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Although the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche had a widespread influence on Russian artists and intellectuals in the early years of the twentieth century, only recently have scholars begun to examine the impact of the German philosopher on one of the most gifted Russian poets at the time, Osip Mandelstam. This is not because Mandelstam did not read Nietzsche or was not interested in his ideas, but because he did not always explicitly acknowledge Nietzsche's impact, generally avoiding direct mention of Nietzsche's name. This practice on the poet's part, however, does not obscure the fact that Nietzsche's ideas-especially those from The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music-can be located throughout Mandelstam's early essays and can clarify how his view of language anticipates features of Western theoretical discourse that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Under Nietzsche's influence, Mandelstam's acmeist poetics diverged from Russian symbolist aesthetics in the early 191 Os in order to embrace a dynamic account of language that borders on structuralist and poststructuralist thought. While the symbolists understood language as a vehicle of spiritual transcendence, Mandelstam highlighted the structural and temporal instabilities in poetic language, implying that these factors spontaneously give rise to new forms of poetic expression. Mandelstam 's understanding of language-strongly reminiscent of aspects of the work of both Saussure and Derrida (although the poet had no apparent means of knowing Saussure's teaching)-is articulated not only in "Conversation about Dante," but also in his early essays "The Morning of Acmeism" (Utro Akmeizmd) and "On the Nature of the Word" (O Prirode Slova). All these works feature the Nietzschean struggle between Apollo and Dionysus, unity and chaos, order and disorder. Through a fresh look at Mandelstam's early essays written in response to the symbolists and Nietzsche- whom the symbolists considered as their spiritual forerunner-I propose to demonstrate how Mandelstam arrived at a realization about language that lasted throughout his career and that became popular in the Western world in the 1960s.
Several recent studies have treated Mandelstam's poetry as a dynamic process based on Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian principles as forces existing in nature, society, and the individual. Elena Glazov-Corrigan, Clare Cavanagh, and Elaine Rusinko have presented a compelling reading of Mandelstam's struggle with tradition in search...