A place for dissidents

Both felt more comfortable in Armenia than in Stalin's Russia: Vasily Grossman (left, 1941) and Ossip Mandelstam (around the beginning of the thirties)

Shortly before the Stalinist terror turned against him and one of the most important Russian-language poets in history perished in the Gulag camps, Ossip Mandelstam was allowed to travel to Armenia between April and November 1930 with the permission of the Comintern chairman and editor of the Soviet daily newspaper Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin. In the Soviet Union, where travel was strictly regulated, this was a high privilege. Although Mandelstam was not a reliable "engineer" of "the human soul" for the regime, as Stalin once described the task of writers in building socialism, his special talent was recognized and he was allowed to be published - and made the journey to Armenia.

At this time, Mandelstam was in a serious creative crisis, which was resolved by his trip to the Caucasus, as the short prose, poems and notes that he wrote during this time show. They were published in German under the title “The Journey to Armenia”. The impressions of the trip, which Mandelstam himself described as the happiest time of his life, are a real fireworks display, an expression of unbridled curiosity and a desire to discover. Mandelstam's Armenia texts are less a travel report in the classic sense than aesthetic explorations. Inspired by the impressions he gained in Armenia and the Caucasus, he wrote poems, reflections and short prose on topics as diverse as contemporary French painting, the music of Mozart and botany. The pieces read like a stormy protest; they are the texts of someone who may have suspected that the open, even naive, self-serving preoccupation with the world, based on the type of polymath of past centuries, could soon be drowned in terror.

To read this content, an online subscription is required::