Mandelstam

by Clarence Brown

Osip Mandelstam, who died in 1938 in one of Stalin's labour camps, is one of the greatest poets of this century. Brown's 1978 volume is a very full and important book which tells of Mandelstam's earlier life and gives an introduction to the poetry. Professor Brown tells as much as will probably ever be known about Mandelstam's early life, his studies, his literary relationships; and recreates in piquant detail the intellectual world of prerevolutionary St Petersburg. Indeed, the criticism of Mandelstam's three collections of poetry, quoted both in Russian and in translation, manages the seemingly the reader with no Russian begins to grasp - as though at first hand - how this poetry makes its effects, and he senses its originality and importance and its place in European literature. Professor Brown here presents the first critical study of the life and works.

Genres: Poetry, Russia

Hardcover

First published October 26, 1973

About the author

Clarence Brown was born in 1929 in Anderson, South Carolina. He is a retired professor of Russian literature and comparative literature from Princeton University. He has written books of criticism and published several books translated from Russian.

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

If it weren't for Chapter 9, "The Romance of the Precise," I would have written that Brown's book (1973), surely the first of its kind in English, isn't worth reading today.

Brown gave us, long ago, a rather odd compilation of dry (but worshipful) biographical narrative, chronology, literary criticism - of the effusive sort that I can hardly read - and whatever other papers on the subject of all-things-Mandelstam that happened to be on his desk around 1973, I suspect. All of it entirely superseded as far as I can tell.

But Chapter 9 is another matter altogether. Here Brown gives us in complete translation OM's manifesto, "The Morning of Acmeism" (1913), as well as illuminating discussions of that document, OM's article on Villon (1910), and his essay of 1922, "On the Nature of the Word."

Not that I've searched for similar materials - but here in the twenty-three pages of Chapter 9, Brown presents a brilliant overview of OM's project and poetics. For me the result of reading these pages is a sense that I now have a fingertip grasp of the qualities of his interior life and motivations that lead his pointless confrontation with Stalin's regime.

Still I do not understand his particular suicidal compulsion, and I still harbor a rather dim view of his decision-making, which seems to resemble a jihadist's more than anything else that comes to mind.

Nonetheless, after reading - and rereading - "The Romance of the Precise," I'm certain that I can grapple with the content of other biographies and biographical studies with greater competence and perhaps sympathy with their subject than I could hitherto.

[Tom]

I really like Mandelstam's poetry, but I confess I don't quite know what to make of it. I seem to enjoy it more on an intuitive level and than understand it in any way I could articulate. I'm hoping Brown's famous study will help some in that regard. (He and Merwin have nice translation of M. in NYRB edition.)