Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T05:28:06.207Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Rereading the Poet's Ending: Mandelstam, Chaplin, and Stalin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Clare Cavanagh
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In The Life of the Poet, Lawrence Lipking speaks of the mature poet's effort to shape a summation in verse that will give meaning and wholeness to the poet's lifework. Osip Mandelstam refused to create such a summation, unlike many of his modernist contemporaries. He developed instead a complex, playful, defiantly open-ended poetics that resists all attempts to shape a definitive, fitting conclusion to his life-in-art. Seeking an appropriate poetic ending to the life of the poet-martyr—Mandelstam died en route to the gulag at the height of Stalin's terror—many critics chose to overlook the provocatively playful lyrics that accompany his more somber late verses. Through analysis of two poems on Charlie Chaplin written near the end of Mandelstam's life, this essay aims both to reopen the question of the poet's ending and to complicate the reader's portrait of the artist's final days.

Type
Special Topic: Literature and Censorship
Information
PMLA , Volume 109 , Issue 1: Special Topic Literature and Censorship , January 1994 , pp. 71 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor “Lyric Poetry and Society.” Telos 20 (1974): 52–71.Google Scholar
Akhmatova, Anna [Works]. Ed. G. P. Struve and B. A. Filipoff. Vols. 1 and 2. Munich: Inter-Language Lit. Assocs., 1967–68. Vol. 3. Paris: YMCA, 1983.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition.” The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age. By Arendt. Ed. Ron Feldman. New York: Grove, 1978. 67–143.Google Scholar
Averintsev, S. S “” [Osip Mandelstam's Fate and Tidings]. Mandelstam, 1:5–65.Google Scholar
Baines, Jennifer Mandelstam: The Later Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter “The Storyteller.” Illuminations. By Benjamin. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1978. 83–110.Google Scholar
Cavanagh, Clare Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition. Princeton: Princeton UP, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Cavanagh, Clare “The Poetics of Jewishness: Mandel'shtam, Dante and the ‘Honorable Calling of Jew.‘” Slavic and East European Journal 35 (1991): 317–31.10.2307/308652CrossRefGoogle Scholar
City Lights. Dir. Charles Chaplin. With Chaplin and Virginia Cherrill. United Artists, 1931.Google Scholar
Costello, Bonnie Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.Google Scholar
de Jonge, Alex Stalin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union. New York: Morrow, 1986.Google Scholar
Eisenstein, Sergei “Charlie the Kid.” Film Essays and a Lecture. By Eisenstein. Ed. Jay Leyda. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982. 108–10.Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S Four Quartets. The Complete Plays and Poems. New York: Harcourt, 1971. 117–11.Google Scholar
Freidin, Gregory A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987.Google Scholar
Isenberg, Charles “The Rhetoric of Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope against Hope.” Autobiographical Statements in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature. Ed. Harris, Jane Gary. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. 227–22.Google Scholar
Levin, Iurii “, I” [Notes on the Poetry of O. Mandelstam, 1]. Slavica Hierosolymitana 3 (1978): 110–11.Google Scholar
Lipking, Lawrence The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.Google Scholar
Mandelstam, Nadezhda [Memoirs]. 3rd ed. Vol. 1. Paris: YMCA, 1982–83. 2 vols.Google Scholar
Mandelstam, Osip The Complete Critical Prose and Letters. Ed. Harris, Jane Gary. Trans. Harris and Link, Constance. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979.Google Scholar
Mandelstam, Osip [Collected Works]. Ed. G. Struve and B. A. Filipoff. 4 vols. Washington: Inter-Language Lit. Assocs., 1967–71; Paris: YMCA, 1981.Google Scholar
Mandelstam, Osip [Works in Two Volumes]. Ed. P. M. Nerler. 2 vols. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1990.Google Scholar
Mandelstam, Osip [The Voronezh Notebooks]. Ed. V. Shveitser. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980.Google Scholar
Matthiessen, F. O The Achievement of T. S. Eliot. New York: Oxford UP, 1959.Google Scholar
Mayakovsky, V. V [Collected Works in Eight Volumes], Vol. 3. Moscow: Pravda, 1968. 8 vols.Google Scholar
Modern Times. Dir. Charles Chaplin. With Chaplin and Paulette Goddard. United Artists, 1936.Google Scholar
Nadeau, Maurice The History of Surrealism. Trans. Howard, Richard. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Robinson, David Chaplin: His Life and Art. New York: McGraw, 1985.Google Scholar
Sokolov, I. V [Charlie Chaplin: His Life and Art]. Moscow: Goskinizdat, 1938.Google Scholar
Stites, Richard Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Struve, Nikita [Osip Mandelstam]. London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1988.Google Scholar
Toporov, V. N “ (T. C. )” [On Echoes of Western European Poetry in Akhmatova (T. S. Eliot)]. International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 16 (1973): 157–15.Google Scholar
Tynianov, Iurii “O ” [On Khlebnikov]. [Archaists and Innovators]. By Tynianov. Priboi, 1929. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985. 581–58.Google Scholar
Zorkaia, Neia “” [“A Terrifying, Truthful, and Vindictive Art”: Osip Mandelstam on Film]. Iskusstvo kino [The Art of Film] 3 (1988): 10–19; 4 (1988): 82-95.Google Scholar