Mandelstam's worlds : poetry, politics, and identity in a revolutionary age /

Referencing some 50 scholarly books, Kahn (Univ. of Oxford) asserts that Osip Mandelstam's poetry "absorbs and responds to his period's horizon of expectations" (p. 198). Discussion centers on politics and history, Mandelstam's early attempts to define the nature of the emerging Soviet state--controlled literature, and, evident in "Verses on Russian Poetry," the ideological premises of a literary canon: "the weaponization of art according to ideological factions" (ibid.). Kahn shows Mandelstam's "wane in the wind" attitudes: the early Acmeist movement and his adulation then repudiation of the Soviet system, which led the poet into domestic exile and untimely to his death. This meticulously detailed and very idiosyncratic scrutiny of Mandelstam's oeuvre, his impressive cubist experiments in visual and film arts, and his revolutionary and love lyrics is enhanced by 13 images and four plates, a chronology of his life and works (the latter by their Russian titles, collections, or first line), and a list of names appearing throughout this rich text. Anchoring Mandelstam's works in the midst of his world literature contemporaries and situating him with such Russian poets such as Pushkin, this volume affords Mandelstam a well-deserved place among the great literary figures of the 20th century. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Danuta Z. Hutchins, independent scholar