Rewriting Ovid’s Exile:
Osip Mandelshtam’s Rome and St. Petersburg

Zara Torlone (Miami University of Ohio)

The question of the reception of antiquity in Russia has never produced any theoretical or conceptual unanimity since it entails a broad variety of themes. The entangling heterogeneity of material is largely due to the idiosyncratic way in which reception of the classics occurred in Russia.

In contrast to Western Europe, there was no archeological or linguistic heritage that would tie Russian culture to Greek or Roman civilizations and thus produce a consistent reception of antiquity. Russians did not view themselves as belonging to any historical continuum at the source of which stood the Greeks and the Romans. Classical reception in Russia does not form the consistently functioning cultural factor, but displays itself intensely only in several periods of country’s spiritual and intellectual development. One of such intensely “classical” periods in Russian culture is the first half of the 20^th century which offers many responses (if not theoretically comprehensive reception) to the legacy of Greece and Rome.

However, the classical legacy in Russia executed a great influence which had to deal not with reception but rather with response (Wirkung) in terms of R.C. Holub (Reception Theory, 1984, xi). As he   points out both response and reception have to do with how the work of art survives in a new cultural context and how it impacts the audience. The difference between them is a question of whether the work of art is absorbed by general audience (reception), or it only evokes reactions (interpretation, imitation, dialog) of some elite cultural agency.  

My talk deals with one such reaction to the legacy of ancient Rome by the Russian “acmeist” poet Osip Mandelshtam who saw in the ancient seat of empire not only a symbolic representation of perennial culture, but also a means of understanding his own city and his own time within the limits of the Russian and then the Soviet Empire. The paper concentrates only on two poems of Osip Mandelshtam which explore Ovid’s exile from Rome as a way to reconcile Mandelshtam’s own “inner” exile from his beloved city of St. Petersburg. These two poems are representative of the larger theme of Mandelshtam’s poetry for which St, Petersburg serves as a tragic protagonist. Mandelshtam rewrites Ovid’s tragic fate as a joyous one when compared with his own fate of alienation from and rejection by his own city changed by the havoc two revolutions. 

Mandelshtam’s contemplation of Ovid’s exile and by extension of the city of Rome betrays an ambivalent perception of his own city. On one hand, he depicts Petersburg with its imperial facades and architecture, as a proud heir of the classical heritage. On the other, he conceives of the northern capital as the wounded, tortured city of loss and sorrow. Mandelshtam’s unusual background, rich in connections with the classical world, illuminates not only his identification of Petersburg with Rome, but also his contradictory attitude toward both imperial capitals and the values they represented.  Mandelshtam “rewrites” Ovid’s biography to accommodate his perception of Rome and by extension of St. Petersburg.