Mandelstam's twin poems

Mandelstam’s two poems, beginning with “I have lost my way in the sky - what shall I do?”, are discussed in this article as a minimal lyrical cycle. It’s not the only example of “twin poems” (in the author’s terms) in his legacy. The two combined texts are related as a draft and a rough draft. The second represents a new stage in the creative process, not surpassing or not cancelling the previous one, but dialogically clarifying and deepening it. The poet himself called this kind of indirect path to the poetic goal “the law of sailing maneuvering”, which, in his view, Dante mastered skillfully. The common beginning of the two texts creates a lyrical situation of a roadblock between a humble descent and a proud ascent. It is no accident that ter-cins appear in the stanza of the second poem: the lyrical subject is trying on the heroic path of Dante, on the chivalrous service of the word to the higher forces of existence. If the first poem marks the abandonment of the position of poetic struggle for the sake of friendly unity with “all who live”, the second poem encapsulates the revision of this decision: the longing for a test of readiness for a high role in the world order. These two self-definitions of the lyrical hero are hierarchically correlated by the author’s intention, which manifests itself not only in the sequence of microcycle subtexts, but also in the peculiarities of organization of different levels of the two-part artistic whole. The case under consideration demonstrates the initial stage of the process of cyclization - the transition from a single artistic whole to the cyclic, polytextual one.