Mandelstam's Worlds: Poetry, Politics, and Identity in a Revolutionary Age by Andrew Kahn

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mandelstam's Worlds: Poetry, Politics, and Identity in a Revolutionary Age by Andrew Kahn Alexandra K. Harrington Mandelstam's Worlds: Poetry, Politics, and Identity in a Revolutionary Age. By Andrew Kahn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2020. xix+672 pp. £85. ISBN 978-0-29-885793-8. Andrew Kahn's achievement in this substantial study is to provide a robust counter to the prevailing view of Mandelstam as a poet outcast and victim who was ambivalent about politics, who felt sidelined after the late 1920s, and who consequently retreated into increasingly self-referential poetic practice. This image of Mandelstam was largely shaped, as Kahn observes, by the dual forces of canonizing life-writing on the one hand, and influential scholarship focused on the intertextual aspects of the poetry on the other. By adopting an interpretative approach aimed at the multiple contexts—political, scientific, biographical, philosophical, emotional, and so on—that informed the poet's thought, Kahn successfully demonstrates both Mandelstam's intensive engagement with the specifics of the political realities of his age and the extent to which forms of visualization played a crucial and pervasive role in his poetics. Individual chapters typically centre on detailed readings of key poems. By bringing text into sustained dialogue with context, and including close examinations of Mandelstam's journalistic output from the 1920s, Kahn produces effective, revisionist readings. His discussion of the 'Slate Ode', which sees it as a challenge to Marxist political thought on consciousness, is a case in point. Another example is his exploration of 'Verses on Russian Poetry' as a response to contemporary debates about aesthetics and the canon. In a thoughtful reading of the ambiguous and contentious 'Ode to Stalin', Kahn mediates between polarized interpretations of it as an expression either of frightened defeat or of ironic defiance. Onto the conventions of the ode, he argues, is 'imposed the superstructure of Stalin's own carefully controlled image-making machine' so that (in ways that respond to the legacy of Derzhavin) the poem pays tribute to Stalin's power while serving ultimately as a 'commemoration of the poet rather than the leader' (p. 565). Inevitably, given the sheer range of poems treated, some readings are more comprehensively persuasive than others. Mandelstam's lyric 'Impressionism', as Kahn notes, is not precisely ekphrastic, aiming rather 'to give an impression of Impressionism' (p. 326), in the form of the viewer's (and an imagined interlocutor's) [End Page 315] impressionistic response. It is therefore unclear, to this reader at least, why Kahn reads the indistinct 'veils' mentioned in the poem as food coverings: Mandelstam's cooking metaphor arises from play on maslo (oil paint/butter), but nonetheless this interpretation seems something of a stretch. Unsurprisingly for a scholarly undertaking on this scale, some minor errors and slips occur. For instance, the title of Clare Cavanagh's study of Mandelstam is truncated in a note (p. 2), 'patent' should presumably read 'patient' (p. 86), and Emma Gershtein is quoted (p. 222) without any note or reference in the bibliography. Citations from Iurii Tynianov (p. 233) and Lidiia Ginzburg (p. 348) also lack references. The title of the poem 'Distant landmarks of a train of carts' is rendered alternatively as 'Distant landmarks of a convoy' in the main text (p. 528). Jan Plamper appears as John Plamper (p. 555). Mandelstam's widow and memoirist, herself a remarkable writer, as Kahn observes, is often referred to as 'Mrs Mandelstam' (pp. 247, 263, and elsewhere). Some expected references to scholarship are absent—there is a larger body of research on Mandelstam and cinema, for instance, than is explicitly acknowledged. Mandelstam is a challenging poet, and this is consequently a densely argued, wide-ranging volume. Overall, Kahn's extensive study undoubtedly provides a significant and welcome contribution to our understanding of Mandelstam's post-Acmeist poetry and its development. Alexandra K. Harrington Durham University Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association