The Poem by O. Mandelstam Because I Could Not Hold Your Hands...ˮ: Comments on Dark Places

As the analysis showed, in this not quite clear and therefore controversial in its content poem, the direct and meta-phorical nomination, dream and reality, as well as motives related to the realities of St. Petersburg and Moscow are intertwined. That is, the tactics of “overlapping images” (A.N. Tolstoy) characteristic of Acmeism and, in particular, of O. Mandelstam’s poetics, is applied. This text hinges on an expanded metaphor built around the siege and fall of Troy, the capture of “the maiden’s house”. This ambiguous image is informed by an episode from the poet’s own biography – the struggle for the favor of the St. Petersburg actress O. Arbenina, the delicate subject, which required euphemistic treatment. Additional to the metaphorical nomination, the means of veiling this topic were, firstly, the transfer of this metaphor to the sphere of sleep, and secondly, the introduction of a motif that gave the place of action the features of the old, and therefore, at the time of the creation of the text (November 1920), wooden Mos-cow – a city “with wooden ribs”. The text is a fantasy based on Virgil’s “Aeneid”, semiotically complicated by allu-sions to the realities of two Russian cities.

Keywords

poetics, Mandelstam, imagery, metaphor, euphemistic phrasing

Received

02.02.2022

Publication date

25.04.2022

Number of characters

65953

Cite

GOST	Moskvin V. The Poem by O. Mandelstam “Because I Could Not Hold Your Hands...ˮ: Comments on Dark Places // Izvestiia Rossiiskoi akademii nauk. Seriia literatury i iazyka – 2022. – V. 81. – Issue 2 C. 27-47 [Electronic resource]. URL: https://izv-oifn.ru/S160578800019456-7-1 (circulation date: 29.04.2024). DOI: 10.31857/S160578800019456-7
MLA	Moskvin, Vasily "The Poem by O. Mandelstam “Because I Could Not Hold Your Hands...ˮ: Comments on Dark Places." Izvestiia Rossiiskoi akademii nauk. Seriia literatury i iazyka 81.2 (2022):27-47. DOI: 10.31857/S160578800019456-7
APA	Moskvin V. (2022). The Poem by O. Mandelstam “Because I Could Not Hold Your Hands...ˮ: Comments on Dark Places. Izvestiia Rossiiskoi akademii nauk. Seriia literatury i iazyka 81(2), pp.27-47 DOI: 10.31857/S160578800019456-7

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