The famous Russian poet Osip Mandelstam was in Shushi 11 years after massacres in Shushi, in 1931, saw a horrible picture of “forty thousand lifeless windows which are visible there from all sides” and wrote a poem called “The phaeton driver” dedicated to this tragedy.

A little-known “early late” Osip Mandelshtam poem (1931) that marks his return to poetry after more than half a decade of writing prose and prose only. Composed on their return to Moscow, Nadezhda Mandelstam writes that it depicts their actual journey out of Armenia, where he’d began to write poetry again in 1930. Source of translation – here.

PHAETON DRIVER

On a vertiginous mountain pass,
In the vicinity of Muslim quarters,
Death and we did a Dance Macabre –
Terrified were we as in a dream.

Our phaeton driver was sun-baked
And all desiccated like a raisin,
Like the devil’s own driver he was
Terse and full of gloom and doom.

Now the guttural cry of an Arab,
Now a meaningless “eh” grumble–
He took care to protect his face
Like it was a rose or a toad.

Hiding his hideous disfigurement
Under a black leather mask,
He was driving the carriage
To the outer limits of humanity.

With a jolt and a start off to the races,
And it seemed impossible we’d ever
Get off this mountain as a multitude
Of carriages and inns flashed by.

I came to: wait a second, buddy!
I now remember – I’ll be damned!
It is the pestilential chairman
That has gotten us and the horses lost.

He guides the noseless carriage,
Making a tired soul rejoice,
So that the bittersweet earth
Did spin like a merry-go-round.

In this way, in Nagorno-Karabakh,
In the cutthroat town of Shusha,
I tasted deep of these terrors
That the human soul is prey to.

Forty thousand lifeless windows
Are visible there from all sides
And labor’s soulless cocoon
Lies buried on its mountainsides.

And the disrobed houses
Turn shamelessly pinker,
And above them the sky’s
Deep blue plague darkens.

June 12, 1931