Repetition as Strategy in Osip Mandelstam’s Late ‘Twin Poems’: A Reinterpretation through Nadezhda Mandelstam's Memoirs

This article challenges the prevailing scholarly tendency to interpret the unconventional features of Osip Mandelstam’s late poetics-notably the repetition of verse lines and metrical irregularities-as signs of mnemonic error or textual incompleteness, and instead proposes a reinterpretation of these phenomena as poet’s deliberate acts of poetic creation and compositional strategy. To this end, the study analyzes the two poems sharing an identical opening, “I Love the Appearance of Fabric,” as a pair of “twin poems” (dvoichatki). Although the two poems begin in the same way, they develop in divergent directions and persist as parallel texts; the repetition functions not as simple variation but as a strategy through which the two texts reflect one another and expand their poetic meaning. The notion of the “twin poems” can be traced to the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, who accompanied the poet into exile. After Mandelstam’s works were banned from publication and until his later rehabilitation, Nadezhda not only collected and preserved confiscated manuscripts but also, during their three years in exile, witnessed his writing process at close range and left comparatively detailed accounts of his creative activity. Drawing on her testimony, this article reexamines the compositional background and editorial arrangement of the twin poems. It argues that her memoirs should be read not merely as biographical or chronological supplements, but as crucial mediating texts for understanding Mandelstam’s late poetics.