Poems in Memory of Olga Vaksel: On the Semantics and Composition ofMandelstam’s Love“Twin Poems”

Purpose. This article is devoted to a motif analysis of Osip Mandelstam’s poems in memory of Olga Vaksel, with detailed biographical and intertextual commentary. Results. A hypothesis is proposed for interpreting the phenomenon Mandelstam’s “twin poems” (“dvoitchatki”) – pairs of poems, published together as two equal and mutually complementary parts of one whole, identical in form and varying the same motifs. The article draws attention to the fact that the “twin” love poems by Mandelstam are always written in situations of unrequited love, and suggests that it is precisely platonic love, in which the lover and beloved cannot unite, that makes impossible the meeting of the lyrical hero and his beloved within the framework of a single poem, prompting the author to write the poem in two variants: in the first, the focus is on the inaccessible beloved, on her body, on material details connected with her. The poet himself appears only in the second part of the “twin” love poems, with emphasis no longer on the material, but on the spiritual, transcendent, metaliterary aspect of reality. Conclusion. It is noted that such a composition of poems about platonic love corresponds to the understanding of love as an ascent from the corporeal to the spiritual in the tradition of Platonic dualism. From the perspective of this hypothesis, the composition of the “twin poems” in memory of Olga Vaksel is analyzed in detail and compared with the composition of the “twin poems” to Salomea Andronnikova and Natalya Shempel.