Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) grew up in St. Petersburg and published his first book, Stone, in 1913. One more volume followed before he began encountering publishing difficulties in the Soviet Union. He wrote poetry, prose, and children’s verse, and also translated (chiefly from French), if largely as a necessity rather than a passion. Sentenced in 1934 to three years of internal exile in the central Russian city of Voronezh, he was re-arrested in 1938 and deported to the Soviet Far East, where he died in a Gulag transit camp.