Mandelstam was born on 14 January 1891[3] in Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire, to a wealthy Polish-Jewish family.[4] His father, a leather merchant by trade, was able to receive a dispensation freeing the family from the Pale of Settlement. Soon after Osip's birth, they moved to Saint Petersburg.[4] In 1900, Mandelstam entered the prestigious Tenishev School. His first poems were printed in 1907 in the school's almanac. As a schoolboy, he was introduced by a friend to members of the illegal Socialist Revolutionary Party, including Mark Natanson, and the revolutionary Grigory Gershuni.[5]
In April 1908, Mandelstam decided to enter the Sorbonne in Paris to study literature and philosophy, but he left the following year to attend the University of Heidelberg in Germany. In 1911, he decided to continue his education at the University of Saint Petersburg, from which Jews were excluded. He converted to Methodism and entered the university the same year.[6] He did not complete a formal degree.[7]
Mandelstam's poetry, acutely populist in spirit after the first Russian revolution in 1905, became closely associated with symbolist imagery. In 1911, he and several other young Russian poets formed the "Poets' Guild", under the formal leadership of Nikolai Gumilyov and Sergei Gorodetsky. The nucleus of this group became known as Acmeists. Mandelstam wrote the manifesto for the new movement: The Morning Of Acmeism (1913, published in 1919).[8] In 1913 he published his first collection of poems, The Stone;[9] it was reissued in 1916 under the same title, but with additional poems included.
