Quote by Osip Mandelstam: “I was born in the night of January second to third, 1891.”

A birth announced with almost bureaucratic precision — yet choosing the exact moment of arrival in the world is a kind of insistence on existence. For a poet who would be erased by the Soviet state, declaring the exact coordinates of his life is an act of survival. I was here. I was real. This is when.

Mandelstam wrote his autobiographical prose piece The Noise of Time around 1923 to 1925, during a period of relative creative freedom in the early Soviet era. He was trying to preserve and understand his own past in a country where the past was being aggressively rewritten. Within a decade, he would be arrested and sent to his death for a poem mocking Stalin.

Russian poet of Jewish origin whose work is considered among the finest in the Russian language. Arrested twice by Stalin's secret police, he died in a transit camp near Vladivostok in 1938. His wife Nadezhda Mandelstam preserved his poems in memory and later in her memoir Hope Against Hope.