Doublespeak: Poetic Language, Lyric Hero, and Soviet Subjectivity in Mandel΄shtam's K nemetskoi rechi

Abstract

This paper analyzes a poem by Osip Mandel΄shtam, his 1932 “To the German Tongue,” as it explores and reveals the tensions and dangers of Soviet discursivity and subjectivity. Tracing its semantic unfolding shaped by ambiguities, nuances, and subtle transitions, and illuminating its evocations of the cultural past, I approach the poem as a consistent, if meaningfully opaque, reflection on the Soviet experience. Mandel΄shtam built upon and self-consciously enacted theoretically-informed conceptions of the lyric, the poetic subject, and poetic language developed in Formalist scholarship and adopted in some of his own critical writing. I argue that in the poem, as well as in the criticism which framed it, these Formalist concepts revealed an undercurrent of political signification, made even more evident in the reflections on Soviet political and aesthetic experience in the memoirist writing of a Lidiia Ginzburg or a Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam.