Last Days of Mandelstam
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The year is 1938. The great Russian poet and essayist Osip Mandelstam is forty-seven years old and is dying in a transit camp near Vladivostok after having been arrested by Stalin’s government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into exile with his wife. Stalin, “the Kremlin mountaineer, murderer, and peasant-slayer,” is undoubtedly responsible for his fatal decline. From the depths of his prison cell, lost in a world full of ghosts, Mandelstam sees scenes from his life pass before him: constant hunger, living hand to mouth, relying on the assistance of sympathetic friends, shunned by others, four decades of creation and struggle, alongside his beloved wife Nadezhda, and his contemporaries Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and many others.
With her sensitive prose and innate sense of drama, French-Lebanese writer Vénus Khoury-Ghata brings Mandelstam back to life and allows him to have the last word—proving that literature is one of the surest means to fight against barbarism.
With her sensitive prose and innate sense of drama, French-Lebanese writer Vénus Khoury-Ghata brings Mandelstam back to life and allows him to have the last word—proving that literature is one of the surest means to fight against barbarism.
Novelist and poet, Vénus Khoury-Ghata is the author of many books. Her works have been awarded prestigious prizes, including the Goncourt de la Poésie and the Prix Renaudot Poche for La fiancée était à dos d’âne (2015). Three collections of her poems and one novel have appeared in English in the United States; She Says was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in poetry in 2003. Teresa Lavender Fagan, winner of the 2018 French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation, is a freelance translator living in Chicago; she has translated numerous works for Seagull Books and a number of other publishers.