“And I’ll Only be Killed by a Peer”

Abstract

In a less formal article, Irina Surat parses the words and history of Osip Mandelstam’s poem “The Wolf,” mostly written in 1930, to identify the significance of its final line, which the poet settled on only in 1935. The discussion ends by citing a stanza from “Facing Nature,” a 1975 poem by Aleksandr Eremenko, which builds on Mandelstam’s poem in much the same way as Mandelstam’s builds on writings by Nikolai Gumilev and Aleksandr Pushkin.