The Love Lyric of Mandelstam: Unity, Evolution, Addressees

According to the widow of Osip Mandelstam, love poetry occupied a "limited place" in the poet's work; however, he considered these few works to be the best of everything he wrote. At the center of Oleg Lekmanov's book is the... connection between eroticism and poetry: the author analyzes all of Mandelstam's poems in which one can identify marker words traditionally used not only to embody the theme of love but also to represent female attractiveness. Combining a biographical method with motif analysis of Mandelstam's lyricism, exploring its evolution and clarifying the details related to the addressees of the poems, O. Lekmanov offers a fresh perspective on familiar texts and reveals something new that has so far escaped the attention of researchers. Oleg Lekmanov is a Doctor of Philology, a visiting professor at Princeton University, the author of the first monographic biography of Mandelstam, and numerous works on his poetics.