A central figure not only in modern Russian but in world poetry, Osip Mandelstam was a crucial instigator of the "revolution of the word" that took place in St. Petersburg, only to be crushed by the Bolshevik revolution. His last poems, written on the run in the interval between his exile to the provinces by Stalin and his death in the gulag, provide an extraordinary testament to the enduring power of art in the presence of state terror.