The Fate of Humanism in the 20^th Century and the Poetry of Osip Mandelstam: The Poem Lamarck and the Idea of Regression in Its Application to Culture

The article focuses not so much the poetic and stylistic features of Osip Mandelstam’s work, which are of interest to philologists (these have largely been researched), as its cultural aspects. To fill this gap, it is important to compare Mandelstam’s lyric with his prose, theory, criticism, and journalism. We believe that the poet’s statements in these genres provide many answers to the question of his attitude to culture. In general, a cultural analysis of Mandelstam’s poetry has not yet been undertaken. Meanwhile, a lot of whimsical and rather obscure associations in his lyric can be understood only with the help of his implied statements about a specific culture, with parallels to other cultures. In particular, we investigate the poet’s interest in philosophy and natural sciences, which is expressed both in his poems and in his assessments of modern processes. The theoretical works also shed light on Mandelstam’s poetic experiments. The article is based on an attempt to unravel the meaning contained in his poem Lamarck. This circumstance generated the analysis of the poet’s special interest in natural sciences, in the ideas of Lamarck and other researchers. The references to natural sciences allowed Mandelstam to get around the insolubility of the problem of the fate of culture, if we proceed from the state of the social and humanitarian sciences, characteristic of the post-revolutionary period in the development of science in Russia. The statement is substantiated by the fact that these sciences did not discuss the problems of culture, and if they did, the discussion was subordinate to Bolshevist ideology. At the same time, the poet’s thoughts are consonant with the concept of O. Spengler. Mandelstam also inclines to biologism in his vision of culture. The interest in Spengler’s morphology also explains O. Mandelstam’s attraction to the natural sciences. The article concludes that the poet’s judgments lie outside the methodological disputes that exist in academic science. Mandelstam was more interested in the fate of European and, accordingly, Russian culture, especially the fate of humanism, whose values were challenged in the 20^th century.

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