Osip Mandelstam, the son of a prosperous Jewish leather merchant, was raised in St. Petersburg. After graduating from the Tenishev Commercial School in 1907, he travelled abroad and continued his education for a year (1909-1910) at the University of Heidelberg. When he returned to Russia he attended the University of St. Petersburg.
Mandelstam was considered to be one of the four most important poets who survived the Russian Revolution: Pasternak, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam. He was arrested in 1934, ostensibly for having written a satirical poem about Stalin, and was exiled. Mandelstam died in transit to one of Stalin's gulags. His widow Nadezhda regarded her main task in life as hiding and preserving of Mandelstam's prose and poetry and frustrating the efforts of the Soviet authorities to destroy evidence of his existence.
