Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, volume II, Stephen Kotkin, Penguin Press 1119 pp.
In April 1934, the poet Osip Mandelstam bumped into Boris Pasternak on a Moscow street. He recited verses that he had read a few weeks earlier to a few intimate friends. The verses ridiculed a “Kremlin highlander” with a criminal past and part Ossetian descent. Retribution from on high came quickly. In May, Mandelstam was arrested at his apartment, where the police confiscated his manuscripts and letters. He was permitted to take a few personal items. Among them he selected Dante’s Inferno.
After Mandelstam was sentenced to exile in …read more
Source: The American Conservative
