A theatre, poetry and music workshop, introduced by the viewing and listening of rare materials relating to the historical and cultural period (pre-revolutionary Russia and Stalinist Soviet Union), designed to immerse us in times and places crucial to world history. Figures close to the poet are evoked, such as Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak and Nadezhda Mandelstam. The title Mandel’štamgrad (“City of Mandelstam”) recalls cities such as Leningrad and Stalingrad. In this way, we wish to dedicate a new city, placing it within our parallel history, not to a dictator, but to a poor poet persecuted by the Stalinist regime, who died of starvation in the winter of 1938 while being transported to a gulag near Vladivostok, in the far eastern reaches of the Soviet Union.

“In its unfolding, the poem moves away from its own ending, and its very ending comes unexpectedly, sounding like a beginning.” O.M.