Quote by Osip Mandelstam: “The word is flesh and bread.”

This powerful metaphor emphasizes the tangible and essential nature of language. It suggests that words are not merely abstract symbols but are as vital and nourishing as physical sustenance, capable of sustaining life and spirit, just as flesh and bread sustain the body.

Mandelstam, facing severe repression, viewed poetry as a fundamental, almost sacred act. He believed in the inherent power and physicality of language in an era when words were twisted and censored by the state.

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.