Osip Mandelstam Essay

Name- Chofia Basumatary

Programme- MA English

Assimilation of the Poetic Self with that of the City as seen in Osip Mandelstam’s works Osip Mandelstam is undeniably one of the most significant and noteworthy Russian poet of the twentieth century. Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1891 to a leather merchant, his family soon moved to St. Petersburg, Russia. Although he joined the prestigious Tenishev School and later the Sorbonne in Paris and the University of Heidelberg in Germany, but left studies in favor of writing as early as in the 1910s and soon enough rose to the ranks of the most remarkable writers such as Nikolay Gumilev, Mikhail Kuzmin, Anna Akhmatova, and Georgiy Ivanov. For years the end of his life was so obscured by rumor, conjecture, and deliberate falsehood that one could be sure only of the fact that he had perished.

Mandelstam's first selection of poems appeared in a major journal, the August 1910 issue of the Petersburg Apollon. Mandelstam disavowed the symbolist style, the then famous style, and its supernatural, even mysterious angles. His own poems were immediate articulations of musings, emotions, and perceptions. All things considered, Mandelstam positioned as an Acmeist, which is to say that his poems were

The city of Petersburg is a dynamic hub of continuous political and literary experimentation and so is Mandelstam, however there is an unconscious consumption in the poet which he is very much unaware of. This assumption is very much visible in one of his one known venture into what would at first appear to be fiction that is The Egyptian Stamp and also his poetry, to which the word “impersonal” has so often been applied that it has become an non-scrutinized critical cliché but requires only a closer and a more enlightened analysis or even just a reading to be seen as the personal and intimate record that it actually