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Mandelstam’s “Ode” to Stalin
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Extract
The haphazard unearthing of Osip Mandelstam’s late poetry and the bio-graphical data of his (all too literal) struggle for existence produces the effect of a mosaic gradually and painstakingly pieced together by several hands. One mysterious piece, long thought lost, was the poem allegedly written in praise of Stalin sometime in the 1930s. For many Western readers at least, the first mention of the poet’s tribute to the dictator was in Anna Akhmatova’s memoirs of Mandelstam published in the emigre miscellany Vozdushnye puti, vol. 4 (1965): ” … he maintained that poems are written only as the result of strong emotional shocks, joyful as well as tragic ones. Concerning his own poem in praise of Stalin—‘I’d like to say not Stalin, but Dzhugashvili’ (1935) —he said to me: ‘Now I understand that it was a sickness.’ “
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1975
References
1. Reprinted in Anna, Akhmatova, Sochineniia, vol. 2 (New York : Inter-Language Literary Associates, 1968), p. 181 Google Scholar. Compare the line she cites with line twelve, stanza two of the “Stikhi o Staline.“
2. Mandel'shtam, Nadezhda, Vospominaniia (New York : Chekhov Publishing Corporation, 1970 Google Scholar ; note particularly the chapter entitled “Oda,” pp. 216-20. All citations from the memoirs, unless otherwise identified, are from this chapter.
3. See Mandel'shtam, Osip, Sobranie sochinenii v trekh totnakh, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C. : Inter-Language Literary Associates, 1967), pp. 236–53Google Scholar, the poems numbered 346- 361, 363-369, 371. Of the twenty-four poems only thirteen (numbered 198-210, in another sequence) are to be found in Mandel'shtam, Osip, Stikhotvoreniia, Biblioteka poeta, Bol'- shaia seriia (Leningrad, 1973)Google Scholar.
4. Mandel'shtam, Nadezhda, Vospominaniia, the chapter “Irratsional'noe,” pp. 47–53Google Scholar.