The Poet and the Empire

ABSTRACT

In this second group of texts from the Znamia roundtables celebrating the 125th anniversary of Osip Mandelstam’s birth, four more poets discuss questions that lead them to compare Mandelstam to other poets: Pushkin (Evgenii Abdullaev on the poet’s relationship to empire); natural science (Grigorii Kruzhkov eliciting important features from Mandelstam’s poem “Lamarck” by referring to Robert Frost’s poem “The White-Tailed Hornet”); Lidiia Ginzburg (not a poet but an important scholar of Russian poetry, discussed by Boris Kutenkov); Nikolai Nekrasov (Aleksandr Kushner imagining a conversation between the two poets in which Mandelstam’s references to Nekrasov are revealed).

KEYWORDS:

• Osip Mandelstam; poetry; Pushkin; Robert Frost; Lidiia Ginzburg; Nikolai Nekrasov

Notes

2 Grigorii Kruzhkov is a poet, essayist, and translator of poetry with special expertise in Anglo-Russian literary connections. He lives in Moscow

2 Boris Kutenkov is a poet who lives in Moscow.

2 Aleksandr Kushner is the author of some fifty books of poetry; he lives in St. Petersburg.

1. See Aleksandr Veitsman’s interesting article, “Brezhnev Through Brodsky’s Eyes” [“Brezhnev glazami Brodskogo”], Slovo, 2008, No. 57. <http://magazines.russ.ru/slovo/2008/57/ve14.html>, accessed December 14, 2020.

2. Zelinskii, K.L. Na literaturnoi doroge. Sb. st. Moscow: Akademiia-XXI, 2014, pp. 248-49.

3. An allusion to the epigraph for Aleksandr Radishchev’s eighteenth-century work A Journey From St. Petersburg to Moscow: “A bloated monster, loathsome, enormous, with a hundred maws and bellowing.” The phrase became commonplace as a criticism of Russia’s political system.—Trans.

4. Lekmanov, O. Zhizn’ Osipa Mandel’shtama. Dokumental’noe povestvovanie. St. Petersburg: Izd-vo zhurnala Zvezda, 2003, p. 183.

5. Nerler, P. Osip Mandel’shtam i ego solagerniki. Moscow: AST, 2015.

6. Katsis, L. “‘Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva’ O. Mandel’shtama: ot fakta k vymyslu.” In Voprosy literatury, 2015, No. 1, p. 159.

7. Kruzhkov, G. “Sinkhronizmy v poezii.” In Zvezda, 5 (2011). See also: Kruzhkov, G.M. Luna i diskobol. Moscow: RGGU, pp. 264-79.

8. Zholkovskii, A. “Eshche raz o mandel’shtamovskom ‘Lamarke’.” In Voprosy literatury, 2 (2010). See that article’s bibliography on this subject.

9. A question may arise with the sequence of events: why is the drawbridge referred to at the very end, not before the depiction of the descent? But such chronological permutations are not rare with Mandelstam. Recall, for example, how the poem “The Decembrist” begins with a depiction of an exile’s hut (or prison), while in the third stanza the action, without warning, swings back many years, to the period of the Napoleonic wars: “And German oaks rustled for the first time,/Europe was weeping in snares … ”.

10. See, for example, Frost’s poem “A Blue Ribbon at Amesbury” (1936).

11. The second line of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem “Poet izdaleka zavodit rech’” (1923), from the cycle “Poets” (Poety).—Ed.

12. Opoiaz is an acronym for Obshchestvo izucheniia poeticheskogo iazyka (Society for the Study of Poetic Language), which brought Russian Formalism into poetry. The group functioned from 1916 to 1925; the Formalist school existed until the early 1930s.—Trans.

13. From ““To Friends” [Druz’iam],” a poem by Alexander Blok.—Trans.