From the Commentary on Mandelstam’s “Egyptian Stamp”

The article is dedicated to the analysis of one fragment from Mandelstam’s Egyptian Stamp — the protagonist’s dream about the movement of Jewish families in carriages through a snowy field to the imaginary town of Malinov (chapter 8). This episode, having no clear interpretation up until now, is being studied in relation to the circumstances of Mandelstam’s visit to the frontline zone in Warsaw in December 1914 and January 1915. A.A. Akhmatova’s memoir stands out among the testimonies of this trip: “There he was struck by the ghetto.” The article puts forward and justifies the theory that the protagonist’s dream contains a projection of Mandelstam’s impressions on the deportation of Jewish families from the frontline zone and on the concentration of Jewish population in Warsaw in autumn 1914 and winter 1915. The article also offers a comparative analysis with N.A. Bruni’s Notes of a Volunteer Orderly and his sonnet “Jews” — both texts reflect similar impressions of the author who worked as an orderly in Warsaw in autumn 1914. In relation to the analysis of the Egyptian Stamp protagonist’s dream, the article also treats the problem of the features of Mandelstam’s creative thought and the problem of the commentary’s task of back translation of the text to the language of the epoch that produced it.