Zagorodny Prospekt, 17, Saint Petersburg, Russia, 191002
In August 1907, Osip submitted an application to enroll as an auditor in the natural sciences department of the physics and mathematics faculty at Saint Petersburg University, but after collecting his documents from the office, he left for Paris in October. Soon, the 17-year-old Osip went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. Because of this, he stayed in the French capital for 2 years. Thanks to this, he studied the works of French poets with great interest and also became engrossed in Baudelaire and Verlaine. Between his trips abroad, he visited Petersburg, where he attended lectures on versification at the "tower" by Vyacheslav Ivanov. By 1911, the family began to fall into poverty, and studying in Europe became impossible. To bypass the quota on Jews when entering Saint Petersburg University, Mandelstam was baptized by a Methodist pastor in Vyborg. At the university, he studied in the Romance-Germanic department. During this time, Osip met Nikolai Gumilev, with whom he immediately found common ground. Soon he began writing his first poems. From his pen came the poem "More Tender Than Tender," dedicated to Marina Tsvetaeva.
More tender than tender is your face,
Whiter than white is your hand,
You are far from the whole world,
And all that is yours is from the inevitable.
From the inevitable is your sorrow,
And the fingers of your uncooled hands,
And the quiet sound of unyielding words,
And the distance of your eyes.
It is interesting because it is written in the style of love lyrics, since Mandelstam rarely wrote in this direction. It is worth noting that Osip Mandelstam was not very interested in studying, so he received low grades. This led to the fact that he never obtained a higher education diploma. At that time, the poet lived at Zagorodny Prospect, house 17.
Sources:
https://ria.ru/20160115/1359081640.html
