Painting

Abstract

This chapter observes that references to the eye and parts of the eye (eyelashes, iris, pupil, sclera, retina, and socket) are pervasive in Mandelstam’s prose and poetry. These references intensify around 1931, at a time when his poems establish a visual dialectic between representations of art (cinema, painting, objects) and also make use of images from Soviet life, adding what W.J.T. Mitchell calls ‘iconotexts’ to the emblems or ideograms seen in the poems of the early 1920s. A close reading of a famous passage from the travel piece Journey to Armenia unravels from its references to French painters and theorists the background behind Mandelstam’s terminology and his preoccupation with the physiological sensitivity of the eye. The Russian art scene was strongly influenced by French neo-Impressionist painting, in both theory and practice, and Mandelstam’s references condense a cultural moment of great prominence and influence. The chapter moves on to poems that aim to transpose onto a verbal canvas some of the lessons of these schools of painting, opening up new worlds governed by rules of art rather than rules of ideology at a time when the Soviet state was imposing canons of representation.