I’ve been thinking a lot about borders; the literal ones drawn across maps, manned by uniformed strangers. And the metaphorical ones—the quiet, invisible lines we learn to draw within ourselves when speaking too loudly, or loving too openly, become dangerous.
Lately, I’ve been immersed in the writing of Osip Mandelstam, a Soviet poet who dared to keep writing under Stalin’s regime, where words were both sacred and punishable by death. His defiance wasn’t loud. He didn’t lead marches or incite rebellion. He wrote poems. Dense, obsessive, haunted poems. He wrote even after being exiled. He wrote until he was silenced.
And I can’t stop asking myself: why?
Why risk everything for a poem? Why persist in writing under a regime that crushed poets beneath the weight of their own metaphors?
Mandelstam’s Fourth Prose isn’t even a poem—it’s a kind of unruly essay, a prose piece that resists containment at every turn. It rages against literary bureaucracy and ideological conformity. It’s manic, hungry, brilliant. It collapses boundaries between political critique and artistic creation. And as I read it now, from a desk in Montreal in 2025, it feels disturbingly familiar.
Because the checkpoints haven’t disappeared. They’ve just changed shape.
For some of us, it’s still a border agent. For others, it’s an algorithm. A classroom. A boardroom. A family dinner. A voice inside your own head that says, Don’t say that. It’s too much. You’re too much.
When Mandelstam wrote his infamous “Stalin Epigram,” he knew he might not survive it. The poem doesn’t even mention Stalin by name, but each line is heavy with risk: “We live, deaf to the land beneath us, / Ten steps away no one hears our speeches.” It’s a portrait of silence and suffocation so precise, it cuts through time.
What Mandelstam teaches me—teaches us—is that resistance isn’t always loud. Sometimes it looks like a line break. A refusal to edit yourself. A joke that masks unbearable truth. A truth told even if no one is listening.
And that feels especially relevant now, in an age of filtered selves and curated outrage. We are encouraged to share, but not too much. To speak, but not too sharply. To tell our stories, but not the ones that might offend.
I’m guilty of this too. I’ve rewritten myself into smaller, safer shapes just to survive a conversation. Just to stay employable. Just to protect the people I love.
But there’s something incredibly radical about telling the truth as you see it—especially when you’re not supposed to.
So lately, I’ve been asking: What does it mean to write as if someone is listening? But more urgently: What does it mean to write even if no one is?
If Mandelstam’s poetics are a kind of checkpoint, then I want to meet them with my own papers in hand—papers covered in scribbles and stories and sentences I haven’t yet found the courage to say aloud.
Writing, after all, is its own border crossing. Every time we sit down to shape our thoughts, we decide whether to pass or resist. To comply or to subvert.
Mandelstam didn’t survive his resistance. But his words did. And maybe that’s the most hopeful thing I’ve learned this year: that even in the face of authoritarianism, invisibility, or apathy, a poem can outlive a prison.
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- John Hates Lemons
- Checkpoint Poetics: What a Soviet Poet Taught Me About Moral Resistance
Anxious Thoughts 
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