“In that ship everything is provided for life, nothing is forgotten”: on idyll and idyllic in O. E. Mandelstam’s lyrics

The paper discusses the concept by I.A. Esaulov, who believes that the term ‘idyllic’ can be applied to the Mandelstam’s oeuvre only in regard to a certain type of artistic spirit and should not be treated as a genre characteristic. The analysis of Mandelstam’s lyrics shows that the key idyll characteristics are traceable in the poetry of the twentieth century. They are: “simple tastes”; the cyclical nature of time; the syncretism of life and death, friend and foe; the absence of chosenness; the gratefulness for the joy of “ordinary” life. We believe that the distinctness and completeness of the idyllic fictional universe may suffer if we limit the definition of the term ‘idyllic’ to “a type of artistic spirit” and without saying about genre’s characteristics of the idyll. We also propose to consider the several stages of development of the idyllic pathos from the point of the historical poetics.