Motifs of “the North” in Young Osip Mandelstam’s Philosophical–Poetic Works

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the problem of cultural–civilizational self-identification in the early philosophical–poetic works of Osip Emil’evich Mandelstam (1891–1938). The author argues that Mandelstam as a poet was shaped by the literary traditions of “Russian northernness,” which begins with Gavriil Derzhavin and Prince Pyotr Viazemskii. Mandelstam was a direct literary disciple of the Russian Symbolist poet of Swedish origins I.I. Oreus (under the literary pseudonym “Ivan Konevskoi”), who also greatly influenced the work of Aleksandr Blok, Valery Bryusov, and the early Boris Pasternak. The author of this article believes that after the revolution, when “northerner-Petersburg” Russia acquired a Bolshevik appearance, a radical shift began in Mandelstam’s self-consciousness, leading to his attempt to form a new personal self-identification as a man of the cultural “South” who tragically found himself in the barbaric “North.”