Modern Russian poetry, with its incredible power over readers-many of whom would admit to their profound puzzlement over its sense-offers a tantalizing case study for anyone interested in this interaction. Hence the title of this book, with its echoes of Roland Barthes's study Mythologies, which first alerted me to the interaction between verbal imagination, ideology, and social practice. Of crucial importance for the understanding of Mandelstam's poetic project as a historical phenomenon, these patterns have functioned as a source from which readers have spun the threads of Mandelstam myths and his mythologies, that is, the rationalizations of the poet's stance. How Mandelstam, with his particular circumstances and background, went about satisfying these desiderata of modern Russian poetry constitutes the subject of this study.Īlthough I do not limit myself to any one aspect of the Mandelstam phenomenon, I focus precisely on these partially overlapping and often homologous patterns of self-presentation. Contemporary poets, beneficiaries of the nineteenth-century comparative mythology, understood that this was to be accomplished in large measure by having the protagonist project narrative patterns intentionally designed both to emulate ancient myth and to absorb modern historical matter. Such a figure had to create the possibility for "naturalizing" the new, for integrating or joining it with the familiar. Furthermore, the self had to be flexible, able to respond to the rapidly changing world, yet stable enough to remain recognizable, allowing the poet to maintain narrative continuity in self-presentation.
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Such a self had to be grounded not only in the particular circumstances and consciousness of the poet as an individual but also in the consciousness of the audience in short, in the culture of the body social to which the poet appealed. He was thus able to satisfy a major condition for being a lyric poet in contemporary Russia, namely, to compose poetry capable of projecting a powerful, integrative self.
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Like other poets of his own and preceding generations (foremost among them Aleksandr Blok, as the Formalist critics were first to point out), Mandelstam was the author of his own "myth," or, rather, "myths of the poet." He worked consistently at designing a figure that could serve as a unifying epic or dramatic center for a variety of lyric gestures. A Coat of Many Colors offers a perspective that helps to ground Mandelstam's poetry and prose in the patterns of his culture and the events of his time, to account for the remarkable narrative integrity of his writings, and, most important, toĮxamine his career in light of modern Russian authorship, an institution with strong charismatic propensities. What unusual coherence it had came from his poetry and prose (both written in the person of the "lyric I") and from a common temptation to attribute to exceptional figures some of the culture's most prized human qualities on an extraordinary scale. This reputation notwithstanding, most students of Mandelstam are aware that the poet's life was not endowed with this sort of unity. Even among the great poets of his generation (Akhmatova, Maiakovskii, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak), Mandelstam has come to define the fullest complement of features making up Russia's symbolic authorial figure: a poet of genius, a witness, a man who began at the culture's periphery and soon moved into its center, a dervish indifferent to worldly success, a fearless fighter for the dignity of man, and finally, a persecuted outcast, an exile, a prisoner, a victim, and in the end a martyr to Stalinist terror.
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There are few authors in this century whose works are so thoroughly identified with their days, and both together with the expectations and catastrophes of modernity. I wish to present the poet Osip Mandelstam as the focal point of a complex cultural phenomenon-perhaps a cult-in which art extends effortlessly into biography, history, politics, and above all the sphere of communal values held sacred by the poet's readers. At this moment the fate of the Russian writer has become the most intriguing, the most fruitful literary topic in the whole world: he is either being imprisoned, pilloried, internally exiled, or simply kicked out.ĪNDREI SINIAVSKII, "Literary Process in Russia"