Thanks to the memories of the poet’s wife and numerous studies, the poet’s life has hardly left a single dark spot. As for death, which the poet himself regarded as the "final creative act," there are more mysteries than answers. Why did the poet write a "malicious epigram" about Stalin, which would prove fatal for the author? Why did the ruthless Soviet tyrant grant the poet a whole four years of life?

In November 1933, Osip Mandelstam wrote a poem about Stalin:

We live, not feeling the country beneath us,

Our words are unheard ten steps away,

And where half a conversation is possible,

They recall the Kremlin Highlander.

His thick fingers are fat like worms,

And his words are as heavy as weights,

Cockroach mustaches laugh,

And his boots shine.

Around him is a rabble of thin-necked leaders,

He plays with the services of half-men.

Some whistle, some meow, some whimper,

He alone babbles and pokes,

Like a horseshoe, forging decree after decree —

To the groin, to the forehead, to the brow, to the eye.

Every execution of his is a delight

And the broad chest of an Ossetian.

Friends and contemporaries reacted disdainfully to this work. Ehrenburg considered it an accidental piece in the poet’s oeuvre, calling it "verses." Even more sharply, B.L. Pasternak reacted to the "Caucasian Highlander": "What you read to me has nothing to do with literature or poetry. It is not a literary fact, but a fact of suicide, which I do not approve of and do not want to participate in." And today, unfortunately, many tend to believe that this critical "epigram" was not an artistic but merely a political act. The chopped lines and vivid metaphors made this piece the most accurate and precise portrayal of the leader and his era ever composed. It is hardly conceivable that Mandelstam did not know what awaited him for such lines. However, Osip Emilievich did not even try to hide such a dangerous work but read it to about fifteen people, as if consciously going to "suicide."

However, Mandelstam did exercise some caution in his actions. Fearing a search, the poet destroyed all records containing the "epigram" and relied only on memory: his own, his wife’s, and the family friend Emma Gershtein’s. The latter recalls in her memoirs: "One morning, Nadia unexpectedly came to me, practically bursting in. She spoke abruptly. 'Osya wrote a very sharp piece. It cannot be written down. No one but me knows it. Someone else must remember it. That will be you. We will die, and you will pass it on to people later. Osya will read it to you, and then you will memorize it with me. No one must know about this yet.' Nadia was very agitated." Incidentally, it was at the moment of this secret reading that Mandelstam changed the poem’s ending. The fear of arrest is also evidenced by the fact that Nadezhda Yakovlevna (the poet’s wife) kept his works during his lifetime, exile, and after Osip Emilievich’s death in pots, in boots—anywhere but the desk drawer.

On January 8, 1934, the poet Andrei Bely died. At the funeral, the lid of the coffin accidentally fell on Mandelstam. Those present saw this as a terrible omen, to which the poet himself replied ironically: "I am ready for death." After the reading of the "epigram," one of its listeners reported Mandelstam, and on the night of May 13–14, 1934, the poet was arrested. The investigator subjected the author to torture. The NKVD’s methods were not particularly diverse: bright lamps, solitary confinement, straitjackets, and so on—in short, everything that could break a person and humiliate him. Mandelstam confessed to everything, and not just confessed but also named those to whom he had read the "epigram." Why Pasternak’s name was not on the list of listeners, although he was one of the first to learn about the composition, remains a mystery. Later, Osip Emilievich confessed to his wife that at Lubyanka he experienced such intense fear that he even tried to cut his veins. Incidentally, the investigator Shivarov, who interrogated the poet, was arrested some time later and committed suicide.

As Akhmatova recalled those days: "On May 13, 1934, he was arrested. On that very day, after a barrage of telegrams and phone calls, I came to the Mandelstams from Leningrad (where not long before, he had a confrontation with Tolstoy). We were all so poor then that, to buy a ticket back, I took with me my Order badge of the Monkey Chamber—the last one given by Remizov in Russia (I received it after Remizov fled in 1921)—and a statuette by Danko (my portrait, 1924), to sell.

The arrest warrant was signed by Yagoda himself. The search lasted all night. They looked for poems, went through manuscripts thrown out of the chest. We all sat in one room. It was very quiet. Behind the wall, at Kirsanov’s, a Hawaiian guitar was playing. The investigator found 'The Wolf' ('For the rattling valor of coming centuries...') in my presence and showed it to Osip Emilievich. He silently nodded. Saying goodbye, he kissed me. They took him away at seven in the morning. It was already quite light. Nadia went to her brother, I went to the Chulkovs on Smolensky Boulevard 8, and we agreed to meet somewhere. Returning home together, we cleaned the apartment and sat down to breakfast. Again a knock, again them, again a search. Khazin said: 'If they come again, they will take you with them.' Pasternak, whom I visited that same day, went to plead for Mandelstam at 'Izvestia' with Bukharin; I went to the Kremlin to Yenuqidze. (At that time, getting into the Kremlin was almost a miracle. It was arranged by the actor Ruslanov through Yenuqidze’s secretary.) Yenuqidze was quite polite but immediately asked: 'Maybe some poems?' With this, we hastened and probably softened the outcome. The sentence was three years in Cherdyn, where Osip threw himself out of the hospital window because he thought they had come for him and broke his arm. Nadia sent a telegram to the Central Committee. Stalin ordered the case to be reviewed and allowed choosing another place. Then he called Pasternak. The rest is too well known."

Unable to endure her husband’s torment, Nadezhda Yakovlevna turned to N. I. Bukharin, who sincerely sympathized with Mandelstam, asking him to intercede for the detainee. He took on the case but was horrified to learn that the poet was arrested "for an epigram about Stalin." "Yagoda read him the poems about Stalin, and he, frightened, backed down...," the poet’s wife believed. It is known that the poet Demyan Bedny gave a categorical answer to Pasternak’s request: "Neither you nor I can interfere in this matter." Incidentally, the line from the "epigram": "His thick fingers are fat like worms..." was born thanks to Bedny, who once carelessly remarked that he could not stand when Stalin flipped through books from his library with his fat fingers. It is obvious that the poet’s probable defenders themselves were hanging by a thread from death. It is difficult to judge the author’s close ones and friends for not being able to save him from tragedy, especially since the investigator threatened execution not only to Mandelstam but to everyone who heard his poem. Bukharin still made an attempt to save Mandelstam. One of these attempts was a letter addressed directly to the leader. Upon receiving it, Stalin unexpectedly called Pasternak. It is impossible to imagine that Stalin called the writer to inquire about the case details; he could not have been unaware of all the details. Stalin understood that posterity would remember him not by flattering poems but by those that could sincerely and skillfully convey his greatness. Already in exile, Mandelstam indeed wrote several compositions praising the leader, but none of them would be remembered by the people as vividly as the "malicious epigram."

After the arrest, execution awaited Mandelstam. Everyone believed this, including the poet himself, and it was obvious. But in Mandelstam’s case, a miracle happened, otherwise it cannot be called. In 1993, a letter from N. I. Bukharin about Osip Mandelstam’s arrest was found in Stalin’s Kremlin archive, bearing Stalin’s handwritten resolution. This resolution is the only documentary evidence to date of Stalin’s involvement in Mandelstam’s 1934 case. Stalin’s text and its dating contradicted the established view of the investigation process in Mandelstam’s case. The accepted opinion was that Stalin, despite the insult of the epigram directed at him, by his order to "isolate but preserve" effectively halted the OGPU investigation, which had sentenced Mandelstam on May 26 to a relatively mild term (three years of Ural exile accompanied by his wife), replaced on June 10 by an even milder option—three years of administrative expulsion.

The discovered text of the resolution contradicted this picture. Bukharin’s letter is undated, but its text clearly indicates it was written after the approval of Mandelstam’s initial sentence, his expulsion from Moscow to Cherdyn on May 28, and the suicide attempt there on the night of June 4. Bukharin’s letter can be dated June 5–6, 1934. The letter, written on the letterhead of the newspaper "Izvestia," of which Bukharin was then editor-in-chief, lacks Stalin Secretariat’s marks, indicating it reached Stalin directly, bypassing the bureaucratic procedure of delivering papers to the leader. This suggested Stalin read the letter on the same days—most likely on the day Bukharin wrote it. The resolution left by him (also undated) on the letter in blue pencil read: "Who gave them the right to arrest Mandelstam? Outrage..."

A literal reading of Stalin’s words meant that a) by June 5–6, 1934, he knew nothing about Mandelstam’s arrest, and b) the fact of the arrest caused his displeasure, addressed to the OGPU. However, this did not fit the picture in which on May 26 the leader sanctioned ("isolate but preserve") the poet’s first sentence. Of course, Stalin’s ignorance excluded his acquaintance with the text of the poem incriminated to Mandelstam. This was nonsense. When the investigation was completed, the author of the "epigram" was exiled for three years to the town of Cherdyn in the Sverdlovsk region, where his wife was allowed to accompany him. Soon, this exile was canceled: Osip Emilievich tried to commit suicide by throwing himself out of a window, Nadezhda Yakovlevna, in despair, wrote to friends and acquaintances in Moscow, and thanks to Bukharin’s letter, the Mandelstams were allowed to settle anywhere except the twelve largest cities of the country. The couple randomly chose Voronezh. Here, despite poverty, they had the right to live and work not in some factory but in the local newspaper and theater, and to receive guests. Moreover, the Voronezh cycle of Mandelstam’s poems is considered the pinnacle of his work. While the poet "toiled," as Nadezhda Yakovlevna claimed, over odes to Stalin, assuring the leader of the success of his plan, his wife carefully preserved her husband’s sincere and hard-won compositions.

In 1937, the exile term ended, and the poet unexpectedly received permission to leave Voronezh. In the fall of 1937, the couple came to Petersburg for two days; they had no money and nowhere to live. They stayed at the "Writers’ Skyscraper" at 9 Griboedov Canal, Mandelstam’s last Leningrad address. After a short stay in Moscow, the couple went to a trade union sanatorium, where on the night of May 1–2, Mandelstam was arrested again. This time, the reason for the arrest was a statement by the secretary of the USSR Writers’ Union, Stavsky, proposing to "resolve the issue of Mandelstam," whose poems were "obscene and slanderous," and informing the authorities about the family’s illegal visits to Moscow. The letter was addressed to the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, the chief executioner of that time, N. I. Yezhov. On May 2, the detainee was taken to Cherusti station, located 25 kilometers from the sanatorium, and sent by stage to a camp in the Far East. On December 27, 1938, at the age of 47, Osip Emilievich died. Neither the date nor the place of death—one of the transit points in Vladivostok—is exact. The cause of Mandelstam’s death remains unknown: according to one version, the poet died of typhus; according to another, which was indicated in the official NKVD conclusion, it was heart paralysis. Mandelstam’s body lay unburied for several months, and then the entire "winter stack," that is, all prisoners who did not survive the winter, were buried in a mass grave.

Sources:

Anna Akhmatova. Pages from the Diary <About Mandelstam>

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Мандельштам,_Осип_Эмильевич

Kristina Minyazeva, Eight Mysteries of Osip Mandelstam’s Death

https://www.colta.ru/articles/literature/26363-gleb-morev-stalin-rezolyutsiya-buharin-pismo-arest-mandelshtam