Osip Emilevich Mandelstam (1891-1938) was a Russian poet in his own right, and an associate of the "Acmeist" movement, along with Nikolay Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova. There were three major schools of poetic thought in the first half of the twentieth century, the Symbolists, the Futurists, and the Acmeists. These names are only a means to identify various forms and techniques used in differing periods, and not a defining title in themselves.

Russia's Symbolists, foremost, contained Alaksandr Blok, Andrey Bely, Valery Bryusov, Konstantine Balmont, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Zinaida Gippius. This movement, occurring at the turn of the century and moving slightly into the Revolution, attempted to re-educate the generation on the system of Russian nineteenth century verse. However, by the year 1910, its emphasis had fragmented into too many different genres to have any further influence. Its poetry was characterized as mystical, revolving around the romanticism of the Vicotrian era, and using abstract ideas to represent or express the thoughts and emotions of the poet. As the power of the revolutionaries increased, the intelligentsia, frustrated with Russia's backwardness, sought the cause of freedom to liberate the illiterate masses. With their fervor arose the Futurists.

Futurists, such as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, revered the Revolution, and broke away from the themes and tradition of the Symbolist poets.

The Acmeists, with the leader being Gumilev, included Mandelstam and Akhmatova, among others. Take note that even as each poet had their own ideas about the tenets of "Acmeism", their poetry so resembles on and another in form and theme, and their ideas were so definitely different from their formers, that they were announced as an entire, separate movement of poetry. Concrete, realized images, logical meanings, and a definite refusal to enter into use of overly abstract, otherwordly phenomena, which the Symbolists were prone to refer to. Strong, definite poems, bereft of the mystique that so characterized the poetry of the early century.

What is important about this poetic evolution from Symbolism to Acmeism is not rhetoric nor style nor technique. Its importance lies in being to hard-won result of a group of talented, devoted Russian thinkers and artists. Its many transitions and deviations, even its definition, is not important.

It is the art that the title represents, the art which was created despite suffering, the artists who persevered, and sacrificed their life for their ideas- here in lies the significance of the so-called Acmeist school.

WORKS

• Stone - published in 1913, this was Mandelstam's first book of poetry, which granted his recognition as a poet in St. Petersburg. An expanded edition was published in 1916.
  
• Tristia - published in 1922, it revealed Mandelstam's own unique voice, separate from the more traditional methods he had experimented with in Stone.
  
• Poems - This contained all his previous poetry, from 1921 to 1925.
  
• On Poetry - All his critical essays
  
• The Egyptian Stamp collected prose
  

• Fourth Prose - appeared in 1930.
  

He was arrested in 1934 for a scathing poem he wrote about dictator Joseph Stalin. A three-year exile in Cherdyn ended when he attempted suicide, and was given a choice as to his next place of exile.

Mandelstam chose Voronezh as his place of exile after his three-year grueling, soul-scarring interrogation episode with the officials. It was so harrowing that he did not speak of it, nor write poetry for a full 30 months. When he finally began to chip away at the cast surrounding his psyche, "The Voronezh Noetbooks" were the result. These revealing poems are scented with concrete, numb frustration,wide skies and the laborious unravelling of Mandelstam's creativity.

The Voronezh Notebooks, translated by Richard and Elizabeth McKane, is prefaced by the translator:

"My first attempts to translate Osip Mandelstam started in the sixties, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, and continued again on and off through the seventies. Although I loved to read Mandelstam's poetry in Russian, my attempts at translation on my own didn't quite make sense as English poems. It wasn't until I teamed up with Elizabeth Mckane in Princeton, and we worked together on the first draft translation of "The Moscow Notebooks", that some of the problems in translation were resolved. Late Mandelstam is very difficult even in the original Russian. His technique is composed of mouthing words with his lips, as opposed to sitting at a table with pen and paper, gives the poems a distinct sound and quality, and a unique voice, ranging from the colloquial to the elegiac. Not only do Mandelstam's poems rhyme, but also sounds and roots evoke other sounds and roots. Form and content unite in an unsplittable whole in Russian. So our interpreting capacities were tested to the full in trying to render meaningful poems in English."

Osip Mandelstam died in a transit prison in the soviet camps in the winter of 1938. His wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, wrote his memoirs in Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandonded.