Mandelstam and his Brothers: On the Question of Mandelstam's Self-projection as the Biblical Joseph

Soshkin's article acquaints readers with new arguments in favor of the old hypothesis that Osip Mandelstam's poem "The bread is poisoned and the air all drunk up..." (1913) was a reaction to a disagreement, a duel that didn't happen and an eventual reconciliation with Khlebnikov regarding the latter's anti-Semitic remark in the "Stray Dog" cafe. An analysis of the poem in its polemical aspect renders the key to understanding a certain strangeness in Fourth Prose, in which Mandelstam describes himself as the victim of an anti-Semitic attack, while paradoxically endowing "Soviet writers" - his persecutors in the unfortunate "Ullenspiegel affair" - with the stereotypically "Jewish" features of anti-Semitic myth.