Freedom of Speech

One of the assigned readings from Thursday's class caught my eye. What intrigued me in Fennelly's 'The Impossibility of Language' was the third section where several references are made to Osip Mandelstam. I thought it might be interesting to find out who this man was, and why he is a figure that other poets would bother mentioning. Before reading this poem, I had never heard of this man, nor did I know that he was a Russian poet who was arrested for nothing other than speaking his mind through his poetry. The thought of this baffles me. Mandelstam was punished for something so simple as writing what he believed. He wrote 'Stalin Epigram' in 1933, which was a poem criticizing Stalin's collectivisation and his intent to eliminate the "kulaks". Mandelstam's "counter-revolutionary" ideas resulted in his arrest, exile and assignation to correction camps for five years. Fennelly makes references to his wife Nadezhda, as she salvaged her husbands' work after he died, and wrote Hope Against Hope, which told his story. After reading about Mandelstam, it is obvious and much more clear than before why Fennelly chose to include this poet in her poem about how words are used to express oneself and how many miscommunications and misnomers arise.