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Osip Mandelstam was born in Warsaw to a Polish Jewish family; his father was a leather merchant, his mother a piano teacher Soon after Osip’s birth, the family moved to Saint Petersburg After attending the prestigious Tenishev School, Mandelstam studied for a year in Paris, at the Sorbonne, and then for a year in Germany, at the University of Heidelberg In 1911, wanting to enter the University of Saint Petersburg – which had a quota on Jews – he converted to Christianity; like many others who converted during these years, he chose Methodism rather than Orthodoxy   Under the leadership of Nikolay Gumilyov, Mandelstam and several other young poets formed a movement known first as the Poets’ Guild and then as the Acmeists Mandelstam wrote a manifesto, ‘The Morning Of Acmeism’ (written in 1913 but published only in 1919) Like Ezra Pound and the Imagists, the Acmeists valued clarity, concision and craftsmanship   In 1913 Mandelstam published his first collection, Stone This includes several poems about architecture, which always remained one of his central themes His poem about the cathedral of ‘Nôtre Dame’ ends with the declaration:   Fortress Nôtre Dame, the more attentively I studied your vast ribs and frame, the more I kept repeating: one day I too will craft beauty from cruel weight In its acknowledgment of earthly gravity and its homage to the anonymous architects and masons of the past, ‘Nôtre Dame’ is typically Acmeist   Throughout his life Mandelstam continued to write about the various arts, but he was also a great love poet Several women – all of them important in their own right – were crucial to his life and work An affair with Marina Tsvetaeva inspired many of his poems about Moscow His close friendship with Anna Akhmatova helped him withstand the persecution he suffered during the 1930s He had intense affairs with the singer Olga Vaksel in 1924-25 and with the poet Maria Petrovykh in 1933 Most important of all was Nadezhda Khazina, whom he married in 1922   Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam moved to Moscow soon after their marriage Mandelstam’s second book, Tristia, published