(Університет імені Альфреда Нобеля, 2017) Livry, А.
The creation of Osip Mandelstam has a totally unexpected source: as Vladimir Nabokov who followed
him in the St. Petersburg school of Prince Tenishev, this Jew, born in the Kingdom of Poland, is Nietzschean. As
a teenager, the young Mandelstam comes into contact with the atmosphere of the German creative elitism
prevalent in St. Petersburg. His elders, already keen on the philosophical, philological and lyrical messages of
Schopenhauer and Wagner, reveal the world of Nietzsche to him. In this article, I demonstrate, as I had previously done for Vladimir Nabokov in Nabokov le nietzschéen (A. Livry, Paris, Hermann, 2010), that Mandelstam became a disciple of Nietzsche’s creativity at the same time as he is become a poet. In his poem that his
editors regard as his first composition worthy of being published «Среди лесов, унылых и заброшенных»
(«In the middle of the sad and neglected forests»), Mandelstam revises all pictures of the last chapters of Also
sprach Zarathustra. Even better: it is only by bearing in mind the philosophical poem of Nietzsche that we can
understand the verses of Mandelstam and the inspiration that guided him throughout his life.