O. Mandelstam and N. Fedorov: Philosophy of Time and Memory On the 130th Anniversary of the Birth of O.E. Mandelstam

Abstract

The article examines some probable lines of refraction of N. Fyodorov’s ideas in the work of Russian greatest Silver age poet O. Mandelstam (1891–1938). Rus­sian thought was a special subject of attention for the poet, his philosophical reading included mainly works by Russian authors such as P. Chaadaev, the Slavophiles, K. Leontiev, V. Rozanov, V. Solovyov, P. Florensky, V. Ivanov, M. Gershenzon and others. It is proposed to analyze O. Mandelstam’s poetic cy­cle Poem on the Unknown Soldier (1937) containing direct references to N. Fe­dorov’s The Philosophy of the Common Task. Taking into account the poet’s con­sistent interest in Russian philosophical thought this allows a possibility of his acquaintance with writings of “Moscow Socrates”. The explication of Mandel­stam’s philosophical views is complicated by the modernist specificity of his po­etic text, which is saturated with a variety of ideological and semantic plans, open to various, often contradictory interpretations, while the correlation with a specific philosophical concept requires a certain unambiguity. On the other hand, the same peculiarity of Mandelstam’s poetics allows us to catch in the se­ries of meanings generated by it Fedorov’s intonations that filled the ideological atmosphere of time, to the “noise” of which the poet was exceptionally sensitive. The field of philosophy of history, time and memory is the predominant area of ideological intersections in the philosopher’s and poet’s heritage. Among other things their views are brought together by their adherence to a specific time con­cept, which was crystallized on the basis of Silver Age religious and philosophi­cal mentality and defined in current research by such concepts as “teleological causality”, “reverse causality”, “enantiodromia”