Osip Mandelstam
Born in 1891 in Warsaw into a Jewish family, Mandelstam studied Latin languages and made the acquaintance of the Symbolists. However, he quickly became a supporter of acmeism as a "literary architect", as claimed by this current. His poem The Seashell testifies to it. When he emigrated, his separation from his relatives as well as from his culture led him to write the poem Tristia in 1920, at the end of the revolutionary period. At that time, popular authors had to face growing censorship under the Stalinist regime. It was during the clandestine reading of his pamphlet against Stalin, in 1933, that Mandelstam was denounced. Despite his suicide attempt, he was deported to Kolyma from where he never returned.
Does my life matter to you,
Night? Like an empty shell,
Out of the universal abyss
I have washed up on your shore. [1]
Acmeism
As in the West, Russian literature experienced the decline of poetry in the nineteenth century, giving way to the novel as well as to the realist movement. If Symbolism had until then the upper hand over other artistic currents during the Silver Age period, two movements emerged that went beyond it:Futurism and Acmeism. The latter includes the great authors of the twentieth century who were little or not published at all at that time, such as Kuzmin, recognized in retrospect as the greatest poet of the Silver Age. Acmeism considers the poet as a craftsman, and does not resort to the symbol as was customary at the very beginning of the century.
The images are emptied like dead animals and stuffed with content that is foreign to them. It is a frightening contredanse of “correspondences” which refer to each other. A perpetual game of winks. Not a precise word, only allusions, insinuations. The rose refers to the young girl, the young girl the rose. Nobody wants to be themselves. [2]