Now Available in English: Mandelstam by Oleg Lekmanov

[christa kling]

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Academic Studies Press is pleased to announce that the English translation of the critically acclaimed literary biography, Mandelstam by Oleg Lekmanov is now available. 

Please visit us at www.academicstudiespress.com for information about this title. To order directly, please contact Ilana Hoffman at sales at academicstudiespress.com and mention your membership in SEELANGS to receive a 20% discount. We look forward to hearing from you!

Mandelstam
By Oleg Lekmanov
Translated by Tatiana Retivov

ISBN 978-1-934843-28-4 (cloth) $32.00 / £26.99
200 pp., 12 illus., January 2010

Series: Studies in Slavic and Russian Literatures, Culture and History

Topic Areas: Russian Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Literary Biography

Level: Academic and General Reader

Bibliographic Data: 1. Mandel'shtam, Osip, 1891-1938. 2. Poets, Russian -- 20th century -- biography. I. Title

Summary: Now available for the first time in English, Oleg Lekmanov’s critically acclaimed Mandelstam presents the maverick Russian poet’s life and work to a wider audience and includes the most reliable details of the poet’s life which were recently found and released from the KGB archives. Through his engaging narrative, Lekmanov carries the reader through Mandelstam’s early life and education in pre-revolutionary Petersburg and at the Sorbonne in Paris and in Heidelberg and his return to revolutionary Russia. Bold and fearless, he was quoted saying: “Only in Russia do they respect poetry. They even kill you for it.” Osip Mandelstam compared a writer to a parrot, saying that once his owner tires of him, he will cover his cage with black cloth, which becomes for literature a surrogate of night. In 1938, Mandelstam was arrested and six months later became a statistic:  over 500,000 political prisoners were sent to the Gulags in 1938; between
 1931 and 1940, over 300,000 prisoners died in the Gulags - one of them was the poet Osip Mandelstam. This is the tragic story of his life pre-empted by the black cloth of Stalinism.

Author: Oleg Lekmanov is a professor at Moscow State University. His main interest has focused on Russian poetry of the twentieth century. Dr. Lekmanov has authored over two hundred articles and his latest papers explore the creative writings of O. Mandelstam, A. Akhmatova, and A. Solzhenitsyn. He is the author of Book on Akmeism (2000) and Sergei Esenin (2007, with Michail Sverdlov).

Reviews:
Of the original Russian edition: 
“Lekmanov’s book contains insightful observations of the poems and convincing attempts at psychological reconstruction. The author does not attempt to conceal the hero’s “idiosyncrasies” and manages to forego engaging in “objective Schadenfreude”. Mandelstam was at times funny, hysterical, naïve, but even in the most curious guise he managed to maintain high stature, without which his poetry would not have been possible. Such stature was the stuff of legends. It is also wonderfully illuminated here by amusing (though occasionally common and mean) anecdotes. This is the image of Mandelstam that Lekmanov presents, reminding us of the inherent kinship between poetry and nobleness. “
--Andrei Nemzer, “Vremya Novostei” 

Table of Contents:
Introduction. . . . . . . . 1

Chapter One

BEFORE THE FIRST “STONE” (1891-1913) . . . 5

Chapter Two

BETWEEN “STONE” (1913) AND “TRISTIA” (1922) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 	41

Chapter Three

BETWEEN “TRISTIA” (1922) AND “POEMS” (1928) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 	81

Chapter Four

BEFORE THE ARREST (1928-1934) . . . . 	101

Chapter 5

THE FINAL YEARS (1934-1938) . . . . . . . . 	133

Epilogue

NADEZHDA YAKOVLEVNA . . . . . . . . . . . . 	165

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	170

Index . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .	180


Please do not hesitate to contact me for more information about this or other Slavic titles. 

All the best,

Christa Kling
Academic Studies Press
christa.kling at academicstudiespress.com


      

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