The main motives of Mandelstam's creativity. Poem dedicated to O

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Introduction
Chapter 1. Features of O. Mandelstam’s poetry

1.1 Acmeistic views on the world and art of O. Mandelstam
1.2 The semantic potential of O. Mandelstam’s poetry

Chapter 2. The theme of love in the lyrics of O. Mandelstam

2.1 Love lyrics by O. Mandelstam
2.2 O. Mandelstam’s lyrical hero

Conclusion
Bibliography
Introduction
Mandelstam, Osip Emilievich (1891-1938),
- Russian Soviet poet, prose writer.
Born on January 3 (15), 1891 in Warsaw in the family of a tanner and glove maker.
Soon after the birth of their son, the family moved to St. Petersburg. Here the consciousness of the future poet is gradually permeated by a deep and creatively fruitful cultural dissonance. The patriarchal life of the Jewish clan, subsequently clothed in the image of the rejected, conjured, but also native “Jewish chaos,” will confront in the poet’s work once and for all the stunning, captivating and alienating imperious greatness of St. Petersburg with its imperial orderliness and commanding harmony, which will echo more than once in Mandelstam’s lyric themes of eternal Rome and the solemnity of architectural masterpieces. Later, in Mandelstam’s poetry, both of these backgrounds were captured in a combination of deep contrasting colors - black and yellow, the colors of the talis (Jewish prayer shawl) and the imperial standard: As if flowing in the air / The bile of a two-headed eagle (Palace Square, 1915); Behold the black and yellow light, behold the joy of Judea! (Among the young Levite priests..., 1917).
The leitmotif of Mandelstam’s childhood memories is “tongue-tied”, “languageless” family, the “fantastic” language of his father, who self-taught himself in Russian and German. The poet’s legacy is not speech, but an insatiable impulse for speech, breaking through the barrier of languagelessness. Mandelstam's path to the laurels of a famous poet of the 20th century. will go through painful attempts to overcome this tongue-tiedness, expand the boundaries of what is spoken, curb the “inexpressible” with an innate rhythm, and find the “lost word”. But along with the tongue-tiedness of the Jews, who enter Russian speech from the outside, with effort, Mandelstam will have to overcome the tongue-tiedness of the Nadsonov era of Russian poetry - 1880-1890, when the old possibilities of the language have been exhausted, and new ones are only dawning, and, finally, the lack of language of the future poet, who was ordered To successfully use the ready-made language, you will have to break through the “high” tongue-tiedness (“tongue-tied” is the speech defect of the Prophet Moses in the Bible) to break through to your own unique word.
From his early youth, the consciousness of Mandelstam is that of a commoner, not rooted in the age-old soil of national culture and patriarchal life: “I could never understand the Tolstoys and Aksakovs, the Bagrov-grandsons, in love with family archives with epic home memories... The commoner does not need memory, it is enough for him to tell about the books he has read, and the biography is ready.” But from this lack of rootedness in national life will grow participation in universal existence, an acmeistic “longing for world culture,” the ability to perceive Homer, Dante and Pushkin as contemporaries and “fellow brothers” at the free “feast” of the universal spirit.
In 1900-1907 Mandelstam studied at the Tenishevsky Commercial School. A special intellectual-ascetic atmosphere reigned here, and the ideals of political freedom and civic duty were cultivated. During the years of the first Russian revolution of 1905-1907, Mandelstam could not help but become infected with political radicalism. Revolutionary events and the catastrophe of the Russian-Japanese War inspired the poet’s first student poetic experiments. He perceives what is happening as a renewing element, a vigorous universal metamorphosis: “The boys of nine hundred and five went into the revolution with the same feeling with which Nikolenka Rostov went into the hussars,” he will say much later, looking back.
Having received a diploma from the Tenishev School on May 15, 1907, Mandelstam tried to join the Socialist Revolutionary Military Organization in Finland, but was not accepted there due to his youth. Concerned for their son's future, his parents are in a hurry to send him to study abroad. In 1907-1908, Mandelstam listened to lectures at the Faculty of Literature of the University of Paris, in 1909-1910 he studied Romance philology at the University of Heidelberg (Germany), and traveled around Switzerland and Italy. The echo of these meetings with Western Europe will never leave Mandelstam's poetry. It was then that the sum of Mandelstam's architectural impressions included European Gothic - a through symbol of the figurative system of his future poetry.
In Paris during these years, an internal change took place: Mandelstam left politics for poetry and turned to intensive literary work. He is passionate about the lyrics of V. Bryusov, the leader of Russian symbolism, and French poets - for the courage of “pure negation”, for the “music of life” caused by the lack of attachment to specific life content, as Mandelstam will say in one of his letters to his former literature teacher and literary mentor Vl . Gippius. In Paris, Mandelstam met N. Gumilev, who became his closest friend and associate. It was Gumilev who “ordained” Mandelstam to the “rank” of a poet. This acquaintance was destined to take root in 1911 already in St. Petersburg, when Mandelstam at an evening in the “tower” of Vyach. Ivanova meets Gumilyov's wife Anna Akhmatova for the first time. All three will be united not only by deep friendship, but also by similarity of poetic aspirations.
Around 1910, in the most sensitive literary circles, the crisis of symbolism as a literary movement, claiming to be the total language of new art and new culture, became obvious. The desire for artistic liberation from the power of too intrusive and didactic symbolism was dictated by the intention of Gumilyov, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, as well as S. Gorodetsky, V. Narbut, M. Zenkevich and some other authors to form a new poetic direction. Thus, at the beginning of 1913, Acmeism came to the forefront of literary struggle.

Chapter 1. Features of O. Mandelstam’s poetry

1. 1 Acmeistic views on the world and art of O. Mandelstam

In the 1910s, Mandelstam, with all the fervor of his youth, shared Acmeist aspirations to oppose the endless symbolist impulses “to heaven,” into indiscriminate mysticism, the golden balance of the earthly and the heavenly. In his work, the fruit of the near-Acmeist journal controversy of 1913 is the article Morning of Acmeism, which for unknown reasons was rejected as an Acmeist manifesto and published only in 1919. However, it was in this article that the essence of the Acmeist view of the world and art, the principles of the poetics of Acmeism, were formulated with utmost clarity and depth.

More than any other literary movement of the 20th century, Acmeism resisted its precise definition. It included too different artistic systems, introduced by too different poets, who were united primarily by friendly relations and the desire to distance themselves from symbolism. But in the history of Russian literature of the 20th century. Acmeism entered primarily as an integral poetic system, uniting three poets - Mandelstam, Akhmatova and Gumilyov.

Acmeism saw the highest miracle in the word, in the poetic action itself. And he contrasted this miracle of words with endless symbolist speculations on the themes of “metaphysical”, transcendental miracles. Mandelstam the Acmeist’s word did not call for escape from the “blue prison” of the real world into a world “even more real,” “higher,” “heavenly” (like the romantics and their heirs - the symbolists). The world was one, God-given palace. The earthly and the heavenly were not opposed to each other here. They merged together thanks to the miracle of the word - the divine gift of naming simple earthly things. And such a poetic word - “the word as such” (a formula from the Morning of Acmeism, developed in Mandelstam’s later articles Word and Culture (1922) and On the Nature of the Word (1922)) - was transformed into a “monstrously condensed reality of phenomena.” Having united the earthly and heavenly, the poetic word seemed to take on flesh and turn into the same fact of reality as the surrounding things - only more durable.

The initial premise of the aesthetics of Mandelstam the Acmeist was the memory of poetic texts of past eras and their recognition - or reinterpreted repetition - in quotations, often transformed and encrypted. Many critics considered Acmeism - including Mandelstam's poetry - to be a conservative neoclassical (or "false-classical") movement. However, the Acmeists themselves traced the word “classical” to the Latin “classicum”, which means “war bugle signal”. And Mandelstam, who in the article Word and Culture defined the classics not as what already was, but as what should be, contrasted the unfading novelty of the “silver trumpet of Catullus” (the ancient Roman poet) of two thousand years ago with quickly becoming outdated futuristic riddles: And more than one treasure , perhaps / Bypassing his grandchildren, he will go to his great-grandchildren, / And again the skald will compose someone else’s song / And pronounce it like his own (I have not heard Ossian’s stories.., 1914).

Mandelstam sought to compare his poetic existence with the indelible mark left by his great predecessors, and to present the result of this comparison to the distant reader in posterity, the “providential interlocutor” (article Morning of Acmeism). Thus, the contradiction between the past, present and future was removed. Mandelstam's poetry could be clothed in clear classical forms, referring to the art of bygone eras. But at the same time, it always contained the explosive power of ultra-modern, avant-garde artistic techniques that endowed stable traditional images with new and unexpected meanings. It was up to the “ideal reader” of the future to guess these meanings. For all the impeccable, classical logic of its “architecture,” the meaning of Mandelstam’s text is as unpredictable as the key to the riddle. At the center of Mandelstam’s figurative language are complex analogies hidden in subtext between phenomena that are sometimes distant from each other. And only a very prepared reader who lives in the same cultural space as Mandelstam himself can discern these analogies.

For example, when Mandelstam in the Summer Stanzas (1913) called fate a gypsy, this image can be explained in two ways: fate is as fickle as a gypsy, and gypsies predict fate. However, Mandelstam's poetics also requires a third motivation for the image - outside the boundaries of the poem. And here we should turn to Pushkin’s poem “Gypsies,” which ends with the words: And there is no protection from fate. Such a hint through a hidden quote and the imposition of different motivations for the image is a characteristic example of Mandelstam’s poetics, which researchers call “semantic” (that is, developing semantic nuances, shifts in meaning due to context and subtext). And therefore, according to S.S. Averintsev, Mandelstam’s poems “are so tempting to understand - and so difficult to interpret.”

1 . 2 The semantic potential of O. Mandelstam's poetry

In Mandelstam's poetry, the semantic potential accumulated by a word over the entire history of its existence in other poetic contexts acquires meaning thanks to such hidden riddle quotes. They force the reader to turn to their sources in order to find a frame of reference, a subtext with the help of which the text can be deciphered.

The main features of this method were fully manifested in the poet’s first published collection, Stone (1913). This included 23 poems from 1908-1913 (later the collection was supplemented with texts from 1914-1915 and republished at the end of 1915 (the title says 1916)). The early poems of 1908-1910 included in the collection represent a unique combination for all world poetry of the immature psychology of a young man, almost a teenager, with the perfect maturity of intellectual observation and poetic description of this particular psychology: From a whirlpool of evil and viscous / I grew up like a rustling reed, - / And passionately, and languidly, and affectionately / Breathing a forbidden life... I am happy with a cruel insult, / And in a life that looks like a dream, I secretly envy everyone / And I’m secretly in love with everyone.

In the first part of the Stone, Mandelstam combines the “severity of Tyutchev” with the “gray song” of Verlaine, where “the vague and the clear are merged.” In the poet's early poems, critics most often noted symbolist influences. Here, indeed, as with the symbolists and the romantics, there is a kind of “two worlds”, a confrontation between the earthly transitory reality and the higher eternal world. But Mandelstam feels this dual world in a special, purely individual way. He dramatically intensely experiences the uniqueness of his fragile self, his weak but unique “warm breath” against the backdrop of a cosmically indifferent eternity. As a result, surprise is born (perhaps the central emotion of all of Mandelstam’s lyrics), psychologically reliable and devoid of any literary or secondary nature: Am I really real, / And, really, will death come?

Soon, Mandelstam will resolve this antinomy of the private and the cosmic in his own way - through the “domestication” and “warming” of matter. The “native and warm” principle in his work masters “alien” and large eternal objects (nature, air, history, art) in purely human, “childish” ways (by inhaling, eating, drinking). So, in the poem Ice Cream! Sun. Airy sponge cake... (1914) the eternal ice of the Alps glorified by Tyutchev is transformed into a “wandering glacier” of the ice cream maker: And into the world of chocolate with a ruddy dawn, / Dreams fly to the milky Alps... And the gods do not know what he will take: / Diamond cream or waffles with filling... In Mandelstam’s poetry, the Eucharist, the Sacrament of Communion of the Body and Blood of Christ, “lasts like an eternal noon,” but “the taste and smell of whipped cream of orange peel” are also eternal.

The second half of the Stone, as Gumilyov noted in his review of the book, is exemplary “Acmeistic.” In contrast to the symbolist “ecstasies of syllable”, deliberate sound writing and decorativeness, the “classical” form of verse, the often elevated intonation of the ode, and the balanced economy of style and image reign here. At the same time, Mandelstam transforms mystical symbols into complex but tangible analogies, and secrets into intellectual problems and riddles. The key to this method lies in the title of the book. The naming “stone” can be perceived as an anagram (a play on consonance through the rearrangement of letters) of the word AKME, which gave the name to the new literary movement (this is a Greek word denoting the highest point of development, flowering, but also the edge of a stone, in origin akin to the Indo-European word akmen - "stone"). But the title of the collection also refers to Tyutchev’s famous poem 1833 Probleme, which tells about a stone that rolled down a mountain and lay down in a valley, falling by itself or thrown down by a thinking hand. In the article Morning of Acmeism, Mandelstam will finally clarify the meaning of this association: “But Tyutchev’s stone... is a word. The voice of matter in this unexpected fall sounds like articulate speech. This challenge can only be answered by architecture. The Acmeists reverently lift the mysterious Tyutchev stone and place it at the base of their building.”

In the Stone, Mandelstam responded to the symbolist cult of music, “the most ephemeral of the arts,” with monumental images of architecture, testifying to the victory of organization over chaos, the pathos of establishing measure and curbing matter over immensity and impulse, and, as a consequence, the Logos, the rational Word, over the mystical nonsense (Hagia Sophia (1912), Notre Dame (1912), Admiralty (1913)): ... beauty is not the whim of a demigod, / But the predatory eye of a simple carpenter. / We enjoy the dominance of the four elements, / But a free man created the fifth: / Doesn’t space deny the superiority / This chastely built ark.

And yet there is no notorious cult of things here, which critics often saw behind Acmeist manifestos, and sensual plasticity and tangible concreteness of images are not the main thing. When a poet wants to convey a thing by touch, he achieves this with one detail. But there are few such things in Mandelstam’s lyrics. The poet looks at the things of his century from a great distance. In themselves they surprise him, but do not really interest him. Mandelstam's gaze seems to pass through things and strives to catch what is hidden behind them.

Back in 1911, Mandelstam committed an act of “transition to European culture” - he accepted Christianity. And although the poet was baptized in the Methodist Church (May 14, in Vyborg), Stone’s poems captured his preoccupation with the Catholic theme, the image of the eternal Rome of the Apostle Peter. In Roman Catholicism, Mandelstam was captivated by the pathos of a single universal organizing idea. It reflected the symphony of Gothic architecture in the spiritual sphere. Just as the “stronghold” of the cathedral is created from the “spontaneous labyrinth”, the “incomprehensible forest” and the “evil weight” of stones, the unity of Western Christendom under the rule of Rome is born from the choir of such different and dissimilar peoples. For centuries this unity was supported by strict rules, iron organization and discipline. But for Mandelstam, the religious cult, precisely in its strictly regulated Catholic charter, “demands nothing” as a reward for its advice and, in Christian free will, paradoxically endows the poet with the highest creative freedom: Like a lark, Jamme (Francis Jamme - French Catholic poet) sings , / After all, the Catholic priest / Gives him advice. Another example is associated with Mandelstam’s perception of the image of the “first Russian Westernizer” - P. Chaadaev. The 1915 article by Pyotr Chaadaev is dedicated to him, and the poem The Staff, created at the same time, is inspired by his image. In Chaadaev’s Catholic sympathies, in his devotion to the idea of Rome as the focus of the spiritual unity of the Christian universe, Mandelstam discerns not betrayal, but a deep loyalty to the Russian national path: “Chaadaev’s thought, national in its origins, is national where it flows into Rome. Only a Russian man could discover this West, which is more condensed, more concrete than the historical West itself. Chaadaev, precisely by the right of a Russian man, entered the sacred land of tradition, with which he was not connected by continuity...” And the lyrical hero of Mandelstam himself, obviously, with the “staff” went to Europe - “the land of holy miracles” - in order to truly “grow into a Russian.”

Now the “spring of undying Rome” takes over from the mature Mandelstam the role of counterweight to the chaos of his birth, which St. Petersburg architecture played for the young poet. And in the concept of “native chaos” two faces are now indistinguishable - “Jewish” and “Russian”.

With the outbreak of the First World War, eschatological notes sounded more and more loudly in Mandelstam's poetry - a feeling of the inevitability of a catastrophe, some kind of temporary end. These notes are associated, first of all, with the theme of Russia and endow the image of the Motherland, squeezed in the grip of an inexorable history, with the gift of special freedom, available only to those who have tasted Death and shouldered the sacrificial Cross: Are we, thrown into space, / Doomed to die, / About beautiful constancy / And to regret about fidelity. (About unprecedented freedom...(1915)). The place of the “stone”, the building material of poetry, is now replaced by a “tree” subject to fire - at the same time a symbol of tragic fate, an expression of the Russian idea and a reminder of the Tree of the Cross of the Passion of the Lord (Destroys the Flame..., 1915).

The desire to join this kind of tragic national experience in practical life forces Mandelstam to go to front-line Warsaw in December 1914, where he wants to join the troops as an orderly. Nothing came of it. The poet returns to the capital and creates a whole series of poems that can be called a requiem for the doomed imperial Petersburg. It is precisely as an imperial capital that St. Petersburg is similar to Mandelstam’s holy, apostate and perishing Jerusalem. The Russian Empire and “petrified” Judea are united by the “sin” of national messianism. The retribution for it is an inevitable catastrophe (the theme of the later article Human Wheat (1923)). A statehood that is too densely, unconditionally and smugly aware of its holiness is doomed to perish. The departing world of power evokes in the poet a complex interweaving of feelings: it is almost physical horror, and solemnity (Let us glorify the twilight burden of power, // Its unbearable oppression), and, finally, even pity. Mandelstam was probably the first in world literature to talk about “compassion” for the state, for its “hunger.” In one of the chapters of The Noise of Time - an autobiographical prose of 1925 - a surreal image of a “sick eagle” appears, pitiful, blind, with broken legs, a two-headed bird swarming in the corner “under the hiss of a primus stove.” The blackness of this heraldic bird - the coat of arms of the Russian Empire - was seen as the color of the end back in 1915.

Poems from the time of war and revolution make up Mandelstam’s collection Tristia (“book of sorrows,” first published without the author’s participation in 1922 and republished under the title Second Book in 1923 in Moscow). The book is cemented by the theme of time, the grandiose flow of history heading towards destruction. This theme will become cross-cutting throughout the poet’s work until his last days. The internal unity of Tristia is ensured by the new quality of the lyrical hero, for whom there is no longer anything personal that is not involved in the general time flow, whose voice can only be heard as an echo of the roar of the era. What is happening in big history is perceived as the collapse and creation of the “temple” of one’s own personality: Whoever has a heart must hear, time, / How your ship goes down. (Twilight of Freedom (1918)). The motive of despair here sounds very clearly, but at the last depth it is illuminated by a cleansing sense of one’s own involvement in what is happening. The narration is often told in the first person plural: We are in the fighting legions / We tied up the swallows - and now / The sun is not visible; the whole element / Chirps, moves, lives; / Through the nets - thick twilight - / The sun is not visible and the earth floats.

According to the laws of spiritual paradox, dating back to the Apostle Paul (“Where sin abounds, there Grace abounds”), the difficult, bloody and hungry time of the early 1920s would not only be marked by a rise in Mandelstam’s poetic activity, but would also bring a strange, seemingly irrational feeling of enlightenment and purification (In St. Petersburg we will meet again... (1920)). Mandelstam speaks of the fragile joy of national culture in the midst of the disastrous cold of Russian life and turns to the most piercing image: And a living swallow fell / On the hot snow. The horror of what is happening is fraught with the last degree of freedom. "Nothing is impossible. Just as the room of a dying man is open to everyone, so the door of the old world is wide open to the crowd. Suddenly everything became common property. Go and get it. Everything is accessible: all labyrinths, all hiding places, all protected passages. The Word became not a seven-barrel, but a thousand-barreled fork, revived at once by the breath of all centuries,” the article says in the Word and Culture.

On December 27, 1938, in the Second River transit camp near Vladivostok, Mandelstam, driven to the brink of madness, dies.

From the beginning of the 1960s, the legacy of O.E. Mandelstam began to actively enter the cultural life of the intelligentsia of the “Thaw” era.

Chapter 2. The theme of love in the lyrics of O. Mandelstam

2.1 Love lyrics by O. Mandelstam

Love lyrics are light and chaste, devoid of tragic heaviness. Falling in love is Mandelstam's almost constant feeling, but it is interpreted broadly: as falling in love with life. Love for a poet is the same as poetry. In 1920, before finally joining his life with Nadezhda Yakovlevna, Mandelstam experienced a deep feeling for the actress of the Alexandria Theater. Several poems are dedicated to her. The poet dedicated several poems to A. Akhmatova. Nadezhda Yakovlevna, the poet’s wife and friend, writes: “Poems to Akhmatova... cannot be classified as love. These are poems of high friendship and misfortune. They have a feeling of common fate and catastrophe.” Nadezhda Yakovlevna spoke in detail about Osip Mandelstam’s love for the beautiful Olga Vaksel, and about the family discord this caused. What can you do, Mandelstam actually fell in love quite often, bringing grief to his Nadenka, and Russian poetry was enriched with the most beautiful poems on the eternal theme of love. Mandelstam fell in love, perhaps, until the last years of his life, admiring life and beauty.

There is no grave of Osip Mandelstam on earth. There is only a pit somewhere where the bodies of tortured people are thrown in disarray; Among them, apparently, lies the Poet - that was his name in the camp.

In the most bitter poems of Mandelstam, admiration for life does not weaken; in the most tragic ones, such as “Keep my speech forever for the taste of misfortune and smoke...”, this delight is heard, embodied in phrases that are striking in their novelty and power: “If only they loved These vile scaffolds are killing me, How, aiming for death, the towns kill me in the garden...” And the more difficult the circumstances, the more palpable the linguistic strength, the more piercing and amazing the details. It was then that such marvelous details appeared, such as “ocean strings of pearls and meek Tahitian baskets.” It seems that behind Mandelstam’s poems one can see through Monet, then Gauguin, then Saryan...

“My time is not yet limited,

And I accompanied the universal delight,

Like a sotto voce organ playing

Accompanied by a female voice..."

This was said on February 12, 1937. Happiness arose at the moment of creation of the poem, perhaps in the most difficult situation, and the miracle of its occurrence is most striking.

"Don't separate me from life -

She's dreaming

Kill and caress now..."

It seems that a man walking on water would inspire us with less awe. It is not clear what miracles we still need if lilacs bloom in a vacant lot every May, if the music of Bach and Mozart was written on the basis of poverty, uncertainty or innate oblivion, wars and epidemics, if the words of the Decembrist Lunin came to us from the “convict hole” that in this world only fools and animals are unhappy if we have Mandelstam’s Voronezh poems at hand.

Experiencing poetry as happiness is happiness. Even more absurd are the complaints that it does not exist in life, that it is possible only in poetry. “There is no happiness in life” is not a human formulation at all, but a criminal formulation. All poetry, and especially Mandelstam’s, rests on the confrontation between happiness and misfortune, love of life and fear of it, which withstood the most difficult test in the history of Russian poetry.

2.2 The lyrical hero of O. Mandelstam

The cornerstone of every lyricist is love. Love for life, nature, women. In the poetry of O. Mandelstam, love lyrics occupy an important place. She is bright and chaste. Mandelstam's lyrical hero is not a lover, but rather a gentle brother, slightly in love with his sister or the “foggy nun” (from a poem dedicated to Marina Tsvetaeva):

“I kiss the tanned elbow

And a piece of wax on the forehead.

I know - he remained white

Under a dark strand of gold.

...All we have left is the name:

Wonderful sound, long lasting,

Take it with my palms

Sprinkled sand."

The poem dedicated to O. Arbenina is a rare case in Mandelstam’s early poems of such an open, passionate manifestation of feelings:

"I'm on par with others

I want to serve you

Dry from jealousy

To cast a spell with your lips.

The word does not satisfy

My lips are dry,

And without you again I

The dense air is empty.

I'm not jealous anymore

But I want you

And I carry myself

Like a sacrifice to the executioner.

I won't call you

Neither joy nor love;

To the wild, alien

They changed my blood.

One more moment

And I'll tell you:

Not joy, but torment

I find in you.

And, like a crime,

I'm attracted to you

Bitten, in confusion,

Cherry tender mouth.

Come back to me soon:

I'm scared without you

I've never been stronger

I didn't feel you

And everything I want

I see it in reality.

I'm not jealous anymore

But I'm calling you."

Mandelstam fell in love, perhaps, until the last years of his life, but his constant affection remained his infinitely devoted Nadezhda Yakovlevna, his wife. O. Mandelstam was one of the few poets who dedicated poems to their wives. Even a poem from 1937, written shortly before his death, looks like a message from a lover:

"Your pupil is in the heavenly crust,

Facing into the distance and prostrate,

Protect reservations

Weak feeling eyelashes.

He will be deified

Living in your home country for a long time -

A whirlwind of surprise, -

Throw it after me.

He already looks eagerly

In fleeting centuries -

Light, rainbow, ethereal,

Pleading for now.

Only Mandelstam knew how to combine bitterness and admiration like this:

You haven't died yet, you're not alone yet,

While with a beggar friend

You enjoy the grandeur of the plains

And darkness, and hunger, and blizzard.

In luxurious poverty, in mighty poverty

Live calm and comforted -

Blessed are those days and nights

And sweet-voiced work is sinless.

Unhappy is the one whom, like his shadow,

The barking of dogs scares and the wind mows,

And the tone is poor, who, himself half-dead,

He asks for alms from the shadow."

Mandelstam's "novels" were, apparently, more successful in literary terms than in love ones. It was not for nothing that he later wrote: “And from the beauties of that time - from those gentle European women - how much embarrassment, annoyance and grief I received!” But Russian poetry has been enriched with the most beautiful poems on this eternal theme.

Conclusion

Mandelstam is a philosophical poet with a keen interest in history. In love with Ancient Hellas, he deeply felt the connections of Russian culture with Hellenism, believing that thanks to this continuity “the Russian language became precisely the sounding and burning flesh.”

Even today no one can say with final accuracy the date of his death and the place of burial. Most evidence confirms the “official” date of the poet’s death - December 27, 1938, but some eyewitnesses “extend” his days by several months, and sometimes even years...

Back in 1915, in the article “Pushkin and Scriabin,” Mandelstam wrote that the death of an artist is his last and natural creative act. In “Poems of the Unknown Soldier” he prophetically said:

“The aortas are filled with blood,

And it sounds in whispers through the rows:

- I was born in ninety-four,

The year of birth - with a crowd and a crowd,

I whisper with a bloodless mouth:

I was born on the night from the second to the third

January at ninety-one

Unreliable year - and centuries

They surround me with fire. »

The death of Mandelstam - “with a crowd and a crowd”, with his people - added the immortality of fate to the immortality of his poetry. Mandelstam the poet became a myth, and his creative biography became one of the central historical and cultural symbols of the 20th century, the embodiment of art that resisted tyranny, was killed physically, but won spiritually, and despite everything is resurrected in miraculously preserved poems, novels, paintings, and symphonies.

Bibliography

1. Memories of the Silver Age. Comp. V. Kreid. M., Republic, 1993.

2. Lekmanov O.A. A book about Acmeism. M., 1996

3. Mandelstam N.Ya. Memories. Second book. M., 2000

4. Mandelstam N.Ya. Memories. M., 1989

5. Mandelstam O.E. Sat. Fourth prose. Noise of time, M., SP Interprint, 1991, p. 94.

6. Mandelstam O.E. Collection of works. Poems / Comp., prepared. text and notes S.V. Vasilenko and Yu.L. Freidina. M., Republic, 1992.

7. Mandelstam O.E. Essays. In 2 vols. M., Artist. lit., 1990.

8. Necheporuk.E. Osip Mandelstam and his time. M., Our House, 1995.

9. Struve N. Osip Mandelstam. Tomsk, 1992

10. Ulyashov P.S. Lonely seeker. M., Knowledge, 1991.

Childhood

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, a Jew by origin, was born in January 1891 in the capital of Poland, which at that time was assigned to Russia. Almost immediately after the birth of their son, the family moved to St. Petersburg. Emilius Veniaminovich, the boy's father, earned his living by making gloves, and was also a member of the first guild as a merchant, thanks to which he occupied a good position in society. And his mother, Flora Verblovskaya, studied music, a love for which the younger Mandelstam inherited from her. From 1900 to 1907, Osip Emilievich studied at the prestigious Tenishev School, where Nabokov once received his education. After graduation, the parents send their son to Paris, and later to Germany (thanks to their financial security). At the Sorbonne, he attends many lectures, gets acquainted with French poetry and meets his future friend, Nikolai Gumilyov.

Homecoming

Unfortunately, the Mandelstam family went bankrupt by 1911, and Osip returned to St. Petersburg. In the same year, he was enrolled in the Faculty of History and Philology at St. Petersburg University, but he never managed to complete his studies due to frivolity, and in 1917 he was expelled. During this period, his political sympathies were given to the left Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats. He also actively preaches Marxism. The work of Osip Mandelstam was formed during the French period of his life, and his first poems were published in 1910 in the Apollo magazine.

"Workshop of Poets"

It is so accepted that poets always need like-minded people and belonging to a certain movement. The group “Workshop of Poets” consisted of such famous personalities as Gumilyov, Akhmatova, and, of course, Mandelstam often attended the meetings. Osip Emilievich in his early years gravitated towards symbolism, but later became a follower of Acmeism, like his closest friends from the club. The grain of this trend is clear, distinct images and realism. Thus, in 1913, Mandelstam’s first collection of poems, entitled “Stone,” absorbed precisely the spirit of Acmeism. In those same years, he spoke publicly, visited Stray Dog, and also met Blok, Tsvetaeva and Livshits.

Years of wandering

The biography of Osip Mandelstam during this period is very stormy. When the First World War begins, the poet does not go to the front due to health problems. But the revolution of 1917 was very clearly reflected in his lyrics. His ideological and political views change again, now in favor of the Bolsheviks. He writes many poems directed against the king and the army. During this period, he gained increasing fame and success, actively traveled around the country and was published in many publications. Unknown reasons prompted him to move to Kyiv, where Osip Khazina’s future wife lived at that moment. Before his marriage in 1922, he managed to live for some time in Crimea, where he was arrested on suspicion of Bolshevik intelligence. A year after his release, fate sends him to Georgia. However, an unpleasant surprise awaits the poet there too. He is again put behind bars, but thanks to the efforts of local colleagues, he manages to quickly be freed.

Immediately after serving his sentence in Georgia, the biography of Osip Mandelstam again returns him to his native Petrograd. His attitude towards the revolution is reflected in the next collection of poems called Tristia, which was published in 1922 in Berlin. Then he binds himself with sacred bonds with Nadezhda Yakovlevna. A sweet tragedy reigns in the works of that time, accompanied by a longing for parting with values, people and places. After this, the poet Osip Mandelstam goes into a deep and protracted poetic crisis, initially delighting his admirers only with rare poems in which he expresses sorrow over the death of the old culture. And in the five-year period (from 1925 to 1930) he wrote nothing at all other than prose. In order to somehow survive in harsh conditions, he is engaged in translations. The third and final collection, simply titled “Poems,” was published in 1928. In this he is greatly assisted by Bukharin, who occupies far from the last place in the Kremlin. However, supporters of Stalin, who is actively gaining strength, are looking for any excuse to frame the poet.

last years of life

The biography of Osip Mandelstam in the 30s takes him and his wife to the Caucasus, which also did not happen without the help and troubles of Bukharin. This is more likely to be a reason to hide from persecution than a vacation. Trips help Osip Emilievich regain interest in poetry, which results in a collection of essays, “A Trip to Armenia,” which, however, was rejected by ideology. After 3 years, the poet returns home. His views are again undergoing changes, and disappointment in the previously revered communism completely obscures his mind. From his pen comes the scandalous epigram “The Kremlin Highlander,” which he reads to a curious public. Among these people there is an informer who is in a hurry to report to Stalin. In 1934, Osip faced another arrest and exile to the Perm region, where he was accompanied by his faithful wife. There he tries to commit suicide, but the attempt ends in failure. After this, the spouses are sent to Voronezh. It was there that the best and last poems were written with the signature “Osip Mandelstam,” whose biography and work ended in 1938.

Death

In 1937, the poet and his wife returned to Moscow. However, a year later he was arrested again in Samatikha. He is sentenced to five years in correctional camps. Unfortunately, he falls ill with typhus while working somewhere near Vladivostok, as a result of which he dies. Most of his poems have survived to this day thanks to the efforts of his wife. During travels and exile, she hid her husband's works or memorized them by heart. Mandelstam was buried in a mass grave.

Mandelstam called his first collection of poetry, published in 1913, “Stone”; and it consisted of 23 poems. But recognition of the poet came with the release of the second edition of “Stone” in 1916, which already included 67 poems. Many reviewers wrote enthusiastically about the book, noting “the velvety of craftsmanship,” “the precision of the lines,” “the impeccability of form,” “the precision of the verse,” and “an undeniable sense of beauty.” There were, however, also accusations of coldness, predominance of thought, and dry rationality. Yes, this collection is marked by a special solemnity, the Gothic architectural style of the lines, which comes from the poet’s passion for the era of classicism and Ancient Rome.

Unlike other reviewers who reproached Mandelstam for inconsistency and even imitation of Balmont, N. Gumilyov noted precisely the originality and originality of the author: “His inspirations were only the Russian language... and his own seeing, hearing, touching, eternally sleepless thought...” These words are the themes What is more surprising is that Mandelstam was not ethnically Russian. The mood of “Stone” is minor. The refrain of most poems is the word “sadness”: “Oh, my prophetic sadness,” “inexpressible sadness,” “I slowly carry sadness, like a gray bird, in my heart,” “Where has sadness gone, hypocrite...” And surprise and quiet joy, and youthful melancholy - all this is present in “The Stone” and seems natural and ordinary. But there are also two or three poems of incredibly dramatic, Lermontovian power: ...The sky is dim with a strange glow -

* World misty pain
*Oh, let me be vague too
* And let me not love you.

In the second large collection “Tristia”, as in “Stone”, a large place is occupied by the theme of Rome, its palaces, squares, as well as St. Petersburg with its no less luxurious and expressive buildings. This collection also contains a cycle of love poems. Some of them are dedicated to Marina Tsvetaeva, with whom, according to some contemporaries, Mandelstam had a “turbulent affair.” One should not think that Mandelstam’s “novels” were like a play of “tragic passions.” Falling in love, as many have noted, is an almost constant quality of Mandelstam, but it is interpreted broadly - as falling in love with life. This fact itself suggests that love for a poet is the same as poetry. For Mandelstam, love lyrics are light and chaste, devoid of tragic heaviness and demonism. Here is one of them dedicated to the actress of the Alexandrinsky Theater O. N. Arbenina - Hildenbrand, for whom the poet experienced a great feeling: Because I could not hold your hands,

* For betraying the salty tender lips,
* I must wait for dawn in a dense acropolis.
* How I hate odorous ancient log cabins!

Mandelstam dedicated several poems to A. Akhmatova. Nadezhda Yakovlevna writes about them: “Akhmatova’s poems – there are five of them... – cannot be classified as love ones. These are poems of high friendship and misfortune. They have a feeling of common fate and catastrophe.” Mandelstam fell in love, perhaps, until the last years of his life. But his constant affection, his second “I,” remained his infinitely devoted Nadezhda Yakovlevna, his Nadenka, as he lovingly called her. Not only letters, but also poems can serve as evidence of Osip Emilievich’s loving attitude towards his wife. The reader may think that Mandelstam at all times wrote only about love, or about antiquity. This is wrong. The poet was one of the first to write on civil topics. The revolution was a huge event for him, and it is no coincidence that the word people appears in his poems. In 1933, Mandelstam, the first and only living and recognized poet in the country, wrote anti-Stalin poems and read them to no less than one and a half dozen people, mostly writers and poets, who, having heard them, were horrified and denied: “I didn’t hear that.” “You didn’t read this to me” Here is one of them:

* We live without feeling the country beneath us,
* Our speeches cannot be heard ten steps away,
* And where is enough for half a conversation,
* There they will remember the Kremlin highlander.
* His thick fingers are fat like worms,
* And the words, like pound weights, are true,
* Cockroach eyes laugh,
* And his boots shine.

* And around him is a rabble of thin-necked leaders,
* He plays with the services of half the people.
* Who whistles, who meows, who whines,
* He is the only one who babbles and pokes.

* Like a horseshoe, he gives a decree after a decree -
* Some in the groin, some in the forehead, some in the eyebrow, some in the eye.
* No matter what his punishment is, it’s a raspberry
* And the broad chest of an Ossetian.

Until recently, this poem was kept in the archives of the State Security Service and was first published in 1963 in the West, and here only in 1987. And this is not surprising. After all, how brave a poet must be to decide on such a daring act. Many critics regarded his anti-Stalin poems as a challenge to Soviet power, assessing his courage, bordering on madness, but, I think, this opinion came from the desire to see the poet with his complex metaphors, and as if not from this world. But Mandelstam was in his right mind, and with completely sincere feelings he depicts the atmosphere of general fear that shackled the country during that period of time. The first two lines of this poem prove this. The poet was not a politician at all and was never anti-Soviet or anti-communist.

It’s just that Mandelstam turned out to be instinctively more perspicacious and wiser than many, having seen the cruel policy of the Kremlin rulers that was destroying the fate of millions of people. This is just a kind of satirical denunciation of evil. The line "His thick fingers are like worms" is expressive, but perhaps too direct. So what is next? “And the words, like pound weights, are true, cockroach eyes laugh and his boots shine. In these lines, Mandelstam gives a complete description of the “Kremlin highlander.” And how fitting is the next detail - “shining tops” - an indispensable attribute of the Stalinist costume. And here you go - the external portrait is ready. A psychological portrait in the next eight lines: in two lines, first there is an assessment of the “thin-necked leaders” - nukers, dubbed “semi-humans”.

It is difficult to think of a more magnificent characteristic for these people, whose moral qualities turned out to be below human limits. Stalin shot their brothers, imprisoned their wives, and not a single one was found who would rebel and avenge himself and the country. Reading this poem, I involuntarily remembered a fairy tale about a tyrant tsar who constantly shouted: “Execute, or hang, or drown!” Only here, of course, everything is much more sinister. The line “No matter his execution is a raspberry,” in my opinion, is very expressive: here there is voluptuousness from the intoxication of power and the quenching of bloodthirstiness. And the line “...and the broad chest of an Ossetian” is a direct allusion to Stalin’s origins. Namely, the legend that spoke of his Ossetian roots. Stalin also generally hinted that he was almost Russian.

Mandelstam speaks sarcastically about the incomprehensible nationality of the Soviet ruler. I liked this poem because it challenges the political and social life of Russia. I bow to the courage of Mandelstam, who alone among the entire crowd, exhausted from misfortune, but living by the principle - “We don’t like everything, but we tolerate and remain silent,” expressed his entire critical point of view on the environment.

He belonged to the galaxy of brilliant poets of the Silver Age. His original high lyrics became a significant contribution to Russian poetry of the 20th century, and his tragic fate still does not leave admirers of his work indifferent.
Mandelstam began writing poetry at the age of 14, although his parents did not approve of this activity. He received an excellent education, knew foreign languages, and was fond of music and philosophy. The future poet considered art the most important thing in life, he formed his own concepts of the beautiful and sublime.
Mandelstam's early lyrics are characterized by reflection on the meaning of life and pessimism:

The tireless pendulum swings
And wants to be my destiny.

The first published poems had the titles “Inexpressible sadness...”, “I was given a body - what should I do with it...”, “Slow snow hive...”. Their theme was the illusory nature of reality. , having become acquainted with the work of the young poet, asked: “Who can indicate where this new divine harmony came to us, which is called the poems of Osip Mandelstam?” Following Tyutchev, the poet introduced into his poems images of sleep, chaos, a lonely voice among the emptiness of space, space and the raging sea.
Mandelstam began with a passion for symbolism. In poems of this period, he argued that music is the fundamental principle of all living things. His poems were musical, he often created musical images, turning to the works of composers Bach, Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven and others.
The images of his poems were still unclear, as if the author wanted to escape into the world of poetry. He wrote: “Am I really real, / And will death really come?”
Meeting the Acmeists changes the tone and content of Mandelstam's lyrics. In the article “The Morning of Acmeism,” he wrote that he considers the word to be the stone that Acmeists lay as the basis for the building of a new literary movement. He called his first collection of poems “Stone”. Mandelstam writes that a poet must be an architect, an architect in verse. He himself changed the subject matter, figurative structure, style and coloring of his poems. The images became objective, visible and material. The poet reflects on the philosophical essence of stone, clay, wood, apple, bread. He imparts weight and heaviness to objects, looking for philosophical and mystical meaning in stone.
Images of architecture are often found in his work. They say that architecture is frozen music. Mandelstam proves this with his poems, which fascinate with the beauty of their lines and depth of thought. His poems about Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, about the Admiralty, about St. Sophia Cathedral in Constantinople, about Hagia Sophia, about the Assumption Church of the Kremlin in Moscow and the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg and many other masterpieces of architecture are striking. The poet in them reflects on time, on the victory of the graceful over the rough, of light over darkness. His poems contain associative images and impressionistic writing. The value of these poems lies in their philosophical, historical and cultural content. Mandelstam can be called the singer of civilization:

Nature is the same Rome and is reflected in it.
We see images of his civic power
In the transparent air, like in a blue circus,
In the forum of fields and in the colonnade of groves.

The poet tried to comprehend the history of civilizations and peoples as a single, endless process.
Mandelstam also talentedly described the natural world in the poems “Sink”, “There are orioles in the forests, and vowels are long...” and others:

The sound is cautious and dull
The fruit that fell from the tree
Among the incessant chant
Deep forest silence...

The poet's poems have a slow rhythm and strictness in the selection of words, which gives each work a solemn sound. This shows respect and reverence for everything created by people and nature.
In Mandelstam's high book poetry there are many references to world culture, which testifies to the erudition of the author. Poems “Insomnia. Homer. Tight Sails…”, “Bach”, “Cinematograph”, “Ode to Beethoven” show what gives the poet inspiration for creativity. The collection “Stone” made the poet famous.
Mandelstam's attitude to the revolution of 1917 was twofold: joy from the great changes and a premonition of the “yoke of violence and malice.” The poet later wrote in a questionnaire that the revolution had robbed him of his “biography” and his sense of “personal significance.” From 1918 to 1922 the poet's ordeal began. In the confusion of the civil war, he is arrested several times and kept in prison. Having miraculously escaped death, Mandelstam finally finds himself in Moscow.
The events of the revolution are reflected in the poems “Let us glorify, brothers, the twilight of freedom...”, “When the October temporary worker prepared for us...” and in the collection “Tristia” (“Sorrows”). The poems of this period are dominated by a gloomy coloring: the image of a ship going to the bottom, the disappearing sun, etc. The collection “Sorrows” presents the theme of love. The poet understands love as the highest value. He recalls with gratitude his friendship with Tsvetaeva, walks around Moscow, and writes about his passion for the actress Arbenina, whom he compares with the ancient Elena. An example of love lyrics is the poem “Because I couldn’t hold your hands...”.
Mandelstam contributed to the development of the theme of St. Petersburg in Russian literature. The tragic feeling of death, dying and emptiness comes through in the poems “In transparent Petropol we will die...”, “I’m cold. Transparent spring...", "In St. Petersburg we will meet again...", "Will-o'-the-wisp at a terrible height!..".
In 1925, Mandelstam was denied publication of his poems. For five years he did not write poetry. In 1928, the previously delayed book “Poems” was released. In it, the poet says that he “has not been heard for a century,” recalling the “cool salt of grievances.” The lyrical hero rushes about in search of salvation. In the poem “January 1, 1924” he writes:

I know that every day the exhalation of life weakens,
A little more and they'll cut you off
A simple song about clay grievances
And your lips will be filled with tin.

In the poem “Concert at the Station,” the poet says that music does not alleviate the suffering of meeting the “iron world”:

You can't breathe, and the firmament is infested with worms,
And not a single star says...

Poems of the 30s reflect the expectation of a tragic outcome in the poet’s confrontation with the authorities. Mandelstam was officially recognized as a “minor poet”; he was awaiting arrest and subsequent death. We read about this in the poems “A River Swollen from Salty Tears...”, “Master of Guilty Glances...”, “I’m Not a Child Anymore! You, grave...", "Blue eyes and a hot forehead...", "Two or three random phrases haunt me...". The poet begins to develop a cycle of protest poems. In 1933, he wrote the poem “We live without feeling the country beneath us...”, directed not only against Stalin, but also against the entire system of fear and terror. In 1934, the poet was sent into exile until May 1937 and during this time he created the Voronezh cycle of poems. A year later he died in a camp near Vladivostok.
Mandelstam, in his uniquely original lyrics, expressed hope for the possibility of knowing the inexplicable in the world. His poetry has deep philosophical content and the theme of overcoming death. His poems enrich a person's personality.

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In addition to the above, V this "C.p." included IN. I. Narbut, M. A. Zenkevich, IN. IN. Gippius, G. IN. Ivanov, ABOUT. E. Mandelstam, M. L. Moravskaya, Grail-Arelsky (S. S. Petrov), E. Yu...
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Emigre critic Vladimir Veidle writes this: O Osip's poem Mandelstam"Leningrad":
IN poetry Mandelstam, and V his prose "The Noise of Time" clearly sounds St. Petersburg subject, a myth is being created O an extraordinary, unique city, “our city.”

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It is also extremely significant that the great patriotic subject, subject Motherland and its destinies, includes V lyrics block simultaneously with topic revolution that captures the poet to his very deepest...

He saw the key to the success and influence of A. Akhmatova and, together with those the objective meaning of her love lyrics V that this lyrics replaced the one who died or simply faded into the background...
Indeed, he was right ABOUT. Mandelstam when he said that A. Akhmatova “brought V Russian lyrics all the enormous complexity and psychological richness of the Russian novel of the nineteenth...

Themes Homeland and nature V lyrics M.Yu. Lermontov.

IN creativity Mandelstam characterized by the predominance of the principle of ascetic restraint over technology, over imagery.
U Mandelstam there are no particularly philanthropic those; but Pushkin was not a sentimental moralist when he summed up his poetic merits V line:

Considering that the most recent monographs O Leontief used by the authors date back to the early 1990s, and the only footnote V awarded the abstract ABOUT. E. Mandelstam (55 ...
I note that ABOUT. E. Mandelstam really experienced a strong influence of K. N. Leontiev, V which he himself admitted.

N.S. Gumilev, A.A. Akhmatova, S.M. Gorodetsky, ABOUT.E. Mandelstam, M.A. Zenkevich, IN.AND. Narbut.
Deserves special consideration creation such writers and poets as IN.IN. Mayakovsky, S.A. Yesenin, A.A. Akhmatova, A.N. Tolstoy, E.I. Zamyatin, M.M. Zoshchenko, M.A. Sholokhov, M.A...

2. Subject homeland V lyrics Yesenina.
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7. ABOUT.E. Mandelstam. - page
IN this same year Mandelstam entered V"Poets Workshop" founded by Gumilyov, those becoming an Acmeist himself.

By the end creativity V lyrics Lermontov increasingly appears the image of a simple, ordinary, tired man, completely different from the hero of the early lyrics.
However, there is a close connection between these heroes, due to the preservation of the main motives, those lyrics that permeate everything creation the poet and form the image of his hero.

The poems that made up her “Seventh Book” were created, which included the cycle Secrets of Craft with traditional Russian poetry topic poet and Poetry, images of muse and reader V their unique...
1934 IN night from 13 to 14 May - IN in his Moscow apartment in front of A.A. was arrested ABOUT.E. Mandelstam.

V rubai and airens arise V folk creativity, but gradually these genres lyrics develop V his lyrics poets of the middle ages
Subject epigrams can be of any scale (nation, country, city, military unit, social group, etc.) and can be dissected (sayings of the seven wise men, characteristics...