“One Alexander Herzevich”

Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) was born into a Polish-Jewish family in what was then the Russian Empire. He became one of the great poets of Russia’s Silver Age, with a keen sense of the melodies of spoken language. He published his first book, Stone, before the Russian Revolution of 1917. His poetry was celebrated from early on, even in an era rich with great poets. However, as the aims of socialism crystallized in tyranny, Russia, and Russian writers in particular, came to live under relentless terror. By the 1920s, he was shunned by the Soviet establishment for refusing to write in praise of the state. Few poets escaped premature death, whether by privation, suicide, or judicial murder. He died in a prison camp in Siberia in 1938; his poetry and prose was preserved by his wife and friends and published in New York in a collected edition in 1955. Mandelstam dove deep beneath the bleak surface of his era to reveal both the luminosity of the living past and the all-consuming brutality yet to come.

Born in Moscow in 1967, Maxim D. Shrayer immigrated to the U.S. in 1987. He is professor of Russian and English at Boston College. A bilingual writer and translator, Shrayer is the author and editor of ten books, including The World of Nabokov’s Stories and Russian Poet/Soviet Jew. He recently edited and co-translated the two-volume Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature. Shrayer adapted “Sarda Resarta” from his forthcoming memoir, Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration. (updated 10/2007)

J. B. Sisson has published poems, short stories, closet dramas, essays, and translations from French, German, and Old English in many journals and anthologies such as Poetry, The Paris Review, and The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. The 2001 issue of the The North Stone Review contains six of his poems and an essay on Elizabeth Barrett Browning. A few years ago he won first prize for the Delia Award from the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets with a dizain about a pair of starfish, “Astrophel and Stella.”