Andrew Kahn is Professor of Russian Literature, University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He was educated in the USA and UK and has degrees in Classical History and Literature as well as in Slavonic Languages and Literatures. He writes mainly about Russian literature and history of ideas of the eighteenth century and the poetic traditions. He has been visiting professor at Berkeley, Columbia, and the Ecole Normale Superieure, rue d'Ulm, and has given invited lectures at Cambridge, Columbia, University of Colorado (Boulder), Yale University, and Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

• Introduction Part One. Cultural Revolution 1: The Political culture of a poet 2: Revolutionary Lyric Part Two. Poetry and Experience 3: The 'Slate Ode': poetry as historical consciousness 4: Verses on Russian Poetry': Literary Politics and the Transvaluation of Values 5: 'Octaves': From the Science of the Mind to the Music of Poetry Part Three. The Visual and Material Turn 6: Painting 7: Moving Pictures 8: Objects Part Four. The Ideal of Love 9: Love's Body 10: From Mortal to Immortal Love Part Five. Spaces of Exile 11: The Voronezh Poems (1934-7) and the Geometry of Exile 12: Into the Fourth Dimension A Short Chronology Selected Bibliography

Mandelstam is a challenging poet, and this is consequently a densely argued, wide-ranging volume. Overall, Kahn's extensive study undoubtedly provides a significant and welcome contribution to our understanding of Mandelstam's post-Acmeist poetry and its development.