The Voronezh Notebooks: Poems 1935-1937

Nearly comatose after the horrors of repeated interrogations by Stalin's regime, Mandelstam (1891-1938) literally wrote himself back into a semblance of life while exiled 300 miles from Moscow in Voronezh....Mandelstam presents visions of the future, his own and his country's, that are steeped in necessarily coded foreboding. It is a great gift to be able to read these ninety poems together and complete in English for the first time, with explanatory notes provided for each. They form a wrenching diary of `iron tenderness' and doomed, penetrative brilliance"" - Publishers Weekly. Childish and wise, joyous and angry, at once complex and simple, he was sustained for twenty years by his wife and memoirist Nadezhda Mandelstam, who became, with Anna Akhmatova, the savior of his poetry. After his exile to Voronezh and his sentencing to hard labor for counter-revolutionary activities, he died of `heart failure' in the winter of 1938 in Siberia.