Mandelstam's arrest photo

Russia is on fire. The unprecedented heat wave in much of the Northern Hemisphere means that temperatures in and around Moscow this summer have reached record highs. On top of that, much of the Russian lands are covered in peat (due to natural vegetation but also bad Soviet agricultural practices) which is now lighting on fire along with the dried-out trees.

Voronezh, a city several hundred miles south of Moscow known for its fertile black earth, is now partially charred (see a photograph here).

I can’t help but think about the concept of poetic justice right now. Here’s why:

Voronezh is the city to which Russian poet Osip Mandelstam was exiled to from 1935-1937 after his poem, the “Stalin Epigram,” got him into trouble with the Soviet authorities. At first he was crushed (he had even tried committing suicide), but later managed to write some of his most brilliant poems, collected in the “Voronezh Notebooks.” In 1938, he died on the way to a Soviet GULAG (prison or labor camp).

Mandelstam tried to write honestly under a totalitarian regime and was repressed. He almost lost faith in the power and role of poetry (his ironic prophecy before his death: “Only in Russia is poetry respected — it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?”). But he still managed to write poems that are now celebrated and translated for their bitterness and their eventual idealism.

Here is one of his Voronezh poems, written in 1935 (translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin):

You took away all the oceans and all the room.
You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it.
Where did it get you? Nowhere.
You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.

(Another great one is called “Black Earth” but I can’t find it online).

Voronezh is the place of exile for one of the 20th Century’s greatest poets, where he managed to write despite deprivation.

The Soviet government irresponsibly drained these lands in the 1960s for agriculture and mining.

Now they’re burning.

I’m certainly not insensitive to the tragedies of the raging wildfires (much of my family lives in Moscow), but I just had to point this out. It’s too weird when life and poetry meet.