O. Mandelstam’s voice in V. Dudarev’s works: national image of death

The object of the article is the national image of death in Russian verbal artistic culture. The subject of the research is the thanatological text in Russian poetry. The material for the article is two poems - “Why is the soul so melodious” by O.E. Mandelstam and “There are quiet valleys in Russia…” by V.F. Dudarev. At the center of hermeneutic and cultural-philosophical analysis is the interaction of two types of reality, phenomenal and noumenal, rational and spontaneous in art. Much attention is paid to the image of death in these two poems and the images of wind, groves, and flowers associated with it. The research methodology is reduced to a holistic ontohermeneutic analysis of poetic texts by O.E. Mandelstam and V.F. Dudarev, aimed at highlighting the cultural potential of the problem of perception of the phenomenon of death in the Russian national image of the world, which allows penetrating the poetic word from ontological and apophatic positions, as well as revealing the significance of the literary traditions of the Silver Age in the work of a modern poet; typological and historical-literary methods of text research are applied. The results of the work may be of interest to philologists who include literature in the space of a large dialogue of cultures, and can also be used in teaching courses in cultural studies and Russian philosophy.