Mandelstam’s Poetry and Artistic–Philosophical Intuitions of Russian Culture

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the artistic experience of Osip E. Mandelstam (1891–1938) in the context of the aesthetic and ideological transformations of Russian and European culture during the first half of the twentieth century and of the philosophical inquiries of that period. Overcoming the programmatic multitudes of modernist aesthetics, Mandelstam draws his own artistic ideas and images from those aesthetics while also opposing postclassical culture in the form of the artistic avant-garde. Relying on his own poetic and intellectual intuition, which he explicated and formalized theoretically in his essays and works of criticism, he asserts an authorly, reflective style of modern poetry that anticipated the post-nonclassical artistic culture characteristic of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.