The Noise of Time (Masterplots II: Nonfiction Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Osip Mandelstam
- First Published: 1925
- Type of Work: Autobiography
- Time of Work: The 1890’s to the first decade of the twentieth century
- Setting: Riga, St. Petersburg, and nearby Pavlosk, Russia, and Finland
- Principal Characters: Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Gippius, Boris Sinani, Yuli Matveich, Vera Komissarzhevskaya, Sergei Ivanych
- Genres: Nonfiction, Autobiography
- Subjects: Maturation or coming of age, Culture, History, Language or languages, Memory, Art or artists, Poetry or poets, Jews or Jewish life, City life, Russia or Russian people
Form and Content
The Noise of Time is a poet’s autobiography. Osip Mandelstam, working in the Russian genre of childhood reminiscence, attempts a completely new transformation of the form. Jane Gary Harris describes it in her introduction to Mandelstam’s The Complete Critical Prose and Letters (1979): “The Noise of Time is structured around fragments or vignettes involving recurrent poetic images and a density of references and associations unified by the autobiographical impulse and ordered ‘according to their spatial extension.’” The genre...
[The entire page is 2660 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
See Also
