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The Complete Critical Prose (Ardis Russian Literature Series)

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This is a book of essays most of which explore, grippingly, the nature of lyric poetry. But no other "literary criticism", by any author, even approaches it; in its density and radiance, it excels all other 20th-century prose and is comparable only to Mandelstam's own great verse, which often it helps to illuminate.

The simple "cause" of this is that Mandelstam "thinks in images"; that is, every chance image he explores from all sides, naively, as if, in the lawcourt of his search for an elusive truth, that mere humble "image" were the only eye-witness. For example, in his little essay about the 19th-century thinker Rozanov, a chance image -- that of an oil fire -- leads him to envisage a world without "philology" (i.e. a world without the love of language; I quote from pp. 124-125):

"The anti-philological spirit against which Rozanov struggled erupted out of the very depths of history. In its own way it was just as inextinguishable a flame as the philological flame.
"Such eternal flames exist on the earth, and they are fed by oil. Something may accidentally catch fire and will continue burning for decades. There is no formula to neutralize it; absolutely nothing can quench it. Luther was a rather poor philologist because instead of argument he let loose his inkwell. An anti-philological flame ulcerates the body of Europe... forever laying waste the ground on which culture
blossomed. Nothing can neutralize such ravenous flames. They must be allowed to burn, while the accursed places where no one needs to go, where no one will hasten, must be avoided.
"Europe devoid of philology is not even America; it is a civilized Sahara, cursed by God,an abomination of desolation."

Thus (as almost everywhere in this book -- for I chose this quotation almost at random) Mandelstam gets "carried away". That this book has been allowed to go out of print seems to me scandalous and a sign of that same "oil fire" which he mentions here!