'Different Faces, Formats All the Same'

In Osip Mandelstam: A Biography, Ralph Dutli describes a chance meeting in March 1934 on Tverskoy Boulevard in Moscow between Boris Pasternak and Mandelstam, who recited to his friend the now-famous poem known as the “Stalin Epigram.” Mandelstam never wrote down the poem but committed it to memory. In a passage included by Dutli from the memoirs of Pasternak’s partner, Olga Ivinskaia, the future author of Doctor Zhivago replied to his friend: 

“I heard nothing, you recited nothing. You know, strange and terrible things are happening now, people are disappearing; I fear the walls have ears, and perhaps even the paving-stones can hear and speak. Let us be clear: I heard nothing.”

 

Two months later, Mandelstam was arrested on the night of May 16-17. Someone had betrayed him and reported the “Stalin Epigram” to the OGPU, the Joint State Political Directorate, the Soviet secret police from 1923 to 1934. Mandelstam was sentenced to three years’ exile in Cherdyn in the Northern Ural. His mugshots were taken.

 

Here is a poem by Charles Martin, “The Twentieth Century in Photographs.” The title might suggest the Western landscapes of Ansel Adams or ‘The Blue Marble” photo taken by the Apollo 17 crew. No, Martin likely refers to Mandelstam’s mugshots, or Isaac Babel’s, or the photos of the thousands tortured and murdered by the Khmer Rouge:

 

“Different faces, formats all the same:

A profile set beside a frontal view

And nothing else included in the frame

Save, at the bottom, for a coded row

 

“Of numbers dashes letters that replaces

A name best left unsaid by those who knew it.

Two aspects of one face there, not two faces.

Behind each is a blank wall, we intuit,

 

“More like an edge each one could be tipped over,

Once photographed. Impossible to read

These inexpressive faces and recover

The thoughts of those who have been so long dead,

 

“Who died, in fact, before the photographer

Had time to fix them in his clear solution.

Although their eyes meet ours now, we are

Still not there yet: no stay of execution.”

 

Mugshots of Mandelstam were taken again four years later when he was arrested a second and final time. He was sentenced to five years in correction camps for “counter-revolutionary activities” and died in a transit camp near Vladivostok on December 27, 1938.

 

[Martin’s poem was first published in the June-July 2010 issue of First Things and collected in his Signs & Wonders (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Dutli’s biography of Mandelstam was translated from the German by Ben Fowkes and published by Verso in 2023.]