Mandelstam Exhibition Opens at HSE

This exhibition, located at the HSE building on Staraya Basmannaya Ulitsa, near the Mandelstam Centre, tells the story of all the important stages in the poet’s life and work. It features photos, announcements of poetry nights, and documents testifying to Mandelstam’s arrest and death, as well as comments by the poet’s contemporaries.

According to Pavel Polian, Director of the Mandelstam Centre, the exposition was based on the material used in the exhibition ‘Osip Mandelstam: “I’ll tell you bluntly one last time…”’, which was prepared by the Mandelstam Society together with the State Literature Museum. ‘This exhibition went on display at Ostroukhov House in Moscow, then traveled to Germany and Spain, to Heidelberg and Granada respectively, and was a huge success in all those locations’, Pavel Polian said, ‘That’s why we came up with the idea of turning it into a permanent exposition at the HSE building, near the Mandelstam Centre, so to say, to interiorize the space around our workplace’.

All the exhibits are high-quality copies which are hard to distinguish from the original even for a professional, according to Dmitry Bak, Director of the State Literature Museum. Most of the originals are stored in the archives of the Literature Museum, the Mandelstam Centre, and the Manuscripts Division of the Princeton University library, to which the poet’s wife donated her husband’s archive.

‘The exhibition at the HSE building won’t necessarily be expanded, but instead, we want to develop in a different direction. For example, we have some outstanding student papers on Mandelstam’s work, and we would like to organize some reading nights. Here, on the second floor, we’ve created a Mandelstam context, which hopefully will inspire people for new ideas and further development’, Pavel Polian concluded.