The Starling’s Whistle: Autophilology and the Order of Osip Mandel’shtam’s Birds

This chapter examines the role of birds and bird formations in Osip Mandel’shtam’s poetry. With special attention to the figure of the starling in a late poem from the 1930s, the chapter explores the ambiguity of its “whistle” not only as an index of the difficult conditions the poet faced in the last years of his life under Stalinism, but also as a point of reference for the changing figuration of birds throughout his poetry. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s references to birdsong (ambiguously figuring both territorialization and de-territorialization), the chapter studies the significance of Mandel’shtam’s reading of collective bird formations in Dante’s Divine Comedy in the late essay “Conversation about Dante.” Revealing the “autophilological” direction of Mandel’shtam’s poetry as a whole, this essay’s reading of the order and disorder of Dante’s bird formations reproduces an underlying problem of bird figuration elsewhere in Mandel’shtam, whether in poems about collective bird forms (cranes or starlings), or individual birds (goldfinch or swallow). All of these are reflected on, if elliptically, in the ambiguous mimicry of the starling’s whistle.