Culture and Poetry: The Synchronic Imperative in Osip Mandelstam’s Work

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article attempts to understand not so much the poetic and stylistic features of Osip. E. Mandelstam’s poetics, which has been of great interest to philologists and thus sufficiently studied to date, as the philosophical–culturological aspects of his work. To fill this lacuna, it is vital that we compare Mandelstam’s poetic works with his prose, theory, criticism, and polemics. The poet’s statements in these genres largely clarify his attitude toward culture. In particular, this article examines the question of the poet’s interest in philosophy and the natural sciences, which is expressed both in his poems and in his attitude to culture. His publications on theory also shed light on his experiments in poetry. Drawing parallels between his contemporary culture and other cultures that exist or had existed in history, Mandelstam’s whimsical culturological associations avoid any detailed narrative development, highlighting only individual features and producing a number of apparently necessary details. This is precisely what testifies to the specific features of Mandelstam’s own poetry. Such a technique requires a sort of co-authorship and cocreation on the reader’s part, the very kind that a contemporary postmodernist aesthetic calls for. The present article also highlights the issue of theoretical and philosophical understanding of the poet’s Acmeism as an independent poetic system in relation to other artistic trends that existed in the first decades of the twentieth century, above all in relation to Symbolism and Futurism, which influenced Mandelstam’s own work.