SOURCE: "Mandel'shtam's 'Ode to Stalin': History and Myth," in The Russian Review, Vol. 41, No. 4, October, 1982, pp. 400-26.

In the following essay, Freidin examines the mysterious circumstances surrounding the writing and publication of Osip Mandel'shtam's "Ode to Stalin."

If manuscripts do not burn, as Mikhail Bulgakov once suggested, they at least get hot sitting in the fire, which is more or less what happened to the "Ode to Stalin" by Osip Mandel'shtam.¹ The first indication that Mandel'shtam might have written something like the "Ode" came from Anna Akhmatova's recollections of Mandel'shtam and had the effect of a minor literary bombshell.² Two years later, in 1967, the issue was taken up in print by Clarence Brown who had been working on Mandel'shtam for nearly a decade.³ In order to determine whether Mandel'shtam had actually written the "Ode," Brown analyzed some twenty-four poems composed during the Voronezh exile (1935-37), relating them to...