I Like the Echo of Fairy Tale Thought in this Mandelstam Poem

Translator not cited.

Edward Gorey was talking about his troublous relationship with fairy tales (he's not as big a fan of them as one might suppose) in an interview I was reading yesterday, and he quoted Bruno Bettelheim's book on fairy tales and made an approbatory comment. That's a book which irked me for its over-Freudianized readings of so many fairy tales; that's a book which is often more of interest as a reflection of the passing zeitgeist that spawned the book than for what it has to say about the deeper meanings of fairy tales.

Maybe I should give it a second chance. I remember giving up in frustration after some really annoying and reductive analyses.



The following clip is just weird. To see the art of someone like Mandelstam being used in some shlock bank ad in Russia...sad! There will always be the tacky "REVOLUTION" sneakers ads and shit like this...but so not respectful of an entire century of Russian history...admittedly either not a great poem or one translated very poorly but still...

The poster of the clip (naively) seems to believe nothing is being advertised...but of course an amoral corporate entity is feigning empathy for the plight of the "meaningless" individual (artist to boot) in the (past) national culture...cheesy......same old "change" bullshit in advertising...can't blame the director...i'm sure he likes to eat and feed his loved ones, and have a few bucks to make some free artistic choices of his own...

But a corpse can have so many uses!

The posterg of the clip writes exoneratively:

This ad was created by film director Timur Bekmambetov known by its two films 'Night Watch' and 'Day Watch' that were shown in Europe and the USA. The clip was filmed for the Slavyansky bank and doesn't advert anything, perhaps the point is in the name of the bank 'Slavyanskyi' -- 'Slavonic',something that represent Slavonic, or Russian culture, so the ad is a symple video sequence for a Mandelstam's poem. Osip Mandelshtam (Mandelstam), Russian poet, spent many years and died in Stalin's camps. After Stalin's death his wife published her memoirs in the west. Though the poem sounding in the clip was written in 1908, it contains Mandelshtam's uneasy presentiments, children's laugh, fear, pity, feeling of prison jails and Christmas tree of those years:

The Christmas trees are shining
With tinsel gold in the forests,
The toy wolves are gazing
With scary eyes in the bushes.

O my prophetic sorrow,
O my silent freedom,
And the ever-laughing crystal
Of the lifeless heavenly vault!