Tag Archives: poetry

Anna Akhmatova in the Modernist Moment

Nathan Altman. Portrait of Anna Akhmatova. 1914. The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. [Source: Anna Akhmatova Foundation] Anna Akhmatova had become a cultural icon by the time Nathan Altman painted her in 1914. Her bangs and shawl, her regal bearing … Continue reading






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Listening to the Voice of Anna Akhmatova

What I found, remarkably, were recordings of Anna Akhmatova reading poems late in her life in the 1960s. This may be as close as we can come to hearing Mandelstam’s voice. Indeed, Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam preserved his verse in their voices and memories for three decades, resurrecting it furtively from inner speech, reciting it aloud to one another in the privacy of their rooms, then preserving it again in memory. Only after a political “thaw” came after Stalin’s death could Mandelstam’s poetry begin to be spoken publically and printed in books.






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Café Mouffe: Paul Celan’s Todesfuge

After a week of searching for the renewal of thought in inner speech, let there be its full expression in external; speech, through poetry. Had Osip Mandelstam survived Stalin’s labor camps, I imagine him bearing witness with the fierce urgency of Paul Celan, who wrote Todesfuge in the aftermath of the Holocaust. This recitation was recorded sometime before his suicide in Paris in 1970. The performance by Diamanda Galas, which ends too abruptly in the clip, was given in Madrid in 2008.






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A Word is the Search for It, part 5: The Renewal of Motive

Early in my study of Lev Vygotsky’s work I asked an experimental psychologist, an eminent authority on the evolution of the mammalian brain, what he knew about Vygotsky. He was working on sabbatical in London at the time, so our … Continue reading






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A Word is the Search for It, part 4: The Living Word

The abridged translation of Thought and Language also omitted passages which the translators considered obscure, overly philosophical, and extraneous to the book’s scientific arguments. In the unabridged translation Kozulin noted, without elaboration, that some of Vygotsky’s conclusions were influenced by … Continue reading






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