Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, an outstanding poet of the 20th century, whose life ended tragically. He was also a literary scholar, translator, and prose writer. Born on January 14, 1891, in Warsaw to a family where his mother was involved in music and his father was a glove maker.

In 1897, the family moved to Petersburg, where Osip studied at the Tenishev School. In 1908, he went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne and Heidelberg University. There he met Gumilev and became interested in Baudelaire's work. In 1911, due to the family's deteriorating financial situation, Mandelstam returned to Petersburg. To enroll in the university, he had to be baptized by a Methodist pastor to bypass the quota for Jews.

In 1911, he entered the historical and philological faculty of the university, but did not complete his studies. Osip participated in the meetings of the Guild of Poets and became part of the Acmeist group, publishing his first collection of poems, "Stone."

In 1919, he met Nadezhda Hazina, who soon became his wife. During the Civil War, they wandered through Ukraine, Georgia, and Russia. In Crimea, he was arrested by White Guards, and later in Georgia, but thanks to the revolutionary Benia Chkhikvishvili, he was released. After that, he went to Petrograd and settled in the House of Arts.

In 1922, his collection "Tristia" was published in Berlin, reflecting fear, hope, grief, and enlightenment. In 1928, the collection "Poems" and the book of articles "On Poetry" were published. In 1930, he completed "The Fourth Prose" and went to Armenia, where he befriended the scholar Boris Kuzin.

In 1933, Mandelstam wrote the anti-Stalinist epigram "We live, not feeling the country beneath us." He showed it to several people, which became a fateful step. One of the listeners reported him, and in May 1934, he was arrested and sent into exile in Cherdyn. Osip attempted to take his own life, but his wife supported him in every way and obtained permission to choose a place for settlement. They chose Voronezh, where they lived in poverty. During this time, he wrote the cycle "Voronezh Notebooks" and an ode praising Stalin.

In 1937, his exile ended, and the couple returned to Moscow. Writer Vladimir Stavsky wrote a statement to the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, calling Mandelstam's poems slanderous. In 1938, he was arrested again, first sent to the NKVD prison, and then to Butyrka prison. In August, he was sentenced to 5 years in a labor camp and in the fall sent to the Far East.

Osip Mandelstam died on December 27, 1938, at the Vladivostok transit point of Dalstroy from typhus. His body remained unburied all winter, and only in spring was he buried in a mass grave.