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.

Talking about God is very intimate. This is a conversation about "the Father who is in secret." In addition, God hears us every second. In such conversations, it is more appropriate to ask the right questions than to stun with the enormity of answers.

Not every conversation about God is truly religious. There is just sheer vulgarity and violation of the third commandment. And, on the contrary, there are clever speeches that do not name names, but bring us close to God.

Here is a young man, according to his confession, "secretly envious of everyone and secretly in love with everyone", drops a few brilliant lines:

For the joy of quietly breathing and living Whom, tell me, should I thank?

My breath, my warmth has already fallen on the glass of eternity...

These simple lines are whispered in such a way that we can almost see with our own eyes the fogged "glass of eternity" and can write on it with our finger. Not commemorating the Creator in any way, this is perhaps one of the best religious poems.

Who found rest in one of the mass graves of the camp, what did he write during his lifetime about death? After all, a poet cannot but write about death. Here, for example, in "The Abbot":