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Mandelstam's poem "With a thin Gillette plate ..." has rarely been subjected to detailed analysis and still contains riddles, the possibility of variable interpretations. This concerns the subtext, the system of images, the intertextual structure, the poetics of the lyrical landscape. In particular, the important components for understanding this text are the connection with traditional culture, the specifics of the "tree" and "river" figurative codes, the relationship of the landscape with other semantic layers, the forms of the presence of the lyrical subject. The image of the half-blood Don, the main mystery of the poem, is of the particular interest. A consistent analysis of stanzas in a system of different contexts allows us to get closer to understanding the symbolism of the poem.

This essay explores the notion of Mitsprechen or "with-speaking" in Paul Celan's poetry. "With-speaking" supposes that voices in the poems actively participate and engage in a dialogue that goes beyond traditional hermeneutic frameworks. Celan's notion of col-loquy, distinct from the conventional sense of dialogue, challenges the separation between author and interpreter, rendering the traditional concept of intertextuality inadequate. The poems, according to Celan, give voice to human destinies, making texts audible as the voices of others. This vocal dimension of Celan's poetry has prompted extensive discussion among philosophers, particularly in France. Levinas, Blanchot, and Derrida, influenced by German phenomenology and hermeneutics, critically examine the ethical implications of speaking "about" the other. They challenge traditional hermeneutical practices, emphasizing the responsibility of interpreters to respect the unique and untranslatable character of individual voices. This critique extends to Protestant categories of interpretation, drawing on alternative Jewish perspectives on being-in-the-world and alterity. The text explores the tensions inherent in speaking "for" or "in the name of" others, especially in the context of interpreting Celan's work, raising questions about maintaining the fundamental difference and distance that otherness implies. The discussion concludes by highlighting Werner Hamacher's formulation of a new philology that disrupts hermeneutical violence, influenced by the critiques of Blanchot, Levinas, and Derrida, and offering an alternative way of addressing the particular challenges posed by Celan's poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mandelstam’s creative thinking is similar to the mythological one. This is refl ected in his lyric poetry as an artistic whole and in individual author’s myths. The article presents the analysis of some features of the author’s myth about the earth, which was formed in the “First Voronezh Notebook” by O. Mandelstam. The following tasks are set: to identify the features of the poetics of the mythological type in the complex of elements associated with the image of the earth; to show their semantic and fi gurative unity, as well as their role in the poetic attitude of Mandelstam in later years. The analysis is carried out mainly at the level of the fi gurative-motivic structure. The article also refl ects intertextual connections, special features of the lyrical plot, artistic space and other elements of poetics. Combinations of elements, their modifi cations, intertextual connections, including those within cyclic structures, are taken into account. The analysis has shown that the author’s myth about the earth is one of the foundations of the poet’s worldview in the “First Voronezh Notebook” and is closely related to both his ideas about the Word, poetry, the poet’s fate, and his understanding of the roots of national existence in their relation to the modern era. The myth of the earth largely determines the originality of the artistic space and optics of the poems of the “First Voronezh Notebook”. Having considered this phenomenon, the author of the article was able to clarify the idea of the most controversial points of the ideological position of Mandelstam in his later years.

The notion of the “fear of tautology” marks Joseph Brodsky’s poem “Notes of a Fern”: “But evil cannot befall a bad human, and the fear of a tautology is a guarantee of prosperity.” The poet thus inverts Socrates’ assertion that no evil befalls a good person. In the eyes of Brodsky, this assertion represented the epiphany of tautology. His viewpoint was that tautology is squandering one’s life trying to resemble and embrace the appearances and experiences of others. Whereas political and social systems gravitate towards tautology, literature helps one to differentiate himself from the crowd, avoid becoming a “victim of history.” Brodsky’s idea of tautology resonates with those of Mandelstam and Averintsev. Sergey Averinsev described Mandelstam’s dread of confining himself within a religious or ethnic identity as a “profound fear of tautology.” Finally, French philosopher Clément Rosset named tautology “the demon of identity” in the sense of it being sorcery and a magical circle. Advancing upon Rosset’s metaphor, it could be said that the fear of tautology is the desire to break the magical circle and drive the demon of identity into the trap of paradox and irony.

Цель данной статьи – выявить и проанализировать комплекс универсалий и образно-символический ряд восточного происхождения в стихотворении О. Э. Мандельштама «Раковина» (1911 г.). Одной из задач исследования также являлось сопоставить ориентальные образы и мотивы с античными и европейскими. Для этого были выделены и изучены такие универсалии, как дао, да-тун, инь-ян, вэнь, у-син, а также мотивы (хрупкости, защищённости, творчества и др.), образы раковины и жемчужины, ночи, морской пены, тумана и дождя и др. В результате было установлено при эксплицитном доминировании реалий европейской культуры имплицитное влияние на мифопоэтическую картину мира О. Э. Мандельштама восточных универсалий, определяющих особое синтезное восприятие природы, бытовой и мировой культуры, а также творчества. Свойственное русскому поэту Серебряного века мироощущение во многом близко средневековым китайским поэтам, художникам и философам. Полученные в ходе исследования данные могут быть использованы в дальнейшем научном изучении восточных универсалий в русской поэзии и преподавании соответствующих учебных курсов, а также помочь при переводах на китайский язык стихотворений О. Э. Мандельштама.

This article focuses on Osip Mandelstam’s poem “Impressionism”. The main objective of this work is to analyze the key motifs and images of the poem and to offer an integral, non-contradictory reading of the poem based on its immediate context as well as on the specific features of Mandelstam’s poetics. Mandelstam treated impressionism with great enthusiasm considering it an innovative phenomenon in art; impressionism in its broad meaning most fully corresponded with his idea of the life-giving capacities of art as reflected in this poem. The article discloses the plot of the gradual immersion in the world of an impressionist painting in Mandelstam’s poem. A verse-by-verse analysis of the text complemented by the parallel reading of the fragments of Mandelstam’s prose, and also with impressionist paintings the poet was familiar with as a backdrop, allows me to define the particularities of Mandelstam’s symphonic and solid perception of plastic arts, including impressionist painting. The article shows how the antinomies of Mandelstam’s creative art affect the poetic text. “Impressionism” is not a reflection of specific motifs of particular paintings but a cocreative effort of resurrecting reality in art that Mandelstam thought to be the art’s prime purpose.

This article investigates the relation between nature, ethics, and poetics in the work of Paul Celan, using „Engführung“ [“Stretto”] as a starting point. The readings from Celan’s library testify to his careful rethinking of what “reality” means. Applying the terminology and research of geology, physics, and, in particular, quantum mechanics, opens up an interpretative horizon for Celan’s poetry that can be configured according to the laws of entanglement as well as the form of a multidimensional ‚Raumgitter‘. The human and ethical elements of intentionality and being-in-the-world are not obliterated but rather subordinated to the natural itself. Celan goes beyond the idea of a subject-observer of the world-as-object and offers us a perspective in which language, as well as humanity and intentionality (poetic and otherwise), is merely one cosmic manifestation – part of nature itself. Language, like nature, shows different and changing states of being. It can be metamorphic but also sedimentary; conglomerate but also fluid like the elements present in nature. It is not a metaphorical analogy but a changing material state. It is non-local, dynamic, and provisional, like the relationality of quantum aggregations. Writing ‚nach der Natur‘ is, for Celan, who makes the knowledge and vocabulary of the natural sciences his own, to recover this metamorphic, provisional dimension of language – inside and outside time, probabilistic, invisible at a macroscopic level. By writing in and as nature in this way, poetry resists the destruction of what “happened” [geschehen] at the camps in the most devastating way.

The theory of thermal fluctuations in open hydrodynamic steady states (OHSS) is presented exclusively within the framework of hydrodynamics. The history of studies of fluctuations in a continuous medium with a stationary flux is described. It is shown that the application the fluctuation-dissipation theorem (FDT) to the OHSS with the requirement of fulfilling the Onsager's reciprocal relations (fluctuating hydrodynamics), is erroneous. The reason is that the flux, changing the dynamics and initial values of the fluctuations, violates the detailed balance existing in equilibrium. This is demonstrated by the example of the Mandelstam problem on fluctuations in a medium with a heat flux. For this problem, the structure dynamic factor is calculated for an isotropic solid and a liquid. The loss of time symmetry by the correlation functions of fluctuations and the asymmetry of their spectral representations in this problem is due to the spatial temperature variation, which determines the flux. In order to show the generality of this result for all OHSS with spatial heterogeneity, the Kelvin problem on thermal fluctuations of the interface displacements between two liquids is also considered. The upper moving liquid has velocity potential changes as the temperature in the Mandelstam problem. Reciprocal relations for both the Mandelstam and the Kelvin problems are pointed out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers “The Octaves” by O.E. Mandelstam as the unique complex of genre and theme connected not only with the literary but also with the philosophical influence of J.W. Goethe on the Mandelstam’s poetry. It is proved that Mandelstam enters the consensual dialogue with Goethe because at the time of creating the studied cycle of poems, at the beginning of 1930s, Mandelstam’s interest in scientific theories, especially in biology and history reached its pinnacle. Mandelstam’s “The Octaves”, “Lamarck” are compared with scientific works of J.W. Goethe as well as with his sciencerelated poetry, in particular with “Metamorphosis of Plants”. Imaginative homology of both poets, convergence of their plots and trope functions are demonstrated. All this undoubtedly proves that Mandelshtam was affected by Goethe’s beliefs reflected in his ideology and ideopoetic. It is shown how the feeling of spiritual connection with Goethe which Mandelstam had, especially after his journey to Armenia (and acquaintance with biologist B. Kuzin) is converted into aesthetic world view and poetic principles. It brightly manifests itself in lyrical ontology of such “The Octaves” like: “Both Schubert on the waters and Mozart in birds’ chirping...”, “When having destroyed a draft...”, “Oh, Moslem-butterfly...”, “And the jagged bough of a maple-tree...”.

The article deals with the under examined problem in literary studies: a folklore tradition in O. Mandelstam’s poetry. The researchers studied manifestation of mythological tradition in the poet’s artistic world and revealed different archetypal models but they paid no attention to folklore elements. The folklore commentary of one of the poems makes it possible to understand an image structure of the text in the other way and brings a reader to the ontological level of the content.

This article addresses the issue of music in the works of Osip Mandelstam. Based on works of both Russian and international scholars, the author examines the markers for music as philosophy in Mandelstam's poetry and prose. The author identifies the common foundations of music and law, including freedom, measure, and harmony, to build the following system of argumentation. Mandelstam's panmusical approach is rooted in a special sense of the poet's language, of its nonverbal basis, while also serving as a starting point for thought to come into being, as the origin of personal transformation. Music in Mandelstam's life and work thus acts as a general law of the universe, as immutable for the natural world as it is for the world of man and the world of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dialogue of Paul Celan, a reader and translator, with the poetry and the whole complex poetic views of Osip Mandelstam demonstrates an important general condition: both poets worked in the context of the modernist language crisis and language critique. Mandelstam takes on the task of creating a pure language of poetry in the struggle against the symbolist “code,” in the “resurrection” of words (V. Shklovsky) by means of a “defamiliarizated” intermixture of meanings and contexts, in intentional semantic oblivion and, among other things, by immersing himself in foreign languages (“An alien speech will be my warming ear husk”). Paul Celan’s work, under the conditions of “poetry after Auschwitz” (T. Adorno), aiming at clearing up the German language of the terror of history, was influenced, among other things, by his strategy of creating a non-figurative, hermetic poetry language comparable to the so-called “absolute music” (K. Dahlhaus). This paper identifies the common poetic motifs in the works of Celan and Mandelstam, as well as individual solutions for overcoming the lingual crisis.

This paper is devoted to the analysis of Osip Mandelstam’s poem “No, I will not hide from the great mess.” The poem is well-known yet remains relatively obscure and understudied, the meaning of most of its images is not clear. On the basis of motive analysis, draft versions of the poem (as analyzed by I. M. Semenko), and memoirs, a new interpretation is proposed: the addressee and the antagonist of the poem is Anna Akhmatova. The lyrical hero of the poem rides in a tram in the 1930s and painfully recalls the trips on a carriage with Akhmatova in 1917–1918. This interpretation allows to clarify the semantics of all the elements of the poem: its desperate and “rippling” intonation, the motive of the carriage driver, the motive of the game, the image of the “whore,” the comparison with a sparrow, etc. All of these images have a biographical connotation, related to Mandelstam’s relationship with Akhmatova.

The article analyzes a diptych “Two Poems about Love” written by Tomas Venclova in 1973 and its contexts. The article refers to the archived manuscript and the translation of Mandelstam’s poem “Za to, chto ia ruki tvoi ne sumel uderzhat‘…” (“For I failed to keep your hands…”) that Venclova first released in 1967. In this case, Mandelstam’s poem is important to Venclova both as a text about a city doomed for collapse, and as a work about love. It is noted that in the diptych this is not the only important poem by Mandelstam (although it was noted in the comments); images from the other poems (“Swallow,” “Leningrad”) were also quoted and reinterpreted by Venclova. Just like Mandelstam, Venclova was also opposed to totalitarianism. For Mandelstam, the post-revolutionary St. Petersburg, and for Venclova the Soviet Vilnius, represent a dying city – in the first poem of the diptych it is moved to the ocean, in such a way highlighting the threatening situation. In the first poem, the source of life is love disguised with a musical theme; the second one already talks about passing lovers – their bodies now “like stones lay next to each other.” Some poetic images are modified in Venclova’s later works. Mandelstam is still as important and will appear next to Ovid, who is only mentioned in the manuscript, in the poem “Tristia” from 1997.

The fates and fortunes of any national literature in a foreign culture is a multifaceted subject. And this is where the perception of Russian culture in France belongs. In France, the general public became aware of the life and works of Osip Mandelstam in the early seventies, when Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs were published. Before 1970, only some translations of Mandelstam’s poems, the first one made by Chuzeville back in 1925, found their way to periodicals and anthologies. Information about the poet was spread to a great degree thanks to anthologies, as befits this genre of reading matter. During that period, the publishers of anthologies could either collaborate with translators (Slonim, Reavey), or translate the poetry themselves (Rais, Granoff). Journal articles and translations chime in and resonate with anthological publications.

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Copyright of Literature / Literatura is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Literature / Literatura is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article is a fragment of the PhD thesis Philosophical and Aesthetic Principles of Tragedy in Calderon and Racine (Department of the History of Foreign Literature, Moscow State University, 1988). In her dissertation, the author examined Racine’s presence in Mandelstam’s poetry against the theory of the tragic. Written in the essayistic form, the article examines the following basic images and key concepts of this general theme: (1) cascading shawls as emblematizing heaviness / lightness; (2) a word-confession as expression of pure and redemptive suffering; (3) death by word followed up by redemption. It pays particular attention to the image of the “black sun” and the “tainted day” in Racine’s Phaedra. According to Mandelstam, this image has different connotations and “does not evoke a ready-made meaning” (“Conversation about Dante”). In Racine, Sun is a sacred symbol, it is “the Hidden God”, or Deus absconditus of Jansenism. Phaedra’s sin stains the Sun and darkens it. Phaedra’s last words confirm the redemptive effect of her death. In the article “Pushkin and Scriabin,” Mandelstam writes about the tragic meaning of the artist’s death and compares it with Phaedra’s deed. The study of Racine’s presence in Mandelstam, taking into account the studies of such scholars as Barthes, Goldmann, Poulet and others, allows us to point out explicit and implicit allusions to Racine in Mandelstam’s poetry. It also helps to understand Mandelstam’s idea of the tragedy and the tragic as it developed from 1914 through 1920 when the poet was translating the great French tragedian and at the same time was trying to comprehend the tragic events he witnessed.

En el presente trabajo analizamos hasta qué extremo el título Tristia, otorgado a la primera edición del segundo poemario de Ósip Mandelstam no por el propio autor sino por el poeta y músico Mijaíl Kuzmín, ha podido influir en la recepción y exégesis posteriores de la obra haciendo que la crítica busque, quizás en exceso, referencias ovidianas.

V prispevku z vidika Mandelštamove poetike analiziramo politični potencial sodobne ruske poezije in rapa kot izrazne oblike, ki v sodobnosti ohranja nekatere tradicionalne prvi- ne pesništva. Mandelštamovo razumevanje pesništva nam služi kot izhodišče za opredelitev specifične pesniške dimenzije političnega in etičnega, nato pa v tem okviru analiziramo dva različna primera sodobne politične poezije (Dmitrij Bikov in Jelena Fanajlova) ter ugotavlja- mo, da v nobenem od obravnavanih primerov ne moremo govoriti o resničnem udejanjenju pesniške politike/etike, da pa se morda del tega potenciala skriva v družbeno angažiranem sodobnem ruskem rapu.

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Copyright of Ágora: Estudos Clássicos em Debate is the property of Agora: Estudos Classicos em Debate and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article offers a detailed analysis of Osip Mandelstam's poem Na otkosy, Volga, chlyn', Volga, chlyn'. The main purpose of the paper is to describe how the poet uses folklore and pseudo-folklore traditions to create his own text. The author concludes that certain words and metaphors dispersed in Mandelstam's poem refer to folklore topoi. As a result, the poem seems to be intuitively understandable despite the fact that the grammatical structure complicates the perception of its semantics. Thus, Mandelstam's poem does not appear to be "obscured" (tëmnoe), contrary to what has been commonly pointed out in previous studies. Moreover, even immanent analysis allows the reader to understand the main semantic features of the text. The article calls into question the intertextual approach, which is the most common, to the late work of Mandelstam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foregrounding through Tense/Aspect Morphology in Lyric Poetry– analysis of Osip Mandelstam’s Poem The Wind Brought Us Comfort… and Its Polish and English Translations The aim of this article is to show how tense-aspect morphology could be used for discourse-pragmatic purpose of structuring the lyric text. In the poem discussed, switching from PFV past to IPFV present is essential for shifting between foreground and background. The novelty of our approach lies in application of ideas developed within narrative analysis in order to discuss information grounding in lyric poetry. Analysing Polish and English translations of O. Mandelstam’s poem, we will demonstrate how saving temporal structure of the original text can become an important criteria in judging the adequacy of poetic translation.

The article dwells upon the problem scarcely investigated in literary studies: a folklore tradition in O. Mandelstam's poetry. The researchers studied manifestation of mythological tradition in the poet's artistic world and revealed different archetypal models but they paid no attention to folklore elements. Only folklorists and ethnographers, while describing children's games associated with the theme of death, refer to one text of the poet illustrating their scientific research. This remark made it possible to develop the idea of folklore tradition existing in the acmeist's works having a latent character. The folklore commentary of one of the poems makes it possible to understand an image structure of the text in other way and brings a reader to the ontological level of the content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Miedzy Oryginalem a Przekladem is the property of Ksiegarnia Akademicka Sp. zo.o and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The essay deals with the literature production of three great Russian writers who travelled in the Caucasus, namely Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41), Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) and Vasily Grossman (1905-64). In particular, I will consider Lermontov’s poems set in the Caucasus, together with his novel Герой нашего времени (A Hero of Our Time), Mandelstam’s prose Путешествие в Армению (Journey to Armenia) and Grossman's Добро вам (An Armenian Sketchbook), the two latter being written after the writers’ journeys. My analysis concentrates on the occurrences of two extensively used words, пыль (dust) and камень (stone). Apart from the factual description of the Caucasus, which is actually dusty and stony, these two antithetical although both chthonic elements acquire symbolic overtones of meaning in the Russian literary production.

There has been little direct discussion between perhaps the two leading philosophers of our age: Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben. Yet both men have written about the same poem by Osip Mandelstam, 'The Age', around the topic of time. Significantly, Agamben's response, written after Badiou's, is a subtle and damning critique of Badiou's conceptualisation of time, in particular extended across the categories of the modern, the contemporary, and the now or the event - although it never actually mentions Badiou by name. In this paper the lens of the central role of indifference in the work of both is used to present alternating and competing views as to the nature of modern, contemporary, and 'now' time. Specifically, a contrast is drawn between Badiou's use of indifference as both quality-neutral and absolutely non-relational, and Agamben's application of the indifferent suspension of the temporal signature as such. The paper concludes that while Badiou uses temporal indifference to question and problematise the idea of modern time as 'now', through a theory of the event, Agamben appears to go further. Rather than analyse the nature of modern time, the contemporary and the now through his reading of Mandelstam, Agamben uses Mandelstam's poem to suspend the Western conception of time as a line composed of points in its entirety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The reception and artistic embodiment of Germany's topic as in the poetry by V.Brusov and also in the verses by O.Mandelstam is realized in cultural and historical aspects. But if Brusov interprets the topic from the historical aspect first of all, and thereupon in the cultural plan, in Mandelstam's poetry historical component is secondary, while Germany's culture both as a power opposing the wars and the destruction and its connection with Russia's culture are of paramount importance. Courageous perception of life and this world reflected in the philosophy of acmeism, in the conception of poetical creation and the Word, found its embodiment in the topic of Germany in Mandelstam's poetry and, primarily, in his indicative' poem "To the German Speech". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The article focuses on the importance of Mandelstam as “a key” to Andrei Bitov''s novel, Pushkin House. It discusses Bitov''s emphasis, in Pushkin House, upon honesty about reality and upon an honest representation of reality. It discusses, in this respect, the ways in which Mandelstam is significant, in terms of Bitov''s response to reading Mandelstam, and in terms of the ways in which Bitov''s knowledge of Mandelstam functions in Pushkin House. The article also takes into account certain relevant features of Bitov''s ‘The Garden’, ‘Life in Windy Weather’, and ‘Notes from around the Corner’. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]