The haphazard unearthing of Osip Mandelstam’s late poetry and the bio-graphical data of his (all too literal) struggle for existence produces the effect of a mosaic gradually and painstakingly pieced together by several hands. One mysterious piece, long thought lost, was the poem allegedly written in praise of Stalin sometime in the 1930s. For many Western readers at least, the first mention of the poet’s tribute to the dictator was in Anna Akhmatova’s memoirs of Mandelstam published in the emigre miscellany Vozdushnye puti, vol. 4 (1965): ” … he maintained that poems are written only as the result of strong emotional shocks, joyful as well as tragic ones. Concerning his own poem in praise of Stalin—‘I’d like to say not Stalin, but Dzhugashvili’ (1935) —he said to me: ‘Now I understand that it was a sickness.’ “