Selected Essays

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Osip Emilevich Mandelstam was a great poet, a great critic, and a profound humanist, perhaps even one of the last of the breed, though let us hope not. There is much interest in him now, if not exactly a “bandwagon.” In any case, I am not a bandwagon man; my aim is to serve.

I thought Mandelstam better served by a careful, if broad, selection than by a complete volume of his prose. Inevitably a certain subjective element has entered into my choices of what to include. I have included all the essays that Mandelstam himself collected in the volume of literary essays published in his lifetime, About Poetry. In addition, I have tried to limit myself to the literary essays. I have excluded the journalistic pieces, though some of them, like the interview with Ho Chi Minh or the account of the Mensheviks in Georgia, are quite interesting. I feel I would have Mandelstam’s approval here. The charming little radio play that he wrote in Voronezh about the early life of Goethe gave me more pain, as did the piece called “Sukharevka,” but I decided finally they did not fit well into the “mix.” Some of Mandelstam’s reviews are interesting, especially his review of Huysmans; yet they do not really display Mandelstam at his best, nor do the two articles dealing with problems of translation.

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