ABSTRACT
The journey of over a thousand miles from Moscow to Cherdyn occupied five days and nights. Not having slept since leaving the capital, the poet and his wife reached their destination exhausted, and in no mood to appreciate the small town’s fading archaic charm. It had been Russia’s gateway to Siberia in the late sixteenth century, marking the start of the Cherdyn Route that led to the Far East. Mandelstam was still showing symptoms of mental disorder, and was admitted to the local hospital. But he was free to leave the premises at will; indeed, he was obliged to do so in order to report to the security authorities every three days. Mandelstam relished such links with the past, but they were small consolation to him and his wife, depressed as they were by the stricken city’s lugubrious atmosphere, by the acute food shortage, by the spectacle of peasants begging in the street.
