Mandelstam. Artistic features of O. E. Mandelstam's lyrics N and NN in the suffixes of words formed from verbs. Full forms

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Davydova T. T. Lyrical hero in the poetry of O.E. Mandelstam 1930s // Scientific and methodological electronic journal “Concept”. – 2014. – T. 20. – P. 2531–2535..htm.

Annotation. The article examines the image of the lyrical hero O. E. Mandelstam in the 1930s. and the characters of his works (the “Armenia” cycle, poems on the death of A. Bely and from Voronezh notebooks), the genetic connections of the poet’s lyrics with the prose of E.-T.-A are traced. Hoffman, the poetry of A. Koltsov and Russian folklore. The analysis is also carried out at the levels of motives, poetic imagery, style, and artistic speech. Different editions of Mandelstam's poetic texts are compared.

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Tatyana Timofeev Davydova, Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor of the Department of History of Literature, Moscow State University of Printing Arts named after I. Fedorov, Moscow [email protected]

Lyrical hero in the poetry of O.E. Mandelstam 1930s

Annotation. The article examines the image of the lyrical hero O.E. Mandelstam 1930s and the characters of his works (the “Armenia” cycle, poems on the death of A. Bely and from Voronezh notebooks), the genetic connections of the poet’s lyrics with the prose of E.T.A. Hoffman, the poetry of A. Koltsov and Russian folklore are traced. The analysis is also carried out at the levels of motives, poetic imagery, style, and artistic speech. Different editions of Mandelstam's poetic texts are compared. Key words: lyrical hero, Mandelstam, Russian poetry of the 1930s.

Section: (04) philology; art history; cultural studies

As L.Ya. Ginzburg showed, in the 1930s. in Mandelstam’s creative development are characterized by the poet’s new relationship with reality. Mandelstam’s desire to invade “the thickness of time” is expressed in his poems, notebooks, and reviews of this period. It gives rise to new themes in his works, a socio-historical analysis of modern life, and a variety of artistic means. In Mandelstam's lyrics of the 1930s, along with symbolism and associativity, new images and tropes appear for him, genetically related to the tradition of Russian folklore, which the poet creatively assimilates. Mandelstam's dictionary, in the 1910s. who had a reputation as a Hellenist, is enriched by colloquial and colloquial vocabulary. And this is by no means accidental, since now for Mandelstam, according to L. Ginzburg, the fate of a modern person becomes the measure of values. At the same time, in the poet’s later works the image of the lyrical hero, which is largely autobiographical, comes to the fore. According to the precise observation of G. Kubatyan, “The “I” of Mandelstam’s poems is identified with Osip Emilievich, and the gaps between the poetic “I” of the 30s and the poet’s “I” are not visible.” The components of this autobiography are the complex vicissitudes of Mandelstam’s fate and his perception of the destructive upheavals of the Soviet era.

The lyrical hero plays a significant role in “Armenia”, being present in seven of the twelve poems of the poetic cycle. The moods and emotions of the lyrical hero in these works are extremely diverse - from falling in love with the history, culture, nature of Armenia, its inhabitants to anxious forebodings and melancholy.

“The lyrical theme of “Armenia” appears in waves: sometimes it rolls up, sometimes it subsides, leaving the surface,” we read from a modern researcher. The lyrical presence is revealed in this cycle both through the personality of the hero and allegorically through the image of a flower, first encountered by Mandelstam in the 1909 poem “I have been given a body - what should I do with it...”:

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, -

and endowed with some multi-valued symbolism. At the same time, in the poetic cycle “Armenia” the generalized image of “flower” is replaced by a specific one - “rose”, a “universal symbol of beauty”, associated in Mandelstam’s mind with the symbolism of Eastern poetry. In the first poem of this cycle, the line “You are shaking the rose of Hafiz” is important, which the Armenian researcher comments as follows: “This, however, is strange. It's not just a rose. But the rose of Hafiz. Having undertaken to establish the spiritual independence of Armenia, Mandelstam begins with the fact that the country about which he writes preserves and carries within itself someone else's beauty. Gafiz is an Iranian poet, his rose is fragrant with the aroma of another culture. But everything is true. Christian Armenian literature, nurtured in the cradle of Mediterranean traditions, has long been influenced by Persian poetry. Well, Persian lyrics in Russia were symbolized by Hafiz and Saadi.” If in the first poem “Armenia” the “rose of Hafiz” is an oriental image perceived by Armenian poetry, then in other texts of this cycle the rose is a constant part of the landscape of the Transcaucasian republic, and all these are different facets of the image of the rose symbol.

From its various semantic components arises the meaning of the fifth poem of the cycle, called by G. Kubatyan “a strange sketch”, “a gardener’s sketch”:

Let's get a rose without scissors.

But be careful that it doesn’t crumble right away -

Pink trash - muslin - solomon petal.

The image of a rose here is an allegory of the fragile, easily vulnerable soul of the lyrical hero. Other meanings of this symbol become more obvious from the semantic roll call of the first and last lines of the eighth poem from the “Armenia” cycle: “It’s cold for a rose in the snow” and “I’m cold. I’m glad…”, conveying tenderness, vulnerability and at the same time love for the life of the lyrical hero. The lyrical “I”, captured in the “Armenia” cycle, receives further development in other poems of the poet in the 1930s. with the help of doubles, literary and folklore characters who highlight different facets of the character of Mandelstam’s hero, who exists in his own historical and cultural space and has his own “bundle” of meanings. Mandelstam, like A.A. Blok once, whose work the author of “Stone” and “Tristia”, despite rejecting the aesthetics of the Symbolists, highly valued, turns to eternal, erased images. (Yu.N. Tynyanov wrote about Blok in an article in 1921: he “prefers traditional, even erased images (walking truths), since they contain the old emotionality; slightly updated, it is stronger and deeper than the emotionality of the new image, because novelty distracts from emotionality towards objectivity”). For Mandelstam, such images are literary and folklore characters who are well known to readers and therefore give them instant associations. The fate of Mandelstam’s lyrical hero is involuntarily projected onto the circumstances of the life of his double, and in the image of the lyrical hero, depending on the poetic context, certain personality traits of this double are emphasized. One of these doubles is Hoffmann's Nutcracker.

His image arises in the subtext of the third poem of “Armenia”:

Ah, Erivan, Erivan! Not a city - a hot nut,

Your large-mouthed streets are crooked, I love Babylons

and is mentioned in the text of the poem “How scared you and I are,” written in October 1930, at the same time as the “Armenia” cycle - the poet worked on it from October 16 to November 5. In this poem, the Nutcracker becomes the companion of the lyrical hero, preserving the individual characteristics of the character in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s fairy tale “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” - external ugliness and such character traits as courage, nobility, readiness to follow the difficult path in life. The Nutcracker's ability to crack even the toughest nuts becomes a metaphorical characteristic of the poet's style and reveals his ability to get to the essence, or the “core” of a concept. The following metaphor in Mandelstam’s article “On the Nature of the Word” is semantically close to this hermeneutic interpretation: “every word in Dahl’s dictionary is a nut of the acropolis, a small Kremlin, a winged fortress of nominalism...”.

In the image of Hoffmann's character in Mandelstam's poem there are also features that appeared on Russian soil. The poet puts on the hero of the literary fairy tale of the German romantic the mask of a folklore fool - an ironic success, hiding true thoughts and intentions behind external ugliness and funny antics.

In Mandelstam's poems 1933–1934 The “fool” becomes a double not of the double of the lyrical hero, as was the case in the poem “How scary it is for you and me...”, but of the lyrical hero himself and the main character of the poems on the death of Andrei Bely. In the poem “The apartment is as quiet as paper...”, written shortly after Mandelstam received an apartment in Moscow, on Nashchokinsky Lane, the lyrical hero is tormented by a premonition of tragic changes in his life:

And the damn walls are thin,

And there's nowhere else to run

And I'm like a fool on a comb

Someone has to play.

In the poem “Blue eyes and a hot frontal bone...”, written on the death of A. Bely, the following lines are noteworthy:

The collector of space, the chick who passed the exams,

Writer, goldfinch, student, student, bell...

N.I. Khardzhiev connects the image of the holy fool from the first two lines with the final poem of A. Bely’s cycle “Eternal Call” (1903), the hero of which turns out to be a madman:

Full of joyful torment,

The fool calms down.

Quietly falls to the floor from your hands

Crazy cap/

One can also recall the poems composed by Senator Ableukhov for his son Kolenka:

Fool, simpleton

Kolenka dances:

He put on the cap -

Prancing on a horse.

However, the semantics of foolish foolishness in the poems in memory of A. Bely is broader than these reminiscences, and this semantics can only be understood with the help of the metatext of Mandelstam’s poetry of the 1930s, where there is a tragically ironic image of a fool.

In the poem “The apartment is as quiet as paper...” the image of the lyrical hero and his double is contrasted with their antipode “an honest traitor”, “cooked in purges like salt.” These images are revealed both in life-like and folklore terms. The first artistic plan is associated with such signs of modernity, the 1930s, as the purges and elaborations of many Soviet citizens, the opportunism of some and the uncompromisingness of others. The second artistic plane is a projection of modernity onto eternity; eternal folklore images become doubles of the lyrical hero Mandelstam and the antagonist of this hero. Comparing the lyrical hero with a fool refers the reader to Russian folk tales about an ironic lucky man who, in order to achieve success in life, pretends to be a fool, fulfills the wishes of others, etc. The metaphor based on purges and referring to a traitor is reminiscent of a situation from a folk tale - being in a boiling cauldron, which serves as a test of the magical properties of the characters. About Mandelstam's conversion in the 1930s. The image of the demonic “six-fingered untruth”, evoking associations with Baba Yaga and the witch, from the 1931 poem “Untruth” also testifies to folk poetics.

In the poem in memory of A. Bely, the image of the folklore fool as an allegorical parallel to the image of the protagonist’s hero deepens. The “fool’s cap,” which is humiliating for A. Bely, partly loses its inherent negative meaning due to its special lexical and figurative context:

They put a tiara on you - a fool's cap,

Turquoise teacher, tormentor, ruler, fool!

These are nouns denoting the ruler and his attributes - “tiara”, “teacher”, “tormentor”, “ruler”. True, the “tiara” acquires a dual meaning - ironic, since this sign of royal power turns out to be the “fool’s cap,” and serious, solemn, reinforced by the following nouns in the second line, denoting the power of the spiritual ruler over people. This reveals the poet’s dramatic relationship with society, encrypted in Mandelstam’s poem and through the relationship of the folkloric ironic lucky man or holy fool with society, which dishonors, humiliates him and at the same time submits to the power of his wise words.

Another facet of A. Bely’s image is closely related to the semantics of the holy fool’s cap that people put on the poet:

Skater and first-born son, persecuted for centuries

Under the frosty dust of newly formed cases.

This facet strengthens the picture of the poet’s dramatic relationship with the century and his contemporaries. As L. Ginzburg noted, revealing these relationships, “exquisite metaphors are made up of the material of everyday words - exams, cases, skater, driven to hell, etc. . “Newly formed cases” are Bely’s word creation. And since he is a speed skater, frosty dust comes from his cases.” And the line: “A connection is born between you and the icy country” corresponds with the line quoted above, where a portrait of A. Bely is drawn - “tormentor”, “teacher”, “ruler” of the thoughts of his readers. These properties of the poet are reinforced by the images of his doubles Lermontov, Gogol and Mandelstam himself, present in the subtext of the poems in memory of A. Bely.

And he is also free over us

Lermontov, our tormentor,

And always sick with shortness of breath

Feta greasy pencil, -

The poet wrote in 1932 (“Give Tyutchev a dragonfly…”). The fact that this poem became the pretext of poems on the death of A. Bely is also evidenced by the image of a grease pencil, transferred with minor grammatical changes to a later work:

Like dragonflies, they land in the reeds without smelling the water,

Grease pencils flew at the dead man.

In the rough draft of poems in memory of A. Bely, there was a comparison of this poet with Gogol, who significantly influenced the Bely prose writer:

Where did you bring it from? Whom? Which one died?

Where? I don't know something...

Here, they say, some kind of Gogol died?

Not Gogol. So-so. Writer. Gogolek.

It is noteworthy that this comparison remained in the final edition, but in it it is given not directly, but by hint, with the help of metaphorical occasionalism:

Like a snowball in Moscow started a mess of gogolek, -

Incomprehensible, incomprehensible, confusing, easy….

However, in Belovik it is not entirely clear what or who is being talked about - about flying snow or a writer who destroys the canons accepted in Russian literature, and the meaning becomes clear only after reading the sketches for poems about A. Bely. Finally, the “collector of space,” one of the properties of A. Bely, an artist of words, was also inherent in Mandelstam, in whose cultural philosophy and creativity the ideas of architecture and architectonics, overcoming chaos, emptiness, that is, “collecting space,” were of fundamental importance.

To understand the concept of the poet depicted in the analyzed poems, Mandelstam’s concept of A. Bely’s style, which is modernistically contradictory, is also important: “Incomprehensible, incomprehensible, confused, easy...”.

So, in Mandelstam’s poem “Blue Eyes and a Hot Frontal Bone...” the image of the poet is romantic: he is not understood by society and is rejected by it, but still he is a genius that people need. The image of Andrei Bely summarizes the circumstances of the life and work of various Russian poets, as well as the vicissitudes of the fate of the author of the work himself. It is no coincidence that S.S. Averintsev assessed this work as “a magnificent poetic requiem for Andrei Bely himself, and for the era that passed with him, and for a lost, destroyed culture, and, implicitly, for himself.”

No matter how difficult it was for Mandelstam in Voronezh in 1934–1937, he was captured by new impressions of provincial, primordially Russian life. Most likely, this explains the poet’s increased interest in Russian folk art during this period, the “expansion” of the visual expressive means of Russian folklore in his poems of these years. E. Gershtein has already noted the folklorism of the poems “The buds stick with a sticky oath...” and “On the slopes, Volga, gully, Volga, gully...” But, along with such obvious folklorism, in the Voronezh poems there is also a hidden appeal to folklore, which does not exclude the predominance of the actual literary traditions. For example, the system of double heroes in Mandelstam’s lyrics goes back to literary duality and resembles the psychological parallelism of works of oral folk poetry.

The famous “My goldfinch, I’ll throw my head up...” was created on the principle of negative psychological parallelism, where the lyrical hero is implicitly compared to a bird with his qualities and habits, in particular, Mandelstam’s inherent sense of self-esteem, outwardly expressed in the habit of holding his head high. At the same time, the unfree poet in exile is contrasted with a free bird, which can fly away in any direction at any moment. The image of the goldfinch, the zoomorphic double of the lyrical hero, is revealed in other facets in the poem “This area in the dark water...” (edited version of the poem “Night. Road. Primary Dream...”), written, like the previous text, in December 1936.

This work is dominated by natural images of “snow-filled Tambov”, “the white white cover of Tsna”, “winterless steppe”, “black ice”, united by the theme of cold. Despite this, the first part of the poem expresses the love of the lyrical hero for the Voronezh land, admiring the luxury of the Russian winter:

This area is in dark water:

Abyss of bread, a bucket of thunderstorms

Not a noble land

Ocean core...

I love her drawing

It looks like Africa.

Give light to the transparent holes

You can't count on plywood.

Anna, Rossosh and Gremyache,

I repeat their names.

The whiteness of the eider snow

From the carriage window.

I circled in the fields of state farms

My mouth was full of air

Sunflower suns formidable

Right in your face.

I drove into the mitten at night,

Tambov full of snow,

I saw the ordinary Tsna River

White, white, white cover.

Workday of a familiar country

I remember forever:

Vorobyovsky district committee

I will never forget!

By the way, the comparison of the cartographic image of the Voronezh region with Africa reminds (a kind of secret writing is used here) of N. Gumilev, in whose poetry the African theme is widely represented, and the toponym “Anna”, thanks to its inherent polysemy, names the poet’s friend Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, who visited Mandelstam in link. In the stanza

Where I am? What's wrong with me?

The winterless steppe is bare...

This is Koltsov's stepmother...

You're kidding, home of the goldfinch!

The mood of the lyrical hero changes, in whose mind fear, foreboding, and compassion arise for the fate of one of his predecessors. Like the goldfinch from the poems on the death of A. Bely, the goldfinch in this text is a metaphorical image of the poet, this time A. Koltsov, and folklore poetics associated with his work. It is interesting that the lyrical hero of this poem turns out to be a double not of the bird, but of Koltsov, who is close to it, while the zoomorphic double of Mandelstam’s lyrical hero, the goldfinch, having existed for a short time in the text of this work, seems to “sink into its subtext.” In accordance with the pathos expressed in these lines, the lyrical hero and his double, the poet, are drawn against the dreary landscape background of the “winterless steppe,” and the image of provincial Russia, which gave Koltsov to Russian culture, is semantically contradictory, since it combines hatred of the stepmother’s stepson, reinforced by the semes of cold and the absence of cover (the text contains the meaning of a layer of snow on the ground, and in the subtext - tender protection, parental love), and the positive meaning of the homeland that nurtured the talented poet. This is how the lyrical hero becomes familiar with the sad fate of Alexei Koltsov and seems to prophesy an equally bitter fate for himself. By the way, the image of a bird is also present in an earlier poem from the Voronezh Notebooks, dated April 1935:

Let me go, give me back, Voronezh:

Will you drop me or miss me,

Will you drop me or bring me back?

Voronezh is a whim, Voronezh is a raven, a knife...

Only here there is a different bird of prey, a raven, associated with death (crows feed, in particular, on carrion), threatening the lyrical hero and in no way being his double.

Mandelstam's lyrical hero of the 1930s. finds moral support in the nature and life of Russian provincial Voronezh, Russian oral poetry, and professional art. Moreover, if for Mandelstam’s lyrics 1910–1920. Architecture was of paramount importance, which was already noted by V.M. Zhirmunsky in his review of “Tristia”, then in the works of Mandelstam in the last years of his life, music and literature become especially significant. And the idea of ​​construction continues to exist in the poet’s work, moving from the material world into the inner world of the lyrical hero.

A love of music and a keen sense of the sounding flesh of language were inherent in Mandelstam [see: 13, p. 220]. His lyrical hero is endowed with these same features. The author’s passion for music and words is revealed in the poems “Azure and clay, clay and azure...”, “Alexander Gertsevich lived...”, “For Paganini the long-fingered...”. In the second of the above-mentioned works, an additional musical effect is given by the monorhythm of the character’s repeated patronymic (“Alexander Gertsovich lived…”, “What, Alexander Gertsovich…”) and the author’s occasionalisms formed on its basis (“Give it up, Alexander Serdtsevich…”, “That’s it, Alexander Gertsovich ...”, “Give it up, Alexander Skertsovich ...”), a monorhyme reminiscent of musical variations, into which dramatic chords invade:

To us with blue music

It's not scary to die

There's at least a crow's fur coat

Hanging on a hanger...

That's it, Alexander Gertsovich,

Completed a long time ago

Give it up, Alexander Skertsovich,

What is there! Doesn't matter!

These poems affirm the idea of ​​the saving power of art, which for some time overcomes the horror of the power of a totalitarian state in the lyrical soul.

So, in creating the image of the lyrical hero in Mandelstam’s late poetry, a significant role is played by his literary and folklore counterparts A. Bely, A. Koltsov, musician, Hoffmann’s nutcracker, and the dandy. Some of these heroes know how to get to the essence of the phenomena of existence, expose its innermost meaning, freeing it from the outer shell; in any circumstances they behave courageously (the nutcracker) and maintain inner independence (the fool). Others associated with art create beauty and give joy to those who come into contact with their work (Bely, Lermontov, Koltsov, musicians). All these properties are integrated in the multifaceted image of the lyrical hero of Mandelstam’s poetry in the 1930s. This image is closely connected with modernity - the personality and circumstances of the life of the “disgraced poet” (A. Akhmatov), ​​which largely explains the full-bloodedness of Mandelstam’s lyrical hero. At the levels of poetics, this image is created in the traditions of Russian folklore, Russian and Western European literature, which is also joined by a certain pan-Eastern poetic tradition that helps to capture the festive and life-affirming image of Armenia. With his love for Armenia, as well as for words, music and the Voronezh land, Mandelstam’s lyrical hero tried to protect himself from the horror and absurdity of the Soviet 1930s, from the gradually more acute premonition of imminent death.

Links to sources 1. Ginzburg L.Ya. About lyrics. M., 1997.2. Kubatyan G. From word to word: commentary on O. Mandelstam’s cycle “Armenia” // Issues. lit. 2005. No. 5. 3. Mandelstam O.E. Full collection op. and letters: in 3 volumes. M.: ProgressPleiada, 2009. Vol.1. Poems.4.Tynyanov Yu.N. Blok // Tynyanov Yu.N. Archaists and innovators. L., 1929. 5. Mandelstam O.E. Full collection op. and letters: in 3 volumes. M.: ProgressPleiada, 2010. T. 2. Prose. 6. Khardzhiev N.I. Notes // Mandelstam O.E. Poems. L., 1974.7. Bely A. Collection. op. Poems and poems. M.: Republic, 1994.8. Bely A. Collection. op. Petersburg. M.: Respublika, 1994. 9. Ginzburg L.Ya. Poetics of Osip Mandelstam // Ginzburg L.Ya. About old and new. L., 1982. 10.

Averintsev S.S. The fate and message of Osip Mandelstam // Mandelstam O.E. Works: in 2 volumes / comp. S. Averintsev, P. Nerler. M.: Artist. lit., 1990. Vol. 1: Poems, translations. 11. Gershtein E. [Introduction] to: Mandelstam O.E. Reviews of the Voronezh period // Issues. lit. 1980. No. 12.12. Zhirmunsky V.M. On the path to classicism (O. Mandelstam - “Tristia”) // Zhirmunsky V.M. Theory of literature. Poetics. Stylistics. L., 1977.13.See. about this: Stempel N.E. Mandelstam in Voronezh // New World. 1987. No. 10. P.220.

Davydova Tatyana Timofeevna, doctor of philological sciences, professor of History of Literature Department, I.Fyodorov"s Moscow State University of Printing [email protected] lyrical hero O.Mandelstam lyrics poetry of the 1930thAbstract. The image of lyrical hero and images of characters O.Mandelstam lyrics poetry of the 1930th (cycle “Armenia”, rhymes dedicated to A.Belyi death and from “Voronezh notebooks) are investigated in the article”. Genetic literary liaisons between his lyrical poetry and Hoffman‱s prose, A.Koltsov verses, Russian folklore are being investigated. The analysis is carried out at the levels of motifs, figurativeness, style, artistic speech. Various redactions of O.Mandelstam poetic texts are compared. Keywords: lyrical hero, Mandelstam, Russian poetry of the 1930th.

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

The tireless pendulum swings
And wants to be my destiny.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam is the creator and most prominent poet of the literary movement - Acmeism, a friend of N. Gumilyov and A. Akhmatova. But despite this, the poetry of O. Mandelstam is not well known to a wide circle of readers, and yet the “breath of time” is reflected in the work of this poet in the best possible way. His poems are straightforward and truthful, there is no place for cynicism, hypocrisy, or flattery. “I wrote as I felt” - this is about Mandelstam. It was precisely for his reluctance to become like the poets singing and glorifying Soviet power and personally Comrade Stalin that he was doomed to non-recognition and exile, to hardships and deprivations. His life is tragic, as is the life of many Russian poets.

The lyrical hero of O. E. Mandelstam's poetry is a man living in the rhythm of his age. His life depends on what is happening around him, but this does not prevent the hero from responding to all events, giving them his assessment, often harsh and too unambiguous. In other words, the lyrical hero is the poet himself.

Osip Mandelstam was born in Warsaw; he spent his childhood and youth in St. Petersburg. Later, in 1937, Mandelstam wrote about the time of his birth:

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

January at ninety-one

Unreliable year...

"Poems about the Unknown Soldier"

Here “into the night” contains an ominous omen of the poet’s tragic fate in the 20th century. and serves as a metaphor for the entire 20th century, according to Mandelstam’s definition, “the century of the beast.” Mandelstam's memories of his childhood and youth are restrained and strict; he avoided revealing himself and commenting on his own actions and poems. He was an early ripened, or rather, a poet who saw the light, and his poetic manner is distinguished by seriousness and severity. What little we find in the poet’s memoirs about his childhood, about the atmosphere that surrounded him, about the air that he had to breathe, is rather painted in gloomy tones:

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"

These lines are from Mandelstam’s poem “From the Evil and Viscous Pool.” "Forbidden Life" is about poetry. From his mother, Mandelstam inherited a heightened sense of the Russian language and precision of speech. The poet's first collection was published in 1913, it was published at his own expense. It was assumed that it would be called "Sink", but the final name was chosen differently - "Stone". The name is quite in the spirit of Acmeism. Stone is a natural material, durable and solid, an eternal material in the hands of a master. For Mandelstam, stone is, as it were, the primary building material of spiritual culture. In the poems of this time one could feel the skill of the young poet, the ability to master the poetic word, and use the wide musical possibilities of Russian verse.

First half of the 20s. was marked for the poet by an upsurge of creative thought and a surge of inspiration, however, the emotional background of this upsurge is painted in dark tones and is combined with a feeling of doom:

You can't breathe, and the firmament is infested with worms,

And not a single star says...

In poems of the 20s and 30s. The social principle and the open author's position acquire special significance. In 1929, he turned to prose and wrote a book called “The Fourth Prose.” It is small in volume, but it fully expresses the poet’s pain and contempt for the writers (“members of MASSOLIT”) who tore Mandelstam’s soul apart for many years. “The Fourth Prose” gives an idea of ​​the character of the poet himself - impulsive, explosive, quarrelsome. Mandelstam very easily made enemies for himself, because he always said what he thought and did not hide his judgments and assessments. Almost all the post-revolutionary years Mandelstam lived in difficult conditions, and in the 30s. - in anticipation of imminent death. There were few friends and admirers of his talent, but they existed. Awareness of the tragedy of his fate, apparently, strengthened the poet, gave him strength, and imparted tragic, majestic pathos to his new creations. This pathos lies in the opposition of a free poetic personality to his age - the “beast age”. The poet did not feel like an insignificant, pathetic victim in front of him, he realizes himself as an equal:

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

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...”

Mandelstam's sincerity bordered on suicide. In November 1933, he wrote a sharply satirical poem about Stalin, which began with the lines:

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...

According to E. Yevtushenko: “Mandelshtam was the first Russian poet to write poems against the personality cult of Stalin that began in the 30s, for which he paid.” Surprisingly, the sentence given to Mandelstam was rather lenient. People at that time died for much smaller “offenses.” Stalin’s resolution simply said: “Isolate, but preserve,” and Osip Mandelstam was sent into exile in the distant northern village of Cherdyn. After exile, he was prohibited from living in twelve major cities of Russia, Mandelstam was transferred to less harsh conditions - to Voronezh, where the poet eked out a miserable existence.

The poet ended up in a cage, but he was not broken, he was not deprived of the inner freedom that raised him above everyone even in captivity:

Depriving me of the seas, run-up and flight

And giving the foot the support of the violent earth,

What have you achieved? Brilliant calculation:

You couldn’t take away the moving lips.

The poems of the Voronezh cycle remained unpublished for a long time. They were not, as they say, political, but even “neutral” poems were perceived as a challenge. These poems are imbued with a feeling of imminent death, sometimes they sound like spells, alas, unsuccessful.

I must live even though I've died twice

And the city went crazy from the water, -

How good he is, how cheerful, how high-cheeked,

How a fat layer is pleasant on a ploughshare,

How the steppe is silent in the April rush...

And the sky, the sky is your Buonorroti!

“I must live, although I have died twice.” 1935

After the Voronezh exile, the poet spent another year in the vicinity of Moscow, trying to obtain permission to live in the capital. Editors of literary magazines were afraid to even talk to him. He was a beggar. Friends and acquaintances helped: V. Shklovsky, B. Pasternak, I. Erenburg, V. Kataev, although it was not easy for them themselves. Subsequently, Anna Akhmatova wrote about 1938: “It was an apocalyptic time. Trouble followed on the heels of all of us. The Mandelstams had no money. They had absolutely nowhere to live. Osip was breathing poorly, catching air with his lips.” In May 1938 Mandelstam is arrested again, sentenced to five years of hard labor and sent to the Far East, from where he will never return. Death overtook the poet in one of the transit camps near Vladivostok on December 2, 1938. One of the poet’s last poems contains the following lines:

The mounds of human heads recede into the distance,

I'm shrinking there - they won't notice me anymore,

But in tender books and in games children

I will rise again to say that the sun is shining.

All the poetry of O. E. Mandelstam is a kind of tragic Oratorio with its own internal music in a wonderful presentation by the Singer-Poet-Seer. Yes! This is truly an amazing phenomenon. It conquers. Fascinating. I want to read and re-read his poems. The language itself captivates - this “wonderful tongue-tiedness”, captivates a certain fusion of lyrical philosophy and Great Love for Man - the most powerless and humiliated creature on our sinful earth. The Poet understands and pities the man, and whoever pities the Poet himself - him - the most unfortunate - the most innocent - the most ruined

Fall is the constant companion of fear,

And fear itself is a feeling of emptiness -

Few live for eternity.

And among these few is Osip Emilievich Mandelstam.

The talented poet O. E. Mandelstam had to live and create in harsh times. He witnessed the revolution of 1917, during the reign of Lenin and Stalin. Mandelstam poured out everything he saw and felt into his poems. That is why the work of this poet is so tragic, filled with fear, anxiety, pain for the fate of the country and for his own fate.
It is known that Stalin really did not like this poet, because Mandelstam openly expressed his attitude towards everything that was happening in the country and towards the leader, in particular. An example of this is the satirical

Pamphlet on the ruler. After reading it, many said that on the part of the poet this act was suicide. And Mandelstam was well aware of this, but he was ready for death.
The lyrical hero of the poem “We live without feeling the country beneath us...” appears as a brave citizen standing in defense of his country and his people. He dares to openly say what everyone knows but is silent about:
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.
The hero laughs bitterly and even to some extent mocks the main character of the poem. In the eyes of the lyrical hero, Stalin turns into some kind of mythical monster: “thick fingers, like worms”; “The cockroach’s eyes laugh and his boots shine.” He is not a man, but some kind of monstrous animal: “He is the only one who babbles and pokes.”
The characteristics of the actions of this monster are no less terrible:
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...
One can only admire the courage of the lyrical hero of this poem. Stalin became “interested” in Mandelstam, and the poet was arrested. But the leader did not order the poet to be shot immediately. It would be too easy. He exiled Mandelstam to Voronezh.
Living in this city, the poet existed as if on the edge of two worlds, always awaiting execution. It was in Voronezh that Mandelstam wrote the poem “Among the People’s Noise and Haste...” Here the intonation of the lyrical hero changes. He feels guilty before the leader for everything that was created by him before. Now the lyrical hero evaluates the “leader of all nations” differently. His “fatherly” gaze both “caresses and drills.” The hero feels that Stalin is reproaching him for all his “mistakes.” But, in my opinion, all these feelings of the hero are far-fetched and insincere. This poem was written under pressure from Stalin, as was the next one, “Ode” (1937).
The title of this work speaks for itself. It is dedicated to chanting the merits of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin-Dzhugashvili. The poem focuses on Dzhugashvili. The poet emphasizes that he, first of all, describes not a leader, but a person. The hero calls him “father.” He allegedly feels reverence for Stalin:
And I want to thank the hills
That this bone and this hand were developed:
He was born in the mountains and knew the bitterness of prison.
I want to call him - not Stalin - Dzhugashvili!
Lyrical addresses the artists - his brethren. He calls on creators to work for the good of the country, that is, for the good of the “father.” After all, this person is completely, with all his thoughts and feelings, with his “children”, his people. “Artist, help the one who is all with you, who thinks, feels and builds,” the poet calls.
The portrait of Stalin in this poem is written in the tradition of an ode. According to the hero, this is an epic hero who devoted himself entirely to the cause of the people. Stalin has powerful eyes, a thick eyebrow, and a firm mouth. Dzhugashvili is a role model, according to Mandelstam. From him we must learn to give all of ourselves to others, without thinking about ourselves and without feeling sorry for ourselves.
The lyrical hero realizes his restlessness in the Soviet country, his guilt before it for the fact that he once scolded the great Stalin. But the hero always has this image before his eyes: “In a wonderful square with happy eyes.”
But behind these pathetic and sublime lines one can see the tragedy of a man driven into a corner. Behind every tortured line one sees a lyrical hero scared to death, not knowing what to do or how to live. That is why Mandelstam’s poems dedicated to Stalin are the most effective documents against the Stalinist regime and the “father of nations.”

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Confessor of imperishable thought,

By the grace of God singer,

The verse of the minted heir,

The last Pushkin chick!

He walked, submissive to the higher

In the wake of the burning pillar...

Over the eccentric, sick and frail,

The lively crowd laughed.

In a cold chorus of praises

His chord did not sound,

Only the ocean with the breath of iambics

He answered with the breath of the storm,

Only he, the great, dark-water

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.

E. M. Tager.

The path of a great artist is always symbolic. And most often, especially in Russia, it is bitter. Yesenin and Mayakovsky committed suicide, Khlebnikov died in poverty, Akhmatova and Pasternak were persecuted, Mandelstam died in the camp. He was a man from the crowd, he lived and died “with the crowd and the crowd,” and shared the fate of many.

In the work of O. E. Mandelstam, three periods are quite clearly distinguished: the first - 1908-1916; the second - 1917-1928; the third - 1930-1937.

Mandelstam begins his poetic career in the “womb of dying symbolism.” In 1913, the poet’s first collection, “Stone,” was published. The title of the first collection already indicated a break in the spiritual and aesthetic traditions of symbolism, but more importantly, it declared the stable internal structure of the poet’s human and poetic worldview, the integrity that was organically inherent in the poet throughout his life, full of drama.

In the poems of 1908-1912 there is a mood of thoughtful silence (“The sound is cautious and dull…”), watercolor tenderness of existence (“Tenderer than tender…”, “On pale blue enamel”); symbolistic “bewilderment” in front of physicality (“I have been given a body - what should I do with it…”); the infinity and meaningfulness of sadness, its dissolution in man and nature (“Like horses slowly tread…”, “A meager ray, in cold measure...”). The very space of the poems is gloomy, cold, orphaned, dumb; the state of the soul of the lyrical hero is a feeling of loss, some amorphousness, inadequacy:

Am I real?

Will death really come?

This can be considered as the legacy of symbolism, which Mandelstam himself gratefully spoke of: “The great merit of symbolism... is the patriarchal weight and legislative gravity in which it educated the reader” (“Attack”).

But already within the first collection (“Stone”) there is an obvious breakdown in the poems of 1912 (Mandelshtam joins Acmeism). The verse acquires new energy, the space of the world changes (natural space itself was of little interest to the early Mandelstam), it becomes (and now forever) a cultural space, the supporting poetic dominants of a tower, dome, arch, temple, stone appear. Mandelstam formulates the basic principle of Acmeism: “Love the existence of a thing more than the thing itself and your existence more than yourself.” He affirms the “conscious meaning” of the word - Logos, the architectural nature of artistic thinking. The poems of the first period are characterized by the theme of Hellenism. But Mandelstam’s Hellenism is homemade, the entire cultural and aesthetic spectrum of antiquity is cemented by the personality of the poet himself.

Gradually, Hellenism disappears from Mandelstam’s poetry, and is replaced by Assyria and Babylon (“Humanism and Modernity”) as threatening symbols of the future. “If truly humanistic compassion does not form the basis of the future social architecture, it will crush man, like Assyria and Babylon.” The poet already predicts the advent of eras that “do not care about man... Social architecture is measured by the scale of man. Sometimes she becomes hostile to man and feeds her greatness on his humiliation and insignificance.” The motive of time and life as a sacrifice appears:

Again sacrificed like a lamb,

They brought the crown of life.

Who spent time kissing the studied crown, -

With filial tenderness later

He will remember the time he went to bed

In a wheat snowdrift outside the window.

The last period of Mandelstam’s work was nakedly tragic. The poems of this period are not a premonition of death and tragedy, but life within the death and tragedy of history. It is this situation that pushes the poet into homelessness, hopelessness.

His free choice is the choice of a sacrificial path and martyrdom, the meaning of which will be revealed in the future:

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 fun, and your honor.

Time grows numb (“I have gone deep into numb time”). Mandelstam fights with despair, with madness that sometimes sets in, with inhuman humiliation, the humiliation of the Beautiful, the Human:

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

To the all-human ones, becoming clearer in Tuscany.

There is no poet's grave, it is nameless. He never opposed himself to people; he longed to be one of many. This is the highest humanity and sacrifice of his redemptive poetry and personality.

Russia did not grant a high-profile execution to its poet, as France granted it to the free fugitive of the “great principles” Andre Chénier. They crushed Mandelstam in the general flow. They threw me into a common pit. The nameless ashes were lost “on this poor land” - the ashes of the poet, who longed to raise the country to the “commanding luminaries”, to “eternity”, to the “artificial heaven”, but never found it, because he looked only up.

Moscow scientist Yu. I. Levin writes: “Mandelshtam, in the unity of his art and his fate, is a phenomenon of high, paradigmatic significance, an example of how fate is fully realized in creativity and, at the same time, creativity in fate... Mandelstam is a call for unity life and culture, to such a deep and serious attitude towards culture, to which our century, apparently, is not yet able to rise.” 1

We live at the beginning of the thirtieth century in a situation of anthropological crisis, which, in particular, is characterized by the loss of humanity’s interest in interpreting the world, in images of the world. And perhaps the poetry and personality of O. E. Mandelstam is a call (to those who hear) to spiritual efforts, a breakthrough to the infinitely beautiful real and spiritual world.