A review by graywacke
Journey to Armenia by Osip Mandel’štam

4.0

A tough and somewhat random book for me. I know very little about this Jewish Soviet poet and his strained and eventually fatal relationship to his state. These essays were written in 1933 when he was sort of politely exiled to Armenia. The main essay, ‘Journey‘, is about Armenia with much extra going on in the subtext. It includes a mixture of classical Greek and Christian references, and a criticism of Darwin in favor Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. It kind of all went right by me. A second essay on Dante was really fascinating about Dante and poetry and, I think, has some interesting embedded criticism of the then Soviet Union.

"If a physicist should conceive of the desire, after taking apart the nucleus of an atom, to put it back together again, he would be like the partisans of descriptive and explanatory poetry, for whom Dante represents, for all time, a plague and a threat."

-----------------------------------------------

45. Journey to Armenia & Conversation about Dante by Osip Mandelstam
translation: from Russian 1977
published: 1933
format: 185-page Notting Hill 2011 hardcover
acquired: 2019
read: Aug 20-29
time reading: 6 hr 12 min, 2 min/page
rating: 4
locations: Armenia
about the author: Polish-born Jewish Soviet poet who grew up in St. Petersburg, and died in a gulag. 1891-1938

Three parts:
'Mandelstam and the Journey' by Henry Gifford, 1979
'Journey to Armenia' translated by Sidney Monas, 1977
'Conversation about Dante' translated by Clarence Brown & Robert Hughes, 1977