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SUMMARY:Poetry and Soviet literary politics in the early 1930s: Mandelstam
 ’s Verses on Russian Poetry (1932) - Andrew Kahn\, University of Oxford
DTSTART:20160126T170000Z
DTEND:20160126T183000Z
UID:TALK62935@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:21355
DESCRIPTION:The paper will consider Mandelstam’s 1932 cycle of three poe
 ms as an act of engagement with Soviet critical debates on poetry and ideo
 logy.  Two assumptions have characterized discussion of Mandelstam’s pos
 ition at the end of NEP. The first is that with the rise of Proletarian po
 etry he must have found himself no longer relevant. The second is that in 
 response to that ostracism his work became more self-referential and remot
 e from contemporary issues.  In that respect\, and partly as a consequence
 \, the Verses on Russian Poetry have been read as examples of Mandelstam a
 t his most sub-textual and hermetic and even backward-looking\, as poems t
 hat put a verbal screen between him and contemporary culture. This paper q
 uestions those assumptions and argues for attempts to read Mandelstam with
 in the horizon of expectation defined by literary politics of his time.
LOCATION:Coleridge Room\, Jesus College\, Cambridge 
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