Thematic features of poetry about Mandelstam. Artistic features of Mandelstam's lyrics

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam was born in Warsaw into a petty-bourgeois family. He spent his childhood and youth in St. Petersburg and Pavlovsk. Graduated from the Tenishevsky School. In 1907, he traveled abroad - to Paris, Rome, Berlin, and attended university lectures at the Sorbonne and the University of Heidelberg. He made his debut as a poet in the Apollo magazine in 1909, and three years later the first book of his poems, entitled “Stone,” was published, announcing to the world the birth of another talented Russian poet.
Mandelstam is a philosophical poet with a keen interest in history. In love with Ancient Hellas, he deeply felt the connection between Russian culture and Hellenism, believing that thanks to this continuity, “the Russian language became precisely the sounding and burning flesh.”
In Mandelstam's poems, a solemn, slightly archaic, full-fledged word sounds. This is a poet of great visual precision; his verse is short, distinct and clear, exquisite in rhythm; it is very expressive and beautiful in sound. Saturated with literary and historical associations, strict in architectonics, it requires close and attentive reading.
The mood of “Stone” is melancholic. The refrain of most of the poems was the word “sadness” - “where has sadness gone, hypocrite.” Having once made a reservation: “I’m mortally tired of life, I don’t accept anything from it,” Mandelstam then firmly declares his acceptance of the world with all its vicissitudes: “I see a lifeless month and the sky is deader than canvas; Your world is painful and strange, I accept, emptiness! Both in “Stone” and in the collection “Tristia” great place The theme of Rome, its palaces and squares is occupied. In "Tristia" there is a cycle of love poems. Some of them are dedicated to Marina Tsvetaeva, with whom, according to some contemporaries, the poet had a “turbulent romance.”
Love lyrics bright 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 Alexandrinsky 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 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 eternal theme love. Mandelstam fell in love, perhaps, before recent years life, admiring life and beauty.
Mandelstam was one of the first to write poetry 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 wrote anti-Stalin poems and read them mainly to his friends - poets, writers, who, upon hearing them, were horrified and said: “I didn’t hear that, you didn’t read that to me...”
We live without feeling the country beneath us,
Our speeches are not heard ten steps away,
And where is enough for half a conversation,
The Kremlin highlander will be remembered there.
On the night of May 13-14, 1934, Mandelstam was arrested. He was seriously threatened with execution. But his friends and wife stood up for him. This played a role; he was sent to Voronezh. After the end of their three-year exile, the Mandelstams returned to Moscow.
On May 2, 1938, Mandelstam was again arrested and sentenced to five years in forced labor camps on charges of counter-revolutionary activities. Then Taganka, Butyrka, following the stage to Vladivostok. From there is the only letter sent in October 1938.
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 kill me, How, aiming for death, the towns kill me in the garden...” And with what more difficult circumstances, the more tangible the linguistic strength, the more piercing and surprising 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 limited yet,
And I accompanied the universal delight,
Like a sotto voce organ playing
Accompanied by a woman's 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 every year in May lilacs bloom in a vacant lot, 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” about that only fools and animals are unhappy in this world if we have Mandelstam’s Voronezh poems at our fingertips. 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.
“Life and death” he called the butterfly. He could say the same about his soul. “Sighted fingers, shame and the convex joy of recognition” guided his pen. Even to depict death, Mandelstam uses the most vivid and tangible details:
Lying for the tender, freshly removed mask,
For plaster fingers that do not hold a pen,
For enlarged lips, for strengthened caress
Coarse-grained peace and goodness...
How is love for the depicted object expressed? In affectionate, selfless attention to him. “The water on the pins and the air are softer than the frog skin of the balloons.” Such close attention, ready to change place with the thing depicted, to get into its “skin”, to feel for it, leads and warms this poetry, makes it possible to feel the ins and outs of the world and our consciousness.
“We sleep standing up in the thick night under a warm sheep’s hat...”, “Quietly ironing the wool and stirring the straw, like an apple tree in winter, starving in the matting”, “The morning clarinet chills the ear”, “It’s as if I were sagging on my own eyelashes.. ."
Of course, Mandelstam’s ability to “absorb into life” is remarkably combined with high intellectualism, but he has nothing to do with abstractions or rationality; he is immersed in life, nature, history, culture, connected with the world and instantly responds to its call.
Poetry inspires happiness and courage; it is our ally in the fight against the “spirit of despondency.”
The people need a mysteriously familiar verse.
So that he would always wake up from it.
And a flax-haired chestnut wave -
I washed myself with its sound.
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:
... Pouring aortic blood,
And it sounds in whispers through the rows:
- I was born in ninety-four,
- I was born in ninety-second...
- And clutching the worn-out fist
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 century
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- one of the central historical and cultural symbols of the 20th century, the embodiment of art that resists tyranny, was killed physically but won spiritually, and despite everything is resurrected in miraculously preserved poems, novels, paintings, and symphonies.

Abstract on the subject literature

Zelenograd District Education Department of the Moscow Department of Education

Moscow 2008

Introduction.

Before talking about Mandelstam's work, it is necessary to say about the time in which the poet lived and worked. This time is the turn of the century, a significant, difficult, bright, eventful time: literally in 25 years, events took place that radically changed the way of life of a person and his consciousness. It was not easy to live at this time, and even more so to create. But, as often happens, in the most difficult times something beautiful and unique is born.

This is exactly what Osip Mandelstam was: unique, original, educated - a wonderful person and a talented poet. This is how Anna Akhmatova wrote about him in her diaries: “Mandelshtam was one of the most brilliant interlocutors: he did not listen to himself and did not answer to himself, as almost everyone does now. In conversation he was polite, resourceful and infinitely varied. I never heard him repeat himself or play records. Osip Emilievich learned languages with extraordinary ease. I read the Divine Comedy by heart, pages and pages in Italian. Shortly before his death, he asked Nadya to teach him English, which he did not know at all. He spoke dazzlingly, biasedly about poetry, and was sometimes monstrously unfair (for example, to Blok). About Pasternak he said: “I thought about him so much that I was even tired” and “I’m sure that he didn’t read a single line of mine.” About Marina: “I am an anti-Tsvetaevite.”

Osip Mandelstam is one of my favorite poets. The first poem I read was:

I look into the face of frost alone, He is nowhere, I am from nowhere,

And everything is ironed and flattened without wrinkles

The plains are a breathing miracle.

And the sun squints in starchy poverty,

His squint is calm and comforted,

Ten-digit forests are almost those...

And the snow crunches in your eyes, like pure, sinless bread.

This poem did not leave me without emotions, it “infected” me with Mandelstam’s lyrics and they did not disappoint me.

The timid heart beats anxiously,

Thirsts for happiness both to give and to keep!

It is possible to hide from people

But nothing can be hidden from the stars.

Afanasy Fet

Biography.

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam was born on January 3 (15), 1891 in Warsaw. His father, Emilius Veniaminovich, a descendant of Spanish Jews, who grew up in a patriarchal family and ran away from home as a teenager, was self-taught in Berlin in learning European culture - Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, and spoke equally poorly in Russian and German. A man with a difficult character, he was a not very successful businessman* and a home-grown philosopher at the same time. Mother, Flora Osipovna, nee Verblovskaya, came from an intelligentsia Vilna family, played the piano excellently, loved Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and was a relative of the famous historian of Russian literature and bibliographer* S.A. Vengerova. Osip was the eldest of three brothers. Soon after Osip's birth, his family moved to Pavlovsk near St. Petersburg, and then in 1897 to St. Petersburg. In 1900, Osip entered the Tenishev School. The teacher of Russian literature Vl. had a great influence on the formation of the young man during his studies. Gippius. At the school, Mandelstam began to write poetry, at the same time becoming fascinated by the ideas of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Immediately after graduating from college in 1907, Osip’s parents, concerned about their son’s political activity, sent Osip to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. In France, Mandelstam discovers the Old French epic, the poetry of Villon, Baudelaire, and Verlaine. Meets K. Mochulsky and N. Gumilev. He writes poetry and tries his hand at prose. In 1909-1910, Mandelstam studied philosophy and philology at the University of Heidelberg. In St. Petersburg, he attends meetings of the Religious and Philosophical Society, whose members were the most prominent thinkers and writers N. Berdyaev, D. Merezhkovsky, D. Filosofov, Vyach. Ivanov. During these years, Mandelstam became closer to the St. Petersburg literary environment. In 1909, he first appears on the Vyach “tower”. Ivanova. There he meets Anna Akhmatova. In August 1910, Mandelstam made his literary debut - a selection of five of his poems was published in the ninth issue of Apollo. In 1911, the “Workshop of Poets” was created, of which Mandelstam became a member. In the same year, Mandelstam converted to Christianity, which allowed him to enter the Romance-Germanic department of the Faculty of History and Philology St. Petersburg University. He attends lectures and seminars of prominent philologists; under the influence of the young scientist V. Shileiko, he becomes interested in the culture of Assyria, Egypt, and Ancient Babylon.

(*) – see the glossary of terms on page 21.

The poet also becomes a regular visitor to the Stray Dog, where he sometimes performs on stage, reading his poems.

In 1913, Mandelstam’s first book, “Stone,” was published by the Akme publishing house. By this time, the poet had already moved away from the influence of symbolism*, having adopted a “new faith” - Acmeism*. Mandelstam's poems are often published in the Apollo magazine. The young poet gains fame. In 1914, after Gumilyov left for the front, Mandelstam was elected syndicate of the “Workshop of Poets.”

In December 1915, Mandelstam published the second edition of “The Stone” (Hyperborey publishing house), almost three times in volume more than the first.

At the beginning of 1916, Marina Tsvetaeva came to Petrograd. On literary evening she met with Petrograd poets. From this “unearthly” evening her friendship with Mandelstam began. Poets often dedicated poems to each other; one of these poems is dedicated to Anna Akhmatova:

Do you want to be a toy?

But your plant is ruined,

No one can come to you for a cannon shot

It won't work without poetry.

After the revolution, Mandelstam served as a minor official in various Petrograd departments, and in the early summer of 1918 he left for Moscow.

In February 1919, the poet left hungry Moscow. Mandelstam's wanderings around Russia begin: Moscow, Kyiv, Feodosia...

On May 1, 1919, in the Kiev cafe “HLAM” Mandelstam met twenty-year-old Nadezhda Khazina, who became his wife in 1922.

After a number of adventures, having been in Wrangel's prison, Mandelstam returned to Petrograd in the fall of 1920. He gets a room in the “House of Arts,” which has been turned into a dormitory for writers and artists.

The Mandelstams spent the summer and autumn of 1921 in Georgia, where they were caught by the news of the death of A. Blok, and then of the execution of Gumilyov. In 1922-23, Mandelstam published three collections of poetry: “Tristia” (1922), “Second Book” (1923), “Stone” (3rd edition, 1923). His poems and articles are published in Petrograd, Moscow, and Berlin. At this time, Mandelstam wrote a number of articles on the most important problems of history, culture and humanism: “Word and Culture”, “On the Nature of Word”, “Human Wheat” and others.

In the summer of 1924, Mandelstam moved from Moscow to Leningrad. In 1925, Mandelstam published his autobiographical book “The Noise of Time.” In 1928, Mandelstam’s last lifetime book of poems, “Poems,” was published, and a little later, a collection of articles “On Poetry” (Academia publishing house) and the story “Egyptian Brand.” The Mandelstams spent most of 1930 in Armenia. The result of this trip was the prose “Journey to Armenia” and the poetic cycle “Armenia”. From Armenia at the end of 1930, the Mandelstams arrived in Leningrad. In January 1931, due to problems with living space, the Mandelstams left for Moscow. In March 1932, for “services to Russian literature,” Mandelstam was awarded a lifelong pension of 200 rubles per month.

Mandelstam writes a lot in Moscow. In addition to poetry, he is working on a long essay, “A Conversation about Dante.” But it becomes almost impossible to print. Editor Ts. Volpe was fired for publishing the last part of “Travels to Armenia” in the Leningrad Zvezda.

In 1933, Mandelstam visited Leningrad, where two of his evenings were organized. Another evening was organized in Moscow at the Polytechnic Museum.

On the night of May 13-14, 1934, O. Mandelstam was arrested. Mandelstam himself said that from the moment of his arrest he had been preparing for execution: “After all, this happens with us for lesser reasons.” But a miracle happened. Mandelstam was not only not shot, but not even sent to the “channel”. He escaped with a relatively light exile to Cherdyn, where his wife was allowed to go with him. And soon the Mandelstams were allowed to settle anywhere except the twelve largest cities in the country (then it was called “minus twelve”). Not having the opportunity to choose for a long time (they had no acquaintances anywhere except in the 12 forbidden cities), they randomly chose Voronezh. There he served exile until May 1937, living almost beggarly, first on small earnings, then on the meager help of friends. What was the reason for the commutation of the sentence? Personally, I prefer the following hypothesis. Stalin understood that killing a poet could not stop the effect of poetry. The poems already existed, were distributed in lists, and were transmitted orally. Killing a poet is nothing. Stalin wanted more. He wanted to force Mandelstam to write other poems - poems glorifying Stalin. Poems in exchange for life. Of course, this is all just a hypothesis, but a very plausible one.

Mandelstam understood Stalin's intentions. (Or maybe they helped him understand). One way or another, driven to despair, he decided to try to save a life at the cost of a few tortured lines. As a result, “Ode to Stalin” was born, which caused numerous controversies.

If I took coal for the highest praise -

For the immutable joy of drawing, I would draw the air into tricky angles

Both cautious and anxious.

It can be assumed that the poet wanted to say: “Now, if I wanted to praise someone, then I would...” And further... I would raise my eyebrows in a small corner

And he raised it again and resolved it differently:

You know, Prometheus fanned his coal, Look, Aeschylus, how I cry while drawing!

In “Ode” * there are no glorifying traditional cliches, it seems to say: this is what would happen if the artist undertook to write about something that he does not have a soul for, but he must say about it in order to save himself and his loved ones. The “Ode” didn’t work out; it turned out to be a poem about the artist’s inner state, the contradictions tearing him apart between what he would like to say and what his soul does not allow him.

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam

1891 – 1938

Mandelstam's creative path is connected with the acmeistic movement. In the first stages of his creative development, Mandelstam experienced a certain influence of symbolism. The pathos of his poems of the early period is the renunciation of life with its conflicts, the poeticization of chamber solitude, joyless and painful, the feeling of the illusory nature of what is happening, the desire to escape into the sphere of original ideas about the world (“Only read children’s books...”). Mandelstam's arrival to Acmeism was driven by the demand for “beautiful clarity” and “eternity” of images. In the works of the 1910s, collected in the book “Stone” (1913), the poet creates an image of stone from which he “builds” buildings, “architecture,” the form of his poems. For Mandelstam, examples of poetic art are “an architecturally justified ascent, corresponding to the tiers of a Gothic cathedral.”

Mandelstam's work expressed, although in different ideological and poetic forms than Gumilyov's, the desire to escape from the tragic storms of time into the timeless, in the civilization of past centuries. The poet creates a kind of secondary world from the cultural history he has perceived, a world built on subjective associations through which he tries to express his attitude towards modernity, arbitrarily grouping historical facts, ideas, literary images (“Dombey and Son”, “I have not heard the stories of Ossian ..."). This was a form of leaving one’s “overlord” age. The poems of “Stone” emanate loneliness.

Speaking about this property of Mandelstam’s poetry, Zhirmunsky wrote: “One can call his poems not the poetry of life, but “the poetry of poetry,” that is, poetry whose subject is not life, directly perceived by the poet himself, but someone else’s artistic perception of life. He retells other people's dreams, with a creative synthesis reproduces someone else's, artistically already established perception of life. Before this objective world, artistically recreated by his imagination, the poet invariably stands as an outside observer, looking from behind the glass at an entertaining spectacle. For him, the origin and relative value of the artistic and poetic cultures he reproduces are completely indifferent.”

Mandelstam occupied a special position in Acmeism. It was not for nothing that Blok singled out Akhmatova and Mandelstam from this environment as masters of truly dramatic lyricism. Defending 1910–1916 aesthetic “decrees” of his “Workshop”, the poet even then differed in many respects from Gumilyov and Gorodetsky. Mandelstam was alien to the Nietzschean aristocracy of Gumilyov, the programmatic rationalism of his romantic works, subordinated to a given pathos. Compared to Gumilyov, Mandelstam’s path of creative development was also different. Gumilev, having failed to “overcome” symbolism in his work, came at the end of his creative path to a pessimistic and almost mystical worldview. The dramatic tension of Mandelstam's lyrics expressed the poet's desire to overcome pessimistic moods, the state internal struggle with myself.

During the First World War, Mandelstam’s poetry contained anti-war and anti-tsarist motifs (“Palace Square”, “Menagerie”). The poet is concerned with such questions as the place of his lyrics in revolutionary modernity, the ways of renewal and restructuring of the language of poetry. The fundamental differences between Mandelstam and the “Workshop” and the world of the literary elite, which continued to fence itself off from social reality, are outlined.

Mandelstam feels the October Revolution as a grandiose turning point, as a historically new era. But he did not accept the nature of the new life. His later poems contain the tragic theme of loneliness, love of life, and the desire to become an accomplice in the “noise of time” (“No, I have never been anyone’s contemporary...”). In the field of poetics, he moved from the imaginary “materiality” of the “Stone” to the poetics of complex and abstract allegories.

Mandelstam's early work was clearly influenced by decadent poets. The young author, who had barely entered into life, declared his complete disappointment in it (“Only read children’s books…”, 1908):

The connection with the poetry of decadence is especially emphasized here by the echo of the title line of Sologub’s poem “I love my dark land...”. Following Sologub, Mandelstam wrote about man’s isolation in himself, in his fictions (“Why is the soul so melodious...”, 1911), about his inescapable alienation.

At the same time, the young author was no stranger to the fascination with poetry of the 19th century. Love for Tyutchev is indicated not only by a number of related themes, but also by the roll calls of individual poetic lines. This is, for example, “Silentium” (1910) by Mandelstam, reminiscent of Tyutchev’s poem of the same name. Soon, however, the poet acquires his own problematic and his own poetic voice. This coincided with his arrival at the “Workshop of Poets”. Mandelstam's inclination towards clarity and visible objectivity of poetic images, as well as the increasingly stronger desire to overcome decadent influence, found a certain support in the declarative speeches of the new literary group.

Mandelstam’s first book “Stone” (1913; a new edition of the collection was published in 1916) showed that in modern poetry a unique author has arrived. Mandelstam's main attention is focused on the cultural values of humanity, perceived as an expression of the spiritual energy of certain historical eras. The title of the first collection is allegorical. The poet is attracted primarily by architecture, it is in it that he sees the embodiment of the spirit of history, a visible exponent of its potential. Stone is evidence of the long life of a materialized idea and at the same time an obedient material in the hands of the artist-creator. The word was such a stone for the poet. Mandelstam is attracted to the Gothic, and he devotes a number of poems to it.

In 1912–1913 “Notre Dame” and “Admiralty” appear, in which the fate of humanity is ancient Byzantium, medieval France and imperial Russia appear captured in beautiful stone buildings.

Mandelstam emphasizes the complexity of art, which subordinates seemingly incompatible objects and phenomena to its harmony. Heaviness and stone, and on the other hand, a reed, a straw, a bird, a swallow belong to the key images of the poet. Architecture leads him to reflect on the nature of creativity and the victory of a spiritual artistic concept over soulless material.

As a poet inclined to a philosophical understanding of history, Mandelstam is distinguished by the ability to convey in a few words or, as it were, condense the most important features of the culture of a particular historical period or individual artistic creatures. The Protestant rationality of Bach's chorales, the mournful and powerful pathos of Racine's tragedy or the intense psychological drama of Poe's poems and short stories are perceived by Mandelstam not as a heritage of the past, but as close, re-experienced values of the artistic world (“Bach”, 1913; “We cannot stand tense silence... ", 1912).

Antiquity, the source of numerous poetic reminiscences, analogies and variations, occupies a special place in Mandelstam’s poetic world. For him, ancient myths are not symbols of a higher being or some irrational emotional experiences, but the embodiment of high humanity - and in this he is closer to Annensky, whose poetry had a significant impact on the Acmeists. Greece and Rome are included in Mandelstam's poetry as an integral part of his consciousness, his personal experience (“Insomnia. Homer. Tight Sails...”, 1915).

At the same time, the creative horizons of the Acmeist poet were clearly limited. His work lacked the deep breath of his time, connection with social thought, with philosophical thoughts about the fate of modern Russia. In the 1910s his poetry includes striking poems about St. Petersburg (“Petersburg stanzas”, “Admiralty”, etc.). In “Petersburg Stanzas” an attempt is made to “throw” a bridge from the past to the present day. As in Pushkin’s times, “the lawyer again sits down in the sleigh, wrapping his overcoat around him with a broad gesture.” On Senate Square, “The smoke of a fire and the chill of a bayonet” evoke the events of December 1825. In St. Petersburg of the new century there is also its own Eugene, who “is ashamed of poverty, inhales gasoline and curses fate!” But this is still the same favorite associativity, the poet is still completely immersed in the world of literature and art. If we talk about the personal tone of Mandelstam’s poetry, then it was devoid of the tragic tension so characteristic of the literature of those years, which was especially striking when compared with Blok’s poetry. Adherence to Acmeism, with its rejection of the social-democratic traditions of Russian poetry, narrowed the poet’s field of vision, affecting the depth of his essentially self-contained historical and historical-philosophical parallels.

Mandelstam acted as a master of polished verse. They paid much attention to the “construction” and composition of the work. The title of the first collection “Stone” was supposed to testify to the harmonious integrity and completeness of the works included in it, the creation of which required not only “inspiration”, but also persistent polishing of the intractable “stone”, the mind of the builder.

In the visibility, the “materiality” of the image, which the Acmeists so strived for, Mandelstam achieved high skill. The poet's thoughts and experiences are organically merged in his poems with a concrete reproduction of the objective world.

Researchers have more than once drawn attention to the fact that in Mandelstam’s poetry there is no image of a person as such. This is true. Alien to his turbulent era, Mandelstam did not create the image of a contemporary; in a retrospective look at the world of cultural values, it was not the man himself that was brought to the fore, but his actions, evidence of his creative work. Nevertheless, we must not forget that inner world What was dear to the artist was precisely this image of the creator, artist, sculptor, not recreated in visible form. At the same time, the poet paid tribute to both the inspired creator and the ordinary implementer of his plan.

The book "Tristia" (1922), which included works from 1916–1920 gg., marked a new stage in Mandelstam’s creative development. The fascination with the Middle Ages and Gothic was replaced by a more active appeal to the culture of Greece and Rome, and a more abundant use of concepts associated with antiquity. At the same time, in poems on other topics, the poetic manner becomes more complex: distant associativity, a craving for reminiscences intensify, and a “secret”, encrypted meaning often appears in poems. Later, Mandelstam will again return to the search for transparency and clarity.

A poet of the chamber type, Mandelstam still could not help but respond to the great events of his time. In January 1916, he wrote the anti-war poem “The Menagerie” (initially it was called “Ode to Peace during the War”), and in December 1917, in the excited atmosphere of revolutionary Russia, he created the poem “Decembrist” - historical portrait a man of heroic character, emerging through the light haze of oblivion.

Only cherish children's thoughts,

Scatter everything big far away,

Rise from deep sorrow.

I'm dead tired of life,

I don't accept anything from her

But I love my poor land,

Because I haven’t seen anyone else

"Notre-Dame" 1912

Where the Roman judge judged a foreign people,

There is a basilica - and, joyful and first,

Like Adam once, spreading his nerves,

The light cross vault plays with its muscles.

But a secret plan reveals itself from the outside:

Here the strength of the girth arches was taken care of,

So that the heavy weight of the wall does not crush,

And the ram is inactive on the daring arch.

A spontaneous labyrinth, an incomprehensible forest,

Gothic souls are a rational abyss,

Egyptian power and Christianity timidity,

Next to the reed is an oak tree, and everywhere the king is a plumb line.

But the closer you look, the stronghold of Notre Dame,

I studied your monstrous ribs

The more often I thought: out of unkind heaviness

And someday I will create something beautiful.

"I Hate the Light" 1912

I hate the light

Monotonous stars.

Hello, my old delirium, -

Lancet towers!

Lace, stone, be

And become a web

Heaven's empty chest

Use a thin needle to wound!

It will be my turn -

I can feel the wingspan.

Yes - but where will it go?

Thoughts are a living arrow?

Or your way and time

Having exhausted myself, I will return:

There - I could not love,

Here - I'm afraid to love...

“No, not the moon, but a light dial”

No, not the moon, but a light dial

Shines on me, and what is my fault,

What faint stars do I feel the milkiness?

And Batyushkova’s arrogance disgusts me:

"what time is it now?" - He was asked here

And he answered the curious: “eternity.”

"Tsarskoye Selo"

Let's go to Tsarskoe Selo!

The bourgeois women are smiling there,

When the lancers are after drinking

Sit in a strong saddle...

Let's go to Tsarskoe Selo!

Barracks, parks and palaces,

And on the trees there are pieces of cotton wool,

And the peals of “health” will ring out

To the cry - “great, well done!”

Barracks, parks and palaces...

One-story houses,

Where are the like-minded generals?

They while away their weary lives,

Reading Niva and Dumas...

Mansions - not houses!

The whistle of a steam locomotive... The prince is riding.

There is a retinue in the glass pavilion!..

And, dragging the saber angrily,

The officer comes out, arrogant, -

I have no doubt - this is the prince...

And returns home -

Of course, to the realm of etiquette -

Inspiring secret fear, the carriage

With the relics of a gray-haired maid of honor,

What comes home...

“Petersburg stanzas” 1913 to N. Gumilyov

Above the yellow government buildings

A muddy snowstorm swirled for a long time,

And the lawyer gets into the sleigh again,

With a broad gesture, he wrapped his overcoat around him.

Steamships winter. In the heat of the moment

The thick glass of the cabin lit up.

Monstrous, like an armadillo at the dock, -

Russia is having a hard time resting.

And above the Neva - the embassies of half the world,

Admiralty, sun, silence!

And the state is a hard porphyry,

Like a hair shirt, rough and poor.

The burden of a northern snob -

Onegin's old melancholy;

On Senate Square there is a bank of snowdrifts,

The smoke of a fire and the chill of a bayonet...

Skiffs and seagulls scooped up water

The marines visited the hemp warehouse,

Where, selling sbiten or saiki,

Only opera men wander around.

A line of engines flies into the fog;

Proud, modest pedestrian -

Eccentric Evgeniy is ashamed of poverty,

He inhales gasoline and curses fate!

"Admiralty"

In the northern capital a dusty poplar languishes,

The transparent dial got entangled in the foliage,

And in the dark greenery a frigate or an acropolis

Brother shines from afar, to the water and sky.

The boat is airy and the mast is untouchable,

Serving as a ruler to the successors of Peter,

He teaches: beauty is not the whim of a demigod,

And the predatory eye of a simple carpenter.

We enjoy the dominance of the four elements,

But the fifth was created by a free man.

Doesn't space deny superiority?

This chastely built ark?

Capricious jellyfish are angrily molded,

Like plows abandoned, anchors rust;

And now the three-dimensional bonds are broken,

And the world's seas open.

"Akhmatova" 1914

Half a turn, oh sadness,

I looked at the indifferent ones.

Falling off my shoulders, I became petrified

False classic shawl.

Souls are unchained by the depths:

So - indignant Phaedra -

Rachel once stood.

"Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails"

Insomnia, Homer, tight sails...

I read the list of ships halfway through...

This long brood, this crane train,

That once rose above Hellas.

Like a crane's wedge into foreign borders

There is divine foam on the heads of the kings...

Where are you sailing? Whenever Elena

What is Troy alone for you, Achaean men??

Both the sea and Homer are all driven by love...

Where should I go? And so, Homer is silent...

And the Black Sea makes a swirling noise

And with a terrible roar he approaches the headboard...

"Decembrist"

“The pagan senate bears witness to this,”

These things never die"

He lit a cigarette and pulled his robe around him,

And they play chess nearby.

He traded an ambitious dream for a log house

In a remote area of Siberia,

And an elaborate chibouk at poisonous lips,

Those who spoke the truth in a sorrowful world.

The German oaks rustled for the first time,

Europe cried in the shadows,

The black quadrigas reared up

On triumphant turns.

It used to be that the blue punch in the glasses was burning,

With the wide noise of a samovar

The Rhine friend says quietly,

Freedom-loving guitar.

About the sweet liberty of citizenship,

But the blind skies don't want victims,

Or rather, work and consistency.

Everything's mixed up and there's no one to tell

That, gradually getting colder,

Everything is mixed up, and it’s sweet to repeat:

Russia, Leta, Lorelei.

"Cinema"

Cinema. Three benches.

Sentimental fever.

Aristocrat and rich woman

In the networks of rival villains.

Can't keep love from flying:

She is not to blame for anything!

Selflessly, like a brother,

Loved a naval lieutenant.

And he wanders in the desert -

The gray-haired count's side son.

This is how popular print begins

A novel by a beautiful countess.

And in a frenzy, like a giant,

She wrings her hands.

Parting. Crazy sounds

A haunted piano.

In the chest of the trusting and weak

There's still enough courage

Steal important papers

For the enemy headquarters.

And along the chestnut alley

The monstrous motor rushes,

The tape is chirping, the heart is beating

More anxious and more fun.

In a traveling dress, with a traveling bag,

In the car and in the carriage,

She's only afraid of being chased

Dry is exhausted by a mirage.

What a bitter absurdity:

The end does not justify the means!

He has his father's inheritance,

And for her - a lifelong fortress!

“That evening the lancet wood of the organ did not hum” 1917

That evening the lancet wood of the organ did not hum,

They sang to us Schubert - our native cradle.

The mill was noisy, and in the songs of the hurricane

The blue-eyed hop laughed at the music.

According to the old song, the world is brown, green,

But only forever young,

Where the nightingale linden trees roar

The king of the forest shakes with mad fury.

And the terrible power of the night return -

That song is wild like black wine:

This is a double, an empty ghost,

Looking senselessly out the cold window!

"Tristia" 1918

I learned the science of breaking up

In the simple-haired complaints of the night.

The oxen chew, and the wait lasts -

Last hour urban vigils,

And I honor the ritual of that cock night,

When, having lifted the burden of road sorrow,

Tear-stained eyes looked into the distance

And the women's crying mixed with the singing of the muses.

Who knows when you hear the word “parting”

What kind of separation awaits us?

What does the cock's crow promise us?

When the fire in the acropolis burns,

And at the dawn of some new life,

When the ox lazily chews in the hallway,

Why the rooster, the herald of new life,

Does it beat its wings on the city wall?

And I love the usual yarn:

The shuttle scurries, the spindle hums.

Look, towards you, like swan fluff,

Already barefoot Delia is flying!

Oh, our life has a meager basis,

How poor is the language of joy!

Everything happened before, everything will happen again,

And only the moment of recognition is sweet for us.

So be it: transparent figurine

It lies on a clean clay dish,

Like a squirrel skin spread out,

Bending over the wax, the girl looks.

It’s not for us to guess about the Greek Erebus,

Wax is to women what copper is to men.

Only in battles does the lot fall to us,

And they were given the opportunity to die wondering.

“Sisters – heaviness and tenderness, your signs are the same”

Sisters - heaviness and tenderness - yours are the same

Lungworts and wasps suck the heavy rose.

The man dies. The warmed sand cools down,

And yesterday's sun is carried on a black stretcher.

Ah, heavy honeycombs and delicate networks,

It's easier to lift a stone than your name repeat!

I have only one concern left in the world:

Golden care, how to relieve the burden of time.

Like dark water, I drink the clouded air.

Time was plowed by the plow, and the rose was earth.

In a slow whirlpool there are heavy tender roses,

Weaved roses with heaviness and tenderness into double wreaths!

And in the stone arches of the Assumption Cathedral

It seems to me that the eyebrows are high and arched.

And from the shaft fortified by the archangels

I looked around the city at a wonderful height.

Within the walls of the Acropolis, sadness consumed me,

By Russian name and Russian beauty.

Isn’t it wonderful that we dream about Vertograd,

Where doves soar in the hot blue,

What Orthodox hooks the blueberry sings:

Tender Assumption - Florence in Moscow.

And the five-domed Moscow cathedrals

With their Italian and Russian soul

Reminds me of the Aurora phenomenon,

But with a Russian name and a fur coat.

“I forgot what I wanted to say”

I forgot what I wanted to say.

The blind swallow will return to the palace of shadows,

Play with cut wings and transparent ones.

In unconsciousness the night song is sung.

I can't hear the birds. Immortelle does not bloom.

The manes of the night herd are transparent.

An empty boat floats in a dry river.

Among the grasshoppers the word is unconscious.

And slowly grows, like a tent or a temple,

Then suddenly she will pretend to be a mad Antigone,

Then he rushes to his feet like a dead swallow,

With Stygian tenderness and a green branch.

Oh, if only I could return the sighting fingers of shame,

And the bulging joy of recognition.

I'm so afraid of the sobs of the aonid,

Fog, ringing and gaping!

And to mortals the power is given to love and recognize,

For them, the sound will spill into their fingers,

But I forgot what I want to say -

And the disembodied thought will return to the palace of shadows.

That’s not what the transparent one is talking about,

All swallow, girlfriend, Antigone...

And on your lips it burns like black ice

Stygian memory of ringing.

“We will meet again in St. Petersburg”

In St. Petersburg we will meet again,

It's like we buried the sun in it,

And the blessed, meaningless word

Let's say it for the first time.

In the black velvet of the Soviet night,

In the velvet of universal emptiness,

All the dear eyes of the blessed women sing,

Immortal flowers are all blooming.

The capital is hunched over like a wild cat,

There is a patrol on the bridge,

Only an evil motor will rush through the darkness

And he will cry like a cuckoo.

I don't need a night pass

I'm not afraid of the sentries:

For the blessed, meaningless word

I will pray in the Soviet night.

I hear a slight theatrical rustle

And the girlish “ah” -

And a huge heap of immortal roses

In Cyprida's arms.

We warm ourselves by the fire from boredom,

Maybe centuries will pass,

And blessed women's dear hands

Light ashes will be collected.

Somewhere there are red parterre beds,

The chiffonieres of the boxes are luxuriantly fluffed,

Wind-up doll of an officer -

Not for black souls and base saints...

Well, perhaps put out our candles

In the black velvet of universal emptiness.

Everyone sings of the blessed women with steep shoulders,

And you won’t notice the night sun.

Save my speech forever for the taste of misfortune and smoke,

For the resin of circular patience, for the conscientious tar of labor...

Just as the water in Novgorod wells should be black and sweet,

So that for Christmas a star will be reflected in it with seven fins.

And for this, my father, my friend and my rude helper,

I am an unrecognized brother, a renegade in the people's family -

I promise to build such dense log houses,

So that the Tatarva lowers the princes into the tub in them.

If only these frozen blocks would love me,

How, aiming for death, the towns are killed in the garden, -

I'll spend my whole life wearing an iron shirt for this.

And for Peter’s execution I will find an ax in the forests.

Abstract on the subject literature

Zelenograd District Education Department of the Moscow Department of Education

Moscow 2008

Introduction.

Osip Mandelstam is one of my favorite poets. The first poem I read was:

I look into the face of frost alone, He is nowhere, I am from nowhere,

And everything is ironed and flattened without wrinkles

The plains are a breathing miracle.

And the sun squints in starchy poverty,

His squint is calm and comforted,

Ten-digit forests are almost those...

And the snow crunches in your eyes, like pure, sinless bread.

This poem did not leave me without emotions, it “infected” me with Mandelstam’s lyrics and they did not disappoint me.

The timid heart beats anxiously,

Thirsts for happiness both to give and to keep!

It is possible to hide from people

But nothing can be hidden from the stars.

Afanasy Fet

Biography.

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam was born on January 3 (15), 1891 in Warsaw. His father, Emilius Veniaminovich, a descendant of Spanish Jews, who grew up in a patriarchal family and ran away from home as a teenager, was self-taught in Berlin in learning European culture - Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, and spoke equally poorly in Russian and German. A man with a difficult character, he was a not very successful businessman* and a home-grown philosopher at the same time. Mother, Flora Osipovna, nee Verblovskaya, came from an intelligentsia Vilna family, played the piano excellently, loved Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and was a relative of the famous historian of Russian literature and bibliographer* S.A. Vengerova. Osip was the eldest of three brothers. Soon after Osip's birth, his family moved to Pavlovsk near St. Petersburg, and then in 1897 to St. Petersburg. In 1900, Osip entered the Tenishev School. The teacher of Russian literature Vl. had a great influence on the formation of the young man during his studies. Gippius. At the school, Mandelstam began to write poetry, at the same time becoming fascinated by the ideas of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Immediately after graduating from college in 1907, Osip’s parents, concerned about their son’s political activity, sent Osip to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. In France, Mandelstam discovers the Old French epic, the poetry of Villon, Baudelaire, and Verlaine. Meets K. Mochulsky and N. Gumilev. He writes poetry and tries his hand at prose. In 1909-1910, Mandelstam studied philosophy and philology at the University of Heidelberg. In St. Petersburg, he attends meetings of the Religious and Philosophical Society, whose members were the most prominent thinkers and writers N. Berdyaev, D. Merezhkovsky, D. Filosofov, Vyach. Ivanov. During these years, Mandelstam became closer to the St. Petersburg literary environment. In 1909, he first appears on the Vyach “tower”. Ivanova. There he meets Anna Akhmatova. In August 1910, Mandelstam made his literary debut - a selection of five of his poems was published in the ninth issue of Apollo. In 1911, the “Workshop of Poets” was created, of which Mandelstam became a member. In the same year, Mandelstam converted to Christianity, which allowed him to enter the Romance-Germanic department of the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. He attends lectures and seminars of prominent philologists; under the influence of the young scientist V. Shileiko, he becomes interested in the culture of Assyria, Egypt, and Ancient Babylon.

(*) – see the glossary of terms on page 21.

The poet also becomes a regular visitor to the Stray Dog, where he sometimes performs on stage, reading his poems.

In December 1915, Mandelstam published the second edition of “The Stone” (Hyperborea Publishing House), almost three times larger in volume than the first.

At the beginning of 1916, Marina Tsvetaeva came to Petrograd. At a literary evening she met with Petrograd poets. From this “unearthly” evening her friendship with Mandelstam began. Poets often dedicated poems to each other; one of these poems is dedicated to Anna Akhmatova:

Do you want to be a toy?

But your plant is ruined,

No one can come to you for a cannon shot

It won't work without poetry.

After the revolution, Mandelstam served as a minor official in various Petrograd departments, and in the early summer of 1918 he left for Moscow.

In February 1919, the poet left hungry Moscow. Mandelstam's wanderings around Russia begin: Moscow, Kyiv, Feodosia...

On May 1, 1919, in the Kiev cafe “HLAM” Mandelstam met twenty-year-old Nadezhda Khazina, who became his wife in 1922.

In 1933, Mandelstam visited Leningrad, where two of his evenings were organized. Another evening was organized in Moscow at the Polytechnic Museum.

If I took coal for the highest praise -

For the immutable joy of drawing, I would draw the air into tricky angles

Both cautious and anxious.

It can be assumed that the poet wanted to say: “Now, if I wanted to praise someone, then I would...” And further... I would raise my eyebrows in a small corner

And he raised it again and resolved it differently:

You know, Prometheus fanned his coal, Look, Aeschylus, how I cry while drawing!

He was last arrested on May 2, 1938. The official notice stated that he died on December 27 of the same year in a camp near Vladivostok.

Features of the lyrics.

Collections: “Stone” and “Tristia”.

“Stone” (1913) - the first collection of poetry. This collection 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 “jewelry craftsmanship”, “chassis of lines”, “impeccability of form”, “sharpness of verse”, “undoubted 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 all the more surprising because ethnically Mandelstam was not Russian.

The mood of “Stone” is minor. The refrain of most poems is the word “sadness”: “Oh my prophetic sadness,” “ unspeakable sadness“,” “I slowly carry sadness in my heart, like a gray bird,” “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's misty pain Oh, let me be also misty

And let me not love you.

In the second large collection “Tristia” (1922), 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. 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. 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:

Because I couldn't hold your hands,

For betraying the salty tender lips,

I have to 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.”

Features of O. Mandelstam's poetic language.

Mandelstam began his work as a supporter of Acmeism. He formulated his concept of Acmeism in the article “The Morning of Acmeism” (1919). Here he rejected the usual idea of Acmeism as a simple return to realism, to the glorification of reality. The only real thing in art is the work of art itself. Reality in poetry is not objects outside world, but “the word as such.” In the article “Word and Culture” (1921) he writes: “ Living word does not designate an object, but freely chooses, as if for housing, this or that objective significance...” And further: “A poem is alive in an internal way, by that cast of form that precedes the written poem. There is not a single word yet, but the poem is already being heard. This is the sound of the inner image, it is the poet’s ear that perceives it.” These words contain the key to much in the poems of both early and late Mandelstam.

Remain foam, Aphrodite,

And return the word to music!

The evolution that Mandelstam experienced during his creative career clearly affected his poetic language and figurative system; they changed significantly from his early poems, from the book “Stone” to “Voronezh Notebooks”, “Poems about the Unknown Soldier”.

For early creativity Mandelstam is characterized by a desire for classical clarity and harmony; his poems are distinguished by simplicity, lightness, transparency, which are achieved by the sparing use of simple rhymes (“The sound is cautious and dull...”, “Only read children's books...”).

In Mandelstam, the expressive, visible objectivity characteristic of Acmeists is spiritualized symbolic meaning. The poem does not reflect the objects and phenomena themselves, but the artist’s perception of them:

Oh heaven, heaven, I will dream about you!

It can't be that you're completely blind,

And the day burned down like white page:

A little smoke and a little ash!

In the poem - real picture: the sky turned white as a page, darkened, as if it had disappeared, the day burned up. We are talking about an inevitably disappearing moment, about the inevitable, irrevocable movement of time. After the collection “Tristia” in “Poems of 1921-1925” and then in the work of the late Mandelstam, classical clarity and transparency disappears, his poetic language acquires metaphorical complexity; unexpected, complicated images make his poems difficult for readers to perceive. A specific phenomenon actually correlates with the universal and eternal. Complex, filled deep meaning the world of the poem is created by the polysemy of the word, revealed in the artistic context. In this context, the word is enriched with new, additional content. Mandelstam has words-symbols that pass from one poem to another, acquiring new semantic shades. For example, the word “age” creates a concept, an image that changes depending on the context of the poem: “My age, my beast, who can look into your pupils”, “But your spine is broken, my beautiful pathetic age” (“Age”); “Two sleepy apples from the ruler” (January 1, 1924); “The wolfhound century is throwing itself on my shoulders” (“For the explosive valor of the coming centuries...”). “Swallow” in Mandelstam’s poems is associated with art, creativity, the word - for example: “I forgot the word, what I wanted to say. The blind swallow will return to the palace” (“Swallow”); “And a living swallow fell on the hot snow” (“The ghostly scene flickers slightly...”); “We have bound swallows into fighting legions...” (“Twilight of Freedom”). Researchers call Mandelstam's poetics associative. Images and words evoke associations that fill in missing semantic links. Often definitions do not refer to the object to which they are grammatically attached; the word being defined, the object that gave rise to some actions may not be named - for example: “I learned the science of parting in the simple-haired complaints of the night.” In the context of the poem “Tristia,” the word “plain-haired” evokes an association with a sudden night farewell, with the tears and complaints of women. In the poem “Where is the bound and nailed groan?..” it becomes clear from the context that we're talking about about Prometheus nailed to a rock, doomed to torment. “The water rested against one hundred and four oars” - this image in the poem “Kama” is associated with a convict galley: the poet made his way along the Kama under escort into exile.

A very stable, private image of Mandelstam: the black sun, the night sun, yesterday’s sun:

Wild and sleepless passions

Let's stop the black sun.

At the gates of Jerusalem

The black sun rose.

I woke up in a cradle

Shined by the black sun.

This night sun buries

The mob excited by games...

A man dies, the warm sand cools down,

And yesterday's sun is carried on a black stretcher.

And you won’t notice the night sun.

The image of the black, night sun is a frequent guest in world literature, especially religious literature. An eclipse of the sun - a black sun - is a harbinger of death. Mandelstam's epithets usually define an object with different sides and may seem to contradict each other. Thus, about Andrei Bely it is said “Turquoise teacher, tormentor, ruler, fool” (“Poems in memory of Andrei Bely”), about St. Petersburg: “Proud, damned, empty, youthful” (“I was only childishly connected with the world of power... ").

Mandelstam solves one of the most difficult problems of verse language. He brought his musical verse from the 19th century, contained in special shades of words:

I'm in a round dance of shadows trampling the gentle meadow,

With a melodious name he intervened,

But everything melted away, and only faint sound

Remained in a foggy memory.

Each restructuring of the melody in Mandelstam is, first of all, a change in the semantic structure:

And I thought: why wake up

A swarm of elongated sounds,

In this eternal squabble to catch

Aeolian miraculous system?

Mandelstam’s semantic structure is such that one image, one line of vocabulary acquires a decisive role for the whole poem and imperceptibly colors all the others - this is the key for the entire hierarchy of images:

I'm on the ladder

I climbed into the disheveled hayloft, I breathed the milky dust of the stars,

He breathed a tangle of space.

He, more than any other modern poet, knows the power of vocabulary coloring. Language is important to him in the shades of words.

Sweeter than the singing of Italian speech

For me native language,

For it babbles mysteriously

A spring of foreign harps.

Here is one “foreign harp”, built almost without foreign words:

I learned the science of breaking up

In the simple-haired complaints of the night.

The oxen are chewing and the waiting continues,

The last hour of urban vigils.

A small foreign inoculation is enough for this receptive verse culture for “parting,” “plain-haired,” “waiting” to become Latin like “vigilia.” S. Averintsev writes: “...Mandelshtam is so tempting to understand - and so difficult to interpret.” Is there always a need to interpret and understand?

Is this “anatomization” of the living body of poetry really necessary? And is it really impossible to simply perceive Mandelstam? Many contemporaries quoted vivid, instantly memorable lines by heart:

Slower than snow hives,

Crystal is clearer than a window,

And a turquoise veil

Carelessly thrown on a chair.

Fabric, intoxicated with itself,

Pampered by the caress of light,

She's experiencing summer

As if untouched in winter;

And if in icy diamonds

Frost flows forever,

Here is the fluttering of dragonflies

Fast-living, blue-eyed.

Themes of O. Mandelstam's poetry.

The poetic heritage of O. Mandelstam is about 600 works of various genres and themes, including poems for children, comic poems and translations. Mandelstam’s range of “blessed inheritance” is all-encompassing. It includes the world of antiquity, French and German Gothic, Italian Renaissance, Dickensian England, French classicism and, of course, Russian poetry... “Alien” images will sprout like grain on fertile soil, reinterpreted by him in his own way.

I. Theme of antiquity. He felt especially keenly the ancient world:

Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails.

I read the list of ships halfway through:

This long brood, this crane train,

What once rose above Hellas...

In antiquity, he is looking for support and salvation, looking for something very simple and at the same time the most important and lasting in relations between people, instilling hope for the future.

On the stone spurs of Pieria

The muses led the first round dance,

So that, like bees, the lyricists are blind

They gave us Ionian honey...

Oh, where are you, holy islands,

Where they do not eat broken bread,

Where there is only honey, wine and milk,

Creaking labor does not darken the sky

And does the wheel rotate easily?

II.Theme of death. From the very first steps of his work, the theme of death became one of the dominant notes in his poetry. Already in his earliest poems, death seemed to him the only test of his own reality:

If it weren't for death, it would never have happened

I won't know that I'm alive.

When the poet was not yet twenty years old, he wrote:

I am a gardener, I am also a flower,

In the dungeon of the world I am not alone.

Eternity has already fallen on the glass

My breath, my warmth.

In transparent Petropol we will die,

Where Proserpine rules over us.

We drink mortal air in every breath,

And every hour is our hour of death.

In another poem he even gives preference to death over love:

Let them say: love has wings,

Death is a hundred times more inspired;

The soul is still engulfed in struggle,

And our lips fly to her.

This theme became more acute in the poems of the 1930s:

Two or three random phrases haunt me all day long: my sadness is fat,

Oh God, how black and blue-eyed

Dragonflies of death are as black as azure!

III.Theme of love. 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 so open, passionate manifestation 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.

However, 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

Long live in home country Surprised pool of eyes, 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 labor 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.

IV.Theme of St. Petersburg. For Mandelstam, St. Petersburg is the city in which he spent his childhood and youth. The theme of St. Petersburg runs through all of the poet’s work. It clearly manifested itself in the first collection “Stone” (1908-1915). For example, “Petersburg stanzas”, “Admiralty”, “Running out to the square, free...”, “Palace Square”. The second collection “Tristia” also contains the theme of the northern capital: “In transparent Petropol we would die...”, “At a terrible height there is a will-o’-the-wisp...”, “In St. Petersburg we will meet again...”. Later, St. Petersburg motifs sound differently in the poems “I returned to my city, familiar to tears...”, “I was only childishly connected with the world of power...”. Most later work Mandelstam's lyrics containing a reference to St. Petersburg - the poem “Isaky froze on dead eyelashes...”. The poet easily and willingly operates with all the known realities of St. Petersburg architecture, which in the minds of the Russian people have become emblems of the northern capital. His “Admiralty”, “Palace Square”, Kazan Cathedral preserve the authenticity of the details, but the recognition of traditional realities does not interfere with the unique Mandelstam plasticity of St. Petersburg. I would like to draw attention to Mandelstam’s characteristic roll call between antiquity and modernity, the themes of Rome and St. Petersburg. For example, in a poem about the Kazan Cathedral, built by the Russian architect A.N. Voronikhin:

Running out to the square, free

The colonnade became a semicircle, and the temple of the Lord spread out,

Like a light spider cross.

And the architect was not Italian,

But a Russian in Rome - tu, so what!

Every time you are like a foreigner,

You walk through a grove of porticoes.

And the temple's small body

A hundred times more animated

The giant that is whole rock

Helplessly pinned to the ground!

The Kazan Cathedral is seen as if from a bird's eye view: “And it lay flat

The temple of the Lord is like a light spider cross.” The cathedral was built in St. Petersburg,

Therefore, the line may cause confusion: “But the Russian is in Rome...” However,

if you know that Voronikhin chose his favorite model for his creation

Mandelstam's Cathedral of St. Peter's in Rome, everything falls into place. The words about the “foreigner” passing through the “grove of porticos” also turn out to be understandable. The poem is also interesting for its figurative structure. The cathedral is a giant colonnade unfolded in a semicircle (a bold comparison: the Church of the Lord is likened to an insect, traditionally far from the concepts of the lofty, beautiful, noble - a “spider cross”). The temple itself occupies approximately a tenth of the total area of the building (“the temple is a small body”). In the unique St. Petersburg-Leningrad almanac* of the 20th century, begun by Blok and continued with poems by Pasternak and Akhmatova, Mandelstam has a special page. Masterful, recognizable, whimsical, precise not by the similarity of features and proportions, but by the internal logic and energy of insight, Mandelstam’s Petersburg is a page without which poetry is unthinkable, without which the city itself becomes destitute and poorer.

V. The political theme sounded in Mandelstam’s poetry even before the revolution.

Europe of Caesars! Since Bonaparte

The quill pen was directed by Metternich For the first time in a hundred years and before my eyes

Yours is changing mysterious map!

According to A. Akhmatova, “Mandelshtam met the revolution completely

an established poet... He was one of the first to write poetry on civil topics. The revolution was a huge event for him, and it is no coincidence that the word people appears in his poems.” For Mandelstam, the essence new government was exposed from the first days, and he felt the fatal meaning of incompatibility with her.

On the square with armored cars

I see a man: he

The wolves are frightened by firebrands Freedom, equality, law!

He accepts the ideals of the revolution, but rejects the authorities who

falsifies.

When the October one was prepared for us by a temporary worker

The yoke of violence and malice,

And the armored car killer bristled

And the low-browed machine gunner - Crucify Kerensky! - the soldier demanded,

And the evil mob applauded:

Pilate allowed us to take our hearts with bayonets,

And the heart stopped beating!

At the time of the first, stunning disappointment with the revolution, looking above

blood flowing down the street, O. Mandelstam wrote “Twilight of Freedom”, a kind of “hymn” of the revolution.

Let us glorify, brothers, the twilight of freedom, the Great Twilight Year.

Into the boiling night waters

The heavy forest of nets is lowered.

You rise in the dark years,

O sun, judge, people.

Let us glorify the fatal burden,

Which the people's leader takes in tears.

Let us glorify the power of the gloomy burden,

Her unbearable oppression.

Whoever has a heart must hear, time,

As your ship goes down.

Well, let's try a huge, clumsy one,

Creaky steering wheel.

The earth is floating. Take heart, men.

Dividing the ocean like a plow,

We will remember even in the Lethean cold,

That the earth cost us ten heavens.

The poet is ready to voluntarily join the efforts of those who are trying

to move humanity in a new, unknown direction: “Well,

let's try a huge, clumsy, creaky turn of the steering wheel...” But he knows

that the “twilight of freedom” has come and “we will remember even in the Lethean cold,

that the earth cost us ten heavens!” In this ode there is a clear readiness to accept the revolution, with full awareness of the size of the payment. He did not want and could not be a passive, impersonal victim, an “unknown soldier” of the wheel of history, and entered into an unprecedented duel with all his time. Mandelstam's poetry in the early 30s became poetry of challenge:

For the explosive valor of the coming centuries,

Behind high tribe of people

I lost even the cup at the feast of my fathers,

And fun, and your honor.

The wolfhound century rushes onto my shoulders,

But I am not a wolf by blood,

You better stuff me like a hat into your sleeve

The hot fur coat of the Siberian steppes, So as not to see either a coward or a flimsy mud,

No bloody bones in the wheel,

So that the blue foxes shine all night

To me in its primeval glory.

Take me into the night where the Yenisei flows,

And the pine tree reaches the star,

Because I am not a wolf by blood

And only my equal will kill me.

Mandelstam was the first, and, perhaps, the only poet in the country,

who in the 30s wrote about the famine in Crimea, Ukraine, Kuban.

Cold Spring. Hungry Old Crimea.

As if under Wrangel - just as guilty.

Shepherd dogs in the yard, patches on rags,

The same gray, biting smoke.

The scattered distance is still beautiful, the trees, slightly swollen with buds,

They stand like strangers and arouse pity

Almonds decorated with yesterday's stupidity.

Nature does not recognize its own face,

And the terrible shadows of Ukraine, Kuban...

Like hungry peasants wearing felt shoes

The gate is guarded without touching the rings.

The poems seem to be devoid of angry motives, but in the atmosphere itself

lethargy, as if frozen, “not recognizing its own face” nature

there is desperation. And of course, the poem could not be published,

In the same 1933 O. Mandelstam, the first and only living and

recognized poets in the country, wrote anti-Stalin poems, for which he

I had to pay the most expensive price - the price of life.

We live without feeling the country beneath us,

Our speeches are not heard ten steps away,

And where is enough for half a conversation,

The Kremlin highlander will be remembered there.

His thick fingers are like worms, fat

And the words, like pound weights, are true,

The cockroaches are laughing,

And his boots shine.

And around him is a rabble of thin-necked leaders,

He plays with the services of demihumans.

Who whistles, who meows, who whines,

He's the only one who babbles and pokes.

Like a horseshoe, a decree forges a decree: someone in the groin, someone in the forehead, someone in the eyebrow, someone in the eye.

Whoever punishes him is a raspberry

And a broad Ossetian chest.

Mandelstam was not a politician or, say, a singer of socialism, but he was never anti-Soviet either. An anti-Stalin poem does not mean anti-Soviet. Perhaps Mandelstam turned out to be more intuitive and wiser than many, seeing the inhumane, anti-people essence of the activities of the Kremlin rulers. The poet turned out to be the first critic of the cult of personality - long before this phenomenon was identified by politicians. Naturally, the poet could not help but fear reprisals for such opposition to the authorities.

Help me, Lord, to get through this night:

I fear for my life - for Your servant -

Living in St. Petersburg is like sleeping in a coffin.

The poem “Leningrad” is also permeated with fear:

Petersburg, I don’t want to die yet...

And all night long I wait for my dear guests,

Moving the shackles of the door chains.

Conclusion.

In the early - mid-thirties, O. Mandelstam's poems were known

only to a narrow circle. This circle of poetry connoisseurs and lovers gradually

increased, although the official literature did not take O. Mandelstam and his work into account. They were relegated to the elite periphery. According to the plans of high-ranking literary and non-literary officials, the poet was doomed to remain in deep shadow and remain silent. O. Mandelstam told his wife: “We take poetry seriously—they kill for it.” He knew the value of his gift. I knew that I was born with the mark of a poet. Poetry is not a position, not a profession. Poetry is “not going anywhere.” When the poems came out, it was like an obsession. The finished poem was a joy, a release, a “straightening sigh.” The poet's work was of such high value to him that in comparison with it, literary ordeals and constant everyday hardships seemed trivial. Mandelstam knew with the instinct of a poet that his feat, both moral and creative, was preparing a crown of imperishable glory.

Don't give it to me, don't give it to me

Sweet laurel on whiskey,

Better split my heart

You are on blue ringing pieces.

And when I die, having served,

Lifelong friend of all living,

So that it can be heard wider and higher

The response of the sky fills my entire chest.

I believe that E.M. wrote most vividly and fairly about Osip Mandelstam. Tager:

Confessor of imperishable thought,

By the grace of God singer,

The verse of the minted heir,

The last Pushkin chick...

He walked, submissive to higher powers,

Following the burning pillar.

Over the eccentric, sick and frail,

The lively crowd laughed.

In a cold chorus of praises

His chorus did not sound;

Only the Ocean is the breath of iambics

He answered with the breath of the storm.

Only he, the Great, the dark-water one,

Sang the last praise

To the one who was a free soul

Like the wind and the eagle.

More indestructible than the temple vaults

Diamond snow, sapphire ice, And a pole in memory of Mandelstam

The northern lights are pouring.

Glossary of terms.

Oh yeah - poetic work, characterized by solemnity and sublimity.

An almanac is a type of serial publication, an ongoing collection of literary, artistic and/or popular science works, united according to some characteristic.

Review (review) - analysis and evaluation of a new artistic (literary, theatrical, musical, cinematic, etc.), scientific or popular science work; a genre of newspaper and magazine journalism and literary criticism by other people who are experts in this field. The purpose of reviewing is to ensure and, where necessary, to ensure that the author adheres to the standards accepted in a particular field or science as a whole. Publication of works that have not undergone peer review is often viewed with suspicion by professionals in many fields.

Refrain - in literature, a certain word or phrase that is repeated repeatedly throughout the work. In poetry, a refrain can be a line or several lines.

A merchant is a person engaged in private trade, carrying out commercial entrepreneurship.

Bibliography is a branch of scientific and practical activity dealing with the preparation, dissemination and use of information about printed works necessary for their identification. Scientific systematic description of book publications, compilation of their lists, indexes and reviews.

Symbolism is one of the largest movements in art (in literature, music and painting), which arose in France in the 1870-80s. and reached its greatest development at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, primarily in France itself, Belgium and Russia. The symbolists radically changed not only various types of art, but also the very attitude towards it. In their work, much attention is paid to signs and symbols. Their experimental nature, desire for innovation, cosmopolitanism and wide range of influences have become a model for most modern art movements.

Acmeism is a literary movement that opposes symbolism and arose at the beginning of the 20th century in Russia. The Acmeists proclaimed materiality, objectivity of themes and images, precision of words (from the standpoint of “art for art’s sake”).

Bibliography

1. S.S. Averintsev. "Poets". M.; 1996.

2. E.E. Mandelstam. “Poems. Prose. Articles”, M., Ast, 2000.

3. E. Necheporuk. “Osip Mandelstam and his time.” M. - Our house, 1995.

4. P.S. Ulyashov. “The Lonely Seeker.” M., Knowledge, 1991.

5. “Russian literature of the 20th century” (edited by Pronina E.P.), 1994.

6. “Russian literature of the 20th century” (edited by L.P. Batakov), 1993.

7. Karpov A. “Osip Emilievich Mandelstam”, 1988.

To prepare this work, materials from the site http://referat.ru were used

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INTRODUCTION 3
1. FEATURES OF MANDELSHTAM’S LYRICS 5

1.1 The poet's position in lyric poetry 5
1.2 The poet's civil indignation 9

2. PROBLEM OF “ARTIST AND AUTHORITY” 12

2.1 Mandelstam's lyrics in the 30s 12
2.2 Mandelstam - a man of the 30s 15
2.3 Mandelstam's poems - monuments of time 18

CONCLUSION 22
BIBLIOGRAPHY 26
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this essay is to reveal the problem of the artist and power in Mandelstam’s lyrics.
The essence of the charm and at the same time complexity of Mandelstam’s lyrics lies not only in the breadth of his bookish, “cultural” associations, but also in the sophisticated art of combining global, world meanings in images with specific, objective and “bodily” ones. Moreover, the concreteness, “materiality” of the figurative vision of the world, scattered and lost in the mists of symbolist poetry, was again returned to Russian poetic culture of the 20th century precisely through the efforts of Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Gumilyov and other poets of the Acmeist circle. The concreteness of their imagery was already different than in the poetry of the past, the 19th century. Mandelstam's lyrics, like those of his friends in the Workshop of Poets, survived and absorbed the experience of the Symbolists, primarily Blok, with their characteristic acute sense of the infinity and cosmic nature of existence.
Mandelstam's poetics as an acmeist is focused on “Romanesque clarity” and “simplicity.” But this is by no means the simplicity of the meanings inherent in his lyrics, which are usually deeply encrypted in the images. The feeling of clarity and transparency of his artistic world arises from the definite outlines of the objects of this world and the distinctness of the boundaries between them. In the poems of the collections “Stone” (1913 and 1916) and “Tristia” (1922), everything, even the subtlest, capricious, “ethereal” matter of existence, like air or musical sound, receives its solid, regular, like crystal, and cast forms. Thus, “faceted air” turns out to be completely poetically natural in Mandelstam’s lyrics (“Your air is faceted. In the bedroom the mountains melt // Of blue decrepit glass...” - in the poem “The dark and barren life of Venice...”, 1920), the sea is perceived as “an elastic wave crystal” (“Feodosia”, 1920), a musical note seems “crystalline” (“Tristia”, 1910, 1935).
Such properties of the poetic structure of Mandelstam’s lyrics are associated with the philosophical foundations of his work, with the originality of his vision of the world in comparison with his immediate predecessors, the poets of Blok’s generation. Mandelstam no longer harbors hopes for those principles of life that endlessly fascinated Blok and the Symbolist poets - for the elements of the world. By element we mean powerful, chaotic, uncontrollable by reason, irrational forces in the universe, in nature and in man himself, in his individual or historical, social life, when he acts under the influence of spontaneous impulses, emotional impulses and passions are forces that are practically uncontrollable and extra-ethical. Incorrigible romantic. Blok saw in the spontaneous movements of life, including social and revolutionary, a potential good, an opportunity for the purification and renewal of man and the entire culture (Blok’s articles “Element and Culture”, 1908, “On Romanticism”, 1919, etc.). He dreamed of the time when “a way would be found to arrange, organize a person, a bearer of culture, into a new connection with the elements” (the detente in the quotes is mine. - Author).
Similar hopes found their expression in Russian poetry of the beginning of the century in the myth it created about cleansing barbarism, barbarism that did not frighten or disgust, but was welcomed and joyfully or doomedly expected - remember “The Coming Huns” by V. Bryusov, “Scythians” by Blok and Ave. Mandelstam was polemical in relation to this tradition, to this kind of myth about “Scythianism” saving humanity (see, for example, his poem “About Simple and Rough Times...”, 1914, built on associations that remove the image of a barbarian -Scythian from a romantic height).

1. FEATURES OF MANDELSHTAM’S LYRICS

1.1 Position poet in lyric poetry

Maybe you don't need me.

Night; from the abyss of the world,

Like a shell without pearls

I am washed up on your shore.

O. Mandelstam

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam knew the true value of himself and his creativity, he believed that he would influence “Russian poetry, changing something in its structure and composition.” The poet never betrayed himself in anything. He preferred the position of a prophet and priest to the position of living together and among people, creating what his people needed.

I have been given a body - what should I do with it?

So one and so mine?

For the joy of quiet breathing and living

Who, tell me, should I thank?

I am a gardener, I am also a flower,

I am not alone in the prison of the world Lavrov A.V. Mandelstam in the 1930s: Life and literary activity. M., 1995 - P.45.

His reward for his talented poetry was persecution, poverty and, ultimately, death. But the truthful poems, paid at a high price, not published for decades, cruelly persecuted, survived... and have now entered our consciousness as high examples of human dignity, unbending will and genius.

In transparent Petropol we will die.

Where Proserpine rules over us.

We drink mortal air in every breath,

And every hour is our hour of death.

In St. Petersburg, Mandelstam began to write poetry; he returned here for a short time; he considered this city “his homeland.”

I returned to my city, familiar to tears,

To the veins, to the swollen glands of children.

I came back here, so swallow it quickly

Fish oil from Leningrad river lanterns.

Mandelstam was a childishly open and joyful person, going towards people with a pure soul, who did not know how to lie or pretend. He never traded his talent, preferring freedom to satiety and comfort: well-being was not a condition for creativity for him. He didn’t look for misfortune, but he didn’t chase happiness either.

Ah, heavy honeycombs and delicate networks,

It's easier to lift a stone than to repeat your name!

I have only one concern left in the world:

Golden care, how to relieve the burden of time.

Like dark water, I drink clouded air.

Time was plowed by the plow, and the rose of the earth was Lavrov A.V. Mandelstam in the 1930s: Life and literary activity. M., 1995 - P.48.

The poet knew and was not indifferent to the price that had to be paid for the blessings of life and even for the happiness of living. Fate beat and tore him pretty hard, repeatedly brought him to the last line, and only a happy accident saved the poet at the decisive moment.

December solemnly shines over the Neva.

Twelve months have been singing about the hour of death.

No, not Straw in ceremonial satin

Tastes a slow, languid peace.

According to Akhmatova, at the age of 42, Mandelstam “became heavy, gray, began to breathe poorly - he gave the impression of an old man, but his eyes still shone. The poems kept getting better. Prose too.” The poet’s physical decrepitude was interestingly combined with poetic and spiritual power.

My eyelashes prickle, a tear wells up in my chest.

I feel without fear that there will be a thunderstorm.

Someone wonderful is trying to hurry me to forget something.

It’s stuffy, and yet I still want to live until I die.

What gave the poet strength? Creation. “Poetry is power,” he told Akhmatova. This power over oneself, illnesses and weaknesses, over human souls, over eternity gave strength to live and create, to be independent and reckless.

For the explosive valor of the coming centuries,

For the high tribe of people

I lost even the cup at the feast of my fathers,

And your fun and honor.

Vek-wolfhound rushes onto my shoulders.

But I am not a wolf by blood,

You better stuff me like a hat into your sleeve

The hot fur coat of the Siberian steppes Lavrov A.V. Mandelstam in the 1930s: Life and literary activity. M., 1995 P.50.

The poet sincerely tried to merge with the times, to fit into the new reality, but he constantly felt its hostility. Over time, this discord became more and more noticeable, and then deadly.

My age, my beast, who can

Look into your pupils

And with his blood he will glue

Two centuries of vertebrae.

In life, Mandelstam was not a fighter or fighter; he was aware of doubts and fear, but in poetry he was an invincible hero, overcoming all difficulties.

Chur! Don't ask, don't complain!

Tsits! Don't whine! Is it for this reason that commoners

The dry boots trampled, so that I would now betray them?

We will die like foot soldiers.

But we will not glorify either robbery, day labor, or lies!

Critics accused Mandelstam of being out of touch with life and its problems, but he was very specific, and this was the worst thing for the authorities. This is how he wrote about the repressions of the 30s:

Help me, Lord, to get through this night:

I'm afraid for my life - for your slave,

Living in St. Petersburg is like sleeping in a coffin Lavrov A.V. Mandelstam in the 1930s: Life and literary activity. M., 1995 - P.65.

“Poems should be civil,” the poet believed. His poem “We live without feeling the country beneath us...” was tantamount to suicide, because about the “earthly god” he wrote:

His thick fingers are like worms, fat

And the words, like pound weights, are true.

The cockroaches are laughing,

And his boots shine.

They could not forgive the poet for this, the authorities destroyed him, but poetry remained, survived and now tells the truth about its creator.

Where there is more sky for me - there I am ready to wander,

And clear melancholy does not let me go

From the still young Voronezh hills

Towards all-human things - becoming clearer in Tuscany Lavrov A.V. Mandelstam in the 1930s: Life and literary activity. M., 1995 - P.69.

1.2 The poet's civil indignation

Since the early 1930s, Mandelstam’s poetry has been accumulating the energy of challenge and “high” civil indignation, dating back to the ancient Roman poet Juvenal: Human pitiful charred mouth / Indignant and saying “no”. This is how a masterpiece of civil lyricism is born - For the explosive valor of the coming centuries.... (1931, 1935).

Meanwhile, the poet increasingly feels like a hunted animal and, finally, decides to take a civic action: in November 1933 he writes poems against Stalin. We live without feeling the country beneath us... The poems quickly gained fame, were distributed in lists, and were learned by heart. Mandelstam's fate was sealed: May 13, 1934, followed by arrest. However, the sentence turned out to be relatively lenient. Instead of execution or at least a camp - deportation to Cherdyn and quick permission to move to Voronezh.

Here Mandelstam experiences the last, very bright flowering of his poetic genius (Three Voronezh Notebooks (1935-1937)). The crown of “Voronezh lyrics” - Poems about the unknown soldier (1937). The poet penetrates into the new “reality” - the ahistorical and despiritualized continent of time. Here it is fulfilled by the deep will to “be like everyone else”, “by choice of personal conscience” to live and die with the “crowd” and “herd” of millions “killed cheaply”, to dissolve in the endless outer space of the universe and the human mass filling it - and thereby win bad time. At the same time, Mandelstam’s late poetics becomes even more “closed,” “dark,” multi-layered, complicated by various subtextual levels. This is the poetics of “omitted links”, when in order to restore the plot of the poem it is necessary to restore the intermediary image. The intermediary image may be hidden in a hidden and processed quotation, an encrypted subtext that is very difficult for an unprepared reader to recover. But it can also be hidden in the purely individual irrational logic of the author’s thinking, which breaks open the ready-made word and extracts its hidden semantic depths, often archaic, dating back to ancient mythological models.

And yet the darkness can unexpectedly lighten up: the Voronezh land, the land of exile, is perceived as a chaste miracle of the Russian landscape. The harsh and pure landscape serves as the backdrop for the triumphant theme of human dignity, not subject to the blows of fate: Unhappy is the one whom, like his shadow, / Fears the barking and the wind mows down, / And the poor one is the one who himself is half-dead, / Begs alms from the shadow.

Rejecting the fate of the “shadow”, but still feeling like a “shadow”, the poet goes through the last temptation - to ask for alms from the one on whom his “return to life” depends. Thus, at the beginning of 1937, Ode to Stalin appeared - a brilliantly compiled catalog of cliched praises to the “leader”. However, Oda did not save Mandelstam. Its hero - cunning and vindictive - could start a crafty game with his offenders and, for example, give life and even hope - as happened with Mandelstam, who in May 1937 served his appointed term in Voronezh exile and returned to Moscow. But Stalin could not forgive and forget the insult: in May 1938 Mandelstam was arrested again (formally, according to a letter to People’s Commissar Yezhov Secretary General Union of Soviet Writers V.P. Stavsky). The poet is sent along a convoy to the Far East.

On December 27, 1938, in the Second River transit camp near Vladivostok, Mandelstam, driven to the brink of madness, dies. According to some prisoners - on a trash heap.

Legacy of O.E. Mandelstam, saved from destruction by his widow, from the early 1960s began to actively enter the cultural life of the intelligentsia of the “Thaw” era. Soon the poet's name becomes a password for those who preserved or tried to restore the memory of Russian culture, and it was perceived as a sign of not only artistic, but also moral values.

The words of the famous literary critic Yu.I. Levin, a representative of the generation that “discovered” Mandelstam, are indicative: “Mandelshtam is a call for the unity of life and culture, for such a deep and serious... attitude towards culture, which our century is apparently not yet capable of rise... Mandelstam - ...an intermediate link, a harbinger, a formula for the transition from our modernity to what “does not exist yet,” but what “should be.” Mandelstam must “change something in the structure and composition” of not only Russian poetry, but also world culture.”

2. PROBLEM OF “ARTIST AND AUTHORITY”

2.1 Mandelstam's lyrics in the 30s

In the poems of the 30s, the poet’s conflict with his time, with the spirit of the totalitarian regime, is revealed with all its harshness and tragedy. The poem “Leningrad” (1930) continues the theme of St. Petersburg, the city-symbol of a dying civilization. The exciting lyricism of the poet’s meeting with his hometown (“I returned to my city, familiar to tears, / To the veins, to the swollen glands of children ...”) is combined with a tragic feeling of pain from the death of friends, a premonition of his own death, the expectation of arrest (“Petersburg ! I don’t want to die yet: / You have my telephone numbers. / Petersburg! I still have addresses, / At which I will find the voices of the dead...") - and irony: “And all night long I wait for dear guests, / Shevel shackles of door chains.”

In the poems of this time (the first half of the 30s), the motives of outcastia, fear, impasse - the feeling that there is “nowhere to run” reach tragic tension: (“You and I will sit in the kitchen...” (1931), “Help, Lord, live this night...” (1931), “The eyelashes prickle. A tear has stuck in my chest...” (1931), etc. A line from the last poem: “It’s stuffy - and yet I want to live until I die” - - accurately captures the contradictory state of the poet, his lyrical hero.

Angry rejection of the atmosphere of the entire life of society breaks out in the poems of the “Wolf Cycle”. This is how Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam conventionally called a number of the poet’s poems, the core of which is the poem “For the explosive valor of the coming centuries...” (1931, 1935) with the image of a “wolfhound” in the center. This cycle includes poems - “No, I can’t hide from the great storm...”, “It’s not true”, “Once upon a time Alexander Hertsevich...”, “I drink to military asters...”, “No, not a migraine , - but give me a menthol pencil...", "Save my speech forever..." (all - 1931).

The poem “For the explosive valor of the coming centuries...” is built on the dissonance of a singing, romance rhythm and a rigid figurative structure - “bones in a wheel”, “age-wolfhound”, “coward” and “flimsy mud”. This is an image of that unbearable existence that the lyrical hero is ready to exchange for “Siberia”: “You better stuff me like a hat into the sleeve / of the hot fur coat of the Siberian steppes...” This is how the poet prophesies his future fate, calling upon himself (poetically and realistically) Siberian exile. The poet dreams of Siberia as a world where pristine natural harmony has been preserved, where “blue arctic foxes” shine in “primordial beauty” and “the pine tree reaches the star.” In this figurative connection - “pine trees... to the stars” - as a carrier of the main poetic meaning one can see not only the image of the mighty Siberian nature, but also the image of the harmony of the earth (roots) and the sky (stars), the poet’s dream of the desired harmony existence, most likely attributed to the “coming centuries.”

In 1933 http://media.utmn.ru/library_view_book.php?chapter_num=8&bid=1036 - i1148#i1148 Mandelstam writes (and reads in a small circle) a poem-pamphlet about Stalin - “We live without feeling the country beneath us...”, which became the reason for the arrest (1934) and the poet’s first exile. The poem gives a devastatingly sarcastic portrait of a “Kremlin highlander”, partly in the spirit of grotesque folklore images of filthy idols - with “cockroach eyes”, words - “pound weights”, fat fingers “like worms” - partly in the spirit of thieves, thieves' songs:

He's 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 a broad Ossetian chest.

The original axis of the poem is We and He. We are the life of the whole country, “our speeches”, our fears, our troubles:

There they will remember the Kremlin highlander N.Ya. Mandelstam. Memories. Second book. M., 2000 - P.75.

This is life outside of history: “we live... without feeling the country”, outside of free communication - life without words (“our speeches... are not heard”) - not life, but half-existence (the image of a “half-talker” is expressive here) The images of this poem echo the nightmarish, grotesque world that appears as if in delirium from a terrible fairy tale in the poem “Untruth”:

I enter with a smoking ray

To the six-fingered lie in the hut:

- Let me look at you,

After all, I should lie in a pine coffin.

In Mandelstam's lyrics of the early 30s, as well as in his work as a whole, a significant place belongs to poetry about poetry - these are two poems entitled “Ariost”, “Poems about Russian Poetry”, addressed to poets of three centuries: Derzhavin, the poet so dear to the heart of Mandelstam, the “Smart and Naive” of the 18th century, Yazykov and his contemporary - S.A. Klychkov (“I fell in love with a beautiful forest...”), as well as poems in memory of A. Bely (“Blue eyes and hot frontal bone...") and etc.

Let us highlight from this series the poem “Batyushkov” (1932). The imagery of the poem is associated with the situation of an imaginary meeting of the lyrical hero with a poet of the past, presented as a real meeting with a St. Petersburg friend on the streets of the city. A living form appears before us Batyushkova, “revelers with a magic cane”, with expressive portrait details (cold hand, light glove, rose), and the ensuing dialogue between poet and poet. This is a dialogue-recognition, even “grandeur”:

He chuckled. I said: thank you.

And out of embarrassment I couldn’t find the words:

- No one has bends in these sounds...

- And never - this talk of the shafts...

Our torment and our wealth,

Tongue-tied, he brought with him -

The noise of poetry and the bell of brotherhood

And a harmonic shower of tears Mandelstam N.Ya. Memories. Second book. M., 2000 - С,.87.

In the dialogue, Mandelstam wonderfully conveys the naturalness of oral, colloquial speech, with its confusion and fragmentation (for example, three breaks in one line: “He grinned. I said: thank you”). The direct speech of the lyrical “I” is also intermittent (in the third stanza): “No one has bends in these sounds...”, etc. Wonderful here and sound game, which in Mandelstam’s poetics of this time acquires an unusually significant role. The noise of poetry, poetic “tongue-tiedness” (see the fourth and fifth stanzas) is emphasized by the saturation of the text with whistling and hissing sounds with - z, sh - zh, and the harmony of the verse - with singing consonants, sonorous in combination with vowels -olo, - -oli, -le, -ate (bell, shed of tears, magnificence, by chance). Ending of the poem:

Eternal dreams are like blood samples,

Pour from glass to glass...

Overflow, overflow - in these words, consonant with each other, there is hidden an image-symbol of the “conversion” of things and phenomena into each other, programmatic for Mandelstam of this period. By pairing opposites, the poet tends to present them not simply in oppositions, confrontations, but in the process of transition, transformation into each other - in “overflows.” In “A Conversation on Dante” he wrote: “Imaginative thinking in Dante, as in all true poetry, is carried out using the property of poetic matter, which I propose to call convertibility or reversibility. The development of an image can only conditionally be called development.”

2.2 Mandelstam - person O century 30s

Poems about poets and poetry were important for Mandelstam personally, subjectively: after all, poetry in his understanding is “the consciousness of one’s rightness,” therefore poems about poets of different times were supposed to strengthen Mandelstam in such a consciousness, to support the artist in his heroic stoicism, which became his civic , personal position.

In 1934, the poet was arrested and exiled to Cherdyn, in the Urals, and then (through the efforts of N. Bukharin) transferred to Voronezh. The position of stoicism is clearly, although inconsistently, expressed in many of his Voronezh poems. “I must live, although I have died twice...” - this is how one of them begins. After the shock of arrest and the ensuing nervous illness, the poet’s return to life and creativity stems from a new encounter with Art. Impressions from the violinist’s concert Galina Barinova, he writes his first Voronezh poem - “For Paganini the long-fingered...” (April-June 1935).

From the image of a young, temperamental violinist to the diverse world of music, art and to one’s own inner self in need of spiritual support (“Comfort me with your playing...”, “Comfort me with Roan Chopin...”) - this is how the figurative moves row in a poem. The outline of the heroine is sketched using Mandelstam’s favorite trinity of “names”: “Girl, upstart, proud woman” (remember a similar technique: “Swallow, girlfriend, Antigone” or “time, lungwort, mint”, etc.), and this is a trinity of nouns, in contrast to the poetic practice of symbolists, for example, Balmont, who most often resorted to a trinity of definitions and adjectives. Then the picture and its space in the poem are expanded by comparing the violinist’s playing, her “sound” with the powerful Siberian nature: “Whose sound is wide as the Yenisei.”

Through the images of music that awakens the soul, the lyrical “I” of the poem breaks into the boundless world - the world not only of culture, but also of different forms of existence: “roan” life, romantic, “serious”, carnival, festive and tragic:

Comfort me with roan Chopin,

Serious Brahms, no, wait:

Paris powerfully wild,

A floury and sweaty carnival

Or the glory of young Vienna... Mandelstam N.Ya. Memories. Second book. M., 2000 - P. 97

This is a provocative apotheosis of the versatility of life - contrary to the prevailing spirit of unification in reality. The image of Vienna entails an association with “Danube fireworks”, horse races and waltzes:

“And a waltz from the coffin to the cradle / Overflowing like hops.” The image of such a “hop”, which is caused by the feeling of life mixed with death, is the key image-meaning of the poem, and it does not exclude the hope for the regenerating movement of life - “from the coffin to the cradle.”

The structure of poems at this time is primarily tuned to the wave of “hearing”, “dream” or “delirium” - those zones of feelings and subconscious that are “fused”, sensitive and incapable of lying. “The dream was more than hearing, the hearing was older than the dream - merged, a little ...” - this is a line from the poem “The Day Stood About Five Heads ...” (1935), which arose from the poet’s memories of how he was taken under escort to the Urals. The poem consists of impressions flickering like pictures in a carriage window, like visions, where an ancient fairy tale (“the day of the five heads”) and wild strangeness, absurdity coexist today: “Dry mint Russian fairy tale, wooden spoon, ay! / Where are you, three nice guys from the iron gates of the GPU?”, the thought of Pushkin and the “Pushkin scholars” with revolvers and the outlines of the Urals, by association evoking a still from the movie: “Speaking Chapaev from the picture was galloping sound...”

And behind all this are the poet’s painful efforts to understand and accept what is happening around him, the life of the country in which millions live. In the Voronezh poems, two trends are discernible, two poles of Mandelstam’s mentality: the indignation of a person who has rejected the nightmare of reality with its violence, lack of freedom and lies (“Depriving me of the seas, running and scattering...”, “Where should I go this January... ", "Like the chiaroscuro martyr Rembrandt...", "Inside the mountain the idol is inactive...", etc.) and an attempt at reconciliation with the regime ("Stanzas", "Ode" [to Stalin], "If only our enemies had taken me. ..”, “Not a white mealy butterfly...”; Mandelstam himself called the last poem “sycophantic poems”).

“I must live, breathe and grow more...” - this is the imperative Mandelstam addresses to himself in “Stanzas” (1935). The title “Stanzas” apparently conceals the poet’s attempt at self-justification by reference to Pushkin’s “Stanzas,” which, as is known, were an expression of Pushkin’s compromise with the authorities, with the tsar.

The poem, known under the code name “Ode to Stalin” or simply “Ode” (“If only I took coal for the highest praise...” and the variant: “The mounds of people’s heads go into the distance...”, 1937), according to the memoirs of N. I. Mandelstam, were a failed “attempt at self-violence,” and in the opinion of A.S. Kushner - “evidence of Mandelstam’s hesitations and doubts” as a man of the 30s.

2.3 Mandelstam's poems - monuments of time

All of Mandelstam’s poems will remain monuments of time, but the pure gold of poetry are those where “consciousness does not cheat” and the voice of unalloyed truth is clearly heard. Among the latter, we must mention, first of all, “Poems about the Unknown Soldier” (March 1937). These verses represent, as it were, a conversation with all of humanity, a reflection on “what will happen now and then,” when the earth and sky, the globe and the universe are called as witnesses: “Let this air be a witness...” “Hear, stepmother star camp, / Night, what will happen now and then? The poet calls the great shadows of the past - Don Quixote, Shakespeare, Lermontov and the brave Schweik - as defenders of the truth, because we are talking about the death of humanity and the voices of the massacres of past history come to life - the Battle of the Peoples of Leipzig, Waterloo, “The Arabian Mess, Krosheva”.

In the image of “moving grapes” carrying death “airships” (zeppelins), the threat of war engulfing the whole world looms. And this is a war that has already happened - with “millions killed cheaply”, “a sky of large wholesale deaths” - and which will still be. The central part of the poem is a kind of grotesque “parade of cripples” (“The infantry dies well ...”):

And knocks on the outskirts of the century

A family of wooden crutches, --

Hey, fellowship, globe!

This part is followed by a passionate anti-war invective, which begins with the question: “Is this why the skull should develop / Full of forehead from temple to temple...?” - and ends with the fact that the lyrical “I” is directly involved in what is happening, in the tragedy of the “unreliable” century, with its “half-faint existence”:

And overstocking my consciousness

Half-faint existence,

Am I drinking this brew without a choice?

Do I eat my head under fire?

Feeling like an unknown soldier, the lyrical hero identifies himself with the victims of the century and conjures humanity against repetitions of such tragic madness in the future.

The Voronezh cycle is completed (in a two-volume edition of 1990, which is quite logical) with poems about love addressed to N. Shtempel. According to her testimony, Mandelstam said, giving her these two poems: “These are love lyrics... This is the best thing I wrote... When I die, send them to the Pushkin House.” Mandelstam's love lyrics are not very large in volume. This is Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails...” (from “Stone”), poems addressed to M. Tsvetaeva - “On the sledges laid with my solo...” (1916) and “In the discordance of the girls’ choir...” (1916), to O.A. Waxel - “Life fell like lightning...” and “From the camp of a dark street...” (1925), to Maria Petrov - “Master of guilty glances...” and “Your narrow shoulders blush under the lashes.. .” (1934) and, finally, poems to N. Stempel. Here is an excerpt from the poem to it:

There are women native to the damp earth,

And every step they take is a loud sob,

Accompany the resurrected and for the first time

Greeting the dead is their calling.

And it’s criminal to demand affection from them,

And N.Ya. Mandelstam cannot bear to part with them. Memories. Second book. M., 2000 - P. 122.

Both poems are in the spirit of the broadest in meaning figurative categories, such as “resurrected” and “survived”, “angel” and “grave worm”, “flowers are immortal”, “the sky is whole” and “the foremother of the tomb vault”, - and in the tone of odic “grandeur”. But the image of a woman here is not only the image of a high-spirited person whose calling is in divine compassion and preservation of purity. It also embodies an indissoluble connection with the earth. In conveying this connection, the poet plays on the originality of the limping gait of a sweet woman who seeks to overcome the constraint of freedom: “Involuntarily falling towards the empty ground, / With an uneven sweet gait / She walks - a little ahead ...” The image of the heroine, as usual in Mandelstam, woven from reflections of different natural principles and forces - “damp earth” and the immortal spirit: “Today is an angel, tomorrow is a grave worm, / And the day after tomorrow is only an outline...” As a result, the poem appears in the image of love as hope for an inaccessible harmony to the earth, as a sign of life that gave “only a promise”:

What was once a step will become inaccessible...

Flowers are immortal, the sky is whole,

And all that will happen is just a promise.

In the poems that can conventionally be called love (listed above), the poet, an opponent of “direct answers,” dispenses with images of immediate feelings, love confessions, and even words about love. This is generally the nature of Mandelstam’s anti-confessional lyricism. In his poems he paints not just a portrait of a woman or the place and time of a meeting with her, but with a whimsical play of associations and reminiscences (for example: Moscow - Italian cathedrals - Florence - fleur - flower - Tsvetaeva) creates the impression of them - a portrait and the chronotope - dizzying depth, bewitching us with a feeling of the incomprehensible and mysterious charm of femininity (“sweet gait”), love and life-“promise”.

The genre of Mandelstam's poems to Shtempel is close to the ode. What they have in common with the ode is the sublimity of vocabulary and tone, the spirit of “grandeur” and the monumental simplicity of the figurative structure itself. Mandelstam’s main and favorite genres are odes (“The Slate Ode,” “The Finder of the Horseshoe,” “Poems about the Unknown Soldier,” etc.) and elegies (poems in the collection “Tristia”). In his odes, Mandelstam, of course, deviates from the canonical paradigm, significantly modifying and enriching it. Odic solemnity, often deliberately not sustained, in the spirit of mocking modernity is interrupted by the introduction of reduced colloquial and ironic verbal turns and intonations into the text.

The genre framework of these odes, as befits an ode, is a portrait - a portrait of the Other, the interlocutor whom Mandelstam finds in the past or expects in the future. Mandelstam’s poems about poets and poems about love can be attributed to this genre type; his poems about cities also gravitate towards it - “Feodosia”, “Rome”, “Paris”, “Life of Venice”, a cycle of poems about Armenia, etc.

In May 1938, Mandelstam was overtaken by a second arrest (in the Samatikha sanatorium, near Shatura), which was followed by exile to Siberia, with a sentence of five years. On December 27, 1938, Mandelstam died in a hospital in a transit camp near Vladivostok (on the Second River).

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.”

In Mandelstam's poems, a solemn, slightly archaic, full-fledged word sounds. This is a poet of great visual precision; his verse is short, distinct and clear, exquisite in rhythm; he is very expressive and beautiful in sound. Saturated with literary and historical associations, strict in architectonics, it requires close and attentive reading.

Mandelstam was one of the first to write poetry 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 wrote anti-Stalin poems and read them mainly to his friends - poets, writers, who, upon hearing them, were horrified and said: “I didn’t hear that, you didn’t read that to me...”

We live without feeling the country beneath us,

Our speeches are not heard ten steps away,

And where is enough for half a conversation,

The Kremlin highlander will be remembered there.

On the night of May 13-14, 1934, Mandelstam was arrested. He was seriously threatened with execution. But his friends and wife stood up for him. This played a role; he was sent to Voronezh. After the end of their three-year exile, the Mandelstams returned to Moscow.

On May 2, 1938, Mandelstam was again arrested and sentenced to five years in forced labor camps on charges of counter-revolutionary activities. Then Taganka, Butyrka, following the stage to Vladivostok. From there is the only letter sent in October 1938.

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...

It seems that a man walking on water would inspire us with less awe. It is not clear what miracles we still need, if every year in May lilacs bloom in a vacant lot, 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” about that only fools and animals are unhappy in this world if we have Mandelstam’s Voronezh poems at our fingertips. 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.

“Life and death” he called the butterfly. He could say the same about his soul. “Sighted fingers, shame and the convex joy of recognition” guided his pen. Even to depict death, Mandelstam uses the most vivid and tangible details:

Lying for the tender, freshly removed mask,

For plaster fingers that do not hold a pen,

For enlarged lips, for strengthened caress

Coarse-grained peace and goodness...

How is love for the depicted object expressed? In affectionate, selfless attention to him. “The water on the pins and the air are softer than the frog skin of the balloons.” Such close attention, ready to change place with the thing depicted, to get into its “skin”, to feel for it, leads and warms this poetry, makes it possible to feel the ins and outs of the world and our consciousness.

“We sleep standing up in the thick night under a warm sheep’s hat...”, “Quietly ironing the wool and stirring the straw, like an apple tree in winter, starving in the matting,” “The morning clarinet chills my ear,” “As if I were sagging on my own eyelashes.. "

Of course, this ability to “dig into life” is remarkably combined with high intellectualism in Mandelstam, but he has nothing to do with abstractions or rationality; he is immersed in life, nature, history, culture, connected with the world and instantly responds to its call.

Poetry inspires happiness and courage, it is our ally in the fight against the “spirit of despondency.”

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 become engorged with blood,

And it sounds in whispers through the rows:

I was born in ninety-four,

I was born in ninety-two...

And clutching the worn-out fist

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. Struve N. Osip Mandelstam. Tomsk, 1992 - P.90

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.