O. Mandelstam’s Poem Skillful Mistress of Guilty Glances...: Comments on Obscure Places

Abstract

This article interprets O. Mandelstam’s poem, which is not quite clear in its content, and therefore controversial. To achieve this purpose, the author employs consituational and contextual analysis, as well as techniques of the experimental method, more particularly, transformational analysis. To confirm the linguistic reality of the revealed metaphorical images, the author uses the analogy technique, which determines the choice of sources of illustrative examples. The study demonstrates that in this poem, direct and indirect, primarily metaphorical nominations are intertwined, being significantly complicated and obscured by the tactics of “superimposing an image on an image” (A. N. Tolstoy). From this point of view, the poem should be characterised as a semantic palimpsest formed by a number of figurative layers: 1) speech sinks into silence (verses 3–4): a metaphorical motif of water appears; 2) as a development of this motif, the presentation of women (and hence the heroine) as fish and the hero as a fisherman becomes understandable (verses 5–8); 3) fish turn out to be nuns (verses 9–12), with the implication of humility, abstinence, and inner cold (“the moist shine of the pupils is in vain”); 4) the presentation of the hero as a janissary, and the heroine as a Turkish woman belonging to him (verses 13–20); further development of the motif of water: drinking the crooked (‘sinful’) water of passion for the heroine, i. e. ‘against her will’ (verses 17–20); 5) metaphorical recoding of the theme realised in verses 17–20: representation of the heroine in the image of the savior of those dying from sinful passion (verses 21–22). Behind these ambiguous images, the author of the article recognises an episode of the poet’s biography, i. e. unrequited love for poetess M. S. Petrovykh, a topic whose delicacy required the use of euphemistic codes. The multilayered imagery complicated by the incompleteness of the context makes the thematic outline of the text almost elusive.