Killing Time: Walter Benjamin, Osip Mandel'štam and the Stalinist Metaphysics of History

The article discusses Osip Mandel'shtam's understanding of time and temporality in relation to the primitive ahistorical visions of the Stalinist age. In order to trace this complex relationship in Mandel'shtam's poetics, the article first looks at Walter Benjamin's incisive critique of historicism with which Mandel'shtam's quintessentially modernist poetics of time shares many affinities. Like Benjamin, Mandel'shtam was sympathetic to the revolution's utopian promise of temporal transformation and release from the empty time of linear history. It did not take him long, however, to realize a radical difference between his own and the Bolsheviks' view of history; much as he tried throughout the 1920s, he failed to bring the two into any kind of alignment. The article argues that passages where Mandel'shtam is at his most revealing about temporality and history also implicitly critique the official pretension of mastery over time: time always strikes back with a vengeance, and it is only through its momentary suspension in shocks that one can begin to comprehend its structure.