Mandel'shtam's Poetics: A Challenge to Postmodernism

Tatiana Nazarenko teaches in the Department of Germanic and Slavic
Studies at the University of Manitoba.

The book under review examines Osip Mandel’shtam’s theoretical
writing in the broader framework of the poststructuralist and
post-modernist poetics. The author should undoubtedly be praised for
focusing on Mandel’shtam’s evolution as a theoretician whose
contribution to modern poetics, unlike his poetic legacy, has not yet
received the recognition it deserves. In a systematic, chronological
analysis of Mandel’shtam’s earlier and mature views on poetry, Elena
Glazov-Corrigan discerns the key theoretical pattern and concepts that
provides insight into the poet’s understanding of poetics. Each
concept is addressed in a separate chapter.

Mandel’shtam’s early views on poetry, revealed in his essays
“Morning of Achmeism,” “Remarks on Chénier,” Peter Chaadaev,”
and “Pushkin and Skriabin” (1913–15), serve as a basis for
discussion of the binomical principles of meaning (presence) / blank
(absence) developed by the poet; his book The Noise of Time (1925), as
well as the essays “Franзois Villon,” “About the Interlocutor,”
“On Nature of the World,” “The Word and Culture,” and to a
lesser extent his later works, provide the material for poet’s the
investigation of communication in poetry. According to the author, even
in his earliest works on poetics, Mandel’shtam outlines ideas and
concepts that were later formulated by Derrida, Barthes, and Iser. These
ideas of the poet, which were synthesized with his further apprehension
of poetry as a journey through various constantly changing metaphorical
landscapes, were developed in his writings of the 1930s—namely,
Journey to Armenia, “Around the Naturalists,” and especially
Conversations about Dante.

Having analyzed Mandel’shtam’s critical works and the theoretical
implications of his poetics in light of contemporary theories, the
author suggests that Mandel’shtam clearly prefigured the future
development of literary theory in its deconstructivist and structuralist
attire and at the same time made an important contribution to modern
poetics, which not infrequently challenges poststructuralist and
postmodernist approaches to the literary text.

This well-researched and interesting study of one of the
less-investigated aspects of Mandel’shtam’s legacy should stimulate
further scholarly research along similar lines.