“Not with you, not with me - with them...” by O.E. Mandelshtam: the reading experience

The article discusses one of the “darkest poems” of late O.E. Mandelstam entitled by the opening lines “Not with you, not with me - with them...”, written in the winter of 1936 in Voronezh. In the controversy between researchers who offer a social-historical or natural-scientific interpretation of this poem, its possible literary sources are traditionally ignored. The article considers literary works that are associatively included in the text as these missing sources and at the same time the keys to understanding the poem. This is a monologue by Satine from the play by M. Gorky’s “At the Bottom”, a conversation between Pierre Bezukhov and Andrei Bolkonsky from the third volume of “War and Peace”, and “The Word about Igor’s Regiment”, which is considered within the general context of O.E. Mandelstam’s work during the Voronezh exile. Special attention is paid to the connection of the poem by O.E. Mandelstam with the poem by E.A. Boratynsky “On sowing the forest”. Mandelstam’s close attention to Boratynsky, the identity of poetic dimensions, a few direct textual references allow not only to explain convincingly the appearance of the word “cartilage”, which is strange in the poetic context, but also to restore the underlying textual casus, associated with the publication of Boratynsky’s poem by his son. Reading Mandelstam’s work within the literary background allows to significantly restore the “omitted links” of the poet’s thinking and, as a result, to understand the poem as a creative program, implemented further in “Poems about the Unknown Soldier”. The essence of this program is the renunciation of the individual in favor of the universal, which equally promises the poet his glory and his death.