The act of their transcription was the sign of their completion: all significant work on the poems was done before they were committed to paper. From the beginning, according to the testimony of Nadezhda, Mandelstam was aware that he was working on a single book, a book that would consist of several related groups of poems. By the time they left Voronezh the Notebooks as a book was for all intents and purposes complete. He did not, however, live to prepare a final text, much less to see the poems published. Osip and Nadezhda were allowed to return to Moscow in 1937, but he was lured back only to be arrested again and sent to Siberia. It is assumed that he died the following year in a transit camp in Vladivostok, either from exhaustion and starvation, or from typhus, or from his chronic heart condition, or from all four. But, in fact, when or where or how he died, no one knows for certain.

By the time Mandelstam arrived in Voronezh, his poetry had been stripped of nonessential elements. Gone as well was his native, infectious cockiness, his confidence in his “place at the table.” He had been dragged by the nape of his neck to the farthest edge of the twentieth century and abandoned.

Where had he landed? In a city on a tributary of the River Don, on the border with Ukraine, in the land of the chernozem, the black-earth cornucopia of plenty. The abundance of this region would provoke only madness in the masters of the times: on the one hand Stalin’s insane scheme of collectivization and the starvation of millions in the midst of plenty; on the other Hitler’s lunatic dream of colonization and a greater German empire, and the destruction as his troops cleared the land of human impediment on their way east. Mandelstam himself had already seen the starvation in the streets; had felt, and anticipated in his poetry, the coming wave that within a few years of his death would leave Voronezh entirely in ruins.

Condemned, isolated, impoverished, terrified, reduced to themselves but entirely attentive to the world at large—somehow he, they, had landed directly in the middle of it all: Hitler, Stalin, and beyond Hitler and Stalin, in the distance but obvious to the poet’s eye, the terrible promise of a future of uncontrolled, inhuman, infinite destruction.

The Voronezh Notebooks survived by a miracle, or rather through the extraordinary determination of Nadezhda Mandelstam. In exile and poverty, under persecution and in isolation, his manuscripts hidden in teapots, shared out with friends, nightly renewed in the fragile casket of her human, fallible recall, she made it her life’s work to preserve her husband’s poetry.

Given the circumstances of its preservation, the completeness of the text and the general consensus as to its form and content are remarkable. But discrepancies between the various published versions of the Notebooks have existed, and over time discrepancies have continued to arise.

The issues that are at stake fall into a few straightforward categories. First are the two poems addressed to Stalin. Nadezhda describes in painfully humorous detail her husband’s ludicrous attempt to write an ode in praise of the dictator, in a futile but completely comprehensible effort to save their necks. Second are the poems that Mandelstam self-censored by producing variant lines he thought would be more palatable. Then there are the poems that Mandelstam produced with variants either because he was uncertain how to proceed or as discrete, and complete, approaches to the same initial impulse. More complex is the question of poems that Mandelstam, by his wife’s own testimony, was uncertain belonged in the corpus of the book. These include the poems beginning “No, it’s not a migraine” and “It’s your fate that your narrow shoulders.” Finally, there is the issue of the correct sequence of the poems.

The text I used, which came from Polnoe Sobranie Stijotvorenie, published by Biblioteka Poeta in St. Petersburg in 1995 and edited by A.G. Mets, has opted above all for clarity and simplicity. The poems addressed directly to Stalin have been removed. (Some have argued that they should be included as a matter of historical accuracy, but I have no problem with eliminating material produced under compulsion.) The poems whose membership in the fraternity is tenuous have been removed. Lines and stanzas where Mandelstam tried self-censorship have been removed. Where variants exist that betray the poet’s indecision, choices have been made. Where variants exist as separate, complete poems, of course they have been preserved.

More complicated is the question of the sequence of the poems. Nadezhda has emphasized the importance to her husband of ordering the poems by date. She took as her point of reference the moment not of composition but of transcription. In the version I used there are some departures from his wife’s ordering. Most delicate is the decision to begin the Third Notebook with the “Verses on the Unknown Soldier” instead of putting it later as Nadezhda has it. As Jennifer Baines discusses in her book on the late poetry, the composition of the “Verses” was the impulse that set in motion the Third Notebook.‡ Even though it was only written down in its final form later, the other poems were written within the parenthesis it formed.