Проза Осипа Мандельштама "Холодное лето" (1923): Языковой комментарий

СПб. : European University at Saint-Petersburg, 2018.

Марина Бобрик

The subject of the book is Osip Mandelstam’s prose work “A Cold Summer” (1923). Engaging readers into a close reading of the text, not only does the author offer a fresh perspective on it but she also presents a vivid picture of how the Russian language pertained in the 1920s. The book is written in the rare genre of language commentary in which linguistic analysis interacts on multiple levels – those of morphology, syntax, semantics, orthography, and punctuation – with a literary analysis of the history of a text - its creation, editing, and publication.
    The commentary strives to equip readers with information essential for comprehending Mandelstam’s text, and in doing so, it continually challenges our assumptions about familiar words and expressions, showing that they used to have different meaning, connotations, and stylistic status back in the 1920s. In several cases, the reader has an opportunity to discover in Mandelstam’s text meanings that were factitiously obscured by publishers. Particularities of Mandelstam’s personal usage (with the complete corpus of his texts being considered) are demonstrated in the book against the background of the language usage of the epoch as it is represented in the texts from the Russian National Corpus.
The facsimile of the issue of Ogoniok magazine where Mandelstam’s text was first published vividly recreates the print media context of “A Cold Summer”.  Carefully culled illustrations – photographs, paintings, graphics and film images of the 1920s – give the reader a glimpse into the everyday life of Moscow of that time.
The book will appeal to anyone with interest in Osip Mandelstam's works as well as to Mandelstam scholars and translators, historians of literature, and linguists.

Keywords: history of Russian Literature, история русской литературы XX века, история русского языка, Осип Мандельштам, O. Mandelstam, O. Mandelstam's language, Russian language history, язык О.Э. Мандельштама, linguistic commentary to literature, лингвистический комментарий к литературному тексту