Vladimir Gippius on Mandelstam, Akhmatova and Literary Generations

Abstract

The paper presents a fragment from Vladimir Gippius’s manuscript of the early 1930s, in which he evaluates his junior literary contemporaries: Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Mayakovsky. This evaluation corresponds with the opinion Gippius expressed in the 1910s: Acmeists for him are indifferent esthetes that lack strong qualities of their predecessors. Gippius evaluates negatively his literary portrait by Mandelstam, his pupil in the Tenishev School, in the autobiographic book “Shum vremeni” (“The Noise of the Time”, 1925). This fragment presents Gippius’s reaction on the correspondent chapter of Mandelstam’s book. The author cites memoirs about Gippius and his responses to works of his contemporaries, touches the issue of his literary behavior and concludes, that the reasons for Gippius's rejection of Mandelstam's memoirs were ethic, esthetic, ideological and sociocultural.

Keywords

• vladimir gippius
• osip mandelstam
• anna akhmatova
• vladimir mayakovsky
• memoires
• literary generations
• archives