Poetry as Bargaining in Osip Mandelstam’s and Marina Tsvetayeva’s Moscow Texts

Abstract

The paper concerns metaphorical representations of the image of Moscow in Osip Mandelstam’s and Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry and prose where themes of the open market bargaining play a significant role. Mandelstam’s negative view on Tsvetaeva’s poetry collection “Mileposts. Vol. 1” is driven by his desire to distance himself from the chaotic and frightening city, personified in Tsvetaeva’s poetic person. Mandelstam’s essay “Sukharevka” is closely analyzed (in the context of Baudelaire’s poem “The Flowers of Evil”) in which the poet interprets this space as a precedent one (“a market in the middle of the city”), and bargaining itself is presented as permanent violence. While Mandelstam’s narrative voice is frightened by the crowded Russian market, Tsvetaeva’s lyrical self immerses in the market crowd and makes poetry, her only goods, a subject of commerce. Tsvetaeva’s poetic space is universalized, but the composition of imaginative complex that is important for the poetics of the book “Mileposts. Vol. 1” (black art – khlysts – market bargaining) is localized in the space of the Sukharevsky market.