Love’s Body

Mandelstam’s love poetry is built out of a dialectical tension between sexual desire and repudiation of the body, expressed by sublimating eroticism into either intimate feeling or rapture that transports the lover into ‘a country beyond the eye-lashes’. Poems written in the mid-1920s stage scenes in which feeling escalates from attraction via flirtation to carnal desire, and then to a transcendent vision involving self-sacrifice and Liebestod. The male figure in a number of these poems moves from a sexually passive posture to sexual desire that is more overt, but also dressed up in theatrical role playing, and the ideal of the sexless male is posited, as is an ideal of devotion including Caritas. The stylistic range of the poems places them among Mandelstam’s most enchanting and challenging. He was always capable of poetic difficulty, and these poems present enigmas whose interpretation folds in earlier discoveries such as the use of the emblem and the figure of Chaplin, and expands our sense of the parallel developments of the worldly and unworldly writer.