Osip Mandelstam Working Group

This working group brings together faculty members and graduate students around the poet, translator, and theorist Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938). We meet once a month to closely read and discuss selections from Mandelstam’s poetry and prose, distributed in advance, in the original Russian supplemented by translations, secondary literature, and other materials that members of the group wish to discuss. The working group is open to everyone, and we especially welcome scholars whose primary field of research is not Russian or Slavic. Our aim is to think broadly and contextually about Mandelstam—as member of the Acmeist school, as a Soviet Jewish poet, as a dissident persecuted by Stalin. Another aim is comparative: as we collectively work our way through his magisterial corpus, a further goal is to discuss how Mandelstam’s poetry and ideas can speak to our respective archives, no matter how far removed they are from Mandelstam in time and space (e.g., premodern Persian literature, Arabic philosophy, etc.).