Talk:Osip Mandelstam

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Nope. White Russian has a direct, explicit political meaning here, jheijmans, which will become apparent as I develop this text. Reverting with extreme prejudice.user:sjc

OK, I await your edit with interest; I assume it has something to do with the White and other Bolshevists? (I cannot exactly recall the names, but I do remember that name.) If so, please make clearly what his nationality was (Soviet/Russian), as "White Russia" makes me (and others) think he's from Belarus, which wasn't even a (independent) country at the time. Jeronimo 03:42 Aug 1, 2002 (PDT)

Correct. Full biographical details will put down his birth details, etc. It is just a marker to me at the moment to detail the WR aspect. He certainly wasn't Belarus; as a geo-political entity it had no real existence at the time. I have put a tbc marker on this article for now. PS: the Whites weren't communist at all. They were pro-Czarists... user:sjc
Hmm there are 37 or so edits to this page since I last visited it and it says less than when I left it. I begin to draw my conclusions about the ultimate viability of the wikipedia model. Sjc 03:14, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Anti-Stalin epigram

May I question the wisdom of including the second-class political verses into the article? I second Nabokov in that the abominable poem doesn't adequately represent the genius of Mandelstam. Could we have something earlier and less disingenuous? --Ghirla -трёп- 17:27, 22 September 2006 (UTC)


It is not his best poem but the translation is dreadful. A better one would be worth including because it's an important poem and always relevant, particularly now, but a more thorough sampling of his work is also in order, particularly "In Petersburg we will meet again..." would be a good choice, as well as some of his better prose, "Noise of Time" and "Morning of Acmeism" come to mind. I will attempt to expand the article to give the reader a better sense of his genius. (JordanBowen 20:56, 15 December 2006 (UTC))

[edit] Conversion

Sergei Averintsev (Сергей Аверинцев; a major Russian literary theorist and philosopher) in his detailed introduction to the first two-volume collection of Mandelstam's ouvre (Moscow, 1989) states that Mandelstam converted to Lutheranism immediately prior to his entrance to University and did not practice this faith thereafter; Averintsev concludes that the reason for this conversion was most likely trying to make it easier to enter the University, avoiding the 3% quota on Jewish students. This is why Lutheranism was chosen by the poet as it had been by most of those seeking fast conversion: it was much easier than conversion to Orthodox Christianity at the time and did not bear the same stigma in the Jewish community. See it being discussed in this encyclopedia entry, in Russian --SimulacrumDP 16:54, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

This account is supported by the cited in the main text biography and by his brother's account --SimulacrumDP 03:35, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sample of poetry

Can we get a sample of poetry--a line or stanza? Badagnani (talk) 23:01, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

ОМ is untranslatable. Tho only decent sample I've seen is http://polyhymnion.org/lit/mandelshtam/index.html .Galassi (talk) 23:45, 28 April 2008 (UTC)