Writing and the End of St Petersburg in Mandel'shtam's The Egyptian Stamp (1928)

Abstract

The 1928 novella The Egyptian Stamp by the important modernist writer Osip Mandel'shtam is explored as offering an innovative way of thinking about 'the end of St Petersburg', which is understood in two senses, as the historical demise of the imperial capital post-1917, as well as a long-standing literary tradition of imagining the apocalyptic fall of the city. It is proposed that writing, writing instruments and texts are linked to revolutionary Petersburg and used as tropes of violence in a way that opens up suggestive subtexts in the Book of Revelation, the Book of Daniel and other historical and revolutionary works. Mandel'shtam's The Egyptian Stamp is situated within the Petersburg text theory of V. N. Toporov and proposed as offering a way to re-think and extend that theory beyond the Silver Age.