his contemporaries in 1937, at the height of the Terror’ (J. Baines).

(354) Third stanza, line 4: the ‘shadow’ Mandelshtam might have ‘begged favour of’ is Stalin.

(358) Henry Gifford (in a letter to me): ‘The “stale loaves” suggest to me Dante’s bread that tastes of salt, or what is called in Richard II “the bitter bread of banishment”.’

(366) ‘Urals’: in 1934 Mandelshtam was exiled to the Urals, to Cherdyn (where – thinking he was going to be arrested again by the secret police – he threw himself out of the window of the hospital), and travelled along the Volga to arrive there.

‘These steppes’ refers to the area around Voronezh.

I am indebted to R. Chandler for drawing my attention to the fact that ‘here are all my rights’ refers to Pushkin’s poem From Pindemonte (1836), in which he says he doesn’t mind about censorship, not having the right to vote, etc.; all he cares about is that he should be left to himself, not have to give account to others of what he does, and be free to wonder at the godlike beauties of nature and art: ‘Here is my happiness! Here are my rights …’

R. F. Holmes has pointed out to me that ‘of course both poets did care about other things than being left to themselves … Mandelshtam, besides attacking Stalin, attacked one Caesar at least, two Tsars, Napoleon, Hitler and Mussolini.’ (In Rome, composed in 1937, Rome is characterized as a ‘nursery for murder’; ‘The degenerate chin of the dictator/Sags over Rome’).

(367) This poem was written during the time when Mandelshtam was particularly obsessed with Joseph Stalin. Wasp, in Russian, is osa, axis is os’. Joseph, in Russian, can be either Osip or Iosif.

O.M. ‘obviously listed here some of the arts officially … encouraged in the mid-thirties, the period of violin-competitions, portrait-painting, the revival of the classical opera …’ (O.