Osip Mandelstam and the modernist creation of tradition / Clare Cavanagh.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cavanagh, Clare.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Modernism (Literature)--Russia.

Modernism (Literature).

Mandelshtam, Osip, 1891-1938--Criticism and interpretation.

Mandelshtam, Osip.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (380 pages)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1995.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

If modernism marked, as some critics claim, an "apocalypse of cultural community," then Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) must rank among its most representative figures. Born to Central European Jews in Warsaw on the cusp of the modern age, he could claim neither Russian nor European traditions as his birthright. Describing the poetic movement he helped to found, Acmeism, as a "yearning for world culture," he defined the impulse that charges his own poetry and prose. Clare Cavanagh has written a sustained study placing Mandelstam's "remembrance and invention" of a usable poetic past in the context of modernist writing in general, with particular attention to the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Cavanagh traces Mandelstam's creation of tradition from his earliest lyrics to his last verses, written shortly before his arrest and subsequent death in a Stalinist camp. Her work shows how the poet, generalizing from his own dilemmas and disruptions, addressed his epoch's paradoxical legacy of disinheritance--and how he responded to this unwelcome legacy with one of modernism's most complex, ambitious, and challenging visions of tradition. Drawing on not only Russian and Western modernist writing and theory, but also modern European Jewish culture, Russian religious thought, post revolutionary politics, and even silent film, Cavanagh traces Mandelstam's recovery of a "world culture" vital, vast, and varied enough to satisfy the desires of the quintessential outcast modernist.

Contents:

Front matter

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS, TRANSLATIONS, AND TRANSLITERATION

CHAPTER ONE. Introduction: The Modernist Creation of Tradition

CHAPTER TWO. Self-Creation and the Creation of Culture

CHAPTER THREE. Making History: Modernist Cathedrals

CHAPTER FOUR. Judaic Chaos

CHAPTER FIVE. The Currency of the Past

CHAPTER SIX. Jewish Creation

CHAPTER SEVEN. Powerful Insignificance

CHAPTER EIGHT. Chaplinesque, or Villon Again: In Place of an Ending

APPENDIX

NOTES

INDEX

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [313]-357) and index.

ISBN:

9786612752070

9781282752078

1282752073

9781400821495

1400821495

9781400811205

1400811201

OCLC:

705526976