The problem of revealing political reality in Osip and Nadezhda Mandelshtam’s documents concerning M. Volfson, V. Narbut, N. Bukharin

The work is devoted to the analysis of Osip Mandelstam’s articles“Streams of hackwork (khaltura)” and “On translations” in the broad literary andpolitical context of the 1920 – 1930s. The author suggests comparing these articleswith the work and publications of the head of the conscientious political censorshipMiron Volfson (1880 – 1932), a member of the board and editor-in-chief of the Gosizdat(State Publishing House), whose name appears several times in Mandelstam’s letters.Analysis of official contacts that Mandelstam had with the leadership of conscientiousideological bodies and highest Soviet ideological authorities, allows us to shed a newlight on the origin and meaning of the Mandelstam’s anti-Stalinist “epigram” “We livewithout feeling the country...” In particular, the author reveals a direct reference toMandelstam’s article “Streams of hackwork” in Wolfson’s 1929 book “The Ways ofthe Soviet Book”, where the author, on one hand, sums up the NEP period of the Sovietbook publishing history, and on the other, sets the task of a new total centralizationof book publishing as an important section of the ideological front. The study allowsto put the poet’s articles “Streams of hackwork” and “On translations”, which at firstglance are devoted exclusively to the problem of translation, in political context of thesecond half of the 1920s and early 1930s. The observations and conclusions based ofthe analysis give the opportunity to substantially correct the information about thisperiod of Mandelstam’s biography, which is contained in the memoirs of his widowN.Ya. Mandelstam