O. Mandelstam’s Poem “Life Has Fallen Like a Comet…” (1925): An Experience of Minimalistic Poetics

The article studies O. Mandelstam's poem “Life has fallen like a comet…” (1925) as a rare work experience of minimalistic poetics in his mature work. The article follows the development of the lyrical plot based on the lexical and grammatical analysis of the text and the composition of its images. Semantically the poem is divided into three parts, each consisting of three verses, and this division corresponds with the changing of verb forms from present (the first part) to past (the second part) and to future (the third part). We show that the specular composition is supported by lexical repetitions – the key words from the first part of the text are also reflected in the final strophes. A series of images passes through the whole poem – images that are connected with the central theme of light – summer lightning, ray, flash, glow. The lyrical plot represents the movement from reality through rejection of the past towards a fairytale-like ideal futureю This movement is followed by devices of folklorization of the lyrical narrative. Syntactic structures and poetic formulas allude to A. S. Pushkin's “Tale of Tsar Saltan” and to P. P. Ershov's “Little Humpbacked Horse”. The range of images includes recurring in Mandelstam's work images-symbols – “apple”, “gold”, “raspberry”, their semantics becomes clearer when studied in a wider horizontal context. The semantical analysis of the poem is complemented by a biographical commentary.