Os ensaios de Ossip Mandelstam — Uma apresentação

Ossip Mandelstam’s essays on poetry and culture offer various problematisations about the nature of the word, of language, in particular about the concreteness of language, as he says when he writes that ‘Hellenism is a pot, cooker tongs, a milk jug, household utensils, crockery, everything that surrounds the body’ [About the nature of the word]. In addition to this theme, other considerations come to mind, such as the poetic tradition and the relationship with his contemporaries, the poet’s interlocutor and the formation — Bildung — of a literary self. On the other hand, in The Noise of Time — his autobiographical prose in which he ‘wishes to speak […] accompanying the century, of the noise and germination of time’ — we come across various images of a Petersburg that has disappeared, nostalgia for the paradigmatic city of his poetry. Between the avant-garde movements and the poet’s situation at the time of the ‘new man’ of the Russian Revolution, we will try to bring together some of the aspects that Ossip Mandelstam’s aesthetic reflection takes on, in order to delineate in nuce a physiognomy of the poet, who was also an essayist.

The seminar will be conducted in Portuguese. To join the session via Zoom, use this link.

Event supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e para a Tecnologia) of the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science under the projects UIDB/00183/2020 and UIDP/00183/2020.