Book Price

Recently, I happened to look into a copy of Osip Mandelstam's Selected Poems, translated by Clarence Brown and W.S Merwin. Within the book, I found a receipt, which gave the price as $6.25. That seemed improbable, until I looked at the date: October 1987, purchased at Olsson's Records and Books in Georgetown.The date brought something else to mind: I must have bought the book after seeing the poem beginning "Insomnia. Homer. Taut sails" quoted in Vassily Aksyonov's novel The Burn, which I had read some months before. The poem appears in this volume on page 8, as poem 78 from Stone.

This time I looked up the book because I had been reading Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam. That volume I found on the outside carts at Second Story Books. I imagined that I would read it over the next couple of weeks: it occupied most of my spare time for the next four days. It gives an appalling picture of the Mandelstams' suffering--and of the bad behavior of many associates--during the period of his persecution for the "Stalin epigram"; it also leaves me wondering about their days in the Crimea and Georgia.

My copy of Selected Poems was published by Athenaeum. I find that NYRB keeps the collection in print, at a list price of $15.95.