Moscow Notebooks

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Moscow Notebooks by Michael Symmons Roberts. Poet Osip Mandelstam is a celebrated poet in Stalin's Russia. The trouble is he's written a poem that makes fun of the leader, and he's not careful about who hears him recite it. So when the poem comes to its subject's attention, Mandelstam's journey of persecution begins. A drama about how an artist stands up to dictatorship. With new versions of Mandelstam's poems by Michael Symmons Roberts. Mandelstam.............................Jonathan Tafler Nadezhda.................................Clare Lawrence Moody Goldfinch/Akhmatova.........Erin Shanagher Christophorovich...................Jonathan Keeble Pasternak..................................Jack Wagman Production Co-ordinator - Pippa Day Studio Manager - Amy Brennan Sound Design- Steve Brooke Producer/Director - Gary Brown A BBC Studios Audio Production Osip Mandelstam's 'Moscow Notebooks' contain poems written during the early 1930s as Stalin tightened his grip on dissidents. These poems are varied and visionary lyrics, from love poems to portraits of corruption and suffering in a great historic city. Stalin knew what he was up against, saying in a phone call to Boris Pasternak in 1934 'He's a genius, isn't he?'. But when Mandelstam's poem 'Stalin Epigram' came to its subject's attention - despite the poet's insistence that it was memorised but never written down - persecution turned to exile resulting in Mandelstam's death in the winter of 1938 on his way to a Siberian labour camp. Mandelstam's poems and his story of artistic defiance were suppressed in Russia for decades, only rehabilitated in 1987 under Gorbachev. He is now recognised as one of the key poets of the twentieth century.