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Doublespeak: Poetic Language, Lyric Hero, and Soviet Subjectivity in Mandel΄shtam's K nemetskoi rechi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2019

Kirill Ospovat
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Abstract

This paper analyzes a poem by Osip Mandel΄shtam, his 1932 “To the German Tongue,” as it explores and reveals the tensions and dangers of Soviet discursivity and subjectivity. Tracing its semantic unfolding shaped by ambiguities, nuances, and subtle transitions, and illuminating its evocations of the cultural past, I approach the poem as a consistent, if meaningfully opaque, reflection on the Soviet experience. Mandel΄shtam built upon and self-consciously enacted theoretically-informed conceptions of the lyric, the poetic subject, and poetic language developed in Formalist scholarship and adopted in some of his own critical writing. I argue that in the poem, as well as in the criticism which framed it, these Formalist concepts revealed an undercurrent of political signification, made even more evident in the reflections on Soviet political and aesthetic experience in the memoirist writing of a Lidiia Ginzburg or a Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 78 , Issue 1 , Spring 2019 , pp. 126 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2019 

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Footnotes

My research was supported by the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. I am grateful to Kevin M. F. Platt, Zinaida Vasilyeva, and Ilya Venyavkin for their comments on the early drafts of this paper, and to Kevin M. F. Platt and Katherine Hill Reischl for their assistance with the translations from Russian.

References

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30. Ibid., 71, translation amended.

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32. Mandel΄shtam, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 2:442; Mandel΄shtam, Critical Prose and Letters, 428.

33. Mandel΄shtam, Critical Prose and Letters, 416.

34. Lydia Ginzburg’s Alternative Literary Identities, 389.

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36. Mandel΄shtam, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 1:481–82.

37. Mandel΄shtam, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 2:165; Mandel΄shtam, Critical Prose and Letters, 407.

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40. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, From My Life: Poetry and Truth, Parts One to Three, trans. Robert R. Heitner (New York, 1987), 212.

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42. Mandel΄shtam, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 2:80; Mandel΄shtam, Critical Prose and Letters, 131.

43. Die then, my verse, / die like a common soldier, / like our men / who nameless died attacking!, V.V. Maiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii 10 (Moscow, 1958), 283; Alan Bold, ed., The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1970), 192.

44. I will also—please allow it, o Heaven!–Join the battle in front of a few heroes. I see you, my proud enemy! as you flee my small unit, And find honor or death in raging turmoil. Ewald von Kleist, Werke, 100.

45. Ewald von Kleist, Werke, lxiii, lxv.

46. Mandel΄shtam, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 2:248; The Noise of Time, 108.

47. Mandel΄shtam, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 2:68; Mandel΄shtam, Critical Prose and Letters, 120–21.

48. Mandel΄shtam, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 3:305; Mandel΄shtam, Critical Prose and Letters, 464.

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56. Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam, Hope Against Hope, 157.

57. Ibid.

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60. On Formalist reflection on the functioning of literature in the early Soviet situation, see M.O. Chudakova, “Sotsial΄naia praktika, filologicheskaia refleksiia i literatura v nauchnoi biografii Eikhenbauma i Tynianova,” in Izbrannye raboty. Vol. 1: Literatura sovetskogo proshlogo (Moscow, 2001), 433–53.

61. Blok: An Anthology, 136, 138, 139.

62. Ibid., 132, 133. In some of these cases, Eikhenbaum is directly quoting Blok.

63. Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam, Hope Abandoned, 326–27.

64. Ibid., 327–28.

65. Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam, Hope Abandoned, 324–29.

66. Ibid., 327.

67. Blok: An Anthology, 138, 134.

68. Iu. N. Tynianov, “O kompozitsii Evgeniia Onegina,” in Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino, 52–78; Pamiatniki kul΄tury. Novye otkrytiia. Ezhegodnik 1974 (Moscow, 1975), 140.

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78. Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam, Hope Abandoned, 61, 89.

79. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Iphigenia in Tauris: A Tragedy (London, 1793), 34, 38–39. Goethe’s tragedy, and this scene in particular, seem to be an important source of Mandel΄shtam’s poem. In a lengthy dialogue, the two protagonists explore the causes and risks of the younger and innocent Pylades’s loyal friendship to Orestes who compares Pylades to a butterfly: “thou, my friend . . . like a butterfly round a dark flower, wouldst play and sport about me.” Amalgamated with another Goethean text, this trope reappears in “K nemetskoi rechi.”

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81. The loyalist Kleist in two of his poems—Die Freundschaft and Cißides und Paches—praised friendship as solidarity in the face of death, in “storm” (reminiscent of Mandel΄shtam’s “thunders”) and war.

82. Mandel΄shtam, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 3:513–15.

83. Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam, Hope Abandoned, 173–74.

84. Ibid., 304.

85. Aleksandr Blok, Sobranie sochinenii. Tom 6 (Moscow, 1962), 166–67.

86. Blok: An Anthology, 140.

87. A. V. Lunacharskii, Istoriia zapadnoevropeiskoi literatury v ee vazhneishikh momentakh, in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4 (Moscow, 1964), at http://lunacharsky.newgod.su/lib/ss-tom-4/ (last accessed January 22, 2019).

88. And meanwhile for the sons of merriment the god of wine poured your beloved Ai, my friends, limitless in a simple glass. No wonder his starried moisture cheers gazes: In it courage is sheltered, it boils with freedom. Like an ardent mind it does not suffer captivity, plucks out the cork in a frolicking wave, and splatters joyful foam, like a young life. We submerged our cares in it. . . Baratynskii, E. A., Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, 2 vols. (Leningrad, 1936), 2:227Google Scholar.

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