You and I will sit in the kitchen,
White kerosene smells sweet;
A sharp knife and a loaf of bread...
If you want, pump the Primus up tight,
Otherwise, collect some ropes
Tie the basket before dawn,
So that we can go to the station,
Where no one would find us.
Analysis of the poem “You and I will sit in the kitchen” by Mandelstam
The work “You and I will sit in the kitchen” is a consequence of the homelessness of Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, who in those years was forced to live with his wife in strange corners.
The poem was written in the winter of 1931. Its author turned 40 at this time, 3 years have passed since the publication of the last collection of his poems, this book will be the last in his life. He managed to secure a trip to the Caucasus, which greatly encouraged the poet and brought a fresh stream to his work. However, he had plans to settle in Tiflis. But I had to return to Moscow, where there was nowhere to live. He does translations and studies Italian. During this period, he and his wife wander around St. Petersburg, without their own corner. The Housing Commission for Creative Workers refused to provide O. Mandelstam with any housing. He would have to leave again, and it was decided that the wife, weakened by an exacerbation of tuberculosis, would stay with her relatives, and he would stay with his own younger brother. The poem was written under the impression of this refusal. By genre - an everyday sketch with tragic overtones, by size - a trochee with adjacent rhyme, consists of 4 couplets. Rhymes are open and closed. The lyrical hero is the author himself. The poem begins with the pronoun “we”, the poet is not alone, there is a devotee next to him close person. “We’ll sit in the kitchen”: before leaving, as usual, people sat down in front of the road. The hope of settling in St. Petersburg has evaporated, this kitchen is also alien, temporary. And they are going, essentially, to nowhere. "White kerosene": mixed with water. The preparations don’t take long, all that’s left is to take a “loaf of bread” for the journey. With subtle irony, the poet lists what else can be done: pump up the primus, collect ropes. Apparently, due to insomnia, they even decided not to go to bed and would get ready “until dawn.” Most likely, no one will accompany them. In the final couplet, the poet makes it clear that clouds have long been gathering over him; these wanderings could end in persecution, arrest, and imprisonment. That’s why the tired couple hurries to the station, trying to go somewhere “where no one would find us.” There are few means of expression, except for the word “sweet.” Contact imperative mood: Want. The vocabulary is neutral and colloquial. The intonation is doomed. In such a short poem there are vivid signs of Soviet life in the 1930s: a smoking kerosene stove, a noisy primus stove, an ordinary table knife, a wicker basket for carrying food.
Several years before his first arrest, O. Mandelstam wrote the poem “You and I will sit in the kitchen,” where behind the everyday picture one can feel the poet’s premonition of his tragic fate.
In 1925‒1926, four books by Mandelstam for children were published: “Primus”, “Two Trams”, “Balls” and “Kitchen” (the archives of the Vremya publishing house preserved the typeset manuscript of the fifth book “Trams”, which was never published during his lifetime poet). By this time, Mandelstam was already a mature master, the author of collections of poems “Stone” and “Tristia”, autobiographical prose “The Noise of Time” and a number of articles on poetry. From 1925 to 1930, he wrote almost no “adult” lyrics, but in children’s poems he was able to say a lot about the time and about himself.
The context for the program on Mandelstam’s children’s books “Primus” and “Kitchen” was his concept of “domestic Hellenism” from the article “On the Nature of the Word” (1922): “Hellenism is the conscious surrounding of a person with utensils, instead of indifferent objects, the transformation of these objects into utensils, humanizing the surrounding world, warming it with the subtlest teleological warmth.” Books about everyday objects are a characteristic phenomenon of children's literature of the 1920–1930s, but in the case of Mandelstam, the intonation of the attitude towards the thing is extremely important.
Introductory part of the lesson
The presenter gathers the children in front of the door to the apartment in which Anna Andreevna Akhmatova lived for more than 30 years, and says that her close friend Osip Emilievich Mandelstam came to visit her more than once. We ring the ancient bell (according to museum tradition, the door is opened by a caretaker), follow the suite of rooms and stop in the living room. Children are usually amazed that about a hundred years ago two poets sat here, at a table under a lampshade, just as they do today.
The image of the poet must come alive for children. The presenter shows a copy of a photograph of Mandelstam from the 1910s - this is how Akhmatova saw him for the first time: “a thin boy, with a lily of the valley in his buttonhole, with his head thrown back high, with flaming eyes and half-cheek eyelashes” (“Leaves from the Diary”). The guys are surprised by every detail of this verbal portrait.
Next we move on to the topic of the lesson. The presenter says that Mandelstam is not a children's poet at all. But in the mid-1920s, he published four books for children, two of them about the kitchen. At this time, Mandelstam got married and brought his wife to Leningrad. They lived on Bolshaya Morskaya Street and, according to Nadezhda Mandelstam, “entertained themselves with their kitchen, apartment and housekeeping.” The books “Primus” and “Kitchen” “were written as jokes: suddenly, unexpectedly and with laughter - “Is this good?”... Fried eggs - a poem. Forgot to turn off the tap in the kitchen - rhyme. We cooked jelly - again an event and a reason for a rhyme.” As the poet’s wife recalls, some of these “poems like sayings and sayings” could have been written together with Akhmatova - “maybe we fried eggs with her.” Children really like this episode.
Before starting to read the poems, the leader asks each child to tell about their favorite thing in the kitchen. Most often, children remember a TV or a refrigerator with different foods. But there are also wonderful examples: a spoon with a turquoise enamel insert or a special plate for blueberries.
Working with texts and illustrations
Children take turns reading fragments of poetry aloud. Together we try to imagine a hundred-year-old kitchen and see it through the eyes of a poet. For example, Mandelstam’s brass pans, polished to a shine, burn like “amber fires” and shine like firemen’s protective helmets. And he compares the tablecloths, which are “boiled in a giant cauldron,” to “white fish in the ocean water.” Of course, the presenter gives the necessary comments from the history of apartment life in the 1920s, but the poetic images of things and actions with them remain the focus of our attention.
The old kitchen is filled with sounds: “a birch fire is humming,” “an open tap is making noise like a drum,” “telephone calls are scattering like peas,” and this helps our imagination. Even when the sounds are not described, the children suggest that the boiling of the laundry was probably accompanied by the gurgling of water in the cauldron, and the cooking of pancakes (they know this for sure!) by the crackling of hot oil in a frying pan. Sometimes we allow ourselves liberties: we depict different sounds with our voice.
The key episode of our readings is associated with the following poem:
- I really love underwear,
I'm friends with a white shirt,
As I look at her -
I iron, iron, glide.
If you knew how I feel
It hurts to stand on fire!
Who is speaking? Children quickly guess what the iron is. Who is he talking about? It turns out it's about the shirt. What is he saying? And then what happens is what this program was started for. Children peer into the text, listen to themselves and make an amazing discovery. Iron says that he is friends with the shirt and takes care of it. It “pains” for him to stand on fire, but he is ready to endure this pain for the sake of friendship with the shirt.
We discuss why the iron had to be kept on fire (cast irons were heated on a wood stove or on a primus stove), but the main thing is that Mandelstam’s things are alive. They talk, there is a relationship between them, they are capable of the most subtle human feelings. And the poet describes kitchen utensils with incredible tenderness.
After reading each fragment, the presenter shows illustrations by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky (“Primus”, 1925), Vladimir Izenberg (“Kitchen”, 1926) or Vera Pavlova (“Sleepy Trams”, 2012). Sometimes children note the peculiarities of the authors’ artistic style: Dobuzhinsky’s graphics are “thin,” Izenberg’s drawings are “festive,” and Pavlova’s illustrations are “disturbing.”
Game around the book
Then we go to the kitchen in the museum exhibition. The presenter warns the children that all the kitchen items here have been sleeping for a long time and do not serve anyone. You can only pick up special things for the game. And even they should be handled with care, because they are alive, they can speak and feel.
In the kitchen, children act out improvisational everyday scenes using household utensils. The objects are real, and everything else is imaginary. We fire up the stove and fry “scrambled eggs for four eyes” in a frying pan (don’t forget to add salt!), grind coffee beans in a manual coffee grinder and brew coffee in a coffee pot. After breakfast, we do housework: we wash clothes in a basin and dry them over the stove, heat a cast iron iron on a primus stove and iron a shirt.
All episodes of the game are based on Mandelstam's texts. But it always turns out that the guys talk about their family farming traditions. For example, in one family they love good coffee and prefer to grind it by hand, while in another they do not keep tablecloths and sleep on unironed linen.
Children's creativity
The presenter asks the children what is the most unusual object they came across in the kitchen. According to the majority, this is a Primus. And right in the museum, at a table under a lampshade, we make an appliqué of a primus stove. Each child receives an image of a primus (based on an illustration by Vera Pavlova) and independently draws and cuts out a kettle, saucepan or iron heated on the primus.
Someone repeats exactly appearance antique items, but cooks for relatives (cooks jelly for her mother, boils milk for her younger brother). Someone draws “living” things: an iron on a fire holds back tears, and a saucepan smiles because it is ticklish. Some people fantasize about how poets see the world and emphasize the beauty of kitchen utensils. One day they drew us a teapot with a multi-colored checkered pattern.
While the children are drawing, the presenter asks them to again describe the most interesting or expensive kitchen item for them. At the end of the lesson, no one remembers the refrigerator. The guys name other things and try to talk about them figuratively, with love.
Conclusion
Along with the primus appliqué, the children take home Mandelstam’s “adult” poem “You and I will sit in the kitchen...” (it was written in January 1931, when the Mandelstams’ request for housing in Leningrad was rejected). Participants in the class find familiar household utensils in it, but feel growing anxiety:
We'll sit in the kitchen.
White kerosene smells sweet.
A sharp knife and a loaf of bread...
If you want, pump the Primus up tight,
Otherwise, collect some ropes
Tie the basket before dawn,
So that we can go to the station,
Where no one would find us.
Ksenia Zernina
Photos by Natalia Bulkina and Alexander Shelemotov
This program became a participant in the festival “Children's Days in St. Petersburg 2016”and the school-museum partnership project “Literary Baggage”.
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"Primus"
Illustrations by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky
Publishing house "Time", 1925
"Kitchen"
Illustrations by Vladimir Izenberg
Publishing house "Rainbow", 1926
The late Mandelstam, whose poem we will analyze, is usually spoken of as a complex and intricate poet. They say that all the connections in his poems are broken, that it is very difficult, almost impossible, to restore them - and this is true. Late Mandelstam is indeed a very complex poet. But we will analyze a poem that is emphatically programmatically simple, even primitive, whose simplicity (or apparent simplicity) simply catches the eye against the backdrop of complex texts. Mandelstam uses the simplest images, the simplest moves in this poem. And even more piercingly, it seems to have an effect on the reader.
It begins as a text praising comfort. This topic is important for Mandel State. Do you remember in one of his poems - “And a sulfur match could warm me up”? In this poem, “You and I will sit in the kitchen, / The white kerosene smells sweet” is an image of absolute happiness and comfort.
First of all, who is this “we”? It is clear that this “we” is most likely Mandel-shtam and his wife Nadezhda Yakovlevna. If only because guests at that time, as a rule, were not invited to the kitchen; the guests sat in the room. The fact that these “we” are sitting in the kitchen indicates that we are talking about a married couple. And then it is very important, it seems to me, to imagine a picture and see that these “we” at the beginning of the poem are in a situation of absolute peace - the peace of fatigue, and perhaps the peace of bliss. The verb is “sit,” but it denotes immobility. “You and I will sit in the kitchen” - and then this word appears, which seems to surround these first two lines: “ Sweet it smells like white kerosene.”
It’s not even clear which word is more important here. Both “sweet” and “white” are both words traditionally associated with positive semantics. The word “kerosene” is more difficult with it, we will return to this image later. But besides everything else, what does it mean? What is kerosene used for? It is needed to cook food on it. That is, again the motive here works on the theme of a home evening and the comfort of the spouses. And this theme is continued in the next couplet.
A sharp knife and a loaf of bread...
If you want, pump the Primus up tight...
This primus appears, into which kerosene is pumped. Moreover, we note again, Mandelstam is working very subtly, there are no actions yet. They haven’t started - he only suggests: “If you want, pump the Primus up tight.” Here an individual Mandelstam symbol arises, but not only that. The traditional symbol of comfort and family is the symbol of bread, homemade bread. And the important word, of course, is “loaf” - round.
But note that, as in the first stanza, an ominous motive arises. In the first stanza it appears completely silently - “kerosene”. On the one hand, of course, kerosene is for cooking. On the other hand, kerosene is also a fire, and this is the famous saying “It smells like kerosene.” Here the knife motif arises, and this knife is sharp. Again a motive that works both ways. On the one side, sharp knife in order to cut round bread, divide the bread between spouses. On the other hand, kerosene and a sharp knife begin to disturb and destroy this picture of the absolute idyll of the family. Further, this anxiety, these ominous motives grow in the following couplet:
Otherwise, collect some ropes
Tie the basket before dawn...
A motive arises, on the one hand, again associated with the family - a basket in which the spouses' things are placed. But here it’s all just a matter of comfort or just because the family is doing some kind of wonderful life, you can’t explain. Why? Because, on the one hand, an ominous image of a rope appears in itself, and even next to a knife. A motive associated with execution, death, and so on. On the other hand, a simple question arises: why is it, why does the basket suddenly have to be tied ----- before dawn? For what?
Note that there is no action taking place here yet, all this is still only hypothetical. Either pump up the primus, or cut the bread, or assemble the ropes. But listen to your reader’s feeling: this feeling of calm, bliss, the feeling of two people sitting in the kitchen in peace - it is being disturbed. The fuss begins. It is implied by the choice itself, right? Cut the bread. No. Pump up the primus. No. Gather some ropes. And this terrible “before dawn” is already here. Hurry up, hurry up! We need to make it before dawn. And then all this is resolved in two final lines:
So that we can go to the station,
Where no one would find us.
Here everything is already completely scary - there seems to be no idyll left. If some kind of idyll remains, even a little, it remains in the word “us”, because “we” must leave, leave, hide. But “we” must leave for the station. Again, the relationship between the word “station” and the word “kitchen” from the first line shows what kind of Mandelstam great master. Because if it is possible to find the absolute antipode of the word “kitchen” in this context, then this is the station. Why? Because it’s just the two of us in the kitchen, there’s no one else, we’re sitting motionless. Station - we are dissolved in a sea of other people, and everyone is moving, everyone is fussing. This fuss, which began approximately from the third or fourth line of the poem, finds its resolution here. We have to leave for the station, and then the worst, most ominous line is “Where no one would find us.” That is, we must disturb the peace that surrounds us, disturb the happiness that binds us, disturb this comfort by running away, going to the station. For what? Why? And here, of course, the most important key is the dating - January 1931. And to Mandelshtam’s contemporaries, who could have read this poem (“could have,” because they didn’t: it was not published on time, only the chosen ones knew it, those to whom Mandelstam read this poem ), it would be very clear what we are talking about. Only one historical circumstance needs to be introduced into this text. People were arrested in Leningrad (this is a Leningrad poem) - as in Moscow, as in all other cities (and this is described in the “Gulag Arch-Pelago” by Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn), they were arrested at night, so as not to attract the attention of passers-by, when two NKVD officers are taking away an arrested man. When we reach this date, we understand that the poem needs to be reread again. Here we are, and we're starting again from the first line. Yeah! It turns out that this peace in the kitchen is not comfort. It turns out that this is the numbness of people who are waiting for arrest. And that’s why kerosene appears and things smell like kerosene.
It turns out that you need to eat quickly, because then you won’t have to eat: then you will need to run away and go quickly to the station. And the sharp knife reminds us of that execution, of that knife that was already hanging over us. It turns out that we must tie this basket in order to run away with these things. And, of course, a side motif inevitably arises here: the prison baskets that their wives tied for the prisoners. It turns out that we must run away to the station hall so that no one finds us. In this “nobody” one hears the word “someone”. And, of course, these are very specific NKVD officers who come to arrest.
Through such a motive, this text is connected with the text that will be written later and which, I am sure, many of you have in your memory. This is Akhmatova’s poem from “Requiem”:
The quiet Don flows quietly,
The yellow moon enters the house.He walks in with his hat on one side,
This month sees a shadow.This woman is sick
This woman is alone.Husband in the grave, son in prison,
Pray for me.
Here it is, this shadow, sitting in a daze, like these two. For Akhmatova, this situation becomes even more tragic: not “we”, but one woman, because the husband is arrested (if he is arrested). Thus, this poem about absolute happiness and absolute peace, where the simplest, most comfortable words are used, as a result turns into a poem about arrest, about death and oh, as we know from the fate of Mandelstam, a hopeless attempt to avoid arrest and death.
Moscow-Leningrad: Rainbow, state lithography named after. Comrade M. Tomsky, 1926. 10 p. Circulation 8000 copies. Price 80 k. In publisher's color. lithographed cover. One of the best Soviet children's books. Extremely rare!
Kitchen.
Pink hums and dances
Dry fire birch
In the kitchen! In the kitchen!
Baked on a sunny morning
With sunflower oil
Pancakes! Pancakes!
Amber lights are burning,
Shining like firefighters
Pots! Pots!
Skimmers and coffee pots,
And graters and stewpans -
On the shelves! On the shelves!
And the laundry is cooking
In a giant cauldron,
Like white fish
In the water-ocean:
The tablecloth is bristling
Big sturgeon
Swims like a whitefish,
Swelled up like a ball.
Where should I put the jelly?
On the window! On the window!
On a large white platter -
And jelly along with it.
It's a shame from the windowsill
To the sparrows, to the sparrows:
- Both jelly and jelly are visible -
Not for us! Not for us!
Bread, table, flexible, steel,
All knives are serrated, all knives are crooked,
Knife not pin:
He needs an edit!
And the whetstone flows
We're murmuring.
The knife caresses and curls
Worm.
- You are my knives, knives!
Silver snakes!
At the grinder's, at Klim's,
Wonderful pressure
And from every pressure
The knife wags like a burbot.
Difficult with kitchen knife,
With a naughty mower;
And with a little finger
We'll handle it later!
- You are my knives, knives!
Silver snakes!
At Timofeevna's
Agile hands -
Coffee beans
Black-black:
They climb and push
Into a narrow throat
And they make their way
Into a dark crater.
Each grain is finely ground,
Falls into the box onto the dark bottom!
There are bagels on the table,
The samovar is already boiling.
Black tea in a dry tin
Rings like carnations:
Come and have some tea
Hurry up, guests,
And fragrant again
Throw some tea in the kettle!
We, rustling tea leaves,
We jingle like carnations.
There are enough of us for a hundred brews,
For four hundred welds:
We don't want to be dry!
Fun on the baking sheet
The oil hissed -
Something will work
Creamy, white.
All egg yolks
Let's knock it over right away
Let's make scrambled eggs
For four eyes.
The pendulum moves rapidly -
One-two-three-four.
And hung from the clock
Golden weights.
To the pendulum with a beard
He ran with a long gait,
You need to lift the weight -
THAT'S IT - DON'T FORGET!
1925-1926
“The authors of almost all memoirs about Mandelstam invariably note that he was a man of ineradicable gaiety: jokes, witticisms, epigrams could be expected from him at any moment, regardless of hardship external circumstances. He drew a clear line between comic and “serious” poems, but the stricter and more ascetic his lyrics became, the more relaxed and willful the comic poems were written,” writes P.M. Nerler in comments to the book of poems by Mandelstam.
The children's poems of 1924–1925 were also humorous. “All the children’s poems came in one year - we then moved to Leningrad and had fun with the kitchen, apartment and housekeeping,” recalled Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam. The year 1924 for Osip was filled primarily with backbreaking translation work and writing “The Noise of Time.” The pathos of this thing is fundamentally different from the pathos of Mandelyptam’s articles of the early twenties. Remembering the era preceding the emergence and flowering of Russian modernism, Mandelstam emphasized its creative sterility and “deep provincialism.” He called the nineties of the 19th century here a “quiet backwater,” varying the image from his 1910 poem:
From the pool of evil and viscous
I grew up rustling like a reed,
And passionately, and languidly, and affectionately
Breathing the forbidden life.
It is no coincidence that the attempts to “glue” and “merge” the pages of history, carefully undertaken in Mandelstam’s previous articles, were replaced in “The Noise of Time” by deliberately “torn pictures.” Perhaps this is why Mandelstam, a year later, would admit to Anna Akhmatova and Pavel Luknitsky that he was “ashamed of the content” of “The Noise of Time.” The final pages of his new prose Mandelstam finished writing in the summer of 1924, in the TSEKUBU rest house, in Aprelevka near Moscow. Apparently, at the same time, “The Noise of Time” was given its title, which goes back not only to the famous - fuga temporis - “running of time”, much later picked up by Akhmatova, but also to the following fragment of Andrei Bely’s novel “Silver Dove”: “...August floats along in the noise and rustle of time: do you hear the noise of time?” At the end of July, the Mandelstams moved to live in Leningrad. They settled in the very center of the city, on Bolshaya Morskaya, renting two rooms in the apartment of actress-entertainer M. Maradulina. Preserved detailed description Mandelstam's modest housing, made by the meticulous P. Luknitsky:
"From round table- to another room. Here it is: narrow, small, 2 windows in length. From the door to the right in the corner there is a stove. On the right wall there is a sofa, on the sofa there is a blanket, on the blanket there is a pillow. There appears to be a shirt and underpants hanging by the stove. From the sofa, along the transverse wall there is a table. There is a lamp with a green shade on it, and nothing else. On the opposite wall - between the windows - there is a kind of cabinet with many drawers. Armchair. All. Everything is clean and good, only the underpants are embarrassing.”
In Leningrad, the poet received an additional source of income: at the suggestion of Samuil Marshak, Mandelstam began writing children's poems. This was natural, since with children Osip Emilievich almost always easily found common language. “He was strange: he couldn’t touch a cat, a dog, or a fish... - Anna Akhmatova told Lydia Chukovskaya in 1940... - But he loved children. And wherever he lived, he always talked about some neighbor’s child.” Some of Mandelstam’s children’s poems took into account the experience of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “ladder”:
- And the water supply
Where
does he take water?
Others adapted the deliberately infantile manner of Mandelstam’s teacher, Innokenty Annensky, for the needs of children’s poetry:
- Eh, balloon pigeons
On a white thread
I'll sell you, balls,
I won't be at a loss!
The liquid balloons are puffing up and puffing up -
Purple, red and blue...
(Mandelshtam “Balls”)
Buy some balls, sudari!
Balls are childish,
Red, purple,
Very cheap!
(Annensky “Children’s Balloons”)
In one of the Leningrad publishing houses, the future famous playwright and then aspiring poet for children Evgeny Schwartz met Mandelstam, in whose diary we find a quick sketch of Mandelstam’s portrait: “Concerned, thin, like a chicken, still raising his head in response to his thoughts, inspiring respect " In September, Pasternak came to Leningrad for a short time and visited the Mandelstams several times. In a letter sent to Osip Emilievich on September 19 from Moscow, Boris Leonidovich complained that he never had a chance to listen to Mandelstam’s prose. Pasternak’s second letter, dated October 24, ends with a friendly and slightly humorous gesture: “I hug you. Warm greetings to Nadezhda Yakovlevna. The wife, with the appropriate movements, joins.” The Mandelstams celebrated Christmas with Benedict Livshits and his wife. “Nadya and I were lying in the bedroom on the marital bed and chatting,” recalled Ekaterina Livshits, “the door was open, and we could see and hear how our husbands were having fun.” They celebrated New Year 1925 together with B. Babin and his wife, acquaintances of Mandelstam’s youth. In mid-January 1925, Olga Aleksandrovna Vaksel (1903-1932) first appeared on Morskaya. In 1925, Mandelstam’s “everyday” Christianity would result in a piercing tercet-prayer:
Help me, Lord, to get through this night,
I'm afraid for my life - for your slave...
Living in St. Petersburg is like sleeping in a coffin.
In mid-November 1925, Mandelstam went to Nadezhda Yakovlevna in Yalta. He returned to Leningrad at the beginning of February 1926, having stayed for one day in Moscow (from a letter to N. Ya. Mandelstam dated February 2: “... In Moscow Pasternak spoke to me, and I was late for the train. My things left at 9 30 o'clock, and I, having sent a telegram to Klin, with parting words from brother Shura, left next at 11 o'clock." Poems were still not written, and this unsettled the poet. “More than anything else, Mandelstam was afraid of his own muteness, calling it suffocation. When she overtook him, he rushed about in horror and came up with some ridiculous reasons to explain this disaster” (“Leaves from the Diary” by Anna Akhmatova). Memoirists remember Mandelstam rushing around Leningrad in search of work. Nevertheless, he tried to stay cheerful, as befits an adult man - the breadwinner of the family: “...I, child, walk merrily in my father’s Jewish fur coat and my brother-in-law’s earflaps. I lost my cap on the road. Got used to winter. On the tram I read Gorlin’s books, that is, French books handed over for translation or review by Alexander Nikolaevich Gorlin” (from a letter to his wife dated February 9-10, 1926). “You won’t believe it: not a trace of neurosis. I rise to the 6th floor without noticing - purring” (from a letter to her dated February 18, 1926). During 1926, Mandelstam wrote 18 internal reviews of foreign books; his translations were published in 10 collections of prose and poetry published in Moscow, Kyiv, and Leningrad. In 1925-1926 Four Mandelstam books of poems for children were published: “Primus”, “2 Trams”, “Kitchen” and “Balls”. Mandelstam lived with his brother Evgeniy on the 8th line of Vasilyevsky Island. At the end of March he left for Kyiv, where he was briefly reunited with Nadezhda Yakovlevna. At the beginning of April, the poet returned to Leningrad, but after half a month he went to Nadezhda Yakovlevna in Yalta. “...For many years, this was the first month when Nadya and I really rested, forgetting everything. I have a short stop now: an oasis, and then it will be difficult again,” Mandelstam wrote presciently to his father. From June to mid-September 1926, Osip Emilievich and Nadezhda Yakovlevna lived in Detskoe Selo, where they rented furnished rooms. Benedict Livshits settled next door to them with his wife and son. “This autumn, St. Petersburg residents and especially writers flocked to Tsarskoe Selo,” R.V. Razumnik reported to Andrei Bely on October 15, 1926. “Sologub left, but Akhmatova now lives in his rooms, and Mandelstam, who still considers himself the first poet of our time, lives in the lyceum (he came to renew his acquaintance”). “There was absolutely no furniture in the rooms and there were gaping holes in the rotten floors,” Akhmatova recalled the Mandelstams’ home. In mid-September, Nadezhda Yakovlevna left for Koktebel.
Izenberg, Vladimir Konstantinovich(1895-1969) - sculptor, artist, worked in magazine and book graphics, bookplates, posters and decorative art. Son of Konstantin Vasilyevich Izenberg. He did not receive any special art education. Consulted with M.I. Kurilko. Lived: until the mid-1920s and from 1954 in Leningrad, 1930s in Kuibyshev (now Samara), 1941 - 1945 in Murom, 1945 - 1953 in Ryazan. In the 1910s he painted for St. Petersburg magazines ("Sun of Russia", etc.).
Since 1916 he performed bookplates. 1920s - illustrated and designed books for the Mysl, Gosizdat, and Raduga publishing houses. He worked in the field of political posters. Also a performing artist at the Odessa Mossadrom Theater and the Sevastopol City Theater. 1930s - participated in the design of performances at the Kuibyshev Drama Theater. In 1954, he supervised the restoration of the monument to the Guardian. 1960s - designed performances at the Leningrad Puppet Theater. 1969 - died in Leningrad.
You can understand the true meaning of the author’s work only by lifting the curtain of his life. The famous Acmeist poet of the 20th century, Osip Mandelstam, left many riddle poems. They are so simple at first glance, even ordinary, but in fact they are very symbolic. The poet rarely resorted to generally accepted artistic means high style, on the contrary, he filled his poems with simple objects that are close to every person. Mandelstam was a free-thinking poet, for which he was displeased with the Soviet authorities.
The poetry “You and I will sit in the kitchen...” is a striking example of Acmeism literature. The plot is simple: two close people are sitting in the kitchen. It smells like white kerosene, which is used to fill a primus stove. Primus was previously used to heat rooms. There is a knife and a loaf of bread in the kitchen. The hero offers to tie the basket so that they can then go with it to the station, where no one will find them. Conclusion - two lovers retire to a secluded kitchen and plan to leave so that no one will bother them. The plot is romantic, but quite ordinary. But this is only at first glance. Let's look at the poem in more detail.
The first line “You and I will sit in the kitchen” reflects the intimacy of feelings, the trust of lovers in each other, their affection. The kitchen is a symbol of the cozy microcosm of the heroes.
The second line “has a smell” - the sweet smell of white kerosene. The modern reader may wonder why the kitchen smells of kerosene. Previously, it was used to fuel a primus - a heating device. But in this line, it is the type of kerosene that is more important - white. It is recognized as the purest, which can symbolize the purity of the characters’ relationships. Plus, it doesn't just smell, it smells sweet. Which suggests that the lovers are so intoxicated by their feeling that even kerosene feels pleasant. Also, something that smells like kerosene can have a connotation of danger. It’s not just that lovers want to run away to the station so that no one will find them there.
The third line mentions a sharp knife and a loaf. The sharpness of a knife means sharpness of feelings, and again danger. The image of the loaf is traditional and important. Many traditions are associated with it, in particular, it was prepared before departure.
The image of the basket is also interesting. It, like the loaf, has a symbolic round shape, which means eternity. The basket is also a piece of that microworld that the heroes can take with them to the station.
The work ends with the belief that no one will find them, because the heroes are happy together.