Osip Mandelstam was born in 1891 of Jewish parents and brought up in St Petersburg. He studied at the universities of Heidelberg and St Petersburg. After his second and third volumes of poetry had been published in the Soviet Union, he began to be persecuted by the authorities for lack of ideological conformism, and in 1934 he was arrested and eventually exiled to Voronezh. After rearrest in 1938 he died in eastern Siberia on the way to a labour camp.