In 1913 Osip Mandelstam published his first book of poems, Kamen (‘Stone’). His father was a successful Jewish glovemaker from Warsaw who had moved to St Petersburg and sent his son to the Tenishev lycée, probably the finest school in Russia. There Mandelstam had received a broad-ranging education centred on the classics. He revelled in his escape from what he called the ‘tongue-tie and languagelessness’ of provincial Jewish life into the rich and cosmopolitan culture of the Russian metropolis. When he applied to St Petersburg University, however, he came up against the quota imposed to restrict Jews’ access to higher education. In order to go to university – though probably also from some degree of personal conviction – he had himself baptised as a Methodist.

LRB 28 July 2011 | PDF Download