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[ONE OF MANDELSTAM’S LAST LIFETIME BOOKS] O poezii: sbornik statey [i.e. On Poetry: A Collection of Articles]

Mandelstam, O.

Item #2407

Leningrad: Academia, 1928. 97, [1] pp. Original publisher’s wrappers. Near fine. Spine is slightly rubbed.

Scarce. 1 of 2,100 copies. Text in Russian.

One of Osip Mandelstam’s final lifetime editions and a rare collection of his essays, released shortly before his name was banned from Soviet print for twenty years. After Mandelstam’s arrest in 1934, all mentions of him and his writings were banned and systematically erased, yet this collection remarkably survived the widespread purge.

Although Mandelstam (1891–1938) is rarely recognized as a critic, he wrote over seventy articles, reviews, and essays. Nearly a third of these were produced between 1922 and 1923, when he planned to compile a collection of literary and cultural-historical essays for the State Publishing House. Although this project never materialized, he revisited the idea in 1927, and in June 1928, On Poetry was finally published. In this book, Mandelstam reflects on the nature of language, the past and present of Russian poetry, and the boundaries of artistic continuity. All the included essays, except Notes on Chénier, had previously appeared in print, though often with difficulty. Even Apollo, the journal of the Poets’ Guild to which Mandelstam belonged, was hesitant to publish his work. Scholars attribute this resistance to the poet’s distinct vision of cultural and historical values and his philosophical approach to art, which was not always understood by his contemporaries. Aware of this, Mandelstam addressed his theoretical reflections to future “conversationalists,” as he called his readers.

While compiling On Poetry, Mandelstam sought to recover The Morning of Acmeism, his early manifesto, along with other lost articles, but was unsuccessful. He revised nearly all the essays in the book, except François Villon, notably softening his earlier critique of Symbolism. The collection includes early works such as On the Conversationalist (1913), François Villon (1913), Chaadayev (1914), and Notes on Chénier (1914), as well as later essays that shape the book’s central argument. These include The Word and
Culture (1921), which questions classical heritage; On the Nature of the Word (1922), a critique of Symbolism; The Attack (1924), a broader analysis of the Silver Age; The Badger’s Den (1922), on Alexander Blok; Notes on Poetry (1923), on poetic language; The Nineteenth Century (1922), which critiques the previous century while acknowledging the dangers of the present one; and The End of the Novel (1922), one of Mandelstam’s most significant essays. In this piece, he explores the contradictions of the 20th century, arguing that the decline of the novel signals both the collapse of humanism and individualism and, paradoxically, the emergence of new artistic possibilities.

A particularly striking aspect of the collection is how censorship allowed Mandelstam to reference the banned author Nikolay Gumilev. In The Attack, he describes Gumilev as one of the «Russian poets—not of yesterday, not of today, but forever.»

Overall, a rare collection of essays by the banned Soviet author.

Worldcat locates copies of the edition at Harvard University, Amherst College Library, Syracuse University, New York Public Library, Princeton University, Northwestern University, Duke University, University of Illinois, and University of California.

Price: $950.00