Osip Mandelstam. “Keep my words forever”

To commemorate Osip Mandelstam's 80th death anniversary the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center presents an exhibition “Keep My Words Forever” dedicated to the artistic legacy of the poet. The display will be a complex installation based on the eponymous documentary by a director Roma Liberov.

Osip Mandelstam – one of the greatest poets of the XX century, writer and translator who stood up openly against violent totalitarism. He was sentenced to deportation after having written an anti-Stalin epigram «Our lives no longer feel ground under them». Several years later, he was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda, arrested and put into labour camp. He died in a transit camp in the Far East near Vtoraya Rechka River.

The exhibition space of the Jewish Museum will closely follow Osip Mandelstam's human and artictic journey: visitors will enter an arcade where each arch will illustrate a lifechanging event from the poet’s life. The architectonics of this pathway filled with historical documents – collages, manuscripts, original printings and artifacts – will lead the poet to his reader.

Apart from the documentary “Keep my words forever” the exhibition will bring to life Mandelstam's poetry – ‘suicidal’ as Boris Pasternak put it – challenging the totalitarian regime. A special attention will be given to those who helped to save the poet’s ‘words’ till the present day. A great part of his heritage would have been lost forever if it was not for his wife, Hadezhda Mandelstam, who learned his poems by heart and copied them by hand waiting for the time when they could finally be published.

A festival dedicated to the memory of Osip Mandelstam will be organized as an integral part of the exhibition project. The public program will include performances, lectures, screenings and a concert at the Jewish Museum and in various other venues.

The event program will feature, among others, a concert of Noize MC (author of the “Keep My Words Forever” original soundtrack), a reading of “Stone” collection of poems by the performers of the Dmitry Brusnikin Studio, special screenings of the “Keep my words forever” documentary at the Documentary Film Center, an evening in the memory of Nadezhda Mandelstam, a performance “The Egyptian Stamp” at the Pyotr Fomenko Studio Theatre, guided tours of Mandelstam's Moscow and readings on the day of the poet's death.