Annal: 1980 National Book Award for Translation

Acclaimed in both Russia and the West as Russia’s greatest poet of the 20th century, Osip Mandelstam was also a brilliant writer of prose. These autobiographical essays, reviews, and personal reflections reveal the themes of his finest poems and of his life in Stalinist Russia: the nature of history, both as it is lived and as it is later constructed; the continuity and destruction of cultural tradition, and the essence of poetry itself.