Mandelstam’s Love Lyric: Sex and Devotion

Conférence d'Andrew Kahn (résident 2018-2019 de l'IEA de Paris) dans le cadre des séminaires "Literature & Culture" du Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures de l'Université Harvard

After some prefatory remarks about Mandelstam’s love lyric, the paper will concentrate on two poems: “Mistress of guilty glances” (“Masteritsa vinovatykh vzorov”, 1934) and “I pray, Dame France, for mercy and compassion,” (“Ia moliu, kak zhalosti i milosti,” 1937). Discussion will address a permanent tension in Mandelstam’s poetry from the Acmeist period (1910) until Voronezh (1934-37) between sexual love, complicated by ambivalence about bodily desire, and ideals of devotion including Charity.  This tension shapes the representational and rhetorical strategies used in establishing the relationship between speaker and beloved. Mandelstam was always capable of a fair degree of poetic difficulty and these poems present some enigmas of interpretation. Whether and how they are specifically Mandelstamian is worth considering. A secondary aim, therefore, will be to make some general comments about the critical methods that help to open up his late poetry.

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