SOURCE: "Mandelstam's Witness," in Commentary, Vol. 57, No. 6, June, 1974, pp. 69-79.

Alter is an American educator and critic. In the following essay, he discusses the influence of Mandelstam's Jewish origins on his poetry.

"I am easy in my mind now," Akhamatova said to me in the sixties. "We have seen how durable poetry is."

—Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope

There is something oddly legendary about the posthumous career of Osip Mandelstam, as though he had died not in a Soviet concentration camp in 1938, with a death certificate issued in due form by the totalitarian bureaucracy, but in some shadowy recess of medieval mystery. He is just now beginning to be recognized in the West as one of the major 20th-century poets; many of those who can read him in the original regard him as the greatest Russian poet since Pushkin; but he has achieved this prominence only through an...