On Some Features of Osip Mandelstam’s Representation in the Memories by Anna Akhmatova

Abstract

The article presents some considerations on the motives for the creation and text strategies of Akhmatova’s memories of Mandelstam. The Pages from a Diary are viewed from two points of view: first, as a fragment of Akhmatova‘s memoir prose of a certain historical time, as an actualization of personal memory in order to correct collective cultural memory; secondly, as a supertext formed by numerous drafts, lists and variations.Within the framework of this genre, it is possible to single out a number of principles that Akhmatova is guided by when creating a memoir text: for example, a dialogical mode of a “conversation” with existing memories, documents, oral evidence; intention of myth-fighting, etc. A look at the Pages from a Diary as a work of narrative prose (based on Akhmatova’s definition of memories as a “short story”), called “The Death’s Way,” allows us to add the hero of her memoir to a number of “damned poets” that are not alien to Mandelstam.