‘Verses on Russian Poetry’

The chapter considers Mandelstam’s 1932 ‘Verses on Russian Poetry’ as an act of engagement with Soviet critical debates on poetry and ideology, and on the nature of the poetic canon. The cycle has been deemed to illustrate Mandelstam at his most hermetic and even backward-looking, read as poems that put up a verbal screen. In fact, it is highly topical and draws heavily on contemporary newspaper material about literary groups and reviews of his own work. A new, productive method of reading such difficult texts is proposed here by showing how closely the cycle assimilates its horizon of expectation, using the language of parable, allegory, visual emblem, and political quotation. Flowing out of the events described in Chapter 1, the cycle asks whether there are limits to the evolutionary model of survival of the fittest that operates in an age of class warfare, and whether in a poetic world that formerly cultivated dialogue the poet still has a place.