Ossip Mandelstam enters these pages like someone who would have put down his suitcases between two exiles, suddenly caught by a surge of his memory, a fugitive whose brief presence reflects back to us the image of our own brevity. Texts in which the author seems stunned by a bit of mist that his breath has just deposited on the window of a train – this train, where is it going? – or which are addressed to the woman he loves. We know that she memorized his poems in order to save them from Stalin’s voracity: erasure of the breath, disappearance of the written word, the railway line inexorably sinking towards the East and the camps, towards the poet’s last station, in the icy monotony of Kolyma.
Difficulty rating: difficult
Ossip Mandelstam
Russian
Texts collected and put into a booklet by the composer.
Mixed a cappella choir divided into six parts, S, MS, A, T, Bt, B with soloists
20 minutes approx.
Cycle in 7 linked parts: 1. Dano mnie tielo, 2. interlude, 3. Nie gavari nikamu, 4. Koljut riesnitsy, 5. Za griemutchuju dobliestch, 6. interlude, 7. Tvaim uzkim plietchams