The eternal cathedrals of St. Sophia and St. Peter,

Barns of air and light,

Granaries of universal goodness And the rigs of the New Testament...

And six years earlier he had begun to speak about the Sacraments. True, in an amateurish enthusiastic way, mixing together the Western and Eastern rites. But it is so joyful and lively that there is no doubt that the delight of prayer is close to the poet.

Divine services are the solemn zenith,

The light in the round temple under the dome in July,

So that we breathe deeply out of time About the meadow where time does not run.

And the Eucharist, like an eternal noon, lasts,

Everyone takes communion, plays and sings,

And in the sight of all, the divine vessel Flows with inexhaustible joy.

For Mandelstam, Christianity is in many ways a cultural phenomenon.

Culture does not heal the wounds of life, but overcomes chaos. This is already a lot. The acmeist movement, to which Mandelstam belonged, he defined as "the desire for world culture."

"World" is said loudly, since neither China, nor India, nor Persia are of interest to him. I am interested in the culture of Christian peoples, as well as that part of their pre-Christian cultural past that has passed through the sieve of believing consciousness. Hence, from the chosen angle, from the point of view from the standpoint of culture, Mandelstam's ecumenism.

"The Abbé Flaubert and Zola", the Athonite "imyabozhtsy-muzhiki", "the late Lutheran" calmly coexist on the pages of his poems, and, as for me, it is not necessary to make too high confessional demands on a native of the Warsaw ghetto. He "drank the cold mountain air of Christianity."

The poet, in general, is a pilgrim of world culture. His interlocutors are people without registration. Who are Arios and Tasso for you and me, how real are they? I dare to assume that at certain moments both these and other poets were more real for Mandelstam than all his contemporaries. Dead poets continue to speak, but stop listening. And they themselves, speaking through works, are heard by a small number of people capable of this. Sometimes the echo of someone else's voice gives rise to his own melody in the poet's soul.

I have received a blessed inheritance —

Wandering dreams of other singers;

We are deliberately free to despise our kinship and boring neighborhood.

And more than one treasure, perhaps,

Bypassing grandchildren, he will go to his great-grandchildren,

And again the skald will compose someone else's song And pronounce it as his own.