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Osip Mandelstam Quotes

Osip Emilyevich Mandelshtam was a Russian poet. He was the husband of Nadezhda Mandelshtam and one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets. He was arrested by Joseph Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife Nadezhda. Given a reprieve of sorts, they moved to Voronezh in southwestern Russia. In 1938 Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to a camp in Siberia. He died that year at a transit camp.

✵ 3. January 1891 – 27. December 1938   •   Other names اسیپ ماندلشتام, أوسيب ماندلشتام, Мандельштам Осип Эмильевич
Osip Mandelstam photo

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Stalin Epigram
Osip Mandelstam
Osip Mandelstam: 5   quotes 3   likes

Famous Osip Mandelstam Quotes

“Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?”

Osip Mandelstam

Quoted in Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir (1970), ch. 35

“My turn shall also come:
I sense the spreading of a wing.”

Osip Mandelstam

Source: The Selected Poems

“Perhaps my whisper was already born before my lips.”

Osip Mandelstam

“Where to start?
Everything cracks and shakes,
The air trembles with similes,
No one world's better than another;
the earth moans with metaphors.”

Osip Mandelstam

Source: Selected Poems

“We live, but we do not feel the land beneath us,
Ten steps away and our words cannot be heard.”

Osip Mandelstam Stalin Epigram

"Stalin Epigram" (November 1933) (Russian: Мы живем, под собою не чуя страны... http://www.litera.ru/stixiya/authors/mandelshtam/my-zhivem-pod.html; English: "We live, not sensing our own country beneath us", http://www.tonykline.co.uk/PITBR/Russian/MoreMandelstam.htm#_Toc103483111) trans. A. S. Kline.

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