“How many of us are here?”: on ways of self-identification in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir prose

On the one hand, the memoir heritage of Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam turns out to be a significant source for studying O. Mandelstam’s literary heritage; on the other hand, it reveals unique linguistic examples that help identify the idiostyle of the writer herself. It is interesting that N. Mandelstam was not only the wife of a prominent poet, but also an elitist linguistic personality; therefore, her texts are characterized by artistic storytelling, deep reflection and intent attention to details. These and other characteristics of the memoirist’s text encourage a thorough study of her works, in particular the first book, “Memoirs,” and the second, “The Second Book.” The memoirs of N. Mandelstam are not only a story about the life of a person living in the twentieth century, but also an attempt to preserve the memory of the writer’s contemporaries who, as well as she did, had to go through a series of severe trials. The article considers the methods of the author’s self-identification, presented from a linguistic point of view, in N. Mandelstam’s ego-documents. The specificity of Mandelstam’s works allows us to highlight several features of “female” writing, salient for the memoirist.