The Change of Epochs in the Works of A.A.Akhmatova and O.E.Mandelstam

This paper examines the ideas about the change of epochs in the work of A. A. Akhmatova and O. E. Mandelstam. The main goal of the paper is to analyze how the concept of the epoch in works of Akhmatova and Mandelstam changes. In addition, the study includes analysis of the memoirs of the poets' contemporaries in the context of how they made sense of the Silver Age. Each of the chapters consists of a motive analysis of the texts, and also considers them in a broad historical and cultural context. The chapter "The Image of the Silver Age in Memoirs" is devoted to memoirs; having singled out the corpus of stable motifs, we use it for comparison in the chapters "Ideas about the Change of Epochs in the Lyrics of A. A. Akhmatova" and "Ideas about the Change of Epochs in the Lyrics of O. E. Mandelstam". We come to the following conclusion: through writing memoirs and poems, they participate in commemorative practice to preserve the memory of the Silver Age; touching on the topic of memory, Akhmatova and Mandelstam build a connection with the era, that is not mediated by other contemporaries. All this helped us to conclude that Akhmatova constantly mentally returns to the epoch of the Silver Age as to the symbolic past, while Mandelstam starts from the past epoch — and that is the main difference between their perception of the epoch.