“Poetic speech is a crossbred process.”
“Poetry establishes itself with astonishing independence in an extra-spatial dimension where it not so much narrates as acts out in nature by means of its myriad devices known as tropes.” Mandelstam, in the company of his wife Nadezdha, was continuously harassed, and was eventually tortured and killed on Stalin’s direct order in the 1930s for believing in, and acting upon, this principle and upon Osip’s definition of literature as “the yearning for world culture.” Stalin’s hold over history’s narration proved to be much weaker than theirs that has yet to disclose the full richness of its possibilities.
—Peter Dimock, in Publishers Weekly on Friday, chose “10 Books That Rewrite History” (written between 1927-2001), and included The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, particularly for its inclusion of the prose piece, “Conversation About Dante.”
