Something German and French in a ballad “Dream” by Osip Mandelstam (“Na vysokom perevale...” (On a high pass...))

The paper deals with the ballad implication of O. Mandelstam’s poem “Na vysokom perevale…” (On a high pass...), referring to J. W. Goethe’s classic German ballads (taking into account the subsequent Russian tradition of the 19th century - V. A. Zhukovsky, A. S. Pushkin and others), as well as to F. Villon and Ch. Baudelaire’s French genre experiments. The ballad sleep motif stretches across the entire text of “Faetonshchik” (Phaeton driver). As in Zhukovsky’s ballads, Mandelstam depicts a journey to another world with a dead guide. The plot of the poem is based on Goethe-Zhukovsky’s “Lesnoy tsar’” (Forest king). Heroes are at the mercy of a terrible creature leading them to the scary world. The lines of “Faetonshchik” (Phaeton driver) also create the image of another ballad journey - the road to the “plague” France of the 15th century, where the poet’s “favorite” Francois Villon lived and worked. Mandelshtam’s poem implicitly echoes “The ballad of the hanged men” by Villon and Charlot Baudelaire’s “The trip to the Kiefer.” The plot of Mandelshtam’s poem reveals the features of the German ballad plot through the analogy with Villon’s correct French ballad: not only fearlessness and confidence but also the hero’s inner fear of the darkness of the grave and emptiness is uncovered in a mystical journey to another world. Also, “Faetonshchik” (Phaeton driver) is a variation on a theme given by N. Gumilev in “Zabludivshiysya tramvay” (The lost tram), a poem which was called a ballad by Louis Allen.

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