Isolate but Preserve! (on Mandelstam’s Isolation)

Abstract

The article is marked by an attempt to cluster together and produce some sources for the allusions represented in Mandelstam’s The Stalin Epigram. As the research has shown, possible sources might have been the memoirs of contemporaries, iconography of the Russian Ethnography, M. Javakhishvili’s novel “Jaqo’s Dispossessed”, etc. In the Long run, the Epigram, specifically, and the Mandelstam’s fate, generically, show how the ways, instruments and goals of politics, on the one part, and of culture, on the other, are wide asunder: while culture tries to have an effect upon state by the instrumentality of catharsis, it resorts to violence.