Keep My Words Forever: a tribute album for Osip Mandelstam

 

In January, it was 130 years since the birth of the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. Mandelstam is widely translated and read in the English-speaking world, but unsurprisingly, his influence is greater in Russian-speaking countries. A victim of state persecution and of the efforts of other literary figures who opposed his subversive views, Mandelstam is as readable and relevant as ever today.

This year, a group of popular musicians have released a tribute album which sets Mandelstam's words to music. The album is called Сохрани мою речь навсегда (in English, Keep My Words Forever) and can be found on streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music and others. 

Some of the artists (who will be better known to Russian speakers) include Ilya Lagutenko (lead singer of the popular band Mumiy Troll), Leonid Agutin, Noize MC and Sansara. Alina Orlova, from Vilnius, performs in Lithuanian, and Mgzavrebi perform in Georgian. The artist who I think may be known to some non-Russian speakers is Oxxxymiron, a prominent Russian rapper who has lived in Slough and the East End of London, and who studied English literature at Oxford University. He performs a rap version of 'Lines for an unknown soldier'. The songs are all musical settings of Mandelstam poems, and they appear on the album in the order that the poems were published.

The project was initiated and produced by Roma Liberov, who I crossed paths with a few years ago. He had already directed the documentary film Keep My Words Forever (2015) about Mandelstam, and in 2017 I went to a screening of the film at London's Pushkin House, where Liberov spoke about Mandelstam's importance and about his work on the documentary. You can read my writeup of the event here: https://thestoneandthestar.blogspot.com/2017/10/keep-my-words-forever-mandelstam-at.html 

I have listened to the album and was very moved by it. My own grasp of Russian is still nascent and as a result, I'm obviously missing some of the impact of the words. The musical styles featured include jazz, 80s-style pop, rap and more, and the poems include works such as 'I despise the light', 'This night is irredeemable' and 'I returned to my city, familiar to tears'. Personally, I definitely liked some tracks better than others. But above all, this project reveals the extreme vitality of Mandelstam's work in our time, and a desire to bring him closer to new audiences, many of which I am sure will embrace his poems if they haven't already. I love to see that Mandelstam is still loved so much.

I recommend checking out the project's official website, https://om130.ru/ . (You can use the Translate function on your browser to see it in English, if you don't speak Russian.) Here you can see the album's wonderful artwork and find links to videos of the songs on Youtube. 

Image: Osip Mandelstam (far right) with Chulkov, Petrovykh and Anna Akhmatova. 1930s.

Keep My Words Forever: Mandelstam at Pushkin House

London's Russian cultural centre Pushkin House is currently running a programme about Russian poetry in exile, to commemorate the centenary of the Russian Revolution. Along with information about their 101st km Further Everywhere pavilion on Bloomsbury Square (until 10 November) you can also find the programme of poetry events here. There are still a few events to go.

On 19 October I went to see the film Keep My Words Forever (directed by Roma Liberov, in Russian with English subtitles), about the life of Osip Mandelstam. The film combined puppetry, animation using cutouts and other effects, and documentary filming. I wasn't totally sure how this was going to work but it turned out to be an extremely moving film, capturing Mandelstam's often manic energy and its disintegration into illness and depression after years of persecution. As the director said, particularly with the use of puppets, it felt as though there was a short period of adjustment needed while watching and then viewers start to see the people in the puppets. This was exactly how it was, for me. The translations used were by a wide variety of Mandelstam's many translators.

Speaking after the film, Roma Liberov referred to the Russian Revolution and what followed as "interrupted history - a social experiment" (which reminded me of when I saw Russian poet Maria Stepanova some years ago and she spoke of decades of "frozen history"). Liberov pointed out that poets in Russia died for the right to write outside of the propaganda machine, and that Mandelstam died principally because people in the literary establishment didn't like him and decided to ensure his downfall. (The latter was an interesting point because it is often assumed that he died specifically because of the 'Stalin Epigram', but Mandelstam didn't particularly consider himself a political poet and his views were more complex than that.) He was hard to capture in the film, said Liberov, but I felt there was success up to a point. I thought Keep My Words Forever was a beautiful and appropriate title. Osip Mandelstam's wife Nadezhda memorised his work and ensured that it was preserved (her story is completely extraordinary in itself) and there we were hearing his words nearly 80 years after the poet died. I wondered how Mandelstam would feel if he could know that.

In the lobby at Pushkin House, film clips with photos of Mandelstam and his handwriting were playing, and a recording of his voice. Liberov said that while it is often difficult to know at which speed old recordings should be played, this one had been listened to by Mandelstam's friend Korney Chukovsky (himself a famous Russian children's poet and literary critic) and that Chukovsky had confirmed at which speed his friend's voice sounded right to him.