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OSIP
MANDELSTAM
The tragic life of the brilliant Russian poet Osip Mandelstam-a
Warsaw·born Jew who died in a labor camp near Vladivostok in 1938-
has recently begun to emerge. Still largely suppressed in the U.S.S.R.,
Russian language editions of some of his literary works have appeared
in
recent years
in
the West. Now, with the publishing of THE PROSE
OF OSIP MANDELSTAM the English.speaking world is introduced
to Mandelstam's major prose works and a remarkably moving reRec·
tion of early 20th century Russia. Here is a sample of his unique
prose style:
"Hone went outside on one of those icy Crimean nights and listened
to the noise of footsteps on the snowless clayey earth, frozen solid like
our northern wheel tracks in October, if in the darkness one groped
with the eyes among the city's hills-populated sepulchres, but with
extinguished lights-if one swallowed that gruel of smothered life, •
thickened with dense barking of dogs and salted with stars, one began
to sense with physical clarity the plague that had descended upon the
world, a Thirty Years' War, with pestilence, darkened, lamps, barking
of dogs and, in the houses of little people, appalling silence."
Theodosia,
1925
THE PROSE OF OSIP MANDELSTAM
The Noise of Time • Theodosia . The Egyptian Stamp
Translated,
With a Critical Essay,
by
CLARENCE BROWN
208 pages
$5.00
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
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