The escape in a foreign language. The history and experience of the interpretation of a poem of O.E. Mandelshtam "On German language"

The poem of O.E. Mandelshtam “On German language” is the peak of development of German theme in poet’s career. The first part of the article contains an overview of existing literary analysis of the poem, arranged chronologically and written by both Russian-speaking (O. Ronen, I. Mess-Beier, M.U. Lotman, P. Nerler, G. Kirshbaum) and German-speaking (B. Schlott, S. Simonek, P. Dutli, S.S. Averintsev) critics. In the second part of the article, in addition to existing observations, we added our own remarks. The articles reveals the reasons of why the poet turned his attention to foreign language; it also analyses the subtext which is instrumental in understanding the poem; the article defines the connections (HP) with other Mandelshtam works and explains the references in the poem attributed to cultural and biographical events taking place during the poem creation. The article analyses the reasons for changes in theme structure which has been taking place during the writing of the poem.The poem “On German language” is being interpreted as the poets rebirth. It is dying off in his own native language and is being reborn in a foreign language, in this case German.