SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 522 Realism was first outlined by Robert Russell in an article published in this journal in July 1982. Dralyuk’s final chapter essentially expands the argument adumbrated by Russell thirty years earlier, for which the latter could be more explicitly acknowledged; a rare oversight in this genuinely engaging, exhaustively researched book. University of Exeter Muireann Maguire Goldberg, Stuart. Mandelstam, Blok, and the Boundaries of Mythopoetic Symbolism. The Ohio State University Press, Columbus, OH, 2011. xi + 305 pp. Appendix. Notes. Selected bibliography. Indexes. $51.95. Russian literary history, or the version of it that has traditionally been presented to undergraduate students, parcels up the early years of the twentieth century as a succession of ‘isms’: students learn that first there was Symbolism, which experienced a crisis and was supplanted by Acmeism, all of which took place alongside the emergence of Futurism, until the declaration of Socialist Realism put a stop to any further ‘isms’. This simplified picture turns the messy entanglements of actual artistic life and creativity into a neat package. Stuart Goldberg’s study of Osip Mandel´shtam’s distancing from Symbolism, and from the person of Aleksandr Blok in particular, anatomizes the younger poet’s complex relationship with a movement that dominated Russian poetry at the time when he began his career. Goldberg succeeds admirably in showing how Mandel´shtam was able to ‘generate distance from Symbolism in order to create the aesthetic tension required for an effective and palpably new return’ (p. 4). Readers are guided through a broadly chronological sequence of Mandel´shtam’s ‘overcoming and assimilation of the Symbolist legacy’ (p. 6), which ranges from his earliest work in the various editions of his collection Kamen´, through the poems of Tristia, to end with a discussion of his critical prose in the 1920s. The time-frame of Goldberg’s investigation is determined by Mandel´shtam’s reassessment of his relationship with Symbolism in the years around 1912, the date of his ‘conversion’ to Acmeism, and by his responses to Blok’s death. As Goldberg convincingly demonstrates, Mandel´shtam’s attitudes towards Blok and Russian Symbolism developed along a complex trajectory. In his fourth chapter, for instance, Goldberg gives an intriguing account of the way Mandel´shtam’s decision to present several of his poems in the second edition Kamen´ as contrasting pairs, which show the poet’s oscillation between the poles of Symbolism and Acmeism. It would be surprising if a study which investigated one poet’s creative response to another poet did not bring in Harold Bloom’s theory of ‘anxiety of REVIEWS 523 influence’,andGoldbergdulydoesso.Yetheshowsthatearlytwentieth-century poets do not entirely conform, in their response to this anxiety, to Bloom’s model. Not only did the Symbolists celebrate the poetic past and borrow freely from it, but Blok showed little if any sign of poetic anxiety. Mandel´shtam, conscious of his status as a ‘latecomer’ and an ‘outsider’, deals with his anxiety without recourse to concealed Freudian rivalries, making poetic borrowings from his predecessors a source, not of anxiety, but of creative liberation. Nevertheless, Goldberg does make it clear that for Mandel´shtam, a certain anxiety was sparked by the persona and actual person of Blok, prompting him to deflate Blok’s tragic and prophetic stance, and to represent him as essentially a literary conservative, imbued with the attitudes of the aristocracy, bound to the nineteenth century. Goldberg is very much at home in his subject, and is an engaging guide through the texts that he analyses in support of his argument. He gives lucid close readings of Mandel´shtam’s poems, for example, of ‘Pust´ v dumnoi komnate, gde kloch´ia seroi vaty’, which is patiently revealed as a ‘goodnatured assault’ (p. 98) on Blok’s Symbolist lyric hero, and of ‘V Peterburge my soidemsia snova’, arguing, on the basis of changes from draft versions, that the ‘ty’ of the final line can be identified as Blok himself, whose ethos is challenged as unequal to the times. It is clear from Goldberg’s account that Mandel´shtam was far from a simple rejection of, or disagreement with Blok, but involved both polemics with Blok’s vision, and a...
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Feb 21, 2023
Laura M Krull + 1
Open Access