“It is tempting to understand and difficult to interpret”. S.S. Averintsev – researcher of O. Mandelstam’s creativity

Abstract

The article is devoted to the comprehension and analysis of O. Mandelstam’s creativity in the works of S.S. Averintsev. From the earliest years of Averintsev’s life, Mandelstam’s poetry played a special role in the formation of his literary taste and the formation of his scientific interests. Already in his very first publications about the poet, Averintsev formulates the basic principles of Mandelstam’s poetics, to which he remained faithful to the end: Mandelstam was always looking for contradictions, a deliberate collision of “yes” and “no”, because it is in this semantic space that genuine art is born. It was very important for Averintsev to compare Mandelstam’s poetry with the poetry of B. Pasternak, who was both closest to him and opposite to him, defining Mandelstam’s poetics as “closed”, and Pasternak’s poetics as “open”. However, reflecting on the attempt of both poets to become “consonant with the epoch”, Averintsev, not without satisfaction, notes that this attempt failed for both of them. The article shows that S. Averintsev’s research of O. Mandelstam’s creativity goes far beyond philological science and rises to the level of cultural and philosophical generalizations about the fate of culture, the world and man in it.