“Ode to Beethoven”: Osip Mandelstam’s newly discovered manuscript and abstract on the history of the Western Church

The article introduces the newly discovered manuscript of OsipMandelstam's poem “Ode to Beethoven”, which was preserved in the family archiveof Semen Lipkin. The autograph was taken into account in Nikolay Khardzhiev’snotes to the “Poems” in the Big Series of “Poet’s Library” (1973), but later it hadbeen inaccessible to researchers for many years. The authors describe and commentin detail on the draft manuscript of the poem — the poet’s first appeal to the odegenre with the development of a stanza inherent in the genre. The text on the backof the sheet is identified by the authors as a fragment of an abstract on the history ofthe Western Church, which directly correlates with the manuscript “Justification ofthe Conciliarity” from the poet’s archive in Princeton. Saying that it is impossible toestablish exactly whether the fragment is an abstract of a book or a lecture, the authorsattempt to date it on the basis of biographical information and a number of textual features. The publication is concluded with a brief commentary on the abstract, as wellas photocopies of the manuscript (on both sides of the sheet), which should greatlyfacilitate researchers' access to this important source