Abstract
A paragraph in Mandel’shtam autobiographical book The Noise of Time (i.e. the chapter Sinani’s family) is usu-‐ ally treated as bona fide biographical information testifying that Mandel’shtam was a member of socialist-revolutionaries' party and had come to Raivola in order to enter the terrorist organization of the party. Some formal peculiarities of the paragraph in question (syntactic and lexical features) give rise to doubts of such interpretation, which is further refuted by close analysis of the chronology of the events described, as well as by some documentary evidences. The passage on Raivola has special artistic function that can be elucidated by comparing it with other Mandel’shtam’s works, with contemporaries’ memoirs and some events of the time.