Abstract
Due to its highly metaphoric language, O. Mandelstam’s Conversation about Dante [Razgovor o Dante] holds a unique place among studies of the Divine Comedy. This provokes its diverging interpretations and even questions the work’s scholarly aspect. In order to discover the best way to treat Conversation about Dante, one should assume it contains several aspects (a description of the author’s own poetics, reflections on the general workings of poetry, and observations of Dante’s language and imagery) and proceed to analyse each statement made in the essay. The article sets out to undertake the same, to a small extent, by examining a specific comment on the imagery of the Divine Comedy made in Conversation about Dante — namely, Mandelstam’s interpretation of Canto XVII of ‘Inferno’ and the character of Geryon, in particular. Through its analysis in comparison with Dante’s text and interpretations of Geryon by academic philologists, and by tracing the sources and history of this image, we find that Mandelstam’s treatment of this fragment is well justified from the viewpoint of Dante studies.
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