Though many share Iosif Brodskij's and Anna Axmatova's view that Pu&shachek;kin is Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's predte&chachek;a, the extent to which Pu&shachek;kin's life and art is a palimpsest underlying Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's life and art has not been fully appreciated. In this paper I argue that an understanding of what I term the imitatio (of) Pu&shachek;kin (after Thomas Mann's notion of the imitatio Goethe) is particularly important for an analysis of Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's Vorone&zhachek; poetry. I also argue that a revised version of Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence may assist us in studying the Pu&shachek;kin-Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam poetic relationship. Significant ways in which Pu&shachek;kin's life and art are reflected in Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's have been analysed by Omry Ronen, E. Toddes, V. Musatov, B. M. Gasparov, M. L. Gasparov, A. Wachtel, and others, but the extent to which and the ways in which Pu&shachek;kin's influence acquired for Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam a fatidic meaning has still to be fully recognised. Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's construction in his poetry of various myths of the poet is underwritten by a three-fold identification with kenotic models. He identifies himself with the values and heroic character of Russian literature and the Russian intelligentsia as a whole; more importantly, he views his life and death as an imitatio Christi; most important of all, he seems to have considered it his destiny to rewrite and relive Pu&shachek;kin's art, life and death—but in his own way.

Too many of the apparently more straightforward Vorone&zhachek; lyrics have been read too innocently (notable exceptions include various readings by Pollak, Cavanagh and in particular Ronen). I shall analyse three poems written in January 1937 (during the centenary celebrations of Pu&shachek;kin's death, when Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's identification with Pu&shachek;kin was most acute) and reveal the strange ways in which Pu&shachek;kin and key Pu&shachek;kinian themes inform works which, on the surface at least, appear to have little or no Pu&shachek;kinian content. Two of the poems, V lico morozu ia glja&zhachek;u odin and E&shachek;&chachek;e ne umer ty, e&shachek;&chachek;e ty ne odin look back to key Pu&shachek;kinian texts expressing the poet's faith in life, love, nature, and poetry and embodying the poetic tongue's ability to praise in spite of all (in particular, Ja pere&zhachek;il svoi &zhachek;elan'ja, Èlegija (Bezumnyx let ugas&shachek;ee vesel&soft;e), Poètu, Zimnee utro). Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's revisions of Pu&shachek;kin epitomize what Bloom terms the magic of the successful apophrades: although these defences of poetry owe much to Pu&shachek;kin (and to Blok), it is Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's poems which seem (for many readers in the West in particular) the most eloquent defence available of the poet's aesthetic and ethical autonomy, of his inner rightness.

The third poem, Kuda mne det&soft;sja v ètom janvare? is a variation on a favored Pu&shachek;kinian theme—the death of the poet. In it Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam, through a series of elusive (transumptive) allusions and echoes, composes a necrology of Russian poets and investigates which fate awaits him in his isolated, exiled disgrace. The poem is Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's version of to be or not to be, and a complex intertextual conversation involving Pu&shachek;kin, Belyj, Pasternak, Majakovskij, Gumilev, Fet, and Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's own poems ends by suggesting that Pu&shachek;kin has fixed his canon against self-slaughter for any true heir.

Pace Bloom, a Russian poet's anxiety before his precursor or his ambivalence regarding the consequences of following in the father's footsteps may in large part arise from his understanding that to experience what Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam called the direct, canonical influence of Pu&shachek;kin may somehow place one under an obligation to imitate his death too—not only symbolically, in the creation of one's literary myths, but literally. I conclude by pointing out some ways in which Bloom's ideas, if revised to take greater account of the importance of the life and the death of the poet in the Russian context, may nevertheless offer additional insights into how, in David Bethea's words, literary material seems to prefigure and shape the real-life outcome in the tragic u&chachek;ast&soft; russkix poètov.