Editing Osip Mandelstam (section)

===Second arrest and death===
[[File:NKVD Mandelstam.jpg|thumb|[[NKVD]] photo after the second arrest, 1938]]
Mandelstam's three-year period of exile ended in May 1937, when the [[Great Purge]] was under way. The previous winter, he had forced himself to write his "Ode to Stalin," hoping it would protect him against further persecution. The couple no longer had the right to live in Moscow, so lived in nearby Kalinin ([[Tver]]), and visited the capital, where they relied on friends to put them up. In the spring of 1938, Mandelstam was granted an interview with the head of the Writers' Union [[Vladimir Stavsky]], who granted him a two-week holiday for two in a rest home outside Moscow. This was a trap. The previous month, on 16 March – the day after the Mandelstams' former protector, Nikolai Bukharin had been sentenced to death – Stavsky had written to the head of the NKVD, [[Nikolay Yezhov]], denouncing Mandelstam. Getting him out of Moscow made it possible to arrest him without setting off a reaction.<ref>{{cite book |last1=McSmith |first1=Andy |title=Fear and the Muse |pages=194–195}}</ref> He was arrested while on holiday, on 5 May (ref. camp document of 12 October 1938, signed by Mandelstam), and charged with "[[counter-revolutionary]] activities."

Four months later, on 2 August 1938,<ref>Extract from court protocol No. 19390/Ts</ref> Mandelstam was sentenced to five years in correction camps. He arrived at the Vtoraya Rechka (Second River) transit camp near [[Vladivostok]] in Russia's Far East. From the Vladperpunkt transit camp he sent his last letter to his brother and his wife,<ref>at 6 Gagarinsky Lane, Moscow.</ref> writing: ''I'm in Vladivostok, [[Sevvostlag|SVITL]], barracks 11. I got 5 years for K.R.D. [counterrevolutionary activity] by the decision of the [[Special Council of the NKVD|OSO]]. From Moscow, left from [[Butyrka prison|Butyrka]] on September 9, arrived on October 12. Health is very poor. Exhausted to the extreme. Have lost weight, almost unrecognizable. But I don't know if there is any sense in sending clothes, food and money. Try it, all the same. I'm freezing without proper things.''<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.poslednyadres.ru/news/news134.htm|script-title=ru:Москва, Гагаринский переулок, 6|publisher=Последний адрес|access-date=2019-12-02|archive-date=2019-11-20|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191120035951/https://www.poslednyadres.ru/news/news134.htm|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.rbth.com/literature/2014/07/16/the_final_days_of_russian_writers_osip_mandelstam_38249.html|title=The final days of Russian writers: Osip Mandelstam|first1=Yolanda|last1=Delgado|first2=special to|last2=RBTH|date=16 July 2014|website=www.rbth.com}}</ref>

On 27 December 1938, three weeks before his 48th birthday, Osip Mandelstam died in a transit camp of typhoid fever. His death was described later in a short story "Cherry Brandy" by [[Varlam Shalamov]], who notes that his fellow inmates concealed his death for two days so they could continue to collect his rations.<ref name="larb">{{cite web | url=https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/his-own-final-thing-on-varlam-shalamovs-kolyma-stories/ | title=Los Angeles Review of Books | date=29 October 2018 }}</ref> His body lay unburied until spring, along with the other deceased. Then the entire "winter stack" was buried in a mass grave.<ref>Izvestia, 8 January 1991. Reproduced according to ed. – Osip Mandelstam and his time: Sat. memories. – Publisher L'Age d'Homme – Nash Dom, 1995 480 p. – p. 402. [https://imwerden.de/pdf/mandelstam_i_ego_vremya_1995__ocr.pdf]</ref>

Mandelstam's own prophecy was fulfilled: "Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?" Nadezhda wrote memoirs about her life and times with her husband in ''Hope against Hope'' (1970)<ref name="ReferenceA"/> and ''Hope Abandoned''.<ref name="ReferenceB"/> She also managed to preserve a significant part of Mandelstam's unpublished work.