A Mandelstam Jubilee

Abstract

The Russian fondness for celebrating authorial anniversaries is especially valuable when a favorite writer reaches a round number: you know there will be a flurry of articles, conferences, and related events in celebration. The 100th anniversary of Osip Mandelstam’s birth came in 1991, and there were certainly important events in connection with it; however, much of his work had only recently become available and entered scholarly discourse in the Soviet Union. By 2016 (the 125th anniversary), the time was ripe: scholars in Russia have had many years to read the suppressed poetry and to become acquainted with details of Mandelstam’s biography, from his wife’s memoirs and other sources, which help to clarify some tricky passages in his poetry. The selection of articles in this special issue devoted to Mandelstam gives a glimpse of the richness of the response to the anniversary, all the more useful since this poet is difficult to read. In the epilogue to her “Requiem,” Anna Akhmatova referred to the “triple bottom” of her jewelry box, with each layer hiding something precious from a cursory search above; writing meant to frustrate censorship is likely to reward repeated reading and scholarly excavation. Dr. Irina Surat’s article “The Language of Space Compressed Down to a Point” examines Mandelstam’s poetry written during the period of exile in Voronezh from the point of view of geography, references to other places, and deployment of space in asserting the poet’s liberty from the local spaces even as he makes connections with some of them. The Voronezh poems are some of Mandelstam’s most complex, and Surat both uncovers underlying references and explores Mandelstam’s Russian Studies in Literature, vol. 53, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–3. © 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1061-1975 (print)/ISSN 1944-7167 (online) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10611975.2017.1373541