“Everything moves with love…”: Experience of reading the poem “Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails…” by O.E. Mandelstam

The article views the poem “Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails...” as a work of Mandelstam-acmeist, who brought his understanding of Acmeism to it as “longing for world culture”. In this poem, the latter is represented by the world of Ancient Greece with its mythology, reflected in the greatest creation of ancient art – the poem of Homer’s “Iliad”, as well as in the classic Russian translation of this poem, made at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the poet N.I. Gnedich. The article describes the semantic context that allows through the connection of mythopoetic views of the ancient Greeks, particularly – the myth of Aphrodite, to give an adequate interpretation of Mandelstam’s idea of the famous line “both the sea and Homer – everything moves with love”. Particular attention is paid to the stylistic and linguistic originality of this work and the peculiarities of its verse form, also, according to the poet’s conception, in a number of moments going back to the poetic works of antiquity. The proposed analysis is intended to demonstrate the possibility of the approach that adapts the complex text to the level of school perception without deliberate simplification of its meaning, which is objectively difficult to understand due to its saturation with a variety of historical and cultural associations.