Osip Mandelshtam was born into a Jewish family in Warsaw in 1891, but grew up chiefly in St Petersburg. His first collection, Stone, published when he was only 22, immediately established him as one of Russia's foremost poets. The revolution and the Soviet rule that followed created immense difficulties for Mandelshtam. Unwilling to bend his art to political ends, and increasingly critical of Stalin's leadership, he was imprisoned, tortured, exiled and generally persecuted. He continued to write, releasing another major collection, Tristia, and entrusting poems to his wife Nadezhda and his literary friends, who kept his works hidden from the authorities. He died of heart failure on his way to a prison camp in 1938.

James Greene was born in Berlin in 1938. He studied French and Russian at Oxford. A prize-winning translator, he worked on several major writers in addition to Mandelshtam, including Fernando Pessoa and Afanasy Fet.