1 Pinskii, L. E., afterword to Osip Mandel'shtam, Razgovor o Dante,ed. Morozov, A. A.(Moscow, 1967), 59.Google Scholar

2 Glazova, Elenaand Glazova, Marina, “Podskazano Dantom“: 0 poetike i poezii Mandel'shtama(Kiev, 2011), 33.Google ScholarEmphasis in the original.

3 Mandelstam, Osip, “An Army of Poets,” in The Collected Critical Prose and Letters,ed. Gary Harris, Jane, trans. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (London, 1991; hereafter CCPL),197, 193;Google Scholar Mandel'shtam, Osip, Sobraniie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh(Moscow, 1993-94; hereafter SS),2:342, 2:338.Google ScholarAll English citations of Mandel'shtam's prose are to Harris and Link's translation, which i have on occasion made slightly more literal; for extended passages i have appended the original Russian in a block quote or footnote.

4 Mandelstam, , “Conversation about Dante,” in CCPL,442; Mandel'shtam, SS,3:259.Google Scholar

5 Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 440. Mandel'shtam, SS,3:258.

6 Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 425; Mandel'shtam, SS,3:243-44.

7 Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 397; Mandel'shtam, SS,3:216. Translation modified. This opposition is presaged by his earlier “Notes on Poetry,” which typifies poetry as a “battle” between speech and writing, “the positive and negative poles of the poetic language.” Mandelstam, “Some Notes on Poetry,” in CCPL,166; Mandel'shtam, SS, 2:299. The same essay anticipates the idea in “Conversation about Dante” of the reflexology of speech through a discussion of Boris Pasternak's “breathing exercises,” which physiologically determine the configuration of the reader's vocal organs. As in “Conversation about Dante,” this process is compared to “the sacred ecstasy of space and bird's flight.” Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 169; Mandel'shtam, SS,2:301.

8 Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 434. Translation modified. Mandel'shtam, SS,3:252. in this sense, we can identify the essay's reflexology of speech with the comment, in Mandel'shtam's notes on “Journey to Armenia,” that “the physiology of reading still remains to be studied.” Mandelstam, “Addenda to ‘Journey to Armenia,'” in CCPL,393; Mandel'shtam, SS,3:389.

9 Elena Glazov-Corrigan, Mandel shtam's Poetics: A Challenge to Postmodernism(Toronto, 2000), 68.

10 Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 421. Mandel'shtam, SS, 3:340. The coexistence of allegorical and literal meanings is consistent with Mandel ‘stam's understanding of Dante's use of the medieval exegetic technique of fourfold interpretation. On dance motifs in “Conversation about Dante” as a way of metaphorically grasping the interaction of material with form as movement, see also Anja Burghardt, “Manifesta intion der Poetik: Osip Mandel'§tams ‘Razgovor o Dante’ als literarisches Kunstwerk und poetologischer Essay,” Zeitschrift fiir Slawistik56, no. 1 (2011): 21.

11 Pinskii, afterword, 68-69. See Mandel'shtam's disdain for “sculptural” interpretations of Dante in Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 400; Mandel'shtam, SS, 3:219.

12 Dmitrii, Segal, Osip Mandel'shtam: istoriia i poetika, 2vols. (Oakland, 1998), 2:771.Google Scholar

13 Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 403; Mandel'shtam, SS,3:221-22.

14 On sexual puns and the poet's fructifying “aspiration to become a seed,” see Glazov-Corrigan, , Mandel'shtam's Poetics,131, 125Google Scholar, and Seamus, Heaney, “The Government of the Tongue,” Partisan Review 55, no. 2(Spring 1988): 295 Google Scholar.

15 Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 437. Mandel'shtam, SS,3:254-55.

16 Stephane, Mallarme, Oeuvres completes(Paris, 1945), 468-69Google Scholar.

17 ibid., 454.

18 ibid., 380.

19 ibid., 647, 648. This latter essay, “La musique et les lettres,” also employs the metaphor of a thunderbolt of inspiration spanning the heavens and the earth. Maurice Blanchot remarks that “in an artist so fascinated by the desire for mastery, nothing is more impressive” than Mallarme's embrace of randomness, doubt, and inspiration. Maurice, Blanchot, The Space of Literature,trans. Ann, Smock(Lincoln, 1982), 117-18Google Scholar.

20 Thomas, Seifrid, The Word Made Self: Russian Writings on Language, 1860-1930(ithaca, 2005), 74,75Google Scholar.

21 ibid., 73.

22 Segal, Osip Mandel'shtam,1:7.

23 Mandel'shtam's 1913 essay “On the Addressee” already speaks to these points, averring that the Pushkinian metaphor of the poet as “God's bird” singing independently of an audience is true only if we understand the bird as “bound by a natural contract with God, an honor even the greatest poetic genius does not dare to dream of,” because “obviously, the one who orders the bird to sing, listens to its song.” The same piece compares the poet to a violinist playing on the psyche of his audience—but because there is no “supplier of living violins,” his ideal instrument is unknown and his poem is compared to a message in a bottle that finds its addressee only by chance. Mandelstam, “On the Addressee,” in CCPL,67-68; Mandel'shtam, SS,1:183-84. A full treatment of these themes’ development over the course of Mandel'shtam's career is beyond the purview of this article, but many of the images in “On the Addressee“—reading as musical performance, the poet's contract with the mob, the author as a bird under divine orders—recur, focused on more technical issues of reading and writing, in “Conversation about Dante.“

24 Mallarme, Oeuvres completes,477.

25 Glazov-Corrigan, Mandel'shtam's Poetics,72.

26 Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 438 Mandel'shtam, SS,3:255.

27 Dante, Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: The inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso,trans. Lawrence Grant, White(New York, 1948), 160 Google Scholar.

28 ibid., 161.

29 Jacques, Derrida, Of Grammatology,trans. Gayatri Chakravorty, Spivak(Baltimore, 1976), 234 Google Scholar.

30 Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 436. Translation modified. Mandel'shtam, SS,3:254.

31 Friedrich, Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,trans. Elizabeth M., Wilkinsonand L. A., Willoughby, in Friedrich, Schiller, Essays,ed. Walter, Hindererand Dahlstrom, Daniel O.(New York, 1993), 93 Google Scholar.

32 Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond,trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton, 1992), 3. At the other end of the Soviet period, a 1978 story by Vladimir Sorokin, “Zaplyv,” utilizes the same Dantean subtext in order to rewrite Paradiso'sobedient angels as instruments of an authoritarian hell. A host of swimmers, the organs of a propaganda ministry, floats in formation down a Stygian river of death, holding up torches to spell out a vapid political slogan for the audiences crowding the embankments and bridges along the way; the piece was later inserted into his 1999 novel Goluboe salo,in which it appears in the course of literature's infernal katabasis into the depths of the earth and, ultimately, the Stalinist past. Vladimir, Sorokin, Utro snaipera(Moscow, 2002), 7-16.Google Scholar

33 Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 438. Translation modified. Mandel'shtam, SS,3:255

34 Derrida, OfGrammatology,132.

35 Mandelstam, “Fourth Prose,” in CCPL,317; Mandel'shtam, SS,3:171.

36 Nadezhda, Mandel'shtam, Vospominaniia(New York, 1970), 295 Google Scholar.

37 ibid, 295, 362-63.

38 ibid., 247; isaiah, Berlin, The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism,ed. Henry, Hardy(Washington, D.C., 2004), 44 Google Scholar.

39 Andrew Kahn, “Lydia Ginzburg's ‘Lives of the Poets': Mandelstam in Profile,” in Emily Van, Buskirkand Andrei, Zorin, eds., Lydia Ginzburg's Alternative Literary identities: A Collection of Articles and New Translations(Bern, 2012), 180-81Google Scholar.

40 ibid., 184.

41 Henry Gifford, “Mandelstam's Conversation about Dante,”in Brown, Edward J.et al., eds., Literature, Culture, and Society in the Modern Age: in Honor of Joseph Frank(Stanford, 1991), 76 Google Scholar.

42 Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 408. Mandel'shtam, SS, 3:227.

43 Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 421. Mandel'shtam, SS,3:334-40.

44 Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 434; Mandel'shtam, SS,3:252.

45 Mandelstam, CCPL,399. Mandel'shtam, SS,3:218.

46 Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 443; Mandel'shtam, SS,3:400.

47 Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 416, 437; Mandel'shtam, SS,3:254, 3:235.

48 Arthur, Rimbaud, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, a Bilingual Edition, trans. Wallace, Fowlie(Chicago, 2005), 140 Google Scholar. Emphasis added.

49 Glazov-Corrigan, Mandel'shtam's Poetics,133.

50 On the poet's friendship with Belyi, see Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Vospominaniia, 162. The word glossolaliiaoccurs once in “Conversation about Dante,” in reference to Dante “combining the incombinable” functions of space and time. Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 439; SS,3:256. Jane Gary Harris suggests that although Belyi is never directly mentioned he serves as Mandel'shtam's interlocutor throughout the essay; its early drafts do explicitly ascribe to Belyi the idea that the human gait, or regulated periodic movement of the body, is the most developed form of conscious movement. See Harris's notes to “Conversation about Dante,” in CCPL,678.

51 Andrei, Belyi, Glossolaliia,with parallel translation by Beyer, Thomas R.(Dornach, 1990), 53 Google Scholar. Mandel'shtam had already referred to Belyi's writing as “dancing prose” in a (negative) 1923 review. Mandelstam, “A. Bely: Diary of an Eccentric,” in CCPL,213-14; Mandel'shtam, SS,2:322.

52 Belyi, Glossolaliia,51.

53 Mandel'shtam, SS,3:57.

54 Mandel'shtam, SS,3:123.

55 Mandel'shtam, SS,1:265.

56 Paul de Man argues that tropological economies of life and death necessarily draw the reader into their field of force insofar as the artwork becomes real in its audience's imagination only by absorbing the audience's creative life; in the time of our reading, we become a dead thing, an atemporal artwork, a statue. “By making the dead speak,” he writes, “the symmetrical structure of the trope implies, by the same token, that the living are struck dumb, frozen in their own death.” Paul de, Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism(New York, 1984), 78 Google Scholar.

57 Gasparov, M. L., O. Mandel'shtam: Grazhdanskaia lirika 1937 goda(Moscow, 1996), 18 Google Scholar.

58 Gasparov, M. L., “Metricheskoe sosedstvo ‘Ody’ Stalinu,”in Robin, Aizlewoodand Diana, Myers, eds., Stoletie Mandel'shtama: Materialy Simpoziuma(Tenafly, N.J., 1994), 105 Google Scholar.

59 The “one time” Nadezhda Mandel'shtam admits to interfering in her husband's poetic affairs was her refusal to write to dictation Mandel ‘shtam's claim that Dante's poem is “directed towards authority; its sound is fullest; it is most concert-like at the point where it is caressed by dogma,” which she interpreted as a concession to Soviet power. Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 424; Mandel'shtam, SS,3:242. “Mandel'shtam grew angry that i had become too smart for my own good and had begun to meddle. i told him to get a new wife… ‘or hire a stenographer, like normal people: she'll write anything you like and not bat an eye.'” Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Vtoraia kniga(Paris, 1972), 222. The poet seems to have eventually reclaimed his scribe's obedience, but the anecdote points to his own essay's origin in a dynamic of both dictation and sexual relations. On this point there are interesting parallels in Kittler's, Friedrich A.analysis of gendered transcription technology in his Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,trans. Geoffrey, Winthrop-Youngand Michael, Wutz(Stanford, 1999), 183-86Google Scholar.

60 Semenko, I. M., Poetika pozdnego Mandel'shtama: Ot chernovykh redaktsii k okonchatel'nomu tekstu,2nd ed. (Moscow, 1997), 10 Google Scholar.

61 Dante, The Divine Comedy,188. “Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir a un livre.“ Mallarme, Oeuvres completes,378

62 Plato, , The Dialogues of Plato,trans. Benjamin, Jowett, 2vols. (New York, 1937), 1:291,1:289Google Scholar.

63 Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 436-37; Mandel'shtam, SS,3:254.

64 V. B. Mikushevich, “Estetika Mandel'shtama v ‘Razgovore o Dante,'” in Vorob'eva, Margarita Z., ed., Smert’ i bessmertiepoeta: Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii. posviashchennoi 60-letiiu so dnia gibeli 0. E. Mandel ‘shtama(Moscow, 2001), 150 Google Scholar.

65 Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 400. “B flaHTOBCKOM noHMMaHHH ytiHTejib MOJiowe yyeHMKa.” Mandel'shtam, SS,3:220. The subtext for this aphorism is Dante's metaphor of his own teacher, Brunetto Latini, as the winner of a race in inferno, canto 15, lines 121-24; the source for the image of the bearded Dante rebuked by Beatrice is Purgatorio,canto 31, in which Beatrice chastises Dante for his faithlessness

66 This imagery anticipates the closing lines of Mandel'shtam's 1937 lyric “fl B jibBHHbiii poB M B KpenocTb norpy>KeH,” in whose conclusion the poet's participation in a universal joy (like that of Dante's angels) is compared to the music of an “organ” accompanying a female voice: Mandel'shtam, SS,3:123. The text is metrically related to the “Ode to Stalin,” composed that same month, and Gasparov reads its final stanzas as similarly sketching out the poet's role in the relationship between the dictator and the multitude, the poet first being equated with the leader and then entering into a global harmony. Gasparov, “Metricheskoe sosedstvo ‘Ody’ Stalinu,” 103.

67 Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 442. Mandel'shtam, SS,3:259.

68 Derrida, Of Grammatology,234-35.

69 Mandelstam, Mandel'shtam, SS,3:244-45.

70 Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 426; Mandel'shtam, SS,3:244.

71 Mandelstam, “Some Notes on Poetry,“165; Mandel'shtam, SS,2:298. Translation modified. Nelson Goodman speaks at length of the relation between transcription and digitization, arguing that only a transcription composed of discrete elements can be realized in another medium (as, e.g., a musical score is realized in sound performance or written text in oral recital). Nelson Goodman, The Languages of Art,2nd ed. (indianapolis, 1976), 159-64,177-92.

72 Osip, Mandelstam, The Noise of Time: Selected Prose,trans. Clarence, Brown(Evanston, 2002), 133 Google Scholar; Mandel'shtam, SS,2:465.