Osip e Nadežda Mandel’štam: ‘rifrazioni del sé’ tra poesia e memoria

Taking into consideration Osip Mandel’shtam’s annotation Poet o sebe, the paper aims to analyze the relationship between the loss of biography and its re-acquisition through the memory of the others. Deprived of his own biography, the poet seems to reacquire one through the memory of his wife. Nadezhda Mandel’shtam’s work attempts to regain this loss, building memory through her plane, dense and detailed prose. Moving from ‘biography’ to ‘auto-biography’, she tries to restore her husband’s identity together with his personal worth and dignity. Assuming the restoration of private and collective memory as a primary duty, Nadezhda Mandel’shtam creates in her memoirs a sort of ‘refracting’ surface that irradiates at the same time different literary instances. This multiple form of identity construction shifts between boundaries of biography, auto-biography and poetry.