a blind flaneur

Reading Rilke’s Requiem for a Friend reminded me of a poem that was its direct descendant, Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Novogodnee” (”New Year’s Greeting”). Tsvetaeva wrote the poem in Paris in an outpouring of grief and nervous exhaustion after Rilke’s death in 1926. Tsvetaeva and Rilke had a deeply expressed poets’ friendship that paralleled the […]

[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 in Moscow confronted him with this hand-written copy.
The Stalin Epigram
We live, but we do not feel […]

Nathan Altman. Portrait of Anna Akhmatova. 1914. Oil on canvas. 123.5 x 103.2 cm. The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. [Source: Anna Akhmatova Foundation]

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 the Voronezh poems directly from Nadezhda Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, who preserved the poems in […]

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 graduate school. It tapped my long-standing interest in Russian literature and led eventually to the […]

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 Search for It, I read the epigraph as a carefully considered subtext that skirted the […]