Osip Mandel'shtam (1891-1938) is considered by many to have been the best Russian poet of his era, and he also wrote a number of critical essays, often considered to be almost impenetrable. Elena Glazov-Corrigan analyses Mandel'shtam’s thoughts on poetry and art in the context of the major postmodern literary debates and traces their development throughout his writings. This is the first attempt to describe in a comprehensive way Mandel'shtam’s intellectual world and its effect on his evolution as a thinker, specifically, on differences in his attitude towards language.

Of particular interest to Mandel'shtam scholars, general Slavists, and comparatists with a focus on theory, this original and thought-provoking approach shows that from the 1920s to the 1930s, a definite development takes place in Mandel'shtam’s view of the poetic process. Many of Glazov-Corrigan’s ideas run contrary to the received wisdom about Mandel'shtam. In contrast to her predecessors, Glazov-Corrigan examines the essays themselves systematically, not allowing herself to be sidetracked by the poetry. By following a series of patterns - metaphors - she convincingly reconstructs a hidden logic in Mandel'shtam’s work.

This book offers a new and stronger sense of Mandel'shtam’s poetic enterprise and the questions he sought to confront in the course of developing his poetics.