Books: A Raspberry in Stalin's Mouth

One gloomy afternoon in 1934, a Russian poet named Osip Mandelstam made the worst mistake of his life. He dropped in on Boris Pasternak at his Moscow apartment. Pasternak he knew he could trust, but there were four other Russian writers in the room. But Mandelstam was too wrought up to be wary. He passionately recited an "epigram" he had written about Stalin.

We live. We are not sure our land is under us. Ten feet away, no one hears us. But wherever there's even a half-conversation, we remember the Kremlin s mountaineer. His thick fingers are fat as worms, his words reliable as ten pound weights. His boot tops shine, his cockroach mustache is laughing. About him, the great, his thin-necked, drained advisors. He plays with them. He is happy with half-men around him. They make touching and funny animal sounds. He alone talks Russian. One after another, his sentences like horseshoes! He pounds them out. He always hits the nail, the balls. After each death, he is like a Georgian tribesman, putting a raspberry in his mouth.

A few days later, the Georgian tribesman in the Kremlin, who was known to like raspberries, put a ripe one in his mouth. Betrayed by one of the writers in Pasternak's parlor, Mandelstam was arrested on Stalin's personal order and banished to Siberia. His poetry was suppressed and is still almost entirely unknown in the Soviet Union, while in the West his reputation has been obscured by trite translations.

Now, three decades after his death, the world is beginning to realize that the man Stalin destroyed was an extraordinary writer and possibly even a great one. In The Prose of Osip Mandelstam (Princeton University; $5). Slavonist Clarence Brown recently provided accurate and arresting translations of the poet's principal stories, and in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Poet Robert Lowell has published renditions of nine poems that sometimes in raw power and sometimes in fine artistry support comparison with the best poetry of the century.

Hard Choice. Mandelstam could have had an easy life if he had wanted one. Born in 1891, he was the only son of a wealthy Jewish merchant. His father treated him to a grand tour of Western Europe before sending him to the University of St. Petersburg and offered young Osip a safe future in the leather business. But Osip opted for the dangerous life of letters, and his father cut him off without a ruble. Nothing daunted, Osip moved in with the Acmeists, a stubborn little literary sect centered in St. Petersburg and set up in opposition to the symbolists, who at that time dominated Russian poetry. In fact, Mandelstam's esthetic ideal was Athenian, and like the temples of the Golden Age, his poems were constructed with stately simplicity and monumental strength. Says Isaiah Berlin: "Mandelstam's poetry possessed a purity and perfection of form never again attained in Russia." His stories, on the other hand, were a wild ebullition of image and idea, and his essays an icefall of glittering intellectual fragments.