Category Archives: Osip Mandelstam

Osip Mandelstam: The Stalin Epigram

[Source: Wikimedia Commons] Osip Mandelstam never wrote this poem down. Only a handful of his most trusted friends ever heard it. One of them betrayed him. After his arrest in the fall of 1934, his interrogator at the Lubiyanka Prison … Continue reading






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Osip Mandelstam: “The Goldfinch”

Birds and birdsong abound in the poetry of Osip Mandelstam. In his later poetry, written after his arrest and internal exile in Voronezh in 1935-7, the goldfinch came to symbolize an unstoppable yearning for freedom and self-expression. Joseph Brodsky heard … Continue reading






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Vygotsky & Bakhtin, Madelstam & Walter Benjamin

My friend and teacher Nancy Mack invited me to visit her seminar on Lev Vygotsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and the social nature of language. When I took her course ten years ago, it was the most stimulating subject I encountered in … Continue reading






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“The Swallow” by Osip Mandelstam

Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky appended lines from Osip Mandelstam’s poem “The Swallow” as an epigraph to the final chapter of his seminal treatise in psycholinguistics, Thought and Language (1934). It wasn’t a heedless literary allusion. In A Word is the … Continue reading






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