The ‘Slate Ode’

The focus of this chapter is the ‘Slate Ode’ (1922). Widely regarded as one of the greatest poems in Russian, it has been read primarily as a subtextual palimpsest. The reading given in this chapter embeds the poem in a set of overlapping contexts, tracing the poem’s utopian language to the value systems of utopian socialist thought in which Mandelstam was steeped; situating it in the context of the Russian reception of Nietzsche, a key thinker for many Russian revolutionaries whose vision in the Genealogy of Morals of a new morality Mandelstam’s poem enacts; exploring its link to New Economic Policy discussion of the primitive economy and natural communism mirrored in the poem, as well as its connection to other thought systems such as mythical ideas of return and a vision of society that replicates the morality of early Christians. Psychological division marks the voice of the speaker who in these new conditions interrogates the sources of poetry and the poet’s own authority. Far from assuming that he can speak with the vatic certainty of the poet-lawgiver of the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition, the first-person speaker delves into the language of the unconscious and Orphic tradition.