Volume 17 & 18, Number 12 & 1 · January 27, 1972
Mandelstam's Power
By Martin Malia
Hope against Hope: A Memoir
by Nadezhda Mandelstam, translated by Max Hayward, Introduction by Clarence Brown
Atheneum, 431 pp., $10.00
'Poetry is power,' Osip Mandelstam once said to Anna Akhmatova, thinking of the extraordinary destiny of the Acmeist movement to which the two had belonged. In the West this observation may hold true for the happy few, but it does not for society, or even for the cultivated public. In Russia, however, it holds true not only for an elite but for society in general. For in Russia, literature, and especially poetry, has long been a major moral force, has, indeed, possessed political 'power.' Mandelstam himself is one of the most powerful Russian poets of all time, in every connotation of the word power.
Review, 3926 words
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