If modernism marked, as some critics claim, an "apocalypse of cultural community," then Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) must rank among its most representative figures. Born to Central European Jews in Warsaw on the cusp of the modern age, he could claim neither Russian nor European traditions as his birthright. Describing the poetic movement he helped to found, Acmeism, as a "yearning for world culture," he defined the impulse that charges his own poetry and prose. Clare Cavanagh has written a sustained study placing Mandelstam's "remembrance and invention" of a usable poetic past in the context of modernist writing in general, with particular attention to the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Cavanagh traces Mandelstam’s creation of tradition from his earliest lyrics to his last verses, written shortly before his arrest and subsequent death in a Stalinist camp. Her work shows how the poet, generalizing from his own dilemmas and disruptions, addressed his epoch’s paradoxical legacy of disinheritance--and how he responded to this unwelcome legacy with one of modernism’s most complex, ambitious, and challenging visions of tradition. Drawing on not only Russian and Western modernist writing and theory, but also modern European Jewish culture, Russian religious thought, postrevolutionary politics, and even silent film, Cavanagh traces Mandelstam’s recovery of a "world culture" vital, vast, and varied enough to satisfy the desires of the quintessential outcast modernist.

Silence and the Rest argues that throughout its entire history, Russian poetry can be read as an argument for "verbal skepticism," positing a long-running dialogue between poets, philosophers, and theorists central to the antiverbal strain of Russian culture.

The personal and political life of the iconic Russian poet Osip Mandelstam is graphically portrayed in this lavishly illustrated book This is the first full-scale biography of Osip Mandelstam to combine an analysis of his poetry with a description of his personal life, from his beginnings as a young intellectual in pre-revolutionary Russia to his final fate as a victim of Stalinism. The myth has grown up that Mandelstam was a gloomy, miserable figure; Dutli deconstructs this, stressing Mandelstam's enjoyment of life. There are several underlying themes here. One is Mandelstam's Jewish background in pre-1914 Russia, which he rejected as a young man, but reaffirmed in later life. Another is the inescapable impact of Russia's political and social transformation. His evolution as a poet naturally occupies a large place in the biography, which quotes many of his most famous poems, including his devastating anti-Stalin epigram. He produced wonderful poetry before the October Revolution, but did not reach his full poetic stature until the 1930s when in exile in Voronezh. He was never an official Soviet poet, and it was only thanks to the intervention of Bukharin that he was brought back from utter impoverishment. The biography gives full weight to his emotional life, beginning with his friendship with two other Russian poets, Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova, followed by love and marriage to Nadezhda Khazina.

This comparative study crosses multiple cultures, traditions, genres, and languages in order to explore the particular importance of Homer in the emergence, development, and promotion of modernist writing. It shows how and why the Homeric epics served both modernist formal experimentation, including Pound's poetics of the fragment and Joyce's sprawling epic novel, and sociopolitical critiques, including H.D.'s analyses of the cultural origins of twentieth-century wars and Mandelstam's poetic defiance of the totalitarian Stalinist regime. The book counters a long critical tradition that has recruited Homer to consolidate, champion and, more recently, chastise an elitist, masculine modernist canon. Departing from the tradition of reading these texts in isolation as mythic engagements with the Homeric epics, Leah Flack argues that ongoing dialogues with Homer helped these writers to mount their distinct visions of a cosmopolitan post-war culture that would include them as artists working on the margins of the Western literary tradition.

This work explores the intersection of poetry, national life, and national identity in Poland and Russia, from 1917 to the present. It also provides a comparative study of modern poetry from the perspective of the Eastern and Western sides of the Iron Curtain.