Into the Fourth Dimension

Abstract

From early 1937, attacks on Mandelstam appeared in the local Voronezh press. The story of adapting to exile and escape from his political plight connects the poems of the notebooks. The chapter examines how the works written in that year explore the various prospects for survival, haunted by the example of homelessness of Schubert’s Winterreise. These experiences drive Mandelstam to consider whether the extensive reach of Stalin can ever be evaded, plotting whether flight might lead to freedom. The remaining possibility might be to surrender politically and submit to Stalin, seeking pardon. The book circles back to Mandelstam’s relation to the revolution by examining his late poem, the ‘Stalin Ode’, one of the most controversial poems in the Russian language, read here as a work of ironic defiance that manipulates panegyric subversively and closes off any possibility of rapprochement. Mandelstam’s final lyrics imagine flight into invisible realms.