Osip Mandel?shtam (1891?1938) is considered by many to have been the best Russian poet of his era. This book is the first attempt to describe in a comprehensive way Mandel?shtam?s intellectual world ...and its effect on his evolution as a thinker.
If modernism marked, as some critics claim, an "apocalypse of cultural community," then Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) must rank among its most representative figures. Born to Central European Jews in ...Warsaw on the cusp of the modern age, he could claim neither Russian nor European traditions as his birthright. Describing the poetic movement he helped to found, Acmeism, as a "yearning for world culture," he defined the impulse that charges his own poetry and prose. Clare Cavanagh has written a sustained study placing Mandelstam's "remembrance and invention" of a usable poetic past in the context of modernist writing in general, with particular attention to the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
Cavanagh traces Mandelstam's creation of tradition from his earliest lyrics to his last verses, written shortly before his arrest and subsequent death in a Stalinist camp. Her work shows how the poet, generalizing from his own dilemmas and disruptions, addressed his epoch's paradoxical legacy of disinheritance--and how he responded to this unwelcome legacy with one of modernism's most complex, ambitious, and challenging visions of tradition. Drawing on not only Russian and Western modernist writing and theory, but also modern European Jewish culture, Russian religious thought, postrevolutionary politics, and even silent film, Cavanagh traces Mandelstam's recovery of a "world culture" vital, vast, and varied enough to satisfy the desires of the quintessential outcast modernist.
Now available for the first time in English, Oleg Lekmanov's critically acclaimed Mandelstam presents the maverick Russian poet's life and work to a wider audience and includes the most reliable ...details of the poet's life which were recently found and released from the KGB archives. Through his engaging narrative, Lekmanov carries the reader through Mandelstam's early life and education in prerevolutionary Petersburg and at the Sorbonne in Paris and in Heidelberg and his return to revolutionary Russia. Bold and fearless, he was quoted saying: "Only in Russia do they respect poetry. They even kill you for it." Osip Mandelstam compared a writer to a parrot, saying that once his owner tires of him, he will cover his cage with black cloth, which becomes for literature a surrogate of night. In 1938, Mandelstam was arrested and six months later became a statistic: Over 500,000 political prisoners were sent to the Gulags in 1938; between 1931 and 1940, over 300,000 prisoners died in the Gulags - one of them was the poet Osip Mandelstam. This is the tragic story of his life pre-empted by the black cloth of Stalinism.
At a time in Russia's history when poets could be (and sometimes were) killed for a poem, the autobiographies of three prominent poets, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Boris Pasternak, became ...a courageous defense of poetry. The Most Dangerous Art shows how these autobiographies trace an emotional trajectory that corresponds to the intensity of the social and state pressures that threatened Russian poets from the early 1920s to the late 1950s. During a period when literature became intensely political, and creative freedom became intensely risky, these autobiographies proclaim poetry's immortality and defend the poet's right to individual creativity against an increasingly threatening Soviet literary hierarchy. Donald Loewen provides detailed close readings of these biographies and juxtaposes these readings with historical context. The Most Dangerous Art is an illuminating contribution to the study of Russian literature. The volume is of special interest to researchers of 20th century Russian literature and autobiography.
Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most influential poets. This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides ...Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam's most beloved and haunting poems. Both scholars and general readers will gain a deeper understanding of his poetics, as Probstein situates each poem in its historical and literary context. The English translations presented here are so deeply immersed in the Russian sources and language through the ear of a Russian-born Probstein who has spent most of his adult life in the US, that they provide reader's with a Mandelstam unseen any translations that precede it.
One of the greatest controversies in Dante scholarship concerns the authenticity of the epistle to Cangrande della Scala, in which the poet (if it is indeed him) provides his patron with exegetical ...and epistemological strategies to be applied in approaching Paradiso,the third part of his Divine Comedy.Accompanying this section as a gift to della Scala, the epistle in itself would not have appeared in any sense out of the ordinary had it not followed its requisite dedication with an extensive commentary on the poem. It is hardly surprising, then, that scholars heatedly debate the authorship of this letter, which purports no less than to prescribe how the Paradisoshould be read, claiming authority of and over the text. Most significantly, the epistle contends that, just like scripture, the Divine Comedyis “polysemous, that is, having many meanings,” requiring a manifold approach; specifically, the author of the letter cites the availability of literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical readings.
The article publishes the newly discovered Osip Mandelstam’s letter to Eudoxia Nikitina (1923), which dropped out of sight of researchers and was not captured in studies of the poet’s biography or ...compilations of his editions. The subject line is the return of books previously borrowed from the addressee. The commentary to the letter contains information on Mandelstam’s literary relations with Nikitina, an analysis of certain features of the content of the text, and a clarification of some realities mentioned therein. The material is accompanied by the publication of the autographs (manuscripts) from the State Literary Museum’s collection (Moscow, Russia). The article reconstructs an unknown episode from Mandelstam’s life in Moscow in 1923 and his relations with Eudoxia Nikitina and Nikolai Aseyev.
Mandelstam’s poem is divided into two opposing parts, in terms o f content and style; they are united by the same lyrical subject. These two parts correspond to two parallel narrative plans. In the ...beginning, the unreal, afterlife world (the world o f shadows) is presented, and then the earthly, real world. The first part describes the lyrical subject’s transition from being to non-being; the second part speaks o f the life he has left behind which at the same time continues for him. The analysis o f the poem leads to the conclusion that the world o f shadows is treated by the poet as an Elysium of names, i.e. poetic words. It is a special reality created by poetic language. This poem appears as an illustration o f Mandelstam’s early theoretical work on poetic language.
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