The Arrest of Osip Mandelstam

        So far I have been looking into two primary sources.  The first is the memoir of Nadezhda Mandelstam, entitled Hope Against Hope.  Nadezhda was the wife of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam until Osip died in a corrective labor camp in the Soviet Union.  The second set of primary sources are printed in a book called The Mandelstam and "Der Nister" Files.  In this book are printed copies of 16 documents (with translations on the following pages) concerning Mandelstam's arrest, including a coupon for his arrest warrant, fingerprint forms, his death certificate, and a letter that Nadezhda wrote to the GULAG camp administration requesting an official death certificate for her husband after she learned of his death.
        Osip was originally arrested in 1934 for a poem that he wrote about Stalin.  Interestingly, the arrest warrants make no mention of this poem, but only say that Osip was arrested for "counterrevolutionary activity" under Article 58, a notorious law that was used to justify the arrests of countless political prisoners.  Nadezhda wrote the poem from memory in her memoir many years later, as there was no physical copy left of the poem at the time Nadezhda wrote it.  I've typed up the poem below in case anyone's interested in reading an example of what could get you sent to a Gulag camp in the Soviet Union, where there would be a good chance of death.
       Nadezhda's memoir is 400 pages long, and I'm still finishing working my way through it.  There are a number of different ways that I could approach the paper.  I will need to keep in mind that I will be trying to tell a story, by looking through this lens, about  a larger outside world.  I was thinking about writing my paper on just Osip's first arrest, which Nadezhda describes in great detail in her memoir, during which secret police officials stormed their house at night and tore it apart in search for the poem.  I think that Nadezhda's account of this event drives home the terror to which anyone was susceptible.  However, I'm not sure how much I will be able to get out of this event alone, so I may need to broaden my field of vision when approaching the paper.  Nonetheless, I'm having a great time so far with the research and am looking forward to continuing my progress.  



 We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

But where there's so much as half a conversation
The Kremlin's mountaineer will get his mention.

His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.

Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders-
fawning half-men for him to play with.

They whinny, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,

One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.

And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete*

*(According to a footnote in the memoir, "There were persistent stories that Stalin had Ossetian blood.  Ossetia is to the north of Georgia in the Caucasus.  The people, of Iranian stock, are quite different from the Georgians)