SOURCE: "The Poetics of Osip Mandelstam," in Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism, edited by Victor Erlich, Yale University Press, 1975, pp. 284-312.

In the following essay, which was first published in a Russian periodical in 1972, Ginzburg distinguishes three stages in the development of Mandelstam's poetry and determines the influence of Hellenistic and Symbolist imagery on his work.

Mandelstam began as an heir to the Russian symbolists. Yet he did so at the moment when the disintegration of the symbolist movement was obvious to everyone, when Blok, its erstwhile standard-bearer, was seeking different answers to the disquieting questions of the era. The poems in Mandelstam's first collection Stone (1913) are free from symbolism's "other-worldliness," from its positive ideology and philosophy.

In 1912 Mandelstam joined the acmeists. These widely differing disciples of the symbolists were united by a common aspiration—the desire to return to an earthly source of poetic values, to a portrayal...