Memorial to the Mandelstams

A sculpture dedicated to Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, entitled “Monument to Love,” was unveiled yesterday in Saint Petersburg during the city’s Mandelstam Days celebration. The Dutch sculptor who designed the new piece, Hanneke de Munck, has posted video footage of it on his website, along with the Russian text of Mandelstam’s poem “Oh how I wish…” (“О как же я хочу...”). He told Radio Svoboda that the sculpture is “far more life-affirming than they expected in Saint Petersburg,” since they had in mind something that “would have expressed all the tragedy of Osip and Nadezhda’s life.”

RIA Novosti, quoting the press service of Saint Petersburg State University, describes the new sculpture, which stands in the courtyard of the university's Twelve Colleges Building, as a “tribute of respect to the great poet and his wife Nadezhda for their devotion to independent creativity and to each other. Many poems by Osip Mandelstam reached us only thanks to his spouse.” As is widely known, Nadezhda Mandelstam memorized countless poems by her husband in order that his work would survive when the manuscripts were stolen or destroyed by the Soviet authorities.