For the major poets of Osip Mandelstam's generation, poetry
represented a calling in the most tangible sense. To respond to it
meant to fashion from the available cultural and personal material
a mythic self, one that could serve both as the organizing subject
for poetry and as an object of worshipful adoration. A successful
poet like Mandelstam thus became the focal point of a complex
cultural phenomenon-perhaps a charismatic cult-that shaped his
writings, gesture, and reception. Gregory Freidin examines
Mandelstam's legacy in this broader context and lays the groundwork
for approaching modernist Russian poetry as a charismatic
institution. He traces the interplay of poetic tradition, personal
background, historical events, religious culture, and political
developments as they entered the symbolic order of Mandelstam's art
and helped determine its outlines in the reader's imagination. Many
important aspects of the Mandelstam phenomenon, including the
Jewish theme, the meaning of the poet's Christianity, his political
stand, and, in particular, his conflict with Stalin and Stalinism,
receive here a new interpretation. A case study in the emergence of
a literary cult, "A Coat of Many Colors" reveals how Russian poetry
of the early twentieth century functioned as a charismatic
institution of a distinctly modern kind. Those who belonged to it
combined knowledge of the recent studies in myth, magic, and
religion with the cultivation of verbal magic, mythic
consciousness, and unorthodox religious beliefs. Following
Mandelstam's career over its entire span (1908-1938), Freidin shows
how the poet benefited from literary scholarship, comparative
mythology, the history and sociology of religion at the same time
he was emulating in his poetry the very subject of these academic
disciplines. To account for this duality in interpreting
Mandelstam's writings, Freidin draws on explanatory paradigms of
contemporary human sciences, from Saussure and the Formalists to
Weber, Durkheim, Freud, and Marcel Mauss.
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