'Are You Still Alive, My Precious?'

Here at the bottom of the year comes a sad day for literature and readers. On Dec. 27, 1834, Charles Lamb died at age fifty-nine. His biographer, E.V. Lucas, explains in a footnote to the letter Lamb wrote five days before his death: “This is the last letter of Charles Lamb, who tripped and fell in Church Street, Edmonton, on 22nd December, and died of erysipelas [a streptococcal infection], on 27^th December.” In his final letter, Lamb writes to the wife of his friend George Dyer, and closes with a typical Lambian wisecrack:

“I am very uneasy about a Book which I either have lost or left at you house on Thursday. It was the book I went out to fetch from Miss Buffam’s, while the tripe was frying. It is called Phillip’s Theatrum Poetarum; but it in an English book. I think I left it in the parlour . . . If it is lost, I shall never like tripe again.”

One-hundred four years later, on Dec. 27, 1938, another poet died, though it was years before the world knew it with any certainty. Osip Mandelstam spent his final days in the transit camp at Vtoraya Rechka near Vladivostok. He was a Jew, a poet and a citizen of Western Civilization. He was buried in a common grave and his brother was notified of his death three years later. His last known letter is addressed to the brother, Alexander (Shura) Mandelstam, and dated in late October, two months before his death. Before receiving the letter, his family had no idea where he was or if he was alive. He writes:

“I got five years for counterrevolutionary activity by decree of the Special Tribunal. The transport left Butyrki Prison in Moscow on the 9th of September [he had been arrested May 5] and we arrived on the 12th of October. I’m in very poor health, utterly exhausted, emaciated, and almost beyond recognition. I don’t know if there’s any sense in sending clothes, food, and money, but try just the same. I’m freezing without proper clothes.”

The poet asks about his wife: “Darling Nadenka, are you alive, my precious? Shura, write me at once about Nadya. This is a transit point. I wasn’t picked for Kolyma. I may have to spend the winter here.” He adds a P.S.: “Shurochka, one thing more. We’ve gone out to work these last few days. That has lifted my spirits. People are sent from our camp, as from a transit point, to regular camps. I was apparently `sifted out’ so I must get ready to spend the winter here. So please send me a telegram and wire me some money.”

Those are his last known words. On Feb. 1, 1939, the package Nadezhda had sent to her husband was returned. At the post office, she was told it could not be delivered because the recipient was dead. Nadezhda received Osip’s death certificate in the summer of 1940. It said Osip Mandelstam, one of the last century’s supreme poets, had died of heart failure on Dec. 27, 1938.

[The books quoted are Vol. III of The Letters of Charles Lamb (ed. E.V. Lucas, J.M. Dent & Sons/Metheun & Co., 1935) and Critical Prose and Letters (ed. and trans. Jane Gary Harris, trans. Constance Link, Ardis, 1979).]