“Land of Screaming Stones: Osip Mandelstam and the Concept of Stone in the Armenian Cycle - A Poetics of Matter, Memory, and History”

Abstract

This article examines the concept of stone in the so-called Armenian Cycle of Acmeist poet Osip Mandelstam, in connection with his 1930 journey to Armenia, highlighting a decisive transformation: from an Acmeist “architectonics of form” to a “stratigraphic poetics of existence,” in which stone ceases to function as a constructive principle and instead becomes a medium of memory and a materialization of historical experience. The study emphasizes the relationship between materiality, temporality, and the representation of trauma in Armenian history. Within this framework, it investigates how the opacity of stone enables the poet to articulate collective memory through a logic of inscription and resistance, thereby avoiding the demands of ideological transparency imposed by Socialist Realism and configuring an ethics of language grounded in density, trace, and persistence.