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By 1917, when he published his second book of poems, Mandelstam was 26 and already recognized as a master. But the master, as one friend remembers him, looked like a child—"a thin young boy with a twig of lily-of-the-valley in his buttonhole and eyelashes so long that they covered half his cheek." Other friends said that he looked like a startled chicken, but it soon became clear that this chicken had a lion's heart.
Mandelstam hated the Bolshevik tyranny from the day it took power, and with a crazy courage that still takes the breath away, he made his feelings known. One night he saw a secret-police official swilling vodka in a public house and drunkenly transcribing the names of political undesirables on a large stack of execution writs. Outraged, the pint-sized poet charged across the room, snatched up the warrants, ripped them to shreds and ran out into the night.
The Outsider. Trotsky's sister, who was impressed by Mandelstam's poetry, saved his life on this occasion, but thereafter he was a marked man. All through the '20s, he lived with his young wife in poverty and in fear. In 1931 he wrote:
I am hanging on the outside of a terrifying time, a moving bus. I do not know why I live.
He was 43 when Stalin sent him to Siberia. His sufferings there disastrously aged his body but wondrously matured his art. Lowell has translated an elegy on exile that suggests how near to the bone his later poems strike.
My body, all that I borrowed from the earth, I do not want it to return here—some flour-white butterfly. My body, scratched and charred with thought, I want it to become a street, a land—It was full of vertebrae, and well aware of its length. The dark green pine needles howling in the wind look like funeral wreaths thrown into the water . . . how our pastimes and life were drained away!
In 1937 Mandelstam was briefly set free. But his energies were drained away by illness, and he was still in a sickbed when he was arrested again on a trumped-up charge of counter-revolutionary activity and sentenced to five years in a concentration camp in far-eastern Siberia. The shock of his new sentence drove Mandelstam out of his mind. Under the delusion that his own food was poisoned, he began to steal food from other prisoners. Time and again his fellow prisoners caught him and beat him cruelly. In the end they threw him out of the barracks into 30-below-zero cold. Filthy, emaciated, dressed in rags, he lived on for several weeks, sleeping in sheds and eating garbage. And then he died.