Children's Verses by Osip Mandelstam: Aspects of Examine

This work is devoted to some aspects of the study of poems by Ossip Mandelstam for children. Mandelstam’s poems addressed to children, despite their “peripheral” status, are an important part of the poet’s creative heritage. They embodied the important features of Mandelstam's worldview; the picture of the world presented in them not only has integrity, but also naturally fits into the great context of the poet’s work. The subject world of Mandelstam in children's poems is an idyllic space in which peace and harmony reign. Unlike children's poems and prose of his contemporaries, Mandelstam does not depict kitchen utensils as an enemy of man and a subject of communal contention, but as a friend in need of affection and support. Such an image of the material world is closely connected with the idea of “home Hellenism,” with ideas about the anthropomorphism of a thing acquiring the qualities of its creator. Mandelstam were created children's poems during the “dead pause” (ML Gasparov). Nevertheless, they maintain a clear continuity with respect to poems and articles of the early 1920s and become a kind of "bridge" to the lyrics of the early 1930s. Mandelstam’s poems for children are clearly discordant with both the primitive journal poetry of the mid-1920s and the wonderful children's poems by K.I. Chukovsky and V.V. Mayakovsky. The juxtaposition of magazine poetry is associated not only with its extremely low level, but also with its attitudes, according to which the child was initially thought of as a small adult, ideological hero, excluded from the world of the family and the usual subject environment. Mandelstam’s children's poems, on the contrary, completely exclude ideology; the child is built into the world of home and street life. The unintended, likely, controversy with the poems of Nikolai and Korney Chukovsky consists in the fact that Mandelstam builds meaningful and creative relationships of a person with the objective world surrounding him. Unlike Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, introducing a child into the big world, does not appeal to the biblical commandments, does not call for the creation of a new person of a new era. On the contrary, the world created by Mandelstam in children's poems has stable features that do not change over time. Mandelstam’s children's poems paint that ideal model of the world in which a person lives in peace, care, and love.