The Orchestra

Abstract

This chapter talks about poet Osip Mandelstam, who professed a nostalgia for world culture shortly before he fell victim to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. Mandelstam's enigmatic late essay Conversation about Dante exploits ambiguous figures of aesthetic inspiration and political tyranny, identifying poetry's effect on its readership with totalitarian control over the citizenry. It demonstrates how Mandelstam's essay addresses perennial problems of relationship to the authority of writing and the preservation of literary culture through time and through a cluster of metaphors around the central image of a conductor's baton. The chapter considers the baton for Mandelstam as a central authority that imposes harmony on the orchestra's cacophony of instruments. It describes the movements of the baton that symbolize the undulating line of script traced by the writing pen, which is realized as waves of sound when the poem is read out loud.