“Silentium” Osip Mandelstam

She hasn't been born yet
She is both music and words,
And therefore all living things
Unbreakable connection.

Seas of breasts breathe calmly,
But, like a crazy day, the day is bright,
And pale lilac foam
In a black and azure vessel.

May my lips find
Initial muteness
Like a crystal note
That she was pure from birth!

Remain foam, Aphrodite,
And return the word to music,
And be ashamed of your heart,
Merged from the fundamental principle of life!

Analysis of Mandelstam's poem "Silentium"

The poem "Silentium" was first published in the ninth issue of the famous Apollo magazine in 1910. Subsequently, Mandelstam included it in his debut collection “Stone”. According to most literary scholars, this book combines the “childishness of Verlaine” with the “severity of Tyutchev.” The first feature is manifested in the ease of presentation of topics. The second is the seriousness of the motives chosen for the lyrics. Osip Emilievich perceives the word as a stone. The poet acts as a builder, an architect. It’s worth dwelling on Mandelstam’s relationship with Tyutchev in a little more detail. The genius of the twentieth century was very familiar with the work of his great predecessor. Osip Emilievich knew many poems by heart, which his wife noted in her memoirs. "Silentium" is an obvious reference to . The difference in names is observed only at the level of punctuation marks. Fyodor Ivanovich has an exclamation point at the end of the title, while Osip Emilievich has nothing.

There is still debate about who or what is meant by the pronoun “she” in Mandelstam’s “Silentium”. There are a huge number of versions, which is quite unusual for such a small poem. One of the options is that Osip Emilievich was talking about love. The key argument in favor of this interpretation is the mention of the Greek goddess Aphrodite. To this day, her image remains perhaps the main symbol of love and beauty in world culture. The next argument in favor of the version expressed here is that the work mentions the “primary principle of life,” which refers readers to natural philosophy. According to its provisions, the Cosmos is formed by two forces: Love as the beginning of a universal connection and Enmity as the beginning of the division of all things. Another poem in the collection “Stone” - “Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails..." His main motive does not raise questions - definitely love. This piece has several overlaps with "Silentium". In particular, we are talking about the ancient theme and the mention of the sea.

The line “she is both music and words” is interesting. Mandelstam considered poetry akin to music. In his opinion, a true composer is always on the same path as a true poet. If we take into account the version that “Silentium” talks about love, it turns out that such a strong feeling is capable of absorbing poetry and music, generating and uniting them.

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, in his unsurpassed poem “Silentium,” which was presented to the general public in 1910, using a special manner of presentation, says that the beginning of all beginnings is thought.

It is born pure and naked, and when it is brought to life with the help of words, it seems to be impoverished, because the word is not able to fully convey the grandeur of the original plan.

Just like Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev, Mandelstam decided to give the title to his work “Silentium”, only by dropping the exclamation mark at the end of the word. Osip Emilievich had a special relationship with Tyutchev’s work, read him avidly, and knew many poems by heart.

The small volume of poetry did not prevent disputes and versions from arising about what basic idea the author laid down. The name itself is translated as “Silence”, but we can also highlight another basis for writing - “Love”.

After all, it mentions an ancient goddess, whose name is forever imprinted in global culture as the personification of love and beauty. The origin of a wonderful feeling is the fundamental basis of everything.

Mandelstam sincerely believed that poetry invariably goes hand in hand with music. They are generated by the embodiment of the strongest of human feelings, firmly uniting them.
Using the example of his poem, the author reveals to us his sincere conviction that it was Silence that arose first of all, and not the Word at all. This is a special, subtle type of art that is not subject to time, since Silence underlies all achievements.

The lyrical hero of this literary masterpiece is puzzled by philosophical questions. His highest aspiration is the return of quiet primordiality, which serves as the foundation of life. The imperative exclamations with which “Silentium” is written indicate a fiery impulse to return the pristine silence.

When analyzing the poem, the reader gets the idea that poetry, like music or words, is based on an initial impulse, on the wave of a sudden thought, but no matter how brilliantly the creator completes his idea, it was initially much deeper, filled with unique images and emotional coloring.

O.E. Mandelstam, with his countless creations, immerses us in the realization that the inner world of every person, without exception, is inviolable and holy, it is a secret storehouse of consciousness that carefully preserves the indestructible power of the fundamental principle of life.

The Silence of Osip Mandelstam

A spoken thought is a lie.
"Silentium!" F.I Tyutchev

No, everything is clear
But what exactly...
“What did you mean” A. Kortnev

Silentium

She hasn't been born yet
She is both music and words,
And therefore all living things
Unbreakable connection.

Seas of breasts breathe calmly,
But, like a crazy day, the day is bright,
And pale lilac foam
In a black and azure vessel.

May my lips find
Initial muteness
Like a crystal note
That she was pure from birth!

Remain foam, Aphrodite,
And, word, return to music,
And, heart, be ashamed of your hearts,
Merged from the fundamental principle of life!

The poem "Silentium" is one of Mandelstam's best-known and most misunderstood poems. To prove this, it is enough to compare comments in various publications, asking the question that is key to understanding this poem: who is “she”?
Meanwhile, a careful reading of the text, it seems to us, could resolve this issue. The key to a poem is its composition. K.F. Taranovsky, who devoted part of his special article to the analysis of this text, believes that the poem is two-part: each part consists of two stanzas, and the main means of contrasting the parts is syntax. The first part in syntactic terms is a sequence of indicative sentences that make up a static description; the second is a series of imperative sentences that form a rhetorical appeal.
All this is true, but there is another level of division of the text - thematic.
The poem is not at all as uniform in terms of content as it seems, and we see this already in the first stanza. This stanza represents a chain of adjacent (since they are united by an explicit or implied connecting connection) definitions of what is called the pronoun “she”: “not yet born”;
“both music and words”, “an unbreakable connection between all living things”; a kind of matrix of equations with one common unknown variable. However, these definitions clearly no longer have any thematic intersections: only a living being can be born, “both music and the word” refers rather to creativity, and “the connection of all living things” generally refers to natural philosophy. So what is this "X"?
So, two definitions are developing, but why is the third definition not developing? And what, generally speaking, is this third definition talking about? The absence of a stanza dedicated to it, thereby turning it into a marked element of the system, makes us think that this is where the “main name” of our “X” lies.
Let's read it again. "The First Principle of Life" is an explicit reference to natural philosophy.
Since the time of Empedocles, it has preserved the doctrine of the presence of two forces that organize the Cosmos: Enmity - the beginning of the division of all things, and Love - the beginning of a universal connection, connection. But the heart mentioned in the fourth stanza has also always been a symbol of love! And Aphrodite is the goddess primarily of love, and only secondarily of beauty, no matter what one of the commentators thinks! "Has the word been found?"
This version can be confirmed by another, no less famous poem from “The Stone”: “Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails...” We find in it most of the motifs of “Silence”: antiquity, the black sea (the existing discrepancies are “black and azure” or “cloudy azure”, it seems more correct to resolve in favor of the first, referring to the black and red vessels of Hellas), silence, “divine foam” - however, in this case, the theme of the poem is beyond any doubt: it is love.
But why does Mandelstam choose such a complex way of naming his theme in “Silentium”? Here it is worth recalling the only compositional element of the text that we have not yet included in the analysis - the title of the poem. It is an undoubted reference to Tyutchev’s famous poem - however, it is a reference, not a quotation. The difference between the two names is in the sign. Tyutchev has an exclamation point at the end of the title; Mandelstam has no sign. Tyutchev's title is a call to silence; Mandelstam's title is an indication of something essential in the text itself. But for what? On the topic of? But the theme is love! Or not?
It is this paradox that Mandelstam is trying to get around: he, like Tyutchev, is aware of the inability of human speech to express innermost human feelings, but cannot do without it. Therefore, he also turns to rhetoric, but no longer in search of new arguments: he uses a figure of silence, which alone can help “the heart to express itself” without calling feelings by name.
One can see in this a manifestation of the fear of love that possessed the young Mandelstam.
But this is only part of the explanation.

This method of overcoming the “liar paradox” also conceals Mandelstam’s constant desire to overcome the conventions of human culture, to break through to the basis of life that gave birth to these cultural forms. The poet, who by his very origin was deprived of access to “high” Russian and world culture, tried to establish a connection between it and his own life. This is precisely the secret of his “Hellenism”. Mandelstam looks for life itself in the manifestations of life; in the discoveries of the past there are traces of the revelations that gave rise to these traces.
“I’ll be there by ten tomorrow,” I thought.
and said out loud:
I'm at ten tomorrow...

“I believe her” A. Kortnev

Actually, the entire “Stone” can be perceived as a gradual movement from external forms of culture, primarily ancient, to their internal meaning. This is even reflected in the poet’s attitude towards ancient imagery. If we accept what was proposed by B.I. Yarkho and the revived M.L.
Gasparov’s division of images into independent ones, having “a real existence in the reality proposed by this work,” and auxiliary ones, serving “to enhance the artistic effectiveness of the first,” we can trace how gradually the images of the ancient world move from the category of auxiliary to the category of basic ones. In some of the early poems of "Stone" (for example, "Why is the soul so melodious...", "Tennis", etc.), the poet uses ancient images only to create a certain aesthetic effect: these images are designed to create a sense of greatness, the enormity of what is being described. Thus, in the poem “Tennis” a number of “ancient” epithets appear against the background of an expanding space: starting with the description of a tennis game, the poem “increases” to the level of the “world”:
Who, who subdued the rude ardor,
Alpine covered in snow,

Entered with a frisky girl
An Olympic duel?
The strings of the lyre are too decrepit.
Golden string rocket

Thus, the ancient theme in this poem remains purely auxiliary, but it turns out to be connected with ideas about the special significance of what is happening.

The function is similar to the comparison of the frigate with the acropolis in the poem “Admiralty”:
And in the dark greenery a frigate or an acropolis

Brother shines from afar, to the water and sky.

Despite the fact that the image of the acropolis performs an auxiliary function, its presence is a definite prediction of the future development of the ancient theme. Another important fact attracts attention: the mixture of the planes of “reality” and “myth” in the image of Medusa:

The capricious Medusas are angrily molded...
On the one hand, the mythical image of Medusa is recognizable, and at the same time we are clearly talking about primitive sea animals clinging to standing ships. This two-dimensionality of the image can be explained by the idea of ​​the poem: if we consider that the “fifth element” that man created is time, that time is the strongest of the elements capable of tearing apart three-dimensional space, then with this understanding of the fifth element the motive of eternity, life in eternity, which contains all present and past times (as well as the future). The images of the Acropolis and Medusa are organically included in the structure of the poetic “today”, permeated with the cultural “always”.
In the poem “About Simple and Rough Times,” the main thing is the process of “recognition” (the term of S.A. Osherov) by the lyrical hero in the world around him of the realities of the ancient era. The noise of horse hooves reminds the poet “of simple and rough times”; Having entered the “aura” of this memory, the poet “recognizes” in the gatekeeper’s yawn the image of a Scythian, who, as it were, is clarifying the characterization of the time that Mandelstam is talking about: this is the time of Ovid’s exile. Thus, although outwardly the poem speaks of the world contemporary to Mandelstam, the semantic weight is clearly transferred to the “auxiliary” reality of Ovid’s era. A semantic association arises in the poet’s mind, the poet “recognizes” semantic fragments close to him and “places” them in reality, while turning to a greater extent to “that” world:

Reminded me of your image, Scythian.

This poem is close in thought to the poem “I have not heard the stories of Ossian...”, written, however, on “Celtic-Scandinavian” material (1914):

I received a blessed inheritance -
Strange singers' wandering dreams;
Your kinship and boring neighborhood
We are obviously free to despise.

And more than one treasure, perhaps,
Bypassing the grandchildren, he will go to his great-grandchildren;
And again the skald will compose someone else's song
And how he will pronounce it.

In the article “About the Interlocutor,” Mandelstam wrote that writing for oneself is madness, turning to one’s neighbors is vulgarity, one must write for an unknown distant reader, whom fate will send, and oneself must be such an addressee of the poets of the past.
The place of antiquity in the poet’s semantic space is gradually changing, it is becoming closer to the poet. This situation is reflected in the poem “Nature is the same as Rome...”. The first phrase “Nature is the same Rome and is reflected in it” is elliptical: nature is compared with Rome, and at the same time we learn that in Rome itself one can see a reflection of nature.
Rome is a metaphor for power, authority. For Mandelstam, Rome, according to Richard Przybylski, is “a symbolic form of culture. The myth of Rome is the work of the joint efforts of many generations who wanted to free man from the fate written in the stars and turn the ashes into a source of constant rebirth. This victory over fate, over time, represented the opportunity to turn Rome into a fixed point of the world, into an indestructible eternal Center of Being. That is why symbolic Rome allows a person to unravel the mystery of existence."
How the poet understood this symbol, we can learn from a poem written in 1914:

Let the names of blooming cities
They caress the ear with mortal significance.
It is not the city of Rome that lives among the centuries,
And the place of man in the universe.

And in this poem the image of Rome is in balance with “man’s place in the universe.” These two images are equally loaded. Despite the fact that in the first stanza the life of Rome among the centuries is denied, in the second stanza it turns out that life “without Rome” loses its meaning:

The kings are trying to take possession of it,
Priests justify wars
And without him we are worthy of contempt,
How pathetic rubbish are houses and altars!

The Roman theme is developed in the poem “The herds graze with a cheerful neighing...”.

It should be noted that this poem belongs to the group of poems that complete “The Stone”, as if summing it up. Now Rome for the poet is a newfound homeland, home. The entire poem is based on “recognition.”
May my sadness be bright in old age:
I was born in Rome, and he returned to me;
Autumn was like a good wolf to me,

And - the month of Caesar - August smiled at me.
In this poem, Mandelstam’s self-identification with ancient culture went so far that it made it possible for V.I. Terrace to claim that it was written on behalf of Ovid. Numerous factual arguments given by the researcher as proof of this point of view must still be accepted with a certain amendment: given the essential two-dimensionality of Mandelstam’s other “ancient” poems, one cannot help but make a reservation: the poem was written on behalf of Mandelstam, who “recognizes” Ovid in himself.

Adjacent to this poem in some sense is the already mentioned poem “Insomnia. Homer. Tight Sails...”, which differs from most of the “ancient” poems of “The Stone”. There are several differences. Firstly, in the poem there is virtually no moment of external perception of the surrounding world, etc., a moment that is almost obligatory in previous poems, since it was precisely this that was accompanied by the “recognition” of ancient realities in the realities of the present.

Thus, “Insomnia...” undoubtedly belongs to the final poems of “The Stone” (along with the already mentioned “With a merry neigh...” and “I will not see the famous Phaedra...”), which reflects the desire the poet to see reality through the eyes of a man of antiquity is a desire that defines, as already said, this period of Mandelstam’s work.
It is interesting that the poet seems to abandon Homer in favor of the sea:

Who should I listen to? And now Homer is silent,
And the black sea, swirling, makes noise
And with a heavy roar he approaches the headboard.

This choice can be interpreted as a symbolic rejection of a no longer unnecessary “assistant”: what Mandelstam could previously see only through the medium of an ancient author has become so close to him that he no longer needs such an intermediary.

At the same time, this acquisition turns out to be associated with an acute feeling of the inaccessibility of the “classical” perception of the world, expressed in the last poem of “The Stone” - “I will not see the famous Phaedra...”. The last phrase of the collection becomes nostalgic:

If only a Greek could see our games...
What to call this gloomy land? -
We will answer: Come on
let's call it Armageddon

"Armageddon" A. Kortnev
The name "Tristia", according to S.A. Osherov, “caused in the Russian reader associations primarily with the elegy from Ovid’s book of the same name, known under the code name “Last Night in Rome.” Both the “science of parting” (named elegy as the antithesis of the “Science of Love”) and “simple-haired complaints" (Ovid talks about his wife's hair ritually loosened as a sign of mourning), and "Cock Night"; the first line of the elegy "Cum subit illius tristissima noctis imago" - "The saddest image of that night will just come to mind" - Mandelstam himself quotes in the article “Word and Culture.” This collection is even more cyclical, the poems are even more interconnected than in “Stone”. already acquired meanings. Zhirmunsky wrote: “Mandelshtam loved to combine the most distant concepts from each other in the form of metaphor or comparison.” Tynyanov later explores the emergence of these strange meanings: “The shade, the coloring of the word is not lost from verse to verse, it thickens in the subsequent. .. these strange meanings are justified by the course of the entire poem, the progression from shade to shade, ultimately leading to a new meaning. Here the main point of Mandelstam's work is the creation of new meanings." What Tynyanov observed within one poem was extended by later researchers - Taranovsky, Ginzburg - to broader contexts.
So, the word carries with it a certain meaning, drawn from already created contexts. Moreover, in “Stone” the poet uses the memory of “alien” contexts, often directly named (“Ask Charles Dickens.”) In “Tristia” the word accumulates mainly the meanings accumulated in the poet’s own previous poems.
All the verses of "Tristia" are connected in one way or another. It is interesting to note that the poet also emphasizes the connection between the collections, ending “Stone” with the poem “I will not see the famous Phaedra...” and beginning “Tristia” with a poem dedicated to Phaedra: “Like these veils...” This poem is a variation on theme of Phaedra's first monologue from Racine's tragedy.
This is how the collection includes the image of death. The concept of “transparency” is attached to the image of ancient Hades (and wider than death), and at the same time - St. Petersburg.

In transparent Petropol we will die,
Where Proserpine rules over us.

At the same time, transparency can also be explained “materialistically”:

I'm cold. Transparent spring
Petropol dresses in green fluff.

"Transparent spring" is the time when leaves just begin to bloom.

These two poems are adjacent, and therefore Proserpina turns spring Petersburg into Hades - the kingdom of the dead, which has the property of transparency. Confirmation of this connection is in the poem “The Asphodels Are Still Far Away...”: “Asphodels are the pale flowers of the kingdom of shadows, the transparent spring of the asphodels is the departure to Hades, to death.”
(Osherov); in a 1918 poem we find:
Will-o'-the-wisp at a terrible height,

But is this how a star twinkles?
Transparent star, flickering fire,
The named trinity - transparency - Petersburg - Hades (death) - becomes the single semantic space of many works, and the motif of death is found in almost all the poems in the collection.

It is important to note that death for Mandelstam is not just a “black hole”, the end of everything. The kingdom of death has its own cultural and semantic structure: it is also a world, although appropriately colored in oppressive, dark and at the same time transparent, ethereal tones; a world in which ancient denominations are present - Proserpina, Lethe. At the same time, this world is extremely poor, limited in every way compared to the “world of the living”; the existence of those who find themselves in the kingdom of death is the existence of shadows.

Due to the fact that this is still being, thought is able to look into the kingdom of death, imagine what is there, and then live with this idea, with the consciousness of its doom.
The revolution, as he foresaw in 1916, turns the world upside down, throwing it into the world of death. And in a poem from 1918, the prediction from the poems two years ago is repeated almost verbatim, but as if it had come true:

Your brother, Petropol, is dying.
Let us pay attention to the fact that St. Petersburg is called here by the ancient name “Petropol”.
This is a symbol of the passing high culture, a very dear part of that world to the poet, that cultural space, the death of which Mandelstam observes.
In the poem "Cassandra", the poet more openly declares the loss of "everything":

This poem is dedicated to Akhmatova, but in the context of other poems in the collection it acquires another level of interpretation. In fact, the “farewell to culture” continues here.
The poem “Venetian life, gloomy and barren...” is about the death of not only Russian, but European and world culture. It begins with sleep and death: “At the theater and at an idle gathering a man dies,” and ends with “everything passes,” including death, “a man is born,” and Vesper, a two-faced star, twinkles in the mirror - morning and evening .
The idea of ​​the cycle of “eternal return” turns out to be the last support for Mandelstam in his opposition to the chaos of reality. In the center of this cycle is a timeless point, “where time does not pass,” a place of peace and balance. For Mandelstam, it is associated with the golden age, the Greek islands of the blessed. Hope for rest finds expression in a cycle of poems, headed by two Crimean poems - “A stream of golden honey...” and “On the stone spurs of Pieria...” (1919). The first poem begins with the symbol of stopped time:

A stream of golden honey flowed from the bottle
So viscous and long...

Peculiar signs of the frozen time of ancient Taurida are the “white columns”, past which the characters - the poet and the mistress of the estate - “went to look at the grapes”; “there are Bacchus services everywhere”, “it smells of vinegar, paint and fresh wine from the cellar”, and nothing reminds of the twentieth century, revolution and so on. Silence is an indispensable attribute of this world:

Well, in the room, white as a spinning wheel, there is silence...

The emerging image of Penelope is associated with the image of a spinning wheel. She is also known to have tried to “stretch out” her husband’s waiting time with the help of needlework:

Do you remember, in a Greek house, everyone’s beloved wife -
Not Elena - the other one - how long did she embroider?

The last phrase of the poem naturally introduces the image of Odysseus: “Odysseus has returned, full of space and time.” It can be assumed that the poet identifies himself with Odysseus returning home, having found peace after a long search, having found the embodiment of his ideal of “Hellenism,” a habitable space commensurate with man, “in rocky Tauris.” Let us also note a change in priorities: not Elena the Beautiful, forcing men to fight, but Penelope, patiently waiting for her husband - this is the new ideal of a woman.
The second key poem of the cycle, “On the stone spurs of Pieria,” according to M.L. Gasparov, is “a set of reminiscences from early Greek lyric poets.” There are no signs of the “outside world” in the poem, the time and place of the poem is an eternal spring poetic holiday, a poetic utopia, “islands of the blessed”, or, as the poem says, “holy islands”, corresponding to the “archipelago”, that is, the islands in the Ionian sea.
This poem contains many images that are key to the entire collection.

So, V.I. Terrace points to the image of the industrious bee as a metaphor for the poet, and accordingly to the image of poetic creativity as “sweet honey”:
So that, like bees, the lyre players are blind

They gave us Ionian honey.

The action takes place on the island of Lesbos, as evidenced by the mention of Sappho and Terpandra - the first famous poet and musician born on this island.
Mandelstam depicts the era of the birth of art, and the symbol of this is the lyre turtle lying in the sun and waiting for Terpandra. In this regard, one cannot help but recall the poem “Silentium”, since we again find ourselves at the moment of the birth of the word. However, the poet’s attitude to this moment is different.
If for the early Mandelstam silence was preferable, then in this poem the time when “On the stone spurs of Pieria the Muses led the first round dance” is perceived by him as a utopia, a beautiful “somewhere.” This utopia is marked by a set of attributes of “Hellenism” already known to us: this is “honey, wine and milk”, and “cold spring”, and such lines that stand out against the symbolic background of the entire poem with their earthly character:
The tall house was built by a stalwart carpenter,

At the wedding, everyone was strangled by chickens
The title poem "Tristia" ("I have studied the science of parting...") becomes a unique point of intersection of many semantic lines of the collection.
The poem consists of two parts, outwardly in no way related to each other.

The key word of the first part is “parting”, and in the context of the entire poem it should be perceived not only as the parting of a person with a person, but also of a person with a certain “old life”. It is no coincidence that in two stanzas the rooster is mentioned three times - “the herald of new life.” We can say that this part of the poem is correlated with those poems in the collection that talk about the world of death, since the action takes place in the “last hour of urban violence.”
The second part is closer to the “Hellenistic” poems of the collection. Here we find both an image of needlework (“the shuttle scurries, the spindle hums”) and a frank declaration:

Everything happened before, everything will happen again,
And only the moment of recognition is sweet for us.

It is interesting that in this part of the poem the opposition between wax and copper is developed. As already mentioned, these are peculiar primary elements of the lived-in, human world. At the same time, they find themselves involved in another, much deeper layer of existence. Thus, wax, due to its transparency, becomes an instrument of fortune telling “about the Greek Erebus,” that is, Hades. At the same time, wax is a property of the feminine world, in contrast to copper, which acts as a property of the masculine world (one should note a subtle play with the grammatical category of gender: “wax” is the masculine gender, as the embodiment of the feminine world, and “copper” is the feminine gender, as the embodiment male).
Copper and wax are not only opposed to each other, but in a certain sense they are identical:
Wax is to women what copper is to men.

It is only in battles that our lot falls,
And they were given the chance to die.

Thus, a complex system of co- and oppositions is built: wax as a tool of fortune-telling gives women the same thing as copper as a weapon for men, namely, involvement in another world (for women to the male world and vice versa; apparently, this explains the morphological inversion noted above) , but for both, touching someone else’s world means death.
So, Mandelstam hopes that the life-giving power inherent in simple human existence will make it possible to overcome the ethereality of Persephone’s kingdom. The death of culture has come, but life goes on. And even if you have to pay for life with oblivion, then this is a worthy price for the acquired land:

One of Mandelstam’s most famous poems, “Swallow,” is also associated with the motif of oblivion. In fact, the entire poem is a complaint about the loss of the ability to remember (recognize). The poet considers himself to be in the world of shadows, since he is deprived of this ability:

And to mortals the power is given to love and recognize,
For them, the sound will spill into their fingers,
But I forgot what I want to say
And the disembodied thought will return to the palace of shadows.

But the poet leaves the world of the dead, gaining the ability to speak. This step is associated with a return to St. Petersburg:

In St. Petersburg we will meet again -
As if we buried the sun in it -
And the blessed, meaningless word
Let's say it for the first time.

For Mandelstam, the process of returning to life cannot help but be associated with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which is why in the poems that marked this milestone, “In St. Petersburg we will meet again...” and “The ghostly scene flickers slightly...” these names are mentioned. But at the same time as Mandelstam returns to life, he begins to feel the theatricality of what is happening. It is significant that Mandelstam of the “Stone” period, acquiring the ability to “recognize” the ancient world in the present world, simultaneously came to a sense of theatricality, the artificiality of this real world.
The poem “The ghostly scene flickers slightly...” is also interesting because in it for the first time Mandelstam speaks about the special responsiveness of the Russian language:

Sweeter than the singing of Italian speech
My native language
For it babbles mysteriously
A spring of foreign harps.

A unique example of such interpenetration of the ancient and Russian is the poem “When the city moon comes out in the hundreds...”. On the one hand, this is the same case when there is not a single ancient name in the poem, but the motives associated with the “antique” poems in the collection make it be perceived as a continuation of the ancient theme. However, the first line of the second stanza, “And the cuckoo cries on its stone tower...” makes us remember “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” - about Yaroslavna’s cry. Thus, for Mandelstam, the ancient Russian epic turns out to be part of his Hellenistic world.
So, the ancient and “near-antique” poems in the collection “Tristia” can be interpreted as a supertext, telling about the poet’s premonition of loss and loss of antiquity as a world of high culture and the subsequent acquisition of the “Hellenistic” world in simple human existence, in the elements of the Russian language.
These poems form a certain skeleton, the framework of the collection; other poems that are not externally connected with antiquity, but use the language formed by ancient poems, also refer to them. This feature of Mandelstam’s poetics (and based specifically on “Tristia”) was noted by Yu.N. Tynyanov in the already cited article “The Interval”: “Equated to each other by a single, well-known melody, the words are colored by one emotion, and their strange order, their hierarchy become mandatory... These strange meanings are justified by the course of the entire poem, the progression from shade to shade, ultimately leading to a new meaning. Here the main point of Mandelstam’s work is the creation of new meanings." It is only worth adding: the creation of new meanings also occurs during the transition from poem to poem.
Antiquity itself becomes the “language” of the poet, since Mandelstam builds, if not absolutely logical, but an integral personal mythology (however, not a single mythology, except for purely rationalistic ones, that is, the dead, was logical).
In this mythology there is a place for the kingdom of life and death with the gods and heroes inhabiting them (Persephone, Athena, Cassandra, Orpheus and Eurydice, Antigone, Psyche); the blissful islands of eternal spring, belonging to poets and artisans; there is also a place for people who wonder about their fate in this world in accordance with the destiny given to them (mythologems of wax and copper), or who have calmed down, reconciled with the world around them (like Penelope and Odysseus). Time in this mythological space, in full accordance with Plato, is cyclical, and the process of creativity, like love, is Recognition (cf. Plato’s definition of knowledge as recollection).

This world is sometimes extremely cruel, you have to pay for existence in it, but one thing cannot be denied: its vitality. There is no allegorical coldness of the classicists’ antiquity here; rather, this is a characteristic attempt of modernism to resurrect the past, return what was lost, repeat what was said, making it new, unusual, even incomprehensible, but alive, saturated with flesh and blood. It is hardly by chance that the collection ends with a cycle of poems dedicated to the poet’s love for O.N. Arbenina - completely carnal love (see, for example, the poem “I am equal with others...”, which is very unusual in its frankness and openness of feeling). Life wins; culture passes away, leaving behind a “blessed, meaningless word,” which becomes the path to life for Mandelstam. Did time justify the poet's hopes for the return of the “forgotten”?
and you can smoke in peace,
Forget about stupid marches
and Pokrass polkas...
"Jazz Club" A. Kortnev

The next era was reflected in the poems contained in the last collection of poems published during Mandelstam’s lifetime. “Poems of 1921 - 1925” preserve the memory of the revelations of previous eras, primarily of the “Hellenistic”, humanized world discovered by the poet. But the place of remote Taurida is occupied by a Russian village: hay, wool, chicken droppings, matting - these are the “primary substances” that make up human life. However, the life of the village for Mandelstam is no less alien and exotic than the life of ancient Taurida. He is trying to find a way to comprehend this life, perceiving it as he perceived the forms of ancient culture, penetrating from the outside into the center that organizes it. But his main means, the poetic word, increasingly fails him. Mandelstam is acutely aware of the discrepancy between the “Aeolian miraculous system” and the chaos of reality:

We rustle not with our scales,
We sing against the grain of the world,
We build the lyre as if we are in a hurry
Overgrow with shaggy fleece!

The connection of all living things is inexorably disintegrating; It is impossible to keep it in borrowed forms; the only hope is to find a new, “native” word:

From a nest of fallen chicks
The mowers are brought back.
I'll break out of the burning ranks
And I will return to my native scale,

To the pink blood connection
And the grass withered ringing
They said goodbye: one - holding fast,
And the other - into an abstruse dream.

This is how another “primal substance” appears - blood. The sacrificial blood must bind “two centuries of vertebrae”;

To snatch a century from captivity,
To start a new world,
Knobby knee days
You need to tie it with a flute.

The poet, like Hamlet, sees his mission in introducing the age into the natural sequence of events from which it was broken, and at the same time increasingly feels his powerlessness to fulfill his destiny.

Mandelstam is trying to find a way to the “native scale”, turning to the speech of Tyutchev and Lermontov (“Concert at the Station”, “Slate Ode”), Pushkin (“The Founder of the Horseshoe”, reminiscent of the moment of inspiration depicted in “Autumn”), Derzhavin ( “The slate ode”) - but increasingly retreats into mystery, understatement, silence. His poetic sense of life does not find support in the established order of the ruler age, the beast age. Life is not even a theater, but a gypsy camp; instead of sea foam - foam of lace:

I will rush around the camp of the dark street...
And there is only light in the star’s prickly untruth!
And there is no one to say: “From the camp of a dark street...”

The poet Osip Mandelstam fell silent for five years - until 1930.

* * *

When the last bummer comes,
I will go out into the world and become a pillar.

How should I act to be myself...
"The Last Bummer" A. Kortnev

The speech will return to Mandelstam when he abandons his attempts to “become on an equal footing with the century,” when he understands that his poetic strength lies not in proximity to life, but in getting closer to it. To gain this power, he must withdraw from life, “destroying himself, contradicting himself.”
Mandelstam takes this last step, creating poems in which the feeling that organizes the entire life around him finds expression - the feeling of fear. In Mandelstam’s contemporary world, this feeling is nameless: no one dares to admit that he is afraid. By naming it, the poet simultaneously pulls himself out of the flow of life and turns to it. He doesn't get rid of fear - he overcomes it. The energy of overcome fear, like once the energy of love, gives him the strength to overcome silence.

Fear makes him dream of salvation from the “wolfhound age”, hoping for a “hot fur coat of the Siberian steppes” - but, in addition to fear, the consciousness of his own superiority over the would-be killer speaks in him:
Because I am not a wolf by blood

And only my equal will kill me.

He challenges the century, ready for anything. He reads “Under a Terrible Secret” to more than a dozen people:

We live without feeling the country beneath us...
The entire work of Osip Mandelstam is a monument, no, simply a memory of human courage. This is not the confident courage of a mighty man who fears nothing because of his strength; this is not the mad courage of a fanatic, protected from fear by his faith;
This is the courage of the weak, overcoming his weakness, this is the courage of the coward, overcoming his cowardice. Perhaps not a single Russian poet knew so well “the fears inherent in the soul,” from the fear of falling in love to the fear of dying. Silence was Mandelstam's destiny, his destiny; but his speech, his poetry are evidence of man’s ability to overcome his fate.
Discovering your feelings always means taking a risk. Let the heart not be allowed to “express itself” in its entirety; but if you don't try, no one will ever know that you had a heart. Osip Mandelstam sacrificed his life, but preserved his existence for us - how many of his contemporaries who saved their lives can we say that they existed? Let it sometimes seem that the existence of one person is an insignificant small thing; but without this smallness, can the great exist?

There are many mysteries in the poetry of Osip Mandelstam. But she is alive as long as there is someone who is trying to solve them. Each new reader brings to life some new part of his world - incorporating this part into his own world. Can we do more for a person than allow him to become a part of us?
...And we, like a school of fish, swim towards the light,
And we call our fishermen by name.
We are composing a farce, but it remains for us
A dozen more rhymes, a dozen more phrases...

“I believe her” A. Kortnev
That's why I'm lying!
Waste!

"The Wolf and the Lamb" by I. A. Krylov

One of the most famous and at the same time most controversial poems written by Osip Mandelstam is “Silentium”. This article contains an analysis of the work: what influenced the poet, what inspired him and how these famous poems were created.

Poems by Mandelstam "Silentium"

She hasn't been born yet

Let us recall the text of the work:

She is both music and words,

And therefore all living things

Seas of breasts breathe calmly,

Unbreakable connection.

But, like a crazy day, the day is bright,

And pale lilac foam

May my lips find

In a black and azure vessel.

Initial muteness

Like a crystal note

Remain foam, Aphrodite,

That she was pure from birth!

And return the word to music,

And be ashamed of your heart,

Merged from the fundamental principle of life!

Below we present an analysis of this work of the great poet.

Mandelstam wrote “Silentium” in 1910 - the poems were included in his debut collection “Stone” and became one of the most striking works of the then nineteen-year-old writer. While writing Silentium, Osip was studying at the Sorbonne, where he attended lectures by the philosopher Henri Bergson and the philologist Joseph Bedier. Perhaps it was under the influence of Bergson that Mandelstam came up with the idea to write this poem, which differs in philosophical depth from the author’s earlier works. At the same time, the poet became interested in the works of Verlaine and Baudelaire, and also began to study the Old French epic.

The work "Silentium", filled with an enthusiastic and sublime mood, belongs to the lyrical genre in free form and with philosophical themes. The lyrical hero of the work tells about “the one who has not yet been born,” but is already music and words, inviolably uniting all living things. Most likely, Mandelstam’s “she” is a harmony of beauty that combines both poetry and music and is the apogee of everything perfect that exists in the world. The mention of the sea is associated with the goddess of beauty and love Aphrodite, who was born from sea foam, combining the beauty of nature and the height of the feelings of the soul - she is harmony. The poet asks Aphrodite to remain foam, implying that the goddess represents too loud a perfection.

Perhaps in the second quatrain the author hints at the biblical story of the creation of the world: land appeared from the sea, and under the light, barely separated from the darkness, beautiful shades became visible among the general blackness of the ocean. The day that “brightened like crazy” may mean some moment of insight and inspiration experienced by the author.

The last quatrain again refers to the biblical theme: hearts ashamed of each other most likely allude to the shame experienced by Adam and Eve after they ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Here Mandelstam calls for a return to the original harmony - “the fundamental principle of life.”

Title and means of expression

It is impossible to analyze Mandelstam's Silentium without understanding what the title means. The Latin word silentium means "silence". This title is an obvious reference to the poems of another famous poet - Fyodor Tyutchev. However, his work is called Silentium! - the exclamation point gives the form of an imperative mood, and therefore the name is most correctly translated as “Be silent!” In these verses, Tyutchev calls for enjoying the beauty of the external world of nature and the inner world of the soul without further ado.

In his poem "Silentium" Mandelstam echoes the words of Tyutchev, but avoids direct appeal. From this we can conclude that “silence” or “silence” is the harmony of beauty, which “has not yet been born,” but is about to appear in the minds and hearts of people, allowing them to silently, in “primary silence,” enjoy their surroundings life with the splendor of natural feelings and emotions.

The main expressive means of this poem are syncretism and cyclic repetitions (“both music and the word - and the word return to music”, “and pale lilac foam - remain foam, Aphrodite”). Also used are picturesque images characteristic of all of Mandelstam’s poetry, for example, “pale lilacs in a black and azure vessel.”

Mandelstam uses iambic tetrameter and his favorite method of cyclic rhyme.

sources of inspiration

Having written "Silentium", Mandelstam is revealed for the first time as a serious, original poet. Here he uses images for the first time, which will then appear again and again in his work. One of these images is the mention of ancient Roman and ancient Greek themes - the poet has repeatedly admitted that it is in the subjects of myths that he sees the harmony he so desires, which he constantly seeks in the things around him. “The birth also prompted Mandelstam to use the image of Aphrodite.

The sea became the main phenomenon that inspired the poet. Mandelstam surrounded “Silentium” with sea foam, likening the silence to Aphrodite. Structurally, the poem begins with the sea and ends with the sea, and thanks to the sound organization, a harmonious splash is heard in every line. The poet believed that it is on the seashore that one can feel how silent and small a person is against the backdrop of the spontaneity of nature.

This poem by O.E. Mandelstam was included in his debut collection entitled “Stone”. It was first published in the then popular publication Apollo. The work attracted public attention for its easy presentation of such a serious and philosophical topic. Among the poet’s debut works, this is precisely what differs sharply from the rest of the theme, showing the depth of thought and the author’s idea.

From the title of the verse there is an immediate reference to the work of the same name by Tyutchev, who was one of Mandelstam’s inspirations. In the poem, Tyutchev speaks about the importance of silent observation of the external nature and internal impulses of the human soul.

Mandelstam presents the theme softer and more mysterious. The title of the poem does not contain a loud appeal, there is no exclamation mark. The presentation of the poem itself is melodic, cyclical and light. The work begins with the sea and ends with it. Disputes still rage about who the mysterious “she” is, about whom the poet speaks so enthusiastically.

Many see it as love, based on the reference to the Greek goddess Aphrodite. Some suggest it might be a thought. Beautiful and comprehensive in the head, and losing its versatility when trying to put it into words.

However, the answer to this question is a more global and independent concept. This is harmony. A thin connecting thread between all phenomena of the world. She is everything and nothing at the same time. And a person with his actions can upset its fragile balance. In this, Mandelstam’s work is based on Tyutchev’s poem about silent admiration of nature, which does not violate its pristine nature.

The author encourages everyone to find within themselves the purity given from birth, which gives the opportunity to see and enjoy the harmony of the world. At the same time, he asks nature to be more lenient towards humans. The desire to leave Aphrodite as simple foam is due to the highest degree of her ideality, such that an ordinary person cannot bear it. The goddess herself in the poet’s work personifies not just love, but the achievement of beautiful harmony between the forces of nature and spirituality.

Subsequently, Mandelstam repeatedly used ancient Greek and Roman themes in his work, in particular the image of Aphrodite. According to the poet, the myths of ancient peoples were an inexhaustible source of inspiration for him, as were the works of art created on their basis.

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