Osip Mandelstam’s cycle “Armenia” (1930), as a careful study of his metric repertoire and rhythmic composition shows, occupies a completely special place in the poet’s work. In it, a mature master demonstrates the possession of all types of contemporary poetry, including the most radical ones, thereby refuting the general opinion about the traditional character of his versification. An important place in the artistic palette of the author of “Armenia” is occupied by the poems from the middle of the cycle, written by complex types of versification: the so-called verses with variable anacrusis, heteromorphic and free verse. The article discusses in detail the stages of Mandelstam’s mastering the Russian free verse.

The current situation with the development of archival sources, inaccessible and for various reasons dropped out of the field of view of the source researchers, related to the literary process of the 1890s – early 1930s and received an active scientific circulation in recent decades in Russia and in the Russian Abroad, allows a new perspective to look at many of its main and often seeming secondary components. The same can be said about the biographical portraits of its participants, – both those who have always been in the field of the most close attention, and those who previously remained on the periphery of the study of this fragment of the history of Russian literature. In many ways, those factors determine one of the most relevant areas in the study of the life and work of Osip Mandel’shtam: an attempt to restore the maximum possible circle of his regular and episodic communication throughout his career. This publication is the first part of the research devoted to the reconstruction of the professional and personal relationships between two active participants of the literary process of the 1910s – 1930s – Osip Mandel’shtam and Ivan Aksenov.

The work offers a fundamentally new approach to the analysis of “Fourth Prose” by O. Mandelstam, based on documents and materials introduced for the first time in scientific circulation, explaining a number of obscure facts that do not always coincide with the historical reality. In particular, the author analyzes an episode connected with the “rope of the strangled Seryozha Yesenin”, which in no way relates to the “Lyceum bastard Mitka Blagoy”; he also analyzes the historical reality in the relationship of O.E. Mandelstam with a circle of Sergei Yesenin. It is shown that Mitka Blagoy is a substitute of I. Evdokimov, close to Yesenin, who is connected in many ways with the circumstances of O.E. Mandelstam’s life as a person or writer. The author shows the role of A. Svirsky both in the history of perpetuating the memory of Sergei Yesenin, and in a number of domestic conflicts involving O.E. Mandelstam, reflected in the “Fourth Рrose”.

The article is devoted to O. Mandelstam’s “The Noise of Time”. This autobiographical prose is considered in the context of cultural models of Jewish and Russian-Jewish memoirs of the 1840s–1930s, including Leon Mandelstam’s, M.L. Lilienblum’s, A.G. Kovner’s, P.Yu. Vengerova’s, S.M. Dubnov’s. Those texts are considered along with the prose of S. Frug, L. Levanda, S. An-sky as well as historical and cultural essays by S.M. Dubnov, P.S. Marek, S.L. Zinberg written in 1880–1910s. Summarizing the development of ideological trends among the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia, they allow the author to show the fundamental similarity of the “Noise of Time” with their most important topics, conceptualizing the ideological crisis of the turn of the 19–20th centuries, as well as the difference in the worldviews of several generations of Jewish “fathers” and “children.” The article analyzes metaphorical concepts that were used in Jewish and Russian-Jewish literature, memoirs and journalism to characterize the period of Jewish modernization in the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Those concepts included an idea of “chaos” as a mixture of the different worldviews systems. All it made clear that the complex of meanings embedded in those concepts in terms of the Russian-Jewish world was not only open to Mandelstam, but was reflected in the composition of several chapters of “The Noise of Time”.

The article offers a commentary on a number of images of poems by O.E. Mandelstam, ascending, according to the author, directly to Jewish sources: Torah, Talmudic commentaries, Jewish funeral and memorial prayers, elements of the synagogue worship. The author discovers in poems by O.E. Mandelstam the acrostic of the word “Torah” with direct quotes from Jewish daily prayers, funeral words and inscriptions. This allows the author to raise the question of the meaning of the poet’s appeal to his wife and future widow N.Ya. Mandelstam.

The article presents an analysis of the exhibition, which is not only an attempt to reconstruct Osip Mandelstam’s library by the description of his widow Nadezhda Yakovlevna, but also is a visualization of the many years researches by curators of the exhibition in the Mandelstam studies and the history of Russian culture. To wide extend, the exhibition is about the eternal theme of “the poet and the book”. But in this project, unexpected facets appeared, in seemingly well-known facts from the life and work of Mandelstam. This is due to the surprisingly accurate synthesis of archival and museum exhibition practices, research excitement and the aspiration of the exhibition creators to be honest in the face of history. The exhibition is arranged in chronological order, but its complex structure – with a lot of story beats and new meanings – requires parsing after the implementation of the project. During its preparation and realization, the author of the article acted as an exhibition manager, therefore this text is also an attempt at self-analysis.