Zagorodny Prospekt, 70, Saint Petersburg, Russia, 190013
The Russian poet Osip Emilievich Mandelstam was born on January 15, 1891, in Warsaw into the family of a tanner and a glove maker. His father, Emil Veniaminovich, a descendant of Spanish Jews, grew up in a patriarchal family. The ancient Jewish Mandelstam family gave the world renowned rabbis, physicists and doctors, Bible translators, and literary historians. Shortly after Osip’s birth, his family moved to the town of Pavlovsk near Petersburg, and then in 1897 to Petersburg itself. The first home for Mandelstam in the capital of the Russian Empire was house No. 100 on Nevsky Prospect. The family spent only three days in the apartment on the fourth floor. The poet’s father rented an apartment overlooking the city’s main avenue to see the body of the deceased Emperor Alexander III carried along it. “The night before, I climbed onto the windowsill, I see: the street is black with people, I ask: ‘When will they go?’ – they say: ‘Tomorrow.’ What struck me most was that all these crowds spent the entire night on the street. Even death appeared to me for the first time in a completely unnatural, magnificent, ceremonial form,” Mandelstam recalled. Osip’s childhood (then still Iosef Khatskelevich Mandelstam) continued in house No. 70 on Zagorodny Prospect (corner of Bronnitskaya Street).
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