Retracing the Footsteps of Osip Mandelstam and Vladimir Mayakovsky

At Literary Hub, read Val Vinokur's thoughts on two major Russian poets, Osip Mandelstam and Vladimir Mayakovksy. This excerpt comes from Vinokur's introduction to recent translations of both writers. "Below is a picture of my son, looking at Anna Akhmatova’s family photo album in her apartment-turned-museum in Petersburg on July 4, 2014. Anna’s stuffed monkey sits behind him on a couch that Vladimir Mayakovsky used whenever he spent the night there, at the Fontanka House," Vinokur begins. From there: 

According to the docent, the 6’2” Mayakovsky would have to remove the armrest cushions. Osip Mandelstam also sometimes spent the night on this couch, but did not need to remove the cushions in order to sleep comfortably at Anna Akhmatova’s. His widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam, always objected to descriptions of him as a tiny “homeless bird.” Osia was broad-shouldered, of average height, she would insist.

In the upper left corner, Pushkin gazes down from the same print that inhabited my own childhood home—first in Moscow and later in Miami Beach, packed in our bags when I arrived with my mother and grandmother in 1979. In many Soviet Jewish homes, this image took the place of icons or portraits of Lenin and rabbinic ancestors. If a self-described child of Africa could become the father of Russian literature… So went the beginning of the syllogism that had been rendered opaque in South Florida, which had its own complicated relationship to the descendants of African slaves.

My book is like Akhmatova’s couch. I thought that if both Mayakovsky and Mandelstam could sleep on the same piece of furniture, then my poems could hold the space between my translations of both poets—so radically different in temperament, style, and outlook. Nadezhda Mandelstam describes how her husband became friends with Mayakovsky in Petersburg, but the two separated due to the fact that “it was ‘not done’ for poets of rival schools to associate with each other.” Mayakovsky was a flamboyant Russian extrovert who served the Soviet regime with poster work and poetry until he could no longer muffle his more lyrical energies. Mandelstam was a refined Jewish introvert who poetically defied the regime and was killed by it. 

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