News at Eleven: This presumption became second nature

to our rulers. Your right to an opinion is always determined by your rank and status in the hierarchy. Not long ago Surkhov [Editor of the Literary Gazette and, later, secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers] explained to me that Pasternak's novel is no good because its hero, Dr Zhivago, has no right to make any judgements about our way of life--'we had not given him this right.'"

Osip Mandelstam was arrested on May 20, 1934 and later deported. Some time in 1938, the exact date is not known, he died at the Vladivostok transit camp on his way to the even more notorious camp at Kolyma. He was forty-seven. Here, translated by Robert Lowell, is the poem that killed him.

Poem

We live. We are not sure our land is under us.

from Stabroek News: Poetry: The perilous art

~~~~~~~~~~~