A Coat of Many Colors : Osip Mandelstam and his Mythologies of Self-Presentation / Gregory Freidin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Freidin, Gregory, Author.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (446 p.)

Edition:

Reprint 2020

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

For the major poets of Osip Mandelstam's generation, poetry represented a calling in the most tangible sense. To respond to it meant to fashion from the available cultural and personal material a mythic self, one that could serve both as the organizing subject for poetry and as an object of worshipful adoration. A successful poet like Mandelstam thus became the focal point of a complex cultural phenomenon-perhaps a charismatic cult-that shaped his writings, gesture, and reception. Gregory Freidin examines Mandelstam's legacy in this broader context and lays the groundwork for approaching modernist Russian poetry as a charismatic institution. He traces the interplay of poetic tradition, personal background, historical events, religious culture, and political developments as they entered the symbolic order of Mandelstam's art and helped determine its outlines in the reader's imagination. Many important aspects of the Mandelstam phenomenon, including the Jewish theme, the meaning of the poet's Christianity, his political stand, and, in particular, his conflict with Stalin and Stalinism, receive here a new interpretation. A case study in the emergence of a literary cult, A Coat of Many Colors reveals how Russian poetry of the early twentieth century functioned as a charismatic institution of a distinctly modern kind. Those who belonged to it combined knowledge of the recent studies in myth, magic, and religion with the cultivation of verbal magic, mythic consciousness, and unorthodox religious beliefs. Following Mandelstam's career over its entire span (1908-1938), Freidin shows how the poet benefited from literary scholarship, comparative mythology, the history and sociology of religion at the same time he was emulating in his poetry the very subject of these academic disciplines. To account for this duality in interpreting Mandelstam's writings, Freidin draws on explanatory paradigms of contemporary human sciences, from Saussure and the Formalists to Weber, Durkheim, Freud, and Marcel Mauss. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988. For the major poets of Osip Mandelstam's generation, poetry represented a calling in the most tangible sense. To respond to it meant to fashion from the available cultural and personal material a mythic self, one that could serve both as the organizing su

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I. The Charisma of Poetry and the Poetry of Charisma

II. Mysteries of Breathing: 1909-1912

III. Le Nouvel Hippolyte and Phaedra-Russia: 1915-1916

IV. Setting the Stage: Prolepsis in Tristia, 1915-1917

V. The Question of Return: Themes and Variations, 1918-1920

VI. Revolutions and the Poetics of a Dying Age

VII. Dying as Metaphor and the Ironic Mode: 1920-1930

VIII. History and Myth: 1930-1938

APPENDIX I. The Mandelstam—Gornfel'd Affair

APPENDIX II. A Note on Pasternak

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 25. Nov 2020)

ISBN:

9780520341999

0520341996

OCLC:

1224278777