I Enter the World

Abstract

The literary development of the prerevolutionary period and the first two decades of the Soviet era has left us a rich heritage. This heritage includes a number of complicated and contradictory writers, the dialectics of whose world view and creativity remains as yet inadequately studied. One such writer, beyond question, was Osip Emil'evich Mandel'shtam (1891-1938), poet, prose writer, critic, and translator, whose creative contribution to the development of Russian literature demands careful historical and literary analysis.