The Language of Space Compressed Down to a Point

Abstract

Irina Surat examines the poetry written during Osip Mandelstam’s two years of exile in Voronezh, finding that its precise evocations of space provide the terms that can be used to analyze the poems. This helps Mandelstam to address exile as a personal experience and a poetic trope, as well as to assert imaginatively his connections with the wider world—both in Soviet space and farther afield. Geography (taken through the filter of Dante’s Inferno, etc.) expresses the poetic connections that support his internal freedom, moving (as Surat puts it) from real space into an open space of imagination.