The poet Osip Emilievich Mandelstam today occupies a leading place among the greatest representatives of Russian Parnassus. However, the significant role of Mandelstam’s work in the history of Russian literature is not always adequately presented in high school lessons. Perhaps because the force of inertia in teaching literature at school is great and the echoes of Soviet literary criticism are still alive; perhaps the poet’s “dark” style causes distrust; it seems difficult to imagine the panorama of his poetic universe.
“I was born from the second to the third / January in ninety-one / An unreliable year - and the centuries / Surround me with fire...” According to the new style, Mandelstam was born on January 15, 1891 and died in 1938 in a transit camp near Vladivostok.
The poet's early childhood was spent in Warsaw. His father, a merchant of the first guild, was a glover; and the image of the house as a dark, cramped hole, saturated with the smell of tanned leather, will become the first stone in the foundation of Mandelstam’s work.
In 1894 the family moved to Pavlovsk, and in 1897 to St. Petersburg. The future poet is 7 years old, and he is amazed by the architecture of St. Petersburg and the melody of Russian speech. Even then, perhaps, a dream of the harmony of the world is born, and it must be felt and conveyed: “Out of unkind heaviness, I will one day create something beautiful...”
Boy, Mandelstam loves music very much, listens to Tchaikovsky and Rubinstein in Pavlovsk: “At that time I fell in love with Tchaikovsky with painful nervous tension... I caught Tchaikovsky’s wide, smooth, purely violin parts from behind the thorny fence and more than once tore my dress and scratched my hands, making his way for free to the shell of the orchestra” (“The Noise of Time”, 1925).
From his mother, a wonderful pianist, the poet inherited a sense of inner harmony. Over time, the poet will always build his relationship with life according to his own inner tuning fork of truth.
Now we have access to an audio recording of several poems read by the author. Contemporaries were amazed at how he sang, reciting poetry, drawing his listeners along with him. Mandelstam's poems should be perceived the way you listen to classical music: immersing yourself, following it.
Currently, more than 50 of Mandelstam's poems have been set to music. Songs based on the poet's poems are performed by T. Gverdtsiteli, A. Lugacheva, A. Buynov, A. Kortnev, I. Churikova, Zh. Bichevskaya and others. Based on his works, compositions for choral and vocal singing accompanied by violin, flute, bassoon, cellos, harps, etc. Mandelstam's poems set to music are heard in the films "Moscow Saga" and "The Man in My Head."
Mandelstam studied at the Tenishevsky School, a secondary educational institution. In the last years of his studies at the school, Mandelstam gave inspired speeches to workers from the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Concerned about the future fate of their son, his parents send him to study abroad...
In 1907-1908, Mandelstam studied at the Sorbonne University, where he listened, in particular, to lectures by A. Bergson, a French philosopher who had a significant influence on him. Henri Bergson imagined life as a cosmic “vital impulse”, a flow.
“Reality is continuous growth, endlessly ongoing creativity.” The intellect (mind), according to the philosopher, is capable of cognizing only the external, superficial essence of phenomena; intuition penetrates into the depths.
Bergson also influenced the poet's understanding of time. For Mandelstam, time is inextricably linked with the feeling of movement, with the spiritual growth and improvement of a person.
In 1909, Mandelstam spent two semesters at the University of Heidelberg, studying Romance languages and philosophy: “Merezhkovsky, while passing through Heidelberg, did not want to listen to a single line of my poetry,” he writes to Voloshin. In 1910, the poet returned to Russia. In the same 1910, the first publication of his poems took place in N. Gumilyov’s magazine “Apollo”.
O. Mandelstam was baptized in July 1911 in the city of Vyborg out of inner conviction. This spiritual act was important for Mandelstam as a way of entering European culture.
Osip Emilievich was distinguished by an amazing reluctance to rationally organize his life. He did not coordinate his actions with the possibility of personal gain.
For him, the only measure of what was due and what was not due in the world was what Akhmatova called the feeling of “deep inner rightness.” So, for example, having written in 1933 the suicidal, as Pasternak put it, poems “We live without feeling the country beneath us...”, the poet I read them to friends and acquaintances. “The first listeners of these poems were horrified and begged O.M. forget them."
The poet could not help but understand what was happening. This means that it was more important for him to save his own life, so that the word would be heard, so that the truth would break the lie. And when, during a time of famine, which lasted most of his life, since the Soviet state did not honor the poet with a salary, Mandelstam suddenly received a certain amount, he, without saving in reserve, bought chocolates and all sorts of things and... treated his friends and neighbor’s children, rejoicing at their joy .
A child's mouth chews its chaff,
Smiling, chewing
I'll throw my head back like a dandy
And I will see the goldfinch.
The leading theme of Mandelstam's poetry is the experience of building personality. “Any moment of growth has its own spiritual meaning; a personality only has the fullness of existence when it expands at each stage, exhausting all the possibilities that age gives,” wrote the poet’s wife, N.Ya. Mandelstam.
Each book of poetry by a poet has a leading thought, its own poetic ray. “Early poems (“Stone”) - youthful anxiety in search of a place in life; “Tristia” – coming of age and a premonition of disaster, a dying culture and the search for salvation; book 1921-1925 - an alien world; “New Poems” - an affirmation of the intrinsic value of life, detachment in a world where they have abandoned the past and all the values accumulated over the centuries, a new misunderstanding of one’s loneliness as a confrontation with evil forces that have abandoned the past, the values accumulated over the centuries “Voronezh Poems” - life is accepted as it is, in all its vanity and charm... “Stone” (1908-1915)
Mandelstam visited Vyacheslav Ivanov’s “tower” several times, but was not a symbolist. The mysterious reticence of his early poems is an expression of the entry into life of a young man full of doubts: “Am I really real / and will death really come?” S. Averintsev writes
“It is very difficult to find anywhere else in world poetry a combination of the immature psychology of a youth, almost a teenager, with such perfect maturity of intellectual observation and poetic description of this particular psychology:
From the pool of evil and viscous
I grew up like a reed, rustling, -
And passionately, and languidly, and affectionately
Breathing the forbidden life.
and niknu, unnoticed by anyone,
To a cold and marshy shelter,
Greeted with a rustle of welcome
Short autumn minutes.
I am happy with the cruel insult,
And in life like a dream,
I secretly envy everyone
And secretly in love with everyone.
This is not decadence - all boys at all times have felt, feel and will feel something similar. The pain of adaptation to the life of adults, and most importantly - the especially acutely felt intermittency of mental life, the unbalanced changes between delight and despondency, between sensuality and disgust, between the craving for the not yet found “my you” and strange coldness - all this for the boy is not a disease, but the norm, but is perceived as a disease and therefore kept silent.”
The lyrical hero of Mandelstam’s first poetry collection “Stone” enters the world, his task is to understand himself... The leitmotif of the collection is listening to oneself. "Who am I?" - the main issue of adolescence. I have been given a body - what should I do with it, So one and so mine?
The poet psychologically accurately conveys the torment of developing self-awareness:
...It will be my turn-
I can feel the wingspan.
Yes - but where will it go?
Thoughts are a living arrow?
During this period, feelings become especially acute. Alien invasions sometimes cause sharp rejection:
So she's real
Connection with the mysterious world!
What aching melancholy,
What a disaster!
“The world of a teenager is full of ideal moods that take him beyond the boundaries of everyday life and real relationships with other people”:
I hate the light
Monotonous stars.
Hello, my old delirium -
Lancet towers rise!
In the first part of "Stone" silence reigns. In the second, sounds and noises appear and the process of “speaking” of the lyrical hero begins. The surrounding world, emerging through the “foggy veil” of the hero’s perception (many epithets with the meaning “gray, foggy”), turns out to be bright and saturated with living colors. The range of phenomena falling within the scope of the author’s attention is becoming wider and wider.
The poet strives to plow through all cultural layers, eras, to bring together the world of ancient, European and Russian culture in order to find the supporting axis on which human life rests. The highest commandment of Acmeism, which formed the basis of Mandelstam’s poetry, is this: “Love the existence of a thing more than the thing itself, and your existence more than yourself.”
... Few live for eternity,
But if you are concerned about the moment -
Your lot is terrible and your house is fragile!
"Tristia" (1916-1920)
In the last poems of “Stone” (1913-1915) and in the collection “Tristia” (1916-1920), Mandelstam realizes the goal of entering European culture as an equal, incorporating it and translating it into poetry. In order to preserve forever the best that was in her.
To match and preserve times, conveying their internal connection, harmony and greatness, was the meaning and purpose of the poet’s life. K. Mochulsky, who helped Mandelstam prepare for the Greek language exam, recalls: “He came to class monstrously late, completely shocked by the secrets of Greek grammar that were revealed to him. He waved his arms, ran around the room and chanted declensions and conjugations. Reading Homer turned into a fabulous event; adverbs, enclitics, pronouns haunted him in his dreams, and he entered into mysterious personal relationships with them.
He turned grammar into poetry and argued that Homer is the more ugly, the more beautiful. I was very afraid that he would fail the exam, but by some miracle he passed the test. Mandelstam did not learn Greek, but he guessed it. Subsequently, he wrote brilliant poems about the Golden Fleece and the wanderings of Odysseus:
And leaving the ship, having worked hard
There is a canvas in the seas,
Odysseus returned, space
and full of time.
There is more “Hellenism” in these two lines than in the entire “ancient” poetry of the learned Vyacheslav Ivanov.”
Mandelstam got used to every cultural era with which he came into contact. He learned Italian so he could read Dante in the original and understand the depths of his works.
The collection “Tristia” is an insight into life through love for a woman, through reflections on life and death, through religion and creativity, through history and modernity.
The main color epithets of the book are gold and black. For Mandelstam, gold is the color of the goodness of peace, unity and integrity. “Golden” is often round: a golden ball, a golden sun, a golden belly of a turtle - a lyre.) Black is the color of death and decay, chaos. In general, the color palette of “Tristia” is the richest of all Mandelstam’s poetry collections. Here you can also find colors such as blue, white, transparent (crystal), green (emerald), yellow, crimson, orange (amber, rusty, copper), red, crimson, cherry, gray, brown. Mandelstam expands the range of good and evil to its utmost limits.
"Poems 1921-1925"
The works in this collection convey the attitude of a thirty-year-old man, ready to embody himself in the world. At this age, a person understands that happiness is the work of his own hands, and it gives him joy to bring benefit to the world. Mandelstam feels full of creative strength, and in Russia there is an era of red terror and famine.
How did Mandelstam feel about the revolution? Like a troubled time in the history of Russia. Osip Emilievich did not believe in universal rapid happiness, did not consider freedom a gift. The poem “Twilight of Freedom” is dedicated to the events of 1918, where “swallows were tied up in the fighting regions - and now / The sun is not visible...”.
Twilight is the harbinger of night. Although the poet did not fully imagine the future, he prophesied the decline of freedom: whoever has a heart must hear the time when your ship is sinking.
In 1921, N. Gumilyov was shot, and in the same year, A. Blok died at the age of 40. The terrible famine in the Volga region of 1921-1922 would put an end to S. Yesenin’s relations with the Soviet regime, and in 1925 the “last poet of the village” would no longer exist.
You can't breathe, and the firmament is infested with worms,
And not a single star says...
Mandelstam has no connections with this new, wild world. After emigration, arrests and executions, the poet finds himself in front of a different audience - the proletarian masses:
Unharnessed huge cart
It sticks out across the universe,
Hayloft ancient chaos
It will tickle, it will irritate.
We rustle not with our scales,
We sing against the grain of the world.
We build the lyre as if we are in a hurry
Overgrown with shaggy fleece.
"What to talk about? What to sing about? - the main theme of this period. To give the world the strength of your soul, you need to know: what you give is in demand. However, the cultural and spiritual values of the past are not accepted by the bulk of citizens of the young Soviet republic.
And the poet does not find in the surrounding reality the idea that gives birth to the song. History was for the poet a treasury of spiritual values, promising inexhaustible opportunities for internal growth, and modernity answered his devoted son with an animal roar:
My age, my beast, who can
Look into your pupils
And with his blood he will glue
Two centuries of vertebrae?
The builder's blood gushes
Throat from earthly things,
The backbone only trembles
On the threshold of new days...
Century, 1922
In time and space, where there is no place for creativity, the poet suffocates:
Time cuts me off like a coin
And I really miss myself.
This self-recognition sounds at a time in life when a person is especially keenly aware of his creative capabilities. “I miss myself!” — and not because I didn’t work hard to find myself.
But time suddenly turned back: a huge, clumsy, creaky turn of the steering wheel... And I would be glad, but I can’t give myself to you, because you... won’t take it.”
Who am I? Not a straight mason,
Not a roofer, not a shipbuilder.
I am a double-dealer, with a double soul.
I am a friend of the night, I am a skirmisher of the day.
“The twenties were perhaps the most difficult time in O. Mandelstam’s life,” writes N.Ya. Mandelstam, the poet’s wife. Never before or subsequently, although life later became much more terrible, did Mandelstam speak with such bitterness about his position in the world.
In his early poems, full of youthful melancholy and longing, the anticipation of future victory and the consciousness of his own strength never left him: “I feel the span of the wing,” and in the twenties he talked about illness, insufficiency, and ultimately inferiority. From the poems it is clear where he saw his inadequacy and illness: this is how the first doubts in the revolution were perceived: “who else will you kill, who else will you glorify, what lie will you invent?”
The poet in modern reality turns out to be a traitor... to the interests of the working class. Emigrate - this option is not considered. To live in Russia, with his people - Mandelstam, without hesitation, makes this choice, just like his friend and comrade-in-arms A. Akhmatova. This means that we will have to find a new language to express the inner idea, learn to speak the language of inarticulate elemental forces:
Mandelstam is trying to find what unites him with today’s owners of streets and squares, to break through to their soul through the non-social, human, close to everyone.
He writes a poem about the French Revolution...
The language of a cobblestone is clearer to me than a dove,
Here the stones are doves, the houses are like dovecotes,
And the story of horseshoes flows like a bright stream
Along the sonorous pavements of the great-grandmothers of cities.
There are crowds of children here - events of beggars,
Frightened flocks of Parisian sparrows -
They quickly pecked at grains of lead crumbs -
The Phrygian grandmother scattered peas,
And a wicker basket lives in my memory,
And a forgotten currant floats in the air,
And cramped houses - a row of milk teeth
On the gums of old people they stand like twins.
Here months were given nicknames, like kittens,
And milk and blood were given to gentle lion cubs;
And when they grow up, maybe two years
A big head rested on his shoulders!
The big heads there raised their hands
And they played with an oath in the sand like an apple.
It's hard for me to say: I didn't see anything,
But I’ll still say - I remember one,
He raised his paw like a fiery rose,
And, like a child, he showed everyone the splinter.
They didn’t listen to him: the coachmen laughed,
And the children were gnawing on apples with a barrel organ;
They put up posters and set traps,
And they sang songs and roasted chestnuts,
And the bright street, like a straight clearing,
Horses flew from the dense greenery.
Paris, 1923
Through a revolutionary theme close to Soviet Russia, through the image of a lion cub asking for understanding and sympathy, Mandelstam is trying to break through to his new reader. His poetic speech is extremely specific. Talking about the gentle lion cub, he expressed his pain...
Mandelstam will never allow himself to do this again. His self-esteem will resist violence, and the poet will come to the conclusion that begging for “pity and mercy” is unworthy.
O clay life! O dying of the century!
I'm afraid only he will understand you,
In whom is the helpless smile of a person,
Who has lost himself.
What a pain - looking for a lost word,
Raise sore eyelids
And with lime in the blood, for a foreign tribe
Collect night herbs.
January 1, 1924
The poetic flow, which was so full recently, is drying up, the poems are not coming. In 1925, Mandelstam’s autobiographical prose was published with the telling title “The Noise of Time.” In the winter of 1929-1930, he dictated the “Fourth Prose” to his wife. “The Fourth Prose” testified to the poet’s final liberation from illusions about the processes taking place in the country.
There was no longer any hope that he could somehow fit into them, that he would be understood, that he would be able to reach the reader. The awareness of this did not bring, as did the depressing everyday disorder and lack of money. But despite this, the feeling of inner freedom that always lived in Mandelstam intensified, which he never wanted to sacrifice, because for him this would be tantamount to creative death.
According to N.Ya. Mandelstam, “The Fourth Prose” paved the way for poetry.” The poet felt himself regaining his lost voice. “He returned to Mandelstam when he was inspired to break the glass cap and break free. There are no poems under a glass bell: there is no air... And this happened only five years later, thanks to a trip to Armenia in the spring of 1930, which Mandelstam had long dreamed of. The poet was able to break away from Soviet reality, touch the biblical beauty of the world - both his poetic ear and
his voice returned.
"New Poems" (1930-1934).
In the first part of “New Poems,” the poet carefully tries out his voice, as after a long, serious illness, when a person learns everything again. In the first part of “New Poems,” the poet tries to combine the humanism and spirituality of previous eras with the present day. But this is not opportunism!
Having made a choice between fear and freedom in favor of inner freedom, he is ready to keep up with the times, but not adapting to it, but maintaining a sense of self-worth. If in 1924 he wrote: “No, I have never been anyone’s contemporary...”, then now: I am a man of the era of Moscow seamstress. Look how my jacket is puffing up on me... The poet believes: he must be honest to himself and to the future and tell the truth to his contemporaries.
I enter with a burning torch
To the six-fingered lie in the hut...
In poems of 1930-1934!
For the first time, direct and indirect assessments of friend, tormentor, ruler, teacher, fool are heard. Now Mandelstam does not listen to the world, as in “Stone”, does not guess it as in “Tpzpa”, does not suffer along with the ruler of the age (“what a pain - to look for a lost word, to raise sore eyelids”), as in the early 1920s , but feels the right to speak out loud.
I returned to my city, familiar to tears,
To the veins, to the swollen glands of children.
You're back here, so swallow it quickly
Fish oil of Leningrad river lanterns,
Recognize the December day soon,
Where the yolk is mixed with the ominous tar.
Petersburg! I don't want to die yet!
You have my phone numbers.
Petersburg! I still have addresses
I live on the black stairs, and to the temple
A bell torn out with meat hits me,
And all night long I wait for my dear guests,
Moving the shackles of the door chains.
Leningrad, 1931
The poem “We live without feeling the country beneath us...”, written in the fall of 1933, dates back to the same period, for which the poet was arrested in May 1934.
It was not fear for life that was tormenting for the poet in prison. Back in February 1934, he calmly told Akhmatova: “I’m ready for death.” The worst thing for Mandelstam is the humiliation of human dignity. The poet spent just over a month in Lubyanka. Stalin's verdict turned out to be unexpectedly lenient: “Isolate, but preserve.” But when Nadezhda Yakovlevna
the poet’s wife was allowed a first date, he looked terrible: “haggard, exhausted, with bloodshot eyes, a half-mad look... in prison he fell ill with traumatic psychosis and was almost insane.”
From the memoirs of the poet’s wife: “Despite his crazy appearance, O.M. I immediately noticed that I was wearing someone else's coat. Whose? Mom's... When did she arrive? I named the day. “So you were at home the whole time?” I didn’t immediately understand why he was so interested in this stupid coat, but now it became clear - he was told that I was also arrested. The technique is common - it serves to depress the psyche of the arrested person.” Later, Mandelstam was unable to tell even his wife what exactly they did to him at Lubyanka.
On the very first night in Cherdyn, where he was exiled, Mandelstam tried to commit suicide. From the memoirs of his wife: “In his madness, O.M. hoped to “prevent death,” to escape, escape and die, but not at the hands of those who shot... The thought of this last outcome consoled and consoled us all our lives.
calmed me down, and I often - at various unbearable periods of our lives - suggested O.M. commit suicide together. At O.M. my words always caused a sharp rebuff.
His main argument: “How do you know what will happen next... Life is a gift that no one dares refuse...”.
Thanks to the efforts of friends and acquaintances and the help of N. Bukharin, the authorities allow the Mandelstams to live in Voronezh. But they don’t give me registration or permission to work. The few remaining friends helped them as best they could, those who considered helping their neighbors more important than protecting their own lives. But this was not enough, very little.
Life continued beyond poverty, from hand to mouth, or even truly starvation, secret trips to Moscow to get at least some help from friends, lack of rights and the exhausting daily expectation of a new arrest, exile, execution.
"Voronezh notebooks" (1935-1937).
The first poems of the Voronezh period still bear the imprint of mental illness. Neologisms (more precisely, occasionalisms) appear, which Mandelstam never had.
Speech falters, it is chaotic and heavy. It took a suicide attempt for the return to life to begin. In the first Voronezh poems, the image of black soil is interesting:
Overrespected, blackened, all in the hall,
All in small withers, all air and prism,
All crumbling, all forming a choir, -
Wet lumps of my earth and will!
Well, hello, black soil:
be courageous, open-eyed...
Eloquent silence at work.
Previously, physical labor was not among the poet’s life guidelines; his attention was given to cities: St. Petersburg, Rome, Paris, Florence, Feodosia, Moscow, etc.
And “he had to go through the most severe trials, to fully feel the cruelty of the era that befell him, in order to ultimately come - paradoxically as it may seem - to the feeling of his blood relationship with the natural world”:
In the light air the pipes dissolved the pearls of pain.
Salt has eaten into the blue, blue color of the ocean chenille... His poetic world includes new phenomena, independent of politics and history. For the first time, the theme of childhood, “childhood” appears.
When a child smiles
With a fork of both sorrow and sweetness,
The ends of his smile, not joking,
They go into the ocean anarchy...
and although life becomes completely unbearable, Mandelstam works hard. “Here, in Voronezh exile, Mandelstam is experiencing, even for him, a surge of poetic inspiration that is rare in strength... Akhmatova was surprised: “It’s amazing that space, breadth, deep breathing appeared in M.’s poems precisely in Voronezh, when he was not at all free.”
Verbs with the semantics “sing” come to the fore here. Natalya Shtempel recalls that in Voronezh “Osip Emilievich wrote a lot... he was literally on fire and, paradoxically, was truly happy.
The poem that concludes the second “Voronezh Notebook” - “Poems not about a famous soldier” - and the poems written in the winter of 1937 are connected by the idea of unity with people. These are poems in defense of human dignity, against Stalin's tyranny.
Death did not frighten Mandelstam. However, it is scary and humiliating to become an “unknown soldier,” one of the millions “killed cheaply.”
Osip Emilievich (Iosif Khatskelevich) Mandelstam is a poet and essayist of Jewish nationality who lived in Russia and the USSR. Born on January 3 (15), 1891, died presumably on December 27, 1938. [For brief information about him, see the articles Osip Mandelstam - a short biography, Mandelstam's work - briefly.]
Mandelstam was born in Warsaw (then part of the Russian Empire) into a wealthy family of Polish Jews. His father was a glover; mother, musician Flora Verblovskaya, was related to the famous literary critic S. Vengerov. Soon after the birth of their son, the family moved to St. Petersburg. In 1900, young Osip entered the prestigious Tenishev School there.
Osip Mandelstam. Life and art
In October 1907, taking advantage of the rich funds of his parents, Osip went abroad, where he spent several years, traveled to a number of European countries, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. When his family's financial situation worsened in 1911, Mandelstam returned to Russia and continued his education at the Romano-Germanic department of the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. At this time he converted from the Jewish religion to Methodism(one of the Protestant confessions) - they say that in order to get rid of the “percentage norm” for admission to the university. In St. Petersburg, Osip studied very unevenly and did not complete the course.
During the revolution of 1905-1907, Mandelstam sympathized with the extreme left parties - the Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries, and was fond of Marxism. After a stay abroad (where he listened to lectures by A. Bergson and fell in love with poetry Verlaine, Baudelaire and Villon) he changed his worldview, became interested in idealistic aesthetics and at one time attended meetings of the Religious and Philosophical Society in St. Petersburg. In poetry, Osip Mandelstam initially gravitated towards symbolism, but in 1911 he and several other young Russian authors (Nikolai Gumilyov, Sergey Gorodetsky etc.) created the group “Workshop of Poets” and founded a new artistic movement - Acmeism. Their theories were the opposite of the Symbolists. Instead of foggy vagueness and mysterious mysticism, the Acmeists called for giving poetry, distinctness, clarity, and filling it with realistic images. Mandelstam wrote a manifesto for the new movement (“Morning of Acmeism,” 1913, published in 1919). In 1913 he published his first collection of poetry, “Stone,” whose “tangible” title was in keeping with Acmeist principles.
According to some reports, Mandelstam had a love affair with Anna Akhmatova, although she insisted all her life that there was nothing between them except close friendship. In 1910, he was secretly and unreciprocated in love with the Georgian princess and St. Petersburg socialite Salome Andronikova, to whom he dedicated the poem “The Straw” (1916). From January to June 1916, the poet had a short relationship with Marina Tsvetaeva.
During First World War Mandelstam was not mobilized into the army due to “cardiac asthenia.” During these years, he wrote “anti-militarist” poems (“Palace Square”, “The Hellenes Gathered for War...”, “The Menagerie”), blaming all powers for the bloodshed, but especially the Russian Tsar.
XX the century has brought untold suffering to man, but even in these trials it has taught him to value life and happiness: you begin to appreciate what is taken out of your hands.
In these circumstances, the latent, secret, original quality of poetry, without which all others lose their strength, manifested itself with new force. This property is the ability to evoke in a person’s soul the idea of happiness. This is how poetry is structured, this is the nature of poetic speech.
Annensky, Kuzmin, Akhmatova, Mandelstam returned to the word its objective meaning, and to poetry its materiality, colorfulness, volume of the world, its living warmth.
Osip Emilievich Mandelstam is a poet, prose writer, critic, translator, whose creative contribution to the development of Russian literature requires careful historical and literary analysis.
Osip Mandelstam was born in 1891 into a Jewish family. From his mother, Mandelstam inherited, along with a predisposition to heart disease and musicality, a heightened sense of the sounds of the Russian language.
Mandelstam recalls: “What did the family want to say? I don't know. She was tongue-tied from birth - and yet she had something to say. The tongue-tiedness of birth weighs heavily on me and many of my contemporaries. We learned not to speak, but to babble - and only by listening to the growing noise of the century and whitened by the foam of its crest, we found language.”
Mandelstam, being a Jew, chooses to be a Russian poet - not just “Russian-speaking,” but precisely Russian. And this decision is not so self-evident: the beginning of the century in Russia was a time of rapid development of Jewish literature, both in Hebrew and Yiddish, and, partly, in Russian. Mandelstam made the choice in favor of Russian poetry and “Christian culture.”
Mandelstam’s entire work can be divided into six periods:
1908 - 1911 are “years of study” abroad and then in St. Petersburg, poems in the tradition of symbolism;
1912 – 1915 - St. Petersburg, Acmeism, “material” poems, work on “Stone”;
1916 – 1920 - revolution and civil war, wanderings, outgrowing Acmeism, developing an individual manner;
1921 – 1925 - intermediate period, gradual departure from poetry;
1926 – 1929 - dead poetic pause, translations;
1930 – 1934 - trip to Armenia, return to poetry, “Moscow poems”;
1935 – 1937 - the last, “Voronezh” poems.
The first, earliest, stage of Mandelstam’s creative evolution is associated with his “study” with the Symbolists, with participation in the Acmeist movement. At this stage, Mandelstam appears in the ranks of Acmeist writers. But how obvious is his specialness in their midst! The poet, who did not seek paths to revolutionary circles, came to an environment that was largely alien to him. He was probably the only Acmeist who so clearly felt the lack of contacts with the “sovereign world.” Subsequently, in 1931, in the poem “I was only childishly connected with the world of power...” Mandelstam said that in his youth he forcibly forced himself to “assimilate” into an alien literary circle, merged with the world, which did not give Mandelstam real spiritual values :
And I don’t owe him a single grain of my soul,
No matter how much I tortured myself in someone else's image.
The early poem “The cloudy air is humid and booming...” directly speaks of the alienation and dissociation that oppresses many people in the “indifferent fatherland” - Tsarist Russia:
I'm taking part in a dark life
Where one to one is lonely!
This awareness of social loneliness gave rise to deeply individualistic sentiments in Mandelstam, leading him to search for “quiet freedom” in individualistic existence, to the illusory concept of self-delimitation of man from society:
Dissatisfied, I stand and remain quiet
I am the creator of my worlds…
(“The thin decay is thinning out...”)
Mandelstam, a sincere lyricist and a skilled master, finds here extremely precise words that define his state: yes, he is dissatisfied, but also quiet, humble and humble, his imagination paints for him some illusory, fantasized world of peace and reconciliation. But the real world stirs his soul, hurts his heart, disturbs his mind and feelings. And hence, in his poems, the motives of dissatisfaction with reality and with oneself “spread” so widely throughout their lines.
In this “denial of life,” in this “self-abasement” and “self-flagellation,” the early Mandelstam has something in common with the early symbolists. Young Osip Mandelstam is also brought together by the early symbolists by the feeling of the catastrophic nature of the modern world, expressed in the images of the abyss, the abyss, the emptiness surrounding it. However, unlike the symbolists, Mandelstam does not attach any ambiguous, ambiguous, mystical meanings to these images. He expresses a thought, a feeling, a mood in “unambiguous” images and comparisons, in precise words that sometimes acquire the character of definitions. His poetic world is material, objective, sometimes “puppet-like.” In this one cannot help but feel the influence of those demands that, in search of “overcoming symbolism,” were put forward by pre-Acmeist and Acmeist theorists and poets - the demands of “beautiful clarity” (M. Kuzmin), the objectivity of details, the materiality of images (S. Gorodetsky).
In lines like:
A little red wine
A little sunny May -
And, breaking a thin biscuit,
The thinnest fingers are white, -
("Unspeakable sadness...")
Mandelstam is unusually close to M. Kuzmin, to the colorfulness and concreteness of details in his poems.
There was a time, the years 1912-1916, when Mandelstam was perceived as a “true” Acmeist. At that time, the poet himself contributed to such a perception of his literary position and creativity, and behaved like a disciplined member of the association. But in fact, he did not share all the principles declared by the Acmeists in their settings. You can very clearly see the differences between him and such a poet of Acmeism as N. Gumilev, comparing the work of both poets. Mandelstam was alien to Gumilyov’s emphasized aristocracy, his anti-humanistic ideas, the coldness, and soulless rationalism of a number of his works. Not only politically - in relation to war, revolution - Mandelstam broke up with Gumilyov, but also creatively. As is known, Gumilyov, who claimed to overcome symbolism, its philosophy and poetics, capitulated to it and returned to symbolic mysticism and social pessimism. Mandelstam's development was different, opposite: religiosity and mysticism were never characteristic of him, the path of his evolution was the path of overcoming a pessimistic worldview.
The literary sources of Mandelstam's poetry are rooted in Russian poetry of the 19th century, in Pushkin, Batyushkov, Baratynsky, Tyutchev.
The cult of Pushkin begins in Mandelstam’s work already on the pages of the book “Stone”. His St. Petersburg theme is filled with the “breath” of Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman”: here is admiration for the genius of Peter, here is the image of Pushkin’s Eugene, sharply contrasted with the “sovereign world”, the image of pre-revolutionary, bourgeois-noble Petersburg:
A line of engines flies into the fog,
Proud, modest pedestrian,
Eccentric Evgeniy, ashamed of poverty,
He inhales gasoline and curses fate!
(“Petersburg stanzas”)
Tyutchev is also one of Mandelstam’s favorite Russian poets, one of his teachers. In one of his early articles, “The Morning of Acmeism,” the author of “The Stone” directly indicated that the title of his first book was brought to life by Tyutchev’s influence. “...Tyutchev’s stone, which, “having rolled down the mountain, lay down in the valley, torn down by itself or overthrown by hand,” is a word,” Mandelstam wrote.
A poet in love with Russian history and his native Russian language, Osip Mandelstam, like his great teachers, was an excellent connoisseur and recipient of a number of the best traditions of world literature. He knew and loved ancient mythology well and generously used its motifs and images; he knew and loved the poets of ancient times - Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, Catullus.
In 1915 and 1916, clear anti-tsarist and anti-war motifs appeared in the poetry of Osip Mandelstam. Censorship did not allow the poet to publish his 1915 poem “Palace Square,” in which she rightly saw a challenge to the Winter Palace and the double-headed eagle. In 1916, the poet wrote two anti-war poems, one of which appeared in print only in 1918. This poem “The Hellenes Gathered for War...” is directed against the insidious, aggressive policy of Great Britain. Another anti-war work, “The Menagerie,” was published after the revolution, in 1917. The demand for peace expressed in it expressed the mood of the broad masses, as well as the call to curb the governments of the warring countries.
So, even on the eve of the revolution, a social theme entered into the work of Osip Mandelstam, solved on the basis of general democratic beliefs and sentiments. Hatred for the “sovereign world,” for the aristocracy, for the military, was combined in the poet’s mind with hatred for the bourgeois governments of a number of warring European countries and for the domestic bourgeoisie. That is why Mandelstam treated ironically the leaders of the Provisional Government, these enemies of the world who stood for continuing the war “to the victorious end.”
The historical experience of the war years, perceived by the poet’s sympathetic heart, prepared Mandelstam for a political break with the old world and the adoption of October. At the same time, the poet’s aversion to the cold-hearted intellectual elite and snobbery also contributed to his departure from the Acmeist group. The writers from the “Workshop of Poets” became spiritually alien to him. Morally devastated aesthetes caused him irritation and indignation.
“The October Revolution could not but influence my work, as it took away my “biography”, my sense of personal significance. I am grateful to her for once and for all putting an end to spiritual security and existence on cultural rent... I feel like a debtor to the revolution..." Mandelstam wrote in 1928.
Everything the poet wrote in these lines was said with complete, utmost sincerity. Mandelstam was really burdened by “biography” - the traditions of the family environment, which were alien to him. The revolution helped to cut the fetters that fettered his spiritual impulses. The refusal to feel personal significance was not self-abasement, but that spiritual well-being that was characteristic of a number of intellectual writers (Bryusov, Blok, etc.) and expressed a willingness to sacrifice personal interests in the name of the common good.
This kind of sentiment was expressed on the pages of the poet’s second book, the collection “Tristia,” in poems written during the period of the revolution and civil war.
The book “Tristia” represents, in comparison with the book “Stone,” a fundamentally new stage in Mandelstam’s aesthetic development. The structure of his poems is still architectural, but the prototypes of his “architecture” now lie not in medieval Gothic, but in ancient Roman architecture, in Hellenistic architecture. This feature is also revealed by the very motives of many poems, the motives of appeals to the cultures of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, to the search for a reflection of Hellenistic traditions in Tauris, in the Crimea.
The poems included in the collection “Tristia” are emphatically classic, some of them even in their size, their poetic “step”: “A stream of golden honey flowed from the bottle...”, “Sisters - heaviness and tenderness, your signs are the same...”.
In “The Stone,” a person was often presented as a toy of fate, fate, “unreal,” a victim of an all-consuming emptiness. In "Tristia" man is the center of the universe, a worker, a creator. A small, eight-line poem with Mandelstam’s inherent precision of words - “definitions” - expresses the humanistic foundations of his worldview:
Let the names of blooming cities
They caress the ear with mortal significance.
It is not the city of Rome that lives among the centuries,
And the place of man in the universe.
The kings are trying to take possession of it,
Priests justify wars
And without him we are worthy of contempt,
Houses and altars are like pathetic rubbish.
Poems about St. Petersburg, created during the years of the Civil War, are also imbued with this admiration for man, faith in him, and love for him. These poems are tragic, St. Petersburg - Petrograd - Petropol seemed to Mandelstam a dying city, perishing “in beautiful poverty.” And it was no longer words - “definitions”, but words - metaphors that this time expressed Mandelstam’s faith in man, immortal like nature:
All the dear eyes of the blessed women sing,
Immortal flowers are all blooming.
(“In St. Petersburg we will meet again...”)
The love theme occupies a small place in Mandelstam's lyrics. But it is also significantly different in “Tristia” than in “Stone”. If in “The Stone” the beloved is filled with sadness, distance from the world, ethereality (the poem “Tenderer than Tender...”), then in “Tristia” he is earthly, carnal, and love itself, although painful, tragic, is earthly, carnal (poem “I am equal to others...”).
Osip Mandelstam went through a certain path of development from “Stone” to “Tristia”, he accepted the revolution, welcomed the new modernity, but, being brought up in the traditions of the idealistic philosophy of history, did not comprehend its socialist content and character, and this, of course, became an obstacle to that to open the pages of his works to new themes and new images born of the new era.
Meanwhile, revolutionary modernity increasingly entered the life of the country and people. Osip Mandelstam undoubtedly felt that his poetry, sincere and emotional, often found itself aloof from modernity. More and more he began to think about the possibilities and ways of overcoming the well-known alienation of his poetry from modern life. There is no doubt that he seriously thought about his own spiritual growth, but this growth was hampered by the remnants of general democratic ideas and illusions, the overcoming of which was still not possible for the poet with due completeness and thoroughness. He also thought about the linguistic “restructuring” of his lyrics, about the possibilities and ways of updating the language.
The poems of the first half of the twenties are marked by a desire to “simplify” the language, to “secularize” the word - in language, imagery, genre features and poetic structure, they differ significantly from the poems in the collection “Tristia”. Mandelstam's renewal of language went in different directions - towards extreme simplicity, towards truly beautiful clarity and towards unexpected, “unprecedented”, complicated comparisons and metaphorical constructions.
So, great simplicity and clarity, the simplicity of the simplest narrative, song, romance:
Tonight, I won't lie,
Waist-deep in melting snow
I was walking from someone else's stop,
I look - a hut, entered the sensi -
The Chernets drank tea with salt,
And the gypsy pampers with them.
Mandelstam, a poet with a keen interest in history, in historical parallels, with a desire to think in broad historical generalizations, sometimes thinks intensely about the past, about the present, about the future, about the connections of the past with the future, about the relationship of modernity to the past and to the historical perspective.
In his thoughts about modernity, Mandelstam the poet appears for the first time in such a clearly “formulated” theme of acute ideological conflicts. In the poem “January 1, 1924” it appears in the form of a strong, dramatic conflict. The poet feels like a prisoner of the dying 19th century, his “sick son” with a “lime layer” hardening in his blood. He feels lost in the modernity that nurtured him – his now “aging son”:
O clay life! O dying of the century!
I'm afraid only he will understand you,
In whom is the helpless smile of a person,
Who has lost himself.
However, Mandelstam did not want to surrender to the “power of legend”, to submit to the pressure of the past. He contrasts this fatal power, this heavy pressure with the voice of conscience and loyalty to the oath that he gave to the new world that won the revolution:
I want to run from my doorstep.
Where? It is dark outside,
And, as if they were pouring salt on a paved road,
My conscience turns white before me.
At the dawn of a new decade, the thirties, Mandelstam rushed into life. He made an extremely important trip to Armenia for him, which gave a rich “harvest” in his work - poetic and prosaic. A cycle of poems about Armenia and the short story “Travel to Armenia” appeared. These works became great successes for the writer; they are still read with loving attention to this day.
Much excited the poet about Armenia - its history, its ancient culture, its colors and its stones. But what pleased him most was his meetings with people, with the people of the young Soviet republic.
Mandelstam never lied about anything. His poetry expressed more and more openly the state of his spiritual world. And she said that the surge of vigor he experienced in Armenia was just that: a surge. But pretty soon the wave of cheerful feelings subsided, and the poet again plunged into painful, nervous thoughts about his attitude to modernity, to the new century.
His arrival in Leningrad at the end of 1930 - his arrival in the city of his childhood and youth, in the city of the revolution - evoked very different poems from the poet: both clear, enlightened, and bitter, mournful. The theme of reckoning with the past was strongly heard in the poem “I was only childishly connected with the world of power...”. But a few weeks earlier, Mandelstam wrote the poem “I returned to my city, familiar to tears...”, which expresses a feeling of a tragic connection with the past - a connection of emotional memory, where there was no room left for the perception of the new, modern.
In the early 1930s, Mandelstam's poetry became a poetry of challenge, anger, and indignation:
It's time for you to know, I am also a contemporary,
I am a man of the Moscow seamstress era, -
Look how my jacket is puffing up on me,
How can I walk and talk!
Try to tear me away from the century, -
I guarantee you that you will break your neck!
In mid-1931, in the poem “Midnight in Moscow...” Mandelstam again continues the conversation with the era. He again struggles with the idea that he may not be understood by the new age. He writes about loyalty to democratic traditions.
Chur! Don't ask, don't complain, chick!
Don't whine!
Is it for this reason that commoners
Dry boots trampled,
So that I betray them now?
In November 1933, Mandelstam wrote poems against Stalin
We live without feeling the country beneath us,
Our speeches are not heard ten steps away,
And where is enough for half a conversation,
They will remember the Kremlin highlander...
In her memoirs about the poet Mandelstam, Anna Andreevna Akhmatova cited a significant phrase that he uttered in Moscow at the beginning of 1934: “Poems now should be civil” and read her his “seditious” poem about Stalin - “We live without feeling the country beneath us... "
On May 13, 1934, Mandelstam was arrested and exiled to Cherdyn. The arrest had a very difficult impact on Mandelstam; at times he experienced clouding of consciousness. Without recognizing and yet feeling every day that he is a “shadow” cast out from the world of people, the poet goes through his last temptation: to succumb to the illusory temptation to return to life. This is how “Ode to Stalin” appears. And yet, work on “Ode” could not but be a clouding of the mind and self-destruction of a genius.
The poem “If our enemies took me...” was also conceived for the glory of Stalin under the influence of an ever-tightening noose around the neck of the still living poet. However, intending to compose something like an ode of praise, Mandelstam became carried away by the force of resistance and wrote a solemn oath in the name of Poetry and People's Truth. And only the ending looks in this context as a tacked-on and false addition:
If our enemies took me
And people stopped talking to me,
If they deprived me of everything in the world,
The right to breathe and open doors
And affirm that existence will be,
And that the people, like a judge, judge;
If they dared to hold me like a beast,
They would throw my food on the floor,
I will not remain silent, I will not drown out the pain,
And shaking the bell of the naked walls,
And awakening the enemy darkness corner,
And I will lead my hand in the darkness with a plow,
And squeezed into the ocean of brotherly eyes,
I will fall with the weight of the entire harvest,
With the compactness of the entire oath rushing into the distance,
And in the depths of the watch night
The laborers' eyes will flare up.
And a flock of fiery years will flash by,
Lenin will rustle like a ripe thunderstorm,
And on earth that will escape decay,
Stalin will awaken reason and life.
Despite the constant disorder of everyday life, despite the increasingly developing nervous illness, the poet’s ideological and aesthetic growth continued. Thoughts, feelings, and images accumulated, expressing not only Mandelstam’s determination to be friends with the century, but also his real, inextricable spiritual connection with it.
The so-called “Voronezh notebooks” (1935-1937) are certainly a major poetic phenomenon. Despite the incompleteness and fragmentation of a number of poems, the “notebooks” present us with high examples of heartfelt patriotic lyrics. Many of those noble thoughts and feelings that accumulated and grew in the mind and heart of Mandelstam received their poetic embodiment in the lines of the “Voronezh notebooks,” which remained unknown to Soviet readers for a long time, until the 60s.
Voronezh poems are dominated by confessional motives, motives of self-disclosure of the poet’s spiritual world. But at the same time, epic features appear in them, features of the appearance of modernity, illuminated by the author’s attitude, much broader than before.
How much clearer, more definite, more politically specific the poet’s lyrical confessions have become:
I have to live, breathe and grow...
("Stanzas")
In the face of the troubles that befell him, the sick poet retains strength and courage in order to declare in the same “Stanzas”:
And I am not robbed, and I am not broken,
But it's just been overwhelmed.
Like “The Lay of the Shelf”, my string is tight...
In March 1937, sick and sensing his imminent death, the poet wrote about his friendship with life and his devotion to people:
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’m lost in the sky, what should I do?..”)
May 2, 1938 re-arrest. Osip Mandelstam died in a camp near Vladivostok on December 27, 1938. It was all over.
The era, the century, expected more from Osip Mandelstam than he did - he knew about it, knew it, and was tormented by it. He was unable to quickly part with all the “birthmarks” of the past. But everything that was written by him was created honestly, with conviction, sincerely, and with talent. Everything was written by an intelligent, reverent, searching master.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
1.M.L. Gasparov "Evolution of Mandelstam's Metrics".
2. E.G. Gershtein "On the civic poetry of Mandelstam."
3. Alexander Kushner “Rectifying sigh.”
4. Alexander Dymshits “Notes on the work of O. Mandelstam.”
"I'm entering the world..."
(works of O. Mandelstam)
This past year, the 125th anniversary of Osip Mandelstam passed quietly and unnoticed. A famous literary critic, translator, prose writer, essayist and one of the most beautiful poets of the last century.
“I was born on the night from the second to the third...”
In the capital of Poland, Warsaw, Osip Mandelstam was born in January 1891. Almost immediately the family moved to St. Petersburg. This is the city of the poet’s childhood and youth.
Mandelstam, the poet’s biography confirms this, did not like to remember these years or give comments to them, as well as to his poems. As a poet, he matured quite early, so his style was very strict and serious.
Here are the bits that can be found about the years of childhood:
"From the pool of evil and viscous
I grew up rustling like a reed,
And passionately, and languidly, and affectionately
Breathing the forbidden life."
("From the whirlpool of evil and viscous...")
In the last line, Mandelstam described his passion for poetry. The poet's biography begins with a family confused about faith and nationality. This is especially noticeable in the author’s speech and his style. The linguistic environment in which little Osip grew up was slightly strange. Father Emilius, a self-educated businessman, had absolutely no sense of language. Ornate, almost always unspoken phrases, bizarre tongue-tiedness - these were the epithets Osip used to describe his father’s speech in the book “The Noise of Time.”
Mother was the complete opposite. Despite the poverty of her vocabulary, the conciseness and monotony of phrases, the dialect of Flora, a music teacher, her Russian speech was clear, sonorous and bright. From his mother, the poet received a subtle sense of the language of Russian culture, its accuracy, musicality and greatness.
Not a boy, but a poet
After graduating from the famous Tenishevsky School, Mandelstam continued his studies abroad. The biography (brief) gives reason to think about the importance of this period: Western Europe can be traced in his poems until his death. In three years, Osip manages to fall in love with Paris, study Romanesque philology at a German university and live for his own pleasure in the Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf.
But the most vivid impression that Mandelstam the poet revealed to the world was from his meeting with A. Akhmatova and N. Gumilyov. They communicated weekly at literary gatherings. Many years after the execution of Nikolai Gumilev, in a letter to Akhmatova, the poet writes that he still talks with him, because Gumilev was the only one who truly understood him.
The poet’s special attitude towards Anna Akhmatova is clearly felt in his words: “I am a contemporary of Akhmatova”. He spoke about this publicly, without fear of the regime of the existing government. And if we remember that Akhmatova was a disgraced poet, and also a woman, then to make such statements you would have to be Osip Mandelstam!
This was a period of a new trend in literature, which was created by A. Akhmatova with N. Gumilev and O. Mandelstam. The poet's biography restores this period of friction and controversy. The process was not easy: Anna Akhmatova was always willful, Gumilev was known as a despot, and Osip Emilievich easily flared up for any reason.
Attempt at writing
At the beginning of 1913, the poet published his first collection of poems at his own expense. The comrades-in-arms rejected the name “Sink” and approved the acmeistic name “Stone”. The current was famous for depriving the world of its foggy and elegiacally light flair. Everything acquired clarity, firmness, strength and solidity. Moreover, this applied to both material bodies and spiritual culture.
New Russia
Osip Mandelstam, whose short biography practically does not touch on this time, did not understand and did not accept the revolutionary transformations of 1917. During this period, after studying at St. Petersburg University at the Faculty of History and Philology, he tries to find himself in a new country. But all attempts end in quarrel, scandal and, consequently, failure. By 1920, the crisis was growing. For five years Osip did not write a single line.
Nine years later, the book “The Fourth Prose” was published. This is a small cry in terms of pages, but a huge cry of pain and hatred towards the participants of MASSOLIT. In addition to violent statements against opportunist writers, the book reveals the main features of the poet’s temper. Mandelstam easily acquired enemies, throwing personal assessments and unflattering judgments that he did not keep to himself; he was quarrelsome, explosive, unyielding and impulsive.
Mutual hatred went off scale. Many hated the poet, but Mandelstam also hated many. The biography makes it possible to trace the extreme conditions in which the poet lived. And by 1930 he had a premonition of death.
During these years, the state begins to provide apartments to cultural workers. In 1933, Mandelstam also received an apartment. Biography and creativity are briefly described by the case of Pasternak. Much later, he recalled how he caused an explosion of rage in Mandelstam when, leaving, he said that now there was a place to write poetry. The poet showered curses on the apartment and advised it to be given to “honest traitors.”
The path has been chosen
The poet is increasingly strengthened by the coming awareness of the tragedy of his chosen fate. Strength and pathos appeared in the poems. It consisted of powerless opposition to the “beast age” of the independent poet. The strength was in the feeling of being equal to the coming century:
“...You better stuff me like a hat into your sleeve
Hot fur coat of the Siberian steppes,
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.”
("For the explosive valor of the coming centuries...")
The poet’s circle and his close people only appreciated these predictive lines after a while. Mandelstam already then had a presentiment of the Siberian exile, the death and immortality of his lines.
Mandelstam: brief biography (by dates)
- 01/03/1891 - born.
- 1900-1907 - studied at the Tenishevsky School.
- 1908-1910 - studies at the Sorbonne.
- 1913 - publication of the collection of poems “Stone”.
- 1919 - meets his future wife.
- 1923 - The second collection of poems is published.
- 1934-1937 - exiled to Voronezh.
- 1938 - died in camps in the Far East.
Mandelstam: biography, interesting facts
Not many people know about Osip’s love for Marina Tsvetaeva. But even less is known about the end of their relationship and the poet’s serious intention to enter a monastery.
The move to Voronezh happened “thanks to” an epigram about the “highlander ruling the country.” Stalin's reaction was, to put it mildly, strange: “isolate, but preserve.”
The first memorial sign dedicated to the poet was erected using the own savings of the sculptor V. Nenazhivin, who was impressed by Mandelstam’s poems.
Osip Mandelstam - life and work
Introduction
Baratynsky once called a painter, sculptor, and musician happy:
Incisor, organ, brush! Happy is he who is at ease
To them sensually, without going beyond them!
There is hops for him at this worldly festival!
Poetry, alas, is not included in this small list. Even if we pay attention to how long artists live, what kind of longevity they are given. For example, Titian lived 100 years, Michelangelo lived 89 years, Matisse - 85 years, Picasso - 92 years...
Still, let’s not be upset. After all, it is to them that poetry and prose are given the great ability to penetrate into the depths of the human soul, to comprehend the tragedy of the world, to shoulder all the burdens, all the pain, all the sorrow.
And at the same time, do not despair, do not retreat, do not give up. Little of! In the fight against historical, social and personal fate, poetry found the strength (especially Russian poetry of the 20th century) to find joy and happiness...
The twentieth century brought unheard-of suffering to man, but in these trials it taught him to value life and happiness: you begin to appreciate what is taken out of your hands.
It is characteristic that not in the 30s, in the era of terrible state pressure on people, but in much easier times - in the 70s - the spirit of despondency and denial penetrated into our poetry. disappointments. “The whole world is a mess” - this is the simple slogan proposed by this poetry to man.
Looking back at the 20th century, I would like to say that in Russia it passed not only “under the sign of losses suffered,” but also under the sign of acquisitions. We have not accumulated material values, not prosperity, not self-confidence, “not a peace full of proud trust” - we have accumulated experience. Historical, human. To think otherwise is to betray our friends who passed away during this era and helped us cope with it.
The purpose of writing my essay is to tell about a person who lived a difficult, but at the same time wonderful life, leaving as a legacy the best part of himself in his poems, which true connoisseurs of poetry often called brilliant.
The work of Osip Mandelstam is usually attributed to the poetry of the “Silver Age”. This era was distinguished by its complex political and social situation. Like each of the poets of the “Silver Age,” Mandelstam tried painfully to find a way out of the impasse that created at the turn of the century.
Osip Emilievich Mandelstam was born in Warsaw on the night of January 14-15, 1891. But he considered not Warsaw, but another European capital - St. Petersburg, his city - “darling to tears.” Warsaw was not the hometown of the poet’s father, Emilius Veniaminovich Mandelstam, a far from successful merchant who constantly expected his leather business to end in bankruptcy. In the fall of 1894, the family moved to St. Petersburg. However, the poet’s early childhood was not spent in the capital itself, but 30 kilometers from it - in Pavlovsk.
The sons were raised by their mother, Flora Verblovskaya, who grew up in a Russian-speaking Jewish family, not alien to the traditional interests in literature and art of the Russian intelligentsia. The parents had the wisdom to send their contemplative and impressionable eldest son to one of the best educational institutions in St. Petersburg - the Tenishev School. Over seven years of study, students acquired a greater amount of knowledge than is provided on average by a modern 4-year college.
In high school, in addition to his interest in literature, Mandelstam developed another interest: the young man tries to read “Capital”, studies the “Erfurt Program” and makes passionate speeches in the crowd.
After graduating from the Tenishev School, Mandelstam in the fall of 1907 went to Paris, the Mecca of young, artistically minded intellectuals.
Having lived in Paris for a little over six months, he returns to St. Petersburg. There, a true success for him was a visit to V. Ivanov’s “Tower” - the famous salon, where the best representatives of the literary, artistic, philosophical and even mystical life of the capital of the empire gathered. Here V. Ivanov taught a course on poetics, and here Mandelstam could meet the young poets who became his life’s companions.
While Mandelstam was living in Zehlendorf near Berlin in the summer of 1910, the St. Petersburg magazine Apollo published five of his poems. This publication was his literary debut.
The very fact of the first publication in “Apollo” is significant in the biography of Mandelstam. Already the first publication contributed to his literary fame. Let us note that the literary debut took place in the year of the crisis of symbolism, when the most sensitive of the poets felt a “new trepidation” in the atmosphere of the era. In the symbolic poems of Mandelstam, published in “Apollo”, the future Acmeism is already guessed. But it took another year and a half for this school to fully develop in its main features.
The time preceding the publication of the poet’s first book (“Stone” 1930) was perhaps the happiest in his life. This small collection (25 poems) was destined to be one of the outstanding achievements of Russian poetry. In the early poems of Mandelstam the Symbolist, N. Gumilyov noted the fragility of well-calibrated rhythms, a flair for style, a lacy composition, but most of all, Music, to which the poet was ready to sacrifice even poetry itself. The same readiness to go to the end of a once-made decision is visible in the acmeistic verses of “The Stone.” “He loves buildings in the same way,” wrote Gumilyov, “as other poets love grief or the sea. He describes them in detail, finds parallels between them and himself, and builds world theories based on their lines. It seems to me that this is the most successful approach...” However, behind this success one can see the innate qualities of the poet: his grandiose love of life, a heightened sense of proportion, obsession with the poetic word.
Like most Russian poets, Mandelstam responded in poetry to the military events of 1914–1918. But unlike Gumilyov, who saw the world war as a mystery of the spirit and volunteered to go to the front, Mandelstam saw war as a misfortune. He was released from service due to illness (asthenic syndrome). He told one of our memoirists about his attitude towards the war: “My stone is not for this sling. I wasn't preparing to feed on blood. I didn't prepare myself to be cannon fodder. The war is being waged without me.”
On the contrary, the revolution aroused tremendous enthusiasm in him as a person and as a poet - to the point of losing mental balance. “The revolution was a huge event for him,” Akhmatova recalled.
The culminating event of his life was a clash with the security officer Yakov Blumkin. Prone to dramatic effects, Blumkin boasted of his unlimited power over the life and death of hundreds of people and, as proof, pulled out a stack of arrest warrants, signed in advance by the chief of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky. As soon as Blumkin entered any name into the warrant, the life of an unsuspecting person was decided. “And Mandelstam, who trembles in front of the dentist’s machine as if in front of a guillotine, suddenly jumps up, runs up to Blumkin, snatches the warrants, tears them into pieces,” wrote G. Ivanov. In this act the whole of Mandelstam is both a man and a poet.
The years of the civil war passed for Mandelstam on the road. He lives in Kharkov for about a month; in April 1919 he came to Kyiv. There he was arrested by counterintelligence of the Volunteer Army. This time Mandelstam was rescued from arrest by Kiev poets and put him on a train going to Crimea.
In Crimea, Mandelstam was arrested again - as unreasonably and accidentally as the first time, but with the difference that now he was arrested by Wrangel intelligence. Far from those in power of any stripe, poor and independent, Mandelstam aroused distrust on the part of any authorities. From Tiflis Mandelstam makes his way to Russia, to Petrograd. Many memoirs have been written about this four-month stay in his hometown - from October 1920 to March 1921. By the time he left Petrograd, the second collection of poems “Tristia” had already been completed - a book that brought its author world fame.
In the summer of 1930 he went to Armenia. Arriving there was for Mandelstam a return to the historical sources of culture. The cycle of poems “Armenia” was soon published in the Moscow magazine “New World”. E. Tager wrote about the impression made by the poems: “Armenia appeared before us, born in music and light.”
Life was filled to the limit, although throughout the 30s it was life on the brink of poverty. The poet was often in a nervous, excited state, realizing that he belonged to another century, that in this society of denunciations and murders he was a real renegade. Living in constant nervous tension, he wrote poems one better than the other - and experienced an acute crisis in all aspects of his life, except for creativity itself.
In external life, one conflict followed another. In the summer of 1932, the writer S. Borodin, who lived next door, insulted Mandelstam’s wife. Mandelstam wrote a complaint to the Writers' Union. The court of honor that took place made a decision that was not satisfactory for the poet. The conflict remained unresolved for a long time. In the spring of 1934, having met the writer A. Tolstoy at the publishing house, under whose chairmanship the “court of honor” was taking place, Mandelstam slapped him in the face with the words: “I punished the executioner who issued a warrant to beat my wife.”
In 1934, he was arrested for an anti-Stalinist, angry, sarcastic epigram, which he carelessly read to his many acquaintances.
Nervous, exhausted, he did not behave very stoically during the investigation and named the names of those to whom he read these poems about Stalin, realizing that he was putting innocent people in a dangerous situation. A sentence soon followed: three years of exile in Cherdyn. He lived here with the knowledge that at any moment they could come for him and take him away to be shot. Suffering from hallucinations and awaiting execution, he jumped out of a window, hurt himself and broke his shoulder. We find details of these days in the memoirs of A. Akhmatova: “Nadya sent a telegram to the Central Committee. Stalin ordered the case to be reconsidered and allowed him to choose another place. It is unknown who influenced Stalin - perhaps Bukharin, who wrote to him: “Poets are always right, history is for them.” In any case, Mandelstam’s fate was eased: he was allowed to move from Cherdyn to Voronezh, where he spent about three years.
