‘It’s Time You Knew: I Too Am a Contemporary…’

ABSTRACT

This publication offers four presentations from a roundtable on the poet Osip Mandelstam. Mikhail Aizenberg opens with a consideration of Mandelstam’s contemporary relevance to poets as well as scholars and readers, as his writings are a vital component of the ongoing life of Russian poetry. Vladimir Aristov points out the ties between Mandelstam and many other poets before comparing his “Lines on the Unknown Soldier” to Picasso’s famous Guernica. Leonid Vidgof also considers Mandelstam as a contemporary poet, underlining among other things the important Jewish elements of his work. Konstantin Komarov’s brief final statement rounds out the session with two comments: on the ways Mandelstam is still ahead of today’s poets, and on the “dreadful povidentialism” of his famous “Stalin epigram.”

KEYWORDS:

• Osip Mandelstam; Russian poetry; contemporary poetry

Notes

1 Vladimir Aristov is a Russian poet, essayist, and prose author with a second life as a professional mathematician. He has published thirteen books of poetry. He lives and works in Moscow.

2 Leonid Vidgof is a Russian author and a specialist in the environs of Moscow. He has published seven books on Osip Mandelstam and/or the city of Moscow, where he resides.

3 Konstantin Komarov is a Russian poet, literary critic, and literary scholar who has published widely in a variety of journals and in several books of poetry. He lives and works in Ekaterinburg.

1. Refers to an error in a widely distributed typewritten poem by Mandelstam, which mistyped belokuraia trost’ [‘fair-haired walking stick’] instead of belorukaia trost’ [‘white-handled walking stick’]. – Trans.

2. The so-called Lianozovo school, named for a district of Moscow; an underground group of post-avant-garde poets and artists that existed from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. – Trans.

3. A poetic name for St. Petersburg. – Trans.

4. Literally denoting ‘people of different ranks,’ the term referred to commoner-intellectuals who did not belong to the gentry. – Trans.