From Mortal to Immortal Love

Mandelstam wrote another set of poems marked by the contrast between love as a form of deep social feeling and love as a renunciation of the earthly. Poems that represent love as a social bond celebrate intimacy as friendship, showing a sense of ethical responsibility and protective consolation in a hostile world. Love as depicted here is, in the famous phrase of the Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev in On the Meaning of Love, ‘the justification and salvation of individuality through the sacrifice of egoism’. Other poems elevate love to a metaphysical category, reviving the use of archetype that Mandelstam favoured before 1918. But instead of troubled figures like Phaedra and Helen of Troy, the feminine ideal projected here takes the form of otherworldly angels who transcend death. Those visions of the eternal beloved complement the poet’s flight to safety described in the final poems of exile.