Mandelstam was one of the great Russian poets of the twentieth century, with a prophetic understanding of its suffering. This contains the poems of his years of persecution, from his journey to Armenia in 1930 until 1934, when he was arrested and exiled to the Urals for writing an unflattering poem about Stalin. Written and preserved by a miracle, his poems have become in Peter Levi's description all gems and ingots in the McKanes' translations. This edition is now out of print but the whole book is reprinted as part of The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks.