Osip Mandelstam has in recent years come to be seen as a central figure in European modernism. Though known primarily as a poet, Mandelstam worked in many styles: autobiography, short story, travel writing, and polemic. Mandelstam's biographer, Clarence Brown, presents a collection of the poet's prose works that illuminates Mandelstam's far-ranging talent and places him within the canon of European modernism.

This volume includes Mandelstam's "The Noise of Time," a series of autobiographical sketches; "The Egyptian Stamp," a novella; "Fourth Prose;" and the famous travel memoirs "Theodosia" and "Journey to Armenia."

OSIP MANDELSTAM (1891–1938) was born in Warsaw in 1891. Raised in St. Petersburg, he published his first collection, Stone, in 1913 and joined with Anna Akhmatova in the Acmeist movement. Arrested in 1934 for an epigram he'd written about Joseph Stalin, Mandelstam died in a gulag near Vladivostok in 1938. His works include Osip Mandelstam: Fifty Poems and Moscow Notebooks.

"The most illuminating commentary on Mandelstam in English at the present moment. . . . A work of impeccable scholarship." —Isaiah Berlin, New York Review of Books

"In this translation, 'Journey to Armenia' takes its place among the outstanding masterpieces of twentieth-century literature." —Bruce Chatwin