SOURCE: "Voronezh Notebooks," in Osip Mandelstam, Twayne Publishers, 1988, pp. 121-45.

Harris is an American educator and critic with a special interest in Russian literature. In the following excerpt from her critical study of Mandelstam, she analyzes thematic and stylistic aspects of the Voronezh Notebooks.

 I am in the heart of the age—the way is unclear
And time distances the goal …
(no. 332, 14 December 1936) 

 People need light and blue air,
They need bread and the snows of Elbrus….
People need poetry secretly their own
To keep them awake forever …
To bathe them in its breath.
(no. 355, 19 January 1937) 

Mandelstam's arrest and interrogation, his mental anguish and suicide attempt, his exile and the intervention on his behalf of such major figures as Bukharin and Pasternak, followed by the subsequent "miracle"—Stalin's commutation of his sentence to "isolate but preserve," three years of exile in the southern Russian city of Voronezh rather...