A jubilee year for a famous Russophone writer will always generate lots of critical and scholarly attention, conferences and roundtables—and 2021 is another round number for Osip Mandelstam, born in 1891. We celebrate at Russian Studies in Literature with some of the pieces we were unable to include in an earlier issue on Mandelstam (53(1)). This issue brings two collective sets of comments from a roundtable of poets (originally hosted by the journal Znamia in late 2015, not long before Mandelstam’s 125th birthday) together with two articles of more traditional literary scholarship. The poets’ less academic comments and the literary criticism or scholarship overlap a great deal, and this surely says something about the readers who are drawn to Mandelstam and the deeply encoded associations of his writings. Scholars in Russia have been able to publish frank and uncensored work on Mandelstam for thirty years now, yet there is still clearly a great deal yet to say.
The first set of commentaries from the roundtables on “Osip Mandelstam and Contemporary Poetry,” identified by its first author Mikhail Aizenberg, focuses on Mandelstam as a contemporary presence in Russian poetry. The participants are poets Mikhail Aizenberg, Vladimir Aristov (both poet and mathematician), Leonid Vidgof, and Konstantin Komarov. Each one emphasizes Mandelstam’s impact on poets today as an inspiration, as an example of use of language against stultification, and as a leader whose work suggests what poetic language can do. As Aizenberg says, “If Mandelstam’s poems had not had such characteristics, contemporary (Russian) poetry would be different too” (this issue, p. 5). Mandelstam, the poets all agree, is contemporary because today’s poets have not yet caught up with him.
The second set of roundtable presentations, which opens with remarks from Evgenii Abdullaev, continues the topic with an emphasis on Mandelstam’s relationship to other poets, scholars and artists. The poets speaking here include Abdullaev (who publishes his own verses as Sukhbat Aflatuni), Grigorii Kruzhkov, Boris Kutenkov, and Aleksandr Kushner. Here, as in the first set of comments, all the poets are men, which raises (but does not answer) the question whether Mandelstam’s influence and importance are more pronounced among contemporary male Russophone poets. Abdullaev examines Mandelstam’s relationship to Russia’s imperial heritage, comparing it to Pushkin’s ambiguous relationship to the same in an earlier century; Kruzhkov elicits some features of Mandelstam’s poem “Lamarck” by comparing it to Robert Frost’s “The White-Tailed Hornet,” published four years before Mandelstam wrote his; Kutenkov reads Mandelstam through Lidiia Ginzburg’s writings but also with reference to his own poetry; Kushner finds echoes of Nekrasov’s poetry and imagines the conversation the two might have had in poet heaven.
Following the roundtables, Irina Surat’s article “A Self-Portrait, the Pitcher, and Rembrandt the Martyr” gives an in-depth reading of three ekphrastic poems: “A hint of wing in the lifted” (also known as “Self-Portrait,” written in St. Petersburg in 1913 or 1914), “Delinquent debtor to a long thirst” (also known as “The Pitcher”) and “Like chiaroscuro’s martyr Rembrandt,” the latter two written when Mandelstam was in exile in Voronezh, almost the final period of his life. In Voronezh he wrote poems particularly difficult to interpret, but also particularly rewarding for analysis with reference to other poets and to the history of art. “Self-Portrait” takes off from Mendelstam’s reading of a portrait that a friend had made of him, while “The Pitcher” and “Like chiaroscuro’s martyr Rembrandt” both spring from visits to Voronezh museums and, Surat argues, are not limited to the individual archeological or artistic items that Mandelstam saw there.
In “Joseph Brodsky’s ‘Unknown Mandelstam,’” Leonid Katsis reaches back to the important 1991 conference on Mandelstam in London, which marked both the centenary of Mandelstam’s birth, Katsis asserts, the end of a certain era in Mandelstam studies. This conference brought together for the first time different communities of experts, including Soviet and émigré scholars whose approaches to the poet had by necessity been different until then. Katsis focuses on what Joseph Brodsky had to say, in particular about the “Stalin Ode.” As in the roundtables, the reader encounters a living poet who was greatly impacted by Mandelstam, and who has very insightful things to contribute to the discussion. One of the changes brought about by the conference was that a serious scholar could no longer ignore the Stalin ode. Though Katsus is quick to criticize the work and approaches of other scholars, he stresses the importance of Brodsky as a poet deeply informed by Mandelstam and in command of a significant philological resources as he advanced his own interpretations.
In sum, this issue shows us Mandelstam’s continuing vitality among active poets and the energy of scholars who work on him. I will finish my introduction by citing Evgenii Abdullaev: “Mandelstam today may be the most influential major poet of the first half of the last century. His name is a watchword both for provisional traditionalists and no less provisional modernists” (this issue, p. 20). Readers will profit from these discussions and return to Mandelstam with renewed enjoyment and understanding.