Osip Mandelstam
The tragedy of Paul Celan – trapped in his own allusive poems
By his late thirties, the great poet of the Holocaust had succumbed to clinical paranoia, in which every aspect of daily life was saturated with evil significance
Another heroic freethinker is wiped from Russian history
Vera Gedroits, the world’s first woman professor of surgery, inevitably fell foul of Stalin, despite supporting workers’ rights and saving hundreds of lives in the Russo-Japanese war
