Osip Mandelstam’s ‘Black Earth’ reaps sweetness from the darkest Soviet years | Calvert Reads

Osip Mandelstam, best remembered as both a witness to and victim of Stalin’s Soviet Russia, was only 47 when he died in a camp. He had spent several years in a labour camp following his arrest during the repressive 1930s. Black Earth, a new translation and selection of his poetry and prose published by New Directions, reveals how he grew from a student of Baudelaire’s Symbolism to a leading Acmeist, a neo-classical school of poetry that included members like Anna Akhmatova. Later on, he became more political and was eventually arrested for penning the infamous Stalin Epigram. This satirical poem, which criticised the Soviet leader and the climate of fear he engendered — “Like horseshoes he hammers out order on order” — was often referred to as a death sentence in 16 lines. It led to Mandelstam’s exile.

It is the work he wrote during his exile in Russia’s black-earth region that form the resounding heart of the collection. An untitled poem captures the ceaseless brutality of Stalin’s regime in the stunning image of a “wave breaking a wave’s back”. Yet, in the midst of such bleak anguish, perhaps most impressive was Mandelstam’s sustained hope:

You’ve not yet died. Still you’re not alone

as long as with your poor beloved

you revel in the plains, their cold

magnificence, the mist, the blizzard.

Accompanying excerpts from Mandelstam’s prose help clarify his vision and life. Essays on the poet’s youth reveal how his infatuation with St Petersburg’s “grand spectacle” led to a “childish imperialism” that was tempered by the reality of the “Judaic chaos” around him. The tsarist St Petersburg of military parades and Christmas trees which Mandelstam remembered was “not a motherland, not a hearth,” for the writer whose Judaism would stamp him with the spectre of otherness he’d be forced to flee his whole life.

Black Earth also includes “The Word and Culture”, a sort of poetic manifesto that unlocks the thrust behind many of Mandelstam’s poems. “Poetry is a plow,” he writes, “which turns over the earth so that the deep layers of time, the black earth, come to the surface.” It is a metaphor Mandelstam returned to frequently, even in exile: “How beautiful it is, cheerful, strong-cheekboned, how / sweet is the fat earth’s pressure on the plow.” If Peter France’s deft translation offers anything new about Mandelstam, it is a glimpse of his unwavering belief that poetry could, and should, reap sweetness from even the darkest experiences of cruelty and injustice.

Get your own copy of Black Earth here.