Mandelstam’s Stalin Ode Within the Context of the Overall Poetic Glorification of Stalin in 1937

Abstract

Oleg A. Lekmanov provides copious examples of poems about Stalin from the 1930s, and especially 1937, written by a wide range of both famous and forgotten Russophone Soviet poets as well as poets from various Soviet nationalities, including examples of putative folklore, translated into Russian. Mandelstam mobilizes this familiar and accepted vocabulary in his Stalin Ode, and Lekmanov argues that a reader in 1937 would have known exactly how to read each trope—although Mandelstam nonetheless frequently subverts them or brings them to unexpected life. The “Ode,” presented towards the end of the article, does indeed read differently after preparatory reading of the other poets.