Reviews for The Noise of Time: The Prose of Osip Mandelstam

The average rating for The Noise of Time: The Prose of Osip Mandelstam based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-07-11 00:00:00 Patricia Olsen The Noise of Time is a colourful novelette of the poet�s childhood and adolescence, of his awakening consciousness and his coming of age� The bookcase of early childhood is a man�s companion for life. The arrangement of its shelves, the choice of books, the colors of the spines are for him the color, height, and arrangement of world literature itself. And as for books which were not included in that first bookcase � they were never to force their way into the universe of world literature. Every book in the first bookcase is, willy-nilly, a classic, and not one of them can ever be expelled. And Osip Mandelstam�s poetic mind paints sharp poetical images all the way through the book. I was troubled and anxious. All the agitation of the times communicated itself to me. There were strange currents loosed about me � from the longing for suicide to the expectation of the end of the world. The literature of problems and idiotic universal questions had just taken its gloomy malodorous leave, and the grimy hairy hands of the traffickers in life and death were rendering the very words life and death repugnant. That was in very truth the night of ignorance! Literati in Russian blouses and black shirts traded, like grain dealers, in God and the Devil, and there was not a single house where the dull polka from The Life of Man, which had become a symbol of vulgar tawdry symbolism, was not picked out with one finger on the piano. For too long the intelligentsia had been fed on student songs. Now it was nauseated by its universal questions. The same philosophy from a beer bottle! That was the spirit of the turn of the century. Such was the raucous noise of the tumultuous time� Theodosia is the travelling sketches of the small town in Crimea: There�s no disputing it: we should be grateful to Wrangel for letting us breathe the pure air of a lawless sixteenth-century Mediterranean republic. But it was not easy for Attic Theodosia to adjust herself to the severe rule of the Crimean pirates. The innovative, written in rhythmic prose short story The Egyptian Stamp is taking place in Petersburg in the year 1917, between two revolutions. It is a surrealistic tale of a hollow young daydreamer: He thought of Petersburg as his infantile disease � one had only to regain consciousness, to come to, and the hallucination would vanish: he would recover, become like all other people, even � perhaps � get married� Then no one would dare call him �young man.� And he would be through with kissing ladies� hands. They�d had their share! Setting up their own Trianon, damn them! Let some slut, some old bag, some shabby feline stick her paw out to his lips and, by the force of long habit, he would give it a smack! Enough! It was time to put an end to his lapdog youth. But any nonentity will ever remain a cipher � a whining gnat lost in the noise of time. And Journey to Armenia is a set of culturological notes: The cheap vegetable pigments of Van Gogh were bought by accident for twenty sous. Van Gogh spits blood like a suicide in furnished rooms. The floorboards in the night cafe are tilted and stream like a gutter in their electric fit. And the narrow trough of the billiard table looks like the manger of a coffin. I never saw such barking colors! Every epoch needs its chronicler and the poets are the best witnesses of history.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-03-29 00:00:00 Michael Gaeta Acknowledgments & Note on Second Printing A Note on the Illustrations A Note on the Transliteration Introduction: The Prose of Mandelstam Introduction to the Second Edition & A Note to the 1993 Edition The Noise of Time --Music in Pavlovsk --Childish Imperialism --Riots and French Governesses --The Bookcase --Finland --The Judaic Chaos --The Concerts of Hofmann and Kubelik --The Tenishev School --Sergey Ivanych --Yuly Matveich --The Erfurt Program --The Sinani Family --Komissarzhevskaya --In a Fur Coat above One's Station Theodosia --The Harbor Master --The Old Woman's Bird --The Royal Mantle of the Law --Mazesa da Vinci --The Egyptian Stamp A Note on 'Fourth Prose' and 'Journey to Armenia' --Fourth Prose --Journey to Armenia Notes Selected Bibliography Index of Names