Arkady Gornfeld

In 1916, Gornfeld published a translation of Till Eulenspiegel, a retelling of German fables by Charles De Coster.^[5] Several years later, the publisher Land and Factory assigned the dissident poet Osip Mandelstam the task of revising it.

A misunderstanding began when the publishing house, Land and Factory, failed to let Gornfeld know about the 1928 revision. Then, in a serious printing error, Gornfeld's name was left off the title page. Instead, Mandelstam's name was on Gornfeld's work.^[6]

The publishing house issued an apology. But Gornfeld had already concluded that Mandelstam purposely stole his work. He attacked the poet in a letter to the Red Evening Gazette, likening Mandelstam to a house guest who steals a fur coat from a hangar.^[7]

Mandelstam struck back, both at Gornfeld and the “trashy” translation industry, in his book The Fourth Prose, calling Gornfeld a sickly version of Georges Charles de Heeckeren d’Anthès, the killer of his fellow poet, Pushkin.

This paralytic d’Anthés, this uncle Monia from the Basseinaia Street . . . Uncle Gornfel'd, why did you decide to complain in the Birzhevka, that is, The Red Evening Gazette, in the Soviet year of 1929? You would have done better to weep in the clean Jewish literary waistcoat of Mr. Propper. You would have done better to relate your misfortune to the banker with sciatic nerve, kugel, and the tallith.^[8]

A bitter blow to Mandelstam's business and reputation, the “Eulenspiegel Affair” led Mandelstam to restyle himself an outlaw poet, rejected and persecuted by a corrupt literary establishment.^[9][10]

«Forgotten writer "(Kushchevskaya, 1895);

"Criticism and lyricism" (1897);

"I. I. Dityatin" (1896, 2);

"Paul-Louis Courier" (1895);

"The torments of the Word" ("Collection of Russian Wealth", 1899);

"Memory of Herzen" (1900);

"Theory and practice of the study of literature" (1901);

"Russian women Nekrasov in a new light" (1904);

"Experimental Art" (1904);

"The Future of Art" (1908);

"S. Aksakov"

"Literature and heroism, etc."

"Books and People" (1908);

"In the West" (1910);

"On the interpretation of artistic works" (1912);

"On the Russian writers", v. 1 (1912);