Volume 15, Number 7 · October 22, 1970
The Nature of the Miracle
By Clarence Brown, Nadezhda Mandelstam
The Russian poet Osip Mandelstam was arrested in May, 1934, for having composed a sixteen-line poem in which Stalin was portrayed as a tyrant and murderer,[*] but he was not summarily shot. Instead, he was flung into prison for a while, then exiled to Cherdyn and finally to Voronezh. This uncommon prolongation of a life that had been in that particular peril, and Stalin's personal intervention, which brought it about, constitute the 'miracle' in the title of this chapter from the memoirs of Mandelstam's widow, Nadezhda Yakovlevna. By the end of the Thirties such miracles were no longer performed. The poet was rearrested and sent by freight car to a camp near Vladivostok, where he died under circumstances of zoological horror in December, 1938.
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