The subject of this book is Osip Mandelstam’s short prose piece "Cold Summer" (1923). The "slow reading" process into which the author invites the reader not only offers a fresh perspective on the text but also reveals a vivid picture of the Russian language as it existed in the 1920s. The book is written in the rare genre of linguistic commentary, in which linguistic analysis—covering morphology, syntax, semantics, orthography, and punctuation—intertwines with a philological examination of the text’s history, its editing, and its publication. The commentary provides the information necessary to understand Mandelstam’s work, yet at every turn, the reader encounters surprises: words, grammatical forms, and phrases that seem familiar today often carried different meanings, connotations, or stylistic status in the 1920s. A facsimile of the issue of the magazine *Ogonyok* in which Mandelstam’s text first appeared offers a clear sense of the original periodical context of "Cold Summer."

This book will be of interest both to general readers of Mandelstam and to specialists—including literary historians, scholars of Mandelstam’s work, translators of his texts, and linguists.