Reflections on Osip Mandelstam’s Poem “Erected on a Wet Stone …” (1909)

Abstract

The poem “Erected on a wet stone …” was sent in the Autumn of 1909 first to Max Voloshin and them to Vyacheslav Ivanov and is part of “poems in letters” which were only published in the second half of 20th century. The central theme of the poem is the juxtaposition of love and death. Cupid finds himself standing on a tombstone (“green moss and wet stone”) and being surprised by what he discovers tries to avenge on death through love (“illegal flame of the heart”). The poetics of the poem represents another step in the development of Mandelstam’s inherent technique of subtexts and contexts. The “mentioning keys&8j1; here are combinations of nouns with uncommon adjectives (“illegal flame&8j1;, “naive valleys&8j1;, etc.), as well as pairs of rhymes: “nagoi – nogoi” (naked – foot), “kamen – plamen” (stone – flame), “grubiy – gubi” (rough – lips). The subtexts of the poem might be read on two levels, so that the motifs of classical poetry shine through the symbolist associations, linking together the poetry of the Russian Golden and Silver Ages. The key image of Cupid for the poem (the only context in the author's poetry) has, apparently, a literary origin.