CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Room S354

After some prefatory remarks about Mandelstam’s love lyric, the paper will concentrate on two poems: “Mistress of guilty glances” (“Masteritsa vinovatykh vzorov”, 1934) and “I pray, Dame France, for mercy and compassion,” (“Ia moliu, kak zhalosti i milosti,” 1937). Discussion will address a permanent tension in Mandelstam’s poetry from the Acmeist period (1910) until Voronezh (1934-37) between sexual love, complicated by ambivalence about bodily desire, and ideals of devotion including Charity.  This tension...