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Contents

September 30, 1976 • Volume 23, Number 15

LETTERS

Contributors

Neal Ascherson is the author of The Struggles for Poland, The Black Sea, and Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland. He is an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. (November 2011)

Thomas R. Edwards is Emeritus Professor of English at Rutgers and a former editor of Raritan. His most recent book is Over Here: Criticizing America, 1968–1989. (June 2004)

George M. Fredrickson is Edgar E. Robinson Professor of US History Emeritus at Stanford. His most recent books are Racism: A Short History and Not Just Black and White, a collection co-edited with Nancy Foner. (August 2006)

Alfred Kazin’s most recent book is God and the American Writer. (April 1998)

Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) was born and raised in St. Petersburg, where he attended the prestigious Tenishev School, before studying at the universities of St. Petersburg and Heidelberg and at the Sorbonne. Mandelstam first published his poems in Apollyon, an avant-garde magazine, in 1910, then banded together with Anna Akhmatova and Nicholas Gumilev to form the Acmeist group, which advocated an aesthetic of exact description and chiseled form, as suggested by the title of Mandelstam’s first book, Stone (1913). During the Russian Revolution, Mandelstam left Leningrad for the Crimea and Georgia, and he settled in Moscow in 1922, where his second collection of poems, Tristia, appeared. Unpopular with the Soviet authorities, Mandelstam found it increasingly difficult to publish his poetry, though an edition of collected poems did come out in 1928. In 1934, after reading an epigram denouncing Stalin to friends, Mandelstam was arrested and sent into exile. He wrote furiously during these years, and his wife, Nadezhda, memorized his work in case his notebooks were destroyed or lost. (Nadezhda Mandelstam’s extraordinary memoirs of life with her husband, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, published in the 1970s, later helped to bring Mandelstam a worldwide audience.)

Richard Murphy’s most recent books are Collected Poems and The Kick: A Life Among Writers. (February 2004)

I.F. Stone was an American journalist, publisher of I.F. Stone’s Weekly, and a regular contributor to the Review. For more about him please visit www.ifstone.org.

Keith Thomas is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His latest book is The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England. (December 2009)

Helen Vendler is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor in the Department of English at Harvard. Her most recent book, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, was published last year.
 (November 2011)

Stanisław Barańczak is a poet, translator, and literary critic. He won the 2007 Nike Award for the best work of Polish literature published in the previous year and the 2009 Silesius Poetry Award for lifetime achievement. He is a professor of Polish language and literature at Harvard University.

Adam Michnik is Editor in Chief of the Warsaw daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. His piece in this issue will appear in Andrei Sakharov and Human Rights, a collection of Sakharov’s writings that is being published by the Council of Europe this month. (January 2011)

Michael Wood teaches at Princeton and is the author, most recently, of Yeats and Violence. -

Henri Zerner, Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard, is the author, most recently, of Renaissance Art in France: The Invention of Classicism and Écrire l’histoire de l’art: Figures d’une discipline. (January 2005)