Revolutionary Lyric

This chapter examines a set of four poems, written between 1921 and 1924, that combine a certain abstraction of language with visceral violence. Mandelstam develops a set of techniques for his lyric poetry that will permanently enrich his poetics in exploring new themes such as guilt and violence; in another poem he creates an emblem to represent generational warfare, combining the highly pictorial and the abstract, and reflecting on questions of whether the ends justify the means; in a third, Mandelstam uses allegory and emblems to represent, in his own way, the analogy between the French Revolution and the Terror widespread in early Bolshevik culture, interrogating the historiography to see whether the past is of any use in predicting the future. In a eulogy to Lenin, the question of Russia’s direction remains acutely open-ended.