The Poet and the Empire

This second group of presentations from the roundtable on Mandelstam organized by the journal Znamia includes pieces by Evgenii Abdullaev, Grigorii Kruzhkov, Boris Kutenkov, and Aleksandr Kushner. Abdullaev discusses Mandelstam’s attitude toward the Russian Empire and especially its Soviet incarnation, noting the poet’s relationship to the very traits of the state that eventually made it deadly to him. Kruzhkov uses a nearly contemporaneous poem by Robert Frost to elicit the significance of Mandelstam’s important poem on Lamarck. Kutenkov discusses the relationship between biographical details and Mandelstam’s poetic work, often finding tightly related examples. Kushner imagines Mandelstam chatting with Nikolai Nekrasov (1821-1878) in the afterlife where poets all get to meet; the creative conversation he offers reveals an understudied subtext of Mandelstam’s work. Many quotations from poems by Mandelstam and others are not identified throughout this section; the poets use these intertextual references in ways that recall Mandelstam’s own comparison of a citation to the ringing call of a cicada.