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On another occasion he was denied a pair of pants—by Playwright Maxim Gorky, then head of the Soviet Writers' Union—because Gorky thought Mandelstam did not possess enough useful knowledge to deserve them.
When asked to define Acmeism, the school of formal, rigorously clear poets to which he belonged, he replied that it was "a nostalgia for world culture."
He often shaped this sentiment into poetry. In 1923, after the ruinous civil war, he wrote:
My animal, my age, who will ever be able
to look into your eyes?
Who will ever glue back together the
vertebrae of two centuries with his blood?
Behind such lines was Mandelstam's yearning for the wrecked social and intellectual milieu that had nourished him in St. Petersburg. Hope Abandoned, too, is shadowed by the conflict between the Slavophiles and those Russians who felt closer to the traditions of Western Europe. The book is also affected by ideas like Tolstoy's radical Christian belief that art should have social utility (a doctrine that was perverted by party ideologues into propaganda for socialist realism). The revolution fundamentally shattered all Mandelstam's ideas about community and home. Their great friend and aesthetic ally, the poet Anna Akhmatova, scathingly summed up the new world: "Nowadays all you need is an ashtray and a spittoon."
The fact that Nadezhda Mandelstam has found the peace and freedom to write — if not to publish — her memoirs in the Soviet Union has done little to lift her basic pessimism. Skeptically she writes, "The fact that the old forces of evil are enfeebled gives no grounds for optimism ... It will require tremendous good management if something fatal is not to happen 'as the curtain comes down' this time, if a new kind of evil, with new blandishments and new watchwords, is not to sweep into power." But against this bleak assessment she has resurrected the blithe spirit of Osip Mandelstam, whom she sees as the saintly, though very human vessel of a great poetic gift. He practiced no religion, though he was thoroughly imbued with Judaeo-Christian views about good, evil and sin. His deeply personal notion of Christianity, says his wife, was mainly stirred by the vision of "a joyful com munion with God, a game that children play with their father." He was a marked man who remained full of life. During the bleakest periods of persecution he thought of suicide but decided against it. As he told his wife, "You have to live your whole life to realize that it does not belong to you."