The Centuries Surround Me with Fire, Osip Mandelstam

A film about the Great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in 1938 in one of Stalin’s concentrati­on camps. It contains the only existing film interview with his widow, Nadeshda, shot on Super-8 in Moscow on May 1, 1973, a day when 1 million non-Muscovites came to the city to celebrate. Writer Andrei Sinyavsky – a pseudonym for Abram Tertz – himself an exile, talks about Nadeshda, recites Mandelstam’s poems, and discusses Mandelstam’s position in Russian literature.