Ученики и учителя Тенишевского училища (по школьным журналам и архивным документам) [Tenishev School: Its Instructors, Students, School Magazines and Archives]

This article results from extensive archival research, and compares information found in Tenishev school magazines to the archival data concerning the school life of the corresponding period. The article’s major goal is to reconstruct life stories of Tenishev school students and the school’s instructors as meticulously as possible, and also to demonstrate the style of communication between the teachers and adolescents. It also reveals some previously unknown information concerning the life story of Tenishev School director Alexander Ostrogorskii (1868—1908). KEYWORDS: 20th-Century Russian History, Osip Mandel’shtam (1891—1938), Viktor Zhirmunskii (1891—1971), Alexander Ostrogorskii (1868—1908), Tenishev School, School Magazines, Soviet Terror, History of School Education in Russia.

«Косящий бег» (Петрарка — Мандельштам — Петрарка) [“The Scything Run”: Petrarch—Mandel’shtam—Petrarch]

The article offers a list of possible iconographic subtexts of Osip Mandel’shtam’s translation of the beginning of Petrarch’s sonnet CCCXIX («I dì miei più leggier che nes(s)un cervo / Fuggir come ombra, et non vider più bene / Ch’un batter d’occhio, et poche hore serene, / Ch’amare et dolci ne la mente servo»). The most likely visual source shaping the word choice of Mandel’shtam’s translation (“Promchalis’ dni moi — kak by olenei / Kosiashchii beg. Srok schast’ia byl koroche, / Chem vzmakh resnitsy. Iz poslednei mochi / Ia v gorst’ zazhal lish’ pepel naslazhdenii”) is the tradition of depicting Time as an old man driving a chariot propelled by a couple of deer in editions of Petrarch’s Triumphs (I Trionfi, 1357—74), which Mandel’shtam possibly knew. Keywords: 20th-Century Russian Literature, Osip Mandel’shtam (1891—1938), Petrarch (1304—74), Il Canzoniere, Translation, Illustration, Iconographic Subtext, In memoriam: Larisa Georgievna Stepanova (1941—2009).

Lyricism and Philosophy in Brodsky's Elegiac Verse

In this article Aaron Beaver analyzes two elegies written by Joseph Brodsky—one for his father (“Pamiati ottsa: Avstraliia“) and one for his mother (“Mysl’ o tebe udaliaetsia …“). The point of departure is Brodsky's appropriation of the genre from his Silver Age predecessors (Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandel'shtam, Marina Tsvetaeva), as made evident in a number of Brodsky's well-known essays. Beaver's central thesis is that Brodsky reshapes the elegy by centering it not on the death of the loved one but on time. Brodsky is inspired in this endeavor by his Silver Age forebears, but he extends their poetic practice into more philosophical territory. Specifically, close reading of Brodsky's two elegies exposes a model of time consistent with the temporal idealism elaborated by Jean- Paul Sartre inBeing and Nothingness.Based on this exegesis Beaver ventures to generalize about the nature of lyricism in Brodsky's verse, arguing that it is inseparable from his philosophical assumptions.

Sons, Lovers, and the Laius Complex in Russian Modernist Poetry

In this introduction to the articles written by Jenifer Presto and Stuart Goldberg that focus on the psychosocial tensions between Russian modernist poets of slightly different generations, Sibelan Forrester explores the distinct options of filiation and affiliation as ways to imagine or describe poetic choices, modeling textual relationships on the familial or genetic, with the interest in personal psychology characteristic of the period. These modes of thinking are reflected in creative writing, diary entries or poetry, as well as in scholarship. The anticarnal bent of Russian symbolists, particularly of Aleksandr Blok, springs from the religious philosophy of the time. Imagining poetic creation as maternity turns out to be less threatening—at least, for a male poet—than treating it as paternity, which raises other concerns too close to home. Both Presto and Goldberg suggest that Blok rightly considered the Acmeists, especially Osip Mandel'shtam, a threat to his own poetic intentions.

Dialogue as “Lyrical Hermaphroditism”: Mandel shtam's Challenge to Bakhtin

Osip Mandel'shtam, “Fransua Villon”Mikhail Bakhtin, “Slovo v romane”The two epigraphs disclose a crucial “genre gap” between Osip Mandel'shtam and Mikhail Bakhtin. If for Mandel'shtam dialogue is essential to lyric, for Bakhtin the dialogical discourse identifies the novel as a genre in opposition to monologic, self-centered and self-sufficient poetic language. In his essays “Fransua Villon” and “O sobesednike,” Mandel'shtam discusses different dimensions of dialogue—the dialogue between various historical epochs—modernity and Middle Ages, Ancient Greece and Renaissance, the dialogue between the author and the distant reader, and finally, the dialogue between the poet's diverse selves. The latter is called “lyrical hermaphroditism” and described in its multiple incarnations, including “ogorchennyi i uteshitel', mat’ i ditia, sudiia i podsudimyi, sobstvennik i nishchii.“ Mandel'shtam's “lyrical hermaphroditism” does not signify a Platonic ideal of androgynous wholeness, a reconciliation of two polarities.

Synthetic Nationality: Mandel'shtam and Chaadaev

“A world that is your own must be created for you since the one you inhabit has become foreign to you.”Petr Chaadaev, “Second Philosophical Letter”In "The Whisper of History and the Noise of Time in the Writings of Osip Mandel'shtam" Gregory Freidin writes that "only a cultural orphan growing up in the revolutionary years could possess such an insatiable need for a continuous construction of a gigantic vision of culture meant to compensate for the impossibility of belonging to a single place." Freidin's richly suggestive remark hints at both the nature of and the reasons for Mandel'shtam's "orphandom," and the means by which he sought to surmount or circumvent his pervasive homelessness and achieve a "homeland, a house, a hearth" in culture.