Mandelstam, Blok and the Borders of Mythopoetic Symbolism

How did the legacy of Russian symbolism reflect in the poetics of Mandelstam? How did he himself write and rewrite his relations with it? How did Mandelstam's attitude toward Alexander Blok evolve? American Slavic scholar Stewart Goldberg analyzes Mandelstam's poems,... their intonation and pragmatics, contexts and intertexts, and also, based on Harold Bloom's famous concept of the anxiety of influence, explores the tense relationship of the poet with symbolism and one of its most powerful poetic voices—Alexander Blok. The author pays special attention to Mandelstam's process of overcoming symbolist poetics, expressed in a peculiar play with ambivalent irony. He also traces a shift in the understanding of poetic sincerity, which became a watershed between two poetic generations. Stewart Goldberg is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.