Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition [Course Book ed.] 9781400821495

Citation preview

Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition

Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition • C LA R E C AVA N AG H

P R I N C E T O N

U N I V E R S I T Y

P R I N C E T O N,

N E W

•

P R E S S

J E R S E Y

Copyright  1995 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cavanagh, Clare. Osip Mandelstam and the modernist creation of tradition / Clare Cavanagh. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. eISBN 1-4008-0114-1 1. Mandel’shtam, Osip, 1891–1938—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Modernism (Literature) I. Title. PG3476.M355Z59 1994 891.71′3—dc20 94-11248

This book has been composed in Galliard

•

TO MIKE

•

THE ARTICULATION OF SIBERIA When the deaf phonetician spread his hand Over the dome of a speaker’s skull He could tell which diphthong and which vowel By the bone vibrating to the sound. A globe stops spinning. I feel my palm On a forehead cold as permafrost And imagine axle-hum and the steadfast Russian of Osip Mandelstam. —Seamus Heaney

•

C

O

N

T

E

N

T

S

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS, TRANSLATIONS, AND TRANSLITERATION

•

xi xiii

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: The Modernist Creation of Tradition

3

CHAPTER TWO

Self-Creation and the Creation of Culture

29

CHAPTER THREE

Making History: Modernist Cathedrals

66

CHAPTER FOUR

Judaic Chaos

103

CHAPTER FIVE

The Currency of the Past

146

CHAPTER SIX

Jewish Creation

193

CHAPTER SEVEN

Powerful Insignificance

215

CHAPTER EIGHT

Chaplinesque, or Villon Again: In Place of an Ending

279

APPENDIX

305

NOTES

313

INDEX

359

•

A

C

K

N

O

W

L

E

D

G

M

E

N

T

S

•

THE CREATION of tradition is, Mandelstam insists, a collaborative endeavor, the work of “colleagues” and “co-discoverers.” A book is no less a collaboration, and for whatever merits this study may possess I am indebted to many—although its faults are entirely my own. A poet finds his true reader only in posterity, Mandelstam laments. As a graduate student, I was more fortunate. I had three readers: Donald Fanger, Stanislaw Baranczak, and especially Jurij Striedter, whose reading of my work—scrupulous, generous, and inspiring—was my best graduate education; and my book and I have both benefited from their continued interest in my research on Mandelstam. Many other colleagues and co-discoverers have helped this book along its way. Svetlana Boym and Andrew Kahn helped to shape my thought early on through memorable conversations about Mandelstam, and Andrew Kahn’s encouragement and criticism have been invaluable at every stage of this project’s evolution. I was lucky to find in my senior colleague at the University of Wisconsin, David Bethea, an inspired interlocutor, astute critic, and generous friend, whose unflagging faith in “the manuscript that wouldn’t die” helped bring the book to life. Others—Jane Garry Harris, Judith Kornblatt, Charles Isenberg, Caryl Emerson—gave much-needed support and advice at critical stages in the book’s development. Jennifer Presto, Mandelstam fan and research assistant extraordinaire, went far beyond the call of duty as I struggled with the manuscript’s beginnings in 1989–90. Andrew Swenson’s assistance at the project’s conclusion was equally invaluable. As materials on and by Mandelstam began to proliferate in a Russia anxious to revive a suppressed poetic past, I relied on the kindness of friends and colleagues—Margaret and Mark Beissinger, Eliot Borenstein, Yuri Shcheglov, Irina Bagrationi-Mukhraneli—to provide me with texts that had not yet reached the West. My parents, John and Adele Cavanagh, have been generosity itself—they have helped in more ways than I can name. Fellowships from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and the Social Science Research Council helped to fund my work on Mandelstam early on; subsequent support and leave time granted me by the University of Wisconsin Graduate School and Department of Slavic Languages allowed me both to expand the scope of my study and to bring it to a conclusion. My editors at Princeton University Press, Robert Brown and Marta Steele, provided assistance and encouragement throughout the arduous process of turning the manuscript into a book. Part of Chapter 1 was published, in somewhat different form, as “Mandel’shtam i modernistskoe izobretenie Evropy” (Mandelstam and the Modernist Invention of Europe), in Diapazon: Vestnik inostrannoi literatury, Vol. 213, No. 1 (1993), 40–47. A longer version of the same essay,

xii

•

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

•

entitled “The Modernist Creation of Tradition: Mandelstam, Eliot and Pound,” appears in American Scholars on Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, ed. Boris Averin and Elizabeth Neatrour (St. Petersburg: Petro-Rif Publishers, 1993): 400–421. Chapters 6 and 8 appeared in abbreviated form as the following articles: “The Poetics of Jewishness: Mandel’shtam, Dante and the ‘Honorable Calling of Jew,’ ” Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 35, No. 3 (1991): 317–38; and “Rereading the Poet’s Ending: Mandelstam, Chaplin and Stalin,” PMLA, Vol. 109, No. 1 (January 1994): 71–86. This last essay is reprinted by permission of the copyright holder, The Modern Language Association of America. The quotation from “Chaplinesque” in The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane by Hart Crane, edited by Brom Weber, copyright 1966 by the Liverright Publishing Corp., is reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton Publishers. The quotations from T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950, copyright by T. S. Eliot 1962, renewed by Esme Valerie Eliot in 1971, are reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace and Company. The quotations from Osip Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols., edited by G. P. Struve, N. Struve, B. A. Filipoff, copyright 1967–69, 1981 by Inter-Language Literary Associates and the YMCA Press, are reprinted by permission of the YMCA Press. Ezra Pound’s poem “Histrion” in Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, edited by Michael John King, copyright 1976 by The Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust, is reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishers. The quotation from Canto I in The Cantos of Ezra Pound, copyrighted 1971 by Ezra Pound, renewed 1972 by the estate of Ezra Pound, is reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishers. The quotation from Ezra Pound’s parody of “Under Ben Bulben” is taken from his collection Pavannes and Divagations, copyrighted 1958 by Ezra Pound and quoted by permission of New Directions Press. The quotation from William Butler Yeat’s “Byzantium” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, copyright 1940 by Georgie Yeats, renewed 1956 by the Macmillan Publishing Co., is reprinted by permission of the Macmillan Publishing Co. I also would like to thank Seamus Heaney for his generous permission to use his poem “The Articulation of Siberia” as this book’s epigraph. Finally my standards of both personal and scholarly integrity were set by my best critic and reader, my “faithful friend” and “favorite relation,” Michael Lopez. This book is dedicated to him as an installment on debts greater than I can ever express or repay.

N

O

T

E

O T

A

N

D

R T

N A B B R E V I A T I O N S , A N S L A T I O N S , R A N S L I T E R A T I O N

UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED, all prose translations are taken, with some modifications, from The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965; abbreviated in the text as POM); and Osip Mandelstam, The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris, tr. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor: Ardis Press, 1979; abbreviated in the text as CPL). The volume and page number of the original Russian text in the Struve/Filipoff edition of Mandelstam’s work will be given whenever the translation has been substantially altered or the original Russian is cited along with the English translation (Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols. Vols. 1–3: ed. G. P. Struve, B. A. Filipoff. Washington: Inter-Language Literary Associations, 1967–69. Vol. 4: ed. G. P. Struve, N. Struve, B. A. Filipoff. Paris: YMCA Press, 1981). Poems will be referred to in the text by their number in the Struve/Filipoff edition of Mandelstam’s writing. All translations of the poetry are my own, unless otherwise noted. For the purposes of this study, I have placed accuracy and readability over artistic merit in my English renditions of Mandelstam’s Russian; unfortunately and inevitably, then, what makes his poems poems in the original has thus been lost even more thoroughly than is usual in the translation of verse. I have used the Library of Congress system in transliterating Russian texts, with some modifications. The final -skii in proper names has been changed to the more common -sky, and well-known proper names are given in their most commonly used forms; e.g., Mandelstam, not Mandel’shtam, Lydia Ginzburg, not Lidiia Ginzburg, Mayakovsky, not Maiakovskii. The spelling Mandel’shtam will be used, however, in book and article titles transliterated from the Russian in the endnotes.

Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition

•

C

H

A

P

T

E

R

O

N

E

•

Introduction: The Modernist Creation of Tradition

Perhaps the strongest impulse towards a shift in the approach to language and linguistics . . . was—for me, at least—the turbulent artistic movement of the early twentieth century. The great men of art born in the 1880’s—Picasso (1881– ), Joyce (1882–1941), Braque (1882– ), Stravinsky (1882– ), Khlebnikov (1885–1922), Le Corbusier (1887– )—were able to complete a thorough and comprehensive schooling in one of the most placid spans of world history, before that “last hour of universal calm” (poslednii chas vsemirnoi tishiny) was shattered by a train of cataclysms. The leading artists of that generation keenly anticipated the upheavals that were to come and met them while still young and dynamic enough to test and steel their own creative power in this crucible. The extraordinary capacity of these discoverers to overcome again and again the faded habits of their own yesterdays, [joined] together with an unprecedented gift for seizing and shaping anew every older tradition or foreign model without sacrificing the stamp of their own permanent individuality in the amazing polyphony of ever new creations. —Roman Jakobson, “Retrospect” (1962)

I was born in the same year as Charlie Chaplin, Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata,” [Gumilev] the Eiffel Tower, and, apparently, [T. S.] Eliot. —Anna Akhmatova, “Notes Towards a Memoir” (undated)

4

•

C H A P T E R

O N E

•

INVENTION AND REMEMBRANCE One often hears: that is good but it belongs to yesterday. But I say: yesterday has not yet been born. It has not yet really existed. —Osip Mandelstam, “The Word and Culture” (1921)

To speak of modernist culture as a culture born of crisis and catastrophe seems to have become in recent years a critical commonplace, a cliché no longer adequate to the phenomena it purports to describe. Indeed, much recent discussion of the modernist movement in European and American culture has focused precisely on exposing what one scholar has called “the myth of the modern,” the myth, that is, of a radical break with a past that modern artists continued to draw on even as they mourned—or celebrated—its loss. Such skepticism can be bracing, and certainly it is necessary if we are to achieve anything like a critical distance on a movement whose parameters are as ill-defined and shifting as those of modernism.1 Revisionist approaches to the modernist sense of an ending should not, however, lead us to overlook the degree to which this particular truism is rooted in historical fact. The modernist artist may have exagerrated the uniqueness of his historical situation: other generations, other ages and cultures have experienced upheavals and disasters that seemed truly cataclysmic at the time and that had a profound and lasting impact on the art and thought that sprang up in their wake. Moreover, the Judeo-Christian models that have shaped Western culture predispose us to perceive all history in terms of “eternal transition, perpetual crisis.”2 Living as we do in the extended aftermath of the modernist movement, we may find it difficult to give credence to the French poet Charles Péguy’s hyberbolic claim, made in 1913, that “the world has changed less since Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years”; history has not yet screeched to a dead halt, nor has the modern world or the human condition changed beyond all possible recognition as we draw to the end of this century and the millennium. The modernist artist had, however, historically grounded reasons for considering that what he lived in was indeed a qualitatively different kind of society, a technologically transformed, radically innovative, international “culture of time and space.” And the Great War, the War to End All Wars—along with the massive social upheavals that followed in its aftermath—undoubtably left a generation of artists and thinkers with scars, both literal and figurative, of a kind that previous generations would have found difficult to imagine.3 The artists and thinkers of early-twentieth-century Russia could lay even greater claim to living in an age of unprecedented disaster. Their experience of World War I was framed by bloody revolutions, first the failed revolt of 1905 and then the February and October revolutions of 1917, which were followed by three years of civil war. This is not the place to

•

M O D E R N I S T

C R E A T I O N

O F

T R A D I T I O N

•

5

rehearse the many horrors that have shaped the course of modern Russian history. But even if we strip away the inflated, apocalyptic rhetoric that colors so many poetic accounts—Symbolist, Futurist, and Acmeist alike—of the Russian experience of war and revolution, we are left, nonetheless, with the genuine, profound sense of an ending and accompanying shock of the new that lent the Russian modernist movement such energy and finally such poignance. Péguy makes his claim for the birth of a new age in 1913. Other modernists dated the death of the past somewhat differently. “It was in 1915,” D. H. Lawrence announces, that “the old world ended”; while Virginia Woolf proclaims, with even greater assurance, that “on or about December, 1910, human nature changed.” Anna Akhmatova was one of the few poets to survive the disasters that befell what Roman Jakobson prophetically called, in a famous essay of 1931, “the generation that squandered its poets.” She thus bore firsthand witness to the many tragedies, national and personal, that followed in the revolution’s wake. Nonetheless, the date she picks for the beginning of the new era comes close to those moments of crisis chosen by Lawrence and Woolf. As she looks back on the past from her vantage point in 1944—in the midst of yet another cataclysm, World War II—she watches “not the calendar, but the real twentieth century approach” along the Petersburg embankments of 1913. Osip Mandelstam joins in this modernist chorus as he mourns the modern loss not just of past times, but of time itself as earlier generations had understood it: “The fragile reckoning of the years of our era has been lost,” he laments in “Pushkin and Skriabin” (1916; CPL, 91).4 The approximate convergence of these dates, taken together with their divergent sources in French, English, and Russian writing, points to one of modernism’s most salient features, a feature we might call continuity in crisis, or, perhaps more precisely, continuity in the perception of crisis. The modern sense of an ending was not confined to one country or one continent alone, and modernist art likewise defies national and linguistic boundaries. The very pervasiveness of this sense of crisis in modernist writing has led to what has become yet another commonplace of the vast scholarship on the movement. It is now “almost a truism,” Matei Calinescu writes, “to describe the modern artist as torn between his urge to cut himself off from the past—to become completely ‘modern’—and his dream to found a new tradition, recognizable as such by the future.” Charles Feidelson and Richard Ellman present us with another variant on this modernist dilemma. The modernist artist who has been, in Mandelstam’s phrase, “excommunicated from history” (CPL, 84), can read his exile from the past in one of two ways: it may be either a “liberation from inherited patterns” or “deprivation and disinheritance.” The modernist must cast his lot either among the “Futurists” or the “Pastists.” He must either celebrate his release from the dead weight of tradition or forever mourn the loss of an infinitely precious, infinitely distant history.5

6

•

C H A P T E R

O N E

•

This kind of opposition—between Pastists and Futurists, Archaists and Innovators, Apollonian preservers and Dionysian destroyers—is far too schematic to encompass the range of responses to the pervasive modern sense of rupture with the past, as Ellmann and Feidelson readily admit. For a variety of reasons, though, it has proved remarkably resilient on Russian soil, and nowhere is this literary two-party system more in evidence than in the responses to Russian modernist poetry. Indeed, the poetry itself might seem to invite just such a polarized reaction. The Russian post-symbolists, in hindsight at least, appear to have divided themselves neatly into two camps, as if for the convenience of future researchers: the Futurists were dedicated, as their name suggests, to casting unwanted cultural ballast off the “Steamship of Modernity”; while their coevals and competitors the Acmeists, whose name proclaimed their allegiance to the akme, the highest and best that Western and Russian culture could offer, were equally bent on demonstrating that this “Steamship of Modernity” was “the ship of eternity,” the ship entrusted with bearing past treasures of world culture into an unknown future. In postrevolutionary Russia, the very notions of “past” and “future,” of “tradition” and “innovation” became valorized to a degree that made it still more difficult to cross these particular party lines in quest of an accurate assessment of the presence of the poetic past in Futurist writing, and of avant-garde innovation at work among the “pastist” Acmeists.6 This thumbnail sketch cannot do justice, poetic or otherwise, to the complicated history of Russian post-symbolist art—but it is not my goal here to address the many problems and issues involved in the critical reception of this poetry. I want to turn now instead to the real subject of my study, to Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) and his modernist invention of tradition. I have spoken of the Acmeist commitment to “world culture”; the phrase itself is Mandelstam’s. Shortly before his final arrest in 1938, he defined the Acmeist aesthetic as a “yearning for world culture (toska po mirovoi kulture)”; and he thus provided us with the best possible shorthand description of the impulse that charges his own poetry and prose. This definition might seem initially to place Mandelstam and his poetics squarely in the camp of the cultural “passéists” (CPL, 176; II, 346). Taken from its proper context in his work, it might appear to signal a hopeless, helpless longing for an all-encompassing culture that existed once but has long since disappeared, or that has known its only life in the pipe dreams and poems of traditionless modernists. The vast scope of Mandelstam’s poetic ambitions, which will be satisfied with nothing less than all of Western culture, attests inversely to the intensity of his sense of cultural deprivation. If modernist artists considered themselves to be the casualties of “an apocalypse of cultural community,” then Mandelstam must be ranked among the movement’s most representative figures.7 In a suggestive essay on Mandelstam’s notion of history, Gregory

•

M O D E R N I S T

C R E A T I O N

O F

T R A D I T I O N

•

7

Freidin observes that “only a cultural orphan growing up in [Russia’s] revolutionary years could possess such an insatiable need for a continuous construction of a gigantic vision of culture meant to compensate for the impossibility of belonging to a single place.” When Mandelstam was born, and where, and to whom—all three conditions apparently conspired to keep him from the European and Russian cultural legacy he craved. He was born, he writes, “in the night between the second and the third/Of January in the ninety-first/Uncertain year, and the centuries/Surround me with fire” (#362). In his autobiography The Noise of Time (1925), Mandelstam laments a generation of Russian modernists born beneath “the sign of the hiatus” (POM, 122) and thus deprived by history of the cultural treasures that should have been theirs by rights. But Mandelstam would not have stood to inherit these treasures in any case. His parents, as he describes them in The Noise of Time, were themselves orphans of sorts, Central European Jews who, uprooted from their own culture, were not at home in their adoptive nation either. Mandelstam himself, born in Warsaw, could not claim Russia and its culture as his birthright. Even as an adopted motherland, though, Russia presented him with as many problems as it solved. It was itself an orphan, “the orphan of nations,” in Belinsky’s phrase, uncomfortably straddling the border between East and West, a feudal past and the foreign present forcibly imported by Peter the Great.8 Mandelstam’s definition of Acmeism appears to place him in the paradoxical position of being a pastist who had no past he could legitimately call his own. This paradox brings us in turn to the apparent contradiction contained in the title of my book, the contradiction that lies at the heart of Mandelstam’s work. It is not finally the intensity of Mandelstam’s sense of loss that distinguishes him among his fellow modernists. It is the energy and the imagination with which he sets about converting his deficits into assets as he works to create a usable past for himself and for a generation of artists that found itself abandoned by history. Gifted with the capacity to generalize from his own dilemma, to convert isolation to connection, to turn disruption to his advantage, and to use all these skills in the service of an encompassing cultural vision, Mandelstam was singularly well equipped to address his own and his epoch’s paradoxical legacy of disinheritance; and he responded with one of modernism’s most complex, ambitious, and challenging visions of tradition. In his famous poem “Tristia” (1918), Mandelstam movingly describes the “profound joy of recurrence” that informs his poetry and vision of history alike: “Everything once was, everything will be repeated/And the moment of recognition alone is sweet to us” (CPL, 114; #104).9 As scholars and critics recognized early on, Mandelstam seeks to provide both himself and his readers with this joyful shock of recognition by reviving in his work the classical, European, and Russian traditions he craved. His aim, though, is not merely to repeat the past, to deliver it intact and unaltered into the

8

•

C H A P T E R

O N E

•

present. The very act of remembering the past changes it irreparably, and this is as it should be, according to Mandelstam. “Invention and remembrance go hand in hand in poetry,” he insists in his essay “Literary Moscow” (1922). “To remember also means to invent, and the one who remembers is also an inventor” (CPL, 146). Invention and remembrance: this complex and energizing dialectic shapes Mandelstam’s work and the vision of tradition it both embodies and describes from his earliest poems and essays to the last “Voronezh Notebook” (1937). It is ideally suited to the needs of the cultural orphan who must invent his way into the past that he desires—but it also demonstrates the ways in which Mandelstam was able to turn necessity to his artistic advantage. The dialectic he develops to counter his sense of loss and isolation serves to place him at the very heart of a modernist art preoccupied with what Guillaume Apollinaire calls the modern “debate between tradition and invention.” Like Mandelstam’s inventive remembrance, the very notion of a modern tradition is an “apparent oxymoron,” as Charles Russell notes, and the ground of this paradoxical tradition “is always slipping out from under [modern] writers’ and artists’ feet.” It slips from beneath the feet of critics as well. Ellman and Feidelson issue the following disclaimer as they struggle to define their own version of The Modern Tradition (1965): “If we can postulate a modern tradition, we must add that it is a paradoxically untraditional tradition.” Renato Poggioli reaches much the same conclusion when he speaks, in his Theory of the Avant-Garde (1968), of modernism’s reliance on a self-consciously “anti-traditional tradition.” My goal in this chapter and the chapters that follow is chiefly to trace the workings of Mandelstam’s invented tradition as it takes shape in both his poetry and his prose. But I also call attention to the ways in which Mandelstam’s seemingly sui generis version of tradition serves to tie him to other modernist writers and thinkers—Russian, European, and American—who struggled to make sense of the past in an age apparently bent upon turning all history on its head.10 Influence study has largely dominated Mandelstam scholarship during what one might call its formative years: I am thinking of the pioneering works of Kiril Taranovsky, Omry Ronen, Dmitrii Segal, Iurii Levin, and others whose development of a “subtextual” and “intertextual” structuralist approach to Mandelstam has defined and refined our understanding of the intricate web of quotations and references that shape Mandelstam’s world culture as it is embodied in his texts.11 I have drawn extensively on this scholarship in my own work—no student of Mandelstam or of Russian modernism in general can afford to neglect it. There is a danger, though, that subtext will take the place of context in such criticism, and that the larger poetic community drawn from all times and ages, the community to which Mandelstam aspired and in which he did indeed participate, at times unconsciously, will be confined to those writers whose works we can safely

•

M O D E R N I S T

C R E A T I O N

O F

T R A D I T I O N

•

9

assume he knew and read. However, this very vision of an international, multilingual community of poets serves to mark him as a modernist; and he shares this vision with other modern poets, most notably T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, whose work he could not have known. (He could not read English, and their work was virtually unknown in Russia at the time he was writing.) If we are to understand what is specifically modernist in Mandelstam’s work, and what is distinctively Mandelstamian about his particular brand of modernism, we must make the same kind of unexpected and, one hopes, illuminating, connections that Mandelstam and other “modern poet-synthesizers” placed at the heart of their endeavor (CPL, 116).12 Our understanding of his work would be impoverished indeed without the glimpses of a larger modernist context that a comparably “synthetic” criticism—a criticism that takes into account not only subtext, but context, that examines affinities as well as influence—can provide.13 Modernism generally makes for strange bedfellows, as this chapter’s first epigraph attests. Roman Jakobson begins his pocket-sized portrait of the linguist as a young man by creating a backdrop in which Russian poets and composers rub shoulders with French architects, Spanish painters, and Irish novelists—even as he emphasizes their shared need to reinvent the various foreign and native traditions that inform their creations. The company Akhmatova keeps in the opening passage of her unfinished memoirs is no less unlikely; she was born, she claims, in the same year as were T. S. Eliot, her fellow Acmeist and first husband Nikolai Gumilev, Tolstoy’s famous novella “The Kreutzer Sonata,” Charlie Chaplin, and, of all things, the Eiffel Tower. Such juxtapositions are entirely true to the spirit of the modernist movement, and necessary to its proper understanding. Indeed, Akhmatova and Jakobson suggest as much by prefacing their selfportraits with these modernist collages.14 In both quotes, we notice a characteristic modernist blurring of boundaries not only between nations, but between different media, genres, and modes of creation. We also note in Akhmatova’s quote particularly a tendency to disregard strict boundaries not only between high and low art, as Charlie Chaplin rubs elbows with the likes of Tolstoy, T. S. Eliot, and Akhmatova herself. She also juxtaposes two “pastist” Acmeists (and Eliot, whom we might consider an honorary Acmeist of sorts) with the Eiffel Tower, which represented for Futurists all over the world the essence of high technology and unabashed modernity that they themselves aspired to in their art.15 Akhmatova’s dates are mistaken on several counts—but it is not my aim to take her to task for what were, I suspect, the intentional mistakes in her chronology. Rather, I wish to call attention to the way in which Akhmatova, a lifelong Acmeist dedicated, like Mandelstam, to the preservation of Western culture within her work, begins her unfinished memoirs with what is, if not precisely a slap in the face of public taste, then at least a calculated gesture intended to disrupt fixed perceptions of a life

10

•

C H A P T E R

O N E

•

and work that should not be rooted too firmly in any form of purely “pastist” aesthetics. The same warning holds true for Mandelstam and his invented tradition, and I will now turn to some of the affinities that Mandelstam shares with several unlikely modernist comrades-at-arms.

MODERNIST GENEALOGIES On or about December 1910 human nature changed. . . . All human relations shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. —Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924) You cannot carry around on your back the corpse of your father. You leave him with the other dead. —Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters (1913)

Following the revolution, Nadezhda Mandelstam notes, the comtemporaries of Akhmatova and Mandelstam “seriously thought of them as old people,” although both notorious pastists were in reality not much over thirty. After the publication of Kornei Chukovsky’s influential essay on “Akhmatova and Mayakovsky” (1920), the Acmeist movement came to be perceived as the essence of a dying culture that had quickly outlived what little usefulness it had for the new regime. Chukovsky is basically sympathetic when he describes Akhmatova as the “heiress of an old and high culture” who “values her inheritance [and] her many ancestors: Pushkin, Baratynsky, Annensky.” He contrasts her with Mayakovsky, who has “no ancestors” and is mighty not in his precursors but his descendants. Chukovsky concludes, however, by proposing not a purge of the poetic past, but a fusion of the “Akhmatova” and “Mayakovsky factions” in a Soviet poetry that has learned to cherish its prerevolutionary legacy. Other critics, including Mayakovsky himself, were less temperate. In a 1922 talk, Mayakovsky calls for a “clean-up of modern poetry” and begins by casting the Akhmatovas of the world on Trotsky’s dust heap of history: “Of course, as literary landmarks, as the last remnants of a crumbling order, they will find their place in the pages of histories of literature. But for us, for our age, they are pointless, pathetic and comic anachronisms.” And in an essay on “The Formalist School of Poetry” (1923), Trotsky himself remarks acidly that “it does not make new poets of you to translate the philosophy of life of the Seventeenth Century into the language of the Acmeists.”16 Mandelstam had never been as widely known or read as was his more celebrated colleague. He was thus spared the kind of direct public attack that Akhmatova endured in the Soviet press of the early twenties.17 Even sympathetic postrevolutionary critics, though, followed Viktor Zhirmunsky’s lead in seeing Mandelstam chiefly as a subtle, elegant advocate of art

•

M O D E R N I S T

C R E A T I O N

O F

T R A D I T I O N

•

11

for art’s sake, the creator of a poetry almost too pure for this world in the best of times, and certainly not up to the monumental tasks set by the modern age for would-be poets of the future. He composes only “chamber music” in an age that demands Mayakovskian marches, Jakobson notes in an essay of 1921. And Iurii Tynianov echoes Jakobson in “Interim” (“Promezhutok,” 1924), as he gives us a Mandelstam who is a “pure lyricist,” an otherworldly poet who deals only in “small forms” refined almost out of existence.18 It is difficult to find traces of this quiet, well-mannered poet in the essays of the twenties, essays that celebrate a Russian history that is “active, forceful, thoroughly dialectical, a living battle of different powers fertilizing one another” (CPL, 141), and a Russian language formed “through ceaseless hybridization, cross-breeding and foreign-born (chuzherodnykh) influences” (CPL, 120). (And in this last phrase, we also see the foreign-born Mandelstam writing himself into the Russian tradition he describes.) Mandelstam’s versions of Russia’s past and language might do double duty as descriptions of his world culture and invented tradition. “Poetic culture,” he asserts in “Badger Hole” (1922), “arises from the attempt to avert catastrophe” (CPL, 137). We may be tempted to hear Jakobson’s chamber musician at work here, struggling in vain to tune out the discordant noise of his times. There is, however, another, more convincing way to read this statement. Mandelstam’s poetic, or world, culture (they are one and the same) not only manages to stave off impending disaster time and again. It actually requires the continuous stimulus of crises barely contained, if it is to survive and flourish. Mandelstam himself implies as much when he speaks in the same essay of culture’s “catastrophic essence” (CPL, 137). Mandelstam longs for his world culture not because it is lost forever, trapped in an irrecoverable past. This culture is beyond his reach precisely because it is, as Freidin suggests, under continuous construction, and, one might add, under a continuous “threat of destruction” as well (POM, 79). Mandelstam weaves the upheavals that mark his and his age’s histories into the fabric of a resilient tradition that draws power from the very forces it is intended to combat. In an essay of 1933, Boris Eikhenbaum notes that Mandelstam’s best lyrics are fueled by an ongoing “battle with the craft” of other poets. Those who would wish to learn from this “great poet” must likewise be prepared to do battle: “You must conquer Mandelstam. Not study him.”19 This rhetoric of battle and mastery is entirely appropriate to Mandelstam’s vision of poetry, which thrives on storm and stress, on insult, injury, and “literary spite” (POM, 127). In his autobiography, Mandelstam gives us his ideal literary history, which comes to him by way of his high school literature teacher, Vladimir Vasilievich Gippius: “Beginning as early as Radishchev and Novikov, V. V. had established personal relations with Russian writers, splenetic and loving liasons filled with noble enviousness, jealousy, with jocular disrespect, grievous unfairness—as is customary between

12

•

C H A P T E R

O N E

•

the members of one family” (POM, 130). If we substitute “strong poet” for Eikhenbaum’s “great poet” and combine his remarks with Mandelstam’s vision of literature as an endlessly squabbling family, we come up with a version of poetic tradition that looks very like Harold Bloom’s more recent notion of a poetry that derives its force from the ceaseless battling of poetic parents and their rebellious offspring.20 In such traditions, Apollinaire’s debate between tradition and innovation turns into something considerably less civil. It becomes a heated argument that threatens to erupt into the literary equivalent of war. But we need not look as far afield as Bloom to uncover comparable visions of a disruptive modern tradition. Modern Russian artists and thinkers were by necessity adept at weaving catastrophe into the substance of their visions, and it is not surprising that we should find similar theories of tradition far closer to home. The authors of these theories might have been startled to find themselves in such company. For all his astute observations on Mandelstam’s poetics, Iurii Tynianov clearly views Mandelstam as one of the exemplary poetarchaists at war with their more experimental brethren in his monumental study of literary Archaists and Innovators (1929). The tradition Tynianov describes in this study bears, however, clear affinities with Mandelstam’s lively, combative world culture. To the scholars of other ages, Tynianov claims, literary history may have seemed to follow an even course and its changes appeared to occur in “peaceful succession (preemvstvennost’).” The principle of genuine literary transformation lies, however, not in simple succession but in “battle and takeover”; and traditions grow through “upheavals,” in “leaps and bounds (smeshchenie, skachok),” not through the systematic evolution posited by earlier, happier generations. Indeed, Mandelstam anticipates Tynianov when he speaks in “The Wheat of Humanity” (1922) of all history and culture as driven by “catastrophe, unexpected shifts, destruction (katastrofa, neozhidannyi sdvig, razrushenie).”21 Only happy families are alike—or so Tolstoy claims in the famous opening lines of Anna Karenina. There are striking similarities, though, between the unhappy literary families that emerge in the traditions described by Mandelstam, Tynianov, and his fellow Formalist Viktor Shklovsky. Such unstable, crisis-ridden traditions would seem to lead inevitably to broken homes, disrupted families, and skewed, peculiar genealogies, and indeed, in Tynianov’s version of the ongoing struggle between literary fathers and sons, children inherit from their parents only by displacing them, and battle-hardened young artists often end up inadvertently “resembling their grandfathers more than the fathers who fought with them.” Writers avoid unwelcome parental interference in a still more roundabout way in the tangled family tree that Shklovsky proposes in an essay of 1923. “In the history of art,” Shklovsky insists, “the legacy is transmitted not from father to son, but from uncle to nephew.”22 Mandelstam is still more insistent on the rights of literary offspring to

•

M O D E R N I S T

C R E A T I O N

O F

T R A D I T I O N

•

13

pick and choose the ancestry that suits them in his early poem “I have not heard the tales of Ossian” (1914; #65). “I’ve come into a blessed legacy,” he announces in the poem’s final stanzas: Hu'ix pevcov blu'da[]ie sny_ Svoe rodstvo i skuhnoe sosedstvo My prezirat; zavedomo vol;ny. I ne odno sokrovi]e, byt; mo'et, Minuq vnukov, k pravnukam ujdet, I snova skal;d hu'u[ pesn[ slo'it I kak svo[ ee proizneset. The wandering dreams of other bards; We’re free to despise consciously Our kin and our dull neighbors. And this may not be the only treasure, either, To skip the grandsons, descending to their sons, And a skald will once again set down another’s song And speak it as though it were his own.

Brave words indeed—but such absolute freedom from the burden of the past is more easily proclaimed than practiced, as Mandelstam’s own poetry demonstrates. Suffice it to note for now, though, that the poem not only provides us with yet another skewed and twisted modernist genealogy. It also indicates the ways in which disinheritance may become a form of liberation for the poet unlucky enough to have been born with an unprepossessing family tree and raised in less than inspiring cultural company. Such a poet, if he is daring and desperate enough, may find himself in possession of a past and present community far grander than anything his actual origins might have seemed to portend. Poetic justice can at last be served, and fairy tales may finally come true, as cultural paupers contrive to take possession of princely treasures through ingenuity and pluck—or so “Ossian”’s optimistic young author would have us believe. Though Mandelstam’s later writings inevitably complicate this triumphant early vision, it remains nonetheless the ideal, ideally liberating version of tradition to which Mandelstam will return throughout his poetry and prose. THE SHIPWRECK OF MODERNITY Elam, Ninevah, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia . . . these too would be beautiful names. Lusitania, too, is a beautiful name. —Paul Valéry, “The Crisis of the Mind” (1919)

14

•

C H A P T E R

O N E

•

“Do “You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember Nothing?” I remember Those are pearls that were his eyes. —T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

Mandelstam was adept at deriving cultural capital from apparently irremediable losses, and in his prose of the early twenties particularly, he manages time and again to turn the modern sense of an ending to his own purposes. He appears to mourn the modern rupture with the past in “Humanism and the Present” (1923): “The chaotic world has burst in—into the English ‘home’ as well as into the German Gemüt; chaos sings in our Russian stoves, banging our dampers and oven doors. . . . No laws preserve the house from catastrophe, provide it with any assurance or security” (CPL, 182). And it is not merely our homes that are at risk, he warns in “The End of the Novel” (1922). Our very selves are at stake, as we bear collective witness to “the catastrophic collapse of biography”: “Today Europeans are plucked out of their own biographies, like balls out of the pockets of billiard tables, and the same principle that governs the collision of billiard balls governs the laws of their actions” (CPL, 200). We have all fallen prey to a universe governed by contingency and chaos alone, as earlier ways of ordering experience fall far short of the needs of the modern age. The collapse of European culture may actually work to the advantage of the modernist orphan in search of cultural community, as Mandelstam demonstrates in “The Nineteenth Century” (1922), where his own dilemma and his generation’s merge. “We appear as colonizers to this new age, so vast and so cruelly determined,” Mandelstam proclaims: “To Europeanize and humanize the twentieth century, to provide it with teleological warmth—this is the task of those emigrants who survived the shipwreck of the nineteenth century and were cast by the will of fate upon a new historical continent” (CPL, 144). After the collapse of history and the shipwreck of the nineteenth century, all modern survivors are equally orphans and emigrants in the unknown land that is the twentieth century. The Jewish émigré turned Russian modernist finds his true community through disruption, and he takes his place at the center of his uprooted age as he works to articulate its mission. In “The Nineteenth Century,” Mandelstam stresses the affinities that modern Russians share with their European brethren: the historical differences that divided Russia from its Western neighbors in the past have been washed away by the shipwreck of the modern age. The disasters and catastrophes that punctuate the pages of Mandelstam’s postrevolutionary essays serve as great levelers. They erase the differences that separate nations

•

M O D E R N I S T

C R E A T I O N

O F

T R A D I T I O N

•

15

blessed with long, distinguished cultural traditions from countries whose pasts are more erratic, marked with the “incoherence and gaps” that Mandelstam sees as the trademark of both his family’s and his adopted nation’s history (POM, 172). And this is where we find the ties that link Mandelstam not so much to his fellow Europeans as to two Americans, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who turned to Europe’s past and present in search of what Eliot would also come to call “world culture.” Mandelstam’s dilemma and his compensatory vision were singular, but they were not unique; and it is no accident that two companions with whom he unwittingly shared his quest for an encompassing culture came, like him, from a country that stood uneasily on the outskirts of the European tradition.23 In Pound’s oblique self-portrait of the artist “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (1920), he mourns his hero’s birth “in a half-savage country, out of date.”24 Mandelstam himself could conceive of only one country whose “impenetrable thickets” (CPL, 87) were less hospitable to culture’s shaping energies than those of his adopted homeland. The “elemental forests” and “mighty vegetation” of American civilization are, he claims in an early essay, “impenetrable to the life-giving rays of culture” (CPL, 99). This America is clearly akin to the Russia—a “young country of half-animated matter and half-dead spirit” (CPL, 81)—that Mandelstam seeks to colonize with the aid of Petr Chaadaev in his 1915 essay on the romantic philosopher.25 And although we need not take Mandelstam’s characteristic hyperbole entirely at face value, America, like Russia, has always stood at an uncomfortable remove from the centers of European culture, and it shares with Russia a profound ambivalence toward the continent and the tradition to which it both does and does not belong. Mandelstam, Eliot, and Pound were alike, too, in sensing not only the difficulties, but the possibilities that accrued to the ambitious poet-synthesist who found his native land sorely lacking in the cultural legacy that could feed his outsized needs. “The Arts insist that a man shall dispose of all he has, even of his family tree, and follow art alone,” Eliot announces in The Sacred Wood (1920).26 The freedom that Mandelstam claims for the poet in “I have not heard the tales of Ossian” becomes an imperative for Eliot, but the impulse that lies behind both statements is recognizably the same, and the art both poets follow leads them in similar directions. Mandelstam’s Jewish emigrant origins made his relations with his adopted homeland even more complex than Eliot’s with his native land. Eliot and Mandelstam were alike, though, in their early sense that their inherited pasts barred them from the European culture they required, and they were alike in their insistence on the poet’s right to choose his own ancestry and sources. The provincial modernist is free to orphan himself in the hopes of achieving a more distinguished lineage and a richer, more rewarding legacy. Mandelstam was preoccupied throughout his life, his wife observes, by the question of “succession and continuity (preemstvennost”), which he

16

•

C H A P T E R

O N E

•

sought everywhere—in history, in culture, in art.” In a late essay Eliot claims that the ideal tradition grows from “the hereditary transmission of culture within a culture.”27 But the younger Eliot knew, as Mandelstam did, that his only hope for the heritage he sought lay in creative appropriation and inventive disruption. Mandelstam’s Chaadaev may have venerated “the sacred bond and succession of events”; but dispossessed poets who, like lands they come from, lack “continuity and unity,” are forced to find more roundabout ways to acquire traditions not rightfully theirs by birth (CPL 84, 88). One method is theft. Great poets “pile up all the excellences they can beg, borrow, or steal from their predecessors and contemporaries,” Ezra Pound announces in an early essay on Dante. And Eliot echoes Pound in a famous dictum from “Philip Massinger” (1920): “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” Mature poets steal, and so do dispossessed ones, like Mandelstam’s François Villon, Pound’s Dante, or Pound, Eliot, and Mandelstam themselves. For the Mandelstam of the twenties and thirties, cultural theft becomes a way of life; true, unofficial culture thrives, like the poets who shape it, on “stolen air” (CPL, 316). The young Eliot chooses a less dubious route to European culture, a route that reveals his own origins in a nation of self-made citizens who value industry over inherited fortune and family name. Tradition, Eliot proclaims in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.” Honest labor replaces thievery in this version of events, which is nonetheless still the cultural vision of the “Displaced Person” or “resident alien,” who must start from scratch and struggle ceaselessly to work his way into his chosen tradition.28 Eliot’s tradition places a heavy burden on the shoulders of the assiduous outsider who must work to earn his culture. It burdens him—but it also grants him special privileges. Tradition cannot be inherited. It cannot be sustained by passive reception or unreflecting repetition, and those who might appear to be in the direct line of succession are actually ill-served by their inherited histories. They do not perceive, as an outsider might, the need to work for what appears to be their birthright. They lack the drive and desire that come “from the fact of being everywhere a foreigner” and that are the special property of the perennial outsider.29 “There are advantages in coming from a large flat country that no one wants to visit.”30 Eliot’s remarks refer to Turgenev and James, but they speak just as well to his own situation and to Mandelstam’s. Though both poets sought to cut themselves off from inadequate pasts, they also learned to use their lack of a European birthright as they worked to invent and remember their world culture. The outsider who comes from the hinterlands may be inspired to go visiting himself, and his very foreignness and freedom from the European past may prove an unexpected asset in his travels. Mandelstam’s Chaadaev, whose historyless homeland has granted him “freedom of choice,” “steps on to the sacred soil” of the European tradi-

•

M O D E R N I S T

C R E A T I O N

O F

T R A D I T I O N

•

17

tion, a tradition “to which he is not bound by inheritance,” “precisely by the right of being a Russian”; and he energizes the sleepy, tradition-bound West by his foreign, unfettered presence (CPL, 88). Eliot’s disinherited American goes one step further. “It is the final perfection, the consummation of an American,” Eliot declares, “to become not an Englishman, but a European—something which no born European, no person of any European nationality can become.” The young Mandelstam observes the Europe he covets in the outlines of a map: “For the first time in a century, right before my eyes,/Your mysterious map is shifting!” he exclaims (#68). The perspective could only come from one who stands outside the picture’s frame. Only the outsider, unconstrained by national boundaries, can hope to see Europe whole. And only the outsider can lay claim to all of its treasures, past and present, by becoming a true European—or so Eliot implies. In The Sacred Wood, Eliot laments the American “remoteness in space from the European centre,” but this very remoteness may also generate the “tendency to seek the centre” that permits the foreigner to become not a born, but a self-made, European. Mandelstam was very much aware that the new arrival who comes to Europe seeking unity ends by inventing his own West. Like Eliot and like his Chaadaev, he was nonetheless possessed by the “wholeness hunger” of modern poetry, and the whole that Mandelstam and Eliot longed for lay, like Chaadaev’s, in a Europe visible only to the eyes of the perennial outsider.31 Mandelstam, Eliot, and Pound began their careers with a quest for what Eliot calls “a living and central tradition,” and their search for the center of world culture took all three “exiled, wandering poets” to the same source—to the Mediterranean, to the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome, and to the Romance cultures that sprang up where Rome had sown its colonies. Pound’s ambitions ultimately led him beyond the confines even of this capacious heritage. His vaulting goal was “to unite the cultures of America, Europe and the Orient” in his Cantos; and Noh Dramas, Saxon sagas, and Chinese calligrams all find their way into the new civilization made up of other cultures that his work is intended to create.32 For Eliot and Mandelstam, however, the Mediterranean remained the center of the world and of its culture, and both sought the cultural home they lacked in their imagined Europe. “The main stream of culture is the culture of Latin Europe,” Eliot writes in 1948. The capital of Mandelstam’s world culture shifts with the “place of man”—and of Mandelstam himself—“in the universe” (#66); it migrates from Rome to Greece and even takes up residence in Erevan for a time, as it follows the poet on his “Journey to Armenia” (1933). But even when Mandelstam and his culture take up wandering for good, his final fellow traveler is Dante Aligheri, the “Great European” for Mandelstam and Eliot alike, and Mandelstam’s “yearning for world culture” translates in a late poem into a longing for the “universal hills” of Dante’s native Tuscany (CPL, 400; #352). The Mediterranean and its great poet, whose Divine Comedy reaches back to antiquity and forward to

18

•

C H A P T E R

O N E

•

the modern world, accompanied Mandelstam throughout the exile, persecution, and isolation he endured in Stalin’s Russia of the thirties.33 “We are all, so far as we inherit the civilization of Europe, still citizens of the Roman Empire,” Eliot proclaims in a late essay. It is one thing to see a culture whole and another thing entirely to enter it, though. How does an outsider come to inherit a civilization that apparently moves in unbroken succession from ancient Rome to modern Europe? If Europe is already a whole, does it allow for or require further additions? Does it want the contributions of outsiders? How are uprooted modernists from the outskirts of Western culture, upstart poets, “wanderers with no fixed abode,” to find their way into this tradition, even with plenty of hard work or diligent theft? Where are the apertures and gaps that will admit them?34 Such problems are particularly tricky for the modernist from the provinces, from the large flat places along the edges of European history. He must come to terms not only with the pervasive modern sense of an ending; he must also cope with the no less troubling knowledge that he has not even had the opportunity to lose the culture he misses because it was never his to begin with. The provincial modernist in search of an encompassing tradition is barred from his longed-for inheritance not only by time, but by space. He is distant from the European center in every possible way. He may have come too late for European culture, but he was not in its direct line of succession in any case. Geography and history have already seen to that. The provincial modernist can turn the disruptions of the modern age to his advantage, though. The modern collapse of “the world of time and its connections,” though it may seem to mean the collapse of tradition itself, can actually lead to a new kind of tradition, one that permits the outsider to defy space and time—and this is true for Pound and Eliot as well as Mandelstam.35 With the “shipwreck of the nineteenth century,” all are freed to stake their claim to those treasures of the past that still remain. In this new and orphaned age, Europeans and provincials, cosmopolitans and country cousins are equally out of place and ill at ease. The old order may have vanished, but, with the line of succession broken once and for all, endless possibilities open up for those who are willing to invent as well as remember as they shape new wholes from the fragments of vanished pasts.

THE FAMILY OF PHILOLOGY In poetry the boundaries of the national are destroyed and the elements of one language exchange greetings with those of another over the heads of space and time. —Osip Mandelstam, “Remarks on Chénier” (1914–15) Between the true artists of any time there is, I believe, an unconscious community. —T. S. Eliot, “The Function of Criticism” (1923)

•

M O D E R N I S T

C R E A T I O N

O F

T R A D I T I O N

•

19

Thus am I Dante for a space and am One François Villon, ballad-lord and thief. —Ezra Pound, “Histrion” (1908)

Dante, Mandelstam insists, “is an antimodernist.” The reasons he gives for Dante’s antimodernism, are, however, precisely what make his Dante modern. “His contemporaneity,” Mandelstam claims in his “Conversation about Dante” (1933), “is continuous, incalculable and inexhaustible” (CPL, 420): “Having combined the uncombinable, Dante altered the structure of time or perhaps, on the contrary, he was forced to a glossolalia of facts, to a synchronism of events, names and traditions severed by centuries, precisely because he had heard the overtones of time” (CPL, 439). Dante employs, in other words, the techniques of the modernist outcast to create his poetic culture. The modern poet who is sensitive to the overtones, or the noise, of his times realizes that the very crisis of the age has laid an inexhaustible wealth of traditions and names before him. He is free, with Dante, to shape a new synchronic order from the inexhaustible contemporaneity that is history in the modern age. “Today,” Mandelstam announces in “The Word and Culture” (1921), “a kind of speaking in tongues is taking place”: “In sacred frenzy poets speak the language of all times, all cultures. Nothing is impossible. As the room of a dying man is open to everyone, so the door of the old world is flung open before the crowd. Suddenly everything becomes public property. Come and take your pick” (CPL, 116). All are free to bid as the holdings of the old world are auctioned off. The “modern poet-synthesizer” (CPL, 116) may pick and choose, or mix and match his pasts, for all ages are equally close at hand. Phenomena have been liberated, along with the provincial modernist, from the tyranny of sequence and succession; and the poet, if he is able “to preserve the principle of unity amidst the vortex of changes and the unceasing flood of phenomena” (CPL, l17), can take the pasts he desires and create from them a new order, a new history, a new lineage and new community that exist in defiance of time and space. Mandelstam shared his sense of the age’s possibilities with his AngloAmerican contemporaries. “We are the heirs of all the ages,” Ford Madox Ford exults, and Pound and Eliot agree. “All ages are contemporaneous,” Pound proclaims in The Spirit of Romance (1910): “This is especially true of literature, where the real time is independent of the apparent, and where many dead men are our grandchildren’s contemporaries.” Eliot, who insists in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” on the past’s continued presence in true culture, creates his world literature on the basis of this “real” time. For the truly traditional poet, he explains, “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.” Such a literature vanquishes both time and space. It occupies its own territory and commands its own chronology. It is as accessible to the disinherited modernist as it is to the provincial poet who dreams of conquering the

20

•

C H A P T E R

O N E

•

capitals of Europe. It is ideal for the poet who is a child both of the provinces and of the modern age.36 In his prescription for a simultaneous tradition, Eliot insists on wholeness, history, and order. In “On the Nature of the Word,” Mandelstam demands a “principle of unity” that will give shape to the unstable landscape of modern civilization (CPL, 117). The world that these poets envision, freed from its moorings in time and space, would seem, however, to lend itself more readily to chaos than to culture. The possibilities of the modern age are inextricably bound to its problems, and even the most gifted, ambitious poet-synthesizer might falter before the task of transforming the age’s hodgepodge of places, people, dates, and artifacts into a cohesive culture. How is the poet-synthesist to proceed if what he seeks is not fragments from a vanished past but a new kind of living whole, not complete liberation from history but creative dialogue with it? What culture can accommodate both history and simultaneous order? What tradition can withstand the shocks of the modern age and retain its wholeness, while holding room for newcomers and outsiders? How is one to preserve, or discover, a principle of unity that will provide both coherence and flexibility amid the vortex of changes that is the modern age? Language, Mandelstam observes in “On the Nature of the Word,” “changes from period to period, never congealing for a moment. Yet at every point, within the confines of all its changes, it remains a fixed quantity, a ‘constant’ that is blindingly clear to the philological consciousness. At every point it remains internally unified.” It may thrive, like Mandelstam’s Russian, on ceaseless hybridization. Still “it will always remain true to itself”; it will retain at every moment its identity and inner unity (CPL, 120). Mandelstam’s Russian changes and grows throughout history. It derives its energy from difference, from variety and “inoculations of foreign blood” (POM, 81). It possesses, nonetheless, a wholeness that cannot be undone by its heterogeneity, and an integrity that persists in spite of its transformations in history. This integrity is apparent at every moment to the philologically sensitive mind of the linguist or the poet. In his “Retrospect” Jakobson notes that the artistic ferment of the early twentieth century gave birth to a new way of looking at language. This movement went both ways, and new notions of language as a “perpetual present” that retained the past even as it pointed to the future, influenced not only budding linguists but poets in quest of world culture as well.37 Eliot, Pound, and Mandelstam shared, if not a common language, then a common philological consciousness, and they find the basis and the model for their world culture in the type of language that Mandelstam celebrates in “On the Nature of the Word.” “The generation of Pound and Eliot,” Hugh Kenner observes, “had access to a new way of thinking about language,” and Kenner’s remarks on modernist philology hold as much for Mandelstam as they do for Eliot or Pound. The modern poet-philologist perceives that language is “an organism that can maintain its identity as it

•

M O D E R N I S T

C R E A T I O N

O F

T R A D I T I O N

•

21

grows and develops in time” and that “keeps all times simultaneous” while it grows. It changes endlessly, yet it is continuous. It outlasts the fall of empires and ages while bearing at every moment its complex, hybrid history within it. “Behind every sound we utter extends a history of ordered changes and remote cultural transactions,” Kenner notes, and “the poetic of our time grows from this discovery.”38 The modernist poet need only speak, then, to lay claim to the complex network of histories and cultures that inhabit his native tongue and tie his speech to other languages and traditions. “It was possible,” Kenner comments, for the Anglo-American modernist “to ignore the national literatures, to conceive poetry as international and interlingual . . . [hence] the literature of Europe, like its speech, could be conceived as one rich organism, and the study of poetry be seen as inextricable from the study of philology.” “The very idea of an interlingual community of poets” stems for Eliot and Pound from “the great idea that languages were siblings, that a creating urgency flowed across their (miscalled) boundaries.”39 The English-speaking modernist may simply turn to his native English in order to receive instant access to a poetic community that ignores the divisions between languages, ages, and nations. “Philology is the family,” Mandelstam announces in “On the Nature of the Word” (CPL, 123). Once again, though, he finds himself possessed of the wrong family tree. Russian, of course, derives from different sources than does English; and Mandelstam’s great essay is preoccupied with the problem of how to lay claim, on his own behalf and on Russia’s, to the classical and European heritage he requires to complete his imaginatively refigured genealogy. He is finally forced to claim kinship with European culture on the basis of Russian’s inner, non-etymological affinity with the Western tradition—but the resourceful poet-synthesist is no more daunted by the gaps in his linguistic genealogy than he is by the lacunae in his literary inheritance. His hybrid Russian contains, he claims, an “inner Hellenism” that guarantees its access to a larger Western tradition (CPL, 127). Mandelstam would have found his way into this expanded philological family in any case. In his “Remarks on Chénier” (1914), he insists that poetic speech itself, whatever its national origins, participates by its nature in a multilingual community of world poetry: “In poetry the boundaries of the national are destroyed and the elements of one language exchange greetings with those of another over the heads of space and time, for all languages are bound in a fraternal union which is strengthened in the freedom and domesticity of each, and within this freedom they are fraternally related, and they greet each other as members of a single family” (CPL, 81). For Pound, Kenner notes, “all poets are contemporaneous, not merely the poets a common idiom unites,” but “the poets of whatever date or language.”40 Pound and Eliot would not have known the language in which Mandelstam describes his brotherhood of poets. They would, however, have recognized the poetic language he celebrates and the poetic

22

•

C H A P T E R

O N E

•

community this language creates, for it is the same language and community to which they themselves aspired. This philological community offers multiple advantages to the outsider in search of world culture. It is uncommonly hospitable—at least to the writer who is willing to work for his keep, who is prepared to take on the requisite linguistic labors. A poet who desires membership in this community does not require a distinguished pedigree. He has only to recognize and master the possibilities of his native speech to be welcomed into an extended poetic family. This community is, moreover, like its component languages, a hybrid; each of its member languages is equally foreign and equally native within its heterogeneous whole. Russian derives its vitality, Mandelstam claims, from its very impurity, from the continuous crossbreeding that shapes its hybrid nature. The best poetry grows, Eliot notes, from “the struggle between native and foreign elements.” For Pound, the “constant cross-fertilization between different languages” prevents the “linguistic provincialism” that is the death of true culture.41 The mobile, polyglot unity of Eliot’s or Pound’s English, like Mandelstam’s Russian, allows for and even requires the continuous contributions of outsiders. Their world culture is no less dependent on the generosity of strangers. The notion of a heteregeneous poetry that draws on all cultures while retaining its inner unity lends itself more readily to theory than to practice. Yet the dream of such a poetry informs the very texture of the poetry shaped by these would-be citizens of world culture. In “Conversation about Dante,” Mandelstam celebrates “the orgy of quotations” and the abundance of “lexical thrusts” he finds at work in Dante’s Divine Comedy (CPL, 401): “There is the barbarian thrust towards German hushing sounds and Slavic cacophony; there is the Latin thrust, at times toward Dies irae and Benedictus qui venit , at other times towards kitchen Latin. There is the great impulse toward the speech of his native province—the Tuscan thrust” (CPL, 446). The same multiplicity of voices and speeches informs the poetry of Mandelstam, Eliot, and Pound. Eliot’s Waste Land (1922) is, of course, this century’s most famous patchwork of poetic quotations. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” Eliot mourns as his poem draws to its close. Its last stanza mimics the kind of linguistic and cultural disruption that is for Eliot the landscape of modern culture, even as its final lines, given in the Sanskrit that is among the oldest of all Indo-European languages, hint at a linguistic and cultural unity that underlies “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”: I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order? London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

•

M O D E R N I S T

C R E A T I O N

O F

T R A D I T I O N

•

23

Quando fiam uti chelidon —O swallow swallow Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih 42

Almost any page of Pound’s Cantos, taken at random, will yield a similar amalgam of linguistic fragments, often not just in multiple languages but in more than one alphabet. The conclusion of Pound’s first Canto (1915/ 1925) may be less conspicuously polyglot than the closing of “The Waste Land.” As Pound begins his lifelong struggle to “write the Paradise” of a new civilization, though, he is no less preoccupied than Eliot with the role of language in shaping a new cultural community from the linguistic artifacts of the past. And I stepped back, And he strong with the blood, said then: “Odysseus “Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas, “Lose all companions.” And then Anticlea came. Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus, In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer. And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away And unto Circe. Venerandam, In the Cretan’s phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite, Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, with golden Girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids Bearing the golden bough of Argicida. So that:

These lines conclude Pound’s free translation of a passage from Homer’s Odyssey, and they demonstrate the degree to which language itself becomes the hero of Pound’s modern saga. “The language of Canto I,” as Christine Froula notes, “is not simply a translator’s modern English version of the ancient Greek, but folds together, ply over ply, Homer’s Greek, the Latin of the [sixteenth century] translator, Andreas Divus, whose text mediates between Pound and the Greek.” Past and present, foreign and native coexist in a linguistic fabric that is “heavy with history.”43 Froula’s imagery of fabric and weaving is equally apt for Mandelstam’s poetics of history. “I love the custom of weaving,” he writes in “Tristia” (1918; #104), and Ovid’s ancient Rome converges with postrevolutionary Russia in his version of the poet as weaver of histories and tongues: Snuet helnok, vereteno 'u''it, Smotri, navstrehu, slovno pux lebq'ij, U'e bosaq Deliq letit!

24

•

C H A P T E R

O N E

•

The shuttle warps, the spindle hums, And look! like swan’s down, barefoot Delia Comes flying to meet us.

Mandelstam’s strategies for weaving his world culture into the fabric of his verse are less flamboyant than Eliot’s or Pound’s; his borrowings seldom take the shape of long quotations in foreign tongues complete with glosses. The barefoot Delia Mandelstam magically summons up with his weaving hints, though, at the ways in which he endows his Russian speech with “inner Hellenism.” This Delia comes to him through Ovid’s contemporaries Tibullus and Horace, in whose verse she appears; and her Greek and Roman name had, moreover, already been given a Russian inflection by Konstantin Batiushkov (1787–1855), who had translated Tibullus’ poem on Delia over a century earlier. Mandelstam draws both the classical and the Russian past into his web of remembered and invented culture by way of a single name.44 An astute early critic of Mandelstam’s verse hints at the distinctiveness of his hybrid poetic speech when he dubs it “classical transsense.”45 And Mandelstam uses still subtler ways of weaving foreign pasts into the fabric of modern Russian speech in other lyrics. . Let us turn here, by way of example, to an early version of the Homer who haunts Mandelstam’s verse as well as Pound’s: Bessonnica. Gomer. Tugie parusa. Q spisok korablej prohel do serediny% Sej dlinnyj vyvodok, sej poezd 'uravlinyj, Hto nad Ellado[ kogda-to podnqlsq. Kak 'uravlinyj klin v hu'ie rube'ió Na golovax carej bo'estvennaq penaó Kuda plyvete vy? Kogda by ne Elena, Hto Troq vam odna, axejskie mu'i? I more, i Gomeróvse dvi'etsq l[bov;[. Kogo 'e slywat; mne? I vot Gomer molhit, I more hernoe, vitijstvuq, wumit I s tq'kim groxotom podxodit k izgolov;[. 1915 (#79) Sleeplessness. Homer. Taut sails. I’ve read halfway through the list of ships: That long-drawn flock, that convoy of cranes That arose once over Hellas. Like a wedge of cranes toward foreign borders— Divine foam on the emperors’ heads— Where are you sailing? If not for Helen, What is Troy alone to you, Achaean men?

•

M O D E R N I S T

C R E A T I O N

O F

T R A D I T I O N

•

25

Both the sea and Homer—all is moved by love. To whom should I listen? Homer now falls still, And the black sea rumbles, orating, And with a heavy crash, draws up beside the bed.

Mandelstam’s brief lyric, like Pound’s first Canto, evokes both the presence of the past and its pastness, as the events described in Homer’s writings converge with and diverge from the experience of the modernist poet-synthesizer who works to recuperate an ancient history for the modern age. Mandelstam’s poem moves from mediation—in the poem’s opening stanza he contemplates the Iliad’s famous catalog of ships—to immediacy, when, in its final lines, Homer’s wine-dark sea sweeps up along the poet’s bedside. Mandelstam achieves this transformation through linguistic sleight of hand, as he endows a purely Russian word with a Hellenistic soul by way of his creative etymology. The sea itself, móre in Russian, is anagrammatically concealed within Homer, Gomér; and Homer, conversely, lies partially hidden in the Russian “sea,” as Mandelstam reminds us by rocking the two words back and forth in the poem’s closing lines: “I mó-re, i Go-mér”; “I vót Go-mér molchít/ I mó-re chérnoe . . .” Centuries, traditions, and linguistic boundaries wash away in the verbal play that gives all Russian speakers permanent access to a Homeric past through their own sea, their more. Such inventive etymologies are one way into the expanded philological family that Mandelstam, Eliot, and Pound seek. In an early essay, Eliot describes another way to acquire the rich history craved by modern orphans; and his method is one that Mandelstam and Pound energetically employ as well. The poet works his way into a new past through what Eliot calls “a feeling of profound kinship, or rather of a peculiar personal intimacy, with another, probably a dead author. . . . Our friendship gives us an introduction to the society in which our friend moved; we learn its origins and its endings; we are broadened . . . we have been quickened, and we become bearers of a tradition.”46 He might be describing the Mandelstam who calls François Villon his “friend and favorite,” his “favorite relation,” who “feels himself the poet’s contemporary” (III, 23; #382; II, 307) and who discovers a fellow traveler in an endlessly contemporaneous Dante obscured by centuries of misguided criticism (CPL 410, 440). The young Pound goes even further in his search for “mine own kind,” “my kin of the spirit” among the poets of the past. He resurrects his absent “soul kin” in his own flesh as he converges with distant poets recovered for a moment from other times and places. “No man hath dared to write this thing as yet,” he proclaims with a very young poet’s brashness in “Histrion” ( 1908): And yet I know, how that the souls of all men great At times pass through us, And we are melted into them, and are not Save reflexions of their souls.

26

•

C H A P T E R

O N E

•

Thus am I Dante for a space and am One François Villon, ballad-lord and thief Or am such holy ones I may not write, Lest blasphemy be writ against my name; This for an instant and the flame is gone.

Pound would soon abandon the fussy diction that so often gives his early lyrics the flavor, he later complained, of “stale creampuffs.” He was quick to put into practice, though, the kind of composite speaker he imagines in these lines; and Mandelstam and Eliot were equally adept at creating poetic speakers who simultaneously resist time and embody history by yoking together the disparate “I” ’s of different nations and ages with their own lyric voices. One need only think here of Pound’s Odysseus, his Seafarer, his Sextus Propertius; of Eliot’s Tiresias or his Magi; or of Mandelstam’s Ovid and his Chaadaev (#79, #80, #104, #69).47 Pound’s poem also suggests the ways in which the ambitious modernist who works to acquire a past much vaster than any one family or nation could provide is also able to circumvent the burden of this overwhelming past. The modern poet who has been denied the European history he requires both by his origins and his age depends on the past that he desires for his community and for the impetus to new creation. At the same time, though, this past depends on him, for without his intervention it cannot be brought to life again within the modern age. The outcast modernist may seek out new kin and neighbors among the dead poets of distant times— but the dead poets also require their self-chosen descendants. They will remain dead to the present age unless their potential is tapped by a selfproclaimed “spiritual heir” and translated into a new idiom for another generation, another tradition or nation. “The present only keeps the past alive,” Eliot asserts.48 Mandelstam is still more audacious: “Yesterday has not yet been born. It has not yet really existed. I want Ovid, Pushkin, and Catullus to live once more, and I am not satisfied with the historical Ovid, Pushkin, and Catullus” (CPL, 113). The poet must assist at the birth of his poetic fathers in the present moment, and as the present moment becomes the past, his task begins again. Tradition is obtained only by great labor, Eliot writes. The same labor that the modernist poet expends in acquiring his history can also work to liberate him from its weight. The fate of the past lies in the hands of the poet-parvenu, and Mandelstam is quick to assert his power. “Not a single poet has yet appeared. We are free from the burden of memories,” he proclaims in “The Word and Culture” (1921; CPL, 114). This can never be entirely true for a poet whose work depends as much on remembrance as invention, and this was the case for Pound and Eliot as well as Mandelstam. For all three poets past and present are engaged in what is both an endless struggle and a fruitful collaboration that revives the life of the past as it provides the modern outsider with his tradition and community.

•

M O D E R N I S T

C R E A T I O N

O F

T R A D I T I O N

•

27

For all the congruences between their visions of a world culture, Mandelstam, Eliot, and Pound are in many ways worlds apart. The traditions they came from—Russian and Jewish on the one hand, Anglo-American on the other—were vastly different, even if the traditions the poets worked to create resemble each other in important ways. I will not address the many differences in temperament and poetic practice between the three here, differences that were significant to begin with and that became still more acute with the passage of time. To compare even briefly their later careers is to become aware, though, not of the powers of time so much as of the dictates of space. What separates Pound and Eliot from Mandelstam is not chronology—their early poetic careers roughly coincide in terms of dates— but geography, and the gap it opened between them was wide indeed. The late twenties saw Eliot, “the successful self-exile” in England, formalize his adoption into his British “homeland of the spirit,” consolidate his self-created identity as a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion,” and find for himself and his revised modernist vision a large, attentive audience in his own generation. The year 1929 specifically marked the apogee of Pound’s success; he found himself, Frank Lentricchia notes, “with the literary revolution won [and] modernism fully in place,” while he himself was hailed as its chief “entrepreneur and guru.”49 These same years witnessed the final defeat of their Russian contemporaries, as socialist realism became the order of the day and Stalin’s compliant “engineers of human souls” took the place of even the most ardently revolutionary avant-garde artists and poets. The years that marked Eliot’s and Pound’s great successes bore witness a world away to Mandelstam’s gradual exclusion, in practice if not in fact, from the nation he had worked so hard to adopt. They saw his world culture become the forbidden homeland of the poet-pariah who could only hope that his “moving lips” (#306) would find an understanding ear in some later generation, and that a distant interlocutor would bring him and his words to life again just as he had revived the voices and visions of others. By the late twenties the Soviet state was doing its best to block the kinds of border crossings, both literal and figurative, that were for Mandelstam the essence of a living culture. Only the poet-pariah who lives defiantly on his own culture’s margins would dare to keep crossing, in spirit at least, into the forbidden zones of other cultures in search of the stolen air that nourishes world literature. But what is stolen may be taken back, and the thief may be locked up or hanged, as Mandelstam had learned early on from his friend François Villon. “I think it would be a long time before Soviet society could afford to approve a Villon if one arose,” Eliot remarked prophetically in 1932, one year before Mandelstam wrote the poem on Stalin that would ultimately become his death sentence.50 Mandelstam paid a high price indeed for his stolen air. The boundaries that came to divide Russia from the West in the years following the revolution may seem as vast and insuperable as those that

28

•

C H A P T E R

O N E

•

separate centuries, epochs, millennia. Yet Eliot’s use of Villon as a touchstone or test case for the new Soviet state testifies to the ways in which Mandelstam succeeded in finding a community of poets who unwittingly joined forces in defiance of space, if not of time, in their quest to create a world culture. Pound envisioned a “world community of poets” made up of “the sons of Homer.”51 By laying claim to the same genealogy—Homer, Villon, Dante, Shakespeare, Gautier—the modernist orphans Mandelstam, Eliot, and Pound become, if not brothers, then at least not-so-distant cousins. “A common inheritance and a common cause unite artists consciously or unconsciously,” Eliot announces in an early essay. Mandelstam, Eliot, and Pound are linked both by their chosen legacies and by the ends to which they put their self-selected pasts. Modernist poetry grew, Eliot observes in 1953, from the efforts of “a number of scattered investigators” who didn’t “like [their] relatives” and turned instead to “writers of another country and another language, or of a remoter age.” These investigators shared what Eliot calls elsewhere the need “to collaborate, to exchange, to contribute” as they worked to invent their new culture.52 In “Conversation about Dante,” Mandelstam calls for “joint international endeavors” to resurrect the long-dead Dante and restore him to the present age. It is only through such efforts, he suggests, that time can be mastered and made to serve human ends. “For Dante,” Mandelstam asserts, “time is the content of history understood as a single synchronic act and vice-versa: the contents of history are the joint containing of time by colleagues, competitors, and co-discoverers” (CPL, 420). In the first decades of the twentieth century, Mandelstam, Eliot, and Pound became in ways they could not have suspected colleagues and co-discoverers as they worked to uncover a world culture vast and varied enough to satisfy the desires of provincial modernists determined to overcome the constraints of time and space through a modern creation of tradition.

•

C

H

A

P

T

E

R

T

W

O

•

Self-Creation and the Creation of Culture It was as if the stone thirsted for another being. It itself discovered the dynamic potential hidden within it, as if it were begging admittance into the “groined arch” in order to participate in the joyous cooperative action of those like it. —Osip Mandelstam, “The Morning of Acmeism” (1913)

SELF-CREATION Whenever I remake a song . . . it is myself that I remake. —William Butler Yeats, “Epigraph,” Collected Works (1908), vol. 2

All the “things that Mandelstam creates have biographies,” Nikolai Berkovsky remarks apropos of the many people and objects that Mandelstam endows with succinct, suggestive histories throughout his prose and, most notably, in his autobiography, The Noise of Time (1925). Berkovsky’s observation is entirely apt—and yet it seems puzzling in the light of Mandelstam’s own pronouncements on biography generally and on his own personal history in particular. In “The Nineteenth Century” (1922), Mandelstam records “the catastrophic collapse of biography” to which the twentieth century has borne reluctant witness (CPL, 144). To judge from the evidence of his autobiography, though, this collapse may have been less than catastrophic for Mandelstam himself: it is instead precisely the kind of crisis that serves as the necessary spur to new creation throughout his work. Mandelstam, paradoxically, makes it clear in his autobiography that he himself aspires to be what Boris Tomashevsky would call “a poet without a biography,” a poet who does not invite attention to a private life that lies safely concealed behind an opaque, apparently impersonal art. The distaste for dreary kin and neighbors that Mandelstam expresses early on in “I have not heard the tales of Ossian” is intensified in The Noise of Time, where he announces that his memory, so welcoming and open to all of Western culture, “is inimical to everything personal” (POM, 122). Mandelstam would have sympathized with Eliot’s insistence that the poet’s progress consists of a “continual extinction of personality” or with the assertions of his fellow post-symbolist, Boris Pasternak, who remarks in his autobiography, Safe

30

•

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

Conduct (1931), that “impersonality is more complex that personality,” and who claims to speak of his own life only “when someone else’s biography requires it.”1 For all their personal and poetic differences, Mandelstam and Pasternak were united in their resistance to the cult of personality that preoccupied their Symbolist precursors. The escape from personality that these poets celebrate, though, is predictably far more complex in practice than it appears to be in theory. Indeed Eliot, arguably the century’s most influential advocate of impersonal verse, tacitly admits as much when he notes that “only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”2 And Mandelstam’s autobiography can be read as testimony to his ongoing struggle with a personal history that refuses to remain mere history, that makes its presence felt even—especially—in his most fervent efforts to resist it. We need only restore his literary declaration of independence—“My memory is inimical to everything personal”—to its proper context in The Noise of Time to sense the complexities that mark Mandelstam’s use and abuse of his personal history. The phrase comes from the magnificent set piece on modernist alienation à la Mandelstam that opens the chapter entitled “Komissarzhevskaia”: My desire is to speak not about myself but to track down the age, the noise, and the germination of time. My memory is inimical to everything personal . . . and it labors not to reproduce but to distance the past. A raznochinets needs no memory—it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done. Where for happy generations the epic speaks in hexameters and chronicles I have merely the sign of the hiatus, and between me and the age there lies a pit, a moat, filled with clamorous time, the place where a family and reminiscences of a family ought to have been. What was it my family wished to say? I do not know. It was tongue-tied from birth—but it had, nevertheless, something that it might have said. Over my head and over the heads of many of my contemporaries there hangs congenital tongue-tie. We were not taught to speak but to babble—and only by listening to the swelling noise of the age and the bleached foam on the crest of its wave did we acquire a language. A revolution is itself about life and death and cannot endure idle chatter about life and death in its presence. Its throat is parched with thirst, but it would not accept a single drop of moisture from alien hands. Nature—revolution—eternal thirst—inflammation (perhaps it envies those ages when thirst was quenched in a quiet home-like way by simply going off to the place where the sheep were watered . . . [but] it dares not, it is afraid to approach the sources of being.). But what did these “sources of being (istochniki bytiia)” ever do for the revolution? (my ellipses; POM, 122–23; II, 99–100)

•

S E L F - C R E A T I O N ,

C R E A T I O N

O F

C U L T U R E

•

31

This dense, occasionally perplexing passage is typical, both in its devices and in what we might call its master plot, of Mandelstam’s ongoing efforts to shape a life for himself through writing that will guarantee for him a place both in his own age and in his ideal world culture.3 Mandelstam’s gift for taking what seem to be the troublesome specifics of his own situation and transforming them into his bond with his nation and his age is abundantly in evidence in this passage. His memory, Mandelstam claims, is inimical to his personal past. He proceeds to tell us, though, that he has no past to oppose; where happier generations have family archives, he laments, “I have merely the sign of the hiatus.” He then uses this very absence of a past to allign himself with a peculiarly Russian tradition, that of the raznochintsy, the self-made intellectuals who sprang up between the cracks in the Russian class system early in the nineteenth century. As the passage progresses, it becomes clear, however, that what Mandelstam lacks is not a family per se, but a speaking family that can articulate whatever history it does possess: “What was it my family wished to say? I do not know. It was tongue-tied from birth.” And once again, the unfortunate family legacy that initially seems to bar him from his age (“between me and the age there lies a pit, a moat, filled with clamorous time”) is made to serve his purposes. It becomes his bridge to an entire generation of tongue-tied Russians, handicapped, perhaps, by the Symbolist murkiness of their literary precursors: “Over my head and over the head of many of my contemporaries there hangs congenital tongue-tie. We were not taught to speak but to babble.” Mandelstam does not so much distance his past as displace it; and nowhere are the resulting deformations clearer than in the idiosyncratic portrait of the revolution that concludes the passage. This revolution apparently has vocal problems of its own; its throat “is parched with thirst.” Its most salient feature, though, draws it still closer to the poet who depicts it: Mandelstam’s revolution is preoccupied with its relations to an oddly personalized past. It also apparently envies earlier, happier generations, when things were done “in a quiet, home-like way.” And it , too, is troubled by its ambivalence toward its origins: “It is afraid to approach the sources of being. But what did these sources of being ever do for [it]?” Like Mandelstam himself, this revolution cannot decide on the proper distance to be kept between itself and its family history. The master plot that informs this passage and other of Mandelstam’s works might be summarized as follows: the poet, or one of his many surrogates, must struggle to re-form or outrun a chaotic past that can only be mastered by language. This language, in turn, provides the entryway into the society and culture that Mandelstam requires. This is the chief story of The Noise of Time, which culminates in the poet’s mastering the secrets of Bildung in a double sense, as he learns to shape not just a self, but a “home” and a “family” (dom , sem’ia) in art by learning to “construct liter-

32

•

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

ature as family history (stroit’ literaturu kak rod)” (POM, 130; II, 106). And this is the story that lends its shape to all Mandelstam’s early poetry and prose, from his first essay on “François Villon” (1910) to the multiple variants of his early collection, Stone (Kamen’, 1913, 1916; 1923, 1928).4 All the things that Mandelstam composes do have biographies, and this includes not only images or characters within individual texts, but the very structure of the early work as such. What emerges in this work in variation after variation is a complex, refracted, highly self-conscious portrait of the artist in search of a self, a language, and a society that will facilitate his plans for an encompassing world culture. This is the poetic life that concerns me here and in future chapters: not the actual biography of the historical Osip Mandelstam so much as the shape that biography takes as it is deformed and reformed to serve the needs of Osip Mandelstam the modernist artist. Similarly, the Mandelstam I refer to in these pages is not only the Mandelstam who lived and died in Russia in the first part of this century; it is also the Mandelstam who struggles to shape and reshape his poetic self within the boundaries of his art. These boundaries are themselves permeable and shifting. “The borderline dividing what is a work of poetry from what is not,” as Roman Jakobson remarks, “is less stable than the frontiers of the Chinese empire’s territories”; and Mandelstam himself was notoriously impatient with fixed and finished boundaries in life or art. Nevertheless, it is the interaction between “modernist making and self-making”—the shifting shape of Mandelstam’s life in art as it intersects with his created tradition—that is the subject of this study.5 Stone marks, I have argued, a complex effort at self-creation. Mandelstam’s first critics, though, were quick to complain that there was no self to be found in the poems of Stone. “He never speaks about himself, his soul or his immediate perceptions of either his inner or outer life,” Viktor Zhirmunsky writes in a generally favorable assessment of Stone’s second redaction. Other critics were less sympathetic to Mandelstam’s apparent refusal to bare his soul in his verse. He is, A. Deich charges in a review of Stone’s second edition, a thoroughly “lifeless poet,” and other critics concurred. “If you read through O. Mandelstam’s book of poems and then try to construct an image of the poet’s appearance (lik),” I. Oksenov grumbles, “you can’t do it. . . . Mandelstam as a poet is simply missing (I’m afraid he’s gone for good).” Zhirmunsky is right to see the apparent impersonality of Mandelstam’s early verse as a reaction against the self-celebration that dominated so much of his precursors’ work—“I’m a sudden break, I’m playful thunder, I’m a crystal stream, I’m everyone’s and no one’s,” Konstantin Bal’mont proclaims in one famous Symbolist self-celebration—and the critical response to Stone can be explained in part by the expectations of a generation of readers trained by two generations of Symbolists to expect soul-baring of cosmic proportions from their poets.6 Zhirmunsky and his fellow critics err, though, in supposing that, since

•

S E L F - C R E A T I O N ,

C R E A T I O N

O F

C U L T U R E

•

33

there is no overt, assertive self in the Symbolist mode on display in the lyrics of Stone, then the poems hold no self at all. They are simply looking in the wrong places for the wrong kind of self. Mandelstam himself was highly critical of his Symbolist precursors’ excessive self-preoccupation, and in an early essay he takes Bal’mont to task specifically for his sollipsistic sins: “[Bal’mont] is downright pathological. He cannot utter the word ‘I’ softly. He screams ‘I’ ” (“On the Interlocutor,” 1913; CPL, 70). He expands these charges a decade later in “A Letter about Russian Poetry” (1922) to include an entire generation of Symbolists who suffered from “hypertrophy of the creative ‘I’ ” and thus neglected “the most interesting process in poetry—the growth of the poetic personality” (CPL 157). Elsewhere he warns that in “raising [society] from chaos to the harmonious order of organic existence,” “the amorphous, formless person, the unorganized personality is society’s greatest foe” (CPL 108). These remarks call attention to what is distinctive about Mandelstam’s own notions of “personality” and the “creative ‘I.’ ” For Mandelstam’s “creative ‘I’ ” is also a created I. It is a conscious, carefully crafted construct; and what we trace in Stone’s progress is a scrupulously composed record of the making of this self. Chaadaev, Mandelstam writes, learned to “look upon himself as raw material [and] the results were astonishing”: “This idea organized not just his intellect, but his personality, and gave it a structure, an architecture” (CPL, 83). This architectural imagery is entirely apt in the context of Acmeist aesthetics. But the quote also provides us with a key to reading Stone as a cryptographic self-portrait of the artist as a young man. In “The Morning of Acmeism” (1913), Mandelstam gives us another oblique self-portrait, with a stone playing the part of the young poet: [Fedor] Tiutchev’s stone [from his poem Problème (1833)] which “had rolled down the mountain, and lay in the valley, having torn itself loose, or cast down by a sentient hand,” is the word. The voice of matter in this unexpected fall sounds like articulate speech. Only architecture can answer this challenge. Reverently the Acmeists raise this mysterious Tiutchevian stone and make it the foundation stone of their own building. It was as if the stone thirsted for another being. It itself discovered the dynamic potential hidden within it, as if it were begging admittance into the “groined arch” in order to participate in the joyous cooperative action of those like it. (CPL, 62)

We recognize key elements of Mandelstam’s master plot in this passage: the acquisition of speech and self, and finally, of a new society of like-minded kin and neighbors in the movement from unformed matter into art. The ambiguity in Tiutchev’s poem—did the stone tear itself loose or was it cast down by another force?—is resolved by Mandelstam in favor of the stone.7 The stone itself initiates its progress and decides the nature of its future incarnation. This stone is the raw material of unformed self on which Man-

34

•

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

delstam as craftsman sets to work in his eponymously titled collection, and which submits itself to progressive reshapings in successive editions as Mandelstam perfects the story of his origins in art.8

GRAVITY AND GRACE Consider the first invention of that creature who eventually would conceive of the word “Man.” I ask you to suppose that its first invention was its own muteness. Muteness is not something attributable to a rock or a stone, a tree or a beast. For anything to imagine its own muteness it would have to desire not to be mute, to desire already to be other than what it is, to become different and to make a difference. Suppose that the next invention was the sound that erased the muteness. —Richard Poirer, “Why Literature Can’t Save Us” (1987) Poetry begins with our awareness, not of a Fall, but that we are falling. The poet is our chosen man, and his consciousness of election becomes a curse; again, not “I am a fallen man,” but “I am Man, and I am falling.” —Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (1973)

Mandelstam tacitly conflates several beginnings in his parable of the fallen stone. His birth as a poet overlaps with the birth of the Acmeist movement from what he sees as the chaos of Symbolist poetics. The juxtaposition of a fall and new creation also echoes the paradigm of biblical beginnings that opens the Book of Genesis (Knigi bytiia, or the Books of Being, in Russian)—although in this case, new creation comes after, not before, the fall. A similar web of beginnings is at work in the poem that opens Stone’s later versions. This poem, “The sound, cautious and muted” (1908; #1) is both a literal and a symbolic point of departure for the young poet in search of a self; it marks Mandelstam’s recreation in verse of his first, fragmentary efforts to unleash his own voice. Zvuk ostoro'nyj i gluxoj Ploda, sorvavwegosq s dreva, Sredi nemolhnogo napeva Glubokoj tiwiny lesnoj . . . The sound, cautious and muted Of a fruit broken loose from the tree, Amidst the ceaseless melody Of deep forest silence . . .

This brief lyric, over almost before it has begun, is the first of a number of poems in the early part of Stone which take for their theme the process, uncertain and equivocal, of deriving a self from the sources of being. As Clarence Brown notes, the poem enacts what it describes; he cites Tsve-

•

S E L F - C R E A T I O N ,

C R E A T I O N

O F

C U L T U R E

•

35

9

taeva, who saw in its four lines an emblem of the fallen fruit itself. And like the single sound of the fruit which dies away in the forest’s stillness, the poem’s single stanza, which ends in ellipses, gives way to the silence of the surrounding page. The very idea of individuality becomes problematic, even ominous here as the single sound vanishes and the poem itself trails off into empty space. The struggle between sound and silence begins in the poem’s opening line. The crisp, stressed monosyllable zvuk that opens the poem is immediately qualified by the two modifiers that soften its blow and muffle its sound—but also render it human by making it “cautious” and hesitant. Or, more probably, it is produced cautiously, by an agent that is itself thus indirectly humanized. The fruit whose fall creates the sound comes to life, or half-life, by way of its modifier, the past active participle from the verb sovrat’sia, which can mean simply “to fall down” but which also signifies breaking loose, breaking free. It is the same verb that Tiutchev uses to describe the equally ambiguous fall of his mysterious stone; unlike the confident Acmeist of 1913, though, this Mandelstam is unwilling to endow his surrogate, fallen self with unequivocal life. “What sort of fruit is this Mandelstam? (Chto eto za frukt takoi etot Mandel’shtam?)” the poet asks ironically in “Fourth Prose” (1930; CPL, 323; II, 189), and the answer here would seem to be, “one that dares not fall too far from the tree.” The poem’s subject dwells on the edge of a “double being” (#22). It hesitates between volition, willed activity, and passive submission to the powers that be—in this case, to the powers that govern physical being, to the force of gravity. In a poem written about a year later and published only posthumously, Mandelstam writes: Mne stalo strawno 'izn; ot'it;ó I s dereva, kak list, otprqnut;, I nihego ne pol[bit;, I bezymqnnom kamnem kanut;. 1910 (#457t) I’ve become afraid of living life out— And pulling back, like a leaf from a tree, And that I’ll love nothing, And vanish like a nameless stone.

“I have bad relations with my family tree (V durnom rodstve/Ia so svoim rodoslovnym drevom),” Tsvetaeva announces in a poem of 1918; and in these poems, Mandelstam hints at a similar dilemma. One can see in the movement of the leaf or the fruit a fall from grace and a falling away from the family tree (rodoslovnoe derevo), from genealogy itself. In uprooting himself, the speaker is in danger of loosing what little identity he has, as the unnamed stone vanishes into a latter-day variant of Tiutchev’s “nameless abyss.”10

36

•

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

In a late poem, Mandelstam returns to the fall from grace that marks his poetic beginnings: “The disgraced verse has fallen, not knowing its father (Upal opal’nyi stikh, ne znaiushchii ottsa )” (1937; #357). The question of paternity is vexed and complex in the early lyric as well. This little poem, with its slavonicized tree (drevo) and its fallen, forbidden fruit (zapretnyi plod), hints at forbidden knowledge and violation of the Father’s will. There are suggestions of other paternal legacies at work in the poem as well. The very name that is Mandelstam’s paternal legacy evokes the notion of family tree: Mandelstam in German means “almond bough,” “almond tree,” and its root stam signifies not only “stem” or “tree,” but also “family,” “clan,” or “ancestry,” and even stammering, stammeln in German.11 In The Noise of Time, Mandelstam mourns a family heritage of tongue-tie; and he assigns this legacy specifically to his German Jewish father, who had, he insists, “absolutely no language” (POM, 90). The attempt to acquire a language would then be a betrayal of this peculiar family legacy, and one might see in the poem’s interrupted silence a first, failed attempt to move from tongue-tied birth to articulate speech. The particular kind of silence that the fallen fruit disturbs suggests another inheritance with which the young poet is struggling. This silence is not absolute. It is an oxymoronic stillness, a “ceaseless melody” of quiet. The fruit is an intruder here, like Tiutchev’s “thinking reed” whose rustling disrupts nature’s “common chorus.” Mandelstam’s native tongue-tie is compounded by his poetic legacy, the “mute musicality” or “plangent, sounding silence” (nemaia muzykal’nost’, zvonko-zvuchashchaia tishina) of his Symbolist forbears. The forest in which the fruit has fallen is also Baudelaire’s “forêt de symboles” in its Russian incarnation; and Mandelstam has already violated “the horror of the forest, the silent thunder scattered in the leaves” that is, according to Stéphane Mallarmé, the proper subject of poetry, through his own opposing sense of “the intrinsic dense wood of the trees.” The awkward drop of the all-too-solid fruit into the uncanny silent music of the woods suggests that the budding Acmeist is already ill at ease in the Symbolists’ “sacred Druidic grove” in which “nothing is real or genuine” (CPL, 128–29).12 The poem enacts Mandelstam’s dilemma in still another sense. The fruit falls in a wood that is both silent and full of song, and what lies behind this sounding silence is “both a poetic anxiety and a natural anxiety, a fear of being overcome by a babble of voices and by silence.”13 By opening Stone with this poem, Mandelstam dramatizes the introduction of his voice into a space both empty and full. The page around the poem is blank, the book is still unread, the poet’s own voice has not yet been heard: This empty space echoes, though, with the music of his poetic predecessors’ words, and his task is now to take this empty, echoing space and make it his own. Before Mandelstam could master anything, though, he had to find out what was his already, and to uncover or create the boundaries of his self in time and space. The first edition of Stone begins with a slightly later poem,

•

S E L F - C R E A T I O N ,

C R E A T I O N

O F

C U L T U R E

•

37

in which he has apparently made some progress toward the self-creation and artistic creation that elude him in “A sound, cautious and muted.” “I’ve been given a body” (1909; #8) takes up where “A sound, cautious and muted” leaves off, as it offers tentative answers to the questions the earlier lyric had left open. Dano mne teloóhto mne delat; s nim, Takim edinym i takim moim? Za radost; tixu[ dywat; i 'it;, Kogo, ska'ite, mne blagodarit;? Q i sadovnik, q 'e i cvetok, V temnice mira q ne odinok. Na stekla vehnosti u'e leglo Moe dyxanie, moe teplo. Zapehatleetsq na nem uzor, Neuznavaemyj s nedavnix por. Puskaj mgnoveniq stekaet mut;ó Uzora milogo ne zaherknut;. I’ve been given a body—what do I do with it, So single and so my own? For the quiet joy of breath and life, Tell me, whom should I thank? I am the gardener, I’m also the flower, I’m not alone in the world’s dungeon. My breathing, my warmth Already lies on eternity’s glass. The pattern that will be etched on it Is unrecognizable in recent times. Let the moments’ lees flow down— The dear pattern will not be crossed out.

“I’ve been given a body—what do I do with it?” The comical clumsiness of the diction mirrors the oddity of the question itself.14 In acknowledging both his connection to and his distance from his physical self, Mandelstam apparently takes up the awkward, lonely object of the earlier lyric and makes it his own. The poem never entirely answers the question that opens it, though; and the stanzas that follow show that the relationship between self as creator and self as raw material, and between these two and the outside world, is still far from settled. In his essay on Villon, Mandelstam praises his favorite’s awareness of

38

•

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

“the abyss between subject and object,” which Villon extends even to his relations with himself: “Villon’s attitude toward himself never exceeds certain limits of intimacy. He expresses no more tenderness, attentiveness, or concern for himself than a good lawyer would show his client” (CPL, 56). In “I’ve been given a body,” Mandelstam sets new terms for his association with his self; the poem’s subject, the self-as-artist, takes as its object the body it wishes to master. Gregory Freidin notes that Mandelstam, in refusing to “check [his] body at the gate” of the Symbolist poets’ club, was defying reigning taboos against the propriety of physical being in poetry.15 But Mandelstam is not simply flouting Symbolist conventions. By taking credit for his own being, he also neatly circumvents the whole uncomfortable issue of origins, whether personal or poetic. His body is a gift; no matter, then, from whom or whence it comes. No need, he seems to say, to look a gift horse in the mouth. The seed, born of unknown sources, has already been planted, and the poet, both gardener and flower, will cultivate and shape it on his own. “I am not alone,” he insists, “in the world’s dungeon.” Perhaps—but within the world of the poem itself his only companion is what he can bring forth by and from himself. The poem is populated solely by his consciousness, the body it nurtures, and the pattern that this body’s breath will leave on eternity’s glass. In this bell-jar universe, Mandelstam can breed only hothouse flowers. “I stand, dissatisfied and quiet,/The creator of my own worlds,” Mandelstam complains in another early lyric (#147). His attempt to resist his Symbolist precursors in “I’ve been given a body” likewise leaves him stranded in the midst of the Symbolist sollipsism he seeks to escape. His efforts at artistic self-assertion are equally unpersuasive. Not only the poet’s body is, he claims, uniquely his own in the poem. The pattern that will be his distinctive gift to posterity is also, he claims in yet another ungainly phrase, “unrecognizable in recent times (neuznavaemyi s nedavnikh por).” This pattern is cast into doubt not only by the passive form (“will be etched,” zapechatleetsia) that introduces it: what role precisely does the artist himself play in shaping this design? Its relationship to both past and future is also problematic. The design still remains to be etched; the poet postpones until an unspecified future the creation that will make his lasting mark on art. At the same time, he also struggles to carve out a space for himself and his art by resisting the immediate past, a past that cannot take credit for his being and does not acknowledge his writing. His work is “unrecognizable in recent times,” and the present passive particle allows him to evade the question of who precisely has failed to recognize his art. The phrase also implies that Mandelstam’s true precursors, those who would recognize his pattern, are to be found not among his immediate predecessors, but in a more distant time and place. As Mandelstam would soon come to see it, this leaves him free to bypass recent history and choose his friends himself from among those to whom he is bound by elective

•

S E L F - C R E A T I O N ,

C R E A T I O N

O F

C U L T U R E

•

39

affinity rather than by ties of blood and chronology. In the early poetry, though, where the young poet still seeks to keep “everything big” (#4) at bay in a safe and static cosmos, the imagining of such a past is troublesome at best. “Tell me, who might expertly combine/Tiutchev’s severity with Verlaine’s childishness,/Having given this fusion his own stamp?” Mandelstam asks in one early lyric (#498). The “unconstrained creative exchange” he envisions in this poem still lies far beyond his powers; he apparently fears that such mighty precursors, if invited whole and untamed into his work, will succeed only in “crossing out” the aesthetic pattern he labors to create. (“The dear pattern will not be crossed out,” he insists, perhaps too strenuously, in “I’ve been given a body.”) This would seem to be the unspoken message of Mandelstam’s first attempt to formulate his version of poetic tradition in verse, “There are chaste charms” (1909; #7). In this lyric Mandelstam attempts to set up housekeeping with domestic gods who appear to be his unnamed, self-selected poetic precursors. Est; celomudrennye haryó Vysokij lad, glubokij mir, Daleko ot /firnyx lir Mnoj ustanovlennye lary. U t]atel;no obmytyx niw V hasy vnimatel;nyx zakatov Q sluwa[ moix penatov Vsegda vostor'ennu[ tiw;. Kakoj igruwehnyj udel, Kakie robkie zakony Prikazyvaet tors tohenyj I xolod /tix xrupkix tel! Inyx bogov ne nado slavit;% Oni kak ravnye s toboj, I ostoro'no[ rukoj, Pozvoleno ix perestavit;. There are chaste charms— High harmony, deep peace, The Lares arranged by me Are distant from ethereal lyres. By their well-washed niches At the times of attentive sunsets I listen to my Penates’ Always rapturous stillness.

40

•

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

What a toy-like lot, What timid laws Are laid down by a molded torso And the cold of these brittle bodies! No need to praise other gods; These are like your equals, And one may rearrange them With a cautious hand.

Victor Terras speculates that the poem may have been inspired by Pushkin’s unfinished translation of Southey’s “Hymn to the Penates” (1796); and this would be in keeping both with the spirit of the poem and the vision of tradition that Mandelstam would soon articulate more fully and forcefully.16 The ancient Roman custom of household gods, Penates, is brought home by a relatively recent Russian writer; and a foreign voice is domesticated by a local poet in the process. Both Pushkin and the recipient of his Penates, Mandelstam himself, thus participate in the mission of the true poet, which is to invite the literary “giants” of other times and places to “pull up their stakes and come be our guests” (“On the Nature of the Word,” CPL, 131). The legacy that Mandelstam attempts to master here is apparently too much for him, though. The literary home he presides over shelters not lively, adventurous giants, but cold and brittle figurines moved only by the poet’s “cautious hand.” He claims to be on equal footing with his gods: “These are like your equals,” he exclaims. Their relationship, though, is more like a one-man game of chess than the easy give-andtake of true equality, the fraternal union of world poetry that Mandelstam envisions elsewhere in his writing. He himself mocks his “toy-like lot” and the “timid laws” that adhere in his “little kingdom” (#9). Its virtues are “high harmony, deep peace”; its code enforces caution, quiet, and retreat. If the young poet has mastered the past and made peers of its gods, he has done so only by reducing them to his own size, by making them less than whole (one is a mere “molded torso”) and less than real. Most strikingly, Mandelstam’s household gods are silent. “The bare walls” of his house are adorned only with “the masks of other men’s voices” (POM, 127); and his Lares’ “rapturous stillness” returns us to the “ceaseless melody” of silence with which Stone begins. In the early poems, poetry is rooted in an impersonal, primordial stillness, an endless quiet that cannot be reconciled with individual, specific, and temporally bounded speech. This paradoxically makes the work of the individual poet virtually impossible, in theory if not in practice, for in articulating his own vision, he withdraws from the boundless silence that is the source of that vision. In the early “poetry of stasis,” Mandelstam circumvents this dilemma by drawing his imagery of art exclusively from the visual and plastic arts: etching, sculpture, textiles, enamel, ceramics.17 He creates within

•

S E L F - C R E A T I O N ,

C R E A T I O N

O F

C U L T U R E

•

41

these poems an image of an art not spoken, but shaped; of an art that is a fixed and lasting artifact. This strategy gives birth to the airtight, lifeless world of these verses—but it also preserves Mandelstam from the full and troubling implications of being a writer endangered by speech. “In art there are no ready-made things,” Mandelstam proclaims in “Conversation about Dante” (1933; CPL, 415). The young poet deals almost exclusively, though, in what critics called “natures mortes,” “still lives” or literally, “dead natures.”18 He has not yet mastered the energy that will enable him to endow the artifacts of later poems with the dynamic, open-ended being that eludes him here. In his essay on Villon, Mandelstam praises in his precursor precisely what he misses in his own work. Villon may have lacked “traditional bonds with the past”; he is filled nonetheless with a “tremendous dynamic ability” and with a passion for “life’s powerful rhythm.” This Villon would have had no difficulty in converting Symbolist music to new uses. He would have adapted, so Mandelstam claims, Verlaine’s famous motto to read, “Du mouvement avant toute chose!” (CPL, 57–58) The Mandelstam of the early poems can master neither movement nor music, and his words return him repeatedly to the possibility, both ominous and attractive, of utter speechlessness. Muteness and tongue-tie are central themes of the early verse, as Clarence Brown observes, and he adds that “Silentium” would have been a fitting title for Stone’s first edition.19 And Mandelstam indeed calls on a favorite precursor, Fedor Tiutchev (1803–73) and his famous “Silentium” (1830), as he struggles to formulate his own response to his legacy, both poetic and personal, of tongue-tie and speechlessness. In “Silentium,” Tiutchev commands his fellow poets to retreat into the uncorrupted, authentic realm of a self untainted by speech’s inevitable distortions—“To live inside your self alone is wiser,/A whole world dwells within your soul”—and a generation of Symbolists was relentless in its celebrations of Tiutchevian silence.20 In a number of early poems, including his own “Silentium” (1910; #14), Mandelstam exceeds both Tiutchev and his own Symbolist precursors. For the young Mandelstam, the notion of self is as disturbing and troublesome as the idea of speech, and his solution in these poems is retreat from both self and speech into the mute and boundless unity of “pre-being.”21 In a discussion of poetic origins, Harold Bloom notes that “poets tend to incarnate by the side of the ocean, at least in vision, if inland far they be,” and the sea that is their source is made up chiefly of their own precursors’ words: “Ocean, the matter of Night . . . mothers what is antithetical to her, the makers who fear (rightly) to accept her and never cease to move toward her. If not to have conceived oneself is a burden, so for the strong poet there is also the more hidden burden: not to have brought oneself forth . . . but to be awash in the Word not quite one’s own.”22 The sea change that Mandelstam proposes in “Silentium” is more radical even than the transformations he envisions in other early lyrics. In “Why is the soul so

42

•

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

songful” (1911; #25), forgetting a “useless I” signals the poet’s final defeat. In “Silentium” it is the consummation devoutly to be wished. The poet does not mourn a vanished self and an uncreated world. He yearns to return both self and world to a state that precedes all creation. And unlike the soul-turned-dolphin of “There’s nothing to talk about” (1909; #11), the poet of “Silentium” desires not to be reborn, but to bypass birth entirely; he longs to be made one with the unformed source of all being. Yet even in the poem in which he foresees his final undoing, Mandelstam leaves loopholes, opportunities for poetic rebirth from the speechless seas made up of the silence extolled by his Symbolist forebears and by their own poetic parent, Tiutchev.23 SILENTIUM

Ona e]e ne rodilas;, Ona i muzyka i slovo, I potomu vsego 'ivogo Nenaruwaemaq svqz;. Spokojno dywat morq grudi, No, kak bezumnyj, svetel den;, I peny blednaq siren; V mutno-lazorevom sosude. Da obretut moi usta Pervonahal;nu[ nemotu, Kak kristallihesku[ notu, Hto ot ro'deniq hista! Ostan;sq penoj, Afrodita, I slovo v muzyku vernis;, I serdce serdca ustydis;, S pervoosnovoj 'izni slito! She has not yet been born, She is both music and the word, And thus the inviolable bond Of everything that lives. The sea’s breasts breathe peacefully, But the day shines like a madman, And the foam’s pale lilac Lies in a basin of muted blue. May my lips acquire this Primeval muteness, Like a crystal note Pure from birth.

•

S E L F - C R E A T I O N ,

C R E A T I O N

O F

C U L T U R E

•

43

Remain foam, Aphrodite, And word, return to music, And heart, be ashamed of heart, When fused with life’s foundation!

The poem’s unborn Aphrodite, herself both “music and the word,” holds out the promise that the fallen fruit can return to the tree, to which it will now be tied by an “inviolable bond.” Through Aphrodite the poet seeks to reunite the lonely, speaking subject of the early poems with the mute music that is his source: “May my lips acquire this/Primeval muteness.” And through the force of his own speech, he seeks to undo speech as such: “Word, return to music.” The name he invokes, though, indicates that his desires go far beyond his own dissolution. Clarence Brown notes that “the poet invites the ordered world to collapse [into] a condition of infinite rawness, of chaos,” the chaos from which, according to legend, Aphrodite herself was born. In commanding the goddess of beauty to remain unformed, mere foam, Mandelstam seeks to erase not only his own birth but the very principle of generation as such; for Aphrodite is “the irrestistable force impelling procreation and production, who ‘strikes fond love into the hearts of all, and makes them in hot desire to renew the stock of their race.’ ” She inspires not only procreation but artistic creation. “Both the sea and Homer—all is moved by love,” another early lyric declares, and this “love” could be interpreted literally as Aphrodite who, in giving Helen to Paris, began the war that prompted Homer’s epic (#78). Mandelstam thus undoes the earliest source of the Western literary tradition, and with it his own poetic precursors, both near (Tiutchev, the Symbolists) and far (Homer himself). Mandelstam’s own cry for silence, he tacitly boasts, far outdoes the more qualified summons to speechlessness articulated by Tiutchev and his Symbolist followers. His muteness, unlike theirs, is absolute and abolishes not only word and world but the very notion of self.24 Mandelstam’s annihilation of self is, however, predictably ambiguous and tricky; he mythologizes his birth in the process of undoing it. In Aphrodite’s parentless birth he locates a model for his own self-origination, and he finds in Aphrodite herself an adoptive mother and muse whom he can follow into oblivion. Moreover, Aphrodite is herself “the eternal and alldominating female through whom resurrection and new life may be attained,”25 and the poem hints that her canceled birth, and thus the poet’s own, may be followed by some form of rebirth. The “primeval muteness” he seeks is “like a crystal note/ Pure from birth”; this silence, in other words, will take on shape and sound in a single, separate form made of a substance that symbolizes permanence as well as purity, that can be both water and wrought stone. The simile thus clears a space for individual creation in a poem that celebrates the unmaking of all creation. It allows for

44

•

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

birth as well. In the same stanza in which the poet wishes himself back into Aphrodite’s inchoate state, the crystal note, “pure from birth,” is born from muteness; and the language itself calls to mind Mandelstam’s own efforts to escape from a family “tongue-tied from birth (ot rozhdeniia)” (POM, 123; II, 99). In “Silentium” Mandelstam does not simply undo and outdo his poetic precursors; he continues to revise his tongue-tied heritage by imaginatively staging an immaculate rebirth from inherited speechlessness. Two poems written in the same year as “Silentium,” “From an evil, miry pond” (1910; #17) and “In the vast pond it’s transparent and dark” (1910; #18), reveal the dark undercurrents that lie just beneath the surface of “Silentium” ’s pristine waters. These poems restage the ambiguous tale told in “Silentium,” as the poet yearns both to emerge from and return to “being’s sources,” to the waters that both nourish and destroy. And all three lyrics are, in turn, small-scale retellings of the Mandelstamian master plot that traces the painful emergence of self and speech from primal chaos. In the pond poems, though, Mandelstam decides to muddy the waters, as he revises once again his mythopoetic account of his personal and poetic origins. The ambiguities that lie concealed beneath the apparently transparent surfaces of the earlier lyrics become the very stuff of which this pair of poems is made, as Mandelstam traces his vacillating responses to a pond that is vast and confining, transparent and dark. Iz omuta zlogo i vqzkogo Q vyros, trostinkoj wurwa, I strastno, i tomno, i laskovo Zapretno[ 'izn;[ dywa. I niknu, nikem ne zamehannyj, V xolodnyj i topkij pri[t, Privetstvennym welestom vstrehennyj Korotkix osennix minut. Q shastliv 'estokoj obido[ I v 'izni, poxo'ej na son, Q ka'domu tajno zavidu[ I v ka'dogo tajno vl[blen. From an evil, miry pond I grew up, rustling like a reed, Passionately, languidly, and tenderly Breathing forbidden life. And noticed by no one, I droop, Into the cold and boggy refuge, Greeted by the friendly rustle Of autumn’s fleeting moments.

•

S E L F - C R E A T I O N ,

C R E A T I O N

O F

C U L T U R E

•

45

I am happy for this harsh insult. And in a life like a dream, I envy everyone secretly And am secretly in love with everyone.

V ogromnom omute prozrahno i temno, I tomnoe okno beleet A serdceóothego tak medlenno ono I tak uporno tq'eleet? To vse[ tq'est;[ ono idet ko dnu, Soskuhivwis; po milom ile, To, kak solominka, minuq glubinu, Naverx vsplyvaet bez usilij. S pritvornoj ne'nost;[ u izgolov;q stoj I sam sebq vs[ 'izn; ba[kaj, Kak nebylice[, svoej tomis; toskoj I laskov bud; s nadmennoj skukoj. In the vast pond it’s transparent and dark, And a languid window shows white; But the heart—why does it so slowly And stubbornly grow heavy? First it sinks with all its weight, Grown homesick for the dear silt, Then, like a straw, it bypasses the depths And effortlessly rises to the top. Stand by the bedside with pretended tenderness And sing yourself lullabies all life long, Yearn with your make-believe longing And be gentle with haughty ennui.

Kiril Taranovsky and Omry Ronen have argued for this pond as an early incarnation of the “Judaic chaos” that Mandelstam seeks to escape in The Noise of Time (POM, 88); and indeed the same ambivalence that marks his response to his family past in the autobiography also shapes the movement of these poems.26 But the topoi that govern these lyrics would already be familiar to the reader of Stone, at least in its final, and fullest, incarnation.27 Stone begins with a fall that hints at violations of taboos, and a new, forbidden life. The fallen fruit’s motion is reversed in these lyrics; rising, not falling, constitutes the poet’s transgression, his abandonment of dear and dangerous roots. Indeed, his successive incarnations as a reed and then a straw seem designed to illustrate both the dangers and the possibilities of rootlessness. Mandelstam’s reversal of his first fall indicates how difficult it is for him, or any poet for that matter, to break free and discover a wholly new

46

•

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

point of departure; and what obstructs him here is the ambivalence that takes the shape of an apparently endless series of rises and returns. The poems themselves embody opposing, apparently irreconcilable forces. The first revolves around the centrifugal powers of a seductive and forbidden outside world, while the second centers on the centripetal pull that emanates from the pond itself. “From an evil, miry pond” begins unequivocally enough: the pond is wholly evil, and the poet is wholly free of it. He is literally a “grown-up,” vzroslyi, a reed that has completely emerged from its sources.28 He possesses at last a fully independent “I”: “I grew up” (Ja vyros; my italics). This reed-self is itself highly derivative, though. It is descended from the “thinking reed” that Tiutchev had borrowed in turn from Blaise Pascal, and its “grumbling” speech, Tiutchev warns us, serves only to sever it from nature’s “common chorus.”29 Speech is a dangerous force in Mandelstam’s early verse as well. The self of this lyric, though, is troubled more by its body than its voice. It is drawn from its native element by sensual love; it yearns for a forbidden world “passionately, languidly and tenderly.” The poet’s body, “so single, so my own” is intimately linked to Mandelstam’s vision of poetic creation from the start, and this singular, physical self will prove to be the building block on which he shapes first an Acmeist “biological” poetics (CPL, 132) and finally world culture itself; in “Conversation about Dante,” Mandelstam celebrates the “youthful, animal appetite,” the “sensual lust after rhyme” that inspired the Divine Comedy (CPL, 399). And the “sensual lust” that impels the young poet of “From an evil, miry pond” does literally inspire him. It moves him to “breath forbidden life,” and breathing can be as in “I’ve been given a body,” the first step toward the shaping of new art. 30 It is precisely for this reason that the body and its impulses are dangerous to the poem’s would-be grown-up; they draw him from his element. Perhaps this is why the Mandelstam of “Silentium” commands his Aphrodite to remain unborn; in this way he can keep the love that moves all things from propelling him into an illicit, forbidding new life. And in the second stanza of “From an evil, miry pond,” the poet shrinks from this forbidden air: “And, noticed by no one, I droop,/Into the cold and boggy refuge.” The phrase “noticed by no one” carries a double weight and pulls in two directions at once. The reed, like the earlier pattern shaped by the poet’s breath, remains unrecognized by the world outside his “little kingdom” (#9). His love for the outside world—be it the Russian world, the world of poetry, or the forbidden world of gentile culture generally—is unrequited and so he withdraws it. The phrase also evokes the furtiveness of a child who tastes forbidden fruits and hides before his trespass can be discovered. It suggests that the poet himself still abides by the taboos of his cheerless home, which deny him the other life he longs for but also shield him from its threat. Even acoustically this line suggests that the vaunted, grown-up self of the opening stanza is on the verge of dissolution. Variants of the negative

•

S E L F - C R E A T I O N ,

C R E A T I O N

O F

C U L T U R E

•

47

particles ne and ni echo throughout the line: “I niknu, nikem nezamechannyi.” This sound patterning, with its persistent ns, ks and is, returns us to the opening stanza’s hapless self-as-reed, trostinkoi, and reminds us that at its heart lies the very antithesis of self, nikto, no one. Born of mud, the poet cannot or will not complete the breath that would make him whole and human, like a perverse Adam who clings to the familiar earth and refuses the gift of life. The rest of the poem is colored by an acute, clear-sighted ambivalence. The pond is no more attractive than before—it is cold and marshy—and yet it offers refuge from a world that the poet fears will not have him. Safely back in his subterranean home, this latter-day underground man is defined and paralyzed by his irreconcilable polarities of feeling. He is suspended between envy and love for the unseen other to whom he is drawn, and his ambivalence traps him in an “uncreated world” (#25) that is a nightmare inversion of the pure and boundless potentiality Mandelstam invokes in “Silentium.” “Heart, be ashamed of heart,” Mandelstam admonishes his nascent self in “Silentium”; and the heart he addresses in that poem is, like the body of the “evil pond,” the force that propels him toward individual identity and away from fusion with life’s sources. The heart that takes the place of the poet’s self in “In the vast pond” symbolizes, though, a very different kind of impulse. Its function is not just metonymical; it is also a realized metaphor, a “heavy heart,” a “sinking heart,” or even a sui generis “heart of stone.” Such combinations are not uncommon in Russian. The idiom “a stone on the heart” is equivalent to our “heavy-hearted”; and Mandelstam himself speaks of a “heart dead as a stone” in a humorous poem of 1921 (#459). The English adage that the poem illustrates best, though, is perhaps “home is where the heart is”; the entire poem works to demonstrate that the pond’s hold on the poet is not wholly negative. This pool’s darkness is also a source of light; it is transparent, and in it a “languid window shows white.” But the poet’s heart chooses not to take this escape route into a longed-for other world (and the “languid window” echoes the “languid” yearnings that had pulled him earlier toward forbidden life). “Why does the heart so stubbornly grow heavy?” Mandelstam asks, and the second stanza suggests both what the heart gains in remaining at home and what it loses by leaving. “There is joy in heaviness/And in falling there is vacillating sweetness,” Mandelstam confesses in another early lyric (#508); and this poem’s heart is clearly drawn to the pool’s depths not by gravity or fear alone. Whenever it ventures to the water’s surface, it misses the “dear silt” that is its source and that pulls it homeward once more. A later poem makes relatives of “heaviness and tenderness”: “Sisters—heaviness and tenderness—your features are the same” (1920; #108). In “In the vast pond,” the poet’s tenderness for his sources serves, at least potentially, as the “specific gravity” that unites all beings in “The Morning of Acmeism” (1913; CPL, 63). Part of the burden of being, the poem suggests, lies in accepting

48

•

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

the self you were born with, in establishing relations with this self that are, like Villon’s, guarded but “tender (nezhen)” (CPL, 56; II, 305). “The power to love and to recognize is given,” another poem warns, “to mortals” alone, that is, to those who embrace the burden of human being (#113). The stanza’s closing lines hint at the cost of failing to take up this burden, of abandoning the “dear silt” for the surface: “Then, like a straw, it bypasses the depths,/And effortlessly rises to the top.” This straw might be the earlier poem’s reed torn from its roots; weightless and lifeless, it cannot govern its own movements. The heart that, like a stone, is pinioned to the pond’s bottom by its own weight, is in danger of becoming mere lifeless matter; but the heart that is utterly unattached is condemned by its very weightlessness to yet another kind of death-in-life. In “Sisters—heaviness and tenderness,” Mandelstam unites air and water in the vessel of his own body: “I drink the troubled air like dark water.” He also finds a pattern that unites the rhythms of rising and falling that oppose each other in the pond poems. He finds in the rose that grows from and returns to earth an emblem of the “eternal recurrence” that signifies, in its distinctively Mandelstamian variant, the poet’s capacity to remember and remake both his own and human history. He can thus lift the “burden of time,” which is also the gravity of human being, with its double knot of tenderness and weight.31 Ambivalence, warring forces, shifting energies held in check by the poet’s body writ large—these are the essence of the culture that Mandelstam the Acmeist will build on the self he has been given. The poet of “In the vast pond” has yet to master the shifting rhythms of his ungovernable heart, though. He can neither reconcile them nor choose between them, and this ambivalence once again fixes him in a netherworld, neither here nor there. In the poem’s final stanza, he condemns himself to a travesty version of the “enchanting duet” Villon sings with himself as both “mother and child” (CPL, 56): “Stand by the bedside with pretended tenderness/ And sing yourself lullabies all life long.” The poem ends on the same note of helpless self-consciousness that concludes “From an evil, miry pond.” The poet is trapped in a half-life, but he cannot or will not choose between worlds. His paralyzing self-awareness goes even further than it had in the earlier poem. In the final stanza he apparently addresses the observer self who contemplates the rise and fall of its own heart. This self, in turn, lulls what seems to be another, newborn self (“And sing yourself lullabies”) in a life “like a dream.” Even grammatically, the personal pronoun that should stand for the poet’s self is suggested only by surrogates, by forms that refer back to an implied but absent subject: sam, sebia, svoei. Mandelstam thus condemns the myth of self-generation he had earlier embraced; here it leads only to an endlessly reflexive, artificial state, in which self, born of self, has only itself to address. In “From an evil, miry pond,” Mandelstam defines the forbidden life he desires but is denied only in terms of his longing for it. A poem of the

•

S E L F - C R E A T I O N ,

C R E A T I O N

O F

C U L T U R E

•

49

following year, “The cloudy air is damp and resonant” (1911; #22), hints at the nature of the other life whose insults he both courts and flees: I opqt; k ravnoduwnoj othizne Dikoj utkoj vzov;etsq uprekó Q uhastvu[ v sumrahnoj 'izni I nevinen, hto q odinok! And once again to an unfeeling fatherland A reproach soars up like a wild duck— I take part in a twilight life And I’m not to blame that I’m alone!

Mandelstam’s defiance here, as the rest of the poem reveals, is fleeting and unsuccessful, but suggestive. The young poet clearly yearns to be adopted by the “unfeeling fatherland” that spurns him. He longs to exchange his lonely “twilight life” for the right to take part in another kind of life, one totally unlike the half-lit, uncertain existence that “stuns” him with its “reflected double being.” The “light cross” that the poet bears elsewhere in the lyric suggests one route that Mandelstam will take as he works his way into his adopted fatherland and thence into Western, Christian culture. In the grandest and most ambitious variant of his master plot, he will conflate his own emergence from “Judaic chaos” into Western culture with the emergence of Christianity itself from its Jewish roots, the emergence that marked, as he sees it, the beginnings of true European culture (CPL, 92). In the early poems of Stone, though, both fall and redemption are played out in tentative, almost parodic form: the fall is “cautious,” and the cross is “light.” This fall and resurrection, moreover, lack a public. They go unnoticed by the fatherland for whom they are performed, and are instead staged and restaged by a lonely poet who plays all parts, including that of audience. “We do not wish to amuse ourselves with a stroll through a ‘forest of symbols,’ ” Mandelstam proclaims in “The Morning of Acmeism,” and he already confidently speaks both for himself and for “those like him” (1913; CPL, 63). The poet of 1911 had yet to emerge from the forest that is both his personal and his poetic inheritance. He is still in the process of uncovering the poetic strategies that would give him access to his coveted fatherland and longed-for fraternity of world culture.

LIMITLESS FISSION The moment comes in the life of every person when, as a child, he suddenly says: “The table—and I,” “The cat—and I,” “The ball— and I,” then, as an adult: “The world—and I.” —Mikhail Kuzmin, “On Beautiful Clarity” (1910)

50

•

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

The way in which I create myself is by means of a quest: I go out to the other in order to come back with a self. —Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) Item nothing to the Foundlings It’s the lostlings that I have to help. —François Villon, Grand Testament (1461)

Modernism, Edward Said observes, “was a response to the crisis of what could be called filiation—linear, biologically grounded process, that which ties children to their parents—which produced the counter-crisis within modernism of affiliation, that is, those creeds, philosophies and visions reassembling the world in new non-familial ways.” One might borrow Said’s terms to describe the dilemma Mandelstam faces in the early verse: the young poet has not yet learned to convert what he has inherited through filiation into a source for the modernist affiliations he desires. I use the term “young poet” here advisedly, for these remarks demand to be qualified: Mandelstam the novice poet remains baffled by problems that Mandelstam the budding essayist has already tackled and largely resolved. In his prose of the twenties, Nadezhda Mandelstam observes, Mandelstam was “defining his place in life”; this place, once found, permitted him to recover and redefine his poet’s voice. Her observation holds for the early prose as well. The young poet still wanders through the unpeopled landscapes of his early lyrics while the essayist is busy mapping out the means by which he can enter the society that surrounds him, inherit its history, and shape from his new-found present and past a poetic community that defies the bounds of space and time.32 “The first literary meeting is irreparable,” Mandelstam warns in The Noise of Time (POM, 127). Mandelstam himself was fortunate in the literary meeting he commemorates in his earliest essay, “François Villon” (1910). He could scarcely have made a better choice of precursors than “the incomparable Villon, François,” whom he celebrates in a late poem— his work is virtually framed by tributes to the French poet—and in whom he finds a “contemporary,” a “friend,” and “favorite relation” (CPL, 58, 222; #382). A great deal depends on such friendships for a young poet in search of a viable self and a usable past. The right literary friendship, T. S. Eliot explains, turns “a bundle of second-hand sentiments” not just “into a person,” but into a person possessed of a genuine past: “It gives us an introduction to the society in which our friend moves . . . we have been quickened, and we become bearers of a tradition.”33 He might be summarizing the lessons Mandelstam learns and the gifts he receives at the hands of the “thief and poet” François Villon (CPL, 57). Jane Gary Harris suggests that “François Villon,” rooted far more deeply than later essays in biographical and historical fact, may derive from Mandelstam’s student days at Heidelberg.34 Certainly the essay demonstrates a thorough familiar-

•

S E L F - C R E A T I O N ,

C R E A T I O N

O F

C U L T U R E

•

51

ity with the particulars of Villon’s life and writings—but the student abroad may also be seeking a new way home through Villon. In giving shape to the late-medieval writer’s life and times, Mandelstam is apparently trying to find a paradigm or program for his own self-creation. That Mandelstam leaves his own life and writing scrupulously out of the picture should not surprise us by now—but we should also not be surprised to find elements of his biographical master plot at work in “François Villon.” What “François Villon” gives us in fact is the first full-fledged version of Mandelstam’s inventively reshaped autobiography: An outcast, cursed with an unlikely past, both personal and poetic, turns this curse into a blessing as he takes on a turbulent age by way of his linguistic gifts. This, Mandelstam implicitly tells us, is exactly how a poet’s remade biography ought to read. At the outset of his essay, Mandelstam speaks of the miraculous convergence of “voice timbre and biography” that makes Villon the unwitting twin of his distant literary descendant and fellow poète maudit Paul Verlaine (1844–96) (CPL, 53). Mandelstam points here to the procedures he will use to make Villon his own double and brother, as the biographical outlines of one self-made poet converge with those of another across the centuries. And Mandelstam proceeds to read his own plight backward into his precursors’ pasts. Both Villon and Verlaine, Mandelstam claims, did battle with various forms of Symbolism avant la lettre: “Each poet was fated to emerge in an epoch of artificial, hothouse poetry; thus just as Verlaine destroyed the serres chaudes [hothouses] of Symbolism, so Villon rejected the call of the reigning rhetorical school that might be properly considered the Symbolism of the fifteenth century” (CPL, 53). Mandelstam’s reading of French literary history is idiosyncratic, to say the least. Verlaine’s work is usually taken to mark the beginnings of Symbolism, not its end; and Villon’s life and work were embraced as models by Romantics and Symbolists alike, who saw in him the prototype for their own version of the poet-outcast as “demonic” criminal. Mandelstam thus trumps his Russian poetic parents by stripping them of their own adoptive forefathers.35 This is not, however, Mandelstam’s chief goal in creating parallels between his precursors’ fate and his own, as other early essays demonstrate. The André Chénier of his “Remarks on Chénier” (1914) is engaged in a struggle with reigning poetic norms that recall Mandelstam’s battles with his Symbolist legacy in the early verse, as his Chénier flees the “empty, transparent ponds (omuty)” of neoclassical poetics in search of “the living water of poetry” (CPL, 75–76; II, 293). The Chaadaev of “Petr Chaadaev” (1915) does not do battle with some form of proto-Symbolism; he does, however, forge his “personality” through his efforts to reconcile the chaos he inherits from a historyless Russia with a Europe “petrified” by its excess of tradition (CPL, 83–89). Villon’s Middle Ages are preoccupied with a similar struggle. For medieval society, Mandelstam claims in “The Morning of Acmeism” (1913), “completely unadorned personal existence” was “valued as a heroic feat,” which bound all people in the “com-

52

•

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

plicity of those who exist in a conspiracy against emptiness and nonbeing” (CPL, 64). In his essays Mandelstam uncovers his comrades-in-arms through a shared battle for being against the two demons, fixed and lifeless forms versus vital chaos, that haunt the early verse. He selects his own society from among those for whom existence is not given but achieved. What Mandelstam effects through this dispersion of his biography is a new kind of existence, existence as the “event” of “shared being (sobytie bytiia)” in Mikhail Bakhtin’s evocative pun.36 These remarks may suggest that invention far outweighs remembrance in Mandelstam’s early essays, that his portraits of the past serve the needs of the uprooted modernist far better than they do historical accuracy. Certainly Villon’s “obscure biography” (CPL, 56) lends itself to the inventive revision Mandelstam recommends for the gaps in Petr Chaadaev’s life and writings: “Let us attempt to develop [Chaadaev’s] Philosophical Letters as if they were a negative photographic plate” (CPL, 56, 86). The Villon of Mandelstam’s essay, moreover, invites just such imaginative mishandling; he himself abandons all moral scruples in quest of the experience that will feed both his personal and his poetic needs. Villon himself, as Mandelstam presents him, appears to grant his latter-day interlocutor license to ransack the past and to use or abuse its contents as he sees fit. Such wholesale reinvention of the past would defeat Mandelstam’s own poetic purposes, though; it would leave him stranded in a fancy-dress version of the Symbolist sollipsism he seeks to escape in the early verse. Mandelstam’s choice of Villon as the unlikely patriarch of his literary family tree testifies not only to the soundness of the historical sense that leads him throughout his work to precisely that source which will best serve his poetic ends. It also demonstrates the ways in which he manages time and again to tie himself to a larger modernist community by way of his personal quest for a new tradition. Villon was among the poetic grandfathers, or rather great-great-grandfathers, that rebellious modernist children were quick to claim as their own. He became the patron saint of a European avant-garde in search of past poetic rebels whom they could use as models for their calculatedly outrageous behavior in art and life. One such rebel, Guillaume Apollinaire, was the author of a “Futurist Anti-Tradition” (1913) as scandalous as any Russian Futurist’s assault on public taste; he nonetheless acknowledges Villon as the greatest of his own masters taken from “far in the past.” More to the point, perhaps, Villon was a favorite of both Eliot and Pound, who return to him repeatedly in their poetry and prose; and Pound in particular was drawn to Villon for reasons that are close to Mandelstam’s own.37 Pound, like Mandelstam, was a student of early French literature, and his essay on Villon, in The Spirit of Romance, also dates from 1910. In another early essay, Pound announces his new-found “world citizenship” and demands his rights as a self-proclaimed “heir of the ages.” Chief among these rights is the privilege of discarding unwanted American poetic precursors

•

S E L F - C R E A T I O N ,

C R E A T I O N

O F

C U L T U R E

•

53

in favor of “more congenial ancestry—Dante, Shakespeare, Theocritus, Villon.” The very title of Pound’s essay on Villon suggests one element of the medieval poet’s modern appeal: it is “Montcorbier, alias Villon” (italics in original). Mandelstam’s summary of Villon’s biography adds yet another name to this dual christening; he speaks of one “François de Montcorbier (or François des Loges)” who only gradually became the François Villon who signs his name to the Petit and Grand Testaments (CPL, 54). Both Pound and Mandelstam stress the necessary self-creation that went into the making of the François Villon whose heritage they claim.38 The names that Pound and Mandelstam cite are historically accurate; Villon presumably took the names of Montcorbier and des Loges from his parents, of whom nothing is known, only to discard them in favor of the name of the priest who later adopted him, Guillaume de Villon. More importantly, though, both Pound and Mandelstam point in their writings on Villon to what proved to be his most important legacy to later French poetry. What is distinctive in Villon’s work is his ability to negotiate between the self he was given by history and nature, the self he creates in his writing, and the larger social world these selves inhabit; and he achieves this through creation of a capacious, innovative “poetic ‘I.’ ” “Villon’s poetic ‘I’ ” Nancy Freeman Regalado explains, “is dramatically plunged into a world of historical time, space, and identity,” and he thus manages to take the whole “world of experience into his poetry”; “he fused lyric feeling and expression of lived experience within the lyric itself by characterizing his poetic ‘I’ fully in terms of historical experience and naming it ‘Villon.’ ” Hugh Kenner observes that all Pound’s early lyrics pose one implicit, unresolved question: “Who am I?” Small wonder, then, that a dispossessed modernist, anxious to ground a newly shaped self in a history likewise reconceived, should take for his model “one François Villon, ballad-lord and thief.”39 “I intend to cut off no one/In this present dispensation,” Villon writes in his Grand Testament. “But don’t let word of this leak out/Beyond the borders of France.” The very form his greatest works take, though, invites creative appropriation by foreigners and natives, “lostlings” and “foundlings” alike. As their names suggest, the Petit and Grand Testaments (1456, 1461) are designed as his ironic legacy to the ages, in which the impoverished outlaw’s possessions are “put up for grabs.” The value of such a legacy may seem dubious—the would-be testator owns only a handful of change, as he himself admits—but what Villon offers the dispossessed modernist in search of self and history is far more valuable than such inventories suggest. Villon’s biography and writings are object lessons in acquiring through language what one wants and lacks in life. His Grand Testament, his “monument for the ages,” is an ironic testimonial to his skill in poetry and thievery alike. It is a litany of stolen goods received and bequeathed through language. “As a poet,” Mandelstam writes, he “ironi-

54

•

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

cally assert[ed] his mastery over all those things he would like to own”: “A pitiful vagabond, he attained for himself unattainable goods aided only by his sharp irony” (CPL, 56–58). Such procedures would undoubtably appeal to modern poets convinced that their only route to tradition was to beg, borrow, or steal the history they required from unwitting poetic precursors. “I await an inheritance and am no one’s heir,” Villon announces in one of his Ballades; he might be speaking for either of his self-proclaimed descendants.40 The Villons of Pound’s and Mandelstam’s essays share a great deal, and their similarities—specificity, concreteness, a commitment to this world and to its speech—point to the congruences that would emerge between Acmeism and its Anglo-American cousin, the Imagist movement that developed under Pound’s direction. Mandelstam’s essay, however, is far more concerned than Pound’s with the specifics of Villon’s self and life as revealed in his art, as Mandelstam works to answer questions left open by the early verse. Let us turn, now, in more detail to the implicit self-portrait of the artist that lies hidden behind Mandelstam’s depiction of his adopted kinsman, François Villon. “There is absolutely no basis for ascribing to [the poet] characteristics of spontaneous generation (samorozhdeniia),” Mandelstam declares in “On the Interlocutor” (1913; CPL, 73; II, 240); and his Villon is carefully rooted in the time and place that gave him birth. Like his biographer, this Villon is the product of an age in transition. “The last born child of the Middle Ages” (CPL, 59) was born into a France that was itself in the process of being reborn as the Renaissance, a France that had been, moreover, impoverished and disrupted by English rule. “From childhood on I’ve been poor/Of poor and obscure origins,” Villon laments in the Grand Testament.41 Mandelstam’s essay makes clear that such poverty may actually be a blessing in disguise. From birth Villon is bound to his city and nation precisely by their common wants: “The indigence that surrounded [Villon’s] cradle matched the nation’s misfortune and, in particular, the misfortune of the capital,” Mandelstam observes (CPL, 54). In an inversion of the fairy-tale formula, misfortune becomes for the impoverished outcast a kind of unlikely fairy godmother, who presents him in his cradle with the neediness that reveals his true genealogy. “How well I know,” Villon admits in his Testaments, “that I am not the son of an angel”; and Mandelstam, the reluctant heir of otherworldly Symbolists, quotes his remarks approvingly (CPL, 60). Villon’s acceptance both of what he is and is not leaves him free, paradoxically, to recreate himself as the occasion and his poet’s calling demand. I have mentioned already the adoption by Guillaume de Villon that led him to abandon his family name. This was only the first of a series of strategic self-transformations. “In the Middle Ages,” Mandelstam writes, “people loved to think of themselves as children of the city, of the church, of the university” (CPL, 55). Villon—who was born a child of the city and became a child of the church as a clergyman’s foster

•

S E L F - C R E A T I O N ,

C R E A T I O N

O F

C U L T U R E

•

55

son and a child of the university through his haphazard studies—becomes a child of his age by way of these multiple adoptions. In Mandelstam’s early verses, the poet who finds himself poised “on the threshold of a double being” is paralyzed by his own uncertain position.42 The same marginality invigorates Villon, and his multiple citizenships held in different worlds and different kinds of being become the source of the dynamism that Mandelstam celebrates in his precursor and seeks to release in himself. Villon, who lacks “traditional bonds with the past,” is placed by his adoption within society proper, and by his birth and proclivities beyond its pale (CPL, 59). He uses this freedom from the past and his sui generis position, though, to create “an intricate network of acquaintances, connections, and reckonings,” “a composite of brillant complexity”: “This man contrived to establish vital, fundamental relationships with enormous numbers of people of the most varied backgrounds, from every rung on the social ladder—thieves to bishops, barmaids to princes” (CPL, 57–58). The later poems of Stone bear witness to the diligence with which the pupil has attended to his master’s lessons. In these poems, the modernist writer, like his medieval teacher, lays claim to a whole range of experience, drawn from both past and present, from home and abroad, from every kind of art and walk of life. He creates his own complex and brilliant network, where Beethoven and Bach, Dickens, Socrates, Ovid, and Akhmatova all meet in a world that offers not only tennis, ice cream, and silent films, but Byzantine churches, bronze horsemen, and Scythian bullock-carts. The relationship between morality and free will that preoccupies Mandelstam in “Petr Chaadaev” and “Pushkin and Skriabin” (1915) surfaces in this essay only at moments.43 Mandelstam is careful, though, to distinguish his favorite’s “amoralism” from the Romantic and Symbolist cult of Villon the demonic outlaw (CPL, 59). “I think that Villon was captivated,” he writes, “not by demonism, but by the dynamics of transgression (dinamika prestupleniia),” and his emphasis on the energy generated by his precursor’s misdeeds points to what he himself seeks to learn from this “comfortingly sinful singer” (CPL, 58; II, 307; #382). “Might there not be some inverse ratio between the moral and the dynamic development of the soul?” Mandelstam asks, and his question takes us back to problems that plague him in the early verse (CPL, 58). How is the young poet to develop the self he has been given? Can he unleash its energies without obliterating its outlines entirely? Villon, who made plans to rob his own uncle, who abandoned his given name and disgraced his adopted name, may have inspired his latter-day descendant to make a final leap of faith. The young poet who cannot free himself from the pull of his family tree may have found in Villon’s example the courage to complete his fall from grace, confident that he, too, will create new roots in his age; like his adoptive ancestor, he will succeed in adapting himself to his age and in shaping the age through his art. This dynamic amorality, however, presents Mandelstam with another set of

56

•

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

problems, at least potentially. Villon, so thoroughly imbued with the Gothic love of motion, turns out to have been “unreceptive to its ethical aspect, to its mutual guarantees” (CPL, 59). If the constraints of conscience or social obligation do not restrict Villon, what, if anything, can serve to check his ceaseless thievery, poetic and otherwise? The Symbolists, Mandelstam complains, were entranced by the apparently boundless powers of a “creative ‘I’ which confused its own boundaries with those of a newly discovered and fascinating world” (CPL, 157). How is his Villon, so taken with his own and his age’s many energies, to escape a similar fate? The poet’s “I,” Mandelstam insists in “On the Interlocutor,” is not born of itself alone, whatever the Symbolists may claim for their overgrown selves. It arises in dialogue with other selves, other “I”’s; and Mandelstam places this dialogue at the heart of the self-creation he envisions in “François Villon”: “The lyric poet is a hermaphrodite by nature, capable of limitless fission in the name of his inner dialogue. Nowhere is this ‘lyrical hermaphroditism’ so clearly expressed as in Villon’s work. What a varied selection of enchanting duets: the aggrieved and the comforter, the mother and child, the judge and the judged, the property-owner and the beggar” (CPL, 56). For all his endless duets with his many selves, Villon manages to avoid the reflexive self-absorption that imprisons the poet of Mandelstam’s early lyrics, for by his very generation of selves, he sets limits on his intimacy with any one of them: “Villon’s attitude to himself never exceeds certain limits of intimacy. He expresses no more tenderness, attentiveness, or concern for himself than a good lawyer would show his client” (CPL, 56). In “On the Interlocutor,” Mandelstam faults his Symbolist forebears for ignoring “the contractual relationship, the mutuality that attends the act of speaking” (CPL, 67). The legal and musical metaphors Mandelstam uses to describe Villon’s dialogues suggest the nature of these dialogues. In duets, as in courtroom dramas, each voice both responds to another voice and is restricted by its formal relationship to it—much as in “On the Interlocutor” a poet’s voice arises not of itself but in response to the summons of a still-undiscovered reader. Mandelstam’s fellow post-Symbolist, Mikhail Bakhtin, also saw the “I” as born in dialogue: “Because I live on the borders between my own subjectivity for myself and my status as object for others, I am able to cross this border and, in my imagination, see the other as subject and myself as object.”44 The dialogues of Mandelstam’s Villon begin within himself, or, more precisely, among his selves, and these selves, like Noah’s animals. come only in pairs. This means that each is both self and other, subject and object; the “abyss between subject and object” that Mandelstam’s Villon feels so strongly is bridged, but not abridged or denied (CPL, 57). Even the particular congregation of couples that Mandelstam finds assembled in Villon suggests a system of checks and balances by which the growth of any particular self can be monitered and contained. The first two

•

S E L F - C R E A T I O N ,

C R E A T I O N

O F

C U L T U R E

•

57

pairs—“aggrieved and comforter,” “mother and child”—bring to mind the poet as insulted and injured, the poet as his own parent at the end of “From an evil, miry pond” and “In the vast pond it’s transparent and dark.” These “tender” pairings, if left to themselves, might well fall into the early poems’ paralyzing self-pity. Villon’s selves, however, are bound together in a balance of power, and these couples are countered by pairings that come closer to duels than duets: “judge and judged,” “property-owner and beggar.” Thus, even within himself, or among his selves, Villon maintains that “living equilibrium” which sustained the medieval world at large according to Mandelstam (CPL, 65). In the early poems, Mandelstam is trapped with and by the very selves he generates in an unreal, “uncreated” world. Villon’s duets, on the other hand, derive from and are themselves in dialogue with the society around him, as the callings of his various selves suggest. His intricate inner world mirrors in miniature the complex social network he uncovers and develops in his age; and his self-revision and “limitless fission” are fitting responses to an epoch teetering on the brink of its own renascence. Villon’s creative force matches that of his nation and age in yet another way. He shares with his captive, captivating France and his hapless age a “feminine” temperament and fate. In his essay Mandelstam celebrates Villon’s “feminine nature, with its excitable temperament and its powerful sense of life’s rhythm.” His “feminine epoch” and that “true woman” France presumably draw power from the same sense of energy and motion (CPL 54, 57). The imagery is entirely appropriate for an endlessly fertile poet and his fruitful age—but it also reminds us of the “feminine” vitality that Mandelstam fails to tap in the early verse. “The woman of Gallic tradition,” Bakhtin claims in Rabelais and His World, “represents in person the undoing . . . of all that is finished, completed, and exhausted. She is the inexhaustible vessel of conception”; and his description takes us back to Mandelstam’s disembodied embodiment of unbounded creative energy, the oceanic Aphrodite of “Silentium.”45 Villon has learned to draw on this power both within himself and in his age. But this feminine nature is only half the story, both for the “hermaphroditic” Villon and for France itself. Images of generation, of masculine and feminine creativity conjoined, permeate the essay: the coming together of two nations, the invader England and a captive France who, like a “true woman,” flirts with her conquerer; the maternal Middle Ages who reluctantly cedes her children to a new era; and even the student mock-wedding of two signboards, the “She-Goat” and the “Bear,” in which Villon himself played a part (CPL, 54–58). Nations, ages, even species come together in the world Villon inhabits, and the pairings, in turn, that inhabit Villon are themselves the progeny or kin of the larger couplings of unlikes that surround him in his nation and his age. “Who am I? A double-dealer with a double soul,” Mandelstam announces in the “Slate Ode” (1923; #137). He had learned his master’s lessons well. The double being that had para-

58

•

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

lyzed him in Stone’s early verses becomes the essence of both individual poetic being and social, historical being for Villon’s adroit and gifted descendant. Villon responds creatively to the summons of his age and thus becomes his era’s interlocutor. He and his age become yet another of the essay’s fruitful pairings, another set of partners in dialogue, both limited and liberated by the presence of the other and bound by the contractual relationship that governs all such exchanges (CPL, 67). The essay’s chief pairing, though, is the crucial dialogue that engages the medieval poet with the modern age, the conversation that takes place between Villon and his “distant heir,” the poet Osip Mandelstam (CPL, 68). Villon’s reader, Mandelstam notes, “feels himself the poet’s contemporary,” and the modernist writer finds potential solutions to the problems that plague his early poetry in this conversation with his fifteenth-century contemporary (CPL, 58). These problems—static form versus vital essence, transformation versus permanence, individual identity versus community—become, under Villon’s tutelage, not paralyzing incompatibles, but productive pairings of opposites. They become the kind of unlikely couplings that animate both Villon and his age. The Mandelstam of “There’s nothing to talk about” (#11) can unleash his “dark, bestial (zverinaia) soul” only by dissolving the self that holds and inhibits its force. Villon, however, both nurtures and contains the “predatory lean little beast (zverek)”’ within him (CPL, 57; II, 306). To draw on the sea’s vitality, the poet of “Silentium” must relinquish speech itself, and with it all hope of community, while for Villon Paris itself becomes a sea whose energy he can tap in shaping his life and art (CPL, 55). Villon shows his latter-day disciple how to break free of the “fenced-in garden” of a poetry divorced from life while preserving the flower-self he nurtures in “I’ve been given a body” (CPL, 53). The plant that is firmly rooted in its age can be transplanted. It can cross the abyss between ages and survive its migration unharmed: “The passing moment can . . . endure the pressure of centuries and preserve itself intact, remaining forever the same ‘here and now.’ You need only know how to extract that ‘here and now’ from the soil of Time without harming its roots, or it will wither and die” (CPL 58). The Mandelstam of the early verse dreads the change that will efface his carefully crafted, static self and verse; this new version of poetic permanence, though, is achieved through ceaseless change: the passing moment changes hands and ages while remaining itself. And the poet who extracts this living moment from the past finds himself in possession not of the brittle shells of long-dead precursors, but of a living being capable of endless fission in the name of unending creation. This being, moreover, is not given but achieved. The poet must actively seek it out, and through his careful recovery of this inherited moment, he himself participates in its continued existence. He becomes, in Eliot’s phrase, the “bearer of a tradition.”

•

S E L F - C R E A T I O N ,

C R E A T I O N

O F

C U L T U R E

•

59

In “François Villon” Mandelstam is given a new kind of being by Villon—though it is a gift he must work to receive, indeed must help to create. This gift is not just a body of work. It is also the body of the poet himself, which cannot be separated from his work and which stands as a model of vital force both developed and contained. This body is not only Mandelstam’s, “so single, so his own”: it is also Villon’s and his age’s and the human body itself, being as such, “unadorned personal existence.” This body, in turn, serves as Mandelstam’s entryway into the social body of his own and other ages; it allows him to participate in the complex structures that these ages have built in their shared quest to conquer emptiness.

AKME AND ADAM In [William] Blake’s own Bible . . . the Poetic Genius, no longer dependent on myths of nature, creates perpetual Genesis in its own image. —Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet (1981) There is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography. —Paul Valéry, “Poetry and Abstract Thought” (1939)

Villon and his verse waited nearly five centuries before finding, Mandelstam implies, a fitting Russian reader in posterity, a reader equipped to uproot the medieval writer’s life and work and replant them in the fertile soul of early-twentieth-century Russian poetry. The essay in which Mandelstam recovers his poetic kinsman was destined, however, to suffer a fate similar to that of the poet it celebrated, although on a far smaller scale. Like Villon and Mandelstam himself, it did not come into the world with a place already prepared for it among those like it; it had to wait before reaching its true audience. “François Villon” found its proper home only three years after its composition, in the April 1913 issue of Apollon, where it was accompanied by Nikolai Gumilev’s translations from Villon’s Grand Testament; and its way had been paved by the Acmeist poem-manifestos, including Mandelstam’s own “Hagia Sophia” and “Notre Dame,” that had appeared in the preceding issue. Villon thus becomes his descendant’s contemporary in yet another sense through their shared debut as Acmeist poets. Gumilev, moreover, had already prepared a welcome for Mandelstam’s “favorite relation” in the manifesto published in the January 1913 issue of Apollon. In “The Precepts of Symbolism and Acmeism,” Villon was made an honorary ancestor of the fledgling movement, a “cornerstone” on which the “Acmeist building” would stand. Both Villon and his newfound friend, the author of “François Villon,” find a new home and a new community on the pages of Apollon and among those whose programs filled its

60

•

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

pages. Villon’s “here and now,” the “passing moment” that Mandelstam seeks to recover singlehandedly in his essay, becomes, in Gumilev’s manifesto, one of the four “moments” (the other three are Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Gautier) from which the Acmeist movement was born: “To unite within ourselves these four moments—this is the dream that joins together those who so boldly call themselves Acmeists.”46 Mandelstam’s quest to retrieve the past and revive its presence unites him with colleagues who also aim to live, as Eliot writes, “not merely in the present, but in the present moment of the past.” It was at this “moment in his life,” Nadezhda Mandelstam observes, that the solitary “I” of Osip Mandelstam “was linked by the pronoun ‘we’ with a group of others,” which “enabled his personality (lichnost’) to come into being.”47 Moments from past and present converge as the lonely stone joins at last in the “joyous cooperative action of those like it.” The first task of the critic, Mandelstam tells us in “Badger Hole” (1922), is to determine the poet’s “literary genesis,” his “ancestry and origins” (italics in original). The Acmeists, in their struggle to replace their Symbolist fathers and their fathers’ fathers, came up with new grandfathers and new “progenitors (rodonachal’niki).”48 But Mandel’stam’s kinship with the Acmeists was not based on shared genealogy alone. “In the face of nonbeing,” Gumilev proclaims in “The Precepts of Symbolism and Acmeism,” “all phenomena are brothers.” “To exist is the artist’s greatest pride. He desires no paradise other than being,” Mandelstam declares in “The Morning of Acmeism” (CPL, 61). For Sergei Gorodetsky, another of the group’s charter members, the only “ugliness” is the “formlessness” of whatever “is not fully incarnated (nedovoploshcheno)” and “fades between being and non-being.”49 Mandelstam thus finds companions and brethren in his battle with non-being in the present as well as in the past. The young poet’s solitary quest for existence has become part of a larger poetic program; it is at the heart of the artist’s mission as Mandelstam and his fellow Acmeists conceive it. Mandelstam joins forces with his fellow Acmeists to create the paradise that is being in poetry and on earth. “Acmeism is in essence mythopoeism,” Gumilev proclaims in the 1912 review that first christened the newborn movement; and the central myth of Acmeism, the myth that will counter Symbolist “chaos, Nirvana, emptiness,” is “the self-sufficient image, which has its own name, which develops through inner correspondence with itself.” Mandelstam’s Acmeist stone, itself the discoverer of the energies contained within it, might be an exemplar of this mythic image with its properties of wholeness, identity, and growth. Gumilev’s central myth is also akin to another, far older and grander legend, though, one that also deals with the creation of self-contained forms from chaos. This is the myth of Genesis, of first, divine creation and absolute originality. The myth governs the first beginnings of Acmeism itself, if we trace them back to the pages of Mikhail Kuzmin’s proto-Acmeist manifesto “On Beautiful Clarity” (1910). Kuzmin’s clarity

•

S E L F - C R E A T I O N ,

C R E A T I O N

O F

C U L T U R E

•

61

emerges, like God’s handiwork, from the “void,” from “darkness” (Genesis 1:2), or, more specifically, from the “chaos” of Symbolist poetry. The article itself begins by paraphrasing the opening passages of Genesis, as it sets the artist’s work in the light of God’s original labors: “When the hard elements were first joined together in dry land and moisture surrounded the earth and seas and flowed over it in rivers and lakes, then the earth first came forth from a state of chaos, over which blew the divine, dividing spirit. And then—by means of demarcations, clear furrows—this complex and beautiful world emerged, [which] artists strive to recognize, to see and imprint in their own way.” Acmeism’s founding myth leaves its traces in the alternate name that Gorodetsky and Gumilev propose for the new movement: Adamism. The task of the “new Adam,” the Acmeist, was not only, as Gumilev puts it, to fix “a manfully hard and clear gaze on life”—a gaze perhaps inspired by the divine spirit that first brought forth firmness from flux. It was also, Gorodetsky writes, to “name the world’s names, and in so doing to summon all creation from damp and dusk into transparent air.” In his poem “Adam,” published in the March 1913 issue of Apollon, Gorodetsky bids farewell to “captivating dampness and primordial mist.” The Acmeists-as-Adamists, who relate the birth of the young movement to the genesis of the human race itself, who follow divine and primal inspiration in their creation from chaos, could call all language, creation, and human history their rightful property, and humanity as such becomes their proper family.50 The young Acmeists, Viktor Zhirmunsky writes, experienced “a certain duality vis-à-vis the tradition that had shaped their age.” He far understates the case. In naming and creating themselves, the Acmeists stake out two ambitious, contradictory claims by way of their double christening. If Adam represents the first of all beginnings, Acmeism is, as Gumilev instructs us, derived from the Greek akme, “the highest degree of something, the flower, a flourishing time,” “the prime of all powers, spiritual and physical.” As Acmeists, the poets are rooted in history and represent the crowning achievement of a long and venerable tradition, and the history they inherit is presumably the one that begins, like their name, in ancient Greece. As Acmeists they build on the legacy left by the past and are indebted to those who precede them. In his manifesto, Gumilev is not only a rebel proclaiming Symbolism’s downfall: “Symbolism has come full circle in its development and is now in decline.” He is also a dutiful son who respectfully solves the problems set him by his Symbolist schoolmaster-parent: “To be a worthy successor to what has gone before it, [Acmeism] must accept its inheritance and answer all the questions it poses. The glory of our ancestors obliges us, and Symbolism was a worthy father.” Both titles of Gumilev’s manifesto—“Acmeism and the Precepts of Symbolism” was later reprinted as “The Symbolist Legacy and Acmeism”—reveal his acute awareness of the past’s burdens even as he sets out to challenge them. In “The Life of Verse” (1910), an essay that prefigures his Acmeist endeavors,

62

•

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

Gumilev ruefully concludes that “we cannot avoid being Symbolists now. This is not a summons, not a desire, but simply a fact that I have verified.”51 Adam’s only ancestor, on the other hand, is God himself. Human time is born with the first man, and human history commences with his fall. There is no past to burden unfallen Adam. God’s work is his sole model for creation, and Adam, authorized by God and formed in his image, is both creature and fellow creator: “And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof” (Gen. 2:19). The very title of Mandelstam’s manifesto, “The Morning of Acmeism” (my italics), suggests not only repetition, the dawn of a new day that follows, all the same, in the wake of countless mornings and will be followed in its turn by countless other dawns and days. It also hints at the quintessential newness that accompanied the first creation. God’s first invention is, after all, morning: “And darkness was on the face of the deep. . . . And God said, Let there be light” (Gen. 1:2–3).52 The Acmeists, Zhirmunsky claims, set out to surmount the “restless chaos of the [Symbolist] epoch that preceded them.” An Acmeist, enmeshed in history, might reluctantly acknowledge his aesthetic legacy: “We appreciate that the Symbolists pointed out the symbol’s significance in art,” Gumilev admits in his manifesto. The Adamist denies this inheritance entirely. This same symbol, Gumilev warns elsewhere, leads only to confusion in art and life. The Symbolist legacy of chaos, translated into the language of Genesis, precedes all creation; it comes before Adam and his names. “No poet since Adam,” Harold Bloom remarks, “speaks a language free of the one wrought by his precursors.” The Acmeists-as-Adamists strive for precisely this kind of poetic priority. The Symbolist verse that sought to transcend speech is made, through the agency of Genesis, to precede speech, and language is born, with Acmeism, from Symbolist chaos. “Then the world first came forth from a state of chaos,” Kuzmin writes of the creation that is his model. “To name, to know, to tear the covers/Of empty mysteries and ancient mist” is the “first feat” of Gorodetsky’s Adam, and the task of Russia’s new Adams is to “name the world’s names, and in so doing to summon all creation from damp and dusk into transparent air.” “Acmeism,” Boris Eikhenbaum observes, “is modernism’s last word.” In the young poets’ language, he continues, the speech of their Symbolist forefathers reaches its akme, its peak. The Acmeists-as-Adamists, however, follow only chaos, and human speech is theirs alone.53 Adam and Acme together represent “a kind of alpha and omega: a primal beginning and a final ripeness.”54 “We will prove our rightness,” Mandelstam proclaims, “in such a way that in answer to us the entire chain of cause and effect, from alpha to omega, will shudder” (CPL, 65). The Acmeists-as-Adamists, at once cause and effect, sense both the weight of history and its liberating absence. The Acmeists struggle to supplant their immediate precursors and to replace their fathers with more sympathetic, more comfortably distant ancestors. The Adamists, on the other hand,

•

S E L F - C R E A T I O N ,

C R E A T I O N

O F

C U L T U R E

•

63

make cause and effect “shudder” by becoming in effect their own fathers, for all humanity descends from Adam. The Symbolist legacy is subverted and the descendant becomes the father of the movement it follows. The Acmeists-as-Adamists also manage to outdo, in theory at least, their poetic brethren and rival “myth-creators,” the Futurists. Mandelstam strips them of their vaunted “word as such (slovo kak takovoe)” in “The Morning of Acmeism” and accuses them of the cardinal sin for any avant-garde innovator: instead of forging new paths, he charges, they are merely “repeating the crude mistakes of their [Symbolist] precursors.” He turns to a more recent myth of origination, to evolution, as he stakes his claim for an Acmeism that is more progressive and original than any pseudo-creation proposed by misnamed Futurists: “If, for the Futurists, the word as such is still down on its knees creeping, in Acmeism it has for the first time assumed a dignified upright position and entered the Stone Age of its existence” (my italics; CPL, 62). No matter what challenges Symbolists or Futurists may contrive for them, the Acmeists, by virtue of their superior mythmaking, retain poetic priority as practitioners of the first truly human creation—or so Mandelstam’s myth-in-miniature proclaims.55 Acmeism is, of course, the name by which the new movement finally came to be known. It is the name that survived in the minds and writings of Akhmatova, Gumilev, and Mandelstam long after Acmeism proper had ceased to exist. In a post factum manifesto of 1922, “On the Nature of the Word,” Mandelstam insists on the vitality of a movement whose members had long since scattered, whose Russia had vanished, and whose leader had been among the first casualities of the new regime.56 He revises the Acmeist past even as he asserts its presence, though, and the movement’s other name falls victim to his changes. “Gorodetsky,” he charges, “attempted to inoculate Acmeism with his literary world view, ‘Adamism,’ a form of doctrine of a new earth and a new Adam.” His efforts, Mandelstam insists, were unsuccessful—yet Mandelstam’s new description of Acmeism still draws indirectly on its Adamist heritage. The “manly will” that is, he says, Acmeism’s moving force is a direct descendant of Adamism’s “manly gaze” fixed on a reawakened world. Mandelstam stresses the group’s newness, the “new tastes” that reshape the world and place humans firmly at its center (CPL, 130). Gorodetsky’s unsavory later history—he became Acmeism’s “first apostate”57 and denounced Gumilev after his death—may have led Mandelstam to erase the traces of his early influence on the group. More importantly, the Acmeist task of recalling the past must have seemed far more urgent than Adamist newness in the wake of a revolution that claimed to have overthrown all history. The Adamist legacy of a primal, human force that converts the past to new presence survives just the same, concealed beneath another name. For the young Mandelstam, both Akme and Adam point a way out of the tremulous half-life of the early poetry and into a full-fledged “paradise” of being. In his review of the 1916 version of Stone, Gumilev recognizes

64

•

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

the Mandelstamian master plot at work behind this collection’s seeming impersonality: he traces in this poetic “tale of a developing spirit” a movement from “pre-being” into history, vitality, and the “human I.” This tale dovetails neatly with the mythologized history of Acmeism itself, as given in its manifestos; and Stone’s turning point, set by Gumilev at 1912, coincides with the group’s first christening.58 Mandelstam anticipates the direction of his own poetic growth and the principles of the nascent Acmeist movement in his early essay on Villon; and his myths of origination converge with those of Acmeism first tacitly, in the manifestos, and then explicitly, in Gumilev’s review. The two-year gap between Mandelstam’s theory, the discoveries he makes by way of Villon, and his poetic practice is perhaps akin to the gap that separates the essay’s composition from its publication. As Mandelstam observes in “The Morning of Acmeism,” an “organism” must uncover or shape for itself a proper “organization” before it can attain the being it requires, and the organization that facilitates Mandelstam’s growth is Acmeism, both in its theories and its practice (CPL, 63). Mandelstam requires both Acmeist history and Adamic newness for his self-creation and creation of tradition. They are the two indispensible forces from which poetry and the poet himself are born. “Remembrance and invention go hand in hand in poetry,” Mandelstam insists in “Literary Moscow” (1922; CPL, 146); and though Akme and Adam have been rechristened here, they are recognizable nonetheless in their new incarnations. Through Adam and Akme Mandelstam masters two kinds of creation, creation within history and an original creation that precedes all history; and two kinds of tradition, an Acmeist tradition transmitted through history and a paradoxical tradition of Adamic newness. By combining these different traditions and creations Mandelstam can create the tradition he requires. By choosing his names carefully, the modern orphan can acquire the history he desires; and the acoustic affinities between the name that Mandelstam gives his encoded self-portrait—Stone (Kamen’ in Russian)—and the names assumed by his new community—Akme, Adam—allow him to take on vast territories indeed.59 He lays claim through the first to the firstness and originality that enable him creatively to reshape the past he inherits through the second. A newcomer to history, he is free to name the world’s names anew, and the chains of historical cause and effect will fall away at his bidding. The stone of this chapter’s epigraph is a fallen stone, and it is kin to the fallen fruit with which Stone itself opens. The Acmeists, “stonemasons of every time and nation,” redeem this fallen stone. They raise it up and use it to begin their building. Mandelstam and his new companions, whose model as Adamists is unfallen Adam, seek ways in verse to reverse humanity’s, and the poet’s, fall from grace. The legacy of fallen Adam is labor— “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground . . . for dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return” (Gen.

•

S E L F - C R E A T I O N ,

C R E A T I O N

O F

C U L T U R E

•

65

3:19)—and this is the labor that Gumilev’s Adam laments: “Now you know heavy labor. . . . as you recall the words ‘Too late.’ ” Acmeist labor in history, though, may be used to regain Adamic firstness. The same stone that summons the Acmeists to build also provides the means to challenge their fall: “Who throws stones to us from on high—/And does the stone negate the yoke of dust?” (#34) In rebellion against Symbolist inspiration, the Acmeists embrace the work that makes a work of art. “He who is willing to work gives birth to his own father,” Harold Bloom proclaims. In the later poems of Stone, Mandelstam uses Acmeist work to create Adamic firstness. Akme and Adam thus take pride of place among the fruitful pairings of opposites that Mandelstam uncovers through Villon. By yoking together history and firstness, past and present, work and effortless creation, he finds a way to build on what Villon has taught him.60

•

C

H

A

P

T

E

R

T

H

R

E

E

•

Making History: Modernist Cathedrals When a person steps beneath the vaults of Notre Dame . . . doesn’t he become a Catholic merely by virtue of being under those vaults? —Osip Mandelstam, in a 1909 letter to Viacheslav Ivanov. The churches and the literary tradition are to be rebuilt by modernists strong enough to inherit by choice and to revise by necessity. —Gregory Jay, on T. S. Eliot’s pamphlet, “The Value and Use of Cathedrals in England Today” The man visited churches rather than went to church. —Omry Ronen, “Osip Mandelshtam” (1990)

VISITING CHURCHES For the Greeks, a stone possessed symbolic meaning. . . . Man and stone represent two cosmic powers, the movement of gravity and grace. A rough stone falls from the sky. Submitted to an architect’s toil, to the suffering of number and measure, it soars to the dwelling of the gods. —Zbigniew Herbert, Barbarian in the Garden (1962)

As concerns culture, T. S. Eliot observes, “one cannot be outside and inside at the same time.” He gives a grisly example to illustrate his point: “The man who, in order to understand the inner world of a cannibal tribe, has partaken of the practice of cannibalism, has probably gone too far: he can never quite be one of his own folk again.”1 Eliot’s cannibals would seem to be immeasurably distant from the Christian Europe that he himself seeks to penetrate. The experience that lies behind Eliot’s grim anecdote is, however, recognizably his own. It is the bitter experience of the newcomer, the alien who has tried and failed to be outside and in at the same time. The same dilemma faces Mandelstam. It is the dilemma of any modern outsider who works to inherit a culture not his by rights without relinquishing entirely his outsider’s identity or vision. The young Mandelstam seeks to inherit the Western, Christian tradition by entering its churches—but he also seeks the freedom to exit these churches, this tradition at will. He requires

•

H I S T O R Y

A N D

M O D E R N

C A T H E D R A L S

•

67

the capacity to be both outside and inside, if not at the same time, then in successive moments. Mandelstam puts his newfound Acmeist and Adamist legacy to work in two crucial poems of Stone, “Hagia Sophia” (1912; #38) and “Notre Dame” (1912; #39), as he struggles to create a tradition that accommodates both the history he desires and the strangeness and newness of the poet-parvenu, the modernist outsider. “Culture should begin in the right place,” Nietzsche proclaims, “[and] the right place is the body.” Mandelstam would have agreed; but building on the body is easier said than done for the young poet of Stone. In “I’ve been given a body”(#8), he labors to reconcile the seeming antinomies of an ephemeral, living self held within a fixed and lasting structure. In a later poem, “Shell” (1911; #26), these properties are reversed. The sea that lies outside the body is vital and changing, while the shell-self is a rigid “empty vessel,” and the poet can only hope that the ocean will enter and fill the “frail shell’s walls” on his command. Though the world and the self shift positions, the terms of the argument remain the same. Form opposes content; self struggles with what exceeds it and is eclipsed by what will outlast it. The poet anticipates a consummation of self and sea in “Shell”—but even here the sea that enters the shell is not the one that lay outside it. It is diminished by its confinement and fills the shell not with oceanic vigor but with “whispers of foam/With mist, wind and rain.” After this disappointing sea change, the poem itself trickles off in ellipses. The shell-body not only cannot contain these oppositions; it cannot even hold the poet himself, whose consciousness hovers beyond the confines of his physical self. This consciousness seeks to negotiate the rift that separates self and world, but can adopt one only by denying the other and is ultimately at home in neither. In “Shell” Mandelstam begins with an “I” that defies the night’s abyss. This abyss becomes the ocean by way of the metaphors that end the first stanza—“Like a shell without a pearl/I am thrown upon your shore”—and remains Mandelstam’s addressee, but his physical being becomes a mere object, an “it,” and the poet’s consciousness is doomed to remain beyond its bounds.2 The Acmeists and their honorary ancestor François Villon help Mandelstam to find new answers to the question that troubles him early on: “I’ve been given a body/What should I do with it?” Villon offers the model of a body whose contained complexity echoes the intricate network that is the social body of his age. His body bonds him to his age and this kinship, in turn, expands the limits of his own restricted self. Moreover, because he is rooted deeply and physically in his age, he can be transplanted, roots and all, into other ages, as Mandelstam demonstrates. He transcends his age and remains alive for generations yet to come; he is expanded spatially and temporally by the very intensity of his physical being. The Acmeists’ kinship with Villon and with his age is likewise born of the body, of their shared, human being. Villon nurtures the “little animal” he bears within him. The Acmeists also cherish the animal in man, that which is purely physical in his nature: “As Adamists,” Gumilev asserts, “we are a

68

•

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

little bit beasts of the forest and we won’t give up the beast in us.” The Adamists spring from the first human body, and their own creation in words is tied to God’s physical creation of the world, and to his Word that is both flesh and spirit, through which all things come to be. If Adam stands for man’s first body, then Akme, “the prime of all powers, spiritual and physical,” represents the best, most perfect human form, and this is the source of true poetry, as Gumilev explains in “The Life of Verse” (1910): “The origin of individual poems is mysteriously akin to that of living organisms,” and the poem itself “must be a copy of a beautiful human body.”3 The “divine physiognomy” of the human body becomes both foundation and master plan for Mandelstam’s Acmeism. In “On the Nature of the Word,” he praises the movement’s “organic poetics,” whose “organization” derives from “the infinite complexity of our own dark organism” he first celebrates in “The Morning of Acmeism” (CPL, 130, 63). Reverence for the body unites the Acmeists with the “physiologically gifted” Middle Ages, and this reverence also brings together self and world, for the world, a “God-given palace,” is, like the body and Tiutchev’s fallen stone, a gift from above (CPL, 63). The organism is akin to the organization of the world that is its home, since their origins are the same. Both world and self are the work of the first builder, and human architecture reflects and answers divine building. Hence God’s first creation and humanity’s highest creation, Adam and Akme, converge in what is built from the body. The Symbolists, “ungrateful guests,” reject the body and the world in favor of an incorporeal being forever beyond their reach (CPL, 63). They are prodigal children who spurn the legacy of a generous father. Mandelstam claims the inheritance his predecessors had refused. He picks up “the stone which the builders rejected” and uses it to construct poems that answer and extend the work of the architect, whether human or divine. Ajq-Sofiq Ajq-Sofiqózdes; ostanovit;sq Sudil Gospod; narodam i carqm! Ved; kupol tvoj, po slovu ohevidca, Kak na cepi podvewen k nebesam. I vsem vekam primer {stiniana, Kogda poxitit; dlq hu'ix bogov Pozvolila ?fesskaq Diana Sto sem; zelenyx mramornyx stolbov. No hto 'e dumal tvoj stroitel; ]edryj, Kogda, duwoj i pomyslom vysok, Raspolo'il apsidy i /ksedry, Im ukazav na zapad i vostok?

•

H I S T O R Y

A N D

M O D E R N

C A T H E D R A L S

•

Prekrasen xram, kupa[]ijsq v mire, I sorok okonósveta tor'estvo; Na parusax, pod kupolom, hetyre Arxangela prekrasnee vsego. I mudroe sferiheskoe zdan;e Narody i veka pere'ivet, I serafimov gulkoe rydanie Ne pokorobit temnyx pozolot. HAGIA SOPHIA Hagia Sophia—here did God decree That nations and emperors should halt! In fact, your cupola, as one eyewitness said, Seems suspended from the heavens on a chain. And Justinian’s example holds for all ages, When Ephesian Diana permitted him To abduct for foreign gods One hundred and seven green marble columns. But what was your lavish builder thinking When high in spirit and design He distributed the apses and exedrae Having shown them which was west and which was east? A beautiful temple bathing in the world, And its forty windows are the triumph of light; On the pendentives beneath the cupola four Archangels are the most beautiful of all. And the wise, spherical building Will outlive nations and ages, And the resounding sobs of seraphim Will not warp the dark gilt. NOTRE DAME

Gde rimskij sudiq sudil hu'oj narodó Stoit bazilika, i radostnyj i pervyj, Kak nekogda Adam, rasplastyvaq nervy, Igraet mywcami krestovyj legkij svod. No vydaet sebq snaru'i tajnyj plan, Zdes; pozabotilas; podpru'nyx arok sila, Htob massa gruznaq steny ne sokruwila, I svoda derzkogo bezdejstvuet taran.

69

70

•

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

Stixijnyj labirint, neposti'imyj les, Duwi gotiheskoj rassudohnaq propast;, Egipetskaq mo]; i xristianstva robost;, S trostinkoj rqdomódub, i vs[du car;óotves. No hem vnimatel;nej, tverdynq Notre Dame, Q izuhal tvoi hudovi]nye rebra, Tem ha]e dumal q: iz tq'esti nedobroj I q kogda-nibud; prekrasnoe sozdam. NOTRE DAME Where a Roman judge had judged a foreign nation There stands a basilica, and joyful and first, As Adam once was, a light groined arch Spreading out its nerves, plays with its muscles. But a secret plan is betrayed from without: Here the strength of the saddle-arches has taken care So that the weighty mass won’t crush the walls And the bold arch’s battering ram is immobilized. Elemental labyrinth, inscrutable forest, The Gothic soul’s rational abyss, Egyptian might and Christian modesty: Beside the reed—the oak, and everywhere the plumbline is emperor. But the more attentively, O fortress, Notre Dame, I studied your monstrous ribs, The more often I thought: from evil weight I too will create beauty some day.

These programmatic poems, which appeared in the March 1913 issue of Apollon and concluded the first edition of Stone, are sister poems, or “doublets,” dvoichatki, in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s term. “Hagia Sophia” and “Notre Dame” both celebrate great Christian structures built at the crossroads of cultures. Both churches in turn embody the highest feminine principles of the Christian faith: divine wisdom, Sophia, and the holy and pure maternity revered in the Mother of God. As poem-manifestos, though, they are not only buildings in verse. They are also blueprints for the construction of an Acmeist poetics and poetry. As such, they have been much discussed.4 They also represent Mandelstam’s own efforts to make the world and its history his home. The eighteen-year-old poet, studying in Paris, hoped that Christianity could be entered as easily as its churches. Mandelstam at twenty is in exile from the longed-for, unfeeling fatherland and carries his light cross alone (#22). The twenty-one-year-old Acmeist is more ambi-

•

H I S T O R Y

A N D

M O D E R N

C A T H E D R A L S

•

71

tious. He neither goes on pilgrimage to distant monuments nor does penance to appease his indifferent homeland. He no longer simply enters churches; now they are also made to enter his verse. The Christian church was a natural choice for the young Acmeist in search of a tradition at once venerable and vital, a tradition open, in principle, to all comers. “The myth of Christianity” is, Mandelstam writes in “Pushkin and Skriabin” (1915), “the legitimate heir of the myths of antiquity” (CPL, 93). Christianity links the legacy of Classical Greece and Rome with the rich heritage of the West, and though Mandelstam seldom mentions it in his early writings, Christianity’s roots are, of course, Jewish, like his own. Moreover, the very essence of Christian being is rebirth, self-creation in Christ. Christianity is governed by “the spirit of adoption” (Rom. 8:15). And through this adoption all become “heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:17): “Ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens . . . of the household of God,” Paul announces to the Ephesians (Eph. 2:19). God’s household is the church, which is built of the bodies of its members: “Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house,” says Peter, himself the “rock” on whom the church stands (Peter 2:5; Matt. 6:18). The church is made up of all who choose to join it, and these “living stones” united form its being. “We, being many, are one body in Christ,” Paul rejoices (Rom. 12:4–5). “The Christian world,” Mandelstam asserts, “is an organism, a living body,” endowed with a “multiple unity” (CPL, 94, 408). This body is one and many, spirit and flesh, human and divine. Born in history, it links humanity with what lies beyond history, and it is renewed throughout history by each new addition. “The achievement of early Christian architecture is that the content created its vessel— spontaneously, and yet in an endlessly complex and complicated creative process,” Heinz Kahler observes. The church’s body is incarnated in its buildings, in the cathedrals where its members gather. Indeed, the “content” and the “vessel” are etymologically the same in Russian: sobor means both “cathedral” and “congregation.” “If any man enter in he shall be saved,” the inscription over Hagia Sophia’s doors once read. Hence Mandelstam’s early dream of entering the Church’s body through its churches’ doors is not as naive or unlikely as it might seem. The Acmeist Mandelstam discovers, however, more complex ways of gaining access to this body and its history by way of his churches in verse.5 Among Christians, Paul declares, all differences dissolve: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3: 28). The student of Villon, though, finds his churches precisely at the points where differences are most acute and cultures and peoples collide. “Where races are mixed, there is the source of great cultures,” Friedrich Nietzsche proclaims—and Mandelstam’s poems might have been written to illustrate his maxim.6 Conquest, colonization, cross-fertilization, cultural theft—these are the common themes of Mandelstam’s cathedrals.

72

•

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

CHILDLESS BYZANTIUM A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire of human veins. —William Butler Yeats, from “Byzantium” (1932)

Justinian’s Church of Holy Wisdom lies not in the Eternal City itself, but in its Eastern double, Constantinople, the Second Rome intended to stave off the empire’s enemies to the East. Justinian himself, whose example, Mandelstam tells us, holds for all ages, struggled to sustain an empire torn by religious rifts, and regional and linguistic cleavages, as Roland Bainton notes. Another historian, Herbert Muller, remarks that the Byzantine Empire, built of multiple cultures, was “an artificial empire,” a “nation without nationality.” And the Byzantine art created during Justinian’s reign grew from his empire’s schisms and rifts. Its greatness lay not in its purity, but in a fusion of elements drawn from East and West alike, from Greece and Rome, from the Orient and the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Justinian’s own example for the ages, according to Mandelstam, is his kidnapping of Ephesian Diana’s columns for the glory of Byzantine, Christian Sophia.7 Mandelstam’s Notre Dame rises “where a Roman judge had judged a foreign nation,” and its foundations conceal “an altar of Jupiter from the period of Tiberius’ reign on which the images of Roman gods were mingled with those of the Gallic druids,” as eighteenth-century excavators discovered.8 Notre Dame is also, like Villon, the creation of a time of fruitful upheaval. Both church and poet are born of the vital play of opposing forces that Mandelstam admires in the French Middle Ages. Mandelstam’s later Russian cathedrals in verse rise where cultures intersect, where East and West meet in medieval Moscow and nineteenth-century Petersburg. A Russian serf trained in Rome modeled the Kazan cathedral on St. Peter’s— “The architect was not Italian/But a Russian in Rome” (#61)—while the Kremlin Church of the Dormition, with its “Italian and Russian soul,” was the work of an Italian architect commanded by Ivan III to imitate Russian models (#84). Like Villon, Mandelstam is at home in the places where foreign and native meet; and culture itself arises, or so his churches suggest, precisely from these unexpected, even unwelcome, meetings of unlikes. In “Conversation about Dante” (1933), Mandelstam links the “complex of culture, homeland, and settled civilization” with “the pilgrimage, the journey, colonization, migration” (CPL, 410). The migrations and colonizations that give birth to his cathedrals also pave the way for the newcomer Osip Mandelstam to enter these churches and build them anew in his words. Like his empire, Justinian’s temple has a double orientation. It points to

•

H I S T O R Y

A N D

M O D E R N

C A T H E D R A L S

•

73

both East and West, but, as Mandelstam’s poem hints, the pull of the East is strongest: “[Justinian] distributed the apses and exedrae/Having shown them which was west and which was east.” The exedrae, the arcades of the atrium that led to the church, lay in the West, but Hagia Sophia’s apses and its altar rose in the East and would have drawn the gazes and spirits of those who entered eastward.9 Mandelstam’s poems likewise point in two directions, towards East and West, toward the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic faiths. Indeed, in pairing the poems Mandelstam tacitly draws our attention to the schisms and conflicts that riddle Christianity itself, for all its dreams of all-embracing unity. Unlike Justinian, Mandelstam begins in the East and moves to the West in his search for an entrance into Christian tradition. And unlike Justinian’s temple, Mandelstam’s own “Hagia Sophia” is subtly directed to the West, to its French counterpart, Notre Dame. “Hagia Sophia,” like “Notre Dame,” begins with foreignness from its very title. The church’s name, though transliterated, remains untranslated from the original Greek, and the reader is thus on foreign soil from the start.10 Notre Dame’s name surfaces again only in “Notre Dame”’s final stanza, after Mandelstam has had time to leave his own mark on the phenomenon he names. Hagia Sophia, on the other hand, is emphatically christened from the start. The name comes doubly first in the poem—it is both the title and the opening phrase, in which the poet apostrophizes the church. Its primacy is underscored metrically: the foreign “Aiia (Hagia)” is the only trochaic foot in an otherwise consistently iambic poem.11 The name dominates the poem. There is no room for a second Adam to renew this church through calling it by name in his own way. The dash that follows the name also sets it apart from its surroundings and creates a visual sense of remove and isolation. Like the name that stands a pause away from the rest of the poem, the temple stands at a little distance from the world beyond it. The temple’s name is fixed from the start. Its place is just as firmly fixed by what follows. The dash breaks the line in two, and the “here” (zdes’) that begins the second hemistich is thus doubly stressed. The line itself ends with a literal “stop” (ostanovit’sia). The two words pin the cathedral down; they demonstrate from the poem’s outset the force of immobility and the power of permanence. But the “stop” does not end the sentence itself, which continues into the next line and reveals the source of the power that keeps cathedrals, and nations, in their place. The power to command is in the hands of the Lord, and it is he who “decreed” or “judged” (sudil) that emperors and their nations should halt their forward progress where the cathedral would come to stand. Indeed, according to legend, Constantine chose his new Rome with divine aid, and the city’s boundaries were fixed by God himself: “I shall advance, till He, the invisible guide who marches before me, thinks proper to stop,” Constantine purportedly declared. Hagia Sophia, which dates from 537, rises on the highest point of

74

•

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

ancient Byzantium, at the city’s center and the empire’s; it stands on “a holy place,” and the temple’s form itself, legend has it, came to Justinian in a dream. “Justinian the Builder” laid his church’s foundation stone and supervised each step of the construction, but he himself was “impelled,” as the church’s chronicler Procopius writes, “by God (for is he not himself a master-builder?)”12 The Christian, or Acmeist, architect’s play can be ferocious: “The handsome arrow of the Gothic belltower rages because its function is to stab the sky, to reproach it for its emptiness” (CPL, 63). Hagia Sophia’s dome, on the other hand, echoes the sky and is a part of it. The chain of command from God to humanity becomes literal in the stanza’s final lines: it is the chain on which the dome hangs from the sky. Unlike the tower the Acmeists build to reach and challenge the heavens—“We can ascend only those towers which we build ourselves”—this church descends from above, and the chain it hangs from is steady, unlike “the mobile chains of being” that the Acmeists embrace (CPL, 64–65). The model for Notre Dame is our own physiology, the human body writ large. Hagia Sophia’s dome is the sky made small. It is a “second firmament,” early witnesses reported. If the church duplicates the heavens, then the heavens are also like the church, as the stanza’s last image suggests. Thousands of lamps hung on chains from the ceiling of Hagia Sophia like heavenly constellations.13 Thus illuminated, Hagia Sophia, suspended on a chain from heaven, itself becomes a lamp hanging from an infinitely vaster ceiling. The crystal firmament that traps the poet in his early work is back in place, and the worshiper who enters Hagia Sophia is doubly confined beneath two equally alien, equally impenetrable domes. Mandelstam himself has not yet entered the church, and his very words are secondhand; he merely passes on the account of “one eyewitness.” But art for Mandelstam grows precisely from that moment when information received from afar becomes immediate, and another’s words become one’s own. The poet who has “not heard the tales of Ossian” bears witness nonetheless to “Scotland’s bloody moon” and repeats another’s song “as if it were his own” (#67). In the third and fourth stanzas, Mandelstam seeks an aperture in the past through which he can approach Hagia Sophia and resurrect Justinian’s temple “in the present moment of the past” by turning from the work of the master builder to his earthly servant, Justinian. Mandelstam apparently finds in Justinian’s theft of pagan columns for his Christian edifice a point of contact between the Byzantine emperor and the pupil of Villon. For both, theft is the very stuff of art; just as the poet borrows others’ words to make his verses, so the architect steals another’s stones to build his church. The columns’ source and their new purpose point to the kind of juncture of ages and places in which Mandelstam, like Villon, feels most at home. Hagia Sophia occupies what Kahler calls “a terminal position”: “It stands at the end of an epoch, which it has outlived, and contains the seeds of a new one.” The Ephesian temple to Diana, one

•

H I S T O R Y

A N D

M O D E R N

C A T H E D R A L S

•

75

of the seven wonders of the ancient world, is torn apart and born again in a new wonder at the center of Justinian’s New Rome, his New Jerusalem.14 This crossbreeding of cultures brings the church to life in another way; it is the offspring of an encounter between a Byzantine emperor and an ancient deity. The temple to Diana becomes the goddess herself in the poem, “Ephesian Diana,” who permits Justinian to “kidnap” or “abduct” her columns (the Russian pokhitit’ can mean both, as well as “to steal”). The personification, the permission, the abduction give the cultural theft a flavor of seduction. As such it echoes feminine France’s flirtation with her captor England in “François Villon,” and here, as in “Villon,” “cultural values ornament” nations and give them “color, form, and even sex” (CPL, 113). The new Byzantine culture and ancient, pagan Greece take on bodies and gender to produce unexpected fruit. “Ephesian Diana” not only offers Mandelstam a way to humanize the temple and its maker. She also allows him to defuse the force of Byzantium’s dictatorial God. Seen from her eyes he becomes simply “foreign gods,” not one and universal, but many and alien. These foreign gods must compete for their temples with other gods just like any other ancient deity. Moreover, the divine, incontrovertable “here” of the poem’s first line suddenly shifts to become Diana’s tacit “over there.” From Diana’s point of view, this god, or these gods, are the foreigners; and foreign and native, center and peripheries, temporarily change places. Mandelstam’s concern with Justinian’s columns represents, perhaps, another attempt to bring Hagia Sophia and its builder literally down to earth by emphasizing the specific, physical nature of what presumably holds the temple up. The church’s “one hundred seven green marble pillars” show humanity and matter working upward against gravity and so pose a counterthrust to the chain on which the church at first seems to dangle helplessly from the heavens. Mandelstam seems in this stanza to have brought God’s static world and his suspended temple subtly back to life, and he has apparently restored “the human place in the universe” (#66) by celebrating the labors of Justinian the Builder. The phrase that begins the stanza serves, however, to freeze its shifted perspectives and unexpected encounters into place. Justinian’s example holds “for all ages,” and the “and” (i), that opens the phrase stresses that his action does not contradict the work of God but continues it. As in the first stanza, the divinely inspired actions of the past intersect not with the present but with eternity. The actions themselves may be rooted in history, but their results are imperishable and unchanging. The individual age vanishes in the face of all ages, just as individual nations and rulers—to say nothing of the mere mortals who make up these nations— are diminished by God’s command, which governs all peoples and kings alike. The stanza establishes a pattern by which historically specific, original acts become immutable models to be followed without question in ages to come.15

76

•

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

Mandelstam enlists the aid of the church as he works to recover the past in the next stanza, which takes the shape of a question addressed to Hagia Sophia herself; he interrogates the architecture in his attempt to engage its architect in dialogue. The “but” (no) that opens the stanza signals a change in direction and perhaps in tactics as the poet once again takes on a church and a world that have thus far resisted his advances. Indeed, the entire opening phrase no chto zhe (but whatever), with its emphatic particle, signals a more personal, engaged poetic voice than we have heard so far. Both the form and sense of the verb that follows, dumal (was thinking), aim to open the mind of the Byzantine ruler to the Acmeist poet. Mandelstam attempts to penetrate the inner sanctum of Justinian himself by way of his building, and to bring these thoughts from a closed past into an unfinished present. The verbs of the preceding stanzas are past perfectives, with perfective infinitive complements. The actions they indicate were finished long ago, and they have borne results that cannot be undone. Here, though, Mandelstam emphasizes the mental processes that shape the structure and continue in the builder even as the stages of the building are completed, and the verb he uses to describe these processes is the poem’s only past imperfective form.16 His efforts to open a closed past were still clearer in an early version of this line: “Where was your lavish builder aiming? (Kuda stremilsia tvoi stroitel’ shchedryi?)” (I, 414). The traces of this motion remain, however, in the two directions, east and west, to which Justinian’s building points. These directions open up the temple’s space, and the poem’s. They remind us that the church and earthly life are not subject to a hierarchical, heavenly axis of up and down alone. The church has not only height, but breadth. It is both physical and spiritual, accommodating East and West as well as high and low. Justinian himself is both lofty in his intentions (“high in spirit and design”) and broad in their execution (“having shown them which was west and which was east”). Even the epithet that describes Justinian, shchedryi—meaning “lavish,” “munificent,” “generous”—suggests breadth and openness.17 Perhaps Mandelstam is hoping that the builder’s munificence extends across time as well as space, and that a distant, dispossessed poet can benefit from the Byzantine emperor’s generosity. And Mandelstam does benefit from the largesse of another builder-emperor. In “The Admiralty” (1913) Peter the Great reaches the present through his building and teaches his successors by its spire that “beauty is not a demigod’s whim/But the measure of a simple joiner’s predatory eye” (#38). The Admiralty, open to earth, air, and water, half-building and halfboat (“frigate or Acropolis”), teaches those who study it to resist the confines of space and time not by denying them but by using them to create. Like the Acmeists’ fallen stone, it teaches them to undo humanity’s fallen state by building from it: “Does not this chastely built ark/Negate the supremacy of space?” The building and its maker insist on human freedom—

•

H I S T O R Y

A N D

M O D E R N

C A T H E D R A L S

•

77

“Free man has created a fifth [element]”—and open “all the world’s seas” to us. Mandelstam may be trying in this stanza to enter Justinian and his church by echoing another poet’s portrait of Peter standing poised on the border between East and West as he prepares to negotiate this boundary by building. “Stojal on, dum velikikh poln (He stood, full of great thoughts),” Pushkin writes in “The Bronze Horseman” (1833); and the sense and construction are close to Mandelstam’s description of Justinian, “dushoi i pomyslom vysok” (high/lofty in spirit and design). Both lines end in shortform adjectives that govern nominal complements in oblique cases; both portray emperor-builders guided by historical and spiritual forces of great magnitude. Unlike Mandelstam, though, Pushkin effortlessly penetrates his subject’s mind. The phrase I I dumal on (and he thought [“was thinking”]; my italics) begins the passage in which Pushkin recreates Peter’s great idea, his dream of cutting “a window through to Europe.” The westward motion of Peter’s vision is clear—but Justinian’s aims remain ambiguous. The stanza itself closes in the East—but the church fails to answer Mandelstam’s question.18 Or perhaps Hagia Sophia’s eastward pull is its answer to Mandelstam, and this is what closes the church to him at last, for the temple of the poem’s final stanzas is a perfect, finished, and finally impenetrable structure. It loses its moorings in this world entirely in the fourth stanza’s first line. Indeed, the world itself dissolves away completely, to become a sea—v mire, “in the world” is only one vowel away from v more, “in the sea”—and the temple merely “bathes” in it. Weightless, it floats on the world’s surface. Hagia Sophia is in the world, but not of it, and were it to admit the world within its walls, it would sink beneath the weight. The participle that describes the cathedral, kupaiushchiisia, “bathing,” is the only verb form in the poem to indicate imperfective present action. Yet what it shows us is not an activity, a process, a present charged with energy, but an endless, changeless, seemingly aimless state. Past, present, and future fade in the light of Hagia Sophia’s incorruptible permanence. Mandelstam does, in a sense, enter the temple in the stanza’s final lines. He describes its interior fleetingly, though, and with an eye to precisely those features that dematerialize the building, that draw the viewer upward, outward, and beyond both self and church. Kahler observes that the forty windows that arched beneath the central cupola created the illusion that the dome, unsupported by mere stone, rose above a wreath of light.19 Mandelstam goes still further; the windows and cupola mark “light’s triumph.” In “The Admiralty,” the dominion of the four elements is destabilized by “free man,” who makes from them his own fifth element. In “Hagia Sophia” unity prevails over multiplicity, as light triumphs over the substance of the church, the elements of earth, and the will of individual humans. The church’s many windows only serve to bear witness to the one

78

•

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

true source of light, which lies far beyond this world. They are like the “monotonous stars” whose light the poet “hates” in an early lyric (#29). In the same poem, Mandelstam dreams of “a tower’s lancet growth” that would pierce and challenge this changeless light. “We do not fly,” he announces in “On the Morning of Acmeism.” “We ascend only those towers that we build ourselves” (CPL, 64). The fourth stanza of “Hagia Sophia” concludes, though, with emblems of superhuman flight, not human building. The church that dissolves the world is “beautiful.” The dome admitting light from beyond this world is, by extension, still more beautiful. The archangels, which symbolize flight in another world, are the “most beautiful of all.” The beings depicted in Hagia Sophia’s pendentives, her sails—the Russian parus means both—are actually seraphim, not archangels, and their forms are made entirely of wings: they are the disembodied essence of flight. The stanza begins with simple beauty—Prekrasen khram, “Beautiful is the church”—and ends with beauty’s highest degree: Chetyre arkhangela prekrasnee vsego, “The four archangels are the most beautiful of all.” Forms of the adjective beautiful frame and finish the stanza just as the church itself is closed and completed in its beauty. Within these limits, though, beauty stretches beyond our comprehension; and the highest degree of beauty in Hagia Sophia transcends human understanding entirely.20 Notre Dame’s vital splendor invites Mandelstam to answer it in kind: “I too will create beauty some day.” Hagia Sophia prompts panegyric, not dialogue. Its beauty exceeds the reach of any merely human builder. “There are places where history is inescapable,” Joseph Brodsky claims in his “Flight from Byzantium” (1985). “Such is Istanbul, alias Constantinople, alias Byzantium.”21 History, though, is precisely what Mandelstam’s Hagia Sophia manages to avoid. The fifth stanza’s “wise, spherical building” will pass human history by entirely; it will “outlive nations and ages.” The God of the first stanza interferes with emperors and nations long enough at least to put them in their place. Justinian has some bond with ages to come, even if it is only to instruct them by example in the procedures of the past. The spherical church, however, seems to have no surface to which time could stick.22 It will outlast the first stanza’s nations and the second stanza’s ages. Past perfective verb forms dominate the poem’s first three stanzas—these are the completed actions that shaped the Church of Holy Wisdom. The church, once built, becomes a timeless state. Its description in the fourth stanza requires little by way of verbs. Both verbs in the final stanza are future perfective forms, perezhivet, “will outlive,” and ne pokorobit, “will not warp” (the subject of the last verb is “the resounding sobs of seraphim,” and its object is the church’s “dark gilding”). Both signify the church’s incorruptible permanence, a permanence that has no place for the present tense or for present being. Even metrically the final stanza pulls away from the rest of the poem as the church itself retreats from earthly life. The basic meter is iambic pentameter. The frequent pyrrhic substitions mean, however, that three or

•

H I S T O R Y

A N D

M O D E R N

C A T H E D R A L S 23

•

79

four stresses often alternate with the expected five stresses. This alternation ceases midway through the fourth stanza, though, and each of “Hagia Sophia” ’s final six lines has only three stresses. The poem’s irregular rhythms fall into place, but this rhythm is marked as much by the absence of the missing stresses as it is by the predictability of those that appear. The very pulse of the poem grows slower as it draws to a close. The poem’s final two lines hint at what the church omits by refusing to admit the present within its walls. “The resounding sobs of seraphim” that will not warp its gilding suggest several interpretations, all dealing with the different ways in which history intersects with divinity. The archangels or seraphim of the fourth stanza bear the traces of the Byzantine cathedral’s complex past, and of its true place at the center of every kind of human strife. Only two of the apse’s angels are the original mosaics. The others were recreated on the plaster that covered the church’s images for centuries as Hagia Sophia was transformed from Christian temple to Moslem mosque. The only human aspect of the angels, moreover, remains lost in the restored or recreated figures. After Constantinople’s fall to the Turks in 1453, their faces were concealed beneath golden stars, in accordance with Muslim prohibitions against figural representation. The seraphim might well weep, if they could, for their mutilation at the hands of history, which took away their human faces.24 Even before their disfigurement, though, they would have born witness to the violent changes wrought by history within the church’s walls. The Iconoclast controversy of the eight and ninth centuries led to the destruction of much of Hagia’s Sophia’s ornamentation, and the church itself, in an earlier form, had actually burned down during earlier fourth- and fifthcentury controversies on the nature of the Holy Trinity. The Vatican’s ambassadors laid down the papal bull by which the Western church finally separated from the church of the East on Hagia Sophia’s altar in 1054. The Fourth Crusade, sent by the Western church to win back the East, led to the devastation of Constantinople and to wholesale pillage within its cathedral. The people of Constantinople turned to the church for protection against the invading Turks in the fifteenth century. They congregated within the temple’s walls and were captured or slaughtered there by the invaders. Even nature worked to change the structure, which was damaged through the centuries by numerous earthquakes.25 The angels would have had reason to weep. But though the physical structure of the church may have been subject to violent transformations, the wise, spherical form that is the essence of the Eastern faith remains impervious to change, according to Mandelstam. Its essential nature resists the historical realities to which its own structure bears witness. But if the cathedral remains untarnished by age, why does Mandelstam describe the gilt that filled its mosaics and covered its domes as dark? Early witnesses celebrated the radiance that emanated from the church’s gilded walls. Its gold and precious stones transformed its structural substance “into the re-

80

•

C H A P T E R 26

T H R E E

•

flection of a higher light.” The golden walls and domes helped to transform the church into pure light, and to transport it to a world beyond our own. The gilt’s darkness, then, is not physical but metaphysical, and the angels’ tears once again suggest an interpretation. Angels—eternal, ethereal, and otherworldly—would shed tears for human suffering only if drawn into human history. The place where human history and divinity meet in the Christian faith is, of course, in the person of Christ. In Christ endless, changeless divinity takes on human form and experiences directly the sufferings of human flesh. The passion of Christ is what makes angels weep. (And one thinks here of Giotto’s Lamentation over Christ, in which angels suffer no less than Christ’s mortal followers at the sight of his lifeless form.) The passion of Christ, the “seed” of his death, gives birth to the “organism, the living body” that is for Mandelstam the Christian world (CPL, 94). It is this Christ, this fusion of timelessness with the passing moment, of divine and boundless force with the pathos of human being, that Hagia Sophia lacks. Its luster is dimmed precisely because it denies the humanity of which Christ’s church on earth is truly built.27 For Mandelstam “Byzantium represented a kind of canonical thinking that blocked out any living sense of the world, of things, of warmth and color,” his widow writes;28 and Mandelstam himself concludes in “On the Nature of the Word” that Byzantium is sterile and childless (bezdetnaia) (CPL, 120; II, 245). The church that is the emblem of this infertile culture can hardly serve as an adoptive parent to the modern orphan in search of a new legacy. Hagia Sophia’s perfect beauty inspires a beautiful poem, but the temple whose contained and fruitless loveliness the poem recreates refuses to collaborate in Mandelstam’s self-creation and creation of culture. Mandelstam indirectly addresses a dual tradition, both Byzantine and Russian, by way of Justinian and his church. Russia’s religion and culture were of course descended from the Byzantine East. Indeed, after Byzantium’s fall the Russian church claimed to be its sole legitimate heir, and Moscow was to take the Eastern capital’s place as the third and final Rome. The name Sophia itself had a more immediate resonance for the reluctant scion of Symbolist fathers. The philosopher Vladimir Soloviev’s Sophia, the “World Soul,” “eternal womanhood,” became the elusive, otherworldly muse to a generation of Russian Symbolists. Soloviev’s vision of world history was complex, and his attitudes toward Russian orthodoxy were far from uncritical. Nonetheless, Soloviev’s Sophia, like Justinian’s, moves toward the dematerialization and transcendency that is the aim of the Byzantine temple. The “World Soul,” fallen matter, and fallen humanity will be redeemed, Soloviev proclaims, at history’s end when they are finally, fully infused with light and spirit, when they are reunited with God’s high and holy being.29 Mandelstam rejects this legacy of transcendence, whether Byzantine, Russian Orthodox, or Symbolist, in turning from Hagia Sophia to the wel-

•

H I S T O R Y

A N D

M O D E R N

C A T H E D R A L S

•

81

coming vaults of Notre Dame. Soloviev’s apocalyptic vision of “All-Unity,” of a universal community that would ultimately heal not only the schisms on earth but the rift between heaven and earth, was rooted in the nineteenth-century, Slavophile concept of sobornost’ (its root is the same sobor that means both “cathedral” and “assembly”). Sobornost’ signified to the Slavophiles a free community of true believers, whose roots lay not in a West riven by individualism, but in untainted, Orthodox, pre-Petrine Rus’.30 Mandelstam aspires to a very different kind of sobornost’. His church is brought to life by the fruitful strife between individual and communal vision. It is to be found not in the static, otherworldly East, but in the energetic Catholic West, and it looks not to the past or future alone, but to the moment when past and present intersect in giving birth to the future.

THE MOTHER CHURCH Verily, the man who once piled his thoughts to the sky in these stones— he, like the wisest, knew the secret of all life. That struggle and inequality are present even in beauty, and also war for power and more power. . . . How divinely vault and arches break through each other in a wrestling match; how they strive against each other with light and shade. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–92)

The church that embodies Western energies for Mandelstam is Notre Dame. The poem that recreates the church begins, like “Hagia Sophia,” in foreignness. Its title is borrowed from another culture and another speech, and the Latin letters that head a Russian text seem themselves to enact the confrontation of Rome and a “foreign nation” that the poem’s first line describes. In “Notre Dame,” however, foreignness serves very different ends than it does in Mandelstam’s aloof and otherworldly Hagia Sophia. Though the title’s letters are strange, the words they spell in a foreign tongue are welcoming as well as alien: Notre Dame is Our Lady. The inclusive possessive pronoun provides Mandelstam with an immediate point of entry into the church and its history. The cathedral’s name may be French, but the church it represents, the “mother church,” is apparently willing to adopt all comers. This particular embodiment of the mother church, moreover, is dedicated to the essence of maternity, to Mary, the Mother of God. Hagia Sophia is “holy,” and her church points beyond matter to pure spirit, but Notre Dame is “ours,” and the lady the church celebrates is the vessel through which spirit descended to matter, through which divinity first came to earth and was made flesh. The poem proper opens, again like “Hagia Sophia,” with a judgment, and the judgment that leads to the building of Notre Dame is doubly stressed: “Where a Roman judge had judged (sud’ia sud il) a foreign nation” (my italics). This emphasis seems to weight the phrase in the judge’s

82

•

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

favor—but the judgment that begins “Notre Dame” is very different from the one that puts a stop to history in “Hagia Sophia.” The Roman laws that rule a foreign nation do not descend from above. They are human laws and govern the relations between the nations of the earth, not between divinities and humans. As such they are subject to historical transformation, the kind of transformation that gives birth to Notre Dame itself, the offspring of imperial Rome and her distant province France. Peter Steiner argues convincingly for the “Roman judge” as architect, shaping through his laws the foreign nation’s formless mass, but this nation is far from being the wholly negative force that Steiner sees.31 The uneasy alliance between containing form and raw, unshaped vitality that operates here is akin to the forces at work in “François Villon,” and in the body of the cathedral itself. Mandelstam also reminds us that the classical heritage of the ancient world was by necessity transfigured as it was transmitted through time and space. He reminds us too that the venerable culture of France and Europe alike began in barbarism, and that “Europe, the new Hellas” (#70) is itself a hybrid.32 This past, unlike that of “Hagia Sophia,” continues into the present, just as the history of the first line feeds directly into the second line’s present tense, into the present being of the church that stands where Rome and France had first crossed paths: past and present, history and firstness come together in the body of the church. Mandelstam calls the building a “basilica,” a Greek word used to designate a secular Roman structure that was later transformed to serve the needs of the newly emerged Christian church. “The Gothic cathedral,” William Fleming observes, “was the culmination in the long process of reconciling the northern urge for verticality with the southern horizontal basilica form.”33 Notre Dame’s basilica, with its “bold vault,” synthesizes the history of North and South, of northern loftiness and southern breadth within its walls. The structure, like the word that describes it, is born of a tradition that works through transformation. It stands for both the continuation and the transfiguration of cultures through history. The intersection of Roman civilization and an untamed foreign nation marks a kind of newness or originality within history. History itself meets with a newness that lies beyond its limits in the lines that follow. The Acmeist history that reaches its peak in Notre Dame’s “groined arch” dissolves into Adamist firstness as the arch, “joyful and first,” and by extension, the church it supports, are transubstantiated to become metaphorically Adam’s body, the body that both precedes and initiates human history.34 Adam does not undo Akme, though; a creative, unstable relationship is established within the stanza between history and “firstness.” The church as human structure is rooted in human history. Its basilica and its arch are the work of architects whose originality is bound by time and place. The church as body, which “plays with its muscles” and “spreads out its nerves,” is, however, the work of God’s first and boundless originality.

•

H I S T O R Y

A N D

M O D E R N

C A T H E D R A L S

•

83

Notre Dame is both the body that is the mysterious gift of “I’ve been given a body” and the body that human beings have used to begin their building. These couplings of civilization and foreignness, history and firstness suggest that Mandelstam is clearing a place for his own alien and unexpected presence within the walls of a church capable of holding both tradition and absolute newness.35 Indeed, Mandelstam’s own foreign body is, one suspects, the catalyst that generates Notre Dame’s Adamic newness. The cathedral’s “body” in fact takes on a familial resemblance to the “bisexual being (dvupoloe sushchestvo)” that is the lyric poet in “François Villon” (CPL, 56; II, 305). Notre Dame, Clarence Brown remarks, is anagrammatically transformed into Adam in the poem’s opening stanza, and the two words even rhyme in Russian.36 The female body that gave birth to Christ, the Second Adam, and the first, male body from which woman herself was born come together under the same roof. Villon’s “hermaphroditic” nature renders him endlessly fruitful and incomplete. Notre Dame as Adam is likewise mobile and growing. It stretches its nerves to uncover or expand their limits; it plays with its muscles and tests the strength of its new form. Such energy and incompletion actually characterize Gothic building as much as they do Adam’s, or the poet’s, body. “What’s the point in rebuilding Notre Dame?” Mayakovsky asks in his irreverent portrait of the French cathedral (“Notre Dame,” 1925). The point, Mandelstam might say, is that the church was never finished to begin with. “There are no finished Gothic cathedrals,” William Fleming explains. The spectator must collaborate with the architects to create a (provisional) whole: “Completion can take place only in the imagination of the observer.”37 In another early lyric, Mandelstam celebrates a cathedral that is “incomplete, but beautiful just the same” (#181). His Notre Dame is beautiful precisely because it is incomplete. Its unfinished form invites, indeed requires Mandelstam’s participation if it is to be completed. He finds an aperture in a space that is structured yet open, a space that holds both history and its opposite. The single stone finally enters “the ‘groined arch”’ of the Gothic church where it at last “participate[s] in the joyous cooperative action of those like it” (CPL, 62). Notre Dame as Gothic church is incomplete. Notre Dame as body is also by definition unfinished. The human body “makes itself or it unmakes itself, but it is never something made,” in Henri Bergson’s phrase;38 and the monstrous form of “Notre Dame,” the human body, both male and female, made large, would presumably possess even greater capacities for growth than would the bisexual being it resembles and dwarfs, the lyric poet of “François Villon.” The problem of “François Villon”—how to inhibit the poet’s energy and fecundity without destroying them—resurfaces here, this time on a giant’s scale. How can the play of Notre Dame the monstrous body be kept from shattering the crafted structure Notre Dame? Villon is built of dualities, and the network of dialogues between the selves within him and between those selves and the society that sur-

84

•

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

rounds him becomes a supple system of checks and balances that curbs, but does not curtail, his growth. The system that sustains Notre Dame is likewise based on the dual natures both of the cathedral itself and of the observer who builds it anew in words. The shift from inside to out that marks the movement from the first to the second stanza suggests the types of “double being” that are open to the church and its observer. The poem’s Notre Dame is both body and building, both divine and human in its origins. It is a product of human history and of the creation that precedes and transcends that history. The historical structure of the first line is infected midway through the second line by the body’s primal vitality, by the Notre Dame that Mandelstam calls elsewhere a “festival of physiology,” a “Dionysian orgy” (CPL, 63).39 This festival threatens literally to raise the roof off Notre Dame, to lift its light vault right off the church, to disrupt the already unstable balance of body and building at work in the first stanza. The poet as spectator and participant in this festival staves off catastrophe by exploiting his capacity for motion. He draws on Villon’s lessons in the art of crossing boundaries as he moves from the church’s interior, where he had watched its muscles and nerves at play, and joins forces with the architectural constructs that labor to contain this giant’s motion. Mandelstam brings his own dual nature to bear in his movement from inside to out. As human body, he is akin to Notre Dame’s monstrous Adam. As the stone that finds its home in its “groined arch,” he is part of its substance. But Mandelstam has learned from Villon to manipulate even those boundaries that seem to shape his very self. He has learned to organize his organism by standing just a little beyond its bounds: the poet is himself both creature and creator, gardener and flower, architect and stone. The architect of his own physical being, he is free to participate in the building of Notre Dame’s body. Unlike Justinian’s fixed, impermeable temple, the Gothic cathedral as building and body lends itself to just such an exchange between the inner world it contains and the outer world that contains it. Gothic architecture, as Fleming describes it, sought to bridge the gap between spirit and matter, between the Word and the world. The vast windows of its cathedrals rendered the barrier between these realms of being transparent and permeable. The Gothic church also worked to heal the rift between mind and faith. It appealed to reason by openly displaying the means by which its seeming miracles of soaring space were achieved. Each upward thrust of its lofty vaults was answered by the counterthrust of the piers and buttresses that circled the church’s outer walls, and this architectural pro and contra could be followed by the worshiper entering the church.40 In his study of François Rabelais, Mikhail Bakhtin describes the “grotesque body” of medieval and Renaissance folk culture in terms that echo Fleming’s portrait of the Gothic church and call to mind the monstrous body of Mandelstam’s Notre Dame. Bakhtin himself, I should add, would

•

H I S T O R Y

A N D

M O D E R N

C A T H E D R A L S

•

85

have been the last to see the resemblance. His Gothic church, rigid, fixed, and humorless, invariably plays straight man to the antics of the body it opposes, while for Mandelstam, medieval culture takes life precisely from the creative strife between the body and the church that dwell for him quite literally under one roof. There are, nonetheless, strong family resemblances between these outsized bodies. Bakhtin’s “grotesque body” is, like the Gothic cathedral, unfinished by nature. It is “a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created.” Like the Gothic church, it is defined by its very lack of definition, by the play of inside and out that keeps its outlines from becoming clear-cut and fixed. The boundaries that divide this body from the world are obscured: “Its exterior aspect is not distinct from the inside” and the “exchange between [this] body and the world” is crucial and continuous.41 The world in which the “grotesque body” finds its home is for Bakhtin the world of carnival. In the carnival all hierarchies are turned topsy-turvy, “inside out and upside down,” as the “grotesque body” is given leave to follow its own propensities.42 It is free to upset the structures—social, political, linguistic, ecclesiastic—that threaten to limit its open-ended being. For all his love of the Gothic “festival of physiology,” however, Mandelstam turns his church inside out to very different ends in the poem’s second stanza. The church that is an open book, or more precisely, an open body on the inside, keeps its secrets outside, where they would seem to be in plain view: “But a secret plan is betrayed from without.” The open secret and the line’s conspiratorial tone raise a question—from whom is this architectural plot being kept? The answer would seem to be that structural secrets are being withheld from the church itself, or rather, from its interior, from the body that rises within its walls and threatens to overwhelm them. Mandelstam’s plotting, his partial inversion of inside and out, aims neither at completing the “carnivalization” of Notre Dame nor at thwarting it completely. Instead, he works to orchestrate an uneasy, even antagonistic relationship between the cathedral’s dualities. His goal is neither war nor peace, but the sort of unresolved, fruitful standoff between opposing forces that led to the building of Notre Dame in the first place. His “secret plan” counterbalances the “battering ram” that the vault, which had been Adam, has now become.43 Mandelstam’s architect’s tools—for the Acmeist, “worldview” becomes a “tool and an instrument, like a hammer in the hands of a stonemason”(“The Morning of Acmeism,” CPL, 61–62)—are busy crafting material that contains within itself the means for its own destruction. A battering ram’s sole purpose, after all, is to undo building, to reduce structure to rubble. The church is thus built on the instrument, at least potentially, of its own downfall. And if the Gothic cathedral depends on its viewers for completion, if it is being built continually in the eyes of its beholders, then it is also, by extension, undone each time they turn away. It is a perfect vessel

86

•

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

for the Acmeist vision of the past. The Acmeists rely on and are justified by the history whose apex they claim to be. As Adamists, however, they lay claim to absolute newness and originality. True Acmeists climb only those towers that they themselves have built; to scale Acmeist heights, though, they must, as Adamists, dismantle and rebuild the monuments of the past as they climb. The potential for catastrophe is built into such a task, and the constant presence of catastrophe momentarily kept in check serves as the stimulus that propels continued creation. The “modest exterior” of a true poem, Mandelstam warns in “The Morning of Acmeism,” conceals a “monstrously condensed reality”; and such artworks, needless to say, are highly combustible and fraught with danger (CPL, 61). The stanza’s final two lines reveal that catastrophe is at best a breath away from Mandelstam’s Notre Dame. Only one syllable keeps the weight of the church as matter from “crushing” its walls (ne sokrushila, literally “[would] not crush”; my italics). Only one syllable restrains the upward motion of its vault (bezdeistvuet, literally “is inactive”; my italics). The forces of catastrophe are forestalled, but their continued power is evident even in the phrases that mark their—temporary—defeat.44 Gothic architecture’s “resilient equilibrium of weights and balances” is an uneasy counterbalancing of opposites: “If any part should give way, the entire structure would be endangered.”45 Perhaps Mandelstam, who is both material and architect, inside and out, the viewer on whom the structure depends and a stone at home in its groined vault, is himself the unreliable part that endangers the integrity of Notre Dame’s structure. Through his movements and shifting identities, he has courted disaster so that he might participate in forestalling it. “Poetic culture,” Mandelstam announces in an essay of 1922, “arises from the attempt to avert catastrophe” (CPL, 137). The catastrophe that Mandelstam activates and contains in Notre Dame allows him in the third stanza to reenter the church and to find in it an even grander and more capacious vessel than it had been before. It becomes a receptacle capable of holding his most ambitious visions of culture. The vital, but unstable, intersections of opposites that animate Notre Dame in the poem’s first stanza join together to form the “living equilibrium” that was for Mandelstam the medieval world’s essence (CPL, 65). The pairs that populate François Villon reflect his nation and his age; they echo the structure of the medieval world that surrounds him. Mandelstam’s renewed Notre Dame, with its more complex, expansive couplings, reflects not just the medieval world but the world of all times and the world beyond time. History and the abyss, nature and culture, spirit and matter, Christian and pagan, victim and oppressor, strength and weakness, reason and belief: the forces interlocked within Notre Dame’s newly reinforced walls suggest in their richness and scope the workings of the cosmos itself. At the same time, this cosmos bears the stamp of a particular, personal universe conquered and contained. The rebuilt Notre Dame holds em-

•

H I S T O R Y

A N D

M O D E R N

C A T H E D R A L S

•

87

blems of the struggles that shape the early poetry of Stone. “[Mandelstam] loves buildings,” Gumilev writes in his review of Stone, “the same way that other poets love mountains and seas.”46 Indeed, Mandelstam’s buildings contain mountains and seas, the forces of nature that other poets might celebrate more directly. The nature held in Notre Dame is, however, a very specific one. It is the same nature in which Mandelstam himself had earlier been contained, the nature he longs for and fears in the early verse. The cathedral’s “elemental labyrinth,” its “inscrutable forest” are akin to the ominous, labyrinthine forests in which the young poet of Stone wanders, uneasy and alone. Elsewhere Mandelstam finds in Gothic building a force to match the boundless energy of the sea, the energy he covets in the early poetry: “Which is more mobile, which is more fluid—a Gothic cathedral or the ocean surge,” he asks in “François Villon” (CPL, 59). And in “Humanism and the Present”(1923), Gothic society is “a complex and dense architectural forest” (CPL, 181). Both the forest and the sea threaten to overwhelm the frail self of the early poems, and this self withstands their primal force only by withdrawing from their vitality. In this stanza, though, the reed that represents a weak and wavering self in earlier lyrics stands beside the oak, an emblem of might and thus apparently the feeble reed’s antithesis. In this new construct, however, it is the equal of the forest’s most powerful tree, and their proximity does not endanger the distinct identity of either. They are united by a structure that yokes together differences and makes of them a strength, a structure that derives its vitality precisely from the volatile, incongruous combinations of which it is made.47 The quest to span the seemingly insuperable distance between absolute differences is the essence of Gothic art, which strove “to bridge the impossible gap between matter and spirit, mass and void, natural and supernatural, inspiration and aspiration, the finite and the infinite.”48 It is an art made to order for the young poet of Stone, suspended between opposing worlds, contradictory desires and fears, and equally contradictory images of the self that fears and desires. This art does not require him to replace one world, one self with another. It provides him instead with the means to forge “mobile chains of being” between worlds and selves without denying their differences. The “emperor” (tsar’) that governs the intricate network of the third stanza’s Notre Dame is not a person, divinity, or principle. It is the plumbline, the instrument that makes architectural creation possible. It is a mobile tool; its reign can be extended everywhere; and like Peter the Great’s “ruler,” the yardstick his descendants inherit in the Admiralty’s spire, it is available, one assumes, to all times as well. This “emperor”—accessible, flexible, and designed to extend the powers of its subjects—is the antithesis of the rigid chain of command that keeps “Hagia Sophia” ’s stern hierarchy in place. Nonetheless the plumbline provides fixed measure; it remains unchanged whenever or whereever it is used. With it, human beings can gauge distances and depths and judge how best to bridge them. With it,

88

•

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

those “rational” mystics, medieval builders, can take on the abyss that threatens them. They can measure the distance they have fallen and use that knowledge to fight their way upward again. This plumbline offers moral guidance as well. In the Old Testament the plumbline becomes a symbolic means of gauging relations between heaven and earth, God and humanity.49 The plumbline as biblical metaphor spans the distance between spirit and matter. It is thus a fitting ruler, in more ways than one, for a church that stands as testament to the medieval builders who used reason’s tools to fathom mysteries seemingly beyond the reach of reason. Perhaps the plumbline that mediates between God and humanity can likewise be used to trace the relation between God’s creation and the creations of his creatures. Or even to collapse the space between them, to overcome the distance that divides divine and human being, and divine and human making. For God’s building and humanity’s ultimately converge in “Notre Dame” ’s third stanza. The Gothic architect, says Mandelstam, built his church on the model of the body. The Gothic cathedral is “the logical development of the concept of the organism” (CPL, 63); and the medieval notion of organism seems to possess in embryo the vast capacities for containment that reach their peak in Notre Dame. Villon’s intricate organism had hinted at the body’s apparently limitless potential as a vessel for shaping the networks of human history and culture. This potential is realized in Notre Dame’s monstrous, built body, which metonymically holds all Judeo-Christian history within its walls. It is Adam, humanity’s first beginnings, and also the mother of God, whose son, the Second Adam, is the race’s final salvation. It holds “Egyptian might,” which evokes the Old Testament oppressions of the Chosen People, and “Christian modesty,” the meekness and suffering through which these oppressions were redeemed. Its basilica is a classical inheritance transfigured through Christianity, and with its “Gothic soul” it enters European history. The “dark organism” of “The Morning of Acmeism” shares Notre Dame’s capacity for containing nature, if on a smaller scale. Its “divine physiology” is itself a “forest” (CPL, 63). As in “Notre Dame,” the nightmare landscape of the early verse is mastered by being turned inward, and this inner forest becomes fresher, “denser,” “more virgin” than the forests of the outside world (CPL, 63). The human body makes nature natural again; it restores nature’s true nature to it. The “grotesque body,” Bakhtin writes, “is the cosmos’ own flesh and blood, possessing the same elemental force, but better organized. [It] is the last and best word of the cosmos.”50 Notre Dame is divine physiology developed by humanity to its highest degree. It amplifies and unites within itself the twin capacities of the human form; it contains both nature and culture, for it is itself the height of nature and culture. It is Adam, God’s annointed master of his newly created nature, and Akme, the summit of all endeavor in human history since the Fall. In Notre Dame, the contours of the body given from above seem to over-

•

H I S T O R Y

A N D

M O D E R N

C A T H E D R A L S

•

89

lap with, indeed to become, the contours of the “God-given palace” that is the world itself (CPL, 63). In this vastest, most cataclysmic of inversions, the church becomes the vessel for the universe that holds it. Bakhtin’s “grotesque body” aims, like Mandelstam’s Notre Dame, to restore “the human place in the universe” by taking the universe inside itself. This body is born of humanity’s awareness of the “cosmic elements within [ourselves],” just as Notre Dame grows from medieval humanity’s recognition of the mystery of its physical being. For both Mandelstam and Bakhtin, the human being at odds with his or her physical self is subject to fear of “the starry sky, the gigantic material masses of the mountains, the sea,” of “cosmic upheavals” and “elemental catastrophes.” Yet the human body provides a bond that unites all people in the battle against the forces that threaten human being as such. This colossus, whether Bakhtin’s “cosmic body” or Mandelstam’s Notre Dame, assumes the form of the forces humanity fears, and turns their power to human ends. It absorbs “mountains, rivers, seas, islands, and continents,” Bakhtin writes. “[It] can fill the entire universe.”51 The task that Bakhtin’s “grotesque body” must accomplish, vast as it is, is ultimately less daunting than the demands Mandelstam makes of his Notre Dame, which must master culture as well as nature and bring them together under one roof. According to Bakhtin, the “grotesque body” was medieval folk culture’s chief weapon directed against the oppressive, ossified hierarchy of the medieval church. This ever-unfinished body draws its strength from nature’s cycles of renewal and change and opposes “official medieval culture,” a “monolith of the Christian cult and ideology” determined to keep this giant’s body, which is the body of the people itself, in its place. “Official culture” seeks to impose the forms of the past on the growing, changing present, while “folk culture,” the culture of the body, looks to the future that will undo and renew both past and present.52 Official medieval culture and medieval folk culture are, in other words, worlds apart. “One might say,” Bakhtin writes, “that [folk culture] builds . . . its own church versus the official church, its own state versus the official state.” For Mandelstam, however, the Middle Ages are “physiologically brilliant” precisely in their interweaving of “Gothic stability and morality” with the body’s dynamics; and medieval culture, high and low, grows from this mixture of moral force and physical vitality (CPL, 59). It is not my task to determine which Middle Ages are more accurate, Bakhtin’s or Mandelstam’s; I suspect that both visions are made up of more or less equal parts of history and myth. Mandelstam’s version of medieval is more complex and finally more challenging, though, than the rigid, if suggestive, binary opposition Bakhtin creates between an oppressive church and the endlessly playful “folk” who work to subvert it. The church as structure in a literal, physical sense is the heart of Mandelstam’s Middle Ages, and its shape and substance are taken from the human form to which, according to Bakhtin, it should be irreconcilably opposed. Mandelstam’s

90

•

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

monstrous church draws on the resources both of the “organism,” the body as such, and of “organization,” the uses to which this body has been put in the past, the structures it has helped to build in human history.53 Like Bakhtin’s “grotesque body,” Notre Dame aims to give the world a human sense by bringing it within the human form. But Notre Dame and its makers also aim to complete the human shaping of the world through building, through human endeavor, human culture. Just as the word organization (organizatsiia) grows from organism (organizm)—and both stem from the Greek word meaning “implement” or “tool” as well as “bodily organ”—building is rooted in the body. Human structures derive from “divine physiology,” from God-the-architect’s initial shaping of the human form itself. Fallen humanity may no longer be master in the universe conceived for its use—but it can employ the model of its own divinely inspired form to reclaim its place in the cosmos. Building becomes a way to extend the realm of the body throughout the world, and upward into the skies as well, for it is also, as Mandelstam’s towers and spires declare, a way to challenge the breach opened by Adam’s fall: “The handsome arrow of the Gothic belltower rages because its function is to stab the sky, to reproach it for its emptiness” (CPL, 63). “In Canto XXVI of the Paradiso, Dante goes so far as to have a private conversation with Adam,” with “St. John the Divine, the author of the Apocalypse” acting as Dante’s chief assistant, Mandelstam writes in “Conversation about Dante”(CPL, 422). This interview, “the alpha and omega of all scripture,” in Dante’s phrase, unites the beginning and end both of the Bible and of world history itself; biblical history’s Adam and Akme, its beginnings in Genesis and culmination in the Apocalypse, are conjoined.54 Mandelstam arranges a similar interview in “Notre Dame.” Notre Dame’s walls enclose the whole of Christian history, from Adam to Christ’s birth (the church, after all, is named for his mother) and beyond. The walls themselves grow from the body of both the first Adam and the second, Christ, who was sent to redeem Adam’s fall, and whose body on earth is the Christian church. Christ, who is both building and body, whose “temple of the body” “filleth all in all” (John 2:21; Eph. 1:23), is Mandelstam’s model for the body that frees humanity from its fear of non-being, as it humanizes, or “Hellenizes,” death itself (CPL, 94). The historical task of the Christian artist, Mandelstam declares, is to reenact “the single creative act that began our historical era,” the “redemption of the world by Christ” (CPL, 91). In “Here the Eucharist, like a golden sun,” the priest who recreates Christ’s passion and resurrection can “take the world into [his] hands like a simple apple” (1920; #117). The Christian artist’s imitation of Christ offers similar possibilities. In “Notre Dame,” Mandelstam uses his art not only to imitate Christ’s first creative act but to anticipate the creative act that will end the Christian era, according to biblical prophecy. This is Christ’s final redemption of the world, the Apocalypse, when beginnings and endings will meet; the fallen world and fallen humanity will be restored at last; and Christ’s body, the body of the

•

H I S T O R Y

A N D

M O D E R N

C A T H E D R A L S

•

91

church, will finally triumph as the Christian world becomes the world as such. In his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye describes the Apocalypse as “the imaginative conception of the whole of nature as the content of an infinite and eternal living body.” In the apocalyptic world-as-body, “nature becomes not the container, but the thing contained,” and the forms “imposed by human work [and] human civilization . . . are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs inside nature, but are themselves the forms of nature” and of “a human universe.” Christ, who unites in himself divine and human, nature and culture, is the medium through which these cosmic transformations are achieved. He is “both the one God and the one Man, the Lamb of God, the tree of life, or vine of which we are the branches, the stone which the builders rejected, and the rebuilt temple, which is identical with his risen body”; and we exist in this body “as in a city or temple.”55 We recognize in this description of the apocalypse the contours of Mandelstam’s Notre Dame, built in imitation of Christ’s allencompassing creative act. Itself both natural and cultural, it can absorb both nature and culture, and it transforms and humanizes nature through culture. Notre Dame arises not only from the drama of its nation’s past and of the age in which it itself was built. It is also a protagonist, a monstrous everyman in the cosmic drama of the struggle to make the world human again. It also represents Mandelstam’s attempt to use the struggles of the early verse to shape the larger context—social, historical, even cosmic—he requires. As manifesto, as Adam and Akme, “Notre Dame” ties him to his own age and nation by way of the Acmeists, whose fight for being, poetic and otherwise, he shares. Through his affinity with the medieval age that produced Villon and Notre Dame, Mandelstam lays claim to other nations and ages; and by declaring his kinship with France’s distant past, he inherits the French tradition that is descended from that past. He can become part of Christendom merely by stepping beneath Notre Dame’s vaults, and his mobility ensures that he can enter and exit this tradition as easily as he steps in and out of the church itself. For all their historical specificity, the Acmeists, medieval humanity, and Christianity are akin on a cosmic scale in Mandelstam’s vision. They are united by their shared quest to shape a place for human life in the inhospitable universe they work to domesticate. Mandelstam’s name for this struggle to assert “the human place in the universe” is Hellenization, and the name itself transforms a historically specific place and time, Hellas, ancient Greece, into a process, Hellenization, and a principle, Hellenism, that are accessible to anyone who seeks to master a hostile cosmos.56 Such Hellenization is the chief task facing the Acmeists themselves, as Mandelstam describes it in “On the Nature of the Word”; within the disembodied universe bequeathed them by their Symbolist parents, “the master was chased out of his own house and no longer dared to enter” (CPL, 129). In reacting against the Symbolists, the Acmeists must reenact the Fall and res-

92

•

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

toration of humankind, or so Mandelstam’s scenario implies; and the Hellenistic system they employ in recovering the cosmos is very like Frye’s apocalypse. Hellenism, Mandelstam explains, is “the transformation of impersonal objects into domestic utensils, and the humanizing and warming of the surrounding world with the most delicate teleological warmth”; in a Hellenized world, all things are “subjected through the human ‘I’ to an inner connection” (CPL, 127–28). Both Frye’s apocalypse and Mandelstam’s Hellenism reclaim the world for human being, and the human home becomes identical with the “God-given palace” that is the world itself. There is, however, a crucial difference between the two. Frye’s apocalypse concludes human history, as time comes to a close in paradise regained. Time in Mandelstam’s Hellenized cosmos, on the other hand, is simply suspended; it is held in check until human history, or poetically induced catastrophe, intrudes to disrupt its precarious structure once again. This is the tenuous, temporary apocalypse at work in “Notre Dame.” The vital equilibrium achieved in the third stanza is paradoxically timeless and changeless; its “intricate network” is sustained entirely without verbs. Time, whose transforming presence makes itself felt in the many active verb forms of the earlier stanzas, is marked here only by its absence. Notre Dame can contain the cosmos, it would seem, only in an interval that stands outside of time; it holds all human history in a moment that lies beyond history’s reach. Time, history, and humanity intrude once more in the poem’s final stanza in the shape of the poet himself. He inserts human time into the body of the church by using his immediate past, his study of the cathedral as body and structure—the fourth stanza’s “ribs (rebry)” refer to architectural terminology as well as to the body57—to propel the church into an open-ended future still remaining to be built. The poem begins in an unresolved past, in a history driven by conflict and conquest, and this past refuses to remain past; it feeds into the present that it continues to shape. “Notre Dame” ends with an equally unsettling leap into the future: “I too will create beauty some day,” Mandelstam tells the church defiantly. As he had in the second stanza, he opposes the very structure whose energies he celebrates, and in each case he registers his opposition with the conjunction but (no), which opens both the second and the fourth stanzas. The war between building and battering ram that had threatened to erupt earlier seems to reignite as Notre Dame itself becomes a stronghold, a fortress (tverdynia). This time, however, the sides are reversed, as Mandelstam, that “double-dealer with a double soul” (#136), turns on the structure he had earlier worked to reinforce. In the second stanza he stands outside to sympathize with the walls that resist the giant’s might of that battering ram, Adam’s body. In the final stanza, though, he threatens to disrupt the hard-earned balance he had himself helped to create, as he takes the place of the forces he sought to suppress. He is inside the church, studying its ribs, apparently held captive by what has become an all-toosolid structure; and his “secret plan” now is presumably designed to free

•

H I S T O R Y

A N D

M O D E R N

C A T H E D R A L S

•

93

him from its confines. The Acmeist, though, is subtler than the monstrous Adam of the earlier stanzas. He uses Acmeist reason, Acmeist logic and craft to draw his weapons from the very structure he opposes—hence his intensive, attentive study of its shape. But why should Mandelstam turn on the church that embodies his humanized, Hellenized cosmos? Why should he create his own beauty when in his Notre Dame he seems to find precisely the kind of vital, fully human loveliness that Hagia Sophia lacks? Why would he disrupt the structure he had worked so hard to construct? Mandelstam’s vision of architecture relies as much on unbuilding or rebuilding as on building proper, and his poetic culture arises only in the face of a catastrophe that is narrowly averted and, if necessary, artificially induced. A catastrophe that has been completely contained, forestalled once and for all, cannot give birth to true poetic culture, for the vessel that holds catastrophe completely, or holds it off completely, has itself become whole and complete and is thus impervious to change and new creation. Such a vessel stands, like Hagia Sophia, beyond the reach of human influence. Perhaps this is why Mandelstam calls Notre Dame by name only in the last stanza, for only here does it threaten to become a finished structure that can be finalized by the name that history has given it. “You cannot Hellenize the world once and for all the way you can paint a house,” Mandelstam warns in “Pushkin and Skriabin” (CPL, 94), and his words are both a statement of fact and a command: the Russian nel’zia (one cannot) can signify either impossibility or prohibition. “In art there are no finished things,” Mandelstam insists in “Conversation about Dante,” and the artist’s task is to “destroy the integrity (tselostnost’)” of everything ready-made, even if he or she has helped to create it (CPL, 415– 16; II, 384–85): “Poetic speech creates its instruments on the move and annihilates them likewise on the move” (CPL, 433). Two decades divide Mandelstam’s “Notre Dame” from his Dante; we can trace nonetheless in the 1912 poem the same pro and contra that shapes Mandelstam’s late vision of tradition. Culture evolves, “Notre Dame” suggests, through a chain of unlikely creative coalitions among elements whose positions shift and twist to form equally unlikely oppositions. There is no final synthesis: “But only once a year does duration overflow/In nature as it does in Homer’s metrics” (#62). Culture and nature coincide only fleetingly. The world is Hellenized only at moments. And this is as it should be. For only in such a world, forever awaiting fresh Hellenization, is the artist necessary at all. In “Pushkin and Skriabin” Mandelstam labors to define the role of the artist in a world that has already witnessed the ultimate creative act in Christ’s redemption of the world (CPL, 91). “What remains?” Mandelstam asks, and the weight of the past is not entirely put to rest by an answer in which “repetition” and “imitation” coexist uneasily with “freedom,” “unfading freshness,” and “personality” (CPL, 91–93). “I am all wholeness (tsel’nost’), I am all personality, I

94

•

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

am all indivisible unity,” Mandelstam’s Christian world announces in the essay (CPL, 93; II, 316). In “Notre Dame,” however, Mandelstam’s own personality emerges only in challenge to whatever claims the church might make for such all-encompassing wholeness. His “I” emerges only once he finds a way to displace a past made absolute, to shift its weight and thus clear a space for himself and his own creation. In Stone’s early lyrics Mandelstam is born into a world that surrounds him, precedes him, and does not need him, a world both ominously empty and overwhelmingly full. In “Notre Dame,” he and his medieval collaborators have succeeded all too well in their conspiracy against the world’s emptiness. Mandelstam has worked with the past to create a monster, a monument that comes dangerously close to all-encompassing perfection. A church that can hold the cosmos, a tverdynia (fortress) that contains the tverd’—the word signifies both sky and earth, and its root, meaning “hard” or “firm,” unites it with tverdynia—can easily devour one small poet. Such a construct hardly requires his further services in any case. “Man must be the hardest thing on earth (tverzhe vsego na zemle),” Mandelstam proclaims in “On the Nature of the Word” (CPL, 132; II, 258). He must become “harder” (tverzhe) than the “fortress” (tverdynja) that he himself has made. The stone finds itself between a rock and a very hard place, and the creature must again be made to serve its maker. This universal, literally catholic church, shaped from and containing a vast web of histories, nations, and traditions, is an early architectural emblem of the world culture that lay at the heart of the Acmeist endeavor. “Culture has become the church,” Mandelstam announces in “The Word and Culture” (CPL, 112)—but in “Notre Dame” the church has become culture. The final stanza thus becomes a battleground between individual talent and the tradition, between the poet and a cultural past that appears to require no further additions. The poet of “Notre Dame” is clearly ill at ease with the past whose present vast contours he has helped to create. In the final stanza, his “I” surfaces three times in the space of as many lines, and his overinsistence seems designed both to compensate for this “I”’s conspicuous absence elsewhere in the poem and to compete with the massive form in whose shadow he stands. Overpowered by Notre Dame, he must protest too much in order to be heard at all. This “I,” for all its assertiveness, appears to stake its claims for existence on something that does not yet exist itself. “I too will create beauty some day,” he claims—but the contribution to world culture that will be “so single, so his own” remains to be seen. The ambitious poet of “Notre Dame” ’s final stanza is still a diligent pupil who has not finished his study of the structure with which he hopes one day to compete. He is apparently reluctant to make good his boast, to take the final, fearful leap into his own creation. Until the day comes when his lessons finally bear fruit, his existence must rest on assertion alone.

•

H I S T O R Y

A N D

M O D E R N

C A T H E D R A L S

•

95

The first edition of Stone closed with this stanza, with Mandelstam poised on the brink between past and future creation. But the contest between tradition and the individual talent was not, of course, resolved “once and for all” in the poems that followed in later editions. The 1916 version of Stone also ends with this struggle, and it, too, is open-ended. The true subject of the second Stone’s final poem, “I will not see the famous Phèdre”(1915; #81), is Mandelstam’s attempt to convert past culture into present experience and present power, as he attempts to circumvent the “mighty curtain” that bars him from a longed-for past: “I came too late for the festival of Racine,” he laments. The closing line of the poem and of the collection is not only grammatically conditional, and thus counter to reality by definition; it is also literally incomplete: “If a Greek could see our games . . . (Kogda by Grek uvidel nashi igry . . . )” The meeting of neoclassical France, modern Russia, and ancient Greece the line anticipates can only be imagined in a space that remains conspicuously empty. Mandelstam articulates his ideally liberating version of tradition and creation most clearly in “I have not heard the tales of Ossian” (1914; #67): Q ne slyxal rasskazov Ossiana, Ne proboval starinnogo vinaó Zahem 'e mne mere]itsq polqna, Wotlandii krovavaq luna? I pereklihka vorona i arfy Mne huditsq v zlove]ej tiwine, I vetrom razvevaemye warfy Dru'innikov mel;ka[t pri lune! Q poluhil bla'ennoe nasledstvoó Hu'ix pevcov blu'da[]ie sny, Svoe rodstvo i skuhnoe sosedstvo My prezirat; zavedomo vol;ny. I ne odno sokrovi]e, byt; mo'et, Minuq vnukov, k pravnukam ujdet, I snova skal;d hu'u[ pesn[ slo'it I kak svo[ ee proizneset. I have not heard the tales of Ossian, I have not tasted of that ancient wine— Why, then, do I seem to see that glade, And Scotland’s bloody moon? And harp and raven calling to and fro Sound for me in ill-omened silence, And the wind-whipped scarves Of the retinue flicker in the moonlight.

96

•

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

I’ve come into a blessed legacy, The wandering dreams of foreign bards We’re free to despise consciously Our kin and our dull neighbors. And this may not be the only treasure, either, To skip the grandsons, descending to their sons, And a skald once again will set down another’s song And speak it as though it were his own.

In this poem culture and poetic tradition become a kind of licensed thievery. They leave the poet free to ransack history for its treasures, to pick and choose among pasts. He is at liberty to disregard a history he dislikes—even if it would seem to be his rightful inheritance—and to replace it with one more to his taste, however distant its origins may be from his own. A past that is doubly mediated (through Ossian and presumably through his latter-day collaborator James Macpherson) and triply translated (from Gaelic into English and, one assumes, into Russian) becomes effortlessly immediate and rightfully the poet’s own, for tradition allows, indeed requires him to take “another’s song” and recreate it in his own voice.58 “If you want [tradition],” Eliot warns, “you must obtain it by great labour.”59 What appears to be a relatively trouble-free procedure in “I have not heard the tales of Ossian” becomes far more problematic as Mandelstam puts his vision of tradition to the test. Let us return in this context to the stand-off of “Notre Dame” ’s final stanza, which reveals that even selfselected pasts and adopted families can prove troublesome in the making of a tradition that allows for new creation. By the time “Notre Dame” was written, Mandelstam has apparently picked the tradition that best suited his poetic needs, and he has done some additional tailoring to perfect the fit of tradition to poet. He tacitly rejects his Jewish heritage in turning to Christianity. The Christianity of Stone, moreover, is at a twofold remove from the East, or more precisely, it has been removed from two different Easts. Mandelstam’s Christianity grows not so much from an Eastern, Hebrew past as from classical Rome and Greece. Christianity is, he insists in “Pushkin and Skriabin,” “the legitimate heir of the myths of antiquity,” and its birth produced “the profound transformation that turned Hellas into Europe” (CPL, 92).60 He turns from the East again in deciding which side to take in the Great Schism. He chooses not Byzantium, but Rome and the faith that turned Rome’s colonies into the vast web of times and places that was the Holy Roman Empire. The particular embodiment of the church that becomes his point of entry into this Christian tradition is Notre Dame, the essence of transcendent maternity, and through his adoptive parent he acquires a distinguished lineage indeed. His family tree includes not only Gothic France and ancient Rome, but the mother of God, Notre Dame, and Adam, the father of humanity. “One pays a price for being the child of

•

H I S T O R Y

A N D

M O D E R N

C A T H E D R A L S

•

97

one’s parents,” Nietzsche warns in The Gay Science, and the child of these self-chosen parents faces a daunting task: it would be difficult to leave one’s own mark on such a legacy.61 And yet the poem’s rhymes suggest that this is what Mandelstam must achieve. The last word of the poem’s final line, sozdam ([I] will create) is a challenge not only to the “Notre Dame” with which it is paired in the final stanza’s rhyme scheme. It also challenges the first stanza’s “Adam,” which forms an internal rhyme with both sozdam and “Notre Dame.” Mandelstam must take the proper names of his adoptive parents—which encompass male and female, tradition and newness, building and body, human and divine, the first man and humanity’s Akme in Christ—and derive his own name and identity from them. Small wonder, then, if the poet should feel unequal to the task at hand. For the “evil weight” from which he must create is not just the unformed, resisting matter that confronted the first man. He must also take on the weight of history, the weight of Notre Dame, without being crushed or pinioned by its mass. The weight of the past keeps the heavy heart of “In the vast pond it’s transparent and dark” (#18) from leaving its native pool and entering into a new world and identity, for this new self would be bought at the cost of the ties that bind the heart to its past. The “I” of “Notre Dame” ’s final stanza is likewise unwilling to sever the bonds he has forged between himself and Notre Dame: hence his prolonged and difficult birth. (And the physiological landscape of the final stanza suggests the poet as infant staring up at “monstrous ribs” within his giant mother’s womb.) He does not wish to undo the past with new creation. “I too will create beauty one day” (my italics), he tells the church, and his “too” does not express defiance alone. It also leaves intact the tie between his future work and the past from which it springs. It signifies both challenge and connection, both continuity and change. Mandelstam finds other ways to accommodate the mother church within his future work. He absorbs its anatomy into himself through his intensive, ongoing study of its form. Though his body is still held within its walls, he can figuratively take these walls into his smaller frame through his craftsman’s understanding of them. He is thus free to draw on their lessons when the time comes for him to give birth to his own beauty. And this beauty, once it emerges, will presumably bear a family resemblance to its adoptive grandmother, Notre Dame. The rhymes that tie Mandelstam to the church as both Notre Dame and Adam—“Adám,” “Notre Dáme,” “sozdám—suggest yet another model for tradition and creation in the poem. The rhymes that frame the final stanza, “Notre Dame,” “sozdam,” also link it to the poem’s opening, by way of “Adam,” and to its title, “Notre Dame.” Through these rhymes, the poem’s ending evokes its beginning, and Mandelstam’s future creation (sozdam) is bound to God’s creation through the first man (“Adam”). It is joined at the same time to a summit of human creation in history (“Notre Dame”). Mandelstam provides the rhyming words with a common family tree. Through a kind of

98

•

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

etymological alchemy, he creates a common root for all three in the syllable dam. There is no such root in Russian, and no actual etymological bond exists between the Russian verb and French and Hebrew nouns; still, its meaning in Russian, “I will give,” ties all three words together implicitly in the generous, fertile exchange that is Mandelstam’s ideal tradition. Moreover, rhyme itself must by its nature continually negotiate the boundary between continuity and change; it must “recollect forwards,” in Harold Bloom’s phrase.62 Invention and remembrance, Mandelstam reminds us, collaborate in true poetry; and rhyme “remembers” the sounds and endings of earlier lines even as it “invents” the new combinations that propel the poem forward. Rhyme alters the past, in other words, in the process of recalling it. The wind of “Why is the soul so songful” (#25) “will not return at all/Or will return completely changed.” Both return and change are assured in rhyme, as they serve both to check and extend each other’s movement. The final word of “Notre Dame,” and the last of its three key rhyme-words, propels the poet into a future where he will both draw on and alter the past. Yet his challenge, sozdam, is not on an equal footing with the forces of the past it echoes. These forces, Adam and Notre Dame, have their own names, the “dear names” that preserve identity in the face of time’s transformations. But the poet, whose self will be formed by future action, whose identity is still pure potential, remains nameless. In “Why is the soul so songful” (#25), the poet who cannot master the mighty named forces (“Aquilon,” the “wind of Orpheus”) around him fails in his creation and loses himself in the process: “And cherishing an uncreated world,/I forgot my useless ‘I.’ ” This is the danger that the stilluntested poet of “Notre Dame”’s final stanza must face in taking on future creation. There is, however, one further name linked with the poem “Notre Dame,” a name that suggests that the final stanza’s “I” will succeed in creating a world and a self from the past he has appropriated. This name stands just beyond the frame of the poem proper—it precedes the two cathedral poems in the March 1913 issue of Apollon—and it rhymes with both “Notre Dame” and “Adam” (Adám in Russian). It is of course Osip Mandelstam. Mandelstam’s very name suggests that he has taken his adopted past into himself and made it his own: both Adam and Dame are anagrammatically encoded in this name.63 The Russified German Jewish name that is his family legacy becomes the means by which he claims an ancestry radically different from his own. Through the medium of his name, he absorbs his adopted mother church into himself and emerges with his own identity intact: the Adam and Dame that resurface in “Mandelstam” are altered by their unexpected context, just as his family name is changed by the adopted family that takes up residence within it. Mandelstam thus orchestrates yet another meeting of structure (Notre Dame) and strangeness (Mandelstam). The first such confrontation within the poem, the encounter of Roman law with foreign France, gives birth to the church

•

H I S T O R Y

A N D

M O D E R N

C A T H E D R A L S

•

99

that is the poem’s subject. The poem ends anticipating another birth, the poet’s self-creation from the fertile past he works to master. Mandelstam’s name can be seen as the final outcome of this prolonged and difficult birth—but this ending is also a new beginning. Just as the meeting of form and foreignness that opens the poem leads to the birth of the French medieval Notre Dame, so this new meeting of unlikes produces the Russian modernist Notre Dame. “We will prove our rightness in such a way,” the fledgling Acmeist proclaims, “that in answer to us the entire chain of cause and effect, from alpha to omega, will shudder” (CPL, 65). The poet who proves himself a worthy heir to his chosen parent Notre Dame produces just such an Acmeist “shudder,” for the child of the church is of course the poem’s father; the poet to whom Notre Dame gives birth within “Notre Dame” himself gives birth to “Notre Dame.” Mandelstam’s name can be seen as the final rhyme in the rhyme scheme that doubles as his cultural lineage. He is the church’s offspring, the akme of his adopted history. But “Mandelstam” could as easily be the first rhyme in this sequence, the rhyme that sets the pattern for the rest, for this Notre Dame, this Adam derive from the poet Osip Mandelstam. They are indebted to him for their being and not the other way around. The poet of Stone cannot be born as a poet until he has acquired a rich tradition to replace the inappropriate past with which his fathers, poetic and otherwise, have burdened him. As Mandelstam’s Villon demonstrates, a poet’s wants can spur his creativity, as stolen legacies take the place of traditional ties to the past and provide the inventive outsider with his home in history. If the poet succeeds completely, however, if the new home he constructs from old and stolen treasures is built too well, he is in danger of being superseded by the very structure he creates, for a perfectly adequate home does not demand additions and a perfectly adequate past requires no further creation. The greater the past the poet appropriates, the more he is in danger of being overshadowed by what Harold Bloom calls the “terrible splendor of cultural heritage,” and his own poetic task is made that much more difficult. Inversely, the greater the deficits of the poet’s own past, as he perceives them, the more he must borrow or steal to make up for his missing heritage, and such “self-appropriation involves immense anxieties of indebtedness.”64 The poet may find that paying off old debts and settling scores has taken the place of the new creation his stolen past was meant to facilitate. He may find himself bankrupted, drained of his own poetic resources by his extensive borrowing. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot tries to resolve this dilemma by claiming that the “new (the really new) work of art” instantaneously modifies the “ideal order” of all the “monuments” that have preceded it. The artist, however, can create such newness and take his place in art’s already extant order only with the weight of “the whole of the literature of Europe” “in his bones”—a burden that would seem to make

100

•

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

virtually any kind of movement, let alone one that was “new, really new,” almost impossibly hard. If the poet does succeed against all odds in his difficult task of making new verse from old, though, the past will acknowledge his efforts by making room for him among its elect. Eliot’s past thus becomes a kind of Westminster Abbey whose proportions shift whenever a new member has earned his place in its Poets’ Corner. Eliot claims that “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” In his model, though, the final word is reserved for the past; it alone sets the standards for the living. The poet must be placed “among the dead” “for contrast and comparison,” and “his significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation” to the “dead poets, his ancestors,” whose voices echo in his work and whose worth is the measure of his merit.65 Mandelstam finds a more radical solution for dealing with a past whose continued presence proves a mixed blessing for the poet who is its beneficiary. By the 1930s he can accommodate both tradition and innovation in the space of a single phrase. In his definition of Acmeism as a “yearning for world culture,” Mandelstam clears a space for himself in world culture’s wholeness precisely by way of his yearning. This longing for what is absent places world culture in a vanished past, or in a future yet to be realized, or both. It is not present in any case, and its absence requires remedy—requires, in other words, the poet’s self and the poet’s work. Eliot’s past is free to pass the poet by entirely, if he proves to be an unworthy vessel for its continuance, if his work is not fit to modify its perfect order. Mandelstam’s world culture, on the other hand, cannot exist without the poet any more than the poet can survive without a world culture to strive for. For Mandelstam it is crucial that world culture remain unrealized and unrealizable. The poet exists not simply to modify art’s ideal order. His task is to disrupt the past’s apparent perfection and end its domination of the present by opening it up to change. True art, he reminds us, holds nothing readymade; hence art itself can never achieve an ideal, finished state. For Mandelstam as for Eliot, awareness of the past must accompany innovation in poetry. But Mandelstam goes beyond Eliot to claim that part of what the artist must invent is the very past that he remembers. The poet must be conscious, Eliot writes, “not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” Mandelstam goes one step further in “The Word and Culture” (1921): “Yesterday has not yet been born. It has not yet really existed” (CPL, 113). The past and its poetry are not the measure by which the present is judged. Rather, the present is the means by which the past may yet come to pass. The past and its poets, “Ovid, Pushkin, Catullus,” exist as pure potential, “rare presentiments,” intimations of what is still to come. They are not finished statements but unfulfilled imperatives, and their future life depends on those who follow them. “Thus,” Mandelstam exults, “not a single poet has yet appeared. We are free from the burden of memories” (CPL, 114). “He who is willing to work gives birth to

•

H I S T O R Y

A N D

M O D E R N

C A T H E D R A L S

•

101

his own father,” Bloom proclaims. Armed with his Acmeist tools, Mandelstam does not merely work to obtain tradition through his labors; he seeks to reverse the flow of time itself and to become a parent to the poetic past that has fathered, or mothered, him.66 Hence the difficult, delicate balance of past and future in “Notre Dame,” for Mandelstam aspires to be both parent and child to the past he adopts in the poem. The Mandelstam of “Notre Dame” lacks the seemingly supreme self-confidence that prompts the pronouncements of “The Word and Culture.” The overly-assertive “I” of the poem’s final stanza masks the child’s uncertainty as he prepares to surpass his parent’s achievement, and the hesitant poet postpones the moment of confrontation until an indefinite future; he will create beauty, he insists, one of these days. Yet we can see in the early poem the outlines of the later strategy by which he will master the past by way of the future. The poet of “Notre Dame” ’s final stanza contrives to deprive the past of its weight by turning it into an imperative demanding further creation, a command issued by a history that can reach fruition only through the good graces of the present. If a poet desires both the Hellenizing presence of a rich and universal tradition and the boundless freedom that comes from being “everywhere a foreigner,”67 he must learn to choose his history carefully. He must pick a past that accommodates strangers and change, and he must use his powers of invention to keep his chosen past from thwarting the transformations he has planned for it. Mandelstam is acute in both his remembrance and his invention. In Christianity he finds a tradition at once venerable and vital. Christianity, founded on the possibility of rebirth and governed, in principle at least, by the spirit of adoption, gives him access to the Europe he covets. It is at the same time an unfinished faith. God’s first revelation is the world’s creation and his second is his son, sent to save a fallen world. The final revelation, the apocalypse through which the rift between God and humanity will be fully healed, has not yet come. This leaves the poet free to treat Christ himself as a presentiment of what is still to pass, an imperative that has yet to be fulfilled. The weight of Christ’s redemption of the world is lifted from him by history itself, by a world that has not yet carried out the divine command. As he wanders in the labyrinths of history, the poet is free to recreate and undo Christ’s incomplete revelation. Hence, “Christian art is always action” and Christian culture is born of Christianity’s “dynamics”: “The divine illusion of redemption in Christian art is explained precisely by this game in which the Divinity plays with us, allowing us to wander the pathways of mystery so that we might happen upon salvation on our own, as it were, having experienced catharsis, redemption in art. Christian artists are like men free of the idea of redemption, neither slaves nor preachers” (CPL,91–92, 87). The Christian church, the emblem of Christ on earth, exemplifies this open-endedness through its dual, ambivalent nature. It is spirit and matter, building and body, organization and organism, continuity and change.

102

•

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

The church’s doubled natures will coincide completely only in the Second Coming, in the final triumph of Christ who is both temple and body and will “unite all categories in identity.”68 Until that day, however, the church as body and as building remain locked in a fruitful, restless alliance that prevents the structure from taking on a final form. And the poetic interloper is free to penetrate the church through the apertures left open by the imperfect fit of its dual natures. This is why Mandelstam turns from Byzantium, for he cannot enter a church that abandons its physical nature, that mistakes its truth for final revelation and withdraws from human history. Built on vital contradictions and tenuous agreements, Notre Dame is the ideal vessel for Mandelstam’s Christianity precisely in its seeming imperfection, in the human incompletion that invites outside participation. “When a person enters under the vaults of Notre Dame . . . doesn’t he become a Catholic merely by virtue of being under those vaults?” the eighteen-year-old poet asks (CPL, 477). And Mandelstam does seem to find a perfect home within the walls of Notre Dame. But Mandelstam’s tradition, which endlessly remakes the past in the name of the future, relies as much on homelessness as home. It holds out the prospect of a cosmic, all-embracing culture while requiring that we relinquish our ready-made pasts to achieve this Hellenized future. It thus makes orphans of us all. Mandelstam must make his Notre Dame not only a point of entry into tradition, but a point of departure from tradition. After he has been taken into Notre Dame, he must take the church into himself and recreate it continually as he wanders in history’s labyrinths.

•

C

H

A

P

T

E

R

F

O

U

R

•

Judaic Chaos THE UNREAD BOOKS OF GENESIS Yura had studied the classics and Scripture (zakon bozhii), legends and poets, history and natural science, which had become to him the chronicles of his house, his family tree (semeinaia khronika rodnogo doma). —Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (1957)

“Culture has become the church,” Mandelstam writes in “The Word and Culture” (1921; CPL, 112). His “Notre Dame” reveals that the church can also become culture, and this is the role that the Christian church—as building, as body, as the embodiment of a living Western tradition—plays for Mandelstam throughout his writing. As Omry Ronen notes, Mandelstam does not go to church so much as enter and exit various churches at will in his search for ever more capacious vessels for his world culture;1 and in “Notre Dame” he seems to have found a way to reconcile his yearning for inclusion in this vast culture with his outsider’s thirst for flexibility and new creation. An early lyric, published only long after Mandelstam’s death, reminds us, though, of the price he pays for his desire to be included within the encompassing structures of a tradition larger than what his own past is apparently prepared to provide. This lyric, “When the grasses of mosaics droop” (1910; #152), marks the first, furtive efforts of the young poet to enter the Christian church: Kogda mozaik niknut travy I cerkov; gulkaq pusta, Q v temnote, kak zmej lukavyj, Vlahus; k podno'i[ Kresta. I p;[ monawesku[ ne'nost; V sosredotohennyx serdcax, Kak kiparisa beznade'nost; V neumolimyx vysotax. When the grasses of mosaics droop, And the plangent church is empty, In the darkness, like an evil serpent, I crawl to the foot of the Cross. And I drink monastic tenderness In concentrated hearts, Like a cypress’s hopelessness In implacable heights.

104

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

One might read these rather awkward stanzas as a very young writer’s tribute to the Silver Age’s reigning decadent clichés, to the quasi-blasphemous images and attitudes that the Symbolists and their epigones had cultivated in their writings. If we examine it in the context of Mandelstam’s own early poetry, though, its imagery becomes both more revealing and more disquieting. The mosaics’ drooping grasses call to mind the drooping reed of “From an evil, miry pond” (#17), and the verb used in both poems is the same, niknut’. Both these poems, in turn, echo another early lyric, “Implacable words” (1910; #182), which places the drooping reed in an explicitly biblical context that proves to be no less “implacable” than the scene in which Mandelstam operates here; and I will return to these affinities at a later point in my discussion. The atmosphere these stanzas evoke harken back to the world of Stone’s early poems generally, in which the lonely poet wanders through an inhospitable landscape. The particular landscape and scenario that Mandelstam sketches here, though, bears a telling relationship to the great cathedral poems that appear to mark his triumphal entry into Western, Christian culture. This poem also concerns entering a church, and the form this forced entry takes is disconcerting indeed. The poet can enter the church only under cover of darkness; and the church itself must apparently be empty before he can make his illicit entrance. The hopes that he entertains in the later poems of conflating church, congregation, and the community of Christian culture at large—sobor and sobornost’—as he enters the portals of his churches in verse, are dashed here from the start. But the poem’s most disturbing note is sounded by the metaphorical form that the poet himself assumes upon entering the church. He is like an “evil serpent,” and the adjective Mandelstam uses to describe his snake is synomous with Satan himself: Lukavyi, the Evil One. The Jewish poet who enters the Christian church is Old Testament evil personified. He may try to identify himself with the New Testament and human time redeemed: “I crawl to the foot of the Cross.” He remains aligned nonetheless with the evil force that precipitated the Fall and drove humanity from Paradise into history at the Old Testament’s outset, the force that led to the crucifixion but could not itself be saved by it. It is a chilling image. In this lyric Mandelstam himself embodies the evil power that bars him from the Eden of world culture. The Jewish interloper whose foreign presence tacitly catalyzes Christian churches in his cathedral poems, who inspires Notre Dame itself to reach new heights through his outsider’s challenge, here remains trapped and alone beneath “implacable skies.” This image of the poet excluded by his Jewish origins from the culture he craves continues to haunt Mandelstam’s writings long after the apparent triumphs marked by the Acmeist manifestos in prose and verse; and this chapter will chiefly concern several poems from Stone and Tristia (1922) that mark Mandelstam’s most ingenious efforts to use his Jewish past as a bridge into Christian history, a bridge that can presumably be burned as

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

105

soon as it has served its unsettling purpose. Before I turn to these lyrics, though, I want to deal, however briefly, with the context in which Mandelstam himself places his Jewish background in The Noise of Time and elsewhere, and with the Russian and European context in which he and his family were placed by their efforts at assimilation.2 “As a little bit of musk fills an entire house,” Mandelstam writes in The Noise of Time, “the least influence of Judaism overflows all of one’s life” (POM, 80). The writer of 1925 thus reluctantly acknowledges the all-pervasive force of a past that the younger poet had sought to evade, transform, or erase. But Mandelstam is not simply recognizing the power that any family past retains over the individual being it has shaped, however unwillingly he may continue to bear its traces into the present. He speaks specifically of Jewishness, and in tsarist Russia, Jewish origins marked their bearer for life. The threat of exclusion haunts The Noise of Time in hints: the Dreyfus affair, Jew-free Finland, Riga divided into two parts, “that which had been cleansed of Jews and that which had not” (POM, 69, 71, 87, 93). “What had all this to do with me?” is Mandelstam’s refrain as he describes the splendors of imperial Petersburg as seen through childish eyes (POM, 78, 79). The official answer would have been, “Very little, indeed.” In the tsar’s empire, Jews’ “residence permit[s] as Russians [were] constantly subject to revocation.” At best, Russia’s Jews were citizens on probation; at worst they were subjected to official constraints and persecution, including state-sanctioned pogroms, of a kind that Western Europe no longer tolerated. “We shall make your position in Russia so unbearable that the Jews will leave the country to the last man,” one of Nicholas II’s ministers allegedly boasted to a delegation of Ukrainian Jews. Mandelstam’s fear that his Jewish birth would exclude him from his adoptive homeland’s culture was perfectly justified in the Russia he knew. In this nation, to be unequivocally Russian was beyond the reach of the Jew.3 Only Jews who practiced particularly valuable trades or professions were allowed to reside in the imperial capital itself—Mandelstam’s father, a leather merchant, presumably obtained such permission—but official persecution did not end for those Jews fortunate enough to gain entry into the sanctum sanctorum of Russo-European culture. Mandelstam himself converted to Christianity to evade the stringent quotas on Jewish admissions in force at all institutes of higher education; and his studies abroad, from 1907 to 1910, were likewise motivated by his efforts to escape Russian restrictions on Jewish education.4 Unofficially, his Jewish past followed him even into the non-Jewish “home and family” he attempted to construct for himself in Russian and European literature (POM, 130). Even the prestigious, progressive Tenishev School he attended as a boy was plagued by occasional outbreaks of anti-Semitism. The young poet was known in Symbolist circles as “Zinaida [Gippius]’s little Yid” (Gippius had been one of his early supporters); and Aleksandr Blok, no admirer either of Acmeists or

106

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

of Jews, later noted in his diary that “Mandelstam has grown a great deal. Gradually one gets used to the kike and sees the artist.”5 Mandelstam’s first response to the threat of exclusion his Jewishness posed was apparently to exclude all mention of his Jewish roots from his own writing. Even the two pond poems (#17, #18), which deal with his Jewish origins in the most veiled and cryptic of terms, appear together only in the 1928 version of Stone. He refers to his Jewish past only obliquely until his great prose works of the mid-twenties—chiefly The Noise of Time (1925), “The Egyptian Stamp” (1928), and “Fourth Prose” (1929–30)— works that mark a concerted effort to reconcile his Jewish heritage with his quest for world culture, on the one hand, and his struggle to place both himself and his culture in relation to the new Soviet state, on the other. But the influence of Judaism is powerful even—especially—in those writings in which Mandelstam apparently tries his hardest to ignore it. It is, like the role of Jewishness in Derridean thought, “a hidden center and motivation for other issues that might at first glance seem to be entirely unrelated to it.”6 Mandelstam’s later writings, and The Noise of Time particularly, provide keys for decoding the furtive influence of Judaism that lies hidden beneath the surface of the early poetry and prose. They indicate, too, the nature and potency of the fears that led the young Mandelstam to conceal the Jewish influence on the writing of this would-be Russian poet. “All the elegant mirage of Petersburg,” Mandelstam writes in his autobiography, “was merely a dream, a brilliant covering thrown over the abyss, while round about there sprawled the chaos of Judaism—not a motherland, not a house, not a hearth, but precisely a chaos, the unknown womb world whence I had issued, which I feared, about which I made vague conjectures and fled, always fled” (POM, 79). The influence of his past is anything but benign, and the “chaos of Judaism,” with its ubiquitous “threat of destruction,” he continues, “showed through all the chinks in [our] stone-clad Petersburg apartment” (POM, 79). The Jewishness he describes here acts as a universal solvent that undoes the singular synthesis of Russia and Europe, past and present, history and new creation that is Petersburg, the Russian capital of Mandelstam’s world culture. “Everything melts. Even Goethe melts,” the narrator mourns in “The Egyptian Stamp,” as he contemplates a ruined landscape made up of “wooden, stonebound book[s], whose interior[s] have been ripped out” (POM, 181, 183). Certainly the verbal splendors of Stone would be no match for this chaotic force capable of dissolving the stone splendors of Petersburg—or so Mandelstam’s refusal to admit this “chaos” into his stone-clad early verse would suggest. As Mandelstam admits in the “Slate Ode” (1923, #137), though, he is anything but a “straightforward stoneworker (kamenshchik priamoi).” Even his most monumental structures are built partly on chaos, and they thrive on the “threat of destruction” that such uncertain foundations guar-

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

107

antee. The very passage in which Mandelstam describes his efforts to outrun his amorphous past reminds us that he is what Wallace Stevens would call a “connoisseur of chaos.” The Jewish chaos that apparently serves only to drive him from the true home he desires in Russian and European culture actually does something like the opposite. For the chaos he combats in this passage is a composite, an artistic construct made up of both Jewish and Russian forms of formlessness. It has its roots in the metaphysical abyss that lies concealed beneath a “brilliant covering” in Tiutchev’s famous lyric, “Day and Night” (1839); and it calls to mind, too, the tumultuous “element (stikhiia)” with which Peter the Great does battle as he builds his new city on the Finnish swamps in Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman” (1833). The “chaotic” inheritance that would appear to bar Mandelstam from his desired history and homeland is made instead to serve his ends, as he tacitly turns it into his bond with Russia’s own struggles to wrest poetic and cultural form from chaos. 7 In “On the Nature of the Word,” Mandelstam places a version of his native chaos at the heart of Russian culture. “Russian history,” he warns, “travels along the brink, along a ledge, over an abyss” made of the chaotic potentials of Russian speech itself: “Russian history and culture are ever awash on all sides, circumscribed only by the ominous and boundless element (stikhiia) of the Russian language, which cannot be contained within any governmental or ecclesiastical form” (CPL, 122, 120; II, 248, 245). Chaos is no less a part of Mandelstam’s world history and culture. It is the necessary enemy who propels his art and prompts him to enlist a range of allies drawn from all nations and ages. This chaos is contradictory. It can signify the absence of life or its superabundance, oblivion or an unbounded energy fruitful in its formlessness. It is protean. It may be Tiutchev’s chaos, or that of the Symbolists, or the chaos faced by medieval humanity, by modern Acmeists, or by a whole generation of Russians deafened by the noise of their times. It can take the shape of Peter the Great’s “element” or the formless darkness of Genesis. Chaos becomes Mandelstam’s bond with Acmeism, Russia, the European tradition, with the human race itself. By identifying his family legacy as chaos, he places it at the core of his endeavor. But why does Mandelstam perceive his inheritance as chaos, and not as a concrete, if oppressive, history and body of traditions? And why is he so anxious in the early work to call this chaos by any but its proper name, by a name that would reflect its Jewish beginnings? One answer to the second question might be that Mandelstam tacitly “christens” his chaos in hopes of gaining entry into Christian culture. And Mandelstam himself suggests an answer to the first question in The Noise of Time as he traces his chaotic inheritance back to the “bookcase of early childhood”: “The chaos of Judaism showed through all the chinks of the stone-clad Petersburg apartment: in the threat of ruin, in the cap hanging in the room

108

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

of the guest from the provinces, in the spiky script of the unread books of Genesis, thrown into the dust one shelf lower than Goethe and Schiller.” (POM, 79). “I always remember,” he continues, “the lower shelf as chaotic”: [the books] lay like ruins: reddish five-volume works with ragged covers, a Russian history of the Jews written in the clumsy, shy language of a Russianspeaking Talmudist. This was the Judaic chaos thrown into the dust. This was the level to which my Hebrew primer, which I never mastered, quickly fell. . . . Above these Jewish ruins there began the orderly arrangement of books; those were the Germans—Schiller, Goethe, Kerner, and Shakespeare in German. . . . All this was my father fighting his way as an autodidact into the German world out of the Talmudic wilds. Still higher were my mother’s Russian books—Pushkin in Isakov’s 1876 edition. . . . It bore an inscription in reddish ink: “For her diligence as a pupil of the Third Form.” (my ellipses; POM 81–83)

“Any object in space is a memory system” to the modernist mind, Hugh Kenner remarks, and this bookshelf represents just such a system.8 It contains “a history of the spiritual efforts of the entire family, as well as the innoculation of it with foreign blood” (POM, 81), and the word Mandelstam uses for “family” is suggestive. It is rod, which means “family” in the largest sense: birth, origins, tribe, nation, even the human race (chelovecheskii rod) as such. The story that Mandelstam recounts through this bookcase does not concern simply his own parents. It is also a succinct, idiosyncratic, and finally suspect retelling of the efforts of the Jewish race to assimilate, to cast off the linguistic and cultural traces of their “chaotic” beginnings as they enter into the main current of European, and (here) Russian, culture. In his autobiography Mandelstam describes his parents’ efforts to acquire a new language and culture to replace the Jewish past that bars them from a European present. Their efforts meet with varying degrees of success, but the context Mandelstam gives them in the bookshelf saturates them with symbolic import. He begins “in the beginning,” with the chaos of Genesis, the chaos that leads to the origins of the human race, on the one hand, and to the founding of the Jewish faith, on the other. But this particular account of origins must be “unread,” or so Mandelstam’s bookshelf suggests. The Hebrew primer (drevne-evreeskaia azbuka) that would, if mastered, provide the key to the family’s unread Genesis, is cast, like the books of Genesis themselves, back into primordial Jewish chaos, where it is left to collapse into “ruins” and “dust.” The family, and by extension, the Jewish people, should not move backward but forward, or so Mandelstam implies; they must join him in his flight from Jewish chaos. And the set of books that accompanies the discarded primer and the unread books of Genesis suggests the shape that this movement should take. This is the “reddish five-volume works with ragged covers, a Russian history of the Jews written in the clumsy, shy language of

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

109

a Russian-speaking Talmudist.” It is quite literally a transitional work. It not only tells the history of the Jews in Russia (one commentator identifies the work as I. G. Orshansky’s The Jews in Russia [Evrei v Rossii, 1872, 1878]).9 It also enacts this history, insofar as it is a history of linguistic and cultural assimilation, for its author has apparently managed to master, however imperfectly, the language that enables him to mediate between the two cultures. Mandelstam’s father and mother continue this movement; and their progress is measured, Mandelstam implies, by the distance they manage to put between themselves and their past. His father attempts to escape the “Talmudic wilds” of his upbringing by way of German culture but ends stranded between cultures, languages, and ages: My father had absolutely no language; his speech was tongue-tie and languagelessness. The Russian speech of a Polish Jew? No. The speech of a German Jew? No again. . . . It was anything in the world, but not a language, neither Russian nor German. In essence, my father transferred me to a totally alien century and distant, although completely un-Jewish atmosphere. These were, if you will, the purest eighteenth or even seventeenth century of an enlightened ghetto somewhere in Hamburg. ( my ellipses; POM, 90)

Mandelstam’s mother moves closer to the unspoken goal of full assimilation. Unlike her “autodidact” husband, she was educated in the Russian schools of Riga; and her academic success is marked by the “Isakov Pushkin” she receives “for her diligence as a pupil of the Third Form” (POM, 82). Russian culture may not have been her birthright, but she attains it nonetheless through hard work and determination. And unlike her “languageless” husband, she also achieves a true speech: “Her vocabulary was poor and restricted, the locutions were trite, but it was a language, it had roots and confidence. Mother . . . took joy in the roots and sounds of her Great Russian speech. . . . Was she not the first of her whole family to achieve pure and clear Russian sounds?” (my ellipses; POM, 90) There is an unspoken sequel to the saga Mandelstam tells here of Jewish chaos partially overcome through European and Russian culture, and that is the story that he tells in the autobiography itself, which recounts the making of a Russian writer from Jewish emigré beginnings. “The speech of father and the speech of mother—does not our language feed throughout all its long life on the confluence of these two, do they not compose its character?” Mandelstam asks in The Noise of Time, and his answer is implicit in the language in which his question and the autobiography that frames it are composed (POM, 90). He shapes from his father’s “languagelessness” and his mother’s pure but impoverished Russian the rich and flexible idiom that is his bid for inclusion in the canon of Russian culture proper. He has advanced his family’s “spiritual efforts” toward linguistic and cultural assimilation to their next, perhaps final, stage by becoming a

110

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

poet, that is, someone who does not merely draw on his language’s resources—and who certainly does not repeat its worn-out locutions and clichés—but who works to transform and extend the language through his own contributions to it. The Russian language, he insists in “On the Nature of the Word,” thrives on “cross-breeding, grafting, and foreign-born (chuzherodnykh) influences” (CPL, 120; II, 245); and through his hybrid writing, the foreign-born Mandelstam stakes his claim to be considered a truly Russian writer. Mandelstam’s efforts to become a Russian writer are riddled with paradoxes. “My memory,” he announces in The Noise of Time, “is inimical to all that is personal”; he claims that his task is “to distance the past” as he replaces his extra-literary ancestry with a purely literary family tree. “A raznochinets,” he insists, “needs no memory—it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done” (POM, 122). Elsewhere though, he admits that even this bibliographic curriculum vitae must begin in “the bookcase of early childhood”; no book contained in this early bookcase “can ever be expelled” either from “the universe of world literature,” or, presumably, from the self that is shaped by way of one’s reading as well (POM, 81). Mandelstam thus implicitly underscores the Jewishness of his efforts both to escape his past and to create a new self and homeland through culture. Through his flight from “Judaic chaos” into Russian and European culture, he does not break with his immediate family past: he continues it. His very struggle to abandon this past extends the efforts of his parents—his father’s escape from the “Talmudic wilds” of his childhood, his mother’s triumphant mastery of Russian speech—to shape new selves from what their son perceives as the rubble, or ruins, or chaos, of Jewish beginnings. Unlike Boris Pasternak, who was born Jewish but raised in a thoroughly Russian cultural milieu, or Isaak Babel, who grew up “steeped in Jewish cultural and literary life,” Mandelstam was brought up between cultures by parents who abandoned the past without mastering the new world that was to take its place.10 Mandelstam’s Jewishness is chaotic because it signifies this no man’s land, neither here nor there, inside or out. In The Noise of Time, he hints that his modernist creation of tradition is Jewish in crucial ways. He gives no indication, in The Noise of Time or elsewhere, that he is aware of the larger Jewish “tradition” of self-creation in which he and his poetic project participate. To look over the vast literature on modern European and Russian Jewry is to encounter, though, a seemingly endless series of variants on Mandelstam’s plight and on his compensatory self-invention and invention of tradition. “The alienated Jew,” Daniel Bell observes, “is the Jewish orphan. . . . Asked, in the classic question of identity, ‘Who are you?’ . . . the apikoros, the ‘sophisticated unbeliever,’ instead of giving the traditional response: ‘I am the son of my father’ . . . says ‘I am I’—meaning, of course, I stand alone, I come out of myself, and, in choice and ac-

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

111

tion, make myself.” Since the Enlightenment, Milton Gordon observes, Jews have been seen as “classic ‘marginal men,’ poised on the edge or dividing line of two cultures, fully at home in neither, and therefore on the margins of both”; and indeed, the pioneering sociologist Georg Simmel takes the European Jew as his exemplar of modern society’s “marginal men” in his classic study “The Stranger” (1908).11 Mandelstam was not alone in his dilemma, then, and he was not alone in the ways he sought to escape from it. In his History of Jewish Literature, Meyer Waxman notes that “to the Jews, literature took the place of the fatherland, and their history is to a fair degree, a history of literature.”12 One thinks of Mandelstam’s raznochinets-reader, whose history consists exclusively of books. And one recognizes the Jewish ancestors of this would-be raznochinets throughout the pages of Lvov-Rogachevsky’s History of Russian Jewish Literature (1922), which are peopled by Jewish “knights errant, with the name of European culture on their lips,” driven by what Mandelstam calls “the reading demon [which] breaks loose from the depths of cultural wastes (kul’tura opustoshitel’nitsa)” (CPL, 393; III, 165).13 For Mandelstam, the self-made man of letters, literature was to take the place of home and family. His parents’ bookcase demonstrates, though, that he was not the first in his family to conceive of such a refuge in art. Such dreams, moreover, were not the property of Mandelstam and his family alone. In Lvov-Rogachevsky’s History and other accounts of modern Jewish writing, such aspirations come to seem the very hallmark of that writing. The French Jewish poet Edmond Jabès (born 1912) is concerned, Allan Megill notes, with “a certain Judaism, as a birth and passion of writing. In the universe of Jabès’s poetry, ‘the Jew’ is defined by his homelessness, by his utter lack of a patrie. Lacking a homeland, he makes a homeland of his own through writing,” for “the house is in the book.” As Murray Baumgarten sees it, this is the true homeland of all modern Jewish writers, who have learned through their art to make “out of worldlessness . . . an independent realm.”14 Even in this thumbnail sketch, we can see ways in which Mandelstam’s calling as modern poet-synthesist might be revised to include his identity as uprooted Jew. The two identities converge in crucial ways; and indeed, in “Fourth Prose” and “Conversation about Dante,” Jewishness, imaginatively reconstrued, becomes the essence of all true culture. The Noise of Time, shaped by unresolved, often unacknowledged ambivalences, marks a halfway point on Mandelstam’s journey toward the calling of poet-Jew he embraces in “Fourth Prose.” The books of Genesis that symbolize both his personal and his ancestral past may, for the time, remain unread; but they have at least earned a permanent place in the family bookcase that is “a man’s travelling companion for life”: “Every book in the first bookcase is, willy-nilly, a classic, and not one of them can ever be expelled” (POM, 81). The younger poet, the poet of Stone and Tristia (1922), does not abide by

112

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

such strictures. He too conflates ancient and recent Jewish beginnings— but not in order to forge a new synthesis from the two. His role comes closer to exorcist than to synthesist as he works to expel his Jewish past from his Russian modernist present.

THE BACKWARD FLOW OF TIME With my love, instincts, and inclinations I should not have been born a Jew. —Boris Pasternak, in a 1928 letter to Maksim Gorky.15

“Who am I?” Mandelstam asks in his “Slate Ode,” and his answer speaks as much to his composite identities as Russian Jew or poet-Jew as it does to his position as an ambivalent postrevolutionary modernist: “Not an honest stoneworker,/A roofmaker or boat-builder,/I’m a double-dealer with a double soul” (1923; #137).15 Double-dealing, double vision, dual identities: these are the animating spirits of Mandelstam’s art from early on, whether they take the form of Villon’s hermaphroditic being, of his paired poetic churches, eastern and western, or of the doubled natures that animate his Notre Dame. In a late poem (1931; 236), Mandelstam finds a striking metaphor for the double vision he cultivates in his late work: On [Zeves] glqdit v binokol; prekrasnyj Cejsaó Dorogoj podarok Car;-Davida,ó Zamehaet vse mor]iny gnejsa, Gde sosna il; derevuwka-gnida. He [Zeus] peers into his splendid Zeiss binoculars— King David’s precious present— He notes all the wrinkles of gneiss, The pine tree and the hamlet-nit.

In this stanza Mandelstam conjures up a double vision made in equal parts of Hebrew and ancient Greek beginnings: the Judaic and Hellenic sources of Western culture fuse in the fabulous binoculars that are King David’s gift to Olympian Zeus. For the younger Mandelstam, though, these traditions are at war. To acknowledge his family history, whether recent or ancient, means to abandon all hope of possessing the classical and Christian cultures he craved. Mandelstam uses his outsider’s status obliquely and slyly in the early work to make other nations and histories his own. His exemplary outcast may be a Russian thinker, Chaadaev, or a French thief, Villon, but he is never a Jewish émigré; and the chaos from which these outcasts shape their culture may be Eastern or Western, ancient or modern, but it will not be Judaic. In the early work, Jewishness operates in disguise, and Jewish origins betray themselves chiefly in the pernicious, centripetal pull that pre-

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

113

vents Mandelstam from emerging full-grown from his “dear” and “evil” pond. In The Noise of Time, Mandelstam speaks of the “unknown womb world” he flees (POM, 79); and he tacitly identifies the “Judaic chaos” of this womb world with the chaotic force that emanates from the family’s unread Genesis. These two forms of genesis converge in a number of early lyrics, in which Mandelstam conflates his Jewish beginnings with the beginnings of Judeo-Christian culture itself, as he works to create a personal and historical mythology of origins that will permit him to cast off his past and enter the Christian world of culture. The shape that these Jewish beginnings take in these lyrics ensure that his task will not be easy. In “Pushkin and Skriabin” (1915), Mandelstam warns that Christian culture can be undone: “The Christian calendar is endangered, the fragile reckoning of the years of our era has been lost—time is rushing backward (vremia mchitsia obratno)” (CPL, 91; II, 314). Elsewhere, in a passage that Mandelstam omitted from the finished essay, he identifies a chief culprit in the plot against Christian time: Rome has surrounded Golgotha with an iron ring: this hill which has become Greek and universal must be set free. A Roman soldier guards the crucifixion and his spear is at hand: now the water will flow: the Roman guard must be removed. . . . The infertile part of Europe, the part without grace (bezblagodatnaia), has risen up against the fertile, graced [part]. Rome has risen up against Hellas. . . . Hellas must be saved from Rome. If Rome triumphs, it is not even Rome that triumphs, but Judaism (iudeistvo)—Judaism always stood behind its back and is only awaiting the hour when it will celebrate its awful, unnatural motion (strashnyi, protivuestestvennyi khod ): history will turn back the flow of time. (Mandelstam’s ellipses; IV, 100)16

Mandelstam implicitly fuses the pull of origins that shapes his pond poems with the insidious, quasi-historical force of a Judaism, iudeistvo, that threatens to suppress or reverse all Christian culture through its “unnatural” backward motion, through the misguided loyalties that lead this Judaism to prefer its fallen past to a redeemed Christian future. This apocalyptic backdrop informs, in turn, Mandelstam’s vision of a contemporary Russia consumed by world war and revolution. A triple history—personal, JudeoChristian, and modern Russian history in the making—comes into play in the lyrics in which Mandelstam struggles to remake his own beginnings. Mandelstam was not alone among modern poets in his efforts to rewrite his past and his nation’s present according to patterns of biblical transformations The task of the true “Poetic Genius,” according to William Blake, is to “create perpetual Genesis in its own image”; “Every true poet must spend his life making the Bible anew.” The Russian modernists hardly required Blake’s inspiration to aspire to “write a last judgment or universal history to fit the revolutionary needs of modern times”; like many romantic and postromantic poets, they were adept at finding ways to make their per-

114

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

sonal history “coincide[] with the universal spiritual history of mankind” conceived along Judeo-Christian lines.17 The cataclysms of modern Russian history, combined with Russia’s powerful eschatological traditions, invited poets to conceive of Russia’s modern struggles as convulsive battles between the past and the future, between a dying order and a new world waiting to be born. Belyi, Blok, Esenin, Akhmatova, Mayakovsky—all read the war and revolution in terms of cosmic, Christian transformation, and all worked, with varying degrees of conviction and success, to place their poetic voice in relation to the upheaval by way of Judeo-Christian models of prophecy and redemption.18 For Mandelstam these models hold both special possibilities and special perils. He cannot claim as his birthright the Christian apocalyptic imagery and thought that enabled his contemporaries to create the poetic cosmologies that would, so they hoped, assure their place in world history. And he can use his Jewish legacy for such purposes only by abusing it. By enlarging his battles with his Jewish past to biblical proportions, he can justify his break with this legacy while placing himself at the heart of Christian culture. By identifying the battle of Judaism and Christianity with Russia’s own divisive struggles, and by linking Christ’s Passion with Russia’s ordeal of war and revolution, Mandelstam can take his place in his adopted nation’s present and stake a claim in its future. His struggle with his Jewish past becomes a modern reenactment of another, far vaster schism: the rift that split time and history in two, the rift that divides the Old Testament from the New. This struggle takes the shape of a battle between a Judaism that remains stubbornly rooted in the past and the “Hellenistic” Christian creed through which time is, in Mandelstam’s eyes, redeemed. We could see in these procedures yet another instance of Mandelstam’s inventive remembrance, as he converts seeming deficits into cultural assets. Mandelstam’s use and abuse of his Jewish past and of Jewish history generally in these texts suggests, however, a far less flattering rubric under which we might place these efforts; their guiding spirit might be called “creative selfhatred,” as Mandelstam turns on his Jewish past in his efforts to fashion a new self fit to enter the portals of Christian culture.19 A complex, imperfect poem that was not included in any of Stone’ s several editions marks Mandelstam’s first, failed attempt to dramatize his battle with his past in biblical terms. “I’ve become afraid of living life out” (1910; #457 t) appears to be, in Eliot’s phrase, “full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate or manipulate into art.”20 Its tangled thread of metaphors seems to be spun from some compelling fear that eludes Mandelstam’s clear understanding and resists his efforts to master it in verse: Mne stalo strawno 'izn; ot'it;ó I s dereva, kak list, otprqnut;, I nihego ne pol[bit;, I bezymqnnym kamnem kanut;_

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

115

I v pustote, kak na kreste, "ivu[ duwu raspinaq, Kak Mojsej na pustote, Isheznut; v oblake Sinaq. I q sle'uóso vsem 'ivym Menq svqzu[]ie niti, I bytiq uzornyj dym Na mramornoj sliha[ plite_ I sodrogan;q teplyx ptic Ulavliva[ herez seti, I s istleva[]ix stranic Pritqgiva[ prax stoletij. I’ve become afraid of living life out— And pulling back, like a leaf from a tree, And that I’ll love nothing, And vanish like a nameless stone. And in emptiness, as on the cross, Crucifying my living soul, Like Moses in the emptiness, I’ll vanish into Sinai’s cloud. And I observe the threads That bind me to everything living, And on a marble tablet I collate The patterned smoke of being; And I snare in nets The warm birds’ trembling, And from moldering pages I dredge the dust of centuries.

I do not intend to decipher all of the poem’s awkward, oddly arresting imagery and will focus instead on its crux, on the crisis that comes at the end of the second stanza.21 The poem breaks into two parts around this troubled center, and each of its halves consists of a sequence of images cobbled into a single sentence by a breathless, insistent series of ands. The first two stanzas lead the poet from fear to fear until he finds himself, with Moses, facing annihilation at the hands of an unseen god. The final stanzas, on the other hand, read like an incantation or exorcism designed to preserve him from this awful, otherworldly force. Mandelstam frantically summons up his store of images for art’s restorative powers as he attempts to put the demons of the opening stanzas to rest. His efforts are less than successful, though, and what remains with the reader is not an image of the poet restored to life through art, but a lingering sense of the propulsive force that pushes him to the brink of destruction in the poem’s opening.

116

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

“Falling is fear’s faithful companion, and fear itself is the sense of emptiness,” another early poem warns (#34). I have suggested already that a “fear of falling” unites the opening stanza’s images; that the falling leaf stands for Mandelstam’s imagined break with his “family tree”; and that it is this fall from grace that costs him his name (the stone is “nameless”) as it turns connection into emptiness and changes vital substance into lifeless matter. This stanza is linked to the second by the conjunction and, which suggests some form of continuity, some single thought or feeling that runs from one stanza to the next. This connection, though, lies more in the mind of the poet than in the poem itself, for the fear that fuels the early imagery shifts radically as it enters the second stanza. The first stanza gives oblique testimony to the emptiness that an abandoned past leaves in its wake. The second bears witness, again indirectly, to the continued, ominous presence of a past that will not be cast off. It testifies to the power of a past that consumes its offspring as it extinguishes present and future. In the second stanza, the books of Genesis are not only unread, but unwritten as “Sinai’s cloud” swallows up their apocryphal author—the Bible’s first five books are also known as the Law or Books of Moses—in Mandelstam’s elliptical, highly personal version of early biblical history. It is here that we find “the influence of Judaism” in its Mandelstamian variant. The stanza actually begins in the New Testament: in attempted imitation of Christ, the poet “crucif[ies]” his “living soul” “as on the cross.” Through this imagery, Mandelstam not only makes his bid for inclusion into his chosen “homeland of the spirit” (CPL, 85) by way of its most venerable archetypes and traditions. He also calls on a complex model for redemptive transformation. “Christian art,” Mandelstam writes in “Pushkin and Skriabin,” is “an eternal return to the single creative act that began our Christian era.” In imitating this act, Mandelstam legitimately takes part in “the profound revolution that turned Hellas into Europe” (CPL, 91–92). Mandelstam’s Christianity ideally begins in Hellas, not Judea. Christianity itself, however, provides the first and perfect paradigm for transforming Jewish origins into what is in Christian belief a new, truly cosmic culture. This revolution is achieved through the sufferings and resurrection of Jesus, a Jew and, one might add, a half-orphan, raised by an adoptive father while his true lineage remains concealed. Christ’s seeming defection from his native tradition is undertaken with the aim of fulfilling that tradition, of revealing its true nature and creating a greater culture from it. Christ himself, moreoever, is restored through his sufferings to his true nature, and he returns from exile to the quintessential homeland of the spirit by way of the cross.22 Mandelstam’s imitation of Christ in “I’ve become afraid of living life out” ends, though, not in rebirth and reconciliation but in destruction, and its final failure is signaled by the third stanza’s opening phrase. Mandelstam’s ordeal takes place not in the desert (pust-ynja), in the purifying wastelands that lead in the Bible to revelation and redemption. (And that

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

117

lead, no less importantly, to true poetic inspiration in Pushkin’s “The Prophet” [Prorok ; 1826], the poem that established the model of poet-asprophet for generations of Russian poets to come.)23 Mandelstam’s metaphoric crucifixion unfolds “in emptiness (v pust-ote)” (desert and emptiness share a root in Russian); and his model for redemption through suffering fails him in this enveloping emptiness. His abortive Passion Play falls under the overwhelming influence of origins, under the spell of the Judaic “backward flow of time.” History reverses itself as the New Testament gives way to the Old and Christ is replaced by his precursor Moses in the stanza’s third line. Time’s backward motion does not end with Moses, though. Mandelstam’s Moses is no less singular than his Christ, and no less subject to time’s “unnatural” flow. This Moses cannot escape the emptiness that had plagued the would-be savior. The third line ends as the first line begins, “in emptiness (na pustote).” This emptiness is less ominous, though, than the implacable force that draws the poet, “like Moses,” into Sinai’s “devouring” cloud in the stanza’s final line (Exodus 24:17). Mandelstam’s Moses symbolizes not new beginnings—new laws, new guarantees from God, an end to exile, and a promised land—but absolute ending. The Moses of “Exodus” withdraws into God’s “devouring fire” more than once. He returns from this “thick darkness” to relay God’s word to his people and set the history of the Israelites in motion (Exodus 19:9, 20:21, 24:17). Nadezhda Mandelstam notes that her husband feared “the Old Testament God and his awesome, totalitarian power.”24 In this poem, Mandelstam’s Yahweh becomes a Hebrew Cronos consuming his young. He not only opposes rebirth and regeneration; he undoes the principle of genesis itself, the principle that he had used to generate both his world and his book. The creator sucks his creatures into himself, as Christ, Moses, and Mandelstam all succumb to time’s unstoppable backward flow. Mandelstam’s Christ cannot counteract the force of Judaic origins, which take on truly cosmic dimensions in this poem. Mandelstam’s own origins have become nothing less than the “patriarchal, paternal source,” in the Judeo-Christian cosmogony, of existence itself (POM, 130). In The Noise of Time, Mandelstam describes his futile flight from Jewish origins. The younger poet likewise takes flight in “I’ve become afraid of living life out.” He cannot vanquish the past on its own terms, and so he changes the terms of the struggle entirely in the poem’s remaining stanzas. He takes refuge behind a screen of metaphors that leave him grasping at threads and nets, smoke and dust as he struggles to retrieve his being from the vortex of all-consuming origins. One of these images suggests that Mandelstam attempts to countermand the laws of Moses and God by creating his own commandments through art: “And on a marble tablet I collate/The patterned smoke of being.” The poem itself demonstrates, though, that Mandelstam is not yet able to rewrite the Old Testament in a way that would remake his past while preserving him from it, that would transform this

118

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

past into a pathway leading him to a new present and a different history. It is perhaps for these reasons, for the poem’s failure as myth-creation, as much as for its evident artistic problems—its unwieldy syntax and scattershot imagery—that Mandelstam chooses to exclude it from the autobiography-in-art he painstakingly constructs in Stone’s various editions. There is one poem that Mandelstam included in all of Stone’s variants in which he apparently manages to convert the Jewish desert to new purposes as he translates his unwanted past into a liberating present. This is “The bread is poisoned and the air’s been drunk” (1913; #54). Otravlen xleb i vozdux vypit. Kak trudno rany vrahevat;@ Iosif, prodannyj v Egipet, Ne mog sil;nee toskovat;@ Pod zvezdnym nebom beduiny, Zakryv glaza i na kone, Slaga[t vol;nye byliny O smutnom pere'itom dne. Nemnogo nu'no dlq naitij% Kto poterql v peske kolhan, Kto vymenql konqósobytij Rasseivaetsq tuman_ I esli podlinno poetsq I polnoj grud;[ónakonec Vs∏ ishezaet% ostaetsq Prostranstvo, zvezdy i pevec! The bread is poisoned and the air’s been drunk. How hard it is to heal the wounds! Joseph, sold into Egypt, Could not yearn more powerfully! Bedouins beneath a starry sky, With closed eyes and on horseback, Compose free ballads About the dimly lived-through day. You don’t need much for inspiration: Someone’s lost his quiver in the sand, Another’s traded horses—the fog Of events clears; And if you sing authentically With your whole chest—at last All vanishes: what remains Is the expanse, the stars, and the singer!

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

119

Mandelstam tacitly compares one Jewish Joseph—Osip is a Russian variant of the name—to another, the Joseph of the Book of Genesis, who is sold into Egyptian slavery by his own brothers.25 Mandelstam thus evokes not only his own Jewish origins, but a history of betrayal, exile, and oppression brought on by a family divided against itself. Joseph’s history is not a perfect fit with Mandelstam’s past as he describes it in The Noise of Time and elsewhere, and the discrepancies between the two stories leave crucial questions unanswered. Does the poet lament his lost family, or what his family causes him to lose? Is he in exile from the land of his origin or because of the land of his origin, because of his family in the larger sense (rod)? What causes the deadly state of affairs we find in the opening line? Does a family past the poet cannot abandon poison his new life? Or does he find himself unable to breathe the air of a forbidden, foreign present? The lines that provoke these unanswered, perhaps unanswerable questions are expressive in their very ambiguity, which permits Mandelstam to voice his double sense of yearning and oppression, of betrayal and longing, without having to take sides or set the story straight. Mandelstam neatly cuts the Gordian knot of tangled past and present in the stanzas that follow. He liberates himself and his namesake from their stifling life-in-death by way of metaphor; he transforms one nomadic people into another, as Jewish Joseph and his troubled tribe become the Bedouins whose “free ballads” go back no further than the dimly remembered events of the day just passed. Mandelstam emerges as a master of the vanishing act that had earlier threatened to destroy him, as he sets time’s destructive backward motion in reverse. The past does not devour the present. Rather, the present, in the person of the poet tutored by Bedouin bards, dissipates the past. “The fog of events clears” and, under the spell of the poet’s “authentic” song, “all vanishes” except for open space, the stars, and the singer himself.26 Mandelstam rids the present of the past’s destructive force by way of song—but the solution he finds in “The bread is poisoned” cannot serve his larger purposes. He does not wish to cast his lot among Bedouins, whose memory lives only in a past so recent that it is really an extension of a present as vast as the expanse they roam. “The present tense, completely isolated from both the future and the past, is conjugated like pure fear,” Mandelstam warns in “Conversation about Dante”; and history is Mandelstam’s antidote to “the horror of the present tense” (CPL, 403). Like the Chaadaev of his 1915 essay, Mandelstam yearns to fertilize the vacant, timeless desert by bringing it into proximity with history (CPL, 83–89). One of the nineteenth century’s most infamous, and influential, antiSemites, Richard Wagner, condemns what he perceives as the aridity of Jewish culture in his essay “Jews in Music” (1850): “The Jew has stood outside the pale of any [true] community, stood solitarily with his Jehovah in a splintered, soilless stock, to which all self-sprung evolution must stay denied.”27 Perhaps unwittingly, Mandelstam echoes Wagner’s complaint in

120

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

the lyric that marks his first effort to transplant his dilemma into stony Judean soil, “Implacable words” (1910; #182). “We are not prophets, not even precursors,” Mandelstam laments in another early lyric (#37). In “Implacable words,” “Pushkin and Skriabin,” and Tristia’s “Jewish” sequence (#91, #100, #109), Mandelstam uses his difficulties with the past he cannot master to establish his kinship with prophets, precursors, and even Christ himself. Like them, he labors to change the landscape of the past as he sows his metaphorical seed on soil that resists new life, and he finds a framework for his struggle that is at once historical in its origins, mythical in its dimensions, and universal in its claims and aspirations. Contra Wagner, he labors to demonstrate that the seemingly barren soil of Judea, which once gave birth to Christ and Christian culture, may prove fertile ground for another birth, for his own “self-sprung evolution” into the Christian traditions of the West. Neumolimye slova . . . Okamenela Iudeq, I s ka'dym migom tq'eleq, Ego ponikla golova. Stoqli voiny krugom Na stra'e stynu]ego tela_ Kak venhik, golova visela Na steble tonkom i hu'om. I carstvoval i niknul On, Kak liliq, v rodimyj omut, I glubina, gde stebli tonut, Tor'estvovala svoj zakon. Implacable words . . . Judea turned to stone, And, heavier by the moment, His head drooped down. Soldiers stood guard Around the body growing cold; His head hung like a halo On a frail and foreign stem. He reigned and He drooped, Like a lily, into his native pond And the depths where stems drown Celebrated their law.28

Mandelstam’s earliest lyrics return time and again to the figure of the poet-Christ, the figure who will prove to be, so he hopes, his point of entry both into what Gregory Freidin has called the kenotic tradition of Russian

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

121

• 29

poetry and into the larger traditions of Western culture. The Passion Plays the young poet stages, however, frequently look more like parodies than authentic calvaries, as Mandelstam himself implies in his descriptions of these poeticized travails. The cross that he bears is “delicate” and “light”; and the “cup” he drinks from is “heavy,” like Christ’s in the garden, but also “shallow” (#22, #19, #161).30 The adjectives suggest an imposter, a mock-Christ whose ordeal is closer to masquerade or child’s play than it is to cosmic drama. These early imitations of Christ, moreover, too often betray their derivative origins in previous, decadent versions of Christ’s Passion; they are pale imitations of Symbolist imitations of Christ and thus succeed neither as poetry nor myth. “Implacable words” is more daring in its ambitions and design. Freidin argues for this lyric as the final part of a triptych that includes the two pond poems, written in the same year.31 The pond that is the locus of his own struggles with his Jewish past is transported to the Judean desert, the birthplace of Christian history and myth. This transplanted pond continues, though, to harbor the unsettling sense of ambivalence that animates the other pond poems, and Mandelstam’s revised crucifixion takes on a peculiar, highly personal resonance in its new setting. Golgotha “has become Greek and universal,” Mandelstam claims in “Pushkin and Skriabin” (IV, 100)—but the Golgotha of “Implacable words” becomes specific, individual, and Jewish. A personal symbol of Mandelstam’s Jewish past becomes an emblem of Judaism as such, of the Hebrew faith from which Jesus and Christianity were born. It embodies the Old Testament and its reign of law, which gives way in the Christian tradition to the New Testament and the triumph of grace. “The soil of Rome” is “infertile,” Mandelstam warns in “Pushkin and Skriabin”; it is “stony” and “lacks grace (lishenaia blagodati )” (CPL, 94; II, 318). Judaism “stands behind” sterile, stony Rome, he warns in the same essay (IV, 100), and the Roman Judea of “Implacable words” has in fact been “turned to stone.” This landscape derives of course from the stony ground on which the seed that is Christ’s word falls and perishes (Matt. 13: 3–22; Mark 4: 5–16). In “Implacable words” Mandelstam attempts to revise the fate of the doomed seed, and to provide it, through his own words, with the fertile soil on which it will thrive. “The seed of [Christ’s] death, having fallen on the soil of Hellas, miraculously flourished,” Mandelstam proclaims in “Pushkin and Skriabin.” “Our entire culture has grown from this seed; we reckon our history from the moment when the soil of Hellas accepted that seed” (CPL, 94). The seed replanted in “Implacable words” will provide its sower with an equally rich culture and history—or so he hopes. “I am the gardener, I’m also the flower,” Mandelstam announces early on; and in “Implacable words” the poet-gardener tacitly draws our attention to the illustrious genealogy of the wounded reed he cultivates in the pond poems. “Noticed by no one, I droop (niknu) into my cold and boggy

122

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

refuge,” he mourns in “From an evil, miry pond” (#17); and this outcast reed is descended not only from Tiutchev and Pascal. The Messiah will be, Isaiah proclaims, “a bruised reed,” “a tender plant,” “despised and rejected of men” (Isaiah 42: 3, 53: 2–3); and “Implacable words” plays on the affinities between these two sensitive plants. It opens with a new version of the plant’s retreat from a world that will not receive it, a world that is hard- or “stony”-hearted, in the Russian idiom.32 In this lyric, Judea takes on the role that Russian gentile culture plays in the pond poems. And, as in the other lyrics, rejection by the longed-for outside world, whether Judean or Russian, results in the tender reed’s final defeat. “Judea turned to stone,/ And, growing heavier by the moment,/His head drooped down” (my italics), Mandelstam laments; and the conjunction that joins the second and third lines suggests a causal connection between Judea’s hard-heartedness and the downfall of the poem’s Christ.33 The New Testament’s Christ promises liberation from the past he fulfills: “For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ” (John 1:17); we are delivered “from the curse of the law” “by the body of Christ that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter” (Romans 7:4–6; Galatians 3:13). One of the laws from which we are delivered is apparently the Fourth Commandment. “I have come to set a man at variance against his father,” Jesus proclaims, and Christ’s true disciple will “hate” and “forsake” his “house,” his “brethren” (Matt.: 10:35, 19:29; Luke 14:27). This Christ seems to offer a perfect model for a poet who seeks both to continue the past and to escape it, who works to replace his unchosen ancestry with a self-selected, “universal” family: “For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother,” Matthew’s Jesus promises (Matt. 12: 50). Mandelstam’s Christ, though, cannot free even himself from the past, let alone save those who would follow him. The prophet who is not honored in his native land withdraws to his “native pond” in the opening stanza, and the rest of the poem traces his descent into the dark places where life’s sources take back what they have given. The savior who was to defeat law with grace is himself defeated by law. Moses the lawgiver and Yahweh the maker of laws are once again victorious over Christ. The scenario of the pond poems is not a good fit with the biblical narrative, and the discrepancies between the two stories create an unsettling, finally unsatisfying poem. Mandelstam finds himself helpless before the force of the pond into which he casts the “seed” that is his Mandelstamian Christ, or Christ-like Mandelstam. His revised biblical narrative falls prey to the fatal influence of origins, as the weight of the past defeats the hoped-for resurrection. In this battle of gravity and grace, gravity has the final word. The poem’s ambiguous imagery suggests that this Christ’s fate is determined more by his author’s confused allegiances than it is by cosmic design. The emblems of Judaism, “stony” Judea, on the one hand, and the

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

123

“native pond,” on the other, take on opposing, seemingly irreconcilable forms in the poem. Judea, the historical homeland of the Jews, the birthplace of Christ, is as unwelcoming as Mandelstam’s “indifferent fatherland,” Russia, had been in other lyrics, and it is as different from his “native pond” as stone is from water. These two opposing forms of Jewishness join forces, though, to assure that the poet-Christ will be at ease neither on land nor in water. This Christ is already divided against himself in any case. The reed of the other pond poems has become a lily, made up of “head” (flower) and “stem” (body).34 The head, the flower, has presumably grown beyond the waters of the pond that is its home, and has learned to breathe “forbidden life,” to partake in the realm of grace. It has become a stranger to itself in the process, for the “stem” that joins it to its “native pond” is not only “frail” but “foreign.” Or perhaps both stem and blossom have grown “foreign” to their native source. In any case, the fragile plant cannot find a home in either world—the seed cast upon stony ground will perish no less surely than will the flower tethered to the “depths where stems drown.” This savior’s victory over death is predictably unconvincing; he “reigns” and “droops” in the same breath, and his reign ends, with the poem, in the triumph of the pond and its law, which is the law of Moses and of time’s backward flow. There is no hint here of the death that fertilizes life in “Sisters—heaviness and tenderness”—“A plough turns up time, and the rose once was earth” (#108), or of the poet who brings together stone and water through Christ’s body in the “Slate Ode” (1923)—“And I want to place my fingers into the flinty path/As into the wound, concluding the juncture/Of Flint and water” (#137).35 What is new in this version of Mandelstam’s battle with Judaism is the battle’s context, a context at once mythic and historical. Mandelstam himself underscores its importance in the passage from “Pushkin and Skriabin” I have already quoted, which reads in this context like a revised and annotated translation of the poem into prose. In this passage Rome, the holy city, Chaadaev’s Mecca and Mandelstam’s—“I took up my staff, rejoiced,/And set out for distant Rome” (#69)—appears in an unexpected role. It no longer continues Mandelstam’s cherished Hellas; it opposes it. But why should the Rome that is Christian culture’s heart in Stone become its enemy? According to the Gospels, Jesus was condemned by both Jewish and Roman courts, but it was the Romans who enacted the will of the Jewish priests by crucifying Christ. Jewish ecclesiastical law did therefore “stand behind,” or hide behind, the force of Roman civil law in Christ’s execution in the Gospels’ telling. Apart from biblical history, there is Mandelstam’s own history to consider. “It is not the city Rome that lives among the ages, but the human place in the universe,” he insists in an early lyric (#66). The capital of Mandelstam’s world culture changes more than once over the course of his career; and between Stone and Tristia, his allegiances shift from Catholicism and West-

124

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

ern Rome to Greece and its Russian descendant, the Orthodox Church.36 This shift is more a matter of orientation or tendency than of absolute repudiation of one faith and one tradition in favor of another: in Tristia ‘s final poem, the “eternal cathedrals” of St. Peter and Hagia Sophia stand united as vessels of a “universal good” (#124). This new direction may, however, partly explain Mandelstam’s condemnation of Rome in “Pushkin and Skriabin,” and the presence in the essay of the Roman soldiers who keep Christ from escaping the deadly embrace of Jewish law in “Implacable Words.” More important than Rome itself, though, is what Rome stands for, or rather, what “stands behind” Rome in both the essay and the poem. “The great Jewish revolts against Rome” in the first and second centuries A.D. were “at bottom a clash between Jewish and Greek culture,” Paul Johnson observes.37 The battle that Mandelstam orchestrates between Rome and Hellas likewise masks a deeper struggle—the struggle in history, in the Christian faith, and in Mandelstam’s created tradition, between Judaism and Hellenism. JUDAISM AND HELLENISM Could Judaism survive if Hellenism became dominant in the civilization of [Judah]? Or were the two spirits mutually exclusive and a menace to each other? —Abram Leon Sachar, A History of the Jews (1966) Ancient Israel was the exact opposite of Hellas. —Faddei Zelinsky, The Religion of Ancient Greece (1918) Hebraism and Hellenism,—between these two points of influence moves our world. —Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869)

“A simoon flew over the meadows and groves of Hellas; Hellas grew yellow and black.” The idea and the imagery could easily be Mandelstam’s—yellow and black were for him the emblems of his Jewish heritage and the Jewish faith.38 The phrase belongs, though, to Faddei Zelinsky (Tadeusz Zielinski) (1859–1944), the Polish classicist who taught at St. Petersburg University from 1885 to 1921. Zelinsky’s ideas influenced not only Mandelstam but his Symbolist predecessors Viacheslav Ivanov and Aleksandr Blok and his great contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin, who, like Mandelstam, attended Zelinsky’s lectures on classical culture at St. Petersburg University.39 Zelinsky’s interpretation of Hellenistic Greek culture attracted not only poets and philosophers; it captivated a generation of Russian intellectuals in search of “true community” in a disrupted age. As Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist note, these Russian “neo-Hellenists” saw important

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

125

parallels between the Hellenistic era and their own. In the Hellenistic epoch “the old lines separating nations, classes, families, races, and even sexes had faded,” and “a new social cosmos had to be created” to replace the old order that had vanished. The Hellenic solution to their age’s upheavals held an obvious appeal for postrevolutionary Russians in search of a new order. It was, in Paul Johnson’s phrase, “universalist culture,” or, in the Greek term, oikumene, “world civilization”: “Isocrates argued that ‘the designation Hellene is no longer a matter of descent but of attitude’; he thought Greeks by education had better titles to citizenship than ‘Greek by birth.’”40 It was Hellenism’s universalist vision that Zelinsky celebrated in his writings, and it was this vision that drew his followers living in a Russia torn by war and revolution. In “hospitable Hellas,” Zelinsky proclaims, “the community was an extended family,” and Hellas itself “was an extended community” built around a “common hearth (ochag).” This is the “Hellenistic” home that finds its way into Mandelstam’s poetic universe: “Hellenism is the warmth of the hearth (ochag) experienced as something sacred. . . . [it is] the humanizing and warming of the surrounding world with the most delicate teleological warmth” (CPL, 127–28). For both Zelinsky and Mandelstam, ancient Greece is an antidote to the ailments of the modern age. It provides a model for an era whose “centrifugal tendencies,” Zelinsky complains, “divide us from one another” and “introduce isolation and coldness where once there was shelter and warmth.”41 Zelinsky’s followers “saw the Hellenistic tradition as a part of the pedigree of the Russian religious tradition, which followed the Byzantine or Greek Orthodox Church rather than the Roman Catholic.” What actively opposes Hellenism in Zelinsky’s thought, though, is Judea, not Rome. His vision has its origins in the centuries-long strife that plagued the relations between Jewish and Greek culture from Alexander’s conquests in the fourth century B.C. until well after the death of Christ. What was at stake, Paul Johnson notes, were two equally ambitious, radically opposed versions of “universalism.” The Greeks, he writes, saw “the civilized universe (as opposed to the chaos beyond it) where their ideas prevailed, as a multiracial, multi-national society, and those who refused to accept it were enemies of man.” The Jews, on the other hand, found universal meaning in the One God who had chosen them and kept them apart from all other nations and faiths. Jewish reformers tried to find ways to bring the two cultures together, but the principles that guided them were finally irreconcilable. The “marriage between the Greek polis and the Jewish moral God” that these reformers envisioned did not and could not take place.42 The Jews, who “refused to associate with the rest of humanity,” were, one early chronicler concluded, “an inhospitable and anti-human” race.43 Romantic and postromantic historiographers and thinkers continued the arguments of Hebrew and Hellenes throughout the nineteenth century in their quest to locate the origins of Western culture, and these explorations

126

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

culminated in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who was, like Zelinsky and Mandelstam, vitally concerned with the relation of the ancient world to an orphaned modern age: “At last one longs back for that place in which alone one can be at home . . . the Greek world,” he mourns in the Will to Power. Zelinsky was one of the first academic Nietzscheans in Europe, and like his master, he is preoccupied with Christianity’s mixed parentage, both Jewish and Greek, and the influence of this dual heritage on modern culture. Nietzsche, the self-proclaimed “anti-Christ and antiChristian,” aggressively prefers the Old Testament to the New—“I have the courage of my bad taste,” he writes—precisely because the New Testament is “not so much Jewish as Hellenistic” and so dilutes the strength of a great nation. When Zelinsky brought this debate to early-twentieth-century Russia, though, he actively sided with the “hospitable” Hellenes and was as partisan in his arguments as any ancient Greek.44 The issue on which Zelinsky based his case against the Judeans was one that crucially concerned Mandelstam. To compare the attitudes of the “two ancient peoples who most influenced modernity” “toward foreign cultures” would produce, he declares, “one of the most interesting and instructive pages of ancient history”; and Zelinsky proceeds to write this page in the light of his Hellenistic proclivities. The Jews, whose universal idea, monotheism, was founded on exclusiveness, are clearly the losers in Zelinsky’s modern version of the ancient conflict. The Jews “possess[ed] a tradition which traced their history in an uninterrupted succession of generations back to the very creation of the world,” a tradition in which “they were explicitly presented as chosen among nations and tribes” and so regarded “foreign cultures” “with hostility and disdain,” Zelinsky argues. Their deity, he claims, does much the same: “Jehovah [was] the tribal god of his ‘chosen people’ and recognized other nations only as the tools of his rewards or his punishments.” The Greek cosmogony, on the other hand, readily adopted foreign gods and allowed itself to be adapted in turn to the needs and beliefs of other nations. The Greek “was capable of the humane and tolerant idea that seemed so hard for the Semitic mind of Israel to grasp—namely that mankind might worship the same godhead under different names.” Zelinsky uses what he sees as a deep-rooted Jewish intolerance for other faiths to justify his distaste for the Hebrew faith, and he also uses it to explain “all the persecutions of the Jews that defile the history of the Christian religion.” These persecutions have their roots, he insists, in an Old Testament legacy of religious intolerance: the Jews, in other words, have only themselves to blame. Zelinsky’s anti-Semitism is the subtext of his version of ancient history, and Mandelstam’s borrowings from this revised history reveal the disturbing depths of his own response to his Jewish past.45 A more balanced scholar of Hellenism, writing at about the same time, noted that “whereas today the charge is made that the Jews are cosmopolitan in a national society, then the current complaint was that they were

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

127

national in a cosmopolitan society.” Mandelstam, whose vision of a universal culture can be traced in part to a modern Jewish sense of worldlessness, draws on Zelinsky’s argument to escape his Jewish origins. Indeed, according to this argument, this would be Mandelstam’s only hope of achieving the “Hellenistic,” Western tradition he craved. “The world belongs to the nation-disciple (narod-uchenik),” Zelinsky asserts in Christianity’s Rivals (Soperniki khristianstva; 1906/1910): “Whoever complacently proclaims that his nation’s period of discipleship has come to an end has sacrificed its future by that very act.” “Hellas,” he writes elsewhere, “regarded herself as the eternal disciple of almost all the nations with which fate brought her into contact.” Zelinsky’s Judea has, however, chosen to remain obstinately closed in its past; it is the same “unnatural” nation that strives, in Mandelstam’s vision, to turn back the flow of time.46 Zelinsky’s image of the “nation-disciple” takes us to the crux of his argument, which lies in the problem of Christianity’s true lineage and its rightful disciples and descendants. His studies are intended to fight “the fatal Judaization of Christianity,” to challenge what he perceives as the distorted and dangerous notion that Judaism is the chief, the crucial “stock from which Christianity grew.” Judaism is, he warns, the “negative source of Christianity”; it threatens the Hellenistic legacy that Christ introduced into the Hebrew tradition. Christ’s message, Zelinsky claims, was “a protest against Judean attachment to the letter of the Law, in the spirit of Hellenic liberty, Hellenic humanitarianism, the Hellenic filial relation to a god whom men love.” And this Hellenic legacy, Zelinsky argues, makes all Christians of whatever time or place the true “heirs of Hellenism.”47 In “The Ideology of the Jewish Question” (1915), Viacheslav Ivanov takes on would-be Hellenists like Zelinsky who choose to ignore Christian culture’s Jewish heritage in their subservience to the “cowardly and pernicious” “ideology of spiritual anti-semitism” in fashion. Such dubious doctrines, he argues, attempt to “hack off Christianity’s deepest root, its taproot”; they refuse to recognize that the church’s body has grown “from the seed of Abraham.” Mandelstam, however, disregards his former mentor as he creates his version of Christianity’s family tree. His Christianity, like Zelinsky’s, grows not from Judea’s stony soil but on the fertile ground of ancient Greece: “The seed of [Christ’s] death, having fallen on the soil of Hellas, miraculously flourished: our entire culture has grown from this seed” (CPL, 94). And those who partake of this Hellenic Christian culture become the ancient world’s “legitimate heir[s]”(CPL, 93). This revised version of Christianity’s origins allows Mandelstam in turn to escape the overbearing power of the “totalitarian” Old Testament God he fears and to replace this God with a “Hellenic filial relation to a god whom men love.” Mandelstam “used to say,” his widow notes, “that with its doctrine of the Trinity, Christianity had overthrown the Jewish God’s absolute rule,” and this is what Mandelstam himself attempts to do, with Zelinsky’s help, as he revises Christian history.48

128

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

In “Pushkin and Skriabin” Mandelstam embraces a vision of a filial relationship with a loving god divided, with the birth of Christ, into father, son and spirit. Christ’s sacrifice frees us for “joyous communion with God, like some game played by the Father and his children, some blind-man’s bluff or hide-and-seek of the spirit” (CPL, 91). The “profound revolution that turned Hellas into Europe” also transforms humanity’s, and Mandelstam’s, relation to his own past and creates a new bond between parent and child, between life and its sources. The past, redeemed by Christ, releases humans “into freedom” and into the future “for the sake of play,” for the sake of new, flexible, free relations with the “patriarchal paternal” origins of being (CPL, 92; POM, 130). This escape from the past’s dark power comes at a cost, though: the force of origins is not easily overcome. “We are free of the burden of memories,” Mandelstam exults in “The Word and Culture” (CPL, 113–14)—but his poems tell a different story. The unsettling network of history, family, and myth that Mandelstam develops in three intertwined poems from the period of Tristia (1922) testifies to the difficulty of casting off this burden and to the price that Mandelstam’s seeming release from the past exacts.49 I have mentioned that Mandelstam moves the capital of world culture from Rome to Greece in Tristia, and Tristia’s Jewish sequence—“This night is irreparable” (1916; #91), “A young Levite among the priests” (1917; #100), and “Return to the incestuous womb” (1920; #109)—plays a crucial role in enabling him to make this shift. In this sequence Mandelstam creates the mythological framework that permits him to claim the legacy of the Greek world whose legends and myths give the collection its cohesion and power. Within these lyrics Mandelstam develops, with Zelinsky’s help, the historical and mythical scenario that enables him to resist the force of origins, to use his Jewish past as a bridge into “Hellenic,” Christian culture and, finally, to reject that past, not ostensibly because of his discomfort with it, but because of its inadequacy as history and myth.50 ?to noh; nepopravima, A u vas e]e svetlo. U vorot Erusalima Solnce hernoe vzowlo. Solnce 'eltoe strawneeó Ba[ ba[wki ba[ó V svetlom xrame iudei Xoronili mat; mo[. Blagodati ne imeq I svq]enstva liweny, V svetlom xrame iudei Otpevali prax 'eny.

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

I nad mater;[ zveneli Golosa izrail;tqn. Q prosnulsq v kolybeli, Hernym solncem osiqn. This night is irreparable, But you are still in light. By Jerusalem’s gates A black sun rose. The yellow sun is still more awful Lulla lulla lullaby— In a lighted temple Judeans Were burying my mother. Deprived of grace And lacking priests, Judeans in a lighted temple Laid to rest a woman’s dust. And over the mother rang Voices of the Israelites. I awakened in a cradle Illuminated by the black sun.

Sredi svq]ennikov levitom molodym Na stra'e utrennej on dolgo ostavalsq. Noh; iudejskaq sgu]alasq nad nim I xram razruwennyj ugr[mo sozidalsq. On govoril% nebes trevo'na 'eltizna. U' nad Efratom noh;, begite, ierei@ A starcy dumali% ne nawa v tom vina_ Se herno'eltyj svet, se radost; Iudei. On s nami byl, kogda na beregu ruh;q My v dragocennyj len Subbotu pelenali I semisve]nikom tq'elym osve]ali Erusalima noh; i had nebytiq. A young Levite among the priests He stayed long on the morning watch. The Judean night grew thick above him And the shattered temple gloomily arose. He said: the skies’ yellow is alarming. Night has already fallen over the Euphrates; run, priests! But the elders thought: It is not our fault; This black-yellow light, this joy of Judea.

129

130

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

He was with us, when on the stream’s banks We swaddled the Sabbath in precious linen And illuminated with a heavy menorrah Jerusalem’s night and the fumes of non-being.

Vernis; v smesitel;noe lono, Otkuda, Liq, ty priwla, Za to, hto solncu Iliona Ty 'eltyj sumrak predpohla. Idi, nikto tebq ne tronet, Na grud; otca v gluxu[ noh; Puskaj glavu svo[ uronit Krovosmesitel;nica-doh;. No rokovaq peremena V tebe ispolnitsq dol'na% Ty budew; Liqóne Elena,ó Ne potomu narehena, Hto carskoj krovi tq'elee Struitsq v 'ilax hem drugojó Net, ty pol[biw; iudeq, Isheznew; v nemói Bog s toboj. Return to the incestuous womb, Whence, Leah, thou hast issued, Because to the sun of Ilium Thou has preferred the yellow dusk. Go, no one shall touch thee; To your father’s bosom, to deep night, Let the incestuous daughter Cast her head down. But a fateful transformation Should be fulfilled in thee: Leah thou shalt be, not Helen, Named, not because Royal blood flows more heavily In veins than any other— No, thou shalt come to love a Judean, Will vanish in him—and Godspeed.51

Tristia’s Jewish poems were written over the course of several years, from 1916 to 1920. These dates also mark the period of Russia’s own great transformation, a transformation achieved at enormous cost through world war, revolution, and civil strife. The outcome of this prolonged, unpredict-

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

131

able series of cataclysms, though it could not be foreseen in 1917 or 1920, would be neither Hellas, nor Europe, but something entirely, unnervingly new. The struggles of fathers and sons, of past, present, and future, became crucial and universal during the revolutionary period in ways that a poet as keenly attuned to the noise of his times as Mandelstam could not fail to grasp and exploit in his writings; and I will return to Russia and revolution as a context for these poems at a later point in this chapter. “This night is irreparable” emerged near the end of Russia’s involvement in the European war. “A young Levite” appeared on the heels of the revolution, in November of 1917. “Return to the incestuous womb” was written during the height of the Russian Civil War. Seen in this light, the Jewish sequence might seem to have been dictated by the age’s upheavals. Its opening and closing poems were prompted, though, not by politics but by deeply personal events: the death of Mandelstam’s mother and separation from the woman who would later become his wife, as Nadezhda Mandelstam writes. Although the poems themselves were chronologically divided by the seismic convulsions of the revolutionary era, the impulse that runs through them is recognizably the same. They are bound together by problems, imagery, and tactics that Mandelstam had first explored in “Implacable words” and “Pushkin and Skriabin” and that he now puts, for the first time, into truly effective poetic and mythopoetic practice.52 The poems themselves mark a progression in more than one sense. Mandelstam shapes yet another version of his poetic autobiography in these lyrics, in which he moves from infancy (“I awakened in a cradle”) to youth, as he becomes the “young Levite among the priests,” and finally, to manhood and the prospects of marriage in “Return to the incestuous womb.” They also mark an apparent growth in Mandelstam’s confidence, an increased assurance in his capacities to do battle with his stubborn, recalcitrant past. His success in shaping a cohesive, mythologized history from his family past is due in part to the new way he finds to place his voice and self in relation to Christ’s Passion. Mandelstam himself no longer occupies center stage. His quest to transform his Jewish origins no longer fuses completely with Christ’s mission to redeem Jewish history and revise the Jewish faith through suffering and sacrifice. “Having endowed us with inner freedom, Russia offers us a choice, and those who make this choice are true Russians,” Mandelstam proclaims in “Petr Chaadaev” (CPL, 89). In “Implacable words” and “I’ve become afraid of living life out,” the force of a Jewish past proves irresistible and the mark of a Jewish birth cannot be erased. In the later Jewish poems, identity, whether Jewish or Christian, is no longer innate. It is, like Russianness, chosen or created, freely elected. Christ’s fate is foreordained. The witness to Christ’s destiny, though, may choose to accept its meaning and message or to reject them; he may recognize the forces of radical historical transformation or remain forever fixed in an unenlightened past. Mandelstam allies himself in these poems not with Christ himself, with the agent and embodiment of historical

132

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

change, but with Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries, who were free to side with the Jewish world, which resisted rebirth, or with the “Hellenic,” Christian world that embraced it. Mandelstam would later admit that his past could not and should not be replaced, as he learns to weave his Jewish heritage into his adopted Russian and European traditions. For the Mandelstam of Tristia, working under Zelinsky’s influence, this is not an option. He is given a choice—but this choice is absolute. He may embrace Judaism or its bastard child, a “fatally Judaized” Christianity, or accept a true, “Hellenic” Christian faith that has wholly disowned its unfortunate origins. He cannot have both, and he cannot fuse the two into a new, synthetic faith to match his “synthetic nationality” (CPL, 88).53 The cost of this choice is clear in “This night is irreparable,” which recreates the funeral of Mandelstam’s mother, who had died of a heart attack earlier that year.54 Mandelstam’s private life ordinarily informs his poetic writings in oblique, frequently irretrievable ways; the autobiographical impulse behind the poetic text is seldom readily available to his reader. “I am not interested in my kinfolk,” the young Mandelstam reportedly told a friend, and his poems are populated not by the “kin and dull neighbors” that a misguided fate has sent him, but by the adoptive family he appropriates from other times and places.55 His mother’s funeral as the pretext for a lyric marks a startling departure from Mandelstam’s usual poetic practice. The death of a loved one might seem to be the stuff of which lyric poems are made; but Mandelstam’s lyric gifts work in entirely different ways. The death of Mandelstam’s mother does not produce the expected elegy. It leads instead to a new variant of the mythologized biography that Mandelstam constructs for himself around the life of Christ and the birth of Christianity. François Villon contains in himself both mother and child, so Mandelstam tells us (CPL, 56). Mandelstam’s new version of the poet as “lyrical hermaphrodite” is chillingly literal. He transposes his mother’s funeral to the time and place of Christianity’s birth, and he himself is reborn with the advent of the new faith. The death of his mother in its Judean context allows Mandelstam to replace the “womb world” of his origins as he becomes both parent and child to himself; he is free to be fully reborn. The poem’s mythic vision commemorates liberation, not loss. The self that is tethered to the “dear silt” of its family past can never be entirely reborn: “Stand by the bedside with pretended tenderness,/And sing yourself lullabies your whole life (I sam sebia vsiu zhizn’ baiukai)” (#18). In “This Night” Mandelstam apparently succeeds where his younger self had failed. The lullaby that accompanies his mother’s funeral in the second stanza—“Lulla lulla lullaby (Baiu baiushki baiu)”—marks not bondage to the world of his birth, but new birth and new beginnings. Indeed, his mother’s three incarnations in the poem show Mandelstam in the process of severing his bonds from an unwanted parent and past.56 In the poem’s second stanza, the mother is intimately, obviously tied to her son: “Judeans were burying my mother” (my italics). In the third stanza,

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

133

the Judeans lament what is only “a woman’s dust.” By the poem’s final stanza, the dead woman is once again “a mother,” but not, it would seem, the poet’s. She exemplifies the Jewish mother as such, the mother through whom Jewishness is transmitted, according to tradition, and her bond now lies with the Israelites who mourn her, not with the man who had been her child. Only after this process is finished, in the poem’s final lines, can the poem’s “I” emerge: “I awakened in a cradle/Illuminated by the black sun” (my italics). As long as the poet’s self is bound to the world of its birth, it cannot exist in its own right. The “I” that lies hidden behind the pronoun my—“my mother”—can appear full-fledged only after it has broken its bond with “congenital” Jewishness and replaced it with another, selfchosen past and future. “Whoever is within the Church must love Mary; and whoever loves Mary, must also love Israel like his own mother,” Viacheslav Ivanov proclaims.57 For Mandelstam these two loves are opposed. In his lyric he takes the central emblems of the Christian faith—a mother, a son, a birth, and a death—and reworks them to create a version of Christian rebirth that allows him to cast off his unwanted “mother Israel”; he shapes his own inverted variant of the Pieta, in which the mourning mother cradling her lifeless son is replaced by the reborn son who shuns his mother’s corpse. Such warped conflations of biblical and personal narratives run throughout the lyric that marks Mandelstam’s poetic declaration of independence from his Jewish past. His mother’s actual funeral is translated in verse to a distant time and place, as St. Petersburg and its assimilated Jews are transformed: Judeans and Israelites mourn the mother, while the son keeps watch by Jerusalem’s gates. The death and birth the poem describes are charged with new import in this richly resonant context. The poem is illuminated by both a “yellow” and a “black” sun; and the second of these leads to the scene’s essence. The “darkened sun,” biblical scholars tell us, “signal[s] divine intervention in history”; its appearance prefigures “cosmic transformation” and “a transition to a radically different world order.” The sun whose light irradiates the reborn Mandelstam is, as Ronen notes, “the black sun of Apocalyptic Christianity.” The Gospels report that in the sixth hour of Christ’s crucifixion darkness covered the earth: “And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent” (Luke 23: 45). The sky will grow dark again, Christ warns, before his second coming: “The sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light” (Mark 13: 24). The poem’s Judea does not recognize the black sun that spells the end of one era and the beginning of the next. It cannot see the sign that marks the birth of a new time and that presages humankind’s final salvation. The poem’s Israelites are trapped in the light of the yellow sun; they are governed by repetition, by a time that will not yield to cosmic revelation. The yellow sun’s unvaried cycles thus become another form of the unnatural motion that imprisons Mandelstam’s Judaism in a stern and sterile past.58

134

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

“This night” ’s Judea may elect to remain bound to ritual and repetition, to Old Testament Law and a death unredeemed by grace. Judea’s offspring, though, are free to turn their backs on their parentage and past, as they embrace the discipleship their nation has disdained. The Gospels’ Christ encourages such insurrection. “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword,” he warns in Matthew. The peace he disrupts is not among nations, but within them, and the sword he sends will sever the ties that bind parent to child: “I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother,” for “a man’s foes shall be those of his own household” (Matt. 10: 34–36). Luke’s Jesus is still harsher: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother . . . he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14: 26). This Christ countermands the force of the Old Testament’s Fourth Commandment. His disciples must use their newfound freedom to abandon the past for the future. This is the freedom that Mandelstam exploits in “This night is irreparable.” The Mandelstam of the early poems cannot resist the terrible, intimate pull of his origins. The later poet, who identifies his plight with Christianity’s struggle to emerge from its Jewish sources, is entitled to deny his family and its history. Indeed, he can be reborn only by leaving the dead to bury the dead, by abandoning his mother to the benighted Israelites. The act may seem as awful, unnatural, and extreme as anything Mandelstam ascribes to Judea, but it is undertaken on the highest authority. He is following the dictates of Christ himself and the dictates of Christian history, as seen through the distorting lens of Zelinsky’s writings. Within the polarized world of “This night,” lit by the light of two wholly opposing suns, Mandelstam gives himself no other choice. To behave in any other way would mean to relinquish both Hellas and Europe. It would mean to succumb once more to time’s backward flow and be consumed by it. In his letter to the Romans, Paul rebukes the Jews who refuse the crisis and conversion he himself has undergone: “Behold, thou art called a Jew, and restest in the law, and makest thy boast of God. . . . And art confident that thou thyself art a guide of the blind, a light of them which are in darkness” (Romans 2: 17–19). In “This night is irreparable,” Mandelstam likewise repudiates those who refuse the dark night that must precede the appearance of true light. The poem is shaped by oppositions—light and darkness, death and birth—and the poem’s “I” derives from these opposing forces. Unlike Mandelstam’s Villon and Notre Dame, who grow from the yoking of opposites, this “I” evolves from its ability to distance itself from the forces it resists: from the mother turned to dust; from the first stanza’s “you” (u vas), who become a “they,” the alien Judeans and Israelites of later stanzas; and from the world of death and deceptive light they inhabit. The newly emerged “I” of the poem’s end is born into isolation, though. Having abandoned parents and past, this “I” has yet to find the new community that will take their place.

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

135

This is the task of the young Levite who is the hero of the next poem in this sequence, “A young Levite among the priests.” In “This night is irreparable,” Mandelstam manages to combine two Jewish pasts, his own and Christianity’s, and to cast them off simultaneously. Having freed himself, so it seems, from this double burden, he is able to elaborate more fully the historical mythology that has helped to liberate him, and he can now expel from this mythology the powerful, personal ghost who haunts “This night.” Through the young Levite who is his proxy, Mandelstam can distance himself still further from the past’s doomed company as he establishes new bonds with the community of the future.59 Unlike the implicit “I” who narrates “This night is irreparable,” the Levite seeks to warn his heedless compatriots—“Night has already fallen over the Euphrates; run, priests!”—and abandons them only when they refuse his message. He is justified, then, in his flight from the past; he has done what he could to open that past to the future. Having broken with the old priesthood, the Levite turns to a new order, to the “we” whom he joins in the poem’s final stanza. This new priesthood does not preside over what has already passed; it assists at the birth of the future. It helps to plant the seed of Christ’s death in new and fertile soil. The “Sabbath” swathed in linen in the final stanza is Christ himself, whose disciples wrapped him after death in “clean linen cloth” (Matthew 27: 59).60 Mandelstam’s image, though, holds birth as well as death. The verb he uses, “to swaddle” (pelenat’), evokes life’s beginnings, not its end, and draws us back to Christ’s own birth: “Ye shall find this babe wrapped in swaddling clothes” (Luke 2: 12). It reminds us, too, that the Russian for “shroud,” pelena, is only two letters removed from the “swaddling clothes,” pelenki, in which the infant Christ was wrapped. It is not Christ alone who will emerge renewed from death; time itself will be transformed through his resurrection. The Jewish holy day, the Sabbath (subbota), which stands for the crucified Christ in the poem, will be reborn with him. More precisely, its priority and its sanctity will be superseded by the new day that will dawn with the risen Christ. Time itself will shift; a new age will begin with Christ’s return from the dead; and the Jewish calendar will find itself quite literally outdated. The Sabbath will become a mere stepping stone to Sunday, whose Russian name is “resurrection,” voskresen’e. Though they help to bring the new age into being, the Levite and his companions remain on the verge of the coming era, “at the dawn of some new life” (#104); they have not yet crossed over with Christ into the future. Perhaps this is why they still rely on Jewish rites and implements—the fourth’s stanza’s “heavy menorrah”—to ward off Judaism’s dark power, “Jerusalem’s night and the fumes of non-being.” The poet who speaks in “Return to the incestuous womb” (1920; #109) has seen the new age dawn and knows that it is lighted by a Greek sun, the “sun of Ilium” (Ilium is the Greek name for Troy). The new world marks the triumph of a

136

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

Hellenism that remains beyond the poet’s range of vision in the earlier lyrics. The poet himself, moreover, has apparently mastered the power of the past that had threatened to undo not only him but Christendom and Hellas itself, according to the mythology he has constructed. He discovers the magic spell that eluded the poet of “I’ve become afraid of living life out,” and his word blocks time’s backward flow. More than this—time stops and starts at his command. It is he who orders Leah to return to her source, to the womb (or breast, or lap; the Russian lono is notoriously vague and can designate almost anything beneath the shoulders and above the knees) whence she came. The power that emanated earlier from Yahweh or the Law, from Jewish origins in their different forms, now issues from the poet himself. His new voice holds a prophet’s force, and with it he can turn back time’s motion and free himself from the past’s destructive pull. This pull has also undergone a change. It is not only destructive: it is immoral, taboo, the illicit coupling of past and present. It is incestuous. “Return to the incestuous breast whence thou hast issued,” the poet commands the Hebrew Leah. He identifies the excessive Jewish attachment to the past with a specific sin, and his speech derives its prophetic strength from the gravity of Judaism’s failing. The biblical stories Mandelstam evokes in the poem testify to the dangerous force of family, to kinship as a curse, not as a blessing. The Old Testament Leah joins in her father’s plotting against Jacob, who becomes her husband through deception and intrigue (Gen. 29: 1–25). The poem’s speaker, from this point of view, is rewriting biblical history. Unlike the long-suffering Jacob of Genesis, he rejects his unwanted bride and returns her to her deceitful or, more precisely, incestuous father’s breast. For Mandelstam has revised his version of the tale in a still more radical way. The sin of the father and of the unloved bride is no longer deceit alone, but the far greater evil of incest. Mandelstam borrows this sin from another biblical story of fathers, daughters, and deception. Nadezhda Mandelstam notes that he combines two erring daughters to create his Leah, and his Old Testament vision brings two neighboring chapters of Genesis and two different family romances together.61 The poem’s second source is the story of Lot. After the downfall of Sodom and Gomorrah and the punishment of Lot’s wife, his daughters sought to “preserve seed” of their father by setting him drunk and “lying with him” (Gen. 19: 12–34). The story is a cautionary tale on the uses and abuses of the past in a double sense. Through his destruction of the unholy cities Sodom and Gomorrah, the Hebrew God teaches that a debased past must be wholly purged from hearts and minds as well as from the earth. “Look not behind thee,” he commands as Lot and his family flee the doomed cities. Lot’s wife, who disobeys and looks back to see what she has lost, forfeits life itself and is turned to lifeless matter. Lot’s daughters, who work to preserve their father’s seed in false and sinful ways, are seemingly no less guilty: they too turn to the past instead of toward the

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

137

future. Unlike their mother, though, they are not punished. In Genesis Lot’s daughters bear sons by their father and so begin new nations. Mandelstam’s Leah, on the other hand, has chosen extinction in choosing the past: “Thou shalt come to love a Judean/[And] will vanish (izcheznesh’) in him.” Hers is the fate that the hapless poet of “I’ve become afraid of living life out” struggles to avoid. She will vanish, as he had feared to, into the all-consuming vortex of Jewish origins. In the light of these Old Testament narratives—to say nothing of the cautionary tale that is the poem itself—it is surprising to find Nadezhda Mandelstam supplying us not only with the poem’s biblical keys, but with what she sees as its real-life prototypes. She herself, she writes, was the inspiration for the poem, and Mandelstam played Judean father to her erring Leah: “Our relationship must have aroused in him a keen awareness of his Jewish roots, a tribal feeling, a sense of kinship with his people (rodovoi moment, chuvstvo sviazi s rodom).” Mandelstam himself “used to say,” she notes elsewhere, “that all Jews are related by blood, and that all marriages between Jews are incestuous”; “He thought of the Jews as one family, hence the theme of incest in the poem.”62 Several critics, most notably Omry Ronen and Gregory Freidin, have followed Nadezhda Mandelstam’s lead in reading the lyric as Mandelstam’s attempted reconciliation with his Jewish legacy, with incest as a somewhat idiosyncratic metaphor for intimacy and affection.63 The poem itself seems to militate against such a reading. Its dramatis personae comprise not two figures, as Nadezhda Mandelstam implies, but three: a father, a daughter, and the speaker, who seeks with great energy and conviction to distance himself from the sinning couple. His prophetic rhetoric suggests not greater closeness to a Jewish past but moral revulsion from it. Far from marking the beginning of Mandelstam’s reconciliation with his past, the poem marks the apogee of the “creative self-hatred” that animates the Jewish sequence. The image of incest also works against Nadezhda Mandelstam’s interpretation: psychologically, it evokes not secure and friendly familial warmth, but a family come entirely too close for comfort. More discomfiting still are the likely sources of Mandelstam’s imagery. Far from being idiosyncratic or personal, the charge of Jewish “incest” had become a stock accusation leveled by anti-Semites against an “inbred race” by the end of the nineteenth century. “They are themselves the cause of their own downfall through their perverse sexuality and . . . their degeneracy is the outward sign of their fall from grace,” one fin de siècle pamphleteer claims; and the biblical rhetoric of downfall and grace has a familiar ring to the reader of Mandelstam. This notion of Jewish insularity and inbreeding is, moreover, perfectly consonant with the vision of ancient history that Mandelstam takes from Zelinsky. Zelinsky does not accuse the Jews of incest as such, but their great fault in his eyes is their obstinate refusal to mingle with other races, unlike the “hospitable” Greeks. Mandelstam combines Zelinsky’s complaints of “Semitic exclusiveness” with anti-Semitic rhetoric

138

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

and his own uneasy sense of a possessive, threatening past to create an image in which family and faith conspire together with time’s perverse backward flow, in which offspring willingly (“thou shalt come to love a Judean”), wrongfully return to their origins. The poet who resists such a past is not willfully abandoning family and faith. He is escaping mortal sin.64 Moreover, the poem’s larger context—“Pushkin and Skriabin,” the Jewish cycle, indeed, the whole of Tristia—speaks for Mandelstam’s choice of Ilium’s sun over Judaic darkness. “A fateful transformation should be fulfilled in thee,” the poet-prophet reproaches his Leah; and this transformation echoes the “profound revolution” that “turned Hellas into Europe,” as it fertilized Judea’s stony soil with the seed of Hellenic grace (CPL, 92). This kind of cultural crossbreeding is the corrective Mandelstam seeks from Jewish “incestuousness.” The crucifixion, Mandelstam insists, made at least one part of “graceless” Judea “Greek and universal” (IV, 100), and this part must be saved from fatal Judaic provincialism, from the insular, inbred faith that rejoices in its backwardness. Mandelstam’s Leah is the emblem of this unnatural motion. She chooses the “womb world whence [she] issued” over “Ilium’s sun.” She prefers her Jewish name to the Greek name, Helen, that would place her at the heart of Western culture; she resists the christening that would take her, with her people, from arid Judea to a new, “Greek and universal” world.65 “If not for Helen/ What is Troy alone to you, Achaian men?” Mandelstam asks in an early poem (#78), and he observes in the same poem that “all is moved by love.” Helen is the fateful catalyst that literally set Greek culture in motion, by inspiring the great epic with which Western literature begins. She is the antithesis of the Hebrew Leah who retreats into the past. To a creative etymologist like Mandelstam, the phonic echoes between Helen (Elena) and Hellas (Ellada) would have seemed no accident. Helen’s name resonates in the name of the culture, Hellenism (ellinizm), and the process, Hellenization (ellinizatsia), through which he seeks to work his way into world culture. Though its origins are utterly different, Leah’s name (Liia) is acoustically kindred to that of the queen she chooses not to become, Helen, and the country she chooses not to join, Hellas. The name alone seems to lend itself to the creation of a new genealogy and etymology that would run from Leah to Elena, and from there on to the modern muses whom Mandelstam celebrates in “Solominka” (1916): Lenor, Ligeia, Salomeia, Seraphita, Solominka (#86). Yet Leah refuses her new incarnation and will participate neither in the revolution that turns Hellas into Europe, nor in the series of transformations that keep Helen alive in modern European culture, and Mandelstam makes it clear that Leah’s fate is choice, not destiny. She will keep her name not because it is preordained by her parentage, by the pull of her Jewish blood: “Leah thou shalt be, not Helen, named,/not because/Royal blood flows more heavily/In veins than any other.” She will remain Leah because

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

139

she has chosen incest, because she will mix her blood with Jewish blood alone: “Thou shalt come to love a Judean.” The Russian for “incest,” krovosmeshenie, means literally the mixing of blood. The mixture, though, is of like with like, of kin with kin. What Mandelstam seeks is the creation of new, synthetic families. He strives for the intermingling of foreign and native, of different ages, races, and nations: his aim is not incest but miscegenation. This is what Leah rejects, and this is why Mandelstam rejects Leah and all that she represents.66 We must remember, though, that Mandelstam has created in the Jewish poems of Tristia, a Judaism that conforms to his own fears and fulfills his own purposes. He shapes a Jewish mother and, in Leah, a Jewish muse whom he must reject if he is to survive himself, and he creates a scenario in which such rejection seems justified, necessary, even sacred. Though the Mandelstam of Stone embraces foreignness, he works to discard the sources of his own foreign nature. In “Pushkin and Skriabin” and the “Jewish” poems of Tristia, he apparently finds a formula that delivers him at last from his bonds with his past. He has invented, with Zelinsky’s help, a history that permits him to turn his back forever on his Jewish beginnings. This is not, however, what finally happens. The Mandelstam of “Fourth Prose” (1929) takes up the weight of the past he had earlier sought to abandon. “I am proud,” he writes, “[of] the honorable calling of Jew,” and his “blood,” he boasts, is “burdened with the heritage of sheep-breeders, patriarchs, and kings” (CPL, 321). This is the heavy, inbred Jewish blood he had scorned in “Return to the incestuous breast,” and it is burdened with the weight of the Old Testament legacy he had worked so hard to escape. The reasons for this remarkable reversal form the subject of another chapter. Perhaps it was inevitable, though, that a poet so devoted to taking up the weight of other pasts and converting them to new energy would return to the burden of his own inheritance and find in it new sources of poetic strength. “Return to the incestuous breast,” Mandelstam bids his Leah as he turns from the past that she embraces. His own poetics, though, is based on the notion of return—on the present’s endless return to the past, on the eternal resurgence of the past within the present, and on the vital exchange that must govern the relations between other ages and our own. Mandelstam’s poet, determined to remember as well as invent, serves as midwife at the past’s rebirth within the present. He instigates exchange at the line that divides past from future.67 “Who stops the sun as it rushes along its sparrow harness to its paternal home, possessed by the desire to return?” (“The Word and Culture,” 1921; CPL, 112). This desire to harness time’s backward flow is part of the very fabric of Mandelstam’s poetics, and he cannot reject this part without undoing the whole. The poet who remembers and invents other histories so skillfully in Tristia has not yet brought this dialectic to bear on his personal past. He reinvents his family history in order to disregard it and thus free himself to acquire new memories. He learns to create, with his fellow

140

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

Acmeists, from the “evil weight” of fallen matter, but he cannot come to terms with the weight of his own history-laden blood. Mandelstam’s Judaism, insular, stubborn, and sterile, is the antithesis of his fruitful, hospitable Hellas. His Leah will not become Helen, and Ilium’s sun cannot penetrate Judaic dusk. The two worlds are worlds apart, and Mandelstam must and does choose between them. The line that divides Judea from Hellas blurs, however, when seen in the context of Tristia as a whole. Here, as elsewhere, “the influence of Judaism” seeps into Mandelstam’s writing in unexpected ways, and he uses it to serve his purposes even as he openly works against its influence. In “Return to the incestuous womb,” incest is the sin of the obstinate Judeans, locked in an unyielding past that turns back endlessly on itself. Tristia begins, however, with incest not among the retrograde Jews, but among the forward-looking Greeks. It opens with Mandelstam’s reenactment of a Greek tragedy, Euripides’ Hippolytus, as transmitted through neoclassical France by way of Jean Racine’s Phèdre (1677). Phaedra, wife of Theseus and granddaughter of the Sun itself, destroys and is destroyed through her guilty love for her stepson Hippolytus. Phaedra’s illicit love is unrequited and unconsummated. Her lofty lineage is nonetheless infected by her sin, whose evil influence extends to the “Sacred Sun” itself, to the “great elder of [her] race.” The crime of incest is not confined to Judea alone, it would seem. Through Phaedra it taints ancient Greece, and through Euripides and Racine it enters into the culture of Hellas-turned-Europe, the culture to which Mandelstam elsewhere opposes his Judea.68 Why should Mandelstam choose to connect the “Judean” sin of incest with his beloved Hellas? Why should he, through Racine, bring this sin into the European tradition he seemingly wishes to purge of any trace of his own past? The answer lies in a strategy that we have seen at work before in the life that Mandelstam shapes for himself in his writing. The Mandelstam of Stone and Tristia works to free himself from the burden of the past he has inherited, and to appropriate a broader, more synthetic legacy made up of Russia, Europe, and antiquity. At the same time, the “Judaic chaos” that has no openly acknowledged place in Mandelstam’s life in art becomes the de facto basis for his appropriation of alien cultures and histories.69 Mandelstam’s unwanted biography, revised and writ large, becomes his tie to all history. Mandelstam uses the sin that symbolizes Jewish insularity, Jewish wrongheadedness and exclusiveness, to similar ends, as the story of Phaedra discloses that perilous origins are not the property of Judaism alone. Racine’s Phaedra sees the Theseus she had married, the young man she had loved, alive again in his son: “He is not dead; he breathes in you./ My husband still seems present to my view.”70 In confusing father and son, Phaedra blurs the line that divides generations. She violates the code that prevents the unnatural, destructive mingling of parents and children, of past and future. Her stepson’s life is the price for her passion, and with him dies the future, or at least the future of the house of Theseus. Phaedra be-

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

141

comes, like Mandelstam’s Judaism, an unnatural parent, a consuming “womb world” willing to destroy both present and future for the sake of its destructive appetites. “Fear your mother, Hippolytus,” Mandelstam’s chorus bids Phaedra’s unwitting stepson (#82).71 Hippolytus’s unhappy fate seems to vindicate Mandelstam’s choice in “This night is irreparable,” his decision to flee a mother and a culture doomed to remain in darkness, or rather, false light. Unlike Hippolytus, he has the foresight, the good fortune, and the will to escape a fatally possessive past. The myth of Phaedra, however, does not simply reinforce Mandelstam’s myth about his and Christianity’s emergence from Jewish origins. One myth enhances the other; Phaedra gives Mandelstam’s Judeo-Christian myth new dimensions, new meanings and connections. The myth that results is a hybrid in more ways than one. Mandelstam ties his personal past to a mythologized version of Christianity’s growth from Jewish roots, and he combines this myth with that of Phaedra to create a paradigm of the present’s ceaseless struggle to emerge from a treacherous past, a plot that is not confined to any one time or place. Within this encompassing myth, he creates a model in which children must abandon oppressive, overwhelming parents, or, to translate the language of kinship into the language of time, a model in which present and future must be set free from the force of a devouring past. And he finds in this hybrid myth both the justification and the means for his own escape from treacherous origins. By combining myths of incest from two different races and nations, he is able to crossbreed two incestuous families, as the Judean race and the family of the unfortunate Phaedra intertwine in his reworked histories. But the stories of Phaedra and Judea do not simply provide an escape route out of one undesirable past into other, more attractive histories, and Mandelstam does not exploit it for its denouement alone. He imports the whole paradigm into the present, as he uses the complex narrative he has shaped as a way to enter the present of twentieth-century Russia, and as a means, potentially at least, of locating himself within its future.72 Mandelstam’s Phaedra, like his Judea, perverts time’s proper flow. She turns time back on itself and thwarts its forward motion. Mandelstam makes this connection clear in the passage from “Pushkin and Skriabin” in which he warns that “Greek and universal” Golgotha must be saved from Judea’s fatal force. Thusfar I have abbreviated the fragment’s final sentence in quoting it. In its closing phrase, Mandelstam explicitly allies the two forces that work in his composite myth to defeat time’s flow: “Judaism is only awaiting the hour when it will celebrate its awful, unnatural motion: history will turn back the flow of time—Phaedra’s black sun” (IV, 100). This black sun is not the apocalyptic Christian sun that promises new birth and new life. It is that sun’s antithesis, not “the sun of redemption, but the sun of guilt” (CPL, 91), the emblem of “unnatural” time thrown in reverse. Through her sin and her perversion of time, Phaedra has blemished her own lineage: “I have stained the sun with my black love,” she

142

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

laments in Mandelstam’s lyric (#82). Hers is a sun of sin and tainted origins, “the sun of guilt and doom,”73 and its light, like Judea’s yellow light, is unnatural. In “Pushkin and Skriabin” Mandelstam tacitly creates an alternate, inverted genealogy made up of those forces in history and culture that obstruct time’s flow and threaten its regeneration; this perverse and negative muse might be called Judea-Phaedra. Mandelstam links another name with Phaedra, and obliquely with Judea, elsewhere in the essay. His adoptive homeland is apparently in danger of succumbing to the fatal force that has enslaved his native past, and in “Pushkin and Skriabin,” he gives us a Russia created in his own image, “Russia, as baptized Jew, lapsing back into the religion that Christianity has already superseded.”74 “Time can go backward,” Mandelstam warns his spiritual homeland, “Phaedra-Russia” (CPL, 90). He thus brings his battle with a Jewish past into the Russian present, and a new name, history, and nation join his list of those who oppose the redemption of time and resist apocalyptic transformation. By identifying the battle of Judaism and Christian Hellenism with Russia’s struggles, and by linking Christ’s Passion with Russia’s ordeal of war and revolution, Mandelstam can, in turn, stake a claim in his adopted nation’s present and future. “The fabric of our world is renewed through death,” the poet-prophet of “Pushkin and Skriabin” proclaims (CPL, 94). The nation that refuses this renewal requires a prophet, and the prophet whose warning is ignored is entitled to turn his back on the past, as he forges new allegiances among those aligned with the forces of the future. The son must reject a doomed mother so that he may be saved himself. He must likewise turn from a dying motherland, be it Judea or Russia, in order to witness the birth of a transfigured nation from its ashes. The young Levite must flee all those, whether Russians or Jews, who will not heed his warning, and he will cast his lot among the chosen ones through whom the old world will be transformed and redeemed. Mandelstam manages to turn his rupture with his Jewish past into the basis for his kinship with a turbulent Russian present. It is a variant on the ploy he uses to adopt the orphan of nations in “Petr Chaadaev,” and it prefigures the strategies he employs in The Noise of Time to make Russia and its revolutionary years his own. One sentence from “Pushkin and Skriabin” in particular points to ways in which Mandelstam works to appropriate his adoptive nation and his age in his autobiography. “The Christian calendar,” he warns in “Pushkin and Skriabin,” “is endangered, the fragile reckoning of the years of our era has been lost—time is rushing backward, roaring and splashing” (CPL, 91; II, 314). This “roaring (shum)” is the same tumult that Mandelstam records in The Noise of Time (Shum vremeni), and the roar of time run amuck unites the outsider with the children of his coveted “homeland of the spirit.” “Judaic chaos” converges with the uproar of a troubled modern Russia, and the reluctant Jew joins the “chil-

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

143

dren of Russia’s terrible years” as they learn to create anew from time’s clamor.75 Mandelstam creates community from rupture in a still more subtle way through his synthetic mythologies. For T. S. Eliot, postwar London merges with other “unreal” cities teetering on the edge of the abyss. “Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London”—so runs the list of doomed and ghostly sister-cities from The Waste Land. For Mandelstam, “dying Petersburg, the end of the Petersburg era of Russian history, called Jerusalem’s fall to mind,” his widow notes. “The fall of both cities is equated: the modern city perishes for the same sin as did the ancient one.”76 This sin is the rejection of revelation, the refusal to accept a redeeming, regenerating death and emerge from it reborn. It is the sin that perverts the flow of time and leads to disruption and desolation. As such, it would seem to defeat all attempts to transmit, or create, tradition. Like Eliot, Mandelstam manages, though, to shape a peculiarly modern form of tradition by aligning comparable kinds of destruction. It is a tradition based not on continuity or succession, on direct transmission from father, or mother, to son: it derives instead from dislocation and interruption. What unity this tradition has comes from the poet who wrenches moments from the past in order to forge their connection with the present. “In order to preserve the principle of unity amidst the vortex of changes and the unceasing flood of phenomena,” Mandelstam insists, the modern thinker must learn to follow the “internal connection among phenomena” and to “liberate[] this connection from time and consider it independently”; phenomena thus linked “form, as it were, a kind of fan whose folds can be opened up in time; however, this fan may also be closed up in a way intelligible to the human mind” (CPL, 117). Mandelstam and Eliot create through their composite cities just such a “fan”; to phrase it differently, they devise in these cities a palimpsest through which the outlines of the past can be traced in the shapes of the present. Through such palimpsests, the noise of the present age takes on historical resonance, and the present age’s vortex of events assumes a historical dimension. This may seem to take us far afield from Mandelstam’s battle with his Jewish origins, and this may well be part of Mandelstam’s intention in creating his synthetic myth, his historical palimpsest. “Remembrance and invention” is a useful and tricky dialectic. It permits Mandelstam to invent complex ways to keep his memory at bay. It enables him to reinvent his past, to cast it in new shapes; and after it has been transformed almost beyond recognition, he can then allow it back into his writing. Mandelstam relies on his seemingly endless capacity for creation from rupture to turn an unwanted past into an asset while removing the outward signs of its presence from his work. Nadezhda Mandelstam claims that Mandelstam’s Jerusalem is merely a symbol or stand-in for a Petersburg in mortal danger in “A young Levite

144

•

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

among the priests.” If this indeed is the poem’s key, then Jerusalem, the center of Jewish culture and the birthplace of Christianity, becomes simply the second figure in the poem’s tacit simile, while dying Petersburg emerges as its true setting and subject. According to this reading, Mandelstam the Russian poet dons the robes of Jewish apostate turned Christian prophet only in order to give greater resonance to his vision of a modern Russian apocalypse. He picks a Hebrew past only to explore a Russian present, and his Jewish origins vanish from the poem’s frame of reference. Such an interpretation might well have served Mandelstam’s own purposes. His complex juxtapositions of different pasts and presents may compensate for what the modernist orphan has failed to inherit directly—but it can also obscure a legacy that the would-be orphan would sooner leave behind. Mandelstam himself, however, has given us the means to develop a reading that ties Jerusalem directly to the “womb world” of his origins. In “This night is irreparable,” Mandelstam observes his mother’s funeral from Jerusalem’s gates, as he conflates not two, but three dying pasts—Jerusalem’s, Petersburg’s, and, crucially, his own—into one unsettling image, and this image derives its force precisely from its deeply personal nature. Behind the dying pasts of cities and nations lies the death of Mandelstam’s mother, the death her poet-son transforms into a means of liberation. Mandelstam must brutally cast off the curse of his Jewish ancestry, if he is to achieve new legacies and new spiritual homelands. The cultural orphan must work to orphan himself. It is a troubling solution. The poet of “In the vast pond it’s transparent and dark” (#18) suspects the cost of such a liberation; the reed uprooted from its native silt becomes mere straw, lifeless matter. The poet who abandons his past for the sake of new life may condemn himself to a similar death-in-life. He betrays, in any case, the sacred mission that the “Christian” Mandelstam of “Pushkin and Skriabin” undertakes: “To remember at all costs! To conquer forgetfulness!” (CPL, 94). The Mandelstam of Tristia seems finally to have found a scheme through which he can abandon his family with what appears to be perfect equanimity, as he forgets at last his intrusive, unwanted past. This discarded past continues, though, to infiltrate and influence Mandelstam’s writings in various guises and under a variety of names. The very dates of Tristia’s three “Jewish” poems—1916, 1917, 1920—suggest that Mandelstam himself senses the persistence of this past, as he periodically repeats and revises his formula for keeping a troublesome inheritance at bay. His exorcisms become increasingly complex and eloquent, but their effects are apparently fleeting at best. Indeed, Mandelstam’s spells cannot take effect without disrupting the substance of his poetic vision. Just as catastrophe is the catalyst for his poetic culture, so chaos lies at the heart of his creation. The Mandelstam of Tristia works to shape a clear-cut opposition between the “Hellenized” world he longs for and the Judaism he rejects. The Judaism Mandelstam takes over from Zelinsky is inbred, exclusive, fixed on the past, while its

•

J U D A I C

C H A O S

•

145

Hellenic antipode offers a domesticated cosmos open to all nations and, through them, to the future. The version of Hellenism he acquires by way of Zelinsky, however, resembles not only the tumultuous world of earlytwentieth-century Russia, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the dilemma of the modern, “worldless” Jew.77 Hellenism, modern Russia, the homeless Jew—all three dwell at the crossroads of cultures and ages. The past Mandelstam describes in The Noise of Time is possessive—its forces pursue him relentlessly—but it is also chaotic, and its chaos derives from its openness to other cultures, from the multiple infusions of “foreign blood” that mark Mandelstam’s family history. Unlike Zelinsky’s Judaism and like his Hellenism, it is intercultural and international, though its many elements remain unsynthesized. It would be too easy, though, to see the battle of Hellenism and Judaism as a struggle between chaos and cosmos, Judaic “worldlessness” and Hellenic home. What is crucial for Mandelstam is not one force or the other, but the dynamic exchange between them, which generates, in turn, the impulse to create. Where Mandelstam the uprooted Jew and Mandelstam the would-be Hellene meet is in the attempt to wrest culture from disruption and to make a home from chaos. Zelinsky’s Hellenism represents an effort to forge order from an age convulsed by change. In “On the Nature of the Word,” Mandelstam recognizes the Hellenic spirit that informs Russia’s mission to shape history from hybridization and foreign-born influences. The poet of Tristia refuses to admit the kinship between the Hellenistic quest to shape an oikumene from disparate nations and traditions, and his own drive, as a dislocated Central European Jew, to synthesize a new homeland from an array of cultures, peoples, and ages. Isaac Deutscher’s remarks on modern European Jewry apply equally to Zelinsky’s Hellenes; both peoples dwell “on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions, and national cultures,” “on the borderlines of various epochs.” And both derive their creations from those places “where the most diverse cultural influences cross and fertilize each other.”78 In the late twenties, Mandelstam begins to explore the bonds that tie his dreamed-of culture to his despised Jewish past, and world culture and “Judaic chaos” become allies as he journeys further into the “irreparable night” of the Soviet age.

•

C

H

A

P

T

E

R

F

I

V

E

•

The Currency of the Past Money and language exist by being current. The acceptance of coin as of value; of words as having meaning, are the essence of currency and speech. —Ezra Pound, “Towards Orthology” “Money, money maketh man,” he said, When he lost his friends and possessions together. —Pindar, Second Isthmian Ode

MANDELSTAM’S POETIC ECONOMY OF THE TWENTIES In The Noise of Time, Mandelstam describes his naive childhood efforts to envision in the century’s “prehistoric” years a “human economy” in which every thing and person would find its proper place in an all-encompassing cosmic order: I was able to populate, to socialize the visible world with its barley, dirt roads, castles, and sunlit spider webs, breaking it down into diagrams and setting up under the pale blue firmament ladders, far from biblical, on which not the angels of Jacob but small and large property holders ascended and descended, passing through the stages of capitalist economy (kapitalisticheskoe khoziastvo). What could be stronger, what could be more organic: I perceived the entire world as an economy, a human economy (chelovecheskoe khoziastvo). . . . Yes, I heard with the sharpness of ears caught by the sound of a distant threshing machine in the field the burgeoning and increase, not of the barley in its ear, not of the northern apple, but of the world, the capitalist world, that was ripening in order to fall! (my ellipses; POM, 111; II, 88).

The rhetoric of this boyhood vision, with its petty landowners and decaying capitalists, may seem incongruous, to say the least, in the writings of a poet whose resolutely un-Soviet views were ultimately to cost him his life. Indeed, Mandelstam himself presents his brief adolescent career as a “prepared and finished Marxist” as a juvenile infatuation or childish illness whose intensity is matched only by its evanescence (POM, 112).

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

147

The program that Mandelstam chooses to shape his childhood cosmic order may be jarring in the context of his later work; the order itself, though, is not. It is an early incarnation of the world culture that haunts Mandelstam from the first poems of Stone to the final “Voronezh Notebooks.” It thus gives us a precocious prototype of the system that provides a place for every outsider by the warming hearth of Western culture in a thoroughly domesticated cosmos. One word in particular alerts us to the convergence between Mandelstam’s early imaginings and his mature poetic vision. This is khoziaistvo, whose Russian meanings span the distance from “economy,” in the sense of “socialist,” “capitalist,” or “world economy”; to “agriculture” (sel’skoe khoziaistvo); to humble “housekeeping” (domashnee khoziaistvo). It encompasses the ordering of human life from the largest scale—that of nations, continents, the globe itself—to the smallest, to the intimate details of daily life as experienced and organized within our own four walls. It bridges the gap between human society’s rural beginnings—sel’skoe khoziaistvo, translated literally, gives us “rural housekeeping”—and its complex modern incarnations in the industrial age. It is ideally suited to Mandelstam’s cosmic vision, in which the modern age is made homely and human again through the efforts of the poet who sees our early beginnings in our present ends. Indeed, the definition of khoziaistvo in Ozhegov’s dictionary might be a kind of shorthand for Mandelstamian Hellenism; it is “the entirety of objects required for daily life (byt).” Mandelstam’s Hellenistic economy consists of just such objects: “[It] is an earthenware pot, oven tongs, a milk jug, kitchen utensils, dishes. . . . [It] is the conscious surrounding of humans with domestic utensils instead of impersonal objects” (CPL, 127). Through such utensils, infused with “teleological warmth,” the poet will transform his domestic housekeeping writ large into the basis for a truly human and universal economy.1 This cosmic economy lies at the heart of Mandelstam’s vision from the start, though it assumes multiple guises, from boyish Marxism to Villon’s Middle Ages and the body of Notre Dame, to Zelinsky’s ideal Hellas, and so on. Mandelstam officially christens his Hellenistic vision as early as 1916, in “Pushkin and Skriabin.”2 He develops his version of this Hellenistic myth in a series of seminal essays that date from the early twenties: “Government and Rhythm” (1920); “The Word and Culture” (1921); “The Wheat of Humanity” (1922); “Humanism and the Present” (1923); and, most importantly, “On the Nature of the Word” (1921). He explicitly articulates his Hellenistic principles in response to a competing cosmic economy, which extends, like his, from the smallest details of daily life to the life of the nation, of Europe, of the planet itself, and even up into the stars. Mandelstam’s Hellenism must coexist with a revolution whose aspirations were nothing less than the radical transformation of human life as we know it. And this transformation was to be accomplished by a thoroughgoing revision of the myriad notions encompassed by the Russian word khoziaistvo.3

148

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

Mandelstam’s Hellenistic economy might seem to be fundamentally at odds with the state-sponsored economy then taking shape under the reins of the newly installed Bolshevik regime. And indeed, it is hard to imagine that Lenin, Trotsky, Lunacharsky, and company would have endorsed Mandelstam’s claim that “classical poetry is the poetry of revolution” (CPL, 116); or that they would have been swayed by his argument that “affirmation and justification of the real values of the past is just as revolutionary an act as the creation of new values” (CPL, 176).4 Mandelstam’s assertions may not have convinced the revolutionary powers-that-be; they demonstrate, nonetheless, the degree to which he himself yearned to reconcile his own poetic principles with the ambitions and aims of the Soviet state. And this desire to fuse what would appear to be two radically opposing worldviews dictates the shape that his Hellenized cosmos takes in the prose of the early twenties. “They say the cause of revolution is hunger in interplanetary space. Grain must be scattered through the ether” (CPL, 116). Mandelstam’s cryptic prescription for cosmic revolution in “The Word and Culture” would seem to lie well beyond the pale of any revolutionary program that the state might be expected to tolerate, let alone endorse. In fact, it demonstrates just the opposite: it places Mandelstam squarely within a postrevolutionary tradition of utopian visionaries that encompassed not only poets, artists, and other notoriously unreliable eccentrics but respected party members and prominent politicians. Poets were disposed from the start to view the revolution in the light of their own eschatological imaginings: one has only to recall, in this context, the Symbolist phantasmagorias of Belyi and Blok, the fantastical Futures conjured up by Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, or the rural utopias extolled by peasant poets like Nikolai Kluiev and Sergei Esenin. Each writer projected his deepest poetic needs and aspirations onto a revolution that was to prove fatally unreceptive to such creative revision; and each ultimately succeeded only in inadvertently disclosing the abyss that separated his personal poetic apocalypse from Soviet reality as it gradually took shape under the Bolshevik regime. This reality finally proved uncongenial to such imaginings. In the early postrevolutionary years, though, anything seemed to be possible; the wildest “scientific fantasy,” in the Russian phrase, appeared to be within the reach of a regime bent on changing the nature of human life on earth. Indeed, the Marxist philosophy on which the new state was based, lent itself to dreams of a humanity liberated from the social shackles that had hitherto confined its untapped capacities for new creation. The October Revolution, Richard Stites observes, created an atmosphere in which “the utopian appears no madder than other men”: “As memoirists and contemporaries put it again and again, it was the deep radicalism of the economic revolution, unprecedented in human history, that seemed to fling open the portals to unending possibilities for drastic change.”5 In this climate, visions of worldwide or cosmic transformation seemed

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

149

less the stuff of childish daydreams than the possible, even necessary ends of the cataclysmic chain of events set in motion by a revolution whose true scope was not national but global. The revolutionary writer Maksim Gorky and Anatoly Lunacharsky, who became Commissar of Education under Lenin, were ardent “Godbuilders” who sought to create a human-based religion to complement the new socialist state; they envisioned “a future world of dreams and myths, of sounds, and rituals that would elevate humanity to the status of divinity and bring collective immortality.” The “biocosmic” philosophy of Nikolai Fedorov (1828–1903) attracted not only susceptible poets and writers such as Mayakovsky and Andrei Platonov. Devout Bolsheviks and respected Soviet scientists were likewise drawn by Fedorov’s vision of a final “victory over death, resurrection of all the dead, and the settlement of outer space” and by the Biocosmists’ slogan of “Immortalism and Interplanetism.”6 In Literature and Revolution (1923), Trotsky scoffs at the “Cosmist” pretensions then current among poets of the “Proletkult” movement: “It seems that the poets are becoming Cosmists, not because the population of the Milky Way is knocking at their doors and demanding an answer, but because the problems of earth are lending themselves to artistic expression with so much difficulty that it makes them feel like jumping into another world.” Trotsky himself, though, was not above indulging in utopian reveries, as the final pages of his study show. He confines his imaginings to Planet Earth alone, but the paean to a human-made paradise that concludes Literature and Revolution is no less fantastical than any Cosmist dream of intergalactic conquest: “Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.” Even Lenin, who was notoriously resistant to such revolutionary flights of fancy, permitted himself the occasional cosmic daydream, as he demonstrated in an interview, fittingly enough, with H. G. Wells: “Human ideas—he told to Wells—are based on the scale of the planet we live in. . . . If we succeed in making contact with the other planets, all our philosophical, social, and moral ideas will have to be revised, and in this event these potentialities will become limitless.”7 In this context Mandelstam’s interplanetary agrarian fantasies seem, if not less far-fetched, then far less marginal; he shared his cosmic daydreams with lofty company. The values on which he based his Hellenistic vision, though, differed drastically from those of the new state and its proponents. Hellenism, he insists in his essays, is the culture of the future; revolutionary art is classical by its nature; and old values, revived and revised, are as vital to the new age as those that have yet to be created. His very insistence, though, holds a note of doubt—as well it might. For the young Soviet state predicated its visions of the future on the total collapse of a past that was,

150

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

if not dead, then gravely ill; a new life would emerge only from “the turmoil of a dying civilization and the agonized death throes of an ancient culture.”8 One does not have to look far to find similar imagery, used to very different ends, in Mandelstam’s poetry of the early twenties. “My age, my animal, who will dare/To gaze into your pupils/And mend with his own blood/The backbone of two centuries,” he mourns in one paean to a passing culture. He recognizes that new culture can only be built from the bones of the old: “To tear the age from its prison,/To begin a new world,/ The gnarled joints of days/Must be bound into a flute” (“The Age,” 1923; #135). Mayakovsky had eagerly tuned his “backbone flute” to the key of a new, revolutionary music. The Mandelstam of these poems, though, is unable to follow suit; he is himself the sickly son of a dying age (#140), and he cannot shape a new art from the desecrated corpse of his beloved culture. New creation apparently bears too high a price—or so the poems might lead us to believe. The essays tell a very different story, though. In “The Word and Culture,” Mandelstam celebrates the cultural treasures that the old world’s death has placed within the reach of audacious grave robbers: “As the room of a dying man is open to everyone, so the door of the old world is flung wide open before the crowd. Suddenly everything becomes public property. Come and take your pick” (CPL, 116). The revolution’s redistribution of wealth takes on new meaning as past traditions become the rightful property of the culturally dispossessed, who ransack history like landless peasants raiding a vanquished master’s estate. And the postrevolutionary “poet-synthesizer” is only too happy to sing a new song in his benefactor’s praise: “He sings of ideas, scientific systems, and State theories (idei, nauchnye sistemy, gosudarstvennye teorii) just as his predecessors sang of nightingales and roses” (CPL, 116; II, 227). This poet-synthesizer effortlessly achieves in his verse what Mandelstam strives for in the essays; he fuses past and present, old world and new, as he plays his classical and revolutionary tunes on a “thousand-stop flute brought instantly to life by the breathing of all ages” (CPL, 116). Mandelstam is not adverse to turning the systems and theories of the new regime to his own ends in the essays, though the state he warily commends would not have recognized itself in his idiosyncratic portraits. At his most optimistic, he sees Mandelstamian Hellenism and Soviet Marxism as a nearly perfect fit: each system is profoundly teleological, and each is guided by a goal of a global, truly human-centered economy at once universal and domestic. In “Humanism and the Present,” he uses Hellenized vocabulary to extoll the “humanist” goals of the Soviet regime: The monumentality of the approaching social architecture is conditioned by its calling to organize the world’s economy (mirovoe khoziaistvo) according to the principle of universal domesticity (vsemirnaia domashnost’) to meet man’s greater demands, broadening the scope of his domestic freedom to universal

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

151

proportions, fanning the flame of his individual hearth to the dimensions of a universal flame. The future appears cold and terrifying to those who do not understand this, but the internal warmth of the future—the warmth of efficiency, home economy, and teleology (tselesoobraznost’)—is just as tangible to the contemporary humanist as the heat of the incandescent stove of the present. (CPL, 182; II, 354)

This cosmic hearth heats the future dreamed of by Bolshevik and poet alike—or so Mandelstam would have us believe. In “The Wheat of Humanity,” he fuses Hellenist and Marxist terminology with even greater abandon: “Blessed be the economy (ekonomika) with its pathos of universal domesticity. Blessed be the flint axe of the class struggle—blessed be all that is absorbed in its tremendous concern for the creation of a world economy (mirovoe khoziaistvo); blessed be all domesticity and domestic economy (khoziaistvennost’), all concern for the universal hearth.”9 “The flint axe of the class struggle” improbably joins forces with the “domestic utensils”—clay pot, oven tongs, kitchenware, dishes—whose help Mandelstam enlists elsewhere in his Hellenistic battle with an inhospitable cosmos (CPL, 127).10 Mandelstam is more cautious in other essays. He does not anticipate full cooperation between the forces of Hellenism and those of the Soviet state; he aims more reasonably, if no less optimistically, for peaceful coexistence and respectful collaboration. In “The Word and Culture,” he envisions an amicable, even advantageous new division of labor between the state and culture. “The separation of Culture and the State,” he proclaims, “is the most significant event of our revolution” (and again, one wonders what Soviet leaders would have made of this singular interpretation). In a regime distinguished by its “tolerant” attitude to the “old world” and its traditions, the continuers of those traditions are “internally free” to practice their calling as they choose (CPL, 112–13). And the regime will learn in time to cherish the culture whose continued life it has permitted: A new kind of organic interrelationship is beginning to appear, one which connects the State with Culture in a way not unlike that which once linked the appanage princes to the monasteries. . . . The isolation of the State insofar as cultural values (kul’turnye tsennosti) are concerned makes it fully dependent on culture. Cultural values ornament the State, endowing it with color, form, and, if you will, even gender. Inscriptions on State buildings, tombs, and gateways insure the State against the ravages of time. (my ellipses; CPL, 112–13; II, 223–24)

The State may make the mistake of thinking that its interests lie not with the truly human values of Hellenistic culture, but with the new values that it itself creates. Culture, however, will have the final word. Its values will outlast the ravages of time that will finally lay bare the State’s pretensions;

152

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

and revolutionary Russia will be remembered in millennia to come not for its own grandiose schemes and plans, but for the cultural grace notes that gave those dreams their true, if unacknowledged, meaning. Mandelstam concludes “Humanism and the Present” with a triumphal assertion of the longevity and power of his beloved Hellenistic values, values that do not derive their worth from the imprimature of any single kingdom of this earth. “The fact that the values of humanism (tsennosti gumanizma) have now become rare,” he claims, “is not a bad sign in itself.” They have merely been “taken out of circulation (upotreblenie) and hidden underground”: “Humanistic values have simply withdrawn, concealed themselves like gold currency (zolotaia valiuta ), but like the gold reserves, they secure contemporary Europe’s entire circulation of ideas (vse ideinoe obrashchenie sovremennoi Evropy) and control them more competently for being underground.” These values, this currency will resurface with the birth of a new, pan-European cultural economy: The transition to gold currency is the business of the future, and in the province of culture what lies before us is the replacement of temporary ideas—of paper banknotes (bumazhnye vypuski)—with the gold coinage (zolotoi chekan) of the European humanistic tradition; the magnificent florins of humanism will ring once again, not against the archaeologist’s spade, but when the time comes, they will recognize their own day and resound like the jingling coins of common currency (khodiachaia zvonkaia moneta) passing from hand to hand. (CPL, 183; II, 354)

In this passage Mandelstam mints the currency that will circulate in the ideal economy of a fully Hellenized cosmos. The language and imagery in which he describes these eternal values, though, mark him as very much a man, and poet, of his time. The system of values he proposes—with its permanent cultural “reserves” linking revolutionary Russia to a pan-European past and future—would have been anathema to a Soviet leadership bent on radical reform of cultural and economic systems alike. Mandelstam’s very preoccupation with questions of value, though, reflects the most pressing concerns of the society in which he found himself and the state that was struggling to govern it. His metaphors—of coinage, currency, banknotes, and gold reserves—link him intimately, if precariously, to the vast social and economic experiments undertaken by the new regime. For Mandelstam, the language of finance provides the aptest metaphor for the cultural values that, as he sees it, underlie all human, or all Western, society; these values govern “contemporary Europe’s entire circulation of ideas,” and these ideas, in turn, guarantee the ongoing life of Western civilization. For the Bolshevik regime, this equation was put in reverse; it had undertaken its revolution in the name of an economic theory that proclaimed that all culture and ideas were determined finally by a state’s means of production, that is, by the economic values at work in a given nation. Culture is derivative, peripheral, even parasitic: it “feeds on

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

153

the sap of economics,” as Trotsky puts it in Literature and Revolution.11 Mandelstam and the Soviet leadership may have disagreed on the relationship between “superstructure” and “base”; they were alike, though, in their sense that the notion of value was now adrift in the uncharted seas of a brave, new Soviet reality.12

CULTURAL BANKRUPTCY The poetry of the revolution is synthetic. It cannot be changed into small coin for the temporary lyric use of sonnet-makers. —Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (1923) If I’ve got the right to change—/Please change my golden coin for me. —Osip Mandelstam, “The Golden Coin” (“Zolotoi”; 1912)

Though Mandelstam and the Soviet state were in crucial ways operating at cross purposes in the early twenties, they shared a common concern with uncovering, or creating, a stable basis for the value systems on which their different endeavors rested. I have argued that the economic metaphors of “Humanism and the Present” link Mandelstam to central concerns of the new regime; and indeed, the essay itself appeared only months after Soviet leaders had decided to base the foundering economy on a gold standard in hopes of curbing the rampant inflation that had rendered the state’s paper currency all but worthless. This decision, reached in the summer of 1922, was merely the latest in a series of experiments intended both to stabilize an economy shattered by war and revolution and to convert Marxist theory into workable Soviet practice. Mandelstam and his contemporaries bore witness to a bewildering sequence of monetary transformations in the years following the overthrow of the tsarist regime. The short-lived kerenki of Aleksandr Kerensky’s Provisional Government replaced the imperial currency of the war years, itself already severely inflated; and Kerensky’s banknotes were themselves replaced in short order during the radical economic experiments that characterized Russia’s years of War Communism (1918–21). Money was abolished entirely for a time—it had become virtually worthless in any case—and its place was taken by barter and pay in kind. Soviet leaders celebrated the end of what Lenin called all “colored pieces of worthless paper” and the beginning of a moneyless, truly communist world order—but their rejoicings were premature. Runaway inflation forced them to introduce the so-called sovznak (“sovtoken” or “sovsign”) in 1921; and the sovznak , in turn, coexisted unhappily for a short while with the chervonets, the unit that marked the regime’s return to a gold standard in 1922. The word money itself, exiled from the Soviet lexicon during War Communism, was permitted back into official circulation at about the same time.13

154

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

These monetary goings-on may seem to have little bearing on the work of poets struggling to make a place for themselves in the new Soviet reality. Mandelstam was not alone, though, in his sense that the values of an older culture might vanish with its coins; and he was not alone in his foreboding that, for good or ill, the fate of poetry, at least in its pre-Bolshevik incarnations, was precarious in the new state’s cultural economy. Percy Bysshe Shelley may have felt that poetry and money were “the God and Mammon of the world.” For the poets of postrevolutionary Russia, though, the bonds that linked verse to currency were more ambiguous, and the ties between the two were not simply metaphorical. Did the new regime want or need the verse of even its most ardent supporters, let alone that of fellow travelers and internal émigrés? Who would pay to print their poetry? Who could afford to buy it? “Inspiration can’t be bought,” the bookseller advises his otherworldly client in Pushkin’s “The Bookseller’s Conversation with the Poet” (1824). “But you can sell your manuscript. . . . Just name your price.” The worth of both poets and their manuscripts was far less certain in the postrevolutionary marketplace. (Stability came only later, and at great cost, as Stalin consolidated his state monopoly on art as well as industry in the late twenties and early thirties.)14 Mandelstam was not the only writer to draw on the language of finance to describe the plight and prospects of poetry under the new regime. Politicians, critics, and poets alike relied on economic metaphors to describe the value of poetry, new and old, to the revolutionary state. In “On Poetry” (1919–20), Velimir Khlebnikov warns the readers of the future not to expect the kind of simpleminded clarity that marked poetic economies of the past, when a misguided bourgeoise demanded that “a poem must be understandable. Like a sign on the street, which carries the clear and simple words, ‘For Sale.’ ” Elsewhere he foresees an international revolution in poetry to parallel the coming global triumph of the Bolshevik regime, a revolution that will do away with the past’s unseemly trade in verbal merchandise. He calls on the “artists of the world” to put an end to the literary “tariff wars” and “verbal marketplaces” in which every “system of auditory currency” vies for linguistic supremacy. On a less grandiose note, Leon Trotsky warns revolutionary poetry against squandering its new-found wealth on small change “for the temporary lyrical use” of has-been versifiers and sonnet-crafting hacks. And in an early essay on Futurism, Roman Jakobson reproaches retrograde critics for their unthinking allegiance to the poetic currency of bygone times; they “prefer the paper currency” of conventional verse to the “gold” of avant-garde experiments. Poets, he notes in another early essay, are no less guilty of pawning off ersatz verse as the genuine article: “Pushkin-style poems are now as easy to print as counterfeit Kerensky banknotes (kerenki): they lack any value of their own and circulate only in the absence of good hard cash.” Jakobson’s metaphor might have derived from the realities of Soviet publishing in the twenties. Poets who found themselves low among the state’s priorities for paper allocations—the treasury alone required monumental amounts of paper to

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

155

keep up with demands for an increasingly devalued currency—were reduced to printing their poems “on money which had gone out use,” or so Mayakovsky recalls.15 Though Mandelstam shares a common vocabulary with Jakobson, Khlebnikov, and Trotsky, he is far from sharing what might be called their verbal economy. His faith in a poetic gold standard that unites past and future may seem naive in light of Trotsky’s dismissal of earlier cultural values, or Jakobson’s establishment of a new value system that explicitly awards its gold prize to the Futurist avant-garde. In other ways, though, the return to a gold standard that marked the early stages of the state’s New Economic Policy, or NEP (1921–28), appeared to justify Mandelstam’s hope that other values from the past might be readmitted into circulation as well. The NEP, with its encouragement of small-scale free enterprise and petty entrepreneurs, was designed to restore the Soviet economy, shattered by war and revolution, to prewar norms. As such, Mayakovsky charges, it “led people to believe, quite simply by analogy, that the old norms should be applied in our cultural life as well.” Such beliefs did finally prove to be misguided, but the loosening of cultural restrictions that accompanied the government’s new hybrid economy seemed for a time to indicate that the revolutionary state might tolerate, if not embrace, artistic traditions and values first cultivated under the ancien régime. Indeed, Mandelstam could have cited the peculiar fate of one of his poems in support of such guarded optimism: his ambiguously titled, highly ambivalent hymn to the new state, “The Twilight [or Dawn] of Freedom” (“Sumerki svobody,” 1918; #103) had appeared in a 1921 issue of Red Militiaman (Krasnyi militsioner) just opposite an article praising the brutal suppression of the recent Kronstadt sailors’ revolt against Soviet power.16 As this perverse juxtaposition suggests, though, the grounds even for guarded optimism were shaky at best, and Mandelstam’s claims for the kinship of Hellenistic and revolutionary values were, by and large, far from cautious. Though he does not mention Mandelstam by name, Trotsky might have composed his critique of “Literary ‘Fellow Travellers”’(1922) to show the would-be revolutionary classicist the error of his ways. He attacks Akhmatova and other erstwhile Acmeists for mistakenly assuming that “neo-Classicism” is “a child of the Revolution in the same sense in which the NEP is”: “We consider that the historic train [of the Revolution] has just begun to move, and that this is only a brief stop at a station for the purpose of taking on water and getting up steam,” while would-be “revolutionary conservatives” are convinced that the train has stopped for good, or better yet, is even going backward. Trotsky rephrases his point in “The Formalist School of Poetry” (1923): “It does not make new poets of you to translate the philosophy of life of the Seventeenth Century into the language of the Acmeists.”17 Trotsky’s views on revolutionary culture might themselves seem suspect when we recall that his days on the Soviet train of history were already numbered. But Mandelstam did not require Trotsky’s warnings to make

156

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

him doubt the worth of his services to the state. The bravado of his essays is undercut by, among other things, his wife’s accounts of his struggles throughout the twenties to earn a living by letters in an increasingly inhospitable marketplace. The early twenties, as Clarence Brown notes, mark the beginning of Mandelstam’s slow fall from grace, and Nadezhda Mandelstam remarks that Mandelstam himself would later consider the first years of NEP the hardest of his life—which is saying a great deal in light of what lay ahead. By 1923, she recalls, he had fallen subject to an unpublicized ban that prohibited him from publishing anything but translations in stateowned journals; and even this “hackwork,” in Mandelstam’s dismissive phrase, was difficult to come by and poorly paid.18 “Ich bin arm. I am poor”: Mandelstam’s rebellious motto in “Fourth Prose” (1930) recasts in a defiant note the plaintive refrain that sounds throughout his own correspondence of the twenties (CPL, 325).19 “Everything is going well for us,” he writes to his father early in 1923. “There is just one problem. Although we have the essentials, lately we have had just barely enough money. Right now I can’t send you a single cent” (Mandelstam’s italics; CPL, 487). A letter sent some eight months later is far more desperate: “A room in the city costs forty chervontsy. We were ready to leave—but where to? We had to stop our account at the store in order to live. . . . What am I doing? I’m working for money. The crisis is grave. It’s much worse than last year.” (Mandelstam’s italics; 1923/24; CPL, 491). Mandelstam struggles to reassure his wife in letters written during her periods of convalescence in Yalta, where she struggled with recurring bouts of tuberculosis. His anxieties manifest themselves, nonetheless, in the worried kopeck-counting that alternates with solicitous endearments throughout the letters: Later, I went everywhere: to Priboi and to GIZ [publishers]. They promised to pay 60 roubles at the paper tomorrow. . . . Gorlin [an editor] submitted some kind of “Billya” [reference unclear]—100 lines—50 roubles, and Priboi wanted Edgar Allan Poe. (1925; CPL, 490) And Nadichka, tomorrow I’ll pay for the insurance and part of what we owe to Sasha. . . . Today we paid the interest on the watch. Tomorrow the Leningrad Red News will give me 60 roubles, and on Wednesday the 21st, Gorlin will give me 50 more rubles for some poems. That means I already have 110 of the 200 rubles. . . . I have twenty pages left of The Thousand and Second Night [a work by F. Heller], but tomorrow GIZ will give me only 100 rubles, and 125 more on the twentieth. (1925; CPL, 491–92) I wrote you not to spare money. Those were not empty words: I have enough money. Even if you spend 400 rubles in March, there will still be enough money for April. I don’t know how, but everything can be taken care of for a price. (1926; CPL, 516) Rent for the room eats up all my pay. How can we survive, Nadik, how. . . . The next paycheck: 15 rubles on account—a deduction (what’s left of the ear-

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

157

lier one)—30 rubles (I owe the cafeteria)—the literary fund (?)—What will I do with 90 rubles minus 60 for the room (not counting debts totaling 25 rubles, they’re beginning to mount up). Nadik, Nadik, tell me how to survive. (1930; CPL, 541)

The sums are as precise and poignant as those that punctuate the speech of any of Dostoevsky’s downtrodden students or clerks. But Mandelstam was troubled not only by his precarious finances. It became increasingly clear in the twenties that he had little of value to offer the new regime in exchange for what meager pay he received. Indeed, the very currency he trafficked in was suspect. The 1918 Constitution of the Russian Republic gave the vote to all legitimate “toilers,” while disenfranchising, among others, anyone living on rent or other unearned income.20 Mandelstam had carefully hoarded the gold coins of European humanism throughout the years of war and revolution, in hopes that the Soviet state might come to recognize their value. Instead he finds himself living on what he calls in a 1928 questionnaire “unearned cultural income (kul’turnaia renta),” on cultural contraband smuggled into an economy that required all citizens to work for their keep in the officially designated fashion. “I feel I’m in debt to the revolution,” Mandelstam continues, “but I offer it gifts for which it still has no need (Ia chuvstvuiu sebia dolzhnikom revoliutsii, no prinoshu ei dary, v kotorykh ona poka chto ne nuzhdaetsia )” (CPL, 275; II, 217). The currency of the past, in other words, is not only worthless in the Soviet present. It also places its bearer in a dubious position vis-à-vis a regime that acknowledges no values but its own. The debtor who has mistakenly invested in the riches of the past now finds himself confessing his cultural bankruptcy to a creditor whose tolerance for such transgressions is limited indeed.

PINDARIC TRIUMPH AND MANDELSTAMIAN DEFEAT If there is a single Greek word that can best capture for us [the] driving force behind Pindar’s poetics, that word is surely oikonomia, ancestor of our borrowed English terms economy and economics. For Pindar, oikonomia is not merely a material concern. . . . In the traditional poetics of Pindar, the reciprocity between poet and patron, which is the oikonomia or “traffic” of praise poetry, depends on a world view that places the ultimate value on the notion that value itself is sacred. —Gregory Nagy, Foreward to Leslie Kurke, The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (1991)

Thus far I have drawn on documents from the late twenties in making a case for Mandelstam’s sense of cultural bankruptcy. Mandelstam’s most complex and moving testimony to this fear dates, however, not from the end of the NEP, but from its early years—the same years in which he stub-

158

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

bornly affirms the worth of a Hellenized Europe in his essays. In critical prose, T. S. Eliot remarks, “one may be legitimately occupied with ideals,” but “in the writing of verse, one can only deal with actuality.”21 He might be describing the rift that divides prose from poetry in Mandelstam’s writing of the early twenties. The reality Mandelstam evokes in his poems of the period forms a grim counterpoint to the resilient, resolutely hopeful tone of the essays, as the glittering golden currency of “Humanism and the Present” turns up, tarnished and diminished, at the end of one of his greatest and most pessimistic lyrics, “The Horseshoe Finder” (1923; #136): “Time cuts me like a coin,/And there’s no longer enough of me for me.” Though it was written in the same year as “Humanism and the Present,” “The Horseshoe Finder” stands in gloomy reproach to that essay’s most hopeful passages; it forms a wrenching antithesis to the essay’s optimistic thesis. The essayist insists that humanistic values, now hidden underground, will return again as common currency. Their burial, in other words, was premature, or perhaps predestined, and will be followed by a glorious resurrection as they triumphally reenter the life of the European culture whose vitality they ensure. Mandelstam the essayist thus assures the stability of his own poetic economy, based as it is on the continuous renovation of past values. The poet, though, tells us something else again. The past, he says, is dead and gone, and no amount of effort—the poem itself is a series of such efforts—will suffice to bring it back to life. The gold coins of the humanist tradition are worthless, and if the spade of some future poet-archaeologist succeeds in digging them up, it will resurrect not living values, but mementos to a vanished past. The bottom of Mandelstam’s poetic economy has dropped out, or so the poem tells us, and with it the very basis of all future poetic creation. “The Horseshoe Finder” is, then, a poem about failure, both personal and artistic, and, at crucial moments, it couches its presentation or enactment of these failures in the language of finance. This language, in turn, lies at the heart of the web of issues—the nature of cultural value; the relationship of the poet to society, to tradition, to the state; the possibilities for poetic language in an age of revolution— that shape Mandelstam’s great modernist lament.22 THE HORSESHOE FINDER (A Pindaric Fragment) We look upon a forest and we say: Here is a forest of ships, of masts, The rosy pines Are free to the very tops from their shaggy burden, They should be creaking in a storm like lone Italian pines in the angry treeless air; the plumbline will resist, fitted to the dancing deck, beneath the wind’s salty heel.

5

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

And the seafarer, In his unbridled passion for space, Dragging the geometer’s brittle implement through damp furrows, Checks the rough surface of the seas Against the pull of the earth’s breast. And inhaling the scent Of tarry tears that have oozed through the ship’s planks, Admiring boards Riveted, ordered into bulkheads Not by Bethlehem’s peaceful carpenter, but the other— father of wanderings, seafarer’s friend— We say: They too stood upon an earth Awkward as the backbone of an ass, Their tops forgetting their roots, Upon the famous mountain ridge, And they sounded beneath the sweet downpour, Imploring the heavens in vain to exchange their noble burden For a pinch of salt. Where to begin? Everything cracks and sways. The air trembles with similes. One word is no better than another, The earth rumbles with metaphors, And the light two-wheeled carts, In bright harness of bird flocks thick with strain, Shatter into pieces, Vying with the racetracks’ snorting favorites. Thrice blessed is he who leads a name into his song; The song adorned with a name Lives longer among the rest— She is marked among her friends by the band upon her brow, which preserves her from fainting, from too strong, stupefying smells— Whether from a man’s nearness, Or a powerful animal’s fur, Or simply the scent of savory rubbed between the palms. Sometimes the air is dark as water, and everything living swims in it like a fish, Sundering with its fins the sphere, dense, resilient, slightly warm,— A crystal, in which wheels spin and horses shy, The damp black earth of Neaera, furrowed again each night With pitchforks, tridents, hoes, and ploughs.

159 10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

50

160

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

The air is mixed as densely as the earth— You can’t get out and it’s hard to enter. A rustle runs across the trees like a green ball; Children play jacks with dead animals’ backbones. The frail chronology of our era draws to a close. Thank you for all that was: I myself made mistakes, miscalculated, bungled the accounts. The era rang out like a golden sphere, Hollow, molded, held by no one. At every touch it answered “yes” and “no.” Just as a child answers: “I’ll give you the apple,” or “I won’t give you the apple,” Its face the exact form of the voice saying those words. The sound still rings, although the sound’s cause is gone. The horse lies in the dust and snorts in a lather, But the sharp arch of its neck Still holds the memory of racing with legs outstretched— When there were not four, But as many as stones on a road, Renewed in four shifts at a time As often as a blazing pacer strikes the ground. Thus, The one who finds a horseshoe Blows the dust from it And rubs it with wool until it shines, Then Hangs it above the lintel, To let it rest. It will never need to strike sparks from flint again. Human lips which have nothing more to say Preserve the shape of the last word spoken, And the hand keeps feeling the weight Though the pitcher lost half its water while being carried home. What I’m saying now isn’t said by me, It’s been dug up from the ground like grains of stony wheat. Some engrave a lion on their coins, Others— a head;

55

60

65

70

75

80

85

90

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

Varied lozenges of copper, gold, and bronze Lie with equal honor in the earth. The age, which tried to gnaw them through, broke its teeth on them. Time cuts me like a coin, And there’s no longer enough of me for me.23

161

95

“The Horseshoe Finder” is exceptional in Mandelstam’s work in more ways than one. It is not only his longest single lyric; it is also his only poem written entirely in free verse, and Mandelstam’s choice of form leads us to the poem’s chief concern: the poet’s cultural bankruptcy and the failure of his poetic economy. Rhyme and meter “recollect forward”;24 they return continuously to a poem’s past in the process of propelling us into its future. One can see why variants worked on traditional verse forms would appeal to a poet like Mandelstam, preoccupied with altering the past in the process of calling it to mind. “Poetry is the plough that turns up time,” Mandelstam announces in “The Word and Culture” (CPL, 113), and the plough’s circling motion—what was below is now above; what was past is now present; what was buried returns to life and will be buried again, and so on, ad infinitum—is the central movement of all his poetry, whether his image is the plough, a ship’s prow, Persephone, or Christ himself. We see one version of this motion at work in “Humanism and the Present,” as the buried coins return to circulation. The coins that end “The Horseshoe Finder,” though, stay buried, and this unfinished cycle, this broken circle dominates the poem from the start—the horseshoe of the title is itself an incomplete circle—and dictates its very shape. The rhyme and meter that any reader of Mandelstam would have known to expect do not materialize; and, as a result, the circling motion and the continuous negotiation between the poem’s own past and future that rhyme and meter create are conspicuous in the poem only by their absence. “Will the circle be unbroken?” runs the chorus of an old American spiritual, and this question, with its manifold implications, preoccupies Mandelstam throughout “The Horseshoe Finder.” The poem abounds in images of circles and spheres, whether partial or full: the title’s horseshoe is followed by cart wheels (33); the band on the song’s brow (40); the crystal sphere and the spinning wheels within it (46–48); the circling horse races (36; 48; 67–70); the green ball (53); the golden sphere (58); the apple (62); the horse’s curved neck (66); the lintel, or threshhold (porog)(77); human lips (80); and finally, the concluding image of coins both broken and whole (91–97). Behind the poem’s openly circular imagery lies a network of less overt patterns of circulation. Throughout the poem, glimpses of a world whose ideally Hellenistic order remains intact are juxtaposed with visions of a disrupted cosmos in which the patterns of the past do not apply. The opening stanzas evoke Mandelstam’s ideal Hellas, in which humanity and the elements labor in concert: water is drawn up into the skies, whence it falls to fertilize earth’s trees, which in turn offer themselves up to

162

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

human purposes and return to the seas as ships. Mandelstam’s imagery of plowing—“The damp black earth of Neaera, furrowed again each night” (49)—likewise summons up his Hellenistic cosmos, in which poetry, the plow that turns up time, restores, or “recycles,” in a modern term, past traditions for future use. The song-maiden and her companions (37–39) also call this cosmos to mind through their kinship with the muses who perform a circle dance (khorovod) in two of Tristia’s “Hellenistic” lyrics (#105, #123). And the poem ends with the ancient coins—“varied lozenges of copper, bronze, and gold” (92)—that are Mandelstam’s tokens of past value in “Humanism and the Present,” the tokens that will return to circulation in some future golden age of European culture.25 All these beneficent forms of circulation, though, be they natural or cultural—and nature always joins forces with culture in the best of all Mandelstamian worlds—operate, if at all, in the shadow of failure, destruction, or defeat. They are summoned up only to be cast into doubt by powerful, opposing imagery. The circling elements of the poem’s opening become a trap by mid-poem, an impenetrable sphere mixed of water and air, resistant to human enterprise: “You can’t get out and it’s hard to enter” (52). The values of a bygone era are reduced in the following stanza to a “golden sphere,/Hollow, molded, held by no one” (58–59). Western culture’s gold standard has lost its center and support, and the poet of “The Horseshoe Finder,” himself supported by “unearned cultural income,” cannot sustain it alone. Finally, the poet himself becomes a devalued coin—yet another diminished circle—that will be destroyed by time, not redeemed by it: “Time cuts me like a coin,/And there’s no longer enough of me for me” (96–97). The past and its values will not return again, at least not through the agency of a poet who has, by his own admission, “bungled the accounts” in his efforts to convert old currency to new purposes. I have returned repeatedly to two words borrowed from Mandelstam’s essays in describing the failed or faltering poetic economy of “The Horseshoe Finder”: circulation (obrashchenie) and return (vozvrashchenie). The Russian words share a common root, vrat or vorot, which etymologically has ties to the Old Slavic for “neck”—one thinks here of the dying horse’s arched neck in “The Horseshoe Finder”—but which is also related to the Latin vertere, “to turn,” and this is the sense its many Slavic offspring share.26 The idea of turning or circularity is built into the words themselves, whose presence makes itself felt in the spirit, if not the letter, of “The Horseshoe Finder.” This spirit, however, is countered by the sense of an opposing word, which is again absent from the poem’s actual text but central to its sense, and which shares, in one Russian variant, its root with obrashchenie and vozvrashchenie. This is revolution, which has in Russian both a native and a foreign form. The imported word, revoliutsiia, is the one by which the end of Imperial Russia and the Bolshevik takeover came to be known. But there is a native equivalent, perevorot, which means literally “a turning around” or “reversal of course.” As in English, then, the

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

163

word revolution is ambivalent literally to its roots. The English word can signify both repetition, as in the earth’s continuous revolving around the sun, and radical transformation, as in the French, American, or Russian revolutions. The Russian perevorot contains no directly antithetical meanings in itself; the same root, though, generates not only the opposing meanings I’ve mentioned, but also provides, in a direct parallel to English, the word for the earth’s daily circling of the sun, “vrashchenie.”27 The ambivalent, even antithetical meanings at war in the Russian root vrat lie at the heart of the poetic enterprise that Mandelstam defines in his essays and despairs of in his verse. “Poetic culture,” he writes in “Badger Hole” (1922), “arises from the attempt to overt catastrophe, to make it dependent on the central sun of the system as a whole” (CPL, 137). The catastrophe Mandelstam faces in the early twenties is a revolution that views all history as an unwelcome obstacle in its progress to the radiant future that will vanquish the past forever. Even the subject of history, one scholar notes, was banished for a time from postrevolutionary curricula “on the grounds that it was irrelevant to contemporary life.”28 If Mandelstam is to avoid being cast onto Trotsky’s “dust heap of history,” he must find a way to transform a revolution that turns its back on history into a revolution that turns back to history continuously, that revolves around a history creatively refigured to serve the needs of present and future. The fate of Western civilization itself depends on just such a transformation, or so Mandelstam the essayist insists at his most hyperbolic. The more hesitant voice of “The Horseshoe Finder” reminds us, though, that Mandelstam has staked his own poetic fate on his capacity to fuse classical and revolutionary values—and the odds against him are nothing short of monumental. In “The Word and Culture,” Mandelstam issues a challenge to the revolutionary cult of the future: “One often hears: that is good but it belongs to yesterday. But I say yesterday has not yet been born. . . . I want Ovid, Pushkin, and Catullus to live once more, and I am not satisfied with the historical Ovid, Pushkin, and Catullus” (CPL, 113). In “The Horseshoe Finder,” Mandelstam sets himself the task of putting this vision of history—in which vanished past becomes vital future through the agency and energies of a latter-day poet-entrepreneur—into postrevolutionary poetic practice. The poet he picks, though, as his test case is neither his great precursor Pushkin, nor the Ovid whose life and writings haunt his own work. It is not even Catullus, whose “silver trumpet” serves as Mandelstam’s summons to action in “The Word and Culture” (CPL, 114). It is Pindar, the Greek lyric poet whose dates run from 518 to sometime after 446 B.C. The choice may seem surprising, for Pindar’s name appears only once in Mandelstam’s writings, in “The Horseshoe Finder” itself, which bears the subtitle “A Pindaric Fragment.” Even this solitary reference vanishes in editions that follow the lead of the 1928 Poems in printing the poem’s title without its explanatory gloss. Two questions, then, remain to be addressed

164

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

before returning to the poem itself: Why Pindar? And what has he to do with Mandelstam’s precarious poetic economy of the early twenties?29 To look even briefly at Pindar’s poetry and his times is to discover parallels and contrasts that illuminate both Mandelstam’s text and its context. Superficially Pindar might seem far removed from the work of a “pastist” poet working to carve a place for himself in an unreceptive new state, a poet struggling to make his lyric voice heard above the uproar of a triumphant revolutionary order relentlessly bent on the future. Pindar was in many ways one of history’s great poetic success stories. His gifts were recognized early on, and he remained until his death in high demand among the ruling families of ancient Greece for the victory odes he wrote to commemorate their triumphs in the various athletic competitions and games staged throughout the different city-states. He was the first great practitioner of the ode, and, as the premier poet of his day, was well compensated for his labors, while his poems received public stagings in Greece’s greatest palaces and stadiums. This thumbnail sketch gives us an artist who is, in crucial ways, Mandelstam’s poetic antipode—but who might also be seen as the fulfillment of his most anxious, heartfelt dreams. In “The Word and Culture,” Mandelstam imagines relations between poetry and the state that are respectful and mutually beneficial; the state can no more ignore its poetic “counselors” than they can survive without its goodwill and patronage. Such relations do seem to obtain between Pindar and his clients; he depended on his lofty patrons for largess and inspiration, while his services immortalized the athletic triumphs that assured both their social preeminence and their place in history.30 There are other suggestive parallels between the poet that Pindar apparently was and the poet that Mandelstam longed to become during the turbulent years of the NEP. Unlike Mandelstam, Pindar enjoyed prosperity and acclaim in his own lifetime; but his poetic path, though glorious, was anything but smooth. “A treacherous age hangs over men’s heads,” Pindar warns in his Eighth Isthmian Ode, and, like Mandelstam, he bore witness to great historical upheavals: invasion, war, uprisings, violent rivalries both within and among the Greek city-states. Both poets, moreover, witnessed large-scale social and political transformations, as older orders, with power based on rank and birth, gave way to radically new forms of government: democratic, in Pindar’s Greece, and Marxist-Leninist in modern Russia. For both writers these upheavals threatened to put an end to cherished visions of a larger cultural community, whether Panhellenic, in Pindar’s case, or all-European for the latter-day Hellene Mandelstam.31 Unlike Mandelstam, however, Pindar managed to negotiate these troubled social waters with aplomb; he contrived not only to stay afloat but to prosper. Perhaps most importantly, for Mandelstam’s purposes, he accomplished this feat without compromising either his conscience or his art; to phrase it differently, he served his patrons without doing a disservice to his gift. He was, as one critic puts it, a “hired poet” who sold his praise to

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

165

the highest bidder—Pindar himself mocks what he calls his “mercenary Muse”—yet his faith in his vocation as “poet, priest and prophet” convinced him that it was he who finally conferred the greater gift on his patron, whose deeds would perish without the “sounding words” that were their guarantee of immortality: “The story of things done outlives the act,” he reminds would-be clients. The patron is thus left in the debt of the poet whose wages he pays.32 This transaction sounds very like the ideal exchange that Mandelstam imagines between Culture and the State in his essays. The poet may depend on the State’s patronage for his present welfare, but the State’s future glory rests entirely in the words of the poet whose voice wards off oblivion. Only the poet’s “inscriptions on State buildings, tombs, and gateways insure the State against the ravages of time,” Mandelstam insists in “The Word and Culture” (CPL, 113). The adroit maneuverings between poetry and the powers-that-be that characterize Pindar’s long career came, however, far less easily to Mandelstam, who was temperamentally unsuited to the role of court poet in any case, and who was faced with a regime whose regard for poetry bore no resemblance to that of Pindar’s Greece, much less to Mandelstam’s Hellenized ideal. Pindar was attacked, both in his lifetime and after, for being “a relic of the past in his own time,” whose “backwardlooking,” “outmoded” attachment to “the dying genre of choral lyric” reflected the old-fashioned way of life that nourished it.33 For Mandelstam, though, struggling to reconcile his love for past cultures with the needs of a state consecrated to the cult of the future, Pindar represents the glorious beginnings of a history to which he himself may be destined to make a less than glorious end. The title and subtitle of “The Horseshoe Finder” hint at such a destiny. The horseshoe is all that remains of the great odic tradition that had its beginnings in the chariot races that were Greece’s most prestigious competition. And the horseshoe finder himself, the latter-day poet who stumbles on this memento of past greatness, can answer a fragment only with a fragment, or so the poem’s subtitle suggests. The verbal fragment echoes the physical fragment, and both are metonyms for a cultural unity that is, perhaps, lost forever, whatever the boastful essayist of “The Word and Culture” may claim to the contrary. Taken together, they seem to spell failure. Defeat is not the message with which the poem proper opens, though. Its initial stanzas project a voice and vision that evoke Pindar while being recognizably Mandelstamian. Mandelstam apparently achieves the kind of verbal palimpsest that marks many of the poems from Tristia and Stone, in which his “I” speaks for both himself and the voices of history: Chaadaev (#69) or Ovid (#79, #80, #104); an exiled Decembrist (#94), a Trojan warrior (#119), or a courtier of old Muscovy (#85).34 His voice in “The Horseshoe Finder” is explicitly collective from the start: “We look upon a forest and we say . . .” (my italics). The first-person plural verb forms—the personal pronouns are omitted in the Russian—of the opening stanzas in-

166

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

dicate that the poet, in Pindaric fashion, speaks for and to a larger community, and that he bears responsibility for shaping and guiding this communal endeavor: when you look on a forest, he tacitly tells his audience, this is what you should see, and these are the words in which you should articulate your vision. The poet’s voice, in other words, is public and rhetorical, aimed at persuading his audience to take his vision for their own. It is, in short, the odist’s voice, and we may hear in the poet’s “we” the presence of yet another “I,” that of Pindar himself, whose supremely confident public persona lends his would-be descendant similar energy and assurance.35 What vision does this collective voice articulate? And, if these stanzas truly operate in the Pindaric tradition, whose victory do they seek to commemorate? There are traces of Pindar’s work scattered throughout the opening stanzas: the master mariner and his ship echo the sea voyages that serve in Pindar’s odes as favorite images for the creation of song itself, while the emphasis on human craftsmanship evokes Pindar’s concern with the poet as maker (poixtxs in Greek), as divinely inspired artisan in a world given its best and highest form by human shaping, human accomplishment. This last notion, in particular, leads us back to Mandelstam’s Acmeist poet-maker, and the human-centered, domesticated cosmos he occupies in the essays and early verse. Certainly the poem’s opening stanzas draw a picture of a world ideally subjugated to human purposes. The very trees that begin the poet’s reverie are “teleological,” in Mandelstam’s specifically “Hellenistic” sense. Not only are they defined by their future use at human hands: “Here is a forest of ships, of masts” (2). They are “rosy”; their very bark seems to glow with “teleological warmth,” as though blood, not sap, were flowing beneath their bark. (And when their sap appears in line 15, it takes the human form of “tarry tears.”) Moreover, they themselves plead to be allowed to serve their would-be masters; they “implore the heavens . . . to exchange their noble burden/For a pinch of salt” (26–27). The trees are turned to human purposes not only by the mariner whose feats the poet celebrates, but also by the poet himself. They are raw material for both the shipbuilder and the poet-maker whose imaginings give shape and meaning to the still-unformed forest he evokes in the opening lines. One might even argue that the poet’s making takes precedence over that of the “seafarer”(9), whose presence in the poem springs from the chain of images unleashed by the poet who acts on the forest’s hidden potential. The tools used by the poem’s unnamed mariner further reveal his affinities with Mandelstam’s poet-maker. Human tools hold pride of place in Mandelstam’s Hellenized cosmos and we recognize the tools his seafarer employs from his Acmeist early verse. The “geometer’s brittle implement” might be borrowed from the toolbox of that “simple joiner” Peter the Great, who battles the four elements as he shapes his “frigate” Admiralty (#48); and the mariner’s “plumbline” is the same instrument that allows medieval humanity to challenge the abyss by building Notre Dame (#39).

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

167

The identification that Mandelstam orchestrates here between the poetmaker and the poem’s master builder or man of action is central to his poetics from the earliest Acmeist manifestos in prose and verse, where he draws his colleagues from among the ranks of history’s carpenters, architects, and masons, not to mention emperor-builders like Justinian or Peter. And poem-ships, be they Chinese junks, Achaean warships, or the Egyptian boats of the dead, surface almost as frequently in Mandelstam’s work as they do in Pindar’s.36 But the enigmatic identity of “The Horseshoe Finder” ’s master mariner suggests that this poem-ship bears an usually heavy load, one that proves finally to be beyond its strength, as its voyage breaks down midway through the lyric. I have mentioned Peter the Great and the Admiralty that doubles as his ship of state in Mandelstam’s early lyric, and Steven Broyde has argued persuasively for Peter—“carpenter, founder of the Russian fleet, and helmsman of the ship of state”—as the prototype for the poem’s unnamed “father of wanderings.”37 As the emperor who tore Russia from its historical moorings and set it sailing on a new and uncharted course, Peter would be certainly an apt point of reference for a poet struggling to find historical analogies for a revolution that claimed to be utterly without precedent. Peter, though, is not the only figure whose image lies concealed behind the mariner’s shadowy form. The task of the poet, as Pindar saw it, was to forge links between the present victor’s attainments and the past glories of his ancestors and nation, and, further, to root all these merely human marvels in the world of the divine by way of the myths that celebrate the matchless feats of the gods themselves. This mission has clear affinities with Mandelstam’s efforts to create poetic palimpsests in which past and present coexist in multilayered images that endow the modern age with historical resonance. It is not difficult to imagine mythological precursors for the poem’s Peter, who might equally deserve the riddling epithets that Mandelstam bestows on his shipbuilder: “father of wanderings, seafarer’s friend” (19). Poseidon, sea god and “father of horses,” comes to mind; his dual allegiances would link the poem’s opening images with the chariots that dominate its later sections, and as patron deity of the Isthmian games, he makes frequent appearances in Pindar’s Isthmian odes. And, perhaps most suggestively, there is the sailor whose voyage home from the Trojan Wars in the Odyssey propels the Western tradition itself and all the many literary journeys that followed in Homer’s wake; indeed, Odysseus’ most frequent epithet, polymxchanos, paid tribute to his skills not only as mariner and shipwright, but as ploughman, carpenter, and steersman.38 No single one of these figures provides the key to the identity of Mandelstam’s mysterious seafarer. Instead of giving him a single, clear-cut prototype, Mandelstam endows his wanderer with an aura of suggestive openendedness. He is “sated with time and space” (#92), and this time and space extend across national and historical boundaries to encompass both Peter’s Russia and Pindar’s classical Greece. But this catalog of past heroes

168

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

and gods does not exhaust the seafarer’s possible identities. Pindar evokes past histories and myths to celebrate present triumphs, and his praise poetry thus guarantees his patron a place in the tradition that will bear his feats into the future. In the process, Pindar demonstrates his own worth to the nobles, kings, and even tyrants who commission his work, and so secures his own place in an uncertain world. If Mandelstam is following Pindar’s lead, then the latter-day triumph he commemorates in his poem’s opening lines can only be that of the revolution itself, and Peter’s ship of state exists largely to provide historical ballast for the revolutionary ship that Lenin and his allies were sailing into an uncharted future.39 Mandelstam had described this journey’s beginning in an earlier lyric, “The Twilight [or Dawn] of Freedom” (“Sumerki svobody,” 1918; #103). Like the opening stanzas of “The Horseshoe Finder,” the poem depicts a voyage by sea; and despite its strongly Hellenic coloration, the voyage is clearly that of the new state making its way through unknown waters, as Mandelstam’s contemporaries were quick to recognize. Broyde notes the metaphoric parallels between this poem and “The Horseshoe Finder”—its ship is a “forest” of snares, its rudder “plows” the sea, and so forth—but the real significance of the poems’ similarities lies elsewhere. Both poems employ a lofty, archaic diction, and in both the poet speaks with authority to and for a larger community, a “we.” In this public voice, he takes on themes of great import: the nation, its history, and its fate. The poems operate, in other words, in the tradition of the ode—“The Twilight of Freedom” was originally entitled “A Hymn,” that is, an ode to the gods—and like many odes, they take praise of the nation’s rulers as one of their central topoi. “Let us praise the fateful burden,/Taken by the nation’s chief in tears,” Mandelstam intones in “The Twilight/Dawn of Freedom,” and friends and enemies alike saw Lenin’s portrait in this ambiguous figure. Clarence Brown is right to question those critics in the 1960s who interpreted these lines as expressing unadulterated enthusiasm for the new state’s leader in hopes of restoring Mandelstam to posthumous favor; the poem is nothing if not ambivalent, beginning with its title (the Russian sumerki can mean either dawn or dusk). It would be equally misguided, though, to overlook the poem’s dawn in favor of its dusk; the ship of state may be headed to perdition, Mandelstam seems to say, but its captain may also be steering us toward the dawn of a new day. Whatever his own misgivings may be, the poet does not hesitate to cast his lot among those who have set to sea: “Well then, let us try: an enormous, awkward, creaking turn (povorot) of the rudder.” His praise may be qualified, but it is praise nonetheless for those who have dared to risk all in hopes of gaining all.40 No doubts apparently beset the poet who celebrates ‘The Horseshoe Finder” ’s dauntless mariner, who is as much Lenin as Peter or Odysseus. This captain’s force and mastery are in evidence throughout the opening stanzas, and his power is even greater than it had been in “The Twilight/Dawn of Freedom.” In the earlier poem, Mandelstam celebrates

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

169

a collaborative undertaking in which he himself participates: “Let us praise,” “We have bonded,” “Let us try.” The “people’s leader (narodnyi vozhd’)” merely guides these efforts; it is the people (or “men,” muzhi) who turn the rudder that shifts the nation’s course. The ship’s captain in “The Horseshoe Finder,” however, charts his course alone; it is his “passion for space” that propels the ship of state, and he alone manipulates the instruments governing its motion. The poet serves merely to laud his master’s achievements as he leads the people’s chorus in praise, and the verbs that describe their behavior stress not action, but perception or reaction: “we look,” “we say,” “[we] admire,” “[we] inhale.”41 This shift accurately reflects the changing nature of Soviet power, as the party’s policies moved away from the utopian dreaming of War Communism—when even committed Bolsheviks believed that a leaderless paradise would emerge from the crucible of war and civil strife—to the more pragmatic considerations that prompted the NEP, as party leadership realized that this paradise would have to be postponed indefinitely while the party, under the unofficial leadership of the equalest of its equals, Vladimir Lenin, established its de facto dictatorship over people and state alike.42 Mandelstam’s goal in the poem’s opening stanzas is not to find fault but to praise, and he apparently achieves his goal in these lines, which lack the pervasive ambivalence that colors his first paean to the revolution’s ship of state. Or do they? The poem itself forces us to challenge this conclusion: if Mandelstam’s hymn of praise is proceeding as planned, then why does it break down so completely at the end of the second stanza? “Where to begin?” the poem asks as the third stanza opens, and ship, captain, and admiring chorus are abruptly jettisoned as Mandelstam challenges not simply these images, but the power and potency of poetic language as such. The ship of state runs aground as the language that had fueled it suddenly loses its force: S hego nahat;? Vs∏ tre]it i kahaetsq. Vozdux dro'it ot sravnenij. Ni odno slovo ne luhwe drugogo. (28–31) Where to begin? Everything cracks and sways. The air trembles with similes. One word is no better than another.

These lines invite us to reread the earlier stanzas in their light, and to examine these stanzas for clues as to what Mandelstam both wishes and fails to achieve in his aborted praise poem. The opening stanzas apparently lack the ambivalence that dominates his earlier ode to the state—but only if we restrict our attention to the poem’s

170

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

“we,” the speaker and his hypothetical community, and its “he,” its composite leader figure. There is, however, another personal pronoun that figures in these opening lines: the “they” representing the trees that are raw material for poet and shipbuilder alike. I have noted their humanized, “Hellenized” nature—their tears, their rosy glow, their yearning to serve the shipbuilder’s lofty goals—and their participation in a “Hellenistic” economy, in which nature submits to human purposes in its desire to help shape a true home for its enterprising masters. Mandelstam’s essays speak to his own desire at this time to find a comfortable fit between this Hellenized cosmos and the Marxist programs of the new state. “The Horseshoe Finder” ’s half-human trees indicate that this fusion of economies, Marxist and Hellenistic, is far from perfect and may even be perilous, if indeed it is possible at all. The opening stanzas grow from these trees and return to them again as the poem’s first segment draws to a close. On their reappearance, the trees are alligned with the poem’s collective speaker—“We say/They too stood upon the earth” (my italics)—and the description that follows hints at why Mandelstam should feel obliged to abandon so abruptly his collective voice and the celebratory vision it articulates. Govorim% I oni stoqli na zemle, Neudobnoj, kak xrebet osla, Zabyvaq verxuwkami o kornqx, Na znamenitom gornom krq'e, I wumeli pod presnym livnem, Bezuspewno predlagaq nebu vymenqt; na ]epotku soli Svoj blagorodnyj gruz. (19–27) We say: They too stood upon an earth Awkward as the backbone of an ass, Their tops forgetting their roots, Upon a famous mountain ridge, And they sounded beneath the sweet downpour, Imploring the heavens in vain to exchange their noble burden For a pinch of salt.

The trees, like the collective speaker who recalls them, once “stood upon the earth,” and the syntax of the stanza’s single sentence suggests that the similarities between trees and speaker do not end here. “The passing moment,” Mandelstam reminds us in “François Villon,” “can endure the pressure of centuries and preserve itself intact” : “You need only know how to extract that ‘here and now’ from the soil of Time without harming its roots, or it will wither and die” (CPL, 58). In their yearning to be of service

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

171

to the future, these half-human trees have apparently forgotten their moorings in the past. Or perhaps it is the poem’s speaker and maker who stands in need of such a reminder, for Mandelstam’s own poetry may not survive the profound sea change his poem describes. It derives its sustenance, after all, from “the deepest strata of time, its black earth” (CPL, 113), and thus may be unable to meet the demands of a world that demands renunciation of this rich past as the price of passage on its future-bound ship of state. There are other hints of ambivalence in this section’s final lines as well. The burden the trees wish to relinquish is a noble one; and when their noble branches are nourished by a freshwater downpour, they produce, if not precisely poetry, then at least eloquent, speaking sound. The life the trees are prepared to sacrifice has genuine worth, and the “tarry tears” (15) that had seemed to mark a fully Hellenized cosmos take on new meaning in this light. The price these living beings pay for their participation in the state’s endeavor is high: stripped of their “noble burden,” “riveted, ordered into bulkheads” (17), they might well weep for what they have lost. “Egyptian builders treat[ed] the human mass as building material in abundant supply,” Mandelstam warns in “Humanism and the Present” (CPL, 181), and the weeping planks call to mind the costs in human material the state has already paid for its great experiments, costs that Mandelstam commemorates in the “Verses on the Unknown Soldier” (1937; #362) with “crosses like forests mark[ing] the ocean (lesistye krestiki metili okean ).”43 The prospect of such a fate is unsettling. But the second stanza’s final lines also hint at an opposing destiny that may be still more disturbing for the would-be Pindar of the Soviet state. The pines, he tells us, pray for their sacrifice “in vain,” “unsuccessfully” (bezuspeshno) (26). We might simply take this to mean that their prayers have not been answered yet, but that they will be, and speedily, as the earlier lines, with their transformed, seafaring pines, assure us. Such assurances must be taken with a grain, or pinch, of salt, though, for the poet’s own self-assurance breaks down at this stanza’s close, and the verb qualified by bezuspeshno provides a clue to this unexpected collapse. The trees offer to strike a bargain with the heavens, to negotiate a trade in which they would “exchange (vymeniat’)” the burden of their boughs for a pinch of salty sea. This exchange—the noble, sounding branches in return for a chance to help shape the Soviet ship of state— calls to mind the attempted exchange that motivates the opening stanzas of the poem itself: Mandelstam turns his gifts to the service of the state in return for what he hopes will be safe passage on its journey to the future. But Mandelstam has no guarantee that the state will recognize his gifts—“I offer it gifts for which it still has no need,” he concludes five years later— and the elaborate metaphor with which he launches his projected praisepoem will indeed prove to be in vain if the state refuses to acknowledge his terms of exchange. For finally, of course, the poem’s pines and the metaphoric ship that grows from them are Mandelstam’s proffered gift to the regime; and if this gift is unacceptable under the rules of the new system,

172

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

then the subtle Pindaric exchange between poetry and the state he negotiates in the poem’s first stanzas will come crashing about his ears.44 This is precisely what happens in the third stanza, as Mandelstam’s carefully constructed Hellenic cosmos suddenly spins out of control: S hego nahat;? Vs∏ tre]it i kahaetsq. Vozdux dro'it ot sravnenij. Ni odno slovo ne luhwe drugogo, Zemlq gudit metaforoj, I legkie dvukolki, V broskoj uprq'i gustyx ot natugi ptih;ix staj, Razryva[tsq na hasti, Sopernihaq s xrapq]imi l[bimcami ristali]. (28–36) Where to begin? Everything cracks and sways. The air trembles with similes. One word is no better than another, The earth rumbles with metaphors, And the light two-wheeled carts, In bright harness of bird flocks thick with strain, Shatter into pieces, Vying with the racetracks’ snorting favorites.

What had looked to be the beginnings of a promising allegiance between the craft of poetry and the ship of state proves to be a false start, one that appears to have near-fatal consequences for poem and poet alike, as the vehicle of the poem—not a ship now, but a fragile two-wheeled cart—is revealed to be inadequate to the task it has been set. Mandelstam attempts to follow Pindar’s lead in casting himself as the poet-priest who raises a communal voice in praise of the nation’s rulers: “Swifter than the proud horse/or winged ship on the sea/I will carry the message [of triumph],” Pindar boasts in his Ninth Olympian Ode.45 But the pupil cannot compete with his master on land any more than he can at sea, and his delicate birdcarts are no match for the horse-drawn chariots of the true praise-poet; they shatter under the strain of a load they were never intended to bear. “Where to begin?” the poet asks as the third stanza opens, and the dizzying rush of images that follows—from bird-drawn carts to maiden-song to murky, muddied crystal ball—represents his repeated efforts to reenter a race that has passed him by, as his place is taken by favorites better suited to the task at hand. One might argue that this very flood of apparently disjointed images demonstrates that Mandelstam is successfully following his mentor’s example, for all his professions of failure. C. M. Bowra warns that Pindar’s odes proceed not by logical progression, but “by apparently

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

173

abrupt changes of subject, which leave us guessing what his intention is.” Pindar himself confesses as much in an eloquently mixed metaphor from his Eleventh Pythian Ode: “Friends, have I been whirled about at the shift of the crossroads,/though I went the right way before?/Has some gale driven me from/my course, like a boat on the sea . . . [as I] stir one theme and another.”46 Pindar can permit himself such luxuries of seeming incoherence, safe in the knowledge that his admiring patrons and public will lend an attentive ear as they struggle to make sense of the sometimes puzzling utterances of the gods’ mouthpiece, the poet-priest.47 The poet of “The Horseshoe Finder,” though, can boast of no such assurance. In the poem’s first stanzas, he borrows Pindar’s confident, collective “we” to speak for both self and community. In the poem’s middle stanzas, though, he speaks for himself alone—or perhaps not even that. Personal pronouns vanish entirely in stanzas 3 through 5; there is already apparently “not enough of me for me,” let alone for some form of “us.” The imagery of the third stanza, moreover, speaks eloquently for the collapse, not the continuation, of the precarious Pindaric balancing act that Mandelstam attempts in his opening lines. In Pindar’s world “games, song, and princely rulers were all parts of a single brilliant order”; and Pindar is quick to insist on the equality, if not priority, of poetic achievement in this distinguished company. He never tires of reminding his patrons that the deeds of princes will perish without the inspired words of poets to inscribe them in the world’s memory. Moreover, the creation of the victory ode itself is as daring a feat as the athletic triumph it commemorates: “Let them dig me a long pit for leaping,” he boasts in the Fifth Nemean Ode. “The spring in my knees is light.” And in the Sixth Olympian Ode, Pindar bids a companion to “yoke me the strength of the mules” while he himself prepares to “mount the chariot [of song]” as he recreates his patron’s racing victory in verse.48 This is the race in which Mandelstam, by his own admission, cannot compete, and his failure is at least twofold. In the poem’s first two stanzas, he orchestrates a tacit, multilayered metaphor, in which his own achievements as praise-poet mirror those of his poetic precursor even as they parallel the feats of the “people’s leader,” the captain of the ship of state whose triumphs he celebrates. He is like Pindar in his role as communal celebrant of the victor’s exploits; and, like Pindar, he draws attention to the congruences between these exploits and his equally bold undertaking as poet-creator. Mandelstam thus works to shape the energetic linkages of past traditions and future creation that charge his work from the start. These volatile linkages, however, require the presence of a dynamic center in the person of the poet himself, if they are to achieve even a tenuous cohesion; midway through “The Horseshoe Finder,” though, we realize that this center no longer holds. Mandelstam hopefully hitches the flocks of birds that are his symbols for poetic speech to the ship of the future in “The Twilight of Freedom”: “We have bound the swallows into battle legions,” he intones.

174

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

The “bird flocks” that strain their “bright harness” in “The Horseshoe Finder,” though, are clearly out of their league. They are no match for the racetrack’s “snorting favorites,” and the charioteer who cannot master even the absurd little bird-carts that collapse in mid-race is no match for past or present heroes and is thus wholly unequal to the model of heroic praise-poet set for him by Pindar. In this stanza Mandelstam employs a Pindaric metaphor to deflate his own Pindaric pretensions. His metaphoric bird-carts do more than this, though; through their dissolution, they explode the very notion of metaphor as such, and with it the basis for Mandelstam’s poetics, which relies on linkages of past and present in its ongoing creation of world culture. This kind of cultural or historical metaphor, as a two-wheeled vehicle, or perhaps as a vehicle and a tenor, disintegrates as Mandelstam fails both to resurrect a Pindaric past and to tie himself to the Soviet present by way of his reborn Pindar. The lines that surround the downfall of Mandelstam’s bird-carts make it clear that what is at stake is not merely this particular poetic undertaking, but Mandelstam’s literary enterprise as such. The very air “trembles with similes” and the earth beneath his feet “rumbles with metaphors” as “everything cracks and sways.” Unlike the ship of state’s triumphant captain, the poet cannot master the tools of his trade, and the result is chaos in a poetic language that refuses to serve his purposes. And what is the worth of such a poet, such a language, to either culture or the state? “One word is no better than another,” Mandelstam mourns, and the phrase erodes the very notion of value in language, or at least of value in his language, in the verse that was intended to prove his worth to both a Hellenic past and a Soviet future. In the fourth stanza, Mandelstam tries to reassert the worth of at least one kind of word and thus both to reestablish a scale of values within his poetry and to reaffirm the place of this poetry within the age. “Thrice blessed is he who leads a name into his song,” he chants. “The song adorned with a name/Lives longer among the rest” (37–39). A certain sort of word is better than the others, then, and it guarantees the longevity of not just the song it adorns, but presumably of its maker (“Thrice blessed is he”) and subject as well. Mandelstam’s choice of proper names for this poetic place of honor should not surprise us. The poems of Stone and Tristia are peppered with the proper names, Russian and foreign, present and past, that preserve his poetry from “unconsciousness” or “loss of memory” (bespamiatstvo) and thus assure his own place in posterity. But do proper names still retain their magic power in “The Horseshoe Finder”? Can they save the would-be poet-priest when all other spells have failed? One proper name does appear in the next stanza, as Mandelstam evokes “the damp black earth of Neaera”(49), but it is an unusually, perhaps intentionally obscure one. It may refer to one of “several nymphs or maidens,” Sir William Smith tells us unhelpfully in his Smaller Classical Dictionary, while Grimal’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology and the Oxford Companion to

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

175

Classical Literature omit it entirely. A claim to poetic immortality based on the name of a nymph or maiden who has herself nearly vanished from memory would seem to be shaky indeed.49 This name, moreover, is the only one to appear within the poem proper. Elsewhere Mandelstam goes out of his way to avoid naming names; he gives us not Jesus or Joseph, but “Bethlehem’s peaceful carpenter,” not Peter or Odysseus, but “the father of wanderings,” “seafarer’s friend” (18– 19). Unlike the triumphant young poet of “Notre Dame,” who writes himself into world culture by way of his family name, the defeated poet of “The Horseshoe Finder” writes himself out of the picture by the poem’s end. “What I’m saying now isn’t said by me,” he mourns as the poem draws to a close: “There’s no longer enough of me for me” (87, 97). This is the line that would presumably have been followed by the author’s own name when the poem was first published in the journal Red Virgin Soil (Krasnaia nov’) in 1923. Unlike the final line of “Notre Dame”—“I too will create beauty some day (I ia kogda-nibud’ prekrasnoe sozdam)”— which highlights its creator’s surname, to which it forms a surreptitious rhyme, this conclusion apparently cancels out all authorial claims implied by the name that follows. (“Don’t forget me, punish me,” another lyric of the period begs, “But give me a name, give me a name” [#139].) The poem’s subtitle, with its powerful proper name, was omitted from some editions of the poem, as though the would-be Soviet Pindar felt himself unworthy of even this modest approach—his own work is merely a “Pindaric fragment”—to his master’s legacy. And indeed, Mandelstam falls short not only of his own poetics of the proper name. Pindar’s poetry, Richmond Lattimore notes, is “formidably studded with proper names” drawn from ancient legends and genealogies, as well as from among Pindar’s own acquaintances, competitors, and patrons. His poems thus form, Lattimore warns, a maze almost impenetrable to “any but an experienced classicist (and sometimes to one of these).”50 Through this complex network of names, Pindar manages to weave past and present, distant legend and current reality into one vital whole, just as Mandelstam had in his earlier work. In “The Horseshoe Finder,” however, Mandelstam has in mind a very specific kind of name, and his description provides us with another clue both to his Pindaric ambitions and to their disappointment. “The song adorned with a name” bears this name in a distinctive fashion: “She is marked among her friends by the band upon her brow” (38–40). He is, once again, following Pindar’s lead in assigning pride of place to his song’s forehead or brow, for as Pindar announces in his Sixth Olympian Ode, “The forehead of every work must shine from afar.” But what precisely does Pindar, or Mandelstam for that matter, have in mind when he speaks of a poem’s “brow”? In his Eighth Nemean Ode, Pindar provides a gloss that illuminates both his words and Mandelstam’s: “As a suppliant on behalf of this dear city and these citizens, I fasten onto the august knees of Aiakos bearing a variegated, sounding Lydian headband as a Nemean

176

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

adornment of the double furlong courses of Deinis and his father Megas.” Pindar uses the image of fillet or headband here and elsewhere to symbolize the poem’s dedication to the lofty patron whose name would “shine from afar” at the head of the ode that would consecrate his deeds for posterity.51 Mandelstam has been unable to negotiate the exchange between poetry and the state that would permit him to dedicate his verse to an esteemed patron who would then protect the maker of the verse that guarantees his own name’s immortality. Mandelstam’s failed song of praise does not bear the powerful name of a patron who would preserve it from a hostile world—and when we translate Mandelstam’s Hellenic conceit into the terms of the unfriendly postrevolutionary reality that surrounded him, the dangers that beset an unprotected poet and his verse seem very real indeed. Small wonder that Mandelstam’s feminine song, deprived of her protective headband, should prove so helpless and vulnerable. She is prone to fainting (bespamiatsvo) and susceptible not just to threatening presences but to their odors alone, be they “from a man’s nearness,/Or a powerful animal’s fur,/ Or simply the scent of savory rubbed between the palms” (42–44). Himself isolated and patronless, Mandelstam cannot provide his poem with the protection that would ensure its well-being; and this fragile song, in turn, can scarcely guarantee the safety of its maker, as Pindar’s songs had protected him in a shifting and uncertain world. Mandelstam’s attempted rapprochement with the Soviet powers-that-be has failed utterly by mid-poem. His effort to fuse economies—poetic and political, Hellenistic and Bolshevik—comes to nothing, and what the poem gives us in its fifth stanza is a surrealistic picture of a Hellenistic cosmos run amuck. In this Hellenized nightmare, the elements that had seemed to serve human purposes in the poem’s opening have apparently declared their independence, as the orderly circulation of air, water, and earth is replaced by elemental chaos. Air is first as dark as water (45) and then as dense as earth (51); and earth, in turn, is furrowed frantically not just by the appropriate hoes and ploughs, but also by the tridents that are the rightful property of Poseidon, king of the sea: “The damp black earth (chernozem) of Neaera, furrowed again each night/With pitchforks, tridents, hoes, and ploughs” (49–50). The confusion of elements is matched by a confusion of implements; the misapplied tridents—and pitchforks would also seem unlikely tools for furrowing—suggest yet another way in which Mandelstam’s Hellas has gone astray. In his ideally Hellenized cosmos, humanity is undoubted master in its own house, which is the earth itself. And humans govern their earthly domain by means of the “domestic utensils” that, properly applied, permit them to “humanize the surrounding world” by infusing it with their own “teleological warmth” (CPL, 127– 28). In this world, though, “domestic utensils have risen up in rebellion” (CPL, 129). Regardless of their intended purpose, tridents, pitchforks, ploughs, and hoes have all decided to furrow the earth, and they do so

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

177

without the help of human agents (the lines contain no human subject) and without human interests in mind: a field furrowed nightly will yield no fruit. This misploughed field has profound implications for Mandelstam’s own project as poet. Mandelstam’s ideal poet is, among other things, the master ploughman who ministers simultaneously to the needs of nature, culture, and the revolution as his symbolic plough turns the past to the service of the future. Poetry, Mandelstam insists in “The Word and Culture,” “is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the deepest strata of time, its black earth (chernozem), appear on the surface. There are epochs, however, when humankind, not satisfied with the present, yearning like the ploughman for time’s deepest strata, thirsts for the virgin soil of time. Revolution in art inevitably leads to classicism, not because David reaped the harvest of Robespierre, but because that is what the earth desires” (CPL, 113; II, 224). In this passage, poetic labor converges perfectly with the needs of a state founded in the name of the laboring classes. In “The Horseshoe Finder,” though, the labor proceeds apace without the poet to guide it; the implements plough on their own, and their frantic tempo is scarcely suited to the considered creation of an art that strives to bring present, past and future into a vital, if tenuous balance. The stanza suggests, moreover, that different times and kinds of circulation are now hopelessly unsynchronized. The tools’ work is mechanical, antihuman, and uninspired—perhaps a hint at the real nature of the labor, poetic or otherwise, then taking shape in the fledgling workers’ republic—and it takes unthinking dictation from the sun’s daily rotations around the earth. Instead of bringing the past close to hand, moreover, this ploughing moves it further from the present. Through a dark crystal, we catch only a glimpse of the chariot races that are the scene of Pindar’s greatest poetic triumphs: Vozdux byvaet temnym, kak voda, i vs∏ 'ivoe v nem plavaet kak ryba, Plavnikami rastalkivaq sferu, Plotnu[, uprugu[, hut; nagretu[,ó Xrustal;, v kotorom dvi'utsq kolesa i waraxa[tsq lowadi. (45–48) Sometimes the air is dark as water, and everything living swims in it like a fish, Sundering with its fins the sphere, dense, resilient, slightly warm— A crystal, in which wheels spin and horses shy.

This vision lasts only for the space of a phrase, and its spinning wheels cannot be made to revolve at the same rate as do the mechanically churning tools or the turning sun that determines the pace of their labor. Time and

178

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

times have come undone, and both passage and stanza alike hint at an ominous, unhappy divorce between past and present. (There is also more than a hint of catastrophe in the turning wheels and shying horses that anticipate the disastrous chariot race whose victim is the dying horse of the poem’s seventh stanza.) What we find by the stanza’s close is a poet stranded between epochs and visions: “The air is mixed as densely as the earth—/You can’t get out and it’s hard to enter” (51–52). In his essays Mandelstam anticipates two cosmic households joining forces in his ideal Helleno-Marxist economy. The reality this unlikely hybrid produces, though, is a bastard, pseudo-Hellenism in which tools have supplanted their masters. It is an inhuman, even demonic world in which “the master has been chased out of his house and no longer dares to enter” (CPL, 129).52 Mandelstam’s dream of a cosmic hearth, heated by a shared “teleological warmth,” is fading fast. The resistant sphere of this mock-Hellas is only “slightly warm (chut’ nagretaia),” and the Russian adjective derives from the verb meaning “to warm, to heat”—that implies, in other words, human agency and purpose. He alerts us to the identity of these unnamed agents in “Humanism and the Present,” where he celebrates a Promethean breed of “modern humanists” who have lit the “incandescent stove of the present” that guarantees “the internal warmth of a future” cold and forbidding only “to those who do not understand this” (CPL, 182). In “The Horseshoe Finder,” he finds himself among the ranks of these ignorant naysayers, or perhaps he has merely discovered that this magic Marxist hearth does not share its heat equally with all who would enjoy its warmth.53 There is no place for the poet in this brave new world—his plough is now manned by unknown forces—but neither can he retreat to a warm and welcoming past. This past, in the particular Pindaric incarnation evoked in “The Horseshoe Finder,” is also inaccessible to the poet, enclosed as it is in a forbidding crystal sphere where it swiftly vanishes from view. Instead of fusing worlds, he is caught between them; instead of shaping a new place for himself and his culture within the Soviet state, he finds himself stateless and stranded, abandoned by past and present alike. THE GOLD COIN AND THE HORSESHOE What he speaks is all in debt; he owes For every word. —William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens

With its spinning wheels and shying horses, “The Horseshoe Finder” ’s fifth stanza provides the poem’s last glimpse of a living past envisioned as present action and motion. Mandelstam no longer asks, “Where to begin?” Rather, he concerns himself with how to end not only his poem, but his poetic mission as such, or so it seems as “The Horseshoe Finder” slowly

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

179

draws to a close. The race has been run and lost; the poet’s quest for a place in the present has failed; and the poem’s extended coda describes not a thriving Hellenist cosmos with everything in its place, but a poetic junkyard of discarded images from a once-cherished culture: a dying horse (65), dead animals’ vertebrae turned to toys (54), an outdated calendar (55), an abandoned horseshoe (73–79), a devalued coin (95–96). All these objects, Mandelstam implies, are equally outmoded. All have been withdrawn from circulation in the households and economies of the new state; and it is doubtful that they will share the happy fate that Mandelstam predicts for the gold coins of “Humanism and the Present,” which will become common currency once more when the proper moment comes. His Pindaric horseshoe, he writes, has been given an honorable retirement above a doorjamb, where “it will never have to strike sparks from flint again” (79). Its salvation from future labor, though, is a mixed blessing at best when viewed in the light of Mandelstam’s ideally Hellenist poetics. Mandelstam’s contemporaries may have seen in his writing a pure poetry, in which shadows of things take the place of things themselves; he prefers, Tynianov charges, poetic “promissory notes” to the literary equivalent of “hard cash” (valiuta).”54 Mandelstam’s essays of the twenties, though, give a very different picture; his gold coins drawn from the European tradition will ultimately be accepted, he announces, not only by the Soviet state; they will be recognized as hard currency in a pan-European cultural economy in which they will pass triumphantly from hand to hand. In these essays, Mandelstam insists on a poetics of use, an instrumental poetics whose task is nothing less than the transformation of the earth itself and its rebirth as a worldwide “home economy” (khoziastvennost’) (CPL, 182; II, 354). Mandelstam’s Hellenism “is an earthenware pot, oven tongs, a milk jug, kitchen utensils, dishes”; and poetry, the tool of tools, reconciles and gives meaning to all our other earthly implements as we work to give the universe a human countenance (CPL, 127). Mandelstam and his fellow Acmeists emphasize from the start their commitment to the physical things of this earth, each endowed with its own “specific gravity” and worth (CPL, 63). Mandelstam’s long-standing commitment to his Acmeist’s version of “material values” (CPL, 132) forms the basis for his attempted rapprochement with the materialist philosophy of the Soviet state. He has discovered, though, by “The Horseshoe Finder” ’s close, that the materials he values are not necessarily those held in esteem by the rulers of the new regime, and that hammers and sickles are not simply the benign Marxist equivalents of his Hellenistic pots and oven tongs. The “revolutionary reevaluation (revoliutionnaia pereotsenka)” and “affirmation” of past values he proposes in his essays will not take its place alongside “the creation of new values” as a legitimate occupation in the workers’ paradise; all that remains to be done, then, is to beg the pardon of past and present alike for his well-meaning errors in judgment (CPL, 176; II, 346). The apology Mandelstam offers for his misdeeds

180

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

might be that of a hapless bookkeeper or blundering accountant confessing to inadvertent financial misconduct: “Thank you for all that was:/I myself made mistakes, miscalculated, bungled the accounts” (56–57). Such pecadilloes were not to be taken lightly according to the codes of the new regime; Mandelstam himself, his widow tells us, would intercede some five years later on behalf of five elderly bank clerks condemned to death for the capital crime of mismanaging funds (beskhoziastvennost’).55 But what are the accounts that Mandelstam himself has mismanaged so disastrously? The line that precedes his confession suggests one cause of his miscalculations: “The frail chronology of our era draws to a close,” he mourns (55). Mandelstam has been counting on the calendar of a dying age and a vanished culture, and he has fatally muddled his dates. The image is not simply metaphorical: one of the earliest innovations of the new regime was the creation of a “Red Calendar,” put into effect on January 4, 1918. This calendar eliminated the two-week time lag that divided Imperial Russia and its Orthodox calendar from the rest of the world and thus brought “Russia into line with most civilized peoples.”56 Its effect for Mandelstam is apparently just the opposite. It places him and his world culture on one side of an unbridgeable divide, and the state and civilization of the future on the other—or so the poems of 1921–25 suggest. “The parasite can only tremble/On the threshhold of new days,” he writes in “The Age” (1923; #135); and this frightened parasite calls to mind not only the diminished artist who concludes “The Horseshoe Finder,” but the passé poet who scrapes by on unearned cultural income in Mandelstam’s pitiful selfportrait of 1928.57 In this incriminating self-portrait, Mandelstam confesses to living on income not his by rights, income derived presumably from the cultural labors of outmoded cultures and perished civilizations. This is why the bookkeeper cum poet of “The Horseshoe Finder” must convict himself of financial wrongdoing. His commitment to past values leaves him dealing in a coinage unacceptable to the new regime, which refuses to reappraise (pereotsenit’) the currency of the past. More than this—Mandelstam must himself reassess the worth of the culture he treasures. “Perhaps poetry’s creditors are all fraudulent,” he remarks defiantly in an essay of 1924: “Poetry doesn’t owe anyone anything” (CPL, 202). The poet of “The Horseshoe Finder” is far from such defiance. On the contrary—he is apparently quite willing to accept the claims of his culture’s creditors. The “gold sphere” that stands for the dying era and its values is, he admits, “hollow, molded, held by no one” (58–59); it is a sham gold standard, not a measure of true worth. Mandelstam echoes charges he makes against the “false truths” of French neoclassical culture in his “Remarks on Chénier” (1915). “The eighteenth century,” he asserts, “had lost its direct link with the moral consciousness of antiquity”; the “solid, homogeneous golden sphere (polnovesnyi i odnorodyi zolotoi shar)” of true classical values had become a

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

181

mere bauble, a hollow form no longer capable of “sounding on its own (ne zvuchal sam po sebe)”(CPL, 75; II, 294–95). The French culture he condemns was destined to be ended by a revolution dedicated to the creation of new values. In “The Horseshoe Finder,” Mandelstam seems resigned to the prospect of the similar fate awaiting his era’s culture. More than this— he apparently accepts the justice of such an inglorious ending. A civilization and poet who base their culture on such a specious foundation deserve little more. The poem’s final stanzas take their shape, or shapes, from this hollow, unsupported sphere. They comprise a catalog of similarly empty, futile forms: the sharp arch of a dying horse’s neck (66), the discarded horseshoe (72–79), speechless lips (80–82); an empty hand still grasping a vanished jug (83–86), and so on, as praise poem turns to reluctant elegy. These images are framed by the language of Mandelstam’s failed economy—by the bookkeeper’s confession and the fool’s gold of the sixth stanza and by the related imagery of the poem’s concluding lines. “What I’m saying now,” Mandelstam claims, “isn’t said by me (to, chto ia seichas govoriu, govoriu ne ia )”: A vyryto iz zemli, podobno zernam okameneloj pwenicy. Odni na monetax izobra'a[t l;va, Drugieó golovu_ Raznoobraznye mednye, zolotye i bronzovye lepewki S odinakovoj pohest;[ le'at v zemle. Vek, probuq ix peregryzt;, ottisnul na nix svoi zuby. Vremq srezaet menq, kak monetu, I mne u'e ne xvataet menq samogo. (86–97) It’s dug up from the ground like grains of stony wheat. Some engrave a lion on their coins, Others— a head; Varied lozenges of copper, gold, and bronze Lie with equal honor in the earth. The age, which tried to gnaw them through, broke its teeth on them. Time cuts me like a coin, And there’s no longer enough of me for me.

Why would Mandelstam highlight this economic imagery just as his poem draws to its painful conclusion? I have argued that notions of economy and circulation—interpreted in distinctively Mandelstamian fashion—underlie both the poem’s quasi-Pindaric opening and its uncertain middle stanzas,

182

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

in which Mandelstam struggles valiantly to cut his losses and undo the consequences of his failed, false start (“Where to begin?”). A post-structuralist might claim that the economic system Mandelstam attempts to construct in the poem’s opening segments is presented as “natural” as long as he still hopes that it may coincide with the actual workings of the Soviet state and thus be justified. This, we might read him as saying, is the way things truly were in the beginning, in an ideal Hellas, and this is the way they naturally ought to be in the coming Helleno-Russian kingdom of Marx. The world of the poem’s early stanzas is, in other words, the natural state of affairs. By the poem’s ending, though, this world has literally reified; the elements of which a living system was to be composed have become instead mere things, lifeless objects; and hence the artifice on which this system rests now stands exposed. What actually lies behind Mandelstam’s magnificent Hellenic dream is only a muddled bookkeeper with a handful of antiquated coins. This kind of unmasking is very much in the spirit of our own times, that is to say, in the spirit of the late-twentieth-century American academy, with its pervasive suspicion of the texts whose tacit ideological underpinnings it claims to expose. Such a reading, though, can hardly do justice to the complexity of Mandelstam’s efforts to come to grips with the spirit of his times; nor can it hope to explain the rich orchestration of endings we discover as “The Horseshoe Finder” draws to a close. Mandelstam commemorates not simply the loss of his own poetic dreams. Nor does he mourn only the death of the age that gave birth to both him and his dreams, monumental as that task might seem. He marks the passing of an entire civilization, the civilization that began with Pindar and the other great poets of ancient Greece and that may be ending with him, unworthy scion of a mighty culture. The horse that lies dying in the poem’s seventh stanza is clearly akin to the suffering creature that is Mandelstam’s dying age in the poems of 1921–25: “My age, my animal,” he mourns in “The Age,” “Who will dare/To look into your pupils/And mend with his own blood/The backbone of two centuries?” (#135) But it is also the Western tradition as such that may have run its course; the racing horse that first spurred Pindar to creation and thus sped Western culture on its way will clearly run no more. New artists will no longer draw inspiration from the source that fed Pindar and those who followed him.58 The horse’s arched neck suggests other endings as well. It is isomorphic with the other frozen forms that haunt the poem’s final stanzas. The neck; the horseshoe; the speechless lips; the empty, grasping hand; and finally, the mutilated coin: all are broken or unfinished circles, and their similarity suggests the intimate connections between the kinds of activity they represent, or perhaps more precisely, negate. The horse’s neck is thus linked with the poetic creation evoked by the frozen lips, and the lively past races that the arched neck “remembers” are

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

183

likewise connected to a particular kind of poetic tradition. They call to mind the ideal poetic community that Mandelstam’s writings celebrate from the start. “The sharp arch” of the horse’s neck E]e soxranqet vospominanie o bege s razbrosannymi nogamió Kogda ix bylo ne hetyre, A po hislu kamnej dorogi, Obnovlqemyx v hetyre smeny Po hislu ottalkivanij ot zemli pywu]ego 'arom inoxodca. (68–71) Still holds the memory of racing with legs outstretched— When there were not four, But as many as stones on a road, Renewed in four shifts at a time As often as a blazing pacer strikes the ground.

In Mandelstam’s ideal tradition, poets of all times and nations are united in the continuous, communal, and contentious process of poetic creation. Such creation requires opposition, friction, and tension, and the true artist seeks not simply “colleagues and co-discoverers”; he or she thrives on the fruitful enmity that only a worthy “competitor” can provide (CPL, 420). The memory evoked by the dying horse’s neck startles us by the sudden charge of energy it emits in the apparently moribund world of the poem’s final stanzas, just as the extended lines and unbroken syntax that describe this memory stand in sharp contrast to the disjointed stanzas and stammering diction that follow. Pindar relishes the double challenge of his craft, as he competes with athletes and fellow artists alike in the shaping of his victory odes: the victories these poems celebrate are not those of the athletes alone. Through these vanished races, Mandelstam evokes the poetic community that has been lost to him, a community in which creative energies are charged by the presence of powerful, worthy opponents. The horse becomes a figure for the poet himself, whose colleagues and competitors survive now only in memory, and who is himself no longer fit to run in their company.59 The racetrack also recalls the elements in Pindar’s poetry that Mandelstam seeks to emulate in his own poem. For Pindar and his age, poetry was a public affair, and its performance at palaces and stadiums was an essential component of the games that played so central a part in ancient Greek culture. Pindar spoke for and to the community at large, and he was handsomely rewarded for services felt to be indispensable to the well-being of rulers and people alike. Pindar himself may have yearned for the days when, as he writes in the Second Isthmian Ode, the Muse “was not mercenary nor worked for hire,/nor was the sweetness of Terpsichore’s honeyed singing

184

• 60

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

for sale.” The coins in which he was paid for his songs were nonetheless a mark of the esteem in which society held his gifts, and such a situation must have seemed enviable indeed to a poet struggling to make ends meet in a state that had no need of his talents. I have spoken of the coins given Pindar in recompense for his poetic labors, and this is not simply a metaphor; Pindar would have been among the first poets to be so rewarded. The years that saw his rise to fame were the same years that marked the minting of the early coins that signaled the beginnings of a Greek money economy, which replaced earlier systems of barter or exchange. Pindar himself was well aware of his novel status as poet for hire. His own poetry is not only “permeated with money imagery,” as Leslie Kurke notes. It also evokes the transactions and contracts that precede the actual creation of his praise poetry, if only to demonstrate that “the power and force of [his] poetry cannot be quantified and reduced to accounting.” Mere “business imagery” cannot do justice to the value of his verse, his poems warn.61 Mandelstam the inept accountant, on the other hand, cannot meet the terms of the contracts he has undertaken as poet and citizen; his poetry, unlike Pindar’s, has been quantified and found wanting. He has, by his own admission, “bungled the accounts,” and the poem’s final stanza suggests that the debts he has failed to honor are not simply those due to the new state. He has also failed to meet his obligations to his own ideal community of poets, and to the ancient cultures he celebrates in his essays and verse. “Thank you for all that was,” he writes; but he himself is unable to convert this “was” into a “will be,” or “must be,” as his own precepts demand.62 He has borrowed on the past’s abundance and cannot repay his loan with interest; he cannot creatively transform what he has taken and thus keep it circulating for the use of future borrowers. He has reneged on his debts to the world culture that nourishes his art. In an early poem, Mandelstam demonstrates his capacity to put the currency of the past to new use. He celebrates the “dry gold of a classical spring,” and this gold inspires him to create a double persona, part Ovid and part Mandelstam, who recalls the man who banished him from his native land: “I will remember Caesar’s splendid features—/That woman’s profile with its cunning aquiline!” (#80). If we take the speaker to be Ovid, then we assume he is drawing this portrait from memory; he knew Caesar Augustus only too well, and he has presumably carried his memories of the ruler into exile. The speaker as Russian modernist, however, is doubly exiled, in time as well as space, from the culture he evokes, and the Caesar he imagines may have come to him by way of an ancient coin. We are shown Augustus only in profile, and Roman coins were adorned with profiles of the emperors from the time of Julius Caesar on. Classical gold is given new luster as past and present, Russia and Rome, Ovid and Mandelstam, are drawn together over the heads of space and time; the currency of the past is endowed with present value.63 The poet of “The Horseshoe Finder” can no longer perform such magi-

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

185

cal transformations, and the coins that await their resurrection near the poem’s end mark the extent of his failure. They symbolize a particular kind of relationship between poet and society, in which the poet is rewarded for his labors in service of the state and its rulers, while sustaining the integrity of his lofty calling. The coins in this reading represent the value of poetry in an ideally Hellenized society. But these same coins may themselves be taken as works of art: “Some engrave a lion on their coins,/Others—a head” (89–92). Such works of art are valuable in more ways than one. They are not only aesthetically pleasing.64 Their aesthetic value is equaled by the value of their material; they are literally worth their weight in “copper, gold and bronze” (93). Such artworks, moreover, ideally receive the widest possible circulation, passing freely, like Mandelstam’s humanist values, from hand to hand. They meet perfectly, then, the criteria for Hellenized art laid forth in “On the Nature of the Word” and elsewhere: they are both beautiful and useful, and their continuous circulation is crucial to the workings of a truly human economy, in which art, use, and value converge entirely. This Hellenized economy, though, is evoked only by its absence from the poem’s final stanza, which looks more like a graveyard of world culture than its apotheosis. Coins of different nations, periods, and materials (“Some engrave a lion on their coins,/Others—a head/Varied lozenges of copper, gold, and bronze”) lie “with equal honor in the earth” (89–94). Time, Mandelstam insists, cannot destroy these mementos to a vanished past: “The age, trying to gnaw them through, broke its teeth on them” (95). But reverent preservation of past creations had never been the aim of Mandelstam’s art; and honorable burial is hardly the ideal fate for the great treasures of the past that he had vowed to recast for future use in “The Word and Culture.” In his early poem “Histrion” (1908), Ezra Pound envisions a similar function for the poet of modernity determined to remake history for future use, and he employs the imagery of minting to describe the reshaping of past words and lives. Tis as in midmost us there glows a sphere Translucent, molten gold, that is the “I” And into this some form projects itself: Christus, or John, or eke the Florentine; And as the clear space is not if a form’s Imposed thereon, So cease we from all being for the time, And these, the Masters of the Soul, live on.

“Charaktxr in Greek,” Richard Sieburth notes, “refers to the upper die used by the coinmaker or the impression or mark on the coin. And in a very similar sense, this poem evokes the process whereby the passive molten ingot of the self, stamped by the form or name of ‘all men great,’ is released from its material incarnation to assume its ideal, poetic character as one of

186

•

C H A P T E R 65

F I V E

•

the ‘Masters of the Soul.’ ” Mandelstam’s ideal poet is less self-effacing as he works to bring the past to life again: “I say: yesterday has not yet been born. . . . I want Ovid, Pushkin, and Catullus to live once more, and I am not satisfied with the historical Ovid, Pushkin, and Catullus” (my italics; CPL, 113). He himself may have been formed by the past he brings to life, but he stamps the past with his own presence in the process of remaking it. The poet of “The Horseshoe Finder” is no longer capable of such feats of active imagination. Pound’s “Histrion” takes its title from the Latin word for “actor,” and thus becomes a bilingual pun we might translate as “he who acts out history.” The poet of Mandelstam’s title, though, is merely a collector of lifeless artifacts, and by the poem’s end he is no longer even that. I have already mentioned the absence of the poet’s “I” from the poem’s middle stanzas, as Mandelstam struggles to find a new voice after the failure of his would-be Pindaric “we.” His “I” makes several brief appearances in the poem’s final stanzas, but these serve only to highlight what apparently will be the poet’s final performance on the stage of history, whether past or passing. This “I” surfaces briefly in the poem’s sixth stanza, as Mandelstam confesses the error of his ways (“I myself made mistakes” [57]), and reappears in the closing stanza only to negate its role in the poem we are reading: “What I’m saying now isn’t said by me,/It’s been dug up from the ground like grains of stony wheat (To, chto ia seichas govoriu, govoriu ne ia/A vyryto iz zemli, podobno zernam okameneloi pshenitsy)”(87–88). What speaks here is not the poet, as he himself informs us, but something dug up from the earth, presumably the coins that surface in the following lines; and the phrases in which Mandelstam writes himself out of his poem speak to the lifelessness of both the poet and his buried treasures. In a perverse inversion of Christ’s miracle that turned stones to bread, Mandelstam’s ancient coins are likened to wheat become stone. Such grain, dead itself, can hardly staunch the interplanetary hunger that Mandelstam had hoped to sate in the domesticated, Helleno-Marxist cosmos of his essays. The verb that is used to unearth this petrified grain, vyryt’, moreover, does double duty as graverobber or coroner in its second meaning, “to exhume,” that is, to “uncover a corpse.” And it is not even the poet himself who performs this exhumation; Mandelstam uses a past passive form of the verb, whose agent or agents are unknown. The vigorous poet-ploughman of “The Word and Culture” regenerates past life by turning it toward the future. He thus performs a variant on the task Mandelstam had set himself in “I have not heard the tales of Ossian,” in which the poet appropriates past treasures (sokrovishche) only to recast them in his own voice. The exhausted poet of “The Horseshoe Finder,” though, is no longer able even to unearth past riches unaided, let alone restore them to new life. The poet’s stature diminishes still further in the poem’s closing lines. His “I” no longer exists in the nominative case; it appears three times in the space of the final two lines, but only in declined forms, in the accusative,

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

187

dative, and genitive cases: “Vremia srezaet menia, kak monetu,/I mne uzh ne khvataet menia samogo (Time cuts me like a coin,/And there’s no longer enough of me for me )” (my italics; 96–97). The grammar and the message are the same, then; the poet is literally in decline. He has gone from acting himself to being acted on, as the time he worked to conquer conquers him instead. The simile of the penultimate line gives the same message in metaphoric form: “Time cuts me like a coin” (96).66 The horseshoe finder of the poem’s title has himself become a mere artifact, an outmoded coin that may, with some luck, be picked up by a future poet, archaeologist, or collector of curiosities and thus be restored to posterity in one form or another. Even this fate, though, seems unlikely in the final lines, as time cuts the poet down to size. The “lozenges of copper, gold, and bronze” that are the treasures of the past have already withstood time’s test. One bites a coin to check if it is counterfeit, and as the age has discovered to its detriment, these coins are the genuine article: “The age, which tried to gnaw them through, broke its teeth on them” (95). They are what they seem, their value will last, and one may hope that they will be restored to circulation by some future poet more resourceful than this poem’s hapless horseshoe finder. Mandelstam’s debased coin, though, does not belong in their company; it has been weighed in the balance and found wanting. “Time cuts me like a coin,” he mourns, and a cut coin is literally not worth the metal it is stamped on. From antiquity on, a coin was literally worth its weight in the precious substance of which it was made. A cheat, though, might cut slivers from the coin while pawning off the coin at its face value, which no longer corresponded to its weight. The fate of such fraudulent coins was eventually to be withdrawn from circulation as their diminished value became increasingly evident.67 This appears to be the destiny of the devalued coin that is Mandelstam’s surrogate self. The coin is not what it seems, and the poet it represents is likewise not equal to his self-proclaimed status. He may claim to be a proper match for Pushkin, Pindar, or Catullus, but he is finally a fraud, a counterfeit. His value, unlike that of his precursors and master, is not lasting, and his diminished poetry will not survive to see the Hellenized future he prophesies in the essays. Mandelstam has staked his own poetic survival on his capacity to transform past values in the process of transmitting them to future generations. Such inventive resurrection awaits all “genuine values of the past” (nastoiashchie tsennosti proshlogo), he assures us in “Storm and Stress” (CPL, 177; II, 346). By the end of “The Horseshoe Finder,” he stands revealed as a relic of the past not worthy of future redemption. The poem that is his bid for self-preservation, and the preservation of tradition, has failed of its purpose. As Mandelstam reminds us at the poem’s end, “there is no longer enough of me for me,” let alone for the reinvention of a world culture suited to the new age dawning in postrevolutionary Russia.

188

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

THE COUNTERFEITER Nothing can be a value without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labor contained in it; the labor does not count as labor, and therefore creates no value. —Karl Marx, Das Kapital (1867) I shall never become a worker. —Osip Mandelstam, “Fourth Prose” (1930)

The only hope “The Horseshoe Finder” seems to offer by its end is that the buried coins may rise to the surface again, and the gold that was minted with Pindar will stand revealed as the currency of past and future alike. The poem’s conclusion suggests another, more ominous scenario, though. In this darker reading, the values of the past have found their way into unworthy hands. The would-be Pindar of a new era has badly misjudged his abilities and worth and due to his miscalculations, the coins that are buried must remain dead to both future and present. If “the magnificent florins of humanism” are by some chance unearthed by some “archaeologist’s spade” (CPL, 183), they will be reborn not as common currency but as museum pieces, mementos to a vanished past: Mandelstam and his poetry will not in any case be counted among their number. The last lines of “The Horseshoe Finder,” taken acoustically, lend weight to the more pessimistic reading. As Stephen Broyde observes, the negative particle ne sounds insistently throughout the poem’s already discouraging final phrases: Vremia srezaet menia, kak monetu,/I mne uzhe ne khvataet menia samogo.68 One could go still further and note that this negative particle becomes the de facto root of the poet’s very self as it is grammatically expressed in these lines: menia, mne, menia. This self, moreover, has already been partly consumed by the time that is its enemy. Three of the four letters of which this self is built in Cyrillic (m e n ia ) make their first appearance in Time the Conquerer, who has already swallowed up part of his prey (vremia). And the word coin, used here in the accusative case, monetu, contains an ominous prediction as to the outcome of this battle. It too contains another distorted and incomplete form of the poet’s self, as menia is echoed in monetu, and its final two syllables give us, in addition, the colloquial form netu, meaning “no more,”“none,” “there isn’t any.”69 The blurred boundaries between identities and words dramatizes a dimension of Mandelstam’s poetic dilemma that he had made explicit earlier in “The Horseshoe Finder.” “One word is no better than another,” he mourns in the third stanza, and the poem makes clear that the demise of his Hellenist economy and humanist values is intimately linked to another pressing issue: a crisis in language as such, or more specifically, in the language of poetry. “When words cease to cling close to things,” Ezra Pound

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

189

announces apocalyptically in 1916, “kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.” Mandelstam’s postrevolutionary experience might have taught him something like the opposite: when kingdoms fall, words, especially poetic words, wane and diminish. They lose their value in a radically altered world. And the medium in which Mandelstam deals was indeed drastically devalued by the new regime, which had little need for poetry. “Our epoch is not lyric,” Trotsky proclaimed in 1925, and Mandelstam himself was well aware that the revolution had bypassed “the accidental, personal, and catastrophic” domain of lyric poetry (CPL, 152) in favor of more utilitarian forms of speech.70 The radical economic restructurings that followed in the revolution’s wake were accompanied by no less radical efforts to reform the Russian language itself, shaped, so it was claimed, by centuries of feudal oppression and the corrupting influence of a growing bourgeoise. I have in mind not only obvious innovations like “comrade” for “mister,” or the burgeoning language of acronyms and blends—NEP, REF, LEF, VAPP, RAPP, MAPP, Litfront, Proletkult, Gosizdat—that was intended to increase the efficiency of a cumbersome tongue unsuited to the needs of a nation newly placed at history’s forefront. In this “renamed world,” one contemporary scholar observed, linguistic innovations of all kinds came “rushing into the language in an irrepressible torrent.” The alphabet was streamlined; streets, cities, even nations were rechristened and then renamed again; all linguistic elitism was banished from official Russian speech; and one division of the Soviet Ministry of Culture occupied itself exclusively with the development of a universal language to be used following the coming worldwide revolution.71 In “On the Nature of the Word,” Mandelstam warns against misguided meddling with “organic” Russian speech: “Attempts to adapt language mechanically to the demands of life are doomed in advance.” The resilient Russian tongue, he claims, can give shape to modern experience while retaining its “inner unity” and the traditions of which it is shaped (CPL, 123). For the poet of “The Horseshoe Finder,” though, it is his language, not the revolution’s, that appears to be doomed. The speech in which he deals has lost its meaning: “The sound still rings, although the sound’s cause is gone” (64). And the poet who relies on this speech has no business addressing the future: “Human lips/which have nothing more to say/Preserve the shape of the last word spoken” (80–82). Words have failed him, or he has failed words, and both the poet and his language must take their place alongside the other broken, empty forms that litter the poem’s final lines. In light of the poem’s preoccupation with a dead or dying language, we might read its final buried coins not only as humanist values or the poet’s dead precursors, but as images for poetic speech itself, as symbols for the “blessed word” that Mandelstam cultivates with such care from “The Morning of Acmeism” on. The classical culture he mourns in “The Horse-

190

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

shoe Finder” would lend support to such a reading. Marc Shell describes the craftsmen who inscribed the first Greek coins as “poet-coinmakers,” whose works “were the first widely circulating publications or impressions in history”; and those poem-coins that survived the ravages of time would later become what one seventeenth-century scholar called “the most lasting and vocal monuments of antiquity.”72 Mandelstam’s poem laments, among other things, the silencing of these vocal monuments and the culture they commemorate. A still more telling context for Mandelstam’s conflation of speech and currency can be found in the modernist movement that frames his struggle with tradition and poetic invention. Mandelstam was not the only writer to suspect that, for better or for worse, the values of the past could not hold fast in the modern age, and that the very nature of language and culture must change as a result; and he was not the only writer to employ money as a metaphor to explore the nature of language and value in what appeared to be a radically “relativistic world.” The unstable economies of fin de siècle Europe and America made such a metaphoric connection seem apt, even inevitable.73 I have mentioned ways in which postrevolutionary Russia prompted its poets and critics to consider the relationship between poetic value and the currency of the old and new regimes. The questions Mandelstam poses in his writings of the twenties haunted other European modernists as well: Does a given language have innate and lasting value? Do its meanings outlast the time and place of its origination? Can they cross national boundaries and transcend historical upheavals? Can language give access to reality as such, or is its significance dictated by linguistic and social conventions? Is a language, in other words, gold coinage, whose worth is self-evident and self-contained, or is it merely paper money, whose value fluctuates with the fortunes of the state that issues it? Such questions preoccupied poets and thinkers like Stephane Mallarmé, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Ferdinand de Saussure, who phrased their most pressing meditations on the nature of language in terms of currency.74 And the Great War, as Peter Nicholls notes, prompted many younger artists and thinkers to explore the nature of language and culture in similar terms: “The old cosmopolitan freedoms had disappeared, and with them a confidence in both money and language; just as cultural exchange had been brought to a halt by predatory nationalisms, so faith in the stability of European currencies had been permanently undermined. Inflation spiralled, and the rhetoric of politicians seems devious and selfserving as never before.”75 At least one of Mandelstam’s fellow modernists, Ezra Pound, placed the relationship between money and language, economy and culture, at the heart of his life’s work; and it is Pound who perhaps best summarizes Mandelstam’s poetic dilemma when he observes in “Towards Orthology” that “Money and language exist by being current. The acceptance of coin as of

•

T H E

C U R R E N C Y

O F

T H E

P A S T

•

191

value; of words as having meaning, are the essence of currency and speech.”76 Unlike Pound, whose interest in economy and culture intensified with time, Mandelstam resorts to the language of finance only at two critical junctures in his writing: in the early twenties, in “The Horseshoe Finder” and the essays, and, once again, as the twenties end, in the cathartic manifesto of the poet-Jew, “Fourth Prose” (1930). In the early twenties, Mandelstam struggles to make his world culture coincide with the workings of a regime convinced that all puzzles in nature and culture could be unlocked by means of a single Marxian master key. All the questions of human history could be reduced, in other words, to the proper economic answer, and those who did not agree to the terms of this onesided debate would find themselves confined, so the new state warned, to history’s dustbin. In “The Horseshoe Finder,” Mandelstam reluctantly agrees to these unforgiving terms, and since he finds himself unable to bring his vision into line with that of his nation’s new rulers, he must bid farewell not only to world culture, but to the self he has painstakingly constructed from that culture. “O dying age!” he mourns in “January 1, 1924.” “I’m afraid that only he will understand you,/Who wears the helpless smile of one,/Who has lost himself” (#140). Mandelstam did not give up poetry entirely upon completing “The Horseshoe Finder.” He wrote, however, only a few poems—though these include masterworks like “The Slate Ode” (#137) and “January 1, 1924”77—before the poetic silence set in that would plague him from 1925 until the composition of “Fourth Prose.” The dates that frame the loss of Mandelstam’s poetic voice and its reemergence by way of “Fourth Prose” are significant not only in terms of Mandelstam’s poetic oeuvre; they also roughly correspond to major transitions in Soviet economic policy. “The Horseshoe Finder” and the other poems of 1921– 25 were written during the “relatively vegetarian” early years of the NEP, when some form of accommodation with the new regime still appeared to be possible even to poetic “passéists” and suspect fellow travelers like Mandelstam.78 Failure to reach an agreement became the fault, then, not of the state but of the erring artist unable to change his misguided ways. By the late twenties and Stalin’s rise to power, all compromise had clearly become impossible, either in the economy or in art. Forced collectivization and the inauguration of the first of Stalin’s ruthless five-year plans brought the relative freedom of the NEP to a brutal end, and these economic innovations were to be celebrated by stalwart supporters drawn among the ranks of those right-minded artists whom Stalin would soon designate as “engineers of human souls.” The complex reasons for Mandelstam’s about-face forms the subject of the next chapter—but “Fourth Prose” makes it clear that he has dramatically reassessed his failure to meet the standards and demands both of the new regime and of his own humanist tradition. “I made mistakes, I bungled the accounts,” he confesses in

192

•

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

“The Horseshoe Finder”; and his language corresponds in striking ways to the diction used in crucial passages of “Fourth Prose.” “I am guilty,” he announces: No two ways about it. I can’t squirm out of this guilt. I’m constantly in debt. I keep myself secure, however, through evasion. . . . When a tin subpoena arrives or a reminder comes from some social organization, so Greek in its simplicity; when they demand that I betray my accomplices, cease my thievish activity (vorovataia deiatel’nost’), admit my source of counterfeit money (fal’shivye den’gi), and sign a warrant limiting my right to travel beyond certain specified zones, I agree on the spot, but immediately afterwords, as if nothing had happened, I begin my evasions again. (CPL, 323; II, 190)

He declares his allegiance with other perpetrators of so-called economic crimes through the deadly irony with which he satirizes Soviet zeal for prosecuting sins against the State: A A A A

shopkeeper on the Ordynka gave a woman short weight: kill him! cashier came out five cents short: kill her! director signed some rubbish by mistake: kill him! peasant hid some rye in his barn: kill him! (CPL, 314)

Finally, literature and world culture become the true domain only of those who are willing to transgress the State’s unyielding and inhuman values. “I divide,” Mandelstam announces, “all of world literature into authorized and unauthorized works. The former are all trash; the latter—stolen air” (CPL, 316). The humanist tradition rightfully belongs only to those who obtain it through crimes against the State. “The Horseshoe Finder” is finally a magnificent lament on the failure of the poet and his tradition to find their place in what seems destined to become the glorious world economy of the future. By the time of “Fourth Prose,” though, such failure becomes a paradoxical mark of success as Mandelstam reevaluates the Soviet scale of values and finds it fatally wanting. He proudly proclaims himself a “failure” (neudachnik) and a “parasite” (sharomyzhnik) (CPL, 325; II, 192) and, following his profoundly antisocial reevaluation of Soviet values, the only currency he will accept in his revised world culture is whatever the enemy State brands as stolen or counterfeit. By “Fourth Prose,” world culture becomes a counter-culture, and its minister of finance can only be that triumphant bungler, the poetparasite whose stock in trade is neither praise nor apology, but anathema, defiance, and evasion.

•

C

H

A

P

T

E

R

S

I

X

•

Jewish Creation DOUBLE-DEALING Who am I? Not an honest stoneworker, A roofmaker or shipbuilder: I’m a double-dealer with a double soul. —Osip Mandelstam, “Slate Ode” (1923) A difficult case. Am I a circus rider on two horses? —Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

In an essay on modernist writing, W. H. Auden remarks that “it was fit and proper that Kafka should have been a Jew, for the Jews have for a long time been placed in the position in which we are all now to be, of having no home.” In her “Poem of the End” (1924), Marina Tsvetaeva creates a more startling variant on this notion of the Jew as exemplary outcast by announcing ironically that “in this most Christian world, the poets are the Yids” (V sem khristianeishem iz mirov, poety—zhidy). Tsvetaeva’s family beginnings were Russian, German, and Polish, not Jewish; she thus lays claim to her “Jewishness” through affinity, not birth. Her caustic aphorism, though, came to frame the late work of two writers who could legitimately claim to be both poets and Jews. The great German Jewish poet Paul Celan (1920–70) uses Tsvetaeva’s phrase to introduce his cycle Die Niemandsrose (1963), which is dedicated to Mandelstam. And in her second volume of memoirs, Nadezhda Mandelstam endorses just such a linkage of Tsvetaeva’s poet-Yid to her husband’s life and work when she quotes Tsvetaeva’s remark in speaking of the difficulties that Mandelstam’s troublesome double identity as poet and Jew caused him under the Soviet regime. Elsewhere in her memoirs, she hints at the affinities between these identities in describing the inflated costs that Mandelstam incurred by way of his divided nature: “M[andelstam], a Jew and a Russian poet, paid—and still pays—a double or triple price for everything.”1 Artist, Jew, and outcast modernist: the terms come to be roughly synonymous not just in the grouping of quotations and cross-quotations assembled here, but in much of the extensive literature that deals with Jewish writing and culture in the modern age. In his recent study of tradition and modernity in Jewish writing, Robert Alter makes a claim for “the Jewish writer as exemplary modernist” on the example of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem; and his description of the project these writers share evokes the poet-Jew who emerges in Mandelstam’s late

194

•

C H A P T E R

S I X

•

writings: “If one major aspect of modernist literature is to make the act of writing a ceremony of conspicuous estrangement—its outward tokens exile, rebellion, social alienation, and formal iconoclasm—Kafka, Benjamin and Scholem, in at once incorporating and transcending the contradictions of their Jewish origins, became extreme and therefore exemplary instances of the modern writer.”2 Alter might be describing Mandelstam’s literary, or anti-literary, declaration of independence from the Soviet state, “Fourth Prose” (1930), and its autobiographical narrator, who proudly proclaims his newfound allegiance to “the honorable calling of Jew (pochetnoe zvanie iudeia)” (CPL, 321; II, 187). Jewishness, imaginatively reconstrued, comes to define Mandelstam’s vision of the poet as willful disrupter of all cultural orthodoxies, as he works to preserve his contraband world culture from the incursions of the state. In responding to an ominous postrevolutionary Russia, Mandelstam revises his identities as both poet and Jew, and world culture becomes the meeting place of the two. “I love only you . . . and Jews,” Mandelstam announces in a 1926 letter to his wife (my ellipses; CPL, 506). This remarkable confession marks the beginning of Mandelstam’s efforts to explore the Jewish origins he had earlier worked to erase or ignore. Mandelstam takes up the “Jewish staff” he embraces in “Fourth Prose” only after he has creatively reshaped the past for which it stands (CPL, 318). “My blood,” he proclaims in “Fourth Prose,” is “burdened with the heritage of sheep breeders, patriarchs, and kings” (CPL, 321). This newly discovered “blood memory” of the twenties was “peculiar,” as Nadezhda Mandelstam observes, and invented as much as it remembered; Mandelstam traced his history back to “biblical ancestors” and to the Mediterranean world, to “the Jewish poets of Alexandria and Spain.” His self-selected family tree “retain[ed] nothing,” she claims, of Central Europe, would-be Russians, and half-assimilated Petersburg Jews.3 Mandelstam’s immediate past continues to shape even this last version of his family tree in roundabout and unexpected ways. Nonetheless, by the thirties Mandelstam manages to conflate two different legacies and two traditions through his imaginatively recreated genealogy: the Jewish past that was his unsought family heritage, and the Western, Mediterranean tradition he had worked all his life to acquire. Mandelstam was not the only modern writer to return to Jewish roots in his quest for a poetics, a voice, and a self that would answer to his outsider’s status in modern society. Benjamin, Kafka, and Scholem, among others, experienced a renewed “fascination with Jewish origins” as they worked to define their place in a culture whose regard for their talents was ambivalent at best, as Alter notes. The society against which they sought to define themselves, the “bland bourgeois culture of the fathers” with its “complacencies of German bourgeois assimilationism,” bore no resemblance to the repressive regime that confronted Mandelstam in the late 1920s, though; and the form that Mandelstam’s own return to origins finally takes bears an unmistakable relation to the monolithic state then emerging under

•

J E W I S H

C R E A T I O N

•

4

195

Stalin’s increasingly heavy-handed direction. Mandelstam mourns in 1928 that he offers revolutionary Russia gifts for which it has no need (CPL, 275), and in the prose of this period he struggles to determine whether he or the state is at fault in this thwarted exchange. During these “mute” years, the years from 1925 to 1930 in which Mandelstam wrote virtually no poetry, the fate of his verse and his poet’s voice hangs on the answer to this question. Nadezhda Mandelstam observes that Mandelstam used his prose writings of the late twenties as an extended ground-clearing operation that allowed him in the end to return to the poetic voice that had, he feared, abandoned him for good. Through this prose he was working to define both his place in life and his relation to the state.5 Mandelstam’s quest to reestablish his poet’s voice in these works converges, then, with his efforts to come to terms with his Jewish beginnings, and this convergence is not accidental. Soviet Russia was not kindly disposed toward any of the identities, invented or remembered, that made up the “intricate networks” of Osip Mandelstam (CPL, 58); and these embattled selves were obliged to join forces if they were to survive and create within the confines of this inhospitable state. To phrase it differently, Mandelstam’s return “road to verse” could be cleared only only if his pariah Jewish self were permitted to dwell openly among the many pairings of multiple selves that comprise the hybrid being of Mandelstam’s ideally double-dealing poet from the start. Indeed, these doubled selves arguably begin in Mandelstam’s split identity as Russian or European Jew. “Dual vision,” “dual being,” “hyphenate identities”: such terms pepper the literature about and by Europe’s “classic marginal men,” the post-Enlightenment Jewry that stands “poised on the edge or dividing line of two cultures” and thus experiences “the double burden and the double pleasure” of divided loyalties and bifurcated perceptions.6 Mandelstam himself acknowledges the Jewish origins of his distinctive double vision in his “Canzonet” (1931, #236), whose third and fourth stanzas read as follows: To Zeves podkruhivaet s tolkom Zolotymi pal;cami krasnoderevca Zamehatel;nye lukovicy-steklaó Prozorlivcu dar ot psalmopevca. On glqdit v binokol; prekrasnyj Cejsaó Dorogoj podarok Car;-Davidaó Zamehaet vse mor]iny gnejsa, Gde sosna il; derevuwka-gnida. Then with a cabinet-maker’s golden fingers Zeus earnestly inserts Glorious glass bulbs, The psalm-singer’s gift to the Sagacious One.

196

•

C H A P T E R

S I X

•

He peers into his splendid Zeiss binoculars— King David’s precious present— He notes all the wrinkles of gneiss, The pine tree and the hamlet-nit.

The poem points not only to a reconciliation of the Hebrew and Hellenic origins of Mandelstam’s world culture. In this lyric the gift of double vision, which takes the shape of the poem’s enchantingly anachronistic Zeiss binoculars, originates not with Zeus but with the Old Testament patriarch King David. “I love these military binoculars,/With their usurer’s magnified sight,” Mandelstam confesses as the poem progresses; and his final allegiance lies with the “chief of the Jews” (nachal’nzk evreev), not the Greek “land of the Hyperboreans.” Indeed, the poem implies that art itself begins not with the deities of ancient Greece, but with the Jewish psalm-singer and poet who transforms Greek vision, and with it all of Western culture through his miraculous gift.7 The Mandelstam of the mid-twenties was far from such assurance. The prose works in which he first begins to address his Jewish heritage—The Noise of Time (1925), “Theodosia” (1925), “Kiev” (1926), “Mikhoels” (1926), “Iakhontov” (1927)—show him engaged, nonetheless, in the process of revising his tradition to accommodate newly synthesized identities made up in equal parts of Russian, European, and Jew. The Noise of Time is peopled by just such hybrids. Mandelstam’s childhood friend Boris Sinani, born to a Russian mother and a father who “stemmed from the Karaite Jews of the Crimea,” is a living synthesis of different races and traditions, and this accounts for “the duality of his appearance”: “He was something between a Russian boy . . . and an Italian John the Baptist with a barely noticeable hook in his sharp nose . . . a Russian boy from Novgorod, but with an un-Russian aquiline nose.” (my ellipses; POM, 112– 13). Russia and Italy, Judaism and Christianity—all meet and intermingle in the synthetic icon of Boris Sinani’s face. Elsewhere in his autobiography, Mandelstam uncovers a model of the outcast writer as Russian Jew in the Yiddish author Semën Akimych Ansky, who “combine[s] in himself a Jewish folklorist with Gleb Uspensky and Chekhov” and recalls, with “his gentle biblical gestures,” “the Jewish apostle Peter at the Last Supper.” Ansky lacks the residence permit that a Jew required to live in tsarist Petersburg, but his homelessness is not Jewish alone; he is a “gentle hemorrhoidal Psyche” (POM, 118–19). Through Ansky, Mandelstam connects modern Jewish homelessness with Psyche’s wanderings through his beloved Greece, as Jewish folklore meets with ancient myth. And through Ansky, the “wandering” Jewish writers of Mandelstam’s boyhood, “Talmudic philosophers,” “peddlers of their own printed aphorisms and dicta,” find a tentative place in the Russian literary tradition (POM, 88).8 Mandelstam uncovers not only models but methods for drawing his disparate identities together in The Noise of Time. In the prose sketch “Theo-

•

J E W I S H

C R E A T I O N

•

197

dosia,” which was omitted from the final version of his autobiography, he encounters a Jewish artist who devises a hybrid identity by revising his name. Mazesa da Vinci turns his Jewish “family name” (rodovoe prozvishche), Mazes, into his first name “with the addition of the feminine ending” and so retains “a blood tie with his family (krovnaia sviaz’ s rodom).” The “involuntary godfather” who unwittingly presides at this rechristening is Leonardo da Vinci, through whom his self-appointed godson receives all the “fruitful uproar” of the Italian Renaissance (POM, 146; II, 123). The enterprising Mazesa adds to his Jewish past without denying it, as he derives a synthetic identity from his inherited history and grafts a lofty Mediterranean heritage onto his personal legacy as a Jew. Mandelstam takes his ideal portrait of the artist as Jewish synthesist still further in “Mikhoels” (1926) and “Iakhontov” (1927). Both essays celebrate actors: Solomon Mikhoels, director and leading man in Moscow’s Jewish State Theater, and Vladimir Iakhontov, the sole performer in his Contemporary Theater or “theater of one actor.”9 And both essays explore possibilities for a cultural synthesis that engages with Russian and European traditions while retaining its Jewish beginnings. Mikhoels was the preeminent Yiddish actor of his day, and though his company staged both Jewish and non-Jewish works, Mandelstam emphasizes the troupe’s Jewish repertory, for it is the intensity with which Mikhoels takes on his Jewish roles that enables him to fuse Hebrew to Hellene. Mikhoels, Mandelstam tells us, is a “Jewish Dionysus”; in his face “the mask of the Jewish people draw[s] nearer to the mask of Classical antiquity, becoming virtually indistinguishable from it” (CPL, 262–63). Iakhontov, an “ugly duckling” “who has never fit in anywhere,” undertakes a different stage in the journey that joins Jewish origins to foreign cultures. Two “demons of reading,” Russian and Jewish, meet and join forces in his performances. The Jewish outsider Iakhontov turns to the literary pedigree—Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky—of the Russian outcast raznochinets-littérateur and he activates the explosive potentials of this tradition through his dramatic readings: in his hands, Mandelstam writes, “our classical repertory resembles a powder keg on the verge of exploding.” Iakhontov manages, nonetheless, to forge a “harmonious literary whole” from these “heterogeneous materials,” and he does not forget his own origins in the process of interpreting Russian culture, or so Mandelstam’s description of his stage properties suggests. Each of these props is apparently made to lead a double life: the “top hat” worn by his Eugene Onegin, for example, also fits the “Jewish linkman” of another sketch (CPL, 267–68). Mandelstam’s Jewish synthesists are significant in yet another sense. These exemplary outsiders retain both their artistic integrity and their distinctively Jewish identity while shaping a place for themselves within the domain of official Soviet culture. Mikhoels performed in what was officially known as “The Moscow Jewish State Theater”—the original title of

198

•

C H A P T E R

S I X

•

Mandelstam’s essay—which was formed under the auspices of Narkompros, the Soviet National Commission of Education. Indeed, Mikhoels, in one of his most famous roles, endows the name of this agency with the same ecstatic Greek aura that imbues his Yiddish performances, or so Mandelstam claims: “The words ‘Narkompros! Narkompros!’ on Shindel’s lips resound like the sighs of an Aeolian harp” (CPL, 262). Iakhontov, the Jewish outsider who transmits Russia’s classics to the Soviet masses (CPL, 267), rivals Mikhoels in popularity. And like Mikhoels, he is equipped to communicate the “fever” of Russia’s present “historical day” by way of his hybrid, Russian-Jewish art (CPL, 262). Mandelstam cites as an example of Iakhontov’s singular theatrical composites a work called “Lenin,” “a montage of the epoch,” which achieves its sweeping effects “through the juxtaposition of political speeches, fragments from the Communist manifesto, newspaper chronicles, and so on” (CPL, 268). Such comments might appear to be mere lip service to a regime growing increasingly intolerant of art and artists who failed to serve the state explicitly and wholeheartedly. Yet I think a deeper concern lies hidden behind these tributes to the new state and its leaders. Through Iakhontov and Mikhoels, Mandelstam envisions the possibility of an intersection of cultures orchestrated by another “ugly duckling” artist—himself. Marked as an outsider as much by his poet’s calling as by his Jewish past, Mandelstam dreams in these essays nonetheless of a cultural synthesis that incorporates ancient and modern, foreign and Russian, gentile and Jew, and that answers, at the same time, to the needs and demands of the Soviet people and state. True art, he seems to say, may be officially sanctioned and still do justice to the singular outsider’s vision that gives it shape. It can answer the summons of the present day without doing violence to the multiple traditions from which it stems. Mandelstam has not given up entirely on the dreams that seem to lie quite literally in pieces by the end of “The Horseshoe Finder.” In his precarious one-man balancing act of cultures and traditions, Iakhontov “calls to mind a trapeze artist working without a net” (CPL, 268). It is an act that Mandelstam will find impossible to follow. Indeed, “The Egyptian Stamp” (1928), the next of his works to deal explicitly with Jewishness in modern Russia, gives us not the poet-synthesist’s dream of a culture in which foreign and native, ancient and modern coexist in a state of fruitful, energizing tension. It presents instead a world in which things and people fall apart, in which artists and Jews particularly fall prey to the centripetal powers of an anarchic age that lies far beyond the reach of culture’s healing powers. The center cannot hold in the hallucinatory Petersburg Mandelstam evokes in “The Egyptian Stamp” because it has ceased to exist. The Russian capital of his world culture becomes an empty shell, a “wooden stonebound book, the interior of which has been ripped out” (POM, 183). “Nothing is left,” the novella’s narrator mourns (POM,

•

J E W I S H

C R E A T I O N

•

199

151). The human and cultural detritus that remains in the aftermath of the novella’s unnamed catastrophe has been placed beneath the “sign of the hiatus” that is the mark of Mandelstam’s Jewish family. In the story’s “thoroughly Semitic” atmosphere,10 the flotsam of Russia’s European heritage is now governed entirely by “Judaic chaos” at its most uncontrollable. In “On the Nature of the Word,” Mandelstam celebrates the synthetic properties of Russian culture that enable Russia to absorb all manner of foreignness while giving it a distinctively Russian flavor. This marvelous glue has apparently vanished from the world of “The Egyptian Stamp,” and what remains is a city composed entirely of unassimilated foreign fragments, a city in which “no character . . . has a Russian surname.” All the characters, both named and unnamed, have an “air of resident aliens about them, as if the whole city had been turned into a foreign quarter.”11 Most of the characters’ surnames are, in fact, Jewish, as Clarence Brown observes,12 but this does not prevent the Jew from being the chief scapegoat in a world made up entirely of outsiders. If Iakhontov or Mikhoels represent Mandelstam’s dream of an assimilation that leaves his identity as both Jew and artist intact, then Parnok, the quasi-Jewish poet manqué of “The Egyptian Stamp,” is his worst nightmare. Not only are Parnok’s attempts at cultural synthesis laughable at best: to innoculate himself against the age’s horror, he prepares “a cocktail of Rembrandt, of goatish Spanish painting and the chirping of cicadas” or “plot[s] the itineraries of grandious voyages, comparing the airy outlines of Aryan Europe with the blunt boot of Africa, with inexpressive Australia” (POM, 165, 153). He also falls prey to unmotivated harrassment at every step. “There are people,” the narrator tells us, “who for some reason or other displease mobs. The mob picks them out at once, taunts them, and pulls them by the nose . . . [and] Parnok was among this number” (POM, 166). Iakhontov surmounts his outsider’s origins and communicates his vision to the masses at large. The best Parnok can hope for is to escape their unwarranted persecution. The novella’s Jewish narrator fares only somewhat better. His own attempts at artistic creation and cultural synthesis are literally a marginal affair. “Destroy your manuscript, but save whatever you have inscribed in the margin,” he bids us and himself (POM, 187). His commandment, though, is born of fear, not defiance: “Fear takes me by the hand and leads me” (POM, 188). “I am not afraid of incoherence and gaps,” he boasts elsewhere , as he envisions what would seem to be a quintessentially Jewish art of margins and gaps: it is no accident that among his marginal scribbles we find a thumbnail sketch of Isaac Babel, “the fox chin and paw-like glasses” (POM, 167). The narrator proves incapable of wholeheartedly embracing this marginal culture, though. Like his ill-fated creature and double, the narrator is “sustained by Petersburg alone,” by a city and civilization that no longer exist (POM, 171).13 In “On the Nature of the Word,” Mandelstam observes that the philoso-

200

•

C H A P T E R

S I X

•

pher Vasilii Rozanov “could not live without walls, without an Acropolis” while “everything around him was collapsing” (CPL, 123). He might be describing his own dilemma, as exemplified by “The Egyptian Stamp” ’s antihero and its implied author. The culture and the writer, though, who hope to survive in an inhospitable world must learn to live without walls; they must carry their centers within themselves. In his study of Sex and Character (1903), Otto Weininger derides the misguided Jews, who “not only have no center within their perception of the world but do not have a center in the world itself.”14 Mandelstam must learn to recognize such seeming deficits as hidden strengths as he imitates the peripheral, perpetually endangered Jewish tradition whose “immense artistic power” stands revealed only once all walls have fallen, “only after the ghetto is destroyed” (“Mikhoels,” CPL, 261). This is the tradition that Mandelstam invents and remembers in “Fourth Prose” and elaborates in “Conversation about Dante” (1933). Nadezhda Mandelstam notes in her memoirs that her husband “loved everything that reminded him, however slightly, of borderlines, of boundaries.”15 For the Mandelstam of “Fourth Prose” and “Conversation about Dante,” all genuine culture thrives on borderlines. The task of true culture is to defy official, “authorized” culture, with its sanctioned centers, and the sign of his anti-cultural culture and anti-traditional tradition is not a new Acropolis but a “Jewish staff” (CPL, 318). The true artist, “a renegade in the nation’s family” (#235), challenges the confines of an inauthentic culture by refusing to acknowledge them. He accepts his outcast status, takes up his wanderer’s staff, and moves on. The staff that Mandelstam embraces is itself a new convert to Judaism. The same staff had accompanied him, in an earlier incarnation, on his poetic journey to Rome with Petr Chaadaev, as he and his mentor adopt the Catholic faith that promises an escape from Russian provincialism and cultural isolation.16 This staff’s conversion in “Fourth Prose” from an adopted Catholicism to a refigured Jewishness is a sign of things to come. In “Conversation about Dante,” the Western tradition has become the exclusive property of the poetic outsider, as world culture becomes the true homeland of the poet-Jew. Explicitly Jewish themes may “almost disappear” from Mandelstam’s writing of the thirties, as Kiril Taranovsky notes, but a Jewish poetics does not.17 This poetics plays a crucial part in Mandelstam’s late vision. Nothing could seem further from the Jewish renegade of “Fourth Prose” than the Dante who stands at the heart of Western, Christian culture. But invention and remembrance go hand in hand in Mandelstam’s prose as well as his verse. If “Conversation about Dante” is Mandelstam’s final ars poetica, it is also implicitly his most imaginative reworking of his Jewish past. Though Mandelstam never mentions this past in “Conversation about Dante,” he appears to have tacitly converted the most Christian of poets to his own “honorable calling”: the author of the Divine Comedy looks suspiciously like the prototype of the poet-Jew.

•

J E W I S H

C R E A T I O N

•

201

THE HONORABLE CALLING OF JEW The year that saw the publication of “The Egyptian Stamp” also witnessed the event in Mandelstam’s life that would permit him to take back the biography the revolution had confiscated and allow him to generate new culture from his unwanted, contraband self. In 1928 the critic and translator A. G. Gornfeld accused Mandelstam of plagiarizing Gornfeld’s own version of Charles de Coster’s La Légende d’Uylenspiegel, which Mandelstam had been commissioned to revise. The publishing house had inadvertently omitted Gornfeld’s name from the title page, and Mandelstam appeared to be taking full credit for work only partially his. The ensuing scandal, the so-called “Eulenspiegel affair,” unexpectedly provided Mandelstam with the impetus to new creation. It compelled him to create a new culture to counter the official culture that had, as he saw it, falsely accused him and wrongly rejected him.18 Mandelstam had complained in 1928 that the revolution had stripped him of a “cultural life supported by unearned cultural income” (CPL, 275). With the Eulenspiegel affair, this metaphor became the literal crime of which he found himself accused. He was deriving profits, so the accusation ran, from another’s cultural handiwork. Mandelstam had drawn inspiration early on from the image of poet as thief. The mentor and fellow outcast whom he celebrates in “François Villon” “attained for himself the unattainable aided only by his sharp irony”; he took for himself what he lacked from birth through cunning and through verse (CPL, 57). Mandelstam’s medieval poète maudit seeks nonetheless in complex ways to reconcile himself with the official culture of his day, and his very deviations from its norms are woven into its all-embracing structure. The Mandelstam of 1929 requires a more radical image of the poet as perpetual outsider. Accused of a petty, despicable kind of cultural pilferage, he is forced to redefine his image of the poet as outlaw. This new poet must always stand apart from the culture of a “dangerous, enigmatic, and criminal” age (CPL, 416). His unauthorized thieveries must challenge the epoch’s legitimized crimes, and his marginal existence must resist its strictures and its structures. Mandelstam had already found that his Jewish blood overflowed the foreign forms with which he had hoped to contain it, that it refused to be finally, fully held within non-Jewish walls. He had learned through long experience that the spells and formulas he used to defuse its force could not subdue it for long. Its influence had marked him “willy-nilly” (CPL, 444) as an outsider for life. He turns to this indestructible legacy to contrive his new identity as poet-Jew. Nowhere is this clearer than in “Fourth Prose.” Mandelstam’s “calling of Jew” is no less synthetic than his earlier invented identities as Russian, European, and Hellene. He draws on his family past in complex, indirect

202

•

C H A P T E R

S I X

•

ways, and the very name for Jew he uses in inventing his “honorable calling” suggests the symbolic directions that his vocation will take. His “Jew” is a “Hebrew,” a “Judean”—the Russian iudei has biblical echoes (CPL, 321; II, 187)—and Mandelstam’s new genealogy turns back to his family’s first sources, to the biblical beginnings he had earlier conflated with his own unwanted past. In his veins, he proclaims, flows the blood of “patriarchs and kings” (CPL, 321). His precursors are the chosen people who stand apart from other nations to serve as God’s reproach to the unrighteous. He calls on other age-old images—the Jew as outcast, as victim, as eternal wanderer—as he shapes his new identity. “In our most Christian world the poets are the Yids,” Tsvetaeva insists. In an age that takes its crimes for virtues and tolerates no deviations from its inverted norms, transgression becomes an act of conscience, and the “conscious pariah,” the self-proclaimed Yid, is the only righteous person.19 Mandelstam’s “honorable calling” is as symbolic, and as literary, as Tsvetaeva’s poet-Yid. Mandelstam’s unwanted legacy becomes a title, a rank, a vocation (zvanie can mean all three). It is an honor to be achieved, a status to be earned, a summons to be heeded and followed. Not every Jew deserves this honor, according to the self-proclaimed scion of patriarchs. There is no room for the assimilated Jew in Mandelstam’s new vision and this in part explains, though it does not excuse, the perverse anti-Semitic flavor that Gregory Freidin detects in “Fourth Prose.”20 In its opening paragraphs, Mandelstam condemns his namesake, one Isaiah Benediktovich Mandelstam, who stems not from mythical biblical forefathers but from happily assimilated stock: “All Isaiah Benediktovich’s relatives had died in their Jewish beds of carved walnut. . . . [T] hese Petersburg bourgeois— descended from rabbis of patrician blood and acquainted with the works of Anatole France through the translator, Isaiah—made pilgrimages to whatever spas bore the imprint of Lermontov and Turgenev, preparing themselves by taking the cure for passage into the next world” (CPL, 312–13). A common response to “Jewish self-hatred,” Sander Gilman notes, is “the creation of a Jewish Other as a substitute for hatred of the self.”21 Mandelstam appears to be exorcising his earlier, would-be assimilated self by way of this evil twin, this assimilated Mandelstam, who has sold his soul to an “alien regime” for the sake of his material and cultural well-being (CPL, 319). He has joined the ranks of the “literary murderers,” those who, like Gornfeld, are as aesthetically corrupt (both Gornfeld and Isaiah Benediktovich traffic in “trashy translations”) as they are unethical (CPL, 319, 313). Isaiah Benediktovich will not defend the state’s victims—he has taken pains to “inoculate himself against the firing squad”—while Gornfeld actively persecutes them (CPL, 312). False ethics and false aesthetics combine to produce the dishonorable Jew. The true Jew, conversely, is not necessarily Jewish. The “honorable calling of Jew” becomes a blanket title for all who refuse to do business with

•

J E W I S H

C R E A T I O N

•

203

the official culture of an oppressive state. Mandelstam cites Zoshchenko and Sergei Esenin as exemplars of “genuine writer[s], mortal enem[ies] of Literature”; enemies, that is, of authorized, “assimilated” writing (CPL, 318). For the Mandelstam of “Fourth Prose,” the genuine writer is the honorable Jew, and Jewishness becomes a literary, or anti-Literary, vocation: “I insist that the writer’s profession as it has developed in Europe and, in particular in Russia, is incompatible with the honorable calling of Jew” (CPL, 321). This opposition, between “the race of professional writers” and honorable Jews, mirrors a distinction that Mandelstam makes elsewhere in “Fourth Prose”: “I divide all of world literature into authorized and unauthorized works. The former are all trash; the latter—stolen air” (CPL, 316). The professional writer produces authorized trash, while the poet-Jew takes what is not his by rights and uses it to shape his unauthorized and therefore genuine art. True “world literature” consists of the illegitimate children of that pariah, the poet-Jew. Mandelstam the modernist outsider had learned early on to turn deficiencies into assets, and to transform the missing pieces of his past into the bonds that tied him to his age and other ages, his nation and other nations. In “The Egyptian Stamp” the task of using missing pieces to create new unities seems impossible in an age as fractured and unstable as the narrator himself. The narrator struggles to shape a marginal art from the missing pieces that are both his family legacy and the present reality of an uprooted age, but he cannot escape his pervasive sense of insufficiency. He cannot answer his age’s demands. The Mandelstam of “Fourth Prose” no longer tries. He takes pride in his very faults: “No matter how hard I work, whether I carry a horse slung across my shoulders, whether I turn millstones, no matter what I do, I shall never become a worker. My work, regardless of the form, is considered mischief, lawlessness, mere accident. But I like it that way, so I agree. I’ll subscribe to it with both hands” (CPL, 324). As he comes to define himself not in terms of his age, but against it, his defects and deficiencies turn into perverse new virtues, and the “sign of the hiatus” that had marked his family past becomes the poet’s badge of honor.22 In gentile culture, Hannah Arendt notes, the assimilated Jew was masked: “He concealed his true identity, and through every hole in his costume his old pariah existence could be detected.”23 The Mandelstam of “Fourth Prose” happily unmasks himself. He flaunts the holes that reveal his pariah existence. “With each passing year I become more incorrigible (prozhennee),” he exults: “It’s as if I have been punched full of holes with a conductor’s steel punch and stamped with my own family name” (CPL, 324; II, 190). There is no room for the assimilated Jew in Mandelstam’s new vision, but Jewishness, as his own experience tells him, always finally refuses to assimilate. It resists all efforts, his own and others’, to make it fit the forms of another culture. He turns now to the gaps in his Jewish past,

204

•

C H A P T E R

S I X

•

to the places that had refused to be filled with foreign content, as he creates an identity and a tradition that cannot be swallowed up by an all-consuming state. Homelessness, foreignness, disruption, incoherence become the essence of an art and a culture made, like Mandelstam himself, from “air, perforations and truancy” (CPL, 324). “For me a doughnut’s value resides in the hole,” Mandelstam proclaims. “You can gobble up the doughnut, but the hole remains” (CPL, 324). The poet-Jew need not fear a disrupted tradition or a shattered identity; continuity and value now derive precisely from missing pieces and empty spaces. In a state growing daily more insistent on the glories of centralization, Mandelstam remains defiantly “eccentric,” beyond the center and its grasp.24 Mandelstam’s own family name—unmistakably German and Jewish despite its new Cyrillic incarnation—stamps him with the holes and gaps of his family past. It makes him unredeemable, unassimilable. It brands him as an outsider. Mandelstam turns his family name into both a means of selfpreservation and an artistic credo. “I love to meet my name among official papers,” he declares in “Fourth Prose”: “There my name takes on a completely objective ring: a rather new sound to me, and I must say, a rather interesting one. I am often curious myself to find out what I have been doing wrong. What sort of bird is this Mandelstam, who, for so many years was supposed to have done such-and-such, but has always managed, the rogue, to evade it?” (CPL, 323) The tactics of evasion and indirection— and the basis for a writing that refuses to walk a straight line or a party line—are built into the fabric of his family name. The instability and uncertainty that are part of his inherited identity are transformed, by way of his name, into lifesaving creative strategies. The age’s authorities, Mandelstam claims, seek to issue him a “warrant limiting my right to travel beyond certain specified zones. . . . I ran away from somewhere and they are convinced that I must be returned, extradited, investigated and settled” (CPL, 323). Mandelstam’s escape route comes in the form of the family name that refuses to straighten up or settle down. In a late poem he celebrates his “devilish name (familiia chertova )”: “No matter how you twist it/It always sounds crooked, not straight (Kak ee ni vyvertyvai,/Krivo zvuchit, a ne priamo)” (1935, #303). To walk down Mandelstam Street is to follow a winding and unpredictable path: Malo v nem bylo linejnogo, Nrava on ne byl lilejnogo, I potomu /ta ulica, Ili, vernej, /ta qmaó Tak i zovetsq po imeni ?togo Mandel;wtama. He wasn’t very linear His nature wasn’t lily-pure And that’s why this street

•

J E W I S H

C R E A T I O N

•

205

Or more precisely this pit Goes by the name Of that Mandelstam.

Mandelstam brings his biblical lineage and his modern Jewish genealogy together in his family name. The modern Jewish homelessness of the Mandelstam family combines in this name with the wanderings of the chosen people themselves, sheepbreeders and exiled kings. The united efforts of these distant relations create for Mandelstam the wandering path and the Jewish staff that will take him beyond the confines of his age.25 Through his family name Mandelstam turns back to a recent and a distant Jewish history, and he transforms the wandering that unites both pasts into a determinedly perverse new ethic and aesthetics. He himself turns backward in time to the past that had horrified him earlier with its “unnatural” backward motion. Unnatural motion is, however, a necessity for the Mandelstam of “Fourth Prose” with his congenitally crooked, unrepentantly nonlinear name and nature. He cannot push onward with his age into a radiant future, and he refuses to work for its approval or praise. Even worse, the poet-saboteur sets the state’s “time forward” in reverse: “Others gain respect with each passing day, but for me the opposite is true: time is flowing backwards” (CPL, 323). The backward flow of time becomes another of the poet-Jew’s irregular, unregulated ploys to defeat the demands of a hostile state. The backward motion that had been, so he thought, the curse of his family past becomes another twist in the crooked path that is the Jewish wanderer’s salvation. Mandelstam’s wandering path takes him beyond the pale of official writing as well as official life. Authorized literature, he proclaims, “is forever fulfilling a single assignment: it helps the rulers keep their soldiers obedient” (CPL, 321). Mandelstam’s own prose refuses to march in time, and it refuses to stand quietly in the straight lines of the rank and file. It proceeds, like his new tradition, through digression and disruption, through fragmentation and gaps. It is evasive, circuitous, haphazard. “Fourth Prose” ’s fifteen pages in the Filipoff/Struve edition are divided into sixteen erratic, apparently disjointed fragments or chapters. Within each segment, moreover, Mandelstam jumps the boundaries, repeatedly and unpredictably, between genres—autobiography, anecdote, jeremiad, invective—and styles, from children’s babble to street-corner cursing to Soviet double-speak and official jargon. Mandelstam’s writing is, in short, literally, graphically punctured with apertures of all kinds, as the path it takes through “Fourth Prose” lurches from one style, one subject, one genre to the next. Nadezhda Mandelstam observes that the defiant energies unleashed by “Fourth Prose” cleared the way for Mandelstam’s return to poetry; it helped him to regain his poet’s voice after years of poetic silence. But “Fourth Prose” not only restored Mandelstam’s poetic voice; it reshaped it. The voice he liberates through “Fourth Prose” is, like Mandelstam him-

206

•

C H A P T E R

S I X

•

self, newly “Judaized,” and it participates in his revision of his Jewish past, as poet and Jew meet linguistically in the poetics of “Fourth Prose.” Though Mandelstam does not explicitly link the two, the voice of “Fourth Prose” is in fact the voice of poetry itself, as he defines it. The “mischief, lawlessness, mere accident (sluchainost’)” that is the work of the poet-Jew coincide with the “accidental (sluchainyi), personal and catastrophic” domain of lyric poetry that Mandelstam describes in “Literary Moscow: The Birth of Plot” (1922, CPL, 152; II, 191, 334). Mandelstam had earlier sought to replace his native babble with a new home in Russian writing and to exchange his “speechless” family for the family of Russian philology. This literary home and linguistic family have, however, vanished in the Soviet age. Philology, like literature, has been polluted by its commerce with a corrupted state: “Think what mother philology (matushka filologiia) once was, and what she has become. . . . She was full-blooded and intolerant, now she’s a bloody shame and all-tolerant (Byla vsia krov’, vsia neterpimost’, a stala psiakrev, stala vseterpimost’)” (CPL, 319; II, 184). Mother philology has fraternized with the enemy. She has been compromised by her service to authorized art and an alien state. She has, in short, decided to assimilate. “How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one’s own language?” How do the linguistic outcasts, be they emigré or Jew or Jewish emigré, take on a language that is not theirs by rights and force it to serve their purposes? How can they, if need be, turn their stolen speech against the “state language,” the “official language,” the “language of the masters”? This is the dilemma faced by Franz Kafka, the German Jew writing in Prague at the tail end of the Hapsburg Empire.26 Kafka confronts these “linguistic impossibilities” in a famous letter to Max Brod: “They [German Jewish writers] exist among three impossibilities. . . . These are: the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently.” Kafka circumvents these impossibilities by creating, like Mandelstam, a literature that revels in its illegitimacy, “a literature impossible in all respects, a gypsy literature which stole the German child out of its cradle and in great haste put it through some kind of training, for someone has to dance on the tightrope.”27 Kafka develops his “gypsy literature” by bringing High German into proximity with its “despised” offspring, Yiddish, as he creates in his writing an almost inaudible dialogue between the two and becomes in the process “a circus rider on two horses.”28 Yiddish would seem to be the ideal vessel for the Jewish artist determined to flaunt his outcast status as he makes his home on the outskirts of official culture. “It is only thieves’ cant that is in the habit of borrowing from [Yiddish],” Kafka observes in his “Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language,” “because Yiddish was, after all, for a long time a despised language” (1912).29 In Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (1986), Sander Gilman notes the venerable Western tradition that “saw in the language of the Jews the lan-

•

J E W I S H

C R E A T I O N

•

207

guage of the most marginal elements of European society”: “[The Jews] were seen to employ the language of the thieves, Yiddish, as a means of hiding their actions from the state, since their actions were always inimical to the state’s best interest.” This marginal language, with its “unreliable” and “shifting nature,” was considered unfit for high culture and genteel, gentile society through much of European history.30 Yiddish, or an inventively construed Yiddish manqué, would seem to be made to order for the self-proclaimed enemy of the state’s best interests, the evasive, irresponsible poet-Jew of “Fourth Prose.” Mandelstam did not know the “melodious, always surprised and disappointed, interrogative language” he describes in The Noise of Time (POM, 89). Yet the rebellious Russian of “Fourth Prose” is clearly a blood relative of the suspect speech that Gilman describes. Like Kafka, Mandelstam learns to derive new “phonological energy” (CPL, 447) from his linguistic legacy. He turns from his treacherous Russian “mother philology” to another philological family as his poetic voice regains its strength. “The speech of the father and the speech of the mother—does not our language feed throughout all its long life on the confluence of these two, do they not compose its character?” he asks in The Noise of Time (POM, 90). Mandelstam does not mention his parents’ imperfect Russian in “Fourth Prose.” But he tacitly returns to his linguistic legacy of “tongue-tie and languagelessness” (POM, 90) as he works to create a perverse new art that cannot be preempted by an enemy state. The noise that Mandelstam describes in his autobiography is not that of time alone. It is also the “babble,” the “swelling noise” of his inarticulate, imperfectly assimilated family, “tongue-tied from birth” (POM, 123). And The Noise of Time is not only a portrait of the artist and his age; it also traces the quest of a first-generation Russian Jew to “escape the damaged discourse inherited from [his] elders” and to acquire a new language, a new home and family in Russian culture.31 Mandelstam’s self-portrait in The Noise of Time bears in fact a strong resemblance to the German-Jewish writers whose efforts to master a “pure,” unmarked German Gilman describes in Jewish Self-Hatred. They must continuously combat their fears, reinforced by the society around them, that Jews “cannot speak German . . . without some specific sign of Jewishness.” As one of Richard Wagner’s disciples proclaimed, “Behind the finest German that any Jew can be taught to speak lurks the inner voice of the Jews, with their borrowed German.”32 Mandelstam is acutely attuned to the nuances that mark Russian Jewish speech throughout The Noise of Time. He fears not only his father’s linguistic no-man’s-land: “The Russian speech of a Polish Jew? No. The speech of a German Jew? No again. Perhaps a special Courland accent? I never heard such. . . . [His speech] was anything in the world, but not a language, neither Russian nor German” (POM, 90). He detects the Jewish accent in a Russian history of the Jews “written in the clumsy, shy language of a Russian-speaking Talmudist” (POM, 81). And he discerns some subtly

208

•

C H A P T E R

S I X

•

un-Russian tone even in his Hebrew tutor’s “correct Russian,” which “sound[s] false,” and in his mother’s impeccable but “impoverished” Russian speech (POM, 90).33 Several of Mandelstam’s early critics claimed to hear a foreign note in Mandelstam’s own Russian: Vladimir Markov’s “Futurist” Mandelstam is a “Jew who wants to be a Greek in Russian,” while Iulii Margolin compares Mandelstam to the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, another “son of an ancient culture” “who came from afar, from the margins” in order to embrace his adopted language “with all the freshness of the newly-converted soul” as he “conjures from it his own peculiar melody.” The erstwhile Acmeist Sergei Gorodetsky is less measured in his remarks: “Anyone sensitive to language will notice in [Mandelstam’s poetry] certain shortcomings, which the author skillfully tries to pass for his own, personal style. . . . However, it is a big mistake to consider Mandelstam’s private language some sort of ‘Russian Latin,’ as do some of his admirers.” According to Gorodetsky, Mandelstam’s poetry, like the poet himself, is an awkward, if not unwelcome, newcomer to the Russian tradition it seeks to adopt. The truly Russian writer will not, however, be misled by its seeming fluency; the verses speak with an accent that the discerning, native ear will readily recognize.34 Gorodetsky stops short of the notoriously anti-Semitic Richard Wagner, to whom the very notion of a Jewish poet was egregiously oxymoronic. In his essay “Jews in Music,” (1850) he explains: “Our whole European art and civilization . . . have remained to the Jew a foreign tongue; for, just as he has taken no part in the evolution of the one, so has he taken none in that of the other. . . . In this Speech, this Art, the Jew can only mimic and mock—not truly make a poem of his words, an artwork of his doings.”35 Similar charges—and they were not uncommon in Silver Age Russia—must have haunted the young Mandelstam, for whom the Russian language, so receptive, he hoped, to “foreign-born influences,” was to serve as a passport into Russian and world culture.36 The poet of “Fourth Prose,” however, flaunts his flagrantly non-native speech. The authorized writer, Mandelstam explains, is obedient to the language of his masters: “He is a parrot in the loftiest sense of the word. He speaks French if his master is French, but if he is sold in Persia, he speaks Persian” (CPL, 321). The true writer, on the other hand, refuses to speak on command, and when he does speak, the sounds he makes cannot be understood by his oppressors. The poet-Jew Osip Mandelstam, whose hyphenated identity makes him an alien twice over in Soviet Russian culture, relishes the foreign, unauthorized, chaotic speech that sets him apart from the writer’s tribe and its rulers: I am a Chinaman, no one understands me. Higgledy-Piggledy (khaldy-baldy). Let’s go to Alma-Ata where the inhabitants have raisin eyes, where the Persian has eyes like fried eggs, where the Sart has the eyes of a sheep. Higgledy-Piggledy! Let’s go to Azerbaijan! (CPL, 317; II, 183)

•

J E W I S H

C R E A T I O N

•

209

A German organ-grinder passes with a barrel organ playing Shubert, such a failure, such a parasite. . . . Ich bin arm. I am poor. Armenians from the city of Erevan walk past with green-painted herrings. Ich bin arm. I am poor. (final ellipses mine; CPL, 325)

Mandelstam does not identify the dialect he speaks in “Fourth Prose,” but in it we recognize the polyglot tongue-tie he describes in The Noise of Time. The defective “speech of the father,” imaginatively recast, becomes a creative necessity to the Mandelstam of “Fourth Prose.” Trained from birth in the art of babble, the poet-Jew can use his inherited speechlessness to baffle the enemy. He can evade the control of authorized philology and create his own meanings on the outskirts of official art. Mandelstam embraces his status as linguistic and literary outcast as he learns to exploit the Jewish confusion of tongues that is his rightful inheritance. Mandelstam summarizes his calling of Jew and his wandering, marginal tradition in an anecdote that comes near the end of “Fourth Prose”: “Two Jews walk hand in hand, an inseparable pair; one—the inquirer, the other— the respondent; one is forever asking, asking, the other—forever evading, evading, and there is no way to interrupt their dialogue” (CPL, 325). Endless, open-ended movement and speech join forces in a culture whose continuity lies precisely in its eternally unfinished motion. The dialogue of the two Jews cannot be interrupted because it cannot be pinned down. The tradition they represent cannot be broken because it cannot be made to stand still. “Both the plasticity and the power of Judaism,” Mandelstam asserts in “Mikhoels,” “come from its having managed to develop and perpetuate down through the ages a feeling for form and movement, . . . making it permanent, millenial” (CPL, 261). The resilience of the outcast tradition lies in its capacity to weave displacement into a restless, perpetually unstable whole. Mandelstam changes the shape of world culture itself as he invents and remembers his Jewish heritage. The tactics designed to save the outcast from his age become the strategies of all true writing, and the evasive path taken by the poet-Jew becomes the wandering route of all genuine culture. The wanderings of Mandelstam’s poetic culture had begun long before “Fourth Prose.” His two Jews continue the travels of the vital Russian culture Mandelstam describes in “On the Nature of Word” (1922)—“We have no Acropolis. Even today our culture is still wandering and not finding its walls” (CPL, 126)—and their path crosses the zigzagging, vagabond’s track of poetry itself: “Waving its arms and muttering under its breath, poetry trudges along, staggering, its head swimming, blissfully crazy, and yet it is the only sober one, the only one completely awake in the whole world” (“Some Notes on Poetry,” 1923; CPL, 169). This meandering path takes a radical shift as it enters “Fourth Prose.” The poet-pariah defiantly divides all writing into two camps, authentic and authorized, in as he works to contrive a new canon for “the genuine writer, the mortal enemy of Literature” (CPL, 318). Having announced his credo, he is pre-

210

•

C H A P T E R

S I X

•

pared to take up his Jewish staff and travel once again into European history and Mediterranean culture. He will discover in his new, Judaized West an anti-cultural culture and an anti-literary literature, and he will place an unlikely fellow pariah at its head.

CONVERTING DANTE Dante, who never forgets the origins of things . . . —Osip Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante” (1933)

“Nel mezzo del’cammin di nostra vita—midway along life’s path—I was stopped in the dense Soviet forest by bandits who called themselves my judges” (CPL, 322). In the midst of the Soviet forest of “Fourth Prose,” Mandelstam’s path converges with Dante’s, and the conversation he strikes up with his fellow traveler will culminate three years later in his “Conversation about Dante” (1933). Mandelstam finds his exemplary poet-Jew in the Italian Catholic writer whose works would seem to be the heart of “official” European culture. Mandelstam’s Dante implicitly becomes the patron saint of all poet-pariahs, the outcast whose writing catalyzes the unsanctioned tradition that generates true culture. “When poets turn to the great masters of the past, they turn to an image of their own creation, one which is likely to be a reflection of their own imaginative needs, their own artistic inclinations and procedures,” the Irish poet Seamus Heaney observes.37 Mandelstam tacitly creates the Dante of the “Conversation” in his own image, and in the image of “Fourth Prose” ’s poet-Jew. “Who were your forefathers?” Mandelstam’s Dante asks (CPL, 404). Mandelstam does not answer his question directly in the “Conversation,” and the defiantly Jewish poet of “Fourth Prose” is apparently nowhere to be seen within the essay. Mandelstam’s inventively remembered Jewish past has entered into his Dante nonetheless; indeed, Mandelstam’s Divine Comedy is given its motion and meaning by the presence of this past, as the origins of the Divine Comedy that emerges in the “Conversation” converge with Mandelstam’s own distant ancestry. “Just try to imagine,” he writes that Patriarch Abraham and King David, the entire tribe of Israel including Isaac, Jacob and all their kin . . . have entered into a singing and roaring organ, as if it were a house with its door left ajar, and have concealed themselves within. And, imagine that even earlier, our forefather Adam with his son Abel, old Noah, and Moses, the lawgiver and the law-abiding, had also entered. . . . Following this, the organ acquires the capacity to move—all its pipes and bellows become extraordinarily agitated, when suddenly, in a frenzied rage, it begins to move backwards. (first ellipses mine; CPL, 440)

•

J E W I S H

C R E A T I O N

•

211

Mandelstam is himself moving backward in this remarkable passage. The imaginatively recast Jewish past of “Fourth Prose” lies concealed within “Conversation about Dante,” much as its patriarchs and kings are hidden inside the sui generis Divine Comedy that Mandelstam celebrates here. And the “unnatural” backward motion that marks Mandelstam’s family past catalyzes his Dante no less than it does the poet-Jew of “Fourth Prose.” Mandelstam’s Divine Comedy draws on other forms of Jewish motion as well. It would seem, in Mandelstam’s reading, to continue, or foreshadow, the unending dialogue of the wandering Jews that closes “Fourth Prose.” It is a “journey with conversations” made up of “questions and answers,” and Dante himself is the eternal outsider, forever on the move. He is “doomed to keep walking, to gather information and to ask and answer questions” (CPL, 447, 451). Mandelstam explicitly allies Dante with his adopted Russian kinsman and fellow outsider, the raznochinets to whom he had sworn his allegiance in The Noise of Time: “Dante is a poor man (bedniak). Dante is an internal raznochinets” (CPL, 405). He might just as easily be an “internal Jew.” The Tuscan raznochinets is haunted by fears he shares with modern Europe’s uncertainly assimilated Jews. His Divine Comedy reveals, according to his latter-day interlocutor, “the inner anxiety and painful, troubled gaucheries which accompany each step of the uncertain, as it were, undereducated man, the man untutored in the ways of applying his inner experience or of objectifying it into etiquette, the tormented and downtrodden man” (CPL, 405). Mandelstam’s portrait of Dante, whose “so-called aquiline profile was, from within, awkwardness overcome through agony (muchitel’no preodolaemaia nelovkost’)” (CPL, 405–6), is in fact his own “SelfPortrait” (1913, #164) redrawn two decades later: the young poet’s “closed eyes” and “peaceful hands” conceal, Mandelstam writes, his drive to “overcome congenital awkwardness with inborn rhythm” (prirozhdennuiu nelovkost’ vrozhdennym ritmom odolet’). Dante’s poverty ties him to the poet-Jew of “Fourth Prose” who takes pride in his indigence—”Ich bin arm. I am poor” (CPL, 325)—and what the two lack is the same. They are homeless. They are outcasts. They are forever on the move. In “Conversation about Dante,” Mandelstam generalizes the dilemma of the poet-Jew who is endangered by a rigid, restrictive society, into a theory of culture at large, and Dante becomes the ringleader in his new poetics of opposition. Dante, master of motion, catalyst of disruption, and “strategist of transmutation and hybridization,” is “least of all, a poet in the ‘general European’ sense” (CPL, 396). He does not belong to the “writer’s profession,” to that sanctioned tribe of obedient scribes that thrives, according to Mandelstam, in both Russia and the West (CPL, 321). Dante refuses to use “those manufactured nails known as images of cultural history” (CPL, 398). As a true poet, he does not traffic in “socalled culture” at all (CPL, 444). “So-called culture” is the world of fixed and forbidding structures. It is the shell the living organism leaves behind.

212

•

C H A P T E R

S I X

•

It is the realm of senseless, lifeless proprieties, the ready-made forms and formal constraints that kill true art by forcing it to hold still. “Culture,” Mandelstam claims, “is no more than the correlative propriety of historical structures suspended in their development and concentrated in a passive conception” (CPL, 686). “’Egyptian culture is essentially Egyptian propriety, and medieval culture is medieval propriety.” (And Soviet culture, one might add, is of course mere Soviet propriety.) “Proponents of the concept of culture,” Mandelstam asserts, “are drawn willy-nilly into the circle, so to speak, of ‘improper propriety’” (CPL, 444).38 Opponents of this lifeless culture must therefore, by necessity, band together in the circle of what we might call “proper impropriety.” The only proper response, in other words, to this culture’s confining codes is impropriety. It is the response of the uncouth, undereducated outsider, and the truancy, mischief, and lawlessness of the poet-Jew. If culture says go forward, the poet replies by moving back. If culture requests that the poet fill in the blanks, he leaves them empty. If culture demands straight answers, the poet misleads, equivocates, and evades. In the vision of culture and anti-culture that Mandelstam develops with Dante’s help in “Conversation about Dante,” the disruptive behavior of the poet-Jew becomes the essence of poetic activity as such. The sociologist John Murray Cuddihy argues that the lot of the postEnlightenment, assimilated European Jew was “awkwardness”: “Unable to turn back, unable completely to acculturate, caught between ‘his own’ whom he had left behind and the Gentile ‘host culture’ where he felt ill at ease and alienated, intellectual Jews and Jewish intellectuals experienced cultural shame and awkwardness.” For these Jews, Jewishness is experienced as “discomfort in the cultured state,” and when “ineradicable” Jewishness erupts, it “create[s] havoc with [the] carefully calculated loyalties and elaborately reasoned postures” designed to allow Jewish outsiders to infiltrate their “host culture.” Jewishness is “badly behaved.” It unfailingly violates gentile etiquette, gentile norms, gentile propriety and “so-called cultured” behavior. The Jew who will not conform to the mores of an “alien regime” is “crude, coarse,” “unruly,” “raw,” and cultured society holds no place for him.39 The “poetic speech” of “Conversation about Dante” behaves like Cuddihy’s unrepentant, unassimilated Jew. “Courtesy is not at all characteristic of [Dante],” Mandelstam argues, and Dante’s poetic language follows suit (CPL, 405). Its rawness offends and repudiates culture: “To squeeze poetic discourse into ‘culture,’ that is into the narration of historical structures, is unfounded, for by such an act its essentially raw nature is completely ignored. Contrary to our accepted way of thinking, poetic discourse is infinitely more raw, infinitely more unfinished than so-called ‘conversational’ speech” (CPL, 445). Poetic speech, in other words, does not indulge in idle chit-chat or polite conversation. Its manners leave much to be desired. “The infinite raw material of poetic sound,” Mandelstam pro-

•

J E W I S H

C R E A T I O N

•

213

claims, “remains outside of culture as propriety.” Poetic speech “does not trust culture.” It “offends culture with its suspiciousness” and it “spits it out like water it has gargled to clear its throat” (CPL, 445).40 “Dante ascertains the origin, fate, and character of a man according to his voice,” Mandelstam notes (CPL, 435). Mandelstam’s rightful linguistic legacy is tongue-tie, and through Dante he learns to use this linguistic confusion to his advantage, and poetry’s. Though Mandelstam does not admit it, Dante’s “raw” poetic speech, which distrusts, disrupts, and offends all culture, has apparently learned its bad manners from Mandelstam’s imperfectly assimilated family. In Dante, Mandelstam claims, “shameful speech is reversed, turned backward (Postydnaia rech’ obratima vspiat’, obrashchena nazad)” (CPL, 431; II, 401). The family and philology join forces in the energy of Dante’s anticultural Italian, as language, following the perverse motion of Mandelstam’s origins, returns to its shamefully inarticulate sources.41 The Russian speech that Mandelstam describes in “On the Nature of the Word” accommodates emigrés and is energized by infusions of foreign blood.42 Dante’s language goes still further. It violates all norms and derives its “surplus of phonological energy” from what appears to be the linguistic confusion of the uprooted, unassimilated Jew (CPL, 447; POM, 90). “It seems to me,” Mandelstam writes, “that Dante made a careful study of all speech defects, listening closely to stutterers and lispers, to nasal twangs and inarticulate pronunciation, and that he learned much from them” (CPL, 430). Like the Jews of Europe, whose mastery of their adopted nations’ tongues would always be suspect, Dante and his Italian balance awkwardly on the boundaries between languages: “The poet improvises inwardly in his beloved, secret Greek, using only the phonetics and the fabric of his native Italian idiom to carry out his purpose” (CPL, 419). Dante’s language thrives on its collapse, on “the degeneration of speech” into “infantilism,” senselessness, and “babble” (CPL, 431, 399). This is the voice of Mandelstam’s own poetry of the early thirties. All poetry, Northrop Frye argues, has its beginnings in “babble and doodle.” Mandelstam, whose poems began, his widow notes, in “clatter and whisper (topot i shopot),” would have agreed.43 The task of the poet, as he sees it in the aftermath of “Fourth Prose,” is to keep these beginnings, which coincide with his own linguistic origins, alive in poems that defy official speech with their illicit, “honest zigzags (chestnye zigzagi)” (#289). Mandelstam creates these poetic zigzags in ways that will be familiar to the reader of “Fourth Prose” or “Conversation about Dante.” In the “Moscow Notebooks” (1930–34), he plays with foreign speech (#216, #226,#251, #266, #270, #273), substandard and “uncultured” speech (#226,#231,#232, #251, #260), nonsense words and phrases (#226,#260,#274,#294), and “infantile” phonetics stripped of meaning (#241, #242, #261, #267, #270, #278, #281). The poet of the “Moscow Notebooks” may be burdened with “Jewish worries” (iudeiskie zaboty), but he has learned to con-

214

•

C H A P T E R

S I X

•

vert his troubled birthright into art: “He molds experience from babble/ And drinks babble drawn from experience (On opyt iz lepeta lepit/I lepet iz opyta p’et)” (1933, #284). And like Dante or the Ariosto of a late poem, he is able to turn his “senseless language,” his “spiteful nonsense” against the wiles of a sinister age in which “power is repulsive, like a barber’s hand” (#267).44 What had been for Mandelstam the “shameful speech” (postydnaia rech’) of his family is converted into the “blatantly shameless” (narochito besstyzhaia) speech of Dante’s Italian and of his own late verse. Mandelstam’s Jewish inheritance of linguistic chaos had been his enemy, and culture’s. Now that he has declared himself to be culture’s enemy, his inheritance is not simply an ally. It becomes the very essence of poetic language, the endlessly disruptive renegade that forever challenges “so-called culture,” that affronts its proprieties, ignores its dictums, and disrupts its structures. This poetic speech, the speech of the poet-Jew, has become the voice of true culture and of a living tradition.

•

C

H

A

P

T

E

R

S

E

V

E

N

•

Powerful Insignificance We are enthralled by new themes: we celebrate superfluousness, meaninglessness, and the secret of powerful insignificance. —David Burliuk, Elena Guro, Nikolai Burliuk, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ekaterina Nizen, Viktor Khlebnikov, Benedikt Livshchits, A. Kruchenykh, “Untitled,” from A Trap for Judges, 2 (1910) The superfluous alone unites us. —Osip Mandelstam, “Verses on the Unknown Soldier” (1937)

TOWARD AN INSIGNIFICANT POETICS A poem should be all inconsequential; society likes order. —Anna Akhmatova, quoted in Anatoly Naiman, Rasskazy ob Anne Akhmatovoi (1989)

“I may be to blame, but I’m not at a loss—/ There’s a many-layered life outside the law,” Mandelstam writes defiantly in his first “Voronezh Notebook” (1935), and we recognize the couplet’s speaker instantly: he is the poet-Jew of “Fourth Prose.” This poem’s first two lines (it has only four) reveal that the outcast poet has managed to retain his booty, the flotsam and jetsam of world culture, even in exile. “The full-weighted ingots of Roman nights,/The loins that enticed young Goethe” have followed Mandelstam to his open-air prison in Voronezh, the provincial town in southern Russia where he and his wife spent three years in exile after his arrest in 1934 (#316).1 World culture and the poet-Jew, the two renegades who first join forces in “Fourth Prose,” have become inseparable by the time of the “Moscow” and “Voronezh Notebooks” (1931–33; 1935–37), and their remarkably productive collaboration is responsible for some of the modern age’s greatest lyrics. In these lyrics Mandelstam takes to his role as poeta non gratus with a vengeance. This is not the only role he plays in the “Moscow” and “Voronezh Notebooks,” and he does not embrace it with equal fervor at all times. However tempting it might be to see “Fourth Prose” as Mandelstam’s final, triumphant declaration of war against an illegitimate regime,

216

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

to do so would simplify radically the poetic testimony of his last years. The poems that Mandelstam composed during the thirties comprise nearly half of his entire lyric output, and it would be critically naive to expect uniformity from such a substantial body of work coming from a major poet even at the best of times. And Mandelstam, who had never been unduly fettered by a hobgoblin consistency in any case, was writing at what might be termed without hyperbole something like the worst of times. For this last phase in his career coincides, of course, with the beginning of Stalin’s reign of terror, and Mandelstam himself would experience this terror in all its variants “on his own hide,” in the Russian saying. “Here writes fear, here writes disruption,” Mandelstam warns in a poem written during the “relatively vegetarian” early twenties (1923; #137).2 Fear, disruption, confusion, and uncertainty could hardly fail to leave their mark on the poems written during the far less benevolent decade that followed, and Mandelstam’s lyrics of the thirties trace a trail of “torturous zigzags,” as he vacillates between powerful self-assertion and equally powerful self-doubt.3 These very waverings, however, recall the poet-Jew and his meandering poetics, the “honest zigzags” of the honorable artist who refuses to falsify the record by giving it to us straight. “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson bids the poet, and for the late Mandelstam, the truth of poetry lies precisely in its shifting, often contradictory angles of vision. True poetry always takes the “roundabout route” as it “forces us to evade our labors, to wink, to seek out new meanings in old wisdom, not in books but in squinting eyes” (CPL, 451, 446). This is Dante’s poetic credo and the credo of “Fourth Prose” ’s rebellious outcast; it is the perverse ideal that Mandelstam takes as his starting point in the late verse. As T. S. Eliot reminds us, though, reality has a way of causing the poet to stray in practice from the ideals he espouses in theory, and Mandelstam’s lyrics of the thirties bear eloquent testimony to the difficult balancing act that the self-proclaimed renegade has undertaken.4 The outcast, whose poetic labors are not required by the state and whose chosen genre and tradition have joined him first in figurative, and then literal exile on the outskirts of official culture, must convince himself—and us with him—that genuine poetry can be shaped from history’s discards, from the stuff and nonsense that Literature proper rejects. He must persuade us and himself that his seeming weakness masks a secret potency at which his enemies can only guess. In “Conversation about Dante,” Mandelstam celebrates a fantastic, monstrous falcon who magically appears in Canto XVII of the Inferno and disappears, again for no apparent reason, at the Canto’s end. This falcon, Mandelstam insists, expresses the very essence of Dante’s art; it is “irreplaceable precisely because it is unnecessary” (CPL, 415). This is the volatile combination to which Mandelstam aspires in the late verse. The poet whose art has been declared superfluous by the Soviet state must learn from Dante and his falcon to make a virtue of the unnecessary, as he creates his poetics of powerful insignificance.

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

217

The phrase I have borrowed to describe Mandelstam’s late poetics derives from an early Futurist manifesto whose signatories comprise a list of those who should be, according to Silver Age poetic policy, ranked among Mandelstam’s fiercest aesthetic enemies: Mayakovsky, David Burliuk, Benedikt Livshchits, Aleksei Kruchenykh, and company. Mandelstam’s essays of the twenties, in particular, demonstrate that he himself was far from doctrinaire in his poetic judgments—Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov are for him, no less than Akhmatova, Khodasevich, and Pasternak, Russian poets “for all time” (CPL, 202)—and I will touch on his use and abuse of avantgarde poetics at various points in this chapter.5 This is not, however, the main reason that I have placed Mandelstam’s late poetics under the sign of a paradoxical “powerful insignificance.” This oxymoronic phrase can be taken in two different ways, which articulate, in turn, the chief alternating currents at work in the late verse. There is, in the first place, the triumphant poetry of what we might call “powerful insignificance” proper, the poetry in which the poet-Jew achieves a visionary force that is in direct, inverse proportion to his apparent marginality. This triumphant strain is countered by what could be called the poetry of doubt, the poetry prompted by Mandelstam’s persistent fear that he and his writing may indeed be, as the regime insists, hopelessly, helplessly insignificant—that is, unless they permit themselves to be taken over and reeducated by an omnipotent age. Mandelstam expresses these powerful fears in seemingly trivial, frivolous, or otherwise incongruous forms, and these poems, no less than the poems of success, mark the evolution of Mandelstam’s altered poetics. Mandelstam’s poetic ambitions had always involved a calculated courtship of catastrophe, and one of his most distinctive artistic gifts is his ability to address the prospect of failure in works that are stunningly innovative artistic successes: “The Horseshoe Finder” and “The Egyptian Stamp” are prime examples. Failure, however, takes on new meaning for the writer attempting to put the perverse precepts of “Fourth Prose” into poetic practice. Failure, as the state defines it, becomes a paradoxical badge of poetic success for the self-proclaimed outcast artist. “I shall never become a worker,” Mandelstam announces in “Fourth Prose,” and he restates his creed in a letter written in the same year: “I’m not a worker. I grow wilder with each passing day” (III, 261). Mandelstam’s self-proclaimed uselessness is programmatic in a worker’s state just beginning to enlist its poets into an elite corps of artistic “engineers of human souls.” Lenin had devised a blueprint for art in the service of the socialist state as early as 1905: literature was to be a “cog and a screw” in the great “Social-Democratic mechanism,” a slave to what would later be called partiinost’, party spirit. It was left to Stalin, though, to realize Lenin’s dream by inventing the literary equivalent of forced labor in the early thirties as he set loyal writers to work on the “ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism.” “Our epoch is not lyric,” Trotsky had noted in 1925. This did not stop Stalin’s literary henchmen from calling in 1930 for “po-

218

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

etry as socially responsible labor” that was to be performed by “poetic shock troops” busy overfulfilling newly proclaimed “five-year plans in poetry” as they built their new “Magnitostroys in literature.” Even Mandelstam’s patron and protector Nikolai Bukharin, a moderate by party standards, demanded, in his address to the First Soviet Writers’ Congress (1934), increased attention to “the objective, and also active, significance of the social function” of a new poetry profoundly “linked with the triumphant march of the millions and reflecting the tremendous creative impulses, the struggle, the building of a new world.”6 There was no place in Stalin’s brave new world for what Max Eastman calls the “totally impractical exhuberance” of the lyric spirit. Even the revolutionary hero John Reed, Eastman reports, supposedly remarked to his Bolshevik comrades-in-arms that “this class struggle plays hell with your poetry.” What Mandelstam discovers in the late verse is that poetry can play hell with the class struggle as well. In his classic essay on socialist realism, Andrei Sinyavsky calls Soviet art “the most purposeful art of our time”; in it “aimless rivers become arteries of communication” and “aimless trees become paper filled with destiny.” Mandelstam’s answer to this ruthlessly pragmatic art is a poetry of pointed aimlessness. The Ariosto of a 1933 poem taunts his hostile age with “senseless speech” and “spiteful nonsense,” and once again Mandelstam takes his cue from an inventively remembered poetic precursor (#267). In the “Moscow” and “Voronezh Notebooks,” he learns to make a virtue of futility as he shapes his aggressively useless poetics.7 This verse marks a new twist in the poetic path that Mandelstam had first begun to map out some two decades earlier. Nadezhda Mandelstam notes that “Fourth Prose” (1930) “cleared [Mandelstam’s] way to poetry”; poetry itself “returned to him on our trip home from Armenia,” where they had gone to escape the aftershocks of the Eulenspiegel affair.8 Poetic inspiration is, however, a tricky business. When it takes its leave, it may “not return at all/Or else return completely changed,” Mandelstam warns in an early poem (#25)—and indeed, the poetic voice that Mandelstam recovers in the thirties is not the same voice he lost in the mid-twenties. Mandelstam had been celebrated, or criticized, as one of the Silver Age’s most subtle and cultured poets, the antithesis of the vulgar Futurists. Viktor Zhirmunsky speaks for many critics when he finds in Stone’s second edition a disembodied poet who “never speaks about himself at all” and whose “poetry of poetry” deals only in “life as experienced in others’ art.” Iurii Tynianov echoes Zhirmunsky when he describes in “Interim” (1924) a poetry refined almost out of existence—real things no sooner enter it than they become mere “verse abstractions”—and a poet who speaks not in words, but “the shadows of words.” Mandelstam is, he insists, a “pure lyricist,” whose nuanced voice would be inaudible beyond the narrow bounds of his chosen “small forms.” And Roman Jakobson voices a similar reservation when he observes in “Recent Russian Poetry” (1921) that Mandelstam’s delicate

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

219

“chamber music” has become virtually inaudible in a clamorous, postrevolutionary Russian reality.9 What would these critics have made of Mandelstam’s defiantly personal, aggressively un-, even anti-, poetic later verse? By the time Mandelstam was writing what is arguably his greatest work, he had become a nonperson or worse in official literary circles, and those few critics who knew his later poems in their unsanctioned, hand-circulated versions would have discussed them, if at all, only very strictly off the record. Lydia Ginzburg, however, gives an indirect and telling answer to this question. She knew Mandelstam personally—she attended his private readings in the early thirties—and she was one of the first Soviet scholars to discuss his late lyrics in print after his partial, posthumous rehabilitation in the 1960s. In “Mandelstam’s Poetics” (1972), Ginzburg recognizes the break these lyrics mark in his work—but she resists the full implications of this break. Her Mandelstam, like Zhirmunsky’s or Tynianov’s, is something of an aesthete, a poet whose first and last loyalties lie with the “principle of beauty in art” even as he records, with increasing directness, a less-thanbeautiful Soviet reality. “In the poems of the thirties,” Ginzburg insists, the “conversation about the beautiful” that Mandelstam conducts in his work “sounds with even greater strength than it had in Tristia, probably because the mature Mandelstam had learned . . . to find beauty without the help of time-honored traditions.” Ginzburg is an acute critic, but here she gives only half the story at best. She was, of course, hampered by a cultural landscape in which, until recently, Mandelstam’s poetic and political perversities of the thirties were still officially off limits and could not be explored openly even by a critic of Ginzburg’s status. But she is also hindered by the canonical image of Mandelstam the impeccable Acmeist hungering for “world culture,” Mandelstam the steadfast opponent of Futurist ugliness, Mandelstam the cultural martyr to whom cosmos is, always and everywhere, infinitely dearer than chaos. She cannot fully come to terms with a Mandelstam whose poetry, in Iurii Levin’s pithy phrase, abruptly “stops being beautiful”: “Mandelstam’s address to his own [late] verse is no accident: ‘You, old-timer, tramp,/Time to start stomping your boots.’ ”10 Recent post-structuralist theories of the lyric have taught us to tease out the conflicts that lurk just beneath the surface of even—especially?—the most carefully constructed text. We do not need, however, to perform complex deconstructive surgery on even the early Mandelstam to find the necessary chaos that informs his culture from the start: we have only to think back to the Dionysian orgy that lies concealed within his programmatically Acmeist Notre Dame. Walter Benjamin notes that every true cultural achievement has its beginnings in barbarism. To Mandelstam, a “barbarian in the garden” of European culture, uncivilized origins are as crucial to art as the civilization that these origins both catalyze and contradict.11 This much is true from the start. This dialectic of culture and chaos

220

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

changes its nature and shape, however, as Mandelstam comes to define himself against the sanctioned art of the Soviet state. In the late work, barbarism and culture change places; when culture is preempted by a profoundly uncivilized regime, true writers must take their place among the barbarians at civilization’s gates. “There is nothing hungrier than the contemporary State,” Mandelstam warns in “The Word and Culture” (1921; CPL, 115). His fears were wellfounded; by the thirties, a voracious regime threatened to devour not only world culture, but world poetry as well. The collective greetings to Comrade Stalin issued at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers included a demand for an art that “will transform [the workers] into the true heirs of all world culture.” Bukharin echoes these remarks in his 1934 address on the state of the art (which was, of course, the art of the state), as he calls for “the creation of a new poetic culture in world history” founded on “the splendid heritage bequeathed [our poets] by the old masters of all times and peoples, the right to receive which has been given them by the triumphant proletariat, whose sons they now are.”12 Mandelstam, who does not stand to receive this heritage at proletarian hands, again follows the lead of his iconoclastic Dante as he creates a poetry whose sources lie well outside of literature proper, a poetry which derives its powerfully anticultural energy from what official culture has discarded: the senseless, the useless, the “thoroughly barbarized” (CPL, 447).

TWO POEM-JOKES If only you knew what sort of trash/ Verse grows from, knowing no shame. —Anna Akhmatova, “I’ve got no use for odic hosts” (1940)

“For a quarter of a century already, mixing the serious with the trivial, I have been bumping up against Russian poetry,” Mandelstam observes in a 1937 letter to Tynianov (CPL, 563). Mandelstam here transposes his entire poetic career into the key of the later poetry, with its abrasive, complex permutations of meaning and nonsense. Iurii Levin suggests that the late verse might be viewed in the light of its pervasive “unconventionality.” We might just as easily see “inconsequentiality” or “inappropriateness” as its key, for in it Mandelstam lets loose an impressive battery of undignified linguistic tricks and calculated poetic faux pas designed to affront his unsuspecting reader. His “metrical monstrosities,” Levin notes, “are almost indecent from the standpoint of normative Russian versification” and would have been unthinkable to the poet of Tristia or Stone; his diction is at times colloquial to the point of obscenity; and his wild punning produces “a grating effect unsuitable for ‘serious’ (not comic) poetry.” Levin finds in the late verse not Ginzburg’s cult of the beautiful, but a sustained,

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

221

and disconcerting “rehabilitation of ugliness,” and the poetic evidence would seem to favor Levin’s interpretation.13 Let us turn, in this context, to two of Mandelstam’s inappropriate poem-jokes of 1931, “I’ll tell it to you absolutely straight” (#226), and “Aleksandr Gertsovich” (#228). Q ska'u tebe s poslednej Prqmotoj% Vse liw; bredni, werri-brendi, Angel moj@ Tam gde /llinu siqla Krasota, Mne iz hernyx dyr ziqla Sramota. Greki sbondili Elenu Po volnam, Nu, a mne solenoj penoj Po gubam@ Po gubam mne poma'et Pustota, Strogij kukiw mne poka'etó Ni]eta. Oj-li, tak li,óduj li vej li,ó Vse ravnoó Angel M/ri, pej koktejli, Duj vino@ Q ska'u tebe s poslednej Prqmotojó Vse liw; bredni, werri-brendi, Angel moj! I’ll give it to you absolutely Straight: It’s all blarney, sherry brandy, Angel mine! There, where for the Hellene Beauty shone, Disgrace gapes at me From black holes. The Greeks burgled Helen O’er the waves, So and I get salty sea-foam On the lips!

222

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

Emptiness smears My lips Beggary flips me The finger. Oy then, so then, blow then, go then— I don’t mind— Angel Mary, drink up cocktails, Guzzle wine! I’ll give it to you absolutely Straight— It’s all blarney, sherry-brandy, Angel mine!

"il Aleksandr Gercovih, Evrejskij muzykant. On Wuberta naverhival, Kak histyj brilliant. I vslast;, s utra do vehera, Zauhennu[ vxrust Odnu sonatu vehnu[ Tverdil on naizust;. Hto, Aleksandr Gercovih, Na ulice temno . . . Bros;, Aleksandr Skercovih, Hego tam, vse ravno . . . Puskaj tam ital;qnohka, Pokuda sneg xrustit, Na uzen;kix na sanohkax Za Wubertom letit. Nam s muzykoj-golubo[ Ne strawno umeret;, A tamóvoron;ej wubo[ Na vewalke viset;. Vse, Aleksandr Serdcevih, Zaverheno davno . . . Bros;, Aleksandr Skercevih, Hego tam, vse ravno . . . There once lived an Aleksandr Gertsovich, A Jewish musician. He drilled holes in Schubert, Like a pure diamond.

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

223

And from dawn to dusk, to his heart’s delight, He repeated by heart One eternal sonata Learned to a crisp. Why? Aleksandr Gertsovich, It’s gotten dark outside . . . Drop it, Aleksandr Scherzovich, What’s the point, it’s all the same . . . So let the Italian girl, While the snow still crunches, On the narrow sled, the little sled, Fly after Schubert there. I’m not afraid to die With my music-dove, But there—like a crow’s fur coat, I’d be hanging on the rack. It’s all, Aleksandr Hertzovich, Been spun out long ago . . . Drop it, Aleksandr Scherzevich, What’s the point, it’s all the same . . .

The perverse charm of Mandelstam’s poem-jokes is, unfortunately and inevitably, the first casuality of the literal translations I rely on here, and these particular poems might appear to be among the slightest and most perishable of Mandelstam’s late poem-jokes.14 But it is precisely because they seem initially to be so entirely ephemeral that I wish to consider them here, for in the late poetry the line that separates the serious from the frivolous is fine indeed, and the most flippant tone, the most irreverent diction and unprepossessing manner often direct us to exactly those places where tensions and turmoil are at their greatest. Mandelstam himself was no stranger in life to the unstable mixture of the serious and the trivial that characterize his late art. In her recollections of Mandelstam, Lydia Ginzburg describes the poet as a kind of idiosyncratic idiot-savante, and she identifies an engagingly oxymoronic blend of loftiness and slapstick as the heart of his “Mandelstamian holy-foolery (mandel’shtamovskoe iurodstvo)”: “He speaks in the language of his verse: tongue-tied (kosnoiazychno) . . . , grandiose, shameless. He never forgets, though, to crack jokes. . . . In the tender melody of his intonation . . . there is a kind of joyful, rhythmic slapstick (buffonada). He has at his disposal an everyday language, slightly bohemian, a little vulgar. . . . Am I jabbering too quickly? (Ne slishkom bystro ia taratoriu ) he asks at his readings.”15 Friends and enemies alike noted the mix of verbal playfulness and caustic wit that marked Mandelstam’s speech, and this mixture carries over

224

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

into the occasional comic poems that punctuate his more serious verse efforts from the start.16 The Filipoff/Struve edition of Mandelstam’s work provides us with a tantalizingly incomplete record of the comic poems, which remain, for the most part, strictly segregated from their more respectable poetic neighbors; they are ghettoized in the Collected Works beneath the slightly seedy heading of “Humorous Verses” (Shutochnye stikhi). This segregation ends, however, when we reach the “Moscow Notebooks.” Here and in the later “Voronezh Notebooks,” the “serious” and the “comic” are not only neighbors. They are roommates; they frequently dwell beneath the same poetic roof. Such unlikely cohabitations are themselves a trademark of the comic. Humor, as Sigmund Freud notes in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), “likes best to wed couples whose union their relatives frown upon,” and the “Moscow” and “Voronezh Notebooks,” with their ceaseless “generic and linguistic misalliances,” might be placed beneath the sign of what Freud calls “joke-work,” that is, the complex emotional and linguistic labor through which jokes ignite their explosive cargo of meaningful nonsense. Jokes for Freud are both delightful and deadly serious; they are significant precisely in the relief they give from the necessity of making sense in ordinary, accepted ways. Through their seeming absurdity, jokes allow us to toy with truths that our conscious minds and socially defined selves find too painful to contemplate (and here lies their affinity with nonsense verse, which likewise releases us from the dictates of common sense and social custom, and which works to “outrage all the sensibilities” of “proper and sensible people,” as one student of the genre puts it). Jokes allow us to articulate the unspeakable, and in the 1930s Mandelstam had a great many unspeakable things to say.17 The poems I have quoted are not jokes per se, but, like many of the witticisms Freud discusses, their seeming frivolity raises serious questions. If we were to find a place for them among Freud’s categories, it would probably be under the heading of “self-critical humor,” for in them Mandelstam does not attack the corrupt aesthetics of the Soviet age or the bastardized “world literature” he castigates in “Fourth Prose.”18 His own world culture is the butt of these bleak and clever poem-jokes. As such, they take their place among a series of poems in the “Moscow Notebooks”—most notably, “Leningrad” (#221), “With the world of power” (#222), “I drink to the martial asters” (#233), “I’m still nothing like a patriarch” (#251), “Midnight in Moscow” (#260), and “Today you can make decals” (#265)—in which Mandelstam struggles to make sense of a past that has become officially irrelevant. What is the relation, these poems ask, between the cultural legacy he had earlier cherished and a new reality that has no need of either his personal or his poetic history? The answer that Mandelstam comes up with in “I’ll give it to you” and “Aleksandr Gertsovich” is discouraging: none whatever, they seem to say. Under the guise of lyric buffoonery, these two poem-jokes allow Man-

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

225

delstam to construct a worse-case scenario in which the past he has worked to preserve becomes the cultural equivalent of the personal detritus that lines the pockets of “Fourth Prose” ’s poet-Jew: “Cryptic notes at least a year old, telephone numbers of dead relatives and addresses of unknown persons” (CPL, 323). In the poem-jokes, Mandelstam aggressively revises his and our measure of the cultural baggage he has been hauling about for two decades, and he uses every underhanded, poetically inappropriate trick in the book to weight the scale against this apparently useless past. “If not for Helen,/What would Troy alone mean to you, men of Achaea?” the poet of Stone had asked in 1915 (#78). “It’s all blarney, sherry brandy,” with or without the hapless, burgled Helen, comes the belated answer some fifteen years later. With their jingly rhythms and mangled, nonsensical rhymes, their malapropisms and neologisms, uncouth diction and wild wordplay, both poems might seem more at home in some Futurist anthology designed to affront cultured taste than among the poetic works of Osip Mandelstam, culture’s long-suffering champion. Indeed, Mandelstam apparently had some form of literary épatage in mind when he recited these poems, along with other recent lyrics, at a public reading that the Literary Gazette (Literaturnaia gazeta) managed to organize for him in 1932. If Mandelstam meant this reading to be a kind of “literary stock-taking,” as Iurii Levin speculates, then to judge by the reports of his shocked audience, “it was a most unusual one, and clearly set out to destroy ‘literary norms,’ ‘literary propriety’ (literaturnye prilichia).” The self-proclaimed renegade of “Fourth Prose” apparently set out to create his own avant-garde “performance-provocation,” and Levin suggests that “I’ll give it to you,” “Aleksandr Gertsovich,” and other unexpected poetic stunts were in large part responsible for the reading’s shocking effect.19 Another of the aggressively “improper” poems Mandelstam recited, “Wild cat, Armenian speech” (1930; #218), perhaps best suggests the nature of the affront to which Mandelstam’s audience was subjected. The lyric both describes and enacts the linguistic violence that is its subject. Its uncivilized speech assaults its auditor both literally (it “tortures me and scratches my ear,” the speaker complains) and figuratively: “Blank your mother! (Mat’ tvoiu tak!)”; “Go to hell. . . . Drop dead, get out of my sight (Propadom ty propadi. . . . Sgin’ ty navek, chtob ni slukhu, ni dukhu).” (The poem’s shock value still holds; try placing these lines in your mind alongside the phrase “Osip Mandelstam.”) Jokes, Freud observes, may take the place of an “inclination to invective . . . held in check by a highly developed aesthetic culture.”20 Soviet culture apparently lacks the power to check the flow of invectives that Mandelstam directs against it in “Fourth Prose” or “Wild cat, Armenian speech”; “Once we were people, but now we’re just scum (Byli my liudi, a stali liud’e),” he taunts his audience in “Wild cat.” In “I’ll give it to you” and “Aleksandr Gertstovich,” Mandelstam’s impulse towards invective takes a different direction. He turns it against the very idea of “aesthetic culture,”

226

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

and he himself, as much as his audience, is the target of his wit. In these poems Mandelstam takes on sacred topoi of his own earlier work—classical music, ancient Greece—and subjects them to scandalously disrespectful mistreatment. “Poetic speech,” he claims in “Conversation about Dante,” “creates its own instruments on the move and annihilates them likewise on the move” (CPL, 433). The same kind of creative self-destruction is at work in Mandelstam’s own self-lacerating humor (CPL, 433). Mandelstam’s Dante is himself a master of creative, comic self-deflation, and he thrives, like the Russian Futurists or the French Surrealists, on “literary scandals” he himself provokes (CPL, 404). Indeed, this Dante is the unacknowledged father of the modern avant-garde. With his “eternal dadaism” and “infantile transsense,” Dante preempts the experiments of his French and Russian offspring, and Rimbaud’s rainbow vowels pale by comparison with Dante’s flamboyant “alphabet of fluttering fabrics” (CPL, 399, 437). Through Dante, Mandelstam creates an idiosyncratic avant-garde with a history, a “futurism with a genealogy.”21 And Mandelstam shares his Dante’s avant-garde taste for jokes told at culture’s expense. Indeed, with their irreverent defacing of cultural sacred cows, Mandelstam’s poem-jokes might almost seem the iconoclastic verbal equivalent of, say, Marcel Duchamp’s mustachioed Mona Lisas. With, of course, one crucial difference: Mandelstam scrawls his linguistic graffitti on poetic portraits he himself has painted, and his mock-revisions are thus more self-critical and ultimately more poignant than the avantgarde pranks of Duchamp and the like. In “I’ll give it to you absolutely straight,” Mandelstam goes straight for world culture’s jugular. He takes on the ancient Greece whose distant light illuminates not only his own verse, but all poetry as such: “All of world poetry [is] a shaft of light sent out by Hellas,” he insists in “On the Nature of the Word” (CPL, 127). In “I’ll give it to you,” Mandelstam abruptly puts out this light: “There, where for the Hellene/Beauty shone,/Disgrace gapes at me/From black holes.” The latecomer to world culture has apparently missed the boat to ancient Greece, and nothing in the modern world can take the place of its compelling beauty. We’ve heard this song before, and not only from Mandelstam’s lips: it is a common enough refrain in modern culture, though one not often sung in this particular key. But Mandelstam takes his complaint one step further : “The Greeks burgled Helen/O’er the waves,/So, and I get salty sea-foam/On the lips!” He may have missed the boat, he seems to say, but the trip was probably overrated in any case. With one strategically miscast verb, sbondit’, “to rip off, to steal,” the abduction of Helen—the event that had, for the poet of Tristia or Stone, set all of Western culture into motion—is reduced to a grotesque opera bouffe, or worse, a commonplace case of petty larceny. It becomes, in short, nonsensical; and nonsense, not Helen, is what makes the world go round: “I’ll give it to you absolutely/Straight:/It’s all blarney, sherry brandy,/Angel mine!” “Hellenism is the warmth of the hearth experienced as something sa-

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

227

cred,” Mandelstam observes in “On the Nature of the Word” (CPL, 127– 28). A world set adrift without even the illusion of Hellenic comfort to cheer it is a cold place indeed, as Mandelstam demonstrates in the poem’s starkly antipoetic fourth stanza: “Emptiness smears/My lips,/Beggary flips me/The finger.” Reality as such has apparently taken lessons from the Soviet tram-goers who plague Mandelstam in another poem of the early thirties: “They still curse at me behind my back/In the language of streetcar squabbles,/In which there’s not an ounce of sense:/—You so and so (Takoi, siakoi)!” (#251). And the poet can counter the senseless hostility of this brave new world only with his own brand of senselessness, or so the poem’s fifth stanza suggests: “Oy then, so then—blow then, go then—/I don’t mind—/Angel Mary, drink up cocktails,/Guzzle wine!” This poetic senselessness takes on a peculiar resonance, however, if we remember that Mandelstam has already had a long history of entanglement with what are, by his own admission, “senseless words (bessmyslennye slova),” and this sacred senselessness, no less than Helen and the Greeks, takes us back in turn to Hellenism’s sacred flame and the heart of Mandelstam’s early verse. “I will pray in the Soviet night for the blessed senseless word,” Mandelstam had written in “We will meet again in Petersburg” (1920; #118), and both the poem and the collection in which it appears, Tristia, are full of powerfully “senseless” words stockpiled against “the dying of the light”: Petersburg, Cyprus, Troy, the Acropolis, Russia (Rossiia ), Rome, Orpheus, Persephone, Cassandra, Lorelei, and Salome, not to mention Helen and Hellas. The list is far from exhaustive, but it should suffice to remind us of the special place that “blessed” nonsense, foreign names and proper names, occupies in Mandelstam’s poetics of inventive recollection. “The song adorned with a name lives longer among the rest,” Mandelstam writes hopefully in “The Horseshoe Finder” (#136), and “I’ll give it to you” might seem initially to add yet another name, “angel Mary” (angel Meri), to Mandelstam’s already lengthy list of redemptive foreign muses.22 Mandelstam “loves proper names,” Tynianov writes, because they are only “the shadows of words”; they are souls without bodies, all nuance and no substance.23 By the early thirties, however, such suggestive, ephemeral nonsense has become a mixed blessing at best. The seductive foreign names that enticed the young Mandelstam cannot save him now, or so another poem of the early thirties implies: “I still repeat to myself on the sly: Lady Godiva, good-bye. . . . I can’t remember, Godiva. . . .” (#222). In the world of Mandelstam’s poem-jokes, such fragile, disembodied names apparently wither on contact with the rigors of a brutal age. In “I’ll give it to you,” Mandelstam orchestrates a rigged fight between old and new forms of senselessness. Helen is debased in the poem not only by her undignified abduction; she and the Greeks suffer as well from the unlikely linguistic company that Mandelstam forces them to keep. (Just as, pace Lydia Ginzburg, “beauty,” krasota, is degraded by its forced mésalli-

228

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

ance with a lowbrow partner-in-rhyme, sramota, “disgrace, dirty shame.”) “Helen,” “Hellene,” “Greek”—all three are knocked from the lofty linguistic pedestal they had formerly occupied by their proximity with other, far less venerable forms of foreign speech: “Angel Mary” (Angel Meri), “sherry brandy” (sherri-brendi), “cocktails” (kokteili). The ancient Greeks meet the Jazz Age at Mandelstam’s catastrophic cocktail party cum poem, and what emerges from this linguistic collision is simply a string of funnysounding foreign words, all democratically leveled to their common denominator of nonsense; it’s all Greek to me, the poet seems to say. Mandelstam linguistically hitches this foreign nonsense, in turn, to its native Russian counterpart. By inverting two letters in the third line, he turns the Russian word that means “nonsense,” “blarney,” “rot”—bredni—into a foreign word, brendi (brandy), that simply is nonsense, that conjures up little beyond its own nonsensical self in this context. Elsewhere, he pairs the Russian nonsense phrase vei li, “blow now,” with the decadent Western kokteili to produce an inventively mismated, “broken” rhyme worthy, perhaps, of a would-be Futurist, but far beneath the dignity of the Acmeist votary of world culture. In “I’ll give it to you,” Mandelstam intentionally steps on the throat of his own song; he comically profanes the senseless, sacred names that were to ensure the survival of his poetry and the culture it celebrates. What remains is nonsense, pure and simple, devoid of the redemptive cultural resonance that the poem evokes only to destroy. “I’ll give it to you absolutely straight,” the poet promises, and his message is bleak indeed: nonsense works to bury culture, not to save it. The way that Mandelstam chooses to give us this message is, however, anything but straight. The poem moves in exuberant zigzags of inventive senselessness that undermine its somber conclusion; indeed, its linguistic playfulness and mocking energy have as their source the same irreverent nonsense that seems to spell the end of world culture. Mandelstam may have stripped his senselessness of its sacral aura; what he has gained in return is the vast and powerful comic potential of nonsense, though he has not yet mastered its force. Mandelstam’s favorite form of nonsense, proper names, lends itself to just such ambivalent use and abuse. Proper names lie at the heart of what Andrew Welsh calls “the roots of lyric,” roots that encompass, at one extreme, magic charms, and at the other, riddles and jokes. In modern poetry and ancient cultures alike, Welsh argues, charms derive their potency from “the power and danger of names.” The primitive shaman, like the modern verbal magician, uses his repertoire of “magic names” taken from “distant or archaic dialects,” “obscure mythological references or topographical allusions,” to weave his “special language of webs of sound and irregular rhythms different from the language used to communicate ordinary meanings.” He thus endows his magic speech—nonsense to uninitiated ears— with an energy and force far beyond that of ordinary language. This is the verbal power that Mandelstam cultivates in the poetic incantations of Tris-

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

229

tia: “I have learned you, blessed words—Lenore, Solominka, Ligeia, Seraphita”(#86).24 These same names, though, can be turned to entirely different purposes; they move with disconcerting ease from the sacred to the profane. “Proper names in general fall easy victims” to joking mistreatment, Freud remarks, and his study of wit abounds in examples of names subjected to all sorts of comic abuse. They are dissected and dismembered only to be reassembled into a variety of undignified, compromising positions. Mandelstam was no stranger to such verbal play, and while his poetry proper attests to his love of highbrow Acmeist anagrams—Ronen notes his play on akme and kamen’, for example, or we might think back to the interwoven names of “Notre Dame”—his less “poetic,” less official, witticisms bear witness to his fondness for more undignified verbal tricks.25 Mandelstam’s verbal treatment of his great friend and colleague Anna Akhmatova testifies to the linguistically split personality of his poetic names. In the poems of Tristia and Stone, Akhmatova joins a sacred triumvirate of names—Phaedra, Rachel, Cassandra—that link her both to ancient Greece and to eighteenth-century France. But Mandelstam’s humor, no less than his poetics, was based on permutations of proper names, his widow notes, and he was not above taking sacred names in vain, as his mistreatment of his fellow Acmeist reveals. In an early verse epigram, her name is subject to comic dismemberment: “Akh! matovyj angel na l’du golubom,/Akhmatovoi Anne pishu ia v al’bom” (Ach! a matte angel on skyblue ice,/I write in Anna Akhmatova’s album) (#420; 1910s). The joke, slight to begin with, dissipates completely in translation; it consists in the original of a comic anaphora in which the first five syllables of the first line reproduce both Akhmatova’s surname and part of her given name while giving them an entirely new sense, as Akhmatova is punned into a matte angel. Freud refers to such puns as “joke-charades,” in which “a name is used twice, once as a whole and again divided up into its separate syllables, which, when they are thus separated, give another sense.” If we take this muted angel on ice as a playful reference to the melancholy self-portraits that Akhmatova so often sketches in her early verse, then we come up with a related type of joke, the “unification joke,” which defines a thing in terms of its own name. Akhmatova herself records a similar joke in her memoirs; puzzled by her growing involvement with the Moscow Art Theater, MKhAT in its Russian abbreviation, Mandelstam punned, “Kak otorvat’ Akhmatovu ot MKhAT-a?” (How can we tear Akhmatova from MKhAT?) Mandelstam’s anagrammatic tongue-twister comically enacts the dilemma it describes: Akhmatova’s very name binds her to the theater from which he seeks to free her.26 Nadezhda Mandelstam notes that her husband specialized in such humor—he composed a whole series of “margulets” on the subject of his friend Aleksandr Margulis—but, she warns, these jokes were generally intended for domestic consumption only.27 “Aleksandr Gertsovich” initially seems to belong among the ranks of such topical, personal jokes. It was

230

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

inspired by the singularly uninspired playing of a neighbor of Mandelstam’s brother—as in the poem, his piano could apparently be heard at all hours—and the poem itself is a running joke on its hapless hero’s name: Aleksandr Gertsovich becomes Aleksandr Scherzovich, who is metamorphized, in turn, into Aleksandr Herzovich (the original puns on the Russian for “heart,” serdtse). “Jokes that ‘play about’ with proper names often have an insulting and wounding purpose,” Freud notes, and certainly Aleksandr Gertsovich’s initial transformation, into Aleksandr Scherzovich, points to his musical ineptitude, to his rapid, mechanical butchery of the unfortunate Schubert.28 His second incarnation, as Aleksandr Herzovich, takes us, however, in a very different direction. The second nickname contradicts the first; the human metronome has a heart. This contradiction, in turn, hints at the ambivalence that colors Mandelstam’s parodic ditty, and at the underlying sympathy that turns his would-be caricature into something like a self-portrait. “Lord! Do not make me like Parnok!” the narrator of “The Egyptian Stamp” begs (POM, 171), and Parnok, part hero, part doodle, part reluctant portrait of the artist, occupies the same discomfiting no-man’s-land as Aleksandr Gertsovich does. One bond between poet and hero, in the poem as in the novella, is Jewishness. Freud observes that a Jew telling Jewish jokes is necessarily engaged in a form of self-criticism; unlike Jewish jokes told by gentiles, though, such jokes are not hostile, but benign and even positive, demonstrating as they do a thorough knowledge of Jewish foibles as well as Jewish virtues. Freud does not explore the reverse side of this humorous self-criticism, which is the onus of self-hatred that such self-critical jokes frequently conceal. Certainly, Mandelstam’s own poetic Jewish joke indirectly poses a variant of the question that had plagued him from the start. “What does a Jew have to do with Russian poetry?” is the question implicitly posed as much by Mandelstam’s own writing as by early criticism of that writing. “What does a Jew have to do with Schubert?” is the disturbing variation on this theme that the Jewish musician’s relentless playing cannot entirely drown out.29 Richard Wagner had already asked, and answered, this question much earlier in his infamous, influential “Jews in Music” (1850)—his response was an all-too-predictable “Nothing whatever”—and Mandelstam himself had experienced the effects of such prejudice firsthand, as his autobiography demonstrates; in segregated Riga, he recalls, German symphony orchestras played resplendent Strauss just beyond the ghetto walls, while “in the Jewish section babies’ diapers hung from lines, and piano scales would gasp for breath” (POM, 93).30 But to speak of Mandelstam and the end of music—“It’s all been spun out long ago,” he tells his misguided semblable and frère—necessarily takes us far beyond the problems of anti-Semitism and self-hatred. “You have loved Mozart in vain,” the French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck proclaims as he guides the poet through a chilling netherworld of pre-human beings (#254). The end of music had always

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

231

meant the end of culture itself for Mandelstam, and if “I’ll give it to you” puts a parodic spin on Mandelstam’s beloved Hellenism, then “Aleksandr Gertsovich” plays a comic variation on an equally lofty theme. We might almost read it as a kind of despairing music hall parody of Mandelstam’s own moving dirge on the death of music, “Concert at the Railway Station” (1921; #125). “Music sounds for us for the last time,” the speaker laments in the earlier poem, and a mocking, jingly echo returns a decade later: “I’m not afraid to die/With my music-dove” (Nam s muzykoi-goluboiu/Ne strashno umeret’).”31 This mock despair is, however, anything but playful. Here, as in “I’ll give it to you,” Mandelstam’s verbal games are in crucial ways deadly serious. The apparently good-natured raillery that begins and ends both poems gives way in the middle to a despair barely masked by the foolish company it keeps; each poem-joke opens in the middle to reveal a poet at his wit’s end. The mocker of “I’ll give it to you” is himself mocked by emptiness and beggary in that poem’s fourth stanza, while the penultimate stanza of “Aleksandr Gertsovich” presents the poet with a chilling choice: to die with his beloved music or “to hang on a coatrack like a crow’s fur coat.” This last image in particular is haunting and suggestive in ways that far exceed the needs of mere parody; it is genuinely poetic and thus seems oddly out of place surrounded by the strains of second-rate Schubert.32 But this is precisely the point of Mandelstam’s poem-jokes; true poetry is sadly out of tune with the new age, and the poet is necessarily reduced to parodic ditties that spell the death of his art in more ways than one. The medium is the message in these poems. With true music ended, the poet himself can only mimic the singsong, monotonous beats of badly played Schubert (and the bouncy, repetitive rhythms of “Aleksandr Gertsovich” do just that). When the sacred, senseless names that illuminate verse have lost their magic, one must make do with mere nonsense, and this is exactly what Mandelstam gives us in “I’ll give it to you.” With poetry bereft of music and meaning, the best a poet can hope to do is go out joking, or so these poems suggest. This is, however, far from Mandelstam’s last word on the subject. At the end of “Fourth Prose,” “a German organ-grinder passes with a barrel organ playing Schubert” and then promptly disappears into the linguistic cacaphony that ends the text, only to resurface five years later in Mandelstam’s unproduced radio script on Goethe’s youth. “The raucous vagabond barrel-organ is better than concert music,” Mandelstam insists in the script, and he provides this inelegant instrument with an equally undignified accompaniment: “The mooing of fattened Tyrolean cows seems full of meaning and life, as if the earth itself had found a voice and were telling us how well the autumnal downpours nourished her” (CPL, 325, 465). In a world where meaning and music have ceased to exist in the traditional sense, the poet must put a very untraditional spin on both; in a state in which “high culture” has been put at the service of Soviet orthodoxies, the

232

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

poet must learn to remake culture in highly unorthodox ways. He must learn, in short, to play Schubert on a barrel organ: the very joke-techniques that seems to mark the death of culture in Mandelstam’s poem-jokes must become the means of culture’s survival.

THREE POEM-STROLLS This is precisely what happens in the “Voronezh Notebooks,” where playing games with sacred names becomes a matter of poetic life and death, and I will return to these names in this chapter’s conclusion. But I want to turn here from Mandelstam’s creation, or desecration, of culture to his accompanying self-creation—for his revised poetics call for a revamped poetic self as well. He must proceed to yet another stage in his ongoing self-invention, and once again he uses prose to anticipate the shape his poetic self will take. “Fourth Prose” has already gone ahead to scout out the territory that this self will occupy in its new incarnation: it is the “anticultural” no-man’sland of Mandelstam’s poet-Jew, and this no-man’s-land would appear to be the homeland of Mandelstam’s particular brand of wit. One of Heinrich Heine’s anti-Semitic critics claimed that the German poet’s Jewishness betrayed itself precisely in his sense of humor: “It is Heine’s ‘wit’ that reveals his pathology. . . . There is a specific Jewish ‘wit,’ which is manifested in the Jews’ love for wordplay, for an undermining of the surface meaning of the word and an emphasis on the word rather than on the thing it represents.”33 Humor as Jewish pathology is a suspect notion indeed; certainly, though, one mark of the creatively construed Jewishness of “Fourth Prose” is wit. The text is peppered with everything from epigrams to anecdotes and Jewish jokes, and this verbal play, colored by what might be politely described as humor noir, is the trademark of “Fourth Prose” ’s vitriolic poet-Jew, whose secret brand of streetwise humor thrives while the powers-that-be sleep: At night along the Ilinka, when the department stores and trusts are at rest and conversing in their native Chinese, at night along the Ilinka jokes and anecdotes circulate/go strolling [khodiat anekdoty; Mandelstam is playing on two meanings of the verb khodit’]. Lenin and Trotsky stroll (khodiat) embracing, as if nothing had ever come between them. One carries in his hand a pail and a fishing rod from Constantinople. Two Jews stroll (khodiat), an inseparable pair; one—the inquirer, the other—the respondent. (CPL, 325; II, 192)

As Mandelstam realizes his metaphor of the wandering jokes, political anecdotes (Lenin and Trotsky) and Jewish humor (the interrogative Jews) become unlikely companions as they make their nocturnal rounds together. Indeed, these wandering jokes with their illicit content—and nothing could be further off limits than Trotsky in 1930—bear a distinct resemblance to Mandelstam in his new role of outcast poet-Jew, always on the

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

233

outskirts of culture proper. In fact, jokes by definition, or at least by Freud’s definition, coincide in striking ways with Mandelstam’s own selfpresentation in “Fourth Prose” and elsewhere. Jokes, Freud observes, frequently smuggle their contraband content into socially acceptable speech by using oblique and indirect routes to tell us their unseemly truths: “A joke is a double-dealing rascal who serves two masters at once” by way of its “double-sidedness,” its “duplicity in speech.”34 It employs the same verbal techniques as does the Mandelstam of “Fourth Prose” who “saves himself by evading” (CPL, 323), and it is clearly akin to the poet of “Slate Ode,” who strategically uses his own “double-sidedness” to evade self-definition: “Who am I? Not an honest mason, not a roofmaker or boatmaker: I’m a double-dealer, with a double soul” (1923; #137). This Mandelstam, like Freud’s joke, is ambiguity incarnate, and he revels in his “contradictory,” “two-faced” song (#287). Freud’s jokes hide behind a façade of unassuming foolishness precisely because “they have something—forbidden—to say.”35 Not only did Mandelstam have something forbidden to say in the Moscow of the early thirties; it was all but forbidden for him to say anything at all, at least in public. And in surreal and sinister Soviet Moscow, even the unofficial poet’s sotto voce existence was far from safe. The stars themselves, like “clerical birds,” are busy writing up reports, according to one poem, and the walls of Soviet apartments are “too damned thin,” another warns (#219; #272). (Mandelstam’s suspicions, however hyperbolically expressed, were more than justified; he was arrested as the result of an unpublished poem read privately to friends.) Both Mandelstam and his poetry were officially off limits—but they found themselves in good company. According to Boris Eikhenbaum, the lyric “I” itself “was nearly taboo” following the revolution.36 Mandelstam’s exclusion from the ranks of the official litterateurs, then, follows the fall from grace of his chosen genre: their fates run parallel. Mandelstam himself had noted in “Literary Moscow” (1922) that the postrevolutionary era placed a premium on “anonymous prose,” disdaining “everything accidental, personal, and catastrophic (the domain of the lyric)” (CPL, 152). The lyric, along with the accidental, personal and catastrophic existence of its maker, is bracketed off from postrevolutionary reality; it is confined to a parenthetical existence on the age’s peripheries, as Mandelstam’s definition graphically demonstrates. “The larger the ambition,” Lawrence Lipking observes, “the more a poet must learn to live with a consciousness of failure.” In my reading of Mandelstam’s life and work, I have stressed his vaunting poetic ambitions and his many unlikely successes in converting a recalcitrant past and turbulent present into the very stuff of world culture. Through this creative alchemy, the place of the poet in universal history repeatedly turns out to be exactly the place where Mandelstam happens to be. I also have spoken, in various contexts, of Mandelstam’s double vision and double self. He is the Jew double-dealing in gentile society, the émigré who infiltrates to the

234

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

heart of Russian culture, the modern poet who thrives on revising the past, the classical revolutionary, the serious joker, and so on. These doubled identities revolve around the crucial, paradoxical task of turning the peripheral, or parenthetical, poet into culture’s center without forcing him to relinquish his outcast status. He must enact, time and again, what JeanPaul Sartre sees as the chief episode in the life of the modern poet: “the case of the loser winning.”37 Mandelstam’s ideal poet is an embodied oxymoron: the outcast who redeems Western culture, the nobody who speaks for all humanity, the winning loser. One model for this figure is Christ himself, whose nature and message are innately, profoundly oxymoronic. The son of God is born to the humblest son of humankind; he preaches that the lofty shall be brought low and the low will be raised high; he suffers and dies so that humankind may live, while he himself ascends to eternal glory; and, perhaps most importantly for a poet in Stalin’s “pre-Gutenberg era,” he writes down nothing himself, but his words survive to shape and teach the ages through the efforts of selfless disciples. (“Did they publish André Chenier?” Mandelstam chastised one frustrated young poet. “Did they publish Sappho? Did they publish Jesus Christ?”)38 In this ambitious model, earthly insignificance is posthumously rewarded with lasting power and glory. Mandelstam discovered a more modest version of the poet’s oxymoronic mission early on in the Baratynsky he cites approvingly in “On the Interlocutor.” His “gift is poor,” Baratynsky admits in the poem Mandelstam quotes, but his “quiet voice” will carry nonetheless far beyond the confines of his age to reach a “distant heir,” his longed-for “reader in posterity” (CPL, 68). The young Mandelstam follows his lead in insisting that the small, still voice is destined to outlast the stentorian tones of overbearing Symbolist poet-prophets. With far fewer hopes for his own age than even Baratynsky had been able to muster, the older poet must have even greater faith in the readers of the future if he is to fulfill his oxymoronic destiny. He may be “lower than the grass,” as the Russian saying goes, but his buried voice will echo through the ages: “Yes I lie in the earth with moving lips,/ But every schoolchild will learn my words” (1935; #306). “Throw away the manuscript, but keep whatever you have inscribed in the margins,” the narrator bids us in “The Egyptian Stamp”(POM, 187). The more Mandelstam himself is thrust to the margins of his age, the more he must seek to convince his hypothetical readers, and himself, that his marginal doodles speak louder than do the age’s texts printed “on official paper” (CPL, 415). If the poet, like his verse, is forced to take up residence in parentheses, he must struggle to persuade both himself and posterity that parenthetical lives and writings are the only ones worth preserving. “The modest exterior of a work of art often deceives us with regard to the monstrously condensed reality contained within,” Mandelstam insists early on, and the notion is crucial to his later life and art (“The Morning of Acmeism”; CPL,

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

235

61). Both are endowed, his late writings argue, with a secret significance, a lasting power that is inversely proportionate to their unprepossessing appearance. The difficulties of sustaining such beliefs are obvious; history’s odds did not favor Mandelstam. However, another of Mandelstam’s remarkable gifts is his ability to shape great poetry from the contemplation of failure. This skill was to prove invaluable in the late work, written at a time in which failure must frequently have seemed infiitely closer at hand than poetic success of any kind, let alone success on the cosmic scale envisioned by Mandelstam at his most ambitious. In Mandelstam’s ideal artist of the thirties, success and failure join forces. More precisely, seeming failure merely disguises this artist’s secret triumphs: he is the buffoon, the holy fool, whose nonsense conceals an indestructible kernel of abiding truth. This is the image of the poet that Mandelstam develops in his idiosyncratic, moving elegies on Andrei Belyi’s death. His Belyi is, as we might expect, in crucial ways an oblique self-portrait of the artist. He is the poet-as-oxymoron par excellence—“Turquoise teacher, martyr, master, jester”—who dons his “holy fool’s cap” to produce an appropriately paradoxical poetic “mess” (kavardak): “unintelligible-intelligible, incomprehensible, entangled, easy” (1935; #288). This Mandelstamian Belyi—and the last quote in particular is an apt description of Mandelstam’s own late poetics—is the poetic counterpart of the “faintly ridiculous little” pianist of a 1931 poem who is Mandelstam’s answer to his benighted Aleksandr Gertsovich. Like Aleksandr Gertsovich, “Master Heinrich” is laughable—Mandelstam calls him a “hunch-backed little horse”—but for this pianist, seeming absurdity serves only to mask the true artist hidden within.39 Unlike Mandelstam’s earlier pianist-as-clown, Master Heinrich does not mechanically repeat the past; he actively reinvents it: Ne prel[dy on i ne val;sy I ne Lista listal listyó V nem lilis; i perelivalis; Volny vnutrennej pravoty. (#234) He played neither preludes nor waltzes, He didn’t leaf through the sheaves of Liszt— In him flowed and flowed over Waves of inner righteousness.

This unlikely artist shares Mandelstam’s own cosmic aspirations; he plays “so the world might be wider, for the sake of worldwide complexity” (chtoby mir stal prostornei/Radi slozhnosti mirovoi). A lofty ambition indeed—but what if the sense of inner rightness should falter? What if universal complexity turns out to be merely localized, private

236

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

confusion? What if poetry and the poet deserve their prison-house in parentheses? Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls her husband commenting “that the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution owed much to a happy choice of party name—one that was bound to inspire confidence and success with its associations such as sam-bol’shoi (independent landowner) or bol’shoi chelovek (great man)” (the word Bolshevik derives from the Russian root meaning “great” or “large” in its comparative form bol’she).40 Mandelstam improbably endows the Bolsheviks with his own playful, punning mind here, but his observation derives from a very great faith in the powers of language, and a very real fear that these powers may now lie with the powers-that-be, and not with the disenfranchised poet. His insignificance may be exactly what it seems, and his holy-foolery is perhaps nothing more than the outdated vagaries of a poet grown old before his time. These troubling possibilities compete with Mandelstam’s larger visions of the poet and poetic language in three of his most important Moscow poems: “I’m still nothing like a patriarch” (1931; #251), “Midnight in Moscow” (1932; #260), and “Today you can make decals” (1932; #265). I’m still nothing like a patriarch, I’m still at a semi-venerable age, People still curse at me behind my back In the speech of streetcar squabbles, Without an ounce of sense: —You so and so!—All right then, I apologize, But I don’t change a bit deep down inside . . . When you stop to think what binds you to the world, You can’t believe yourself: it’s nonsense. The midnight key to someone else’s flat, And the silver dime inside your pocket, And the celluloid from a gangster film . . . Like a puppy, I rush to the phone At every hysterical ring,— I hear a Polish “Dzi‘kuj‘, panie!”— Or a tender, long-distance reproach Or a promise left unkept. You keep thinking: what could you learn to like Amid the Christmas poppers and the firecrackers— You’ll work yourself up—but look out, what remains Is only Confusion and Unemployment— Go ahead, go bum a light off them! I’ll grin, I’ll modestly take on airs And I go out with my fair-haired cane, I hear sonatas in the narrow lanes,

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

I lick my lips at every hawker’s stand, I leaf through books in the muck under gates And I don’t live, but I live on just the same. I’ll go out to the sparrows and reporters, I’ll go out to the street photographers, And in five minutes, like a shovel from a bucket, I’ll get back my portrait Beneath the cone of lilac Mount Shah. Or else I’ll set out on errands In steamy, stuffy cellars Where clean and honest Chinamen Seize balls of dough with sticks, And play with narrow, sliced-up cards And drink vodka, like Yangtze sparrows. I love the starling tramcars setting out And the Astrakhan caviar of the asphalt Covered with straw matting Like a basket-bottle of Asti, And the ostrich feather reinforcements They use to start building Lenin projects. I enter museums’ splendid dens, Where Kashchei’s Rembrandts swell, Having achieved the sheen of Cordovan leather; I marvel at Titian’s horned mitres And I marvel at motley Tintoretto’s Thousand screeching parrots . . . And I want so badly to cut loose, To warm up to my subject, speak the truth, To send my gloom to haze, to blazes, straight to hell, To take someone by the hand: be so kind— I’d say—you and I are heading the same way . . . MIDNIGHT IN MOSCOW Midnight in Moscow. The Buddhist summer is splendid. With pattering feet the streets disperse in narrow iron boots. The rings of boulevards are blissful in black pockmarks. Even at night Moscow can’t settle down. When peace runs out from under hooves, You’ll say—somewhere out there on the firing range, Two clowns have set up shop—Bim and Bom, And got their little combs and hammers going.

237

238

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

First you hear the mouth organ, Then a child’s tiny piano— Do-re-mi-fa And sol-fa-mi-re-do . . . Time was, when I was younger, I’d go out In a patched gum coat Into the broad-boughed boulevards, Where a little gypsy’s matchstick legs beat against long skirts, Where the arrested bear strolls— Nature’s own eternal menshevik, And the smell of cherry-laurel overflowing . . . Where do you think you’re going! There aren’t any cherries or laurels . . . I’ll tighten up the bottle-weight On the wide-swinging kitchen clock. Time’s fur is remarkably rough, But just the same I love to catch it by the tail: After all it’s not to blame for its own flight, And I guess it cons us just a tiny bit. Back off! No begging, no complaining! Hush! Don’t whine! Did the raznochintsy Stamp their cracked boots so that I could betray them now? We’ll die like foot-soldiers, But we won’t glorify greed or day-labor or lies! Only a spider web’s left of our old Scottish plaid— When I die, you’ll wrap me in it like a military flag. Let’s drink, old pal, to our barley grief— Bottoms up! From the packed and worn-out movie houses, As if chloroformed, dead Crowds emerge. How veined they are, How badly they need oxygen! It’s time you knew, I’m a contemporary too, I’m a man of the epoch of the Moscow Garment Combine, See how my jacket bristles on me, How I can speak and strut! Just try to tear me from the age! I swear you’ll end up wringing your own neck! I speak with the age, but does it really Have a hempen soul, was it really

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

Born on the wrong side of the sheets, Like some wrinkled little beast in a Tibetan temple That scratches itself, then hops into its zinc-lined tub— Show us another one, Marya Ivanna! It may offend you—but get this: There’s a lechery of labor and it’s gotten in our blood. It’s already getting light. Gardens hum like a green telegraph. Raphael comes to pay a call on Rembrandt. He and Mozart just adore Moscow For its hazel eye, for its summer drunkenness. And like pneumatic mail Or Black Sea jellyfish aspic Breezes pass from one apartment To the next on an aerial conveyer, Like May students playing hookey . . . Today you can make decals Of the brigand Kremlin, by dipping Your little finger in the Moscow River. How lovely Those pistachio dovecotes are— You might even sprinkle them with millet or with oats! And whom do we count among the minors? Ivan the Great— His overgrown bell-tower Just stands there like the monumental blockhead That is the age. Send him abroad To complete his education. But what’s the point! . . . Disgraceful. The Moscow River in four smokestacks’ haze, And before us the whole city opens out— Factories bathing and suburban Gardens. Isn’t it like Throwing back the rosewood lid Of an enormous concert grand piano And penetrating to its sounding depths? Men of the White Guard, have you seen it? Have you heard Moscow’s piano? Coo, coo, coo! It seems to me, like every other time, You, time, are illegitimate. . . . Like a little boy Following the grown-ups into the wrinkled water, It seems that I’m entering the future And it seems I won’t be there to see it. I can’t keep up with young men any longer As they enter the stadium’s ruled lines.

239

240

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

Awakened by a motorcycle’s signal, I don’t leap up from my bed at dawn, And I won’t cast even a faint shadow Into glass palaces standing on hens’ legs. My breathing grows more labored every day, But all the same I can’t delay— For only the hearts of men and steeds Are born for the pleasures of the race. . . . But Faust’s devil—dry and well-preserved— Throws himself once more on the old man’s rib, And urges him to take up boating for a bit, Or to wave at the Sparrow Hills, Or to whip through Moscow on a tram. . . . Moscow’s got no time for that today: she’s on nanny duty— She’s rushing around forty thousand cradles, She’s all alone, with yarn on her hands.41

I began this section with the nocturnal ramblings of jokes and anecdotes with which Mandelstam concludes “Fourth Prose.” In the poems I have just quoted—works that Iurii Levin calls, in a lovely phrase, Mandelstam’s “poem-strolls (stikhi-progulki)”—Mandelstam himself takes up where his wandering jokes left off. “Mandelstam was a wanderer, a nomad, and the very walls of Moscow houses shied away from him,” his widow notes, and she recalls that Mandelstam himself composed, like his Dante, na khodu, on the go. “How many shoe soles, how many oxhide soles, how many sandals did Alighieri wear out during the course of his poetic work, wandering the goat paths of Italy?” Mandelstam asks “in all seriousness” in “Conversation about Dante,” and it is no coincidence that he himself commands his verse to abandon the “hackwork walls of Moscow’s evil lodgings” in a poem written, like the “Conversation,” in 1933. “Time to start stomping your boots,” he tells the “old-timer” and “tramp,” and he is quick to follow his own advice, as his poem-strolls demonstrate (CPL, 400; #272).42 The image that Mandelstam cultivates in these poems—the poet as perpetual outsider eternally on the move—is not new. We have seen it before, in the prose, from “François Villon” to “Fourth Prose” to “Dante,” and in the poetry from Stone—“I met a funeral while strolling” begins one early poem (# 37)—up to the “Moscow Notebooks,” which open with images of traveling (the Armenia sequence) and homelessness (“We can escape to the train station/Where no one would think to look for us,” ends one heart-wrenching lyric of 1931 [#224]). The migrations that mark Mandelstam’s family past, both ancient and modern, as well as his personal history, dictate the shape of his world culture from the start. Indeed, his entire poetic career might be placed beneath the sign of the traveler’s staff, the trostnik that guides Chaadaev and the poet-Jew, and that reappears in yet

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

241

another guise in “I’m still nothing like a patriarch”: “And I go out with my fair-haired cane” (s belokuroi trost’iu). These “poem-strolls” thus continue a venerable Mandelstamian tradition. But, true to form, they extend and alter this wandering legacy in the process of calling it to mind. The poem-strolls are not simply inspired by the poet’s ramblings; nor do they merely describe the wanderings that are in part their subject; and they do not confine themselves to taking as their hero a vagabond artist. They differ from Mandelstam’s earlier verse in their very makeup; as Levin’s coinage suggests, they are almost generically a breed apart. These poem-strolls are precisely that: meandering works whose very shape seems to be taken from the haphazard movements of their displaced creator. In this they are perhaps closer to “Fourth Prose” than to Mandelstam’s earlier verse. Formally, the poems are baggy monsters, or, in Levin’s phrase, “metrical monstrosities.” Their stanzas contain—at times wildly—-unequal numbers of lines; their metrical organization is erratic at best; and to speak of their rhyme schemes would be euphemistic in the extreme. They employ a full arsenal of slant rhymes, light rhymes, eye rhymes, internal rhymes, consonance and assonance, but to meet the occasional full rhyme in these poems is to be taken aback, as by something “from another opera,” in the Russian phrase. Regularity of any kind is highly irregular in Mandelstam’s wandering poems, as indeed it must be if he is to do justice to an ominously erratic, unpredictable age.43 In the context of modern poetry generally, these are not perhaps such striking innovations; readers of Eliot or Pound, Williams or Stevens may not be startled by Mandelstam’s audacity. In the context of Mandelstam’s own verse, however, and of a Russian tradition that has never really embraced the West’s vers libre, they are notable indeed. Had Russian admirers of Mandelstam known these poems—only “Midnight in Moscow” was published in his lifetime—they would presumably have seen in them yet another form of épatage, a slap in the face of the cultured taste that Mandelstam himself had worked to cultivate. “How is this different from Mayakovsky?” one disgruntled émigré critic wrote in 1961 apropos of “Midnight in Moscow,” and Mandelstam’s contemporaries might well have shared his sentiments.44 The poems provoke such reactions not only through their metrical irregularities and missing rhymes. Their erratic forms mimic and reinforce the unpredictable shifts of diction, tone, subject matter, style, and point of view that punctuate the poems. They are ungainly hybrids; they lack all sense of poetic decorum. They move from street-corner (or streetcar) cursing to vaudeville humor to lofty, rhetorical defiance to slangy self-deprecation with disconcerting ease: You so and so! All right then, I apologize, But I don’t change a bit deep down inside. (#251)

242

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

You’ll cook yourself over—but look out, what remains Is only Confusion and Unemployment— Go ahead, go bum a light off them! (#251) Back off! No begging, no complaining! Hush! Don’t whine! Did the raznochintsy Stomp their cracked boots so that I could betray them now? We’ll die like foot-soldiers, But we won’t glorify greed or day-labor or lies! (#260)

Traditionally lyric elements—meditations on nature, on the past, on death, on art—emerge only to be deflated by their decidedly un-, even anti-lyrical neighbors: Time was, when I was younger, I’d go out In a patched gum coat Into the broad-boughed boulevards, Where a little gypsy’s matchstick legs beat against long skirts, Where the arrested bear strolls— Nature’s own eternal menshevik, And the smell of cherry-laurel overflowing . . . Where do you think you’re going! There aren’t any cherries or laurels . . . (#260) Isn’t it like Throwing back the rosewood lid Of an enormous concert grand piano And penetrating to its sounding depths? Men of the White Guard, have you seen it? Have you heard Moscow’s piano? Coo, coo, coo! (#265)

Time and space cannot help us gain our bearings where tone and style have failed. The poems’ time frame is as skewed and disorienting as their diction: it can shift from a specific to a generalized present to a remembered past to a hypothetical future within the space of a stanza.45 Their spatial setting is equally disconcerting. The Moscow Mandelstam inhabits in these poems is as nightmarish and surreal as Gogol’s Petersburg or the Brezhnev-era Moscow of Benedikt Erofeev’s Moscow Circles (Moskva-Petushki [1974]). As in Erofeev’s novel, the public transportation of Mandelstam’s “bitch Moscow” (kurva-Moskva) guarantees passage only to perdition: “You and I will take the “A” and “B” lines/ To see which of us dies first” (1931; #232). Even Mandelstam’s remarkably expressive punctuation—a sign of things to come in the “Voronezh Notebooks”—conspires against our efforts to

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

243

make the poems cohere. Our progress through his lines moves in stops and starts, as Mandelstam’s deceptive road signs of dots and dashes, question marks, and exclamation marks repeatedly pull us up short and send us off in a different direction. Regardless of the route, we never reach our final destination: two of the three poems end inconclusively, trickling off into ellipses. Indeed, ellipses, that graphic shorthand for hesitation and uncertainty, might be the trademark for all three poems, perforated as they are by rows of little dots. The poet’s self is not exempt from the kind of continuous dislocation that marks the poems on other levels. The voice of lyric poetry in its purest form, T. S. Eliot observes, “is the voice of the poet talking to himself—or to nobody. . . . [It] is not primarily an attempt to communicate with anyone at all.”46 Eliot, of course, had the luxury of deciding if and when he wanted an audience for his verse, and by the time he made these remarks in 1953, he knew a large public was hanging on his every word, whether he chose to address them directly or not. Mandelstam declares his independence from contemporary readers early on; the poet writes only for posterity, he insists in “On the Interlocutor.” By the early 1930s, however, the state had taken the liberty of making this decision for him, and in his unsettling late portraits of the artist—“I’ll go out to the street photographers,/ And in five minutes, like a shovel from a bucket,/I’ll get back my portrait” (#251)—the strain of talking to himself, or to nobody, is palpable. The poignant conclusion of “I’m still nothing like a patriarch” speaks for itself—but it also speaks to itself, or so the poet fears: And I want so badly to cut loose, To warm up to my subject, speak the truth, To send my gloom to haze, to blazes, straight to hell, To take someone by the hand:—be so kind— I’d say—you and I are heading the same way . . . (#251)47

In the absence of any possible interlocutor—and Mandelstam’s Moscow is marked by its eerie isolation—the dialogue between self and soul that is for Eliot the essence of lyric poetry takes on disturbing forms. The poet shuttles back and forth between speaking as himself and at himself, and his second voice often countermands or contradicts the first: Time was, when I was younger, I’d go out In a patched gum coat Into the broad-boughed boulevards . . . Where do you think you’re going! . . . (#260) Time’s fur is remarkably rough, But just the same I love to catch it by the tail . . . Back off! No begging, no complaining! Hush! (#260)

244

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

These are not dialogues, but arguments, in which one self repeatedly steps on the throat of another’s song. The poet who is not persuaded by his own poetic voice can hardly hope to convince the age to heed his words. When Mandelstam makes the mistake of assuming the prophet’s mantle, of daring to speak for or against the age, he is himself the first to lay bare his illusions. In the seventh stanza of “Midnight in Moscow,” he speaks in a glorified, defiant “we” that represents, presumably, all of Russia’s disaffected raznochintsy —“We’ll die like foot-soldiers,/But we won’t glorify greed or day-labor or lies!”—only to have this “we” dwindle into the poet and the one threadbare companion (his “old-timer” verse perhaps) who will witness his inglorious death: “Only a spider web’s left of our old Scottish plaid—/When I die, you’ll wrap me in it like a military flag” (#260). He may defiantly claim his place in the age by addressing its inhabitants en masse: “It’s time you knew, I’m a contemporary too.” He may even claim implicitly to be their voice, the age’s unacknowledged spokesman: “Just try to tear me from the age!/I swear you’ll end up wringing your own neck!” But he is quick to puncture his own pretensions. He knows full well that the age has little use for the poet’s voice crying in the wilderness: I speak with the age, but does it really Have a hempen soul, was it really Born on the wrong side of the sheets, Like some wrinkled little beast in a Tibetan temple That scratches itself, then hops into its zinc-lined tub . . . (#260)

The age may be ignoble, but that is no guarantee that poetry and the poet are a match for this petty demon. They are no less trivial, and infinitely less powerful, for all their prophetic pretensions. In an early poem, Mandelstam describes an encounter with an old man wandering the Petersburg streets at dawn, a “disillusioned worker or a spendthrift in distress” who becomes in the young writer’s eyes a failed Verlaine, a would-be or hasbeen poète maudit: “He blasphemes and mumbles/ Disconnected words;/ He wants to prophesy” (“Starik,” 1913; #41). The poem’s mockery is gentle, lighthearted, and good-natured; the young poet gives no indication— how could he—of recognizing in his incoherent wanderer a portrait of the artist himself some twenty years on, or, to put it more precisely, a portrait of the artist’s worst fears. Mandelstam’s writing abounds in exuberant or defiant nomads, creative spirits who do their best work on their feet. What he gives us in his poem-strolls is the reverse side of these triumphant outsiders: the old-timer tramp whose disjointed mumblings may amuse the occasional passer-by, but whose attempts to prophesy prompt only pity at best. “I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter,” Eliot’s famous poet manqué mourns in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1911).48 The Mandelstam of the poem-strolls is not a fake poet, but he may be a failed poet—not a poet manqué, but a poet passé. His best days are behind him—

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

245

“I’m still nothing like a patriarch,” he insists in 1931, but he “can’t keep up with the young men,” he admits a year later—and the stuff of which his verse is made is indeed no great matter: “The midnight key to someone else’s flat,/And the silver dime inside your pocket,/And the celluloid from a gangster film” (#251). “When you stop to think what binds you to the world,” Mandelstam writes in “I’m still nothing like a patriarch,” “you can’t believe yourself: it’s nonsense”; and the lines that follow, in which he catalogs the inconsequential contents of his pockets, are a poignant poetic gloss on his earlier definition of the lyric as the realm of the accidental, the personal, and the catastrophic. Indeed, Mandelstam’s poem-strolls perhaps come closest of all his works to fulfilling this eloquent definition. In earlier verses, the personal and accidental impetus behind the text is transformed beyond recognition by the time it reaches the printed page. What was in the earlier work the raw material of lyric verse becomes, however, the very substance of the later writing; as Mandelstam reminds us in “Conversation about Dante,” true poetry is “raw material” by nature (CPL, 445). I have mentioned what we might call the accidental poetics of the poem-strolls: their intentionally half-baked rhymes and missing stresses, their haphazard stanzas and unpredictable diction. Other critics have noted the shift from an apparently impersonal “poetry about poetry” to a deeply, openly autobiographical “poetry about life” in the “Moscow” and “Voronezh Notebooks,” and this convergence of the accidental and the personal in the late verse is no accident.49 For Mandelstam the accidental and the personal are one and the same, at least until they meet with the transforming will of the poet who transmutes mere happenstance into necessity through the force of his art. “What is true of one poet is true of all,” Mandelstam insists in “The Word and Culture,” and he manages time and again to convert his own life into the exemplary, necessary life of all true artists, indeed, of art as such (CPL, 114). What had seemed incidental becomes essential; what had appeared to be eccentricity stands revealed as pivotal and central, as Osip becomes the os’, the axis around which worlds revolve;50 what looks like mere verbal embroidery becomes the very thread that culture hangs on, irreplaceable because it is unnecessary. This is Mandelstam’s ideal late poetics, the poetics of his Dante and his poet-Jew. But, as Eliot ruefully notes, the ideals that flourish in the poet’s essays may not take hold in his verse, rooted as it is in an intransigent reality that resists the poet’s transformative vision. The nocturnal wanderer in Eliot’s early “Preludes” interrupts his own reveries as he rudely revises his own poetic “visions of the street”: “Wipe your hand across your mouth and laugh;/The worlds revolve like ancient women/Gathering fuel in vacant lots.”51 Mandelstam engages in the same kind of self-revision throughout the poem-strolls as he checks, tests, and challenges the limits of his insignificant poetics: Are the accidents of his personal vision really worth preserving? Does his nonsense bind all of us to the world, or is it his alone? Can his marginalia triumph over the fixed codes of the centralized state? Or should

246

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

he learn to correct his peripheral vision? Mandelstam’s argument with himself goes to the heart of his poetic gifts as the poet-Jew takes turns quarreling with another self who sounds suspiciously like his antithesis, Parnok, the hapless half-poet, half-doodle of “The Egyptian Stamp.” “From childhood,” the narrator of “The Egyptian Stamp” records, “Parnok had been devoted to whatever was useless, metamorphosing the streetcar rattle of life into events of consequence,” events of consequence, that is, for Parnok himself, for he never succeeds in communicating these metamorphoses to anyone else: “He tried to tell women about this, but they did not understand him, for which he revenged himself by speaking to them in a wild, bombastic birdy language and exclusively about the loftiest matters” (POM, 157–58). Parnok, member of the “Society of Friends and Amateurs of the Last Word” and the “Circle for Grasshopper Chamber Music,” is “hooked on to the present age sideways” and thus cannot get a word in edgewise in the age’s heated conversations (POM, 157, 160). His accidental, personal, quasi-lyrical language is intended for domestic consumption only: To calm himself, he consulted a certain small, unwritten dictionary—-or rather, a register of little homey words that had gone out of use. . . . “Horseshoe.” That was the name for a poppy-seed roll. “Fromuga”—his mother’s name for the large, hinged dormer window, which slammed shut like the lid of a grand piano. “Don’t botch it.” This was said about life. “Do not command.” One of the commandments. (POM, 185)

Parnok’s idiosyncratic, outmoded speech is intended to envelope him in the past, not to engage him in the present: the directions on his homegrown dictionary read, “For use in case of misfortune and shock” (POM, 185). His limited linguistic aspirations directly oppose those of his more audacious brother, the poet-Jew, whose words erase the distance between life and death, heaven and earth, self and universe: Q bol;we ne rebenok. Ty, mogila, Ne smej uhit; gorbatogoómolhi@ Q govor[ za vsex s tako[ siloj, Htob n∏bo stalo nebom, htoby guby Potreskalis;, kak rozovaq glina. 1931 (#240) I’m no longer a child. You, grave, Don’t dare to teach the hunchback—shut your mouth! I speak for all with such force, That the mouth’s roof will house the sky, and the lips Will crack like rosy clay.

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

247

This is Mandelstam the apocalyptic poet-prophet at his most ambitious; through his wordplay and similes, the poet’s mouth becomes both heaven (as the palate, nëbo, becomes the sky, nebo, in an untranslatable pun) and earth (the “rosy clay” of the poet’s lips).52 He is a far cry from Parnok, who is himself consumed by life—“He is a lemon seed thrown into a crevice in the granite of Petersburg and will be drunk with black Turkish coffee by the winged night” (POM, 169)—and he is equally distant from the “hunger artist” of “I’m still nothing like a patriarch,” who helplessly “licks his lips at every hawker’s stand” and dines on roadside metaphors alone: “I love . . . the Astrakhan caviar of the asphalt/Covered with straw matting/ Like a basket-bottle of Asti.” These two extremes, Parnok and the poet-Jew, mark the outer limits between which Mandelstam moves in the poetry of the early thirties; the relations between selves within the poem-strolls is mirrored on a larger scale in the relations between poems within the “Moscow Notebooks” as a whole, as Mandelstam works to decide if his “trivial” verse is destined to remake the age or if it is the superfluous poet himself who must be made over (“Measure me, land, reshape me,” he implores in a poem of 1935 [#311]). One unsympathetic contemporary, Ilya Selinvinsky, noted that in the early thirties a new term appeared which summarized in one derisive pun all the relics of “bourgeois Western civilization”: “Mandelstamp” (I, 489). Mandelstam, whose very name becomes synonymous with the unwanted legacy of the past, must decide if his stigmatized name is, as he proclaims in “Fourth Prose,” truly a badge of pride, or if this “mandelstamp” is instead a latter-day variant on the “Egyptian stamp” that symbolizes Parnok, a stamp that loses its defining features as soon as it is postmarked by the age.53 Mandelstam does in fact have one model at hand for the poet-rebel who turns dross into gold by turning his back on his age’s expectations. This is Charles Baudelaire’s poète-chiffonnier, the ragpicker poet of “Le Vin des chiffonniers,” who bears, in Walter Benjamin’s description, a marked resemblance to Mandelstam’s Dante or his poet-Jew. Such poets, Benjamin writes, “find the refuse of society on their street and derive their heroic subject from this very refuse”: This new type is permeated by the features of the ragpicker with whom Baudelaire repeatedly concerned himself. One year before he wrote “Le Vin des chiffonniers” he published a prose presentation of the figure: “Here we have a man who has to gather the day’s refuse in the capital city. Everything that the big city threw away, everything it lost, everything it despised, everything it crushed underfoot, he catalogues and collects. . . .” This description is one extended metaphor for the procedure of the poet in Baudelaire’s spirit. Ragpicker or poet—the refuse concerns both, and both go about their business in solitude at times when the citizens indulge in sleeping; even the gesture is the same with both. Nadar speaks of Baudelaire’s “jerky gait” (“pas saccade”).

248

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

This is the gait of the poet who roams the city in search of rhyme-booty; it must also be the gait of the ragpicker who stops on his path every few moments to pick up the refuse he secretly encounters.

Baudelaire’s vision of the ragpicker-poet is prophetic; it anticipates the shape that the poetic vocation will take some sixty years later among the writers of the French avant-garde. Benjamin takes Apollinaire as his example of a twentieth-century ragpicker who scrounges for poetic inspiration on street corners. One might also mention André Breton and his aggressively anti-aesthetic surrealist wanderings, in verse as in life, or the streetwise poetry of Mayakovsky and his Futurist brethren, who assault bourgeois taste by celebrating the dregs, human and otherwise, that Russian culture proper relegates to its gutters.54 We may recall here that the Villon whose verse is a calculated slap in the face of late-medieval taste very likely came to Mandelstam by way of the nineteenth-century French poètes maudits, who found in Villon a poetic forefather. Mandelstam thus shares his ragpicking genealogy with the avant-garde poets who should be, according to orthodox Acmeist doctrine, his fiercest aesthetic enemies. 55 The Mandelstam of the “Moscow Notebooks” both does and does not belong to this ragpickers’ league, to the ranks of the poètes maudits who would seem to be the poet-Jew’s rightful comrades-in-arms. Like them, he occupies the margins of the society in which he lives; and like them, he defies this society by shaping his art from what official culture has discarded. There is, however, one crucial difference: this poet’s predecessors (the French Symbolists), and his contemporaries (the French Dadaists and Surrealists, the Russian Futurists), conduct their assaults specifically on bourgeois society and bourgeois tastes, in the hopes of creating an ideal future state that would share their avant-garde vision. Mandelstam has, on the other hand, been branded with the “mandelstamp” that marks the unregenerate bourgeoise, and the revolutionary society he offends is the very society that his avant-garde coevals struggled to achieve. He thus becomes the unlikely, at times unwilling, standardbearer for outlawed, outdated bourgeois values, and in the “Moscow Notebooks” the poet-Jew, at his most aggressive, is more than happy to oblige his critics by flaunting his political incorrectness. “I have strange taste,” the young poet confesses in a 1909 letter to his Symbolist mentor, Viacheslav Ivanov: “I love the patches of electric light on Lake Leman, the deferential lackeys, the noiseless flight of the elevator, the marble vestibule of the hotel, and the Englishwomen who play Mozart in a half-darkened salon for an audience of two or three official listeners. I love bourgeois, European comfort and am attached to it not only physically, but also emotionally” (CPL, 478). The attachment proved to be lasting; the accoutrements of bourgeois, European comfort that Mandelstam celebrates here resurface twenty-two years later in his poetic slap in the face of socialist taste, “I drink to military asters” (1931; #233). Appropriately

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

249

enough, this slap takes the form of a toast, which extols all the haute bourgeois ephemera that the new regime most deplores: Q p;[ za voennye astry, za vse, hem korili menq% Za barsku[ wubu, za astmu, za 'elh; peterburskogo dnq, Za muzyku sosen savojskix, Polej Eliskejskix benzin, Za rozy v kabine rols-rojsa, za maslo pari'skix kartin. Q p;[ za biskajskie volny, za slivok al;pijskix kuvwin, Za ry'u[ spes; anglihanok i dal;nix kolonij xinin, Q p;[, no e]e ne pridumal, iz dvux vybira[ odno% Veseloe asti-spumante il; papskogo zamka vino . . . I drink to military asters, to all that they’ve scolded me for, To a noble fur coat, to asthma, to a bilious Petersburg day, To the music of Savoy pine trees, to benzine in the Champs-Elysées, To the roses inside of Rolls Royces, to Parisian pictures’ oil paint. I drink to the waves of Biscay, to cream in Alpine jugs, To British ladies’ ruddy grandeur, to quinine from distant colonies, I drink, but I’ve not yet decided which of the two I will pick: A sparkling asti spumante or a Chateauneuf-du-Pape.

Mandelstam sets avant-garde épatage in reverse as the revolutionary insulter and the insulted bourgeoise change places in what Nadezhda Mandelstam calls this “sweet, humorous little verse” (milyi shutochnyi stishok). Nadezhda Mandelstam far underrates the force of her husband’s wit; Mandelstam’s blasphemous toast is anything but sweet (let alone “innocuous,” as Max Hayward’s translation would have it). According to Kovalenkov, its impact was such that Sergei Esenin himself apparently rose from the grave (he had committed suicide in 1925) to avenge the sullied honor of the state. “Esenin once even tried to beat Mandelstam,” Kovalenkov recalls. “And with good reason. After all he was the one who wrote: ‘I drink to the military asters . . . the benzine of the Champs Elysées . . . the quinine of distant colonies.’ ”56 In a discussion of the late lyrics, Vladimir Veidle laments the poem’s “intentional” celebration of “the superficial and the frivolous” at the expense of “serious” culture; “He has forgotten Greece here,” Veidle mourns. In Veidle’s reading of the Moscow poems, Mandelstam bids farewell to a tragically trivialized Hellas in “I’ll give it to you absolutely straight,” and all that remains to him after this “bitter” parting is the cultural trivia of his ironic poem-toast: English snobs, Alpine cream, and Parisian gasoline. World culture, according to this reading, has shrunk into what another, less sympathetic observer called Mandelstam’s “world of the epicure and the billiard marker.” It is possible, however, to read this poem

250

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

quite differently; the despairing “sherry brandy” of “I’ll give it to you” is a far cry from the exultant couplet that concludes the poet’s toast: “I drink, but I’ve not yet decided which of the two I will pick:/A sparkling asti spumante or a Chateauneuf-du-Pape.” The foreign nonsense that seems to mark the end of Mandelstam’s culture in “I’ll give it to you” serves a very different purpose in “I drink to the military asters.” World culture is played here in an intentionally trivial and comic key that does not diminish its power to provoke, and, as one Soviet critic charged, to “perpetuate capitalism and its culture.” The European traditions that Mandelstam both cherishes and challenges survive the onslaughts of a hostile age by way of the same idiosyncratic, avowedly bourgeois tastes that Mandelstam had cataloged for Ivanov.57 These tastes and the traditions they sustain are in far greater danger in the poem-strolls, which comprise, among other things, an ongoing critique of the limits and possibilities of peripheral vision. Let us return in this context to a phrase that lies at the heart of Mandelstam’s insignificant poetics: “When you stop to think what binds you to the world,/You can’t believe yourself: it’s nonsense.” We might summarize all the uncertainties of the poet’s position with one question: to whom does the ambiguous pronoun “you” (ty) refer here? Is it general or specific? Does Mandelstam mean to speak for all of us? Is nonsense, his nonsense, truly the stuff of which our lives are made? Or does he speak to and for himself alone? Is his nonsense merely private and personal, the poetic equivalent of the homespun dictionary with which Parnok seeks to shield himself from the shock of the new? “I’m still nothing like a patriarch” seems, of the three poem-strolls, to speak most clearly for this second point of view, for the poet as failure, as Parnok, for the parenthetical poet whose writing brackets him off from life instead of placing him squarely at its—imaginatively recast—center. His one attempt at defiance is couched in grudging apologies (“All right, then, I apologize,/But I don’t change a bit deep down inside”), and the poem itself is framed in missed connections and failed communications. It opens with the tram-goers whose nonsensical abuse (“People still curse at me behind my back/In the speech of streetcar squabbles,/Without an ounce of sense”) is clearly at odds with the poet’s own brand of nonsense; and it ends with his thwarted efforts to locate an interlocutor in the present, a fellow traveler and friend to share his lonely wanderings (“And I’m alone on every road,” he mourns in another Moscow poem [#253]). Even the phone call that opens the poem’s third stanza turns out to be only a tragicomically wrong number in the wrong language: “Like a puppy, I rush to the phone/At every hysterical ring—/I hear a Polish ‘Dzi‘kuj‘, panie!’ ” This poet shares the idiosyncratic, politically inappropriate vision of “I drink to the military asters.” Soviet Moscow, as seen through his eyes, becomes unexpectedly frivolous and insubstantial: its basements hold Yang-

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

251

tze swallows; its starling streetcars ride on streets paved with Astrakhan caviar and covered in Asti Spumante baskets; and its Lenin housing projects are propped up with ostrich feathers. As in the earlier poem-toast, the imagery is bourgeois, foreign, and effete; it is thus completely out of keeping with the postrevolutionary Russian reality it ostensibly describes. A toast, however, is by definition addressed to an audience; it exists by its very nature in the public domain. The imagery in this poem-stroll, on the other hand, appears destined for private consumption only, or so its sixth stanza suggests. In this stanza the poet creates his self-portrait, fittingly enough, with the aid of street photographers: “I’ll go out to the street photographers,/And in five minutes, like a shovel from a bucket,/I’ll get back my portrait.” Here, indeed, he does appear to succeed in transforming hostile Moscow into a landscape governed by his imaginings alone, as, instead of the expected city streets, “lilac Mount Shah” magically arises behind his photographic likeness. The image hints, in fact, at the fertile, receptive landscape that Mandelstam celebrates in his earlier “Armenia” cycle (1930; #203–18), a landscape that he explicitly contrasts with inhospitable Moscow in his “Journey to Armenia” (CPL, 352). But the wandering poet works this wonder for his eyes alone; he is both the creator of and the sole audience for this pocket-sized miracle, this street-corner metamorphosis. His artistry is self-reflexive and ineffectual, insignificant in the most undesirable, unimpressive way. The status of world culture in this poem-stroll’s unstable cosmos is as uncertain as that of the “semi-venerable” poet himself. As in “I drink to the military asters,” the poem’s frame of reference is international, with its Polish phone calls, Armenian landscapes, Chinese basements, Astrakhan caviar, Italian wine, and Dutch paintings. The international bric-a-brac of Mandelstam’s defiant toast, however, adds up, for all its seeming haphazardness, to a portrait of a vanished Russo-European culture captured through its nuances and details: colonial quinine, the waves of Biscay, the bilious Petersburg day. The street-corner poet of “I’m still nothing like a patriarch,” on the other hand, cannot orchestrate the different cultures he summons up in passing. They are disjointed and disparate; no frame of reference resonates beyond the space of the single stanza in which it makes its isolated appearance. “I cannot make it cohere,” this forlorn wanderer might mourn with Ezra Pound.58 In this ambiguous vision, even his Rembrandts, Titians, and Tintorettos, apparent markers of genuine culture, may be little more than the kind of pathetic cultural cocktail made “of Rembrandt, of goatish Spanish painting and the chirping of cicadas” that Parnok concocts in his efforts to keep the age at bay (POM, 165). The street-corner poets of “Midnight in Moscow” and “Today you can make decals” have larger designs for their peripheral vision—and their voices and visions are thus even more vulnerable to the kind of self-mockery and self-revision that marks “I’m still nothing like a patriarch.” “It

252

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

seems to me, like every other time,/You, time, are illegitimate,” the poet observes in “Today you can make decals,” and this challenge, with its cautious qualifications (“It seems to me,” “like every other time”), exemplifies the dilemma shared by the would-be visionaries of the poem-strolls. Indeed, “it seems to me,” mne kazhetsia, and the variant “it seems,” kazhetsia, appear three times in the space of the five short lines in which the poet of “Today you can make decals” issues his tentative challenge. The poet who struggles to revise the age by presenting it through the lens of his own off-kilter vision remains painfully aware of the limits of this vision; he cannot shake off the fear that his personal perceptions remain merely that, and that he, not the age, stands in desperate need of revision. This dialectic of vision and revision determines the very shape of “Today you can make decals.” The poem is preoccupied from the start with the kind of imaginative recreation of Soviet reality that is at work already on a smaller scale in “I’m still nothing like a patriarch,” where the poet replaces hostile Moscow with a more congenial backdrop in his photographic selfportrait. The poet of “Today you can make decals” conducts more ambitious experiments in creative reproduction. He plays the “real” Moscow against his peripheral Moscow, the city he sees reflected in the Moscow river, whose shape he can change simply by dipping his little finger in the water. The poem charts his reflections on these reflections, as he checks and challenges the legitimacy of his refracted visions. The images Mandelstam finds reflected in the river’s inverted mirror endow him with apparent power; they allow him to cut the “brigand Kremlin” down to size as it reappears, magically, comically revised, as the “pistachio dovecotes” that surface on the other side of his poetic looking glass. The Kremlin—seat of Russian power from the time of Ivan the Third (1440–1505) to Peter the Great (1672–1725), and home to the leaders of the Soviet state—is metaphorically transported to the fairy-tale world of an early Mandelstam poem, in which the people of the moon, basket-weavers by trade, live not in houses, but in “sky-blue,” “marvelous dovecotes” (1914; #58). It becomes part of Mandelstam’s own poetic landscape in its most charmingly infantile form, and the poet, a Gulliver among the Kremlin’s dovecote Lilliputians, may or may not choose to feed his fancy by “sprinkling it with millet or with oats.” Thus empowered, the poet proceeds to take on the age itself, to act as stern parent or tutor to an erring past and present. Pre-Petrine and postrevolutionary Russia are collapsed into a single image, Ivan the Great’s outsized bell tower, which stands revealed as an ungainly kinsman of the overfed, undereducated adolescent who is the subject of Denis Fonvizin’s famous play The Minor (Nedorosl’; 1782): “And whom do we count among the minors? (A v nedorosliakh kto?)” Like a latter-day Starodum, the bearer of “old truths (starye dumy)” in Fonvizin’s play, the poet will return Russia to earlier virtues by seeing to its proper upbringing: “Send him abroad to complete his education.” The

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

253

poet’s tricks with mirrors appear to have worked; his own poetic force and moral stature are enhanced by way of his imagistic transformations, while the age’s apparent might is reduced to a simple case of overactive hormones. Mandelstam himself, however, is the first to question his powers of imagination. He cuts his revery short—“But what’s the point! . . . Disgraceful”—and it is not clear if his rebuke is aimed at an immature age that cannot be brought to reason, or at a poet who stubbornly refuses to put away his own childish games. The question of youth and age that Mandelstam raises here runs throughout the anxious assessment of his worth and vision that shapes the poem-strolls. Is the poet too old to see and understand the future that is being built before his eyes (“It seems that I’m entering the future,/And it seems I won’t be there to see it”)? Or is he guilty rather of what Levin calls “infantilism” as he refuses to relinquish his useless poet’s vision?59 Who stands in greater need of reeducation, the “useless” poet or the purposeful state? Whose vision requires correction? Mandelstam returns to these issues in the second stanza of “Today you can make decals,” as he tries once again to remake Moscow in the image of his own vision, and to place his mandelstamp on a resisting, or worse, indifferent, new world: The Moscow River in four smokestacks’ haze, And before us the whole city opens out— Factories bathing and suburban Gardens. Isn’t it like Throwing back the rosewood lid Of an enormous concert grand piano And penetrating to its sounding depths?

Mandelstam, it would seem, can play the age’s capital like a piano. He holds the metaphorical key to the city, and he can open it at will and plumb its depths. Or can he? The image is phrased, atypically, as a question, and Mandelstam does not merely question the aptness of this metaphor alone. His grand piano comes from the same inappropriate, outdated cultural repertoire he draws on in “I drink to the military asters” and “I’m still nothing like a patriarch,” and it may not be, he seems to concede, a metaphoric match for Soviet factories and smokestacks. But his question implicitly raises other issues as well. Perhaps his very capacity to generate metaphors is dubious, out of tune with the times, out of sync with the age and its demands. (Indeed, Mandelstam himself mocks his childish, “reactionary” imagination in the lines that serve to shut his metaphor down: “Men of the White Guard, have you seen it?/Have you heard Moscow’s piano? Coo, coo, coo [Guli-guli].”) Perhaps his imagery reveals more about himself and his needs than it does about Soviet reality. This is the possibility that

254

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

Mandelstam entertains in “Midnight in Moscow,” as he challenges his own vision of the age as petty demon: I speak with the age, but does it really Have a hempen soul, was it really Born on the wrong side of the sheets, Like some wrinkled little beast in a Tibetan temple That scratches itself, then hops into its zinc-lined tub— Show us another one, Marya Ivanna!

Is the age truly so misbegotten, so trivial? Or does the trivial poet simply need to see it this way in order to bolster his diminished sense of worth? Are his metaphors merely misconceived parlor tricks (“Show us another one”), designed to deceive only children at best? Is his seeming virtuosity, his vaunted mastery of the age’s metaphorical keyboard, mere child’s play in elaborate disguise? Mandelstam himself raises this possibility implicitly in his image of Moscow as grand piano. He is quoting himself; this metaphor has appeared in his work before, where it tellingly takes the form of an “insignificant” children’s ditty: “Today we saw a little town,/Inside a grand piano./A whole town made of ivory,/With its mallets rising like mountains” (“Piano,” 1926; #412). In “Today you can make decals,” Mandelstam apparently perceives the “infantilism” of his efforts to master his age through frivolous imagery. Indeed, the decal-making that gives the poem its name and that is itself a literal creation of images, is hardly a fit occupation for responsible grown-ups. He demotes himself from the ranks of the adults and convicts himself of limited vision in the stanza that follows: Like a little boy Following the grown-ups into the wrinkled water, It seems that I’m entering the future And it seems I won’t be there to see it.

(And, needless to say, the legions of adults ploughing into the future’s wrinkled water will put an end to the childish poet’s pretty pictures on its surface.) Mandelstam mocks his “childish” efforts to subordinate the age to his imagination still more openly in “Midnight in Moscow” ’s pathetic clown parade: When peace runs out from under hooves, You’ll say—somewhere out there on the firing range, Two clowns have set up shop—Bim and Bom, And got their little combs and hammers going. First you hear the mouth organ, Then a child’s tiny piano— Do-re-mi-fa And sol-fa-mi-re-do . . .

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

255

One cannot orchestrate the age on a toy piano. One cannot tame ominous Moscow with clowns and mouth organs, and to try is not magical, Mandelstamian holy-foolery, but folly pure and simple.60 This, at least, is the conclusion that Mandelstam seems to reach in his poems’ inconclusive endings. As day breaks near the end of “Midnight in Moscow,” he apparently regains his poetic gifts: It’s already getting light. Gardens hum like a green telegraph. Raphael comes to pay a call on Rembrandt. He and Mozart just adore Moscow For its hazel eye, for its summer drunkenness. And like pneumatic mail Or Black Sea jellyfish aspic Breezes pass from one apartment To the next on an aerial conveyer, Like May students playing hookey . . .

The denizens of world culture—Mozart, Rembrandt, Raphael—take up residence in seductive, tipsy Moscow, and the poet’s systems of metaphorical linkages are apparently restored with their return, as Mandelstam sets up a network of poetic communications in the sunlit, vernal city: green telegraphs, airy mails, and breezy conveyer belts. His aerial ways, his whimsical, insubstantial system of connections perhaps will withstand and regenerate even the most inauspicious setting, as he continues to transmit his meanings over the heads, if not of time and space, then at least of the Soviet state. This would be a convenient way of lending the poet’s tale a happy ending. But the stanzas also suggest a more unsettling interpretation. It is not just the uncanny jellyfish aspic that floats through Moscow skies that hints at future trouble (although we might recall that an earlier jellyfish [meduza] “inspires” the poet only with “light revulsion” [1916; #88].) The final ellipses also warn that the story does not end here. In a poem marked by multiple, failed efforts at communication, it is difficult to believe that the frail and fugitive networks that Mandelstam sets up in its concluding lines will last beyond the confines of the poem. Throughout the poemstrolls, ellipses ordinarily signal a change in tactics or tone, a switch from vision to revision, and the concluding ellipses here do not suggest resolution; they seem instead merely to mark the place where this particular line of imagery goes dead, the place where the poet would, if he continued, be forced to drum up still another simile or style, to strike still another pose in his ongoing efforts to place himself in relation to the age. The poet’s argument with himself must continue, Mandelstam seems to say, but not in this poem, not on this page, not today. Every hopeful Moscow spring morning is, after all, a prelude to one more horrific Moscow midnight. The ending of “Today you can make decals” is no more auspicious.

256

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

“Quit sulking!” Mandelstam scolds himself in another lyric of the period, as he is “seized by a marvelous demon” who urges him to keep playing his poetic tricks (“Ia eshche mogu nabedokurit’”) on a hostile, incomprehending city (#247). In this poem, his tricks apparently work, as the watery Moscow of his imagination merges with Moscow in fact: “All Moscow is sailing on skiffs,” he exults. The same demon takes the shape of Faust’s Mephistopheles in the final stanza of “Today you can make decals,” and he continues to encourage the poet not to act his age, “to take up boating for a bit,/Or to wave at the Sparrow Hills,/Or to whip through Moscow on a tram.” In “Today you can make decals,” though, Mandelstam does not succeed in keeping his imaginatively revised Moscow afloat. Mother Russia’s wierd sister, Nursemaid Moscow, has other fish to fry, other children to tend; she is oblivious to the antics of her rebellious son: “Moscow’s got no time for that today: she’s on nanny duty—/She’s rushing around forty thousand cradles.” This nanny bears an unsettling resemblance to the “Mother Philology” (matushka filologiia) whom Mandelstam accuses of consorting with the enemy in “Fourth Prose”; like that false parent, Moscow has apparently sold her services to the state whose wards she minds. Mandelstam hints, moreover, that this is the same witch Moscow or “bitch Moscow” (kurva-Moskva) (#232) whose powers he fears in another poem of the period, “With a smoking torch I enter” ( 1931; #231): Q s dymq]ej luhinoj vxo'u K westipaloj nepravde v izbu% Daj-ka q na tebq poglq'uó Ved; le'at; mne v sosnovom grobu. A ona mne solenyx gribkov Vynimaet v gorwke iz-pod nar, A ona iz rebqh;ix pupkov Podaet mne gorqhij otvar. óZaxohu,ógovorit,ódam e]e . . . Nu, a q ne dywu,ósam ne rad. Wast; k poroguókuda tam@óv pleho Ucepilias; i ta]it nazad. Tiw; da gluw; u nee, vow; da mwa, Poluspalenka, polut[r;ma. óNihego, xorowa, xorowa@ Q i sam ved; takoj 'e, kuma. With a smoking torch I enter Six-fingered falsehood’s hut: So let me get a look at you I’m en route to a pine coffin after all.

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

257

And she feeds me pickled mushrooms From a pot beneath her bed, And she serves me steaming broth That’s brewed from babies’ navels. If I feel like it, she says, you’ll get more . . . But I can’t breathe, I’m sorry, I hop up—What’s your hurry!—she grabs My shoulder and drags me back. It’s nice and quiet here, lice and moss, Half-nursery and half-jail. —It’s not bad, though, fine, just fine! And, godmother, we really are a pair.

This cannibal’s cottage is the prototype for the fantasmagoric Soviet city he describes in “Today you can make decals”: “I won’t even cast a faint shadow/Into glass palaces standing on hens’ legs.” Two equally terrifying, equally inhuman fairy tales meet in Mandelstam’s image; the Crystal Palace of socialist pipe dreams rests on the chicken legs that hold up witches’ huts in Russian folklore. Baba Yaga has taken up residence in Moscow—where she is, one suspects, far more at home than Mozart or Rembrandt—and her spells, not the poet’s, are shaping future generations as she takes up her new post of officially designated state baby-sitter. Mandelstam’s personal brand of accidental, catastrophic magic cannot combat her more powerful enchantments: he is himself seduced by her spells. He must confine his insignificant designs to street-corner photographs, children’s pianos, and flimsy, fleeting decals, as he and his poetry apparently come to terms with what promises to be their permanent residence in parentheses.

NAME-CALLING “I don’t want to ‘play at’ being Mandelstam! (Ne khochu ‘ figuriat’ Mandel’shtamom!) I don’t dare! Why should I?” (III, 262). This heartbreaking plaint appears in a letter written to Nadezhda Mandelstam in 1930, the same year in which the poet-Jew of “Fourth Prose” seems to master “ ‘playing at’ being Mandelstam,” as he turns the surname used as a term of abuse by servants of the new state—“Mandelstam, go scratch the dogs!” (CPL, 324)—into a singular “mandelstamp” of poetic and personal honor. The problems and the privileges of “being Mandelstam,” the letter’s despair and the gleeful audacity of the poet-Jew, mark the two poles between which Mandelstam moves in the “Moscow Notebooks,” as he seeks to place his unnecessary self and gifts in relation to his hostile age. These painful vacillations do not end with the advent of the “Voronezh Notebooks”

258

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

(1935–37): how could they, given the conditions in which Mandelstam lived and—miraculously—managed to write?61 The Voronezh poems do, however, initiate a new phase in Mandelstam’s “insignificant” poetics, and one way to hint at the range and richness of the Voronezh poetry would be to examine his new ways with names, beginning with his own. My earlier discussion of Mandelstam’s “honorable calling of Jew” leapfrogs chronologically from “Fourth Prose” to the early “Voronezh Notebooks” as one of Mandelstam’s late poems is called on to bear witness to the resilience and ingenuity of the poet-Jew’s new creed. The route from “Fourth Prose” to Mandelstam Street is anything but straight, though, and I want to return to Mandelstam’s poem-namesake, “What street is this” (1935; #303), in the context of his late verse: ?ta, kakaq ulica? Ulica Mandel;wtama. Hto za familiq hertova@ó Kak ee ni vyvertyvaj, Krivo zvuhit, a ne prqmo. Malo v nem bylo linejnogo, Nrava on ne byl lilejnogo, I potomu /ta ulica, Ili, vernej, /ta qmaó Tak i zovetsq po imeni ?togo Mandel;wtama. What street is this? Mandelstam Street. What a devilish name!— No matter which way you twist it, It always sounds crooked, not straight. He wasn’t very linear, His manners weren’t lily-pure, And that’s why this street, Or, more precisely, this pit— Goes by the name Of that Mandelstam.

The poem can and should be read, I have argued, as the poet-Jew’s verse manifesto. It might be viewed with equal justice, though, as a pocket-sized portrait of Mandelstam’s powerfully insignificant poetics. Within the space of a few lines, it manages, if not to resolve, then at least to bring into creative equilibrium, many of the troublesome issues that plague the poet of the “Moscow Notebooks.” In my discussion of the “Moscow Notebooks,” I have focused on Man-

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

259

delstam’s seeming defeats, as the trivial poet of the “poem-strolls” fails repeatedly to make his vision stick. “What street is this” is, however, an unequivocal triumph of triviality, no less, although it belongs by rights among the ranks of Mandelstam’s humorous verses, or so his widow suggests. “Some of his jokes,” she notes in her memoirs, “were included in the main body of his work,” and she cites “What street is this?” as chief among these poetic interlopers. “I don’t know what this mischievous genre is worth,” she admits, but she herself bears witness to the value of what proved to be an eminently practical poetic joke: “There is no house on which we could put up a plaque saying ‘Mandelstam lived here,’ there is no grave on which to put a cross, and in this country, the country we call our own, they have been trying for a long time to eliminate every trace of Mandelstam’s work. . . . It’s fortunate, then, that he managed at least to name an entire street in his own honor.”62 Mandelstam has, in short, “raised himself a monument not built by human hands” on the basis of his own unstable name; he ensures his poetic survival by way of a poem set up as a posthumous joke told at his, and his surname’s, expense. As long as his nation insists on poking fun at his unassimilable name (“That’s a devil of a name!”) and nature (“He wasn’t very linear/His manners weren’t lily-pure”), it will unwittingly serve his purposes in preserving his resolutely “non-linear” legacy far better than any straightforward, legitimate monument could. He succeeds in turning the abuse heaped on him in the poem-strolls to his own poetic ends; in his imaginative revision, it becomes an eccentric, witty gift to a posterity that may stand in need of such underhanded humor. In the space of a few “crooked” lines (and the poem’s irregular metrics do mimic the zigzagging street they describe), Mandelstam combines the sublime and the ridiculous by putting the innately double-edged nature of proper names to use. Proper names, as we have seen, lend themselves as readily to comic abuse as they do to poetic incantations, and Mandelstam has already proved himself adept at both skills, though they earlier seemed to operate at crosspurposes. In “What street is this,” however, the name that serves as the butt of scornful jokes and the “mandelstamp” of bourgeois shame joins forces with the blessed names that guarantee the survival of poetic language and of world culture. As usual, Mandelstam manages to upend poetic tradition in the process of preserving it. Playing games with proper names is, Roman Jakobson notes, a venerable (or “semi-venerable”) tradition in Russian comic verse, a tradition whose beginnings he traces back to Pushkin and the Golden Age in “Recent Russian Poetry” (1921). The rightful legatees of this tradition, are, however, those poetic scandalmongers, the Futurists, as Jakobson demonstrates; such disrespectful tricks do not belong in the hands of civilized Acmeists.63 Mandelstam, however, uses such play to commemorate what should be—and is, in the Russian tradition—the loftiest of lyric occa-

260

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

sions, the poet’s last will and testament, his poetic legacy to the ages. In “What street is this,” Mandelstam envisions the likely form that his cultural afterlife will take, following what appears to be his inevitable fate at the hands of the Soviet state, and the grim reality of his playful imaginings lies buried in the poem’s final lines: “And that’s why this street,/Or, more precisely, this pit/Goes by the name/Of that Mandelstam.” In the Russian text, “pit” (iama ) forms an ominous rhyme with the poet’s own name, which appears in the genitive case here, “Mandelstama.” The pit that lies in wait inside the poet’s very name may prove to be, he intimates, his final resting place. It is perhaps the same ignominious grave from which his moving lips will address the future in a poem written shortly after this one: “Yes, I lie in the ground with moving lips/But every schoolchild will learn my words by heart” (1935; #306). “Not all of me will die,/But death shall leave behind/My greater part as I relinquish life”: The prophecy expressed in Mikhail Lomonosov’s rendering into Russian of the thirtieth ode from Horace’s third book of odes is borne out not only by Lomonosov’s own translation, which does indeed preserve the memory of the earlier poet by reviving his work in a different language and culture nearly eighteen centuries after Horace’s death (it dates from 1747); Lomonosov also stakes out his own claim to lasting poetic life as he builds his Russian monument (“I have raised up my emblem of immortality/Higher than pyramids, stronger than bronze”) on the basis of the Latin poet’s words. Other monuments would follow on this same fertile ground, each more audacious and original than the next, as Gavriil Derzhavin builds on his precursor’s words in his “Monument” (Pamiatnik) of 1795, only to be eclipsed four decades later by Aleksandr Pushkin’s resplendent “Exegi monumentum”(1836), written in what would prove to be, prophetically enough, the year of the poet’s death.64 Mandelstam turns this distinguished tradition on end in his commemorative poem-joke. To phrase it differently, instead of adding to the height of his lofty legacy, Mandelstam attacks it from beneath as he digs the very ground out from under it. (It may be worth nothing that his “pit,” his “iama” is anagrammatically encoded not just in his own name, but in the commemorative tradition itself—the Russian for “monument” is pamiatnik.) And this is perfectly in keeping with the mission of the poet-as-walking-oxymoron: what was high shall be brought low, and what was low shall be raised up, as his most illustrious role model had demonstrated early on (“He hath put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree” [Luke 1:52]). That which is lower than grass may, after all, outlast us all. Mandelstam’s chosen genre may be undistinguished; his crooked anti-monument may be trampled underfoot; but his claims on his nation’s future are no less lofty, no less pressing than those of his more exalted precursors, to judge by the evidence of “Yes, I lie in the ground.” He, too, will not die entirely but will live on in the minds of all those who follow either his prophet’s words, or the witty, winding path that bears his name. It is as

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

261

•

if Yeats had composed both the aristocratic epitaph of “Under Ben Bulben”—“Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by!” (1938)—and Ezra Pound’s wickedly irreverent parody: Neath Ben Bulben’s buttocks lies Bill Yeats, a poet twoice the soize Of William Shakespear, as they say Down Ballykillywuchlin way.65

Mandelstam does not reserve such disrespectful treatment for his own tombstone alone. Inappropriate levity is the only appropriate treatment for the true poet, the magus of powerful insignificance whom Mandelstam celebrates in his playful, moving elegies on Andrei Belyi’s death. Mandelstam’s Belyi is both a “master” and a “jester” whose seeming “fluff” conceals “miraculous power,” and he follows a winding path not unlike Mandelstam’s own: “Where’s the straightness of speeches/Tangled up like honest zigzags,” Mandelstam mourns (#288, #289, #291). It is only fitting, then, that he should be subjected to the same kind of undignified posthumous scrutiny that plagues the namesake of Mandelstam Street, and this abuse likewise turns upon a comically twisted name: Otkuda privezli? Kogo? Kotoryj umer? Gde [imenno]?* Mne hto-to nevdomek . . . Ska'ite, govorqt kakoj-to Gogol; umer? Ne Gogol;, tak sebe, pisatel; . . . gogol∏k. 1934 (#294) Where’d they get him from? Who? The guy who died? Where [exactly]?* I never got it straight . . . So tell me, they say some sort of Gogol died? Not a Gogol quite, more like a writer . . . . a gogolet. *Word(s) missing in manuscript (editor’s note).

In these four lines, which open one of Mandelstam’s poems on Belyi, the dead poet is apparently ill-served several times over. It is not enough that his death has become the subject of casual, cursory street-corner conversation. He also suffers from one misnomer after another: his own name, it seems, has not survived his passing. He is first identified as “some sort of Gogol,” with the nineteenth-century writer’s name serving as lowbrow shorthand for “writer” or “bard,” or perhaps as the generic designation for some deviant offshoot of the human species. (It is also, of course, Mandelstam’s wink at Belyi’s own debt to the writer he celebrates in his study of Gogol’s Mastery [1934]). But Belyi is not even accorded the dignity of being a full-fledged Gogol; he is merely one of Gogol’s linguistic offspring, a gogling or gogolet (gogolëk). And his comic diminution by way of his precursor’s name does not end here. Mandelstam is also making an etymological pun, necessarily lost in translation, as he takes Gogol’s name

262

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

back to its ornithological beginnings in the gogol’, the golden-eyed duck. Belyi is, like his master, a strange bird indeed, but this is not, I think, the chief purpose of Mandelstam’s apparently absurd wordplay. What would seem to be the ultimate indignity endured by the dead writer—his unseemly metamorphosis from corpse to demi-Gogol to baby duck—is in fact a clue to his true, oxymoronic poet’s calling, as an enchanting earlier elegy reveals: Na tebq nadevali tiaruó[roda kolpak, Bur[zovyj uhitel;, muhitel;, vlastitel;, durak. Kak sne'ok na Moskve zavodil kavardak gogol∏k, Neponqten-ponqten, nevnqten, zaputan, lego≠k. Sobiratel; prostranstva, /kzameny sdavwij ptenec, Sohinitel;, ]eglenok, studentik, student, bubenec . . . 1934 (#288) They placed a tiara on you—a holy fool’s cap, Turquoise teacher, martyr, master, jester. The duckling (gogolëk) set up a mess in Moscow like a light snowfall, Unintelligible-intelligible, incomprehensible, entangled, easy. A collector of space, a nestling who’s passed his exams, Scribbler, baby goldfinch, studentlet, student, little bell.

What had seemed to be merely senseless street-corner abuse stands revealed as secret praise, as the Gogolian duckling takes its place among the other little birds—the baby goldfinch, the nestling who’s passed his exams—whose seeming helplessness only masks the master’s hidden strengths. And the “homeland of the goldfinch” (#338) is of course also Mandelstam’s native turf. “My goldfinch, I’ll tip back my head—/We’ll view the world together,” one lovely Voronezh lyric begins (#325), and the variants of this poem celebrate these “bright, unruly birds” in no uncertain terms: “To live like a goldfinch—this is my command!” (#326, #327). As in Mandelstam’s own anti-monument, the ambivalence of proper names becomes, in the hands of the serious jokester, the ideal articulation of the poet’s necessarily split personality, both powerful and insignificant.66 This is not, however, the only function that proper names serve in the “Voronezh Notebooks.” Mandelstam’s Belyi poems actually belong among the concluding poems in the “Moscow Notebooks,” and the poet they celebrate is, like Mandelstam’s poet-wanderer, a “collector of space” (#288). Though Mandelstam’s lyric voice and vision may be, he fears, confined to parentheses, the poet himself is free to wander the city streets in search of his place in the age, and his very meanderings serve to give shape to his verse. This situation is reversed in the Voronezh poems. The poet is

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

263

immobilized by what appears to be, paradoxically, open space as he waits out the term of his involuntary exile to the provincial town of Voronezh, the consequence of his fearless Stalin epigram of 1933 (#286).67 “A deep blue pine forest/Is tethered to my leg,” he complains in one late lyric (#343), and similar laments echo throughout the notebooks: Na verwok by mne sinego morq, na igol;noe tol;ko uwko . . . 1935 (#313) Give me just an inch of deep blue sea, just enough to fill a needle’s eye . . . Kuda mne det;sq v /tom qnvare? Otkrytyj gorod sumasbrodno cepok . . . Ot zamknutyx q hto li p;qn dverej?ó I xohetsq myhat; ot vsex zamkov i skrepok. 1937 (#360) Where can I vanish in this January? The open city wildly clings to me . . . Have I gotten drunk on bolted doors? And I want to howl from locks and clamps.

In another of the Voronezh poems, he mourns “the organ-grinder’s death,” the death of the same wandering musician, apparently, who strolls through the conclusion of “Fourth Prose” playing Schubert on his barrel organ, for Schubert, too, has been immobilized by this poem’s conclusion: “And Schubert’s talisman has frozen—/Motion, motion, and motion . . .” (1935; #315). “Travel is absolutely essential, and not only travel to Armenia or Tadzhikistan,” Mandelstam insists in his “Journey to Armenia.” (CPL, 396) What can the artist do to create movement in his art when he himself has been firmly, forcibly fixed in one place? In the “Moscow Notebooks” motion generates poetry. In the “Voronezh Notebooks,” Mandelstam must reverse this process. The immobilized poet must use poetry to generate motion. He must create space and freedom within the confines of a few lines of verse. He must cultivate “the language of space compressed to a point” (#300). Mandelstam himself reveals the solution to his dilemma in the conclusion to one brief Voronezh lyric, “You’ve deprived me of seas, running starts, and departures” (#307): Liwiv menq morej, razbega i razleta I dav stope upor nasil;stennoj zemli, Hego dobilis; vy? Blestq]ego rasheta% Gub wevelq]ixsq otnqt; vy ne mogli.

264

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

You’ve deprived me of seas, running starts, and departures, And laid my foot to rest upon coercive earth, And what have you attained? A marvelous advantage: You could not take away my moving lips.

Mandelstam’s punning epigram hints at the multiple ways in which verse eludes its enemies’ efforts to “extradite, investigate and settle” it (CPL, 323). The Russian stopa has the same double meaning, both anatomical and poetic, as does the English foot, and what the poet’s moving lips set in motion are precisely his “feet,” the energizing rhythms and meters that are the pulse of poetic language and that the Soviet state had sought to suppress.68 Mandelstam uses his own body—his moving lips, his mouth’s roof, his punning poetic feet, and so on—to catalyze motion where the regime seeks to enforce stasis throughout the late poems, and these powers of the body converge with the ambivalent energies of proper names as Mandelstam works to derive poetic movement from the inauspicious circumstances of his exile. “Not as a mealy white butterfly/Will I return my borrowed dust to earth,” Mandelstam writes in another Voronezh poem: Q xohu, htob myslq]ee telo Prevratilos; v ulicu, v stranuó Pozvonohnoe, obuglennoe telo, Osoznavwee svo[ dlinu. 1935 (#320) I want my thinking body To become a street, a nation— My vertebral, charred body, Having realized its full length.

The diction is unmistakably Mandelstam’s, but the ambition—the yearning for “the spread of [the poet’s] own body” to incorporate vast spaces and entire nations—might be Mayakovsky’s or Whitman’s, unlikely antecedents though they may seem for a self-proclaimed Acmeist.69 What concerns me here, however, is another kind of convergence; the length of the poet’s charred body is also the length of his misshapen name, both of which combine to create the crooked street that he christens in his own honor. And, as Mandelstam informs us defiantly in another lyric, the grave itself will not succeed in setting the twisted poet straight: “You, grave,/Don’t dare to teach the hunchback—Shut your mouth!” (1931; #240).70 If the poet cannot move freely above ground, he will learn to release his poetic energies underground, whether through the subterranean forces unleashed by his prematurely buried body, or through the hidden powers of names. “In pronouncing the word ‘sun,’ we are, as it were, undertaking an enormous journey,” Mandelstam observes in “Conversation about Dante,” and “to speak means to be forever on the road” (CPL, 407).

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

265

“Freedom produces jokes and jokes produce freedom,” Freud observes in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.71 In his poem-joke “What street is this,” Mandelstam combines these two kinds of linguistic liberation. The exiled poet in his open-air prison playfully uses and abuses his own name to create both freedom and motion. To pronounce this name, he proclaims, is to undertake an unexpected and perplexing trip. It means to be forever traveling the quirky expanse of the street that bears his name. Mandelstam exploits these linguistic resources to generate possibilities from the very terms of his exile in another brief poem composed in the same month as his comic epitaph, “Set me free, let me be, Voronezh” (1935; #301): Pusti menq, otdaj menq, Vorone',ó Uroniw; ty menq il; provorniw;, Ty vyroniw; menq ili vernew;ó Vorone'óbla';, Vorone'óvoron, no'. Set me free, let me be, Voronezh,— You’ll skip me or you’ll let me slip, You’ll lose me or you’ll lose your grip— Voronezh—rainbow, raven, razor’s edge.

The poem’s lines are spun from the name of Mandelstam’s place of exile; sound and sense are even more tightly interwoven than they ordinarily are in the late poetry, and the lyric’s ominous soundplay is thus very nearly impossible to convey in English. I have taken more liberties than usual in my translation in an effort to transmit some echo of the special effects that Mandelstam achieves in his miniature tour de force; a more literal rendering might read as follows: “Let me go, give me up, Voronezh,/You’ll lose me or you’ll let me slip,/You’ll drop me or you’ll give me back—/Voronezh— whimsy, Voronezh—raven, knife!” I will also give a transliterated version that will allow the reader who does not know Russian to see Mandelstam’s ingenious sound-patterning at work, or more precisely, at play: Pusti menia, otdai menia, Voronezh , [the final syllable is pronounced -ish in unstressed, final position] Uronish’ ty menia il’ provoronish’, Ty vyronish’ menia ili verniosh’— Voronezh—blazh’ , Voronezh—voron, nozh ! [and again, the final zh’s are pronounced sh ].

The poem’s four lines exploit both techniques Freud describes in his study of jokes and the properties that Andrew Welsh ascribes to lyric poetry’s early roots in riddles and charms as Mandelstam attempts to gain mastery over his sinister setting by way of its proper name. For both Freud and Welsh proper names, which are not bound like other nouns to denotative drudgery, are free to exhibit the powers of language in their most flex-

266

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

ible, unfettered form. Such nouns lend themselves, as we have seen, to comic wordplay, on the one hand, and charms and incantations, on the other, and Mandelstam’s somber little lyric draws on both the comic and magical properties of proper nouns as he works to escape the clutches of his hostile host. The poem’s insistent play on the separate syllables of Voronezh suggests its affinities with the kind of humor that Freud calls “joke-charades.” I have mentioned these jokes before in connection with Mandelstam’s joking play on Akhmatova’s name; in them, “a name is used twice, once as a whole and again divided up into its separate syllables, which, when they are thus separated, give another sense.” It also resembles Freud’s “unification jokes,” in which a thing is defined in terms of its own name, as in “Voronezh—voron (raven), nozh (knife).” And both these kinds of jokes are variants on the riddle, variants that include the answer to the problem they pose. “What do you get when you set a raven on a knife?” might be the riddling version of the poem’s final line.72 Jokes create freedom, Freud claims. Mandelstam’s jokes, however, evoke an image of a poet at the mercy of the city whose name he dissects and reassembles in vain: “You’ll lose me or you’ll let me slip,/You’ll drop me or you’ll give me back.” The city, not the poet, is the actor and agent in the poem, while Mandelstam, the hapless object of its attention, or inattention, must submit to the whims of a town that might decide to turn its knife on him at any moment. He does, though, manage to wrest a kind of linguistic freedom from the very name of the city that has him in its grip. The lyric itself may present the poet as the town’s prey, but the poet who writes the poem, as opposed to the poet within the poem, linguistically masters the town as he turns it inside out in order to unpack the dangerous potentials he finds buried within its very name. The poet may appear to be outmatched by his knife-wielding, capricious captor—but he has the last word, as his whimsical dissection of the city permits him to articulate, and perhaps to diffuse, its ill-boding, hidden meanings. This, at any rate, would be one reading of this little poem’s partial magic. The same techniques that lead us to this reading, however, may just as easily be made to serve a very different interpretation. The poem’s devices, the ways in which it spins its sense from the sounds of the city’s name, finally derive from what, Freud notes, is generally considered to be the lowest and most despised form of verbal jokes: the pun. As opposed to more complex plays on words, Freud observes, “it is enough for a pun if . . . two words expressing two [different] meanings recall each other by some vague similarity, whether they have a general similarity of structure or a rhyming assonance, or whether they share the same first few letters, and so on.” It is a fair enough description of this poem’s verbal play, but it does not do justice to the powerful potentials of this humble genre. As Andrew Welsh remarks, the “lowly pun” may be made to serve lofty aims indeed. The pun’s verbal repetitions, in which sound creates sense, are essential to

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

267

the language of charms, and the language of charms is the language of “secret power” and “sacred action.”73 The force of charms, moreover, is closely linked to the magic of names, and these kindred forms of magic converge in Mandelstam’s brief lyric, as he generates the terms of his charm from the very name of his enemy. To see the poem in this light—as a poem-charm, not a poem-joke—is to arrive at a reading that is very nearly the antithesis of the “weak” reading I have just given. In primitive cultures, Freud tells us, the name does not simply designate the self; it is the self, and possession of another’s name means mastery of his very being. The poem’s first line becomes, in this reading, not an entreaty, but a warning. “Let me go, give me up, Voronezh,” the poet threatens his captor, and he makes good on his threat in the lines that follow by demonstrating his demonic mastery over his foe by way of his foe’s name. Voronezh twists and turns in its adversary’s words: “Uronish’ ty menia il’ provoronish’,/ Ty vyronish’ menia ili vernësh’ (You’ll lose me or you’ll let me slip,/ You’ll drop me or you’ll give me back).” If we read these punning lines as a form of verbal sorcery, and not as a victim’s feeble jokes, then what they voice is strength, not fear. The poet does not anticipate defeat at the city’s hands; he is spelling out the terms of his victory. For the sorcerer and his audience, Welsh notes, charm language does not merely describe action. It is action, and its incantory rhythms and repetitions serve to bring about the reality they describe. Certainly, the two lines I have just quoted read like an incantation, with their insistent rhythmic, syntactic, and acoustic repetitions. In this poem-charm, the verbal magician, no longer the timid jokester, predicts the future his words will summon into being: “You’ll drop me or you’ll give me back.” Voronezh has taken on more than it can handle; it cannot hang on to its slippery catch.74 Charms, Welsh notes, are “first and foremost concerned with power,” and chief among their aims is the defeat of others’ spells. Even more to Mandelstam’s purposes, the charm achieves its ends by way of the rhythmic, “magical compulsion” or “magic motion” with which it counteracts real or threatened “spatial containment” and “magical imprisonment.” The linguistic wizard who is seemingly held in place by another’s spells can open up the city that confines him merely by opening up its name. By releasing this name’s hidden powers, he can obtain his own release, and the town that seems to hold him fast cannot in fact contain him so long as he possesses its very essence by way of its magical, manipulable name. The poem’s last line, “Voronezh—whimsy, Voronezh—raven, knife!” becomes in this reading not the nervous riddling of the city’s luckless victim, but the verbal wizard’s coup de grâce, his final curse on the town that dared to challenge him. According to Welsh, the riddle is the figure of magic confinement just as the charm is the emblem of magic liberation. Perhaps the poem’s final line is a kind of riddling curse designed to fix the warden in place while the prisoner makes his escape.75

268

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

This final line, which assigns opposing properties to the same proper noun—Voronezh is simultaneously whimsical and menacing—also exemplifies the ambivalent nature of the proper names that punctuate Mandelstam’s late work. Certainly it characterizes the ambivalence that lies at the heart of the poem itself, spun from a single proper name: it is both serious and joking, both sacred—and the city’s “whim,” blazh’ in the original, actually shares a root with Mandelstam’s “blessed (blazh-ennye), senseless words”—and profane. The poem might be said to enact this ambivalence in yet another sense. I have proposed two readings here, but I do not want to enforce a form of interpretive Darwinism in which the “stronger” reading (Mandelstam as verbal magus) cancels out the “weaker” (Mandelstam as captive jokester). Rather, the two readings necessarily work together to form the dynamic, unstable equilibrium that is the only adequate expression of Mandelstam’s paradoxical position and his oxymoronic mission. We will recognize the poet who emerges from such a composite reading immediately: he is the powerfully insignificant paradox who is Mandelstam’s poetic ideal. A variant on this same paradox would seem to dictate the very shape of the poem itself; its restricted size belies its hidden power, as an apparent trifle gives simultaneous, or better, consecutive voice both to mighty fears and to powerful possibilities. The space of the poem, moreover, plays a variation on the spatial paradox that informs Mandelstam’s very presence in Voronezh, the seemingly open city that serves as his penitentiary. Voronezh is enclosure masquerading as openness; the poem in which he plays out his relationship to the city, however, inverts this formula. Its very shape on the page would seem to make it an emblem of confinement, and our sense of restriction and deprivation is intensified by the four brief lines that squeeze their meanings from the three syllables that designate the poet’s prison cell. These lines, however, refuse to restrict themselves to one sense or one meaning alone; they are relentlessly openended in the contradictory, mutually enriching interpretations they generate. Even the poem’s linguistic constriction, the way in which its sounds and meanings apparently cling to the city’s name, can be seen as an underhanded form of defiance. “You’ve deprived me of all words, all places, but this,” Mandelstam seems to say. “But look! I can build an entire dialect, a whole poetry from the one word that remains to me.” In this quintessential Voronezh lyric, he gives us not so much “the language of space compressed to a point,” as the name of one particular geographical point expanded to accommodate the poet’s liberating language of space. Mandelstam approaches a similar configuration of captivity, linguistic play, and proper names from a different angle in a cryptic later lyric, “I’m stuck around Koltsov” (1937; #343). This poem takes as its point of departure the name not of Voronezh itself, but of one of the city’s most famous native sons, the nineteenth-century peasant poet Aleksei Koltsov (1809–42), who spent most of his short life unhappily trapped in his provincial birthplace:

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

269

Q okolo Kol;cova, Kak sokol, zakol;covan, I net ko mne gonca, I dom moj bez kryl;ca. K noge moej privqzan Sosnovyj sinij bor, Kak vestnik bez ukaza, Raspaxnut krugozor. V stepi kohu[t kohkió I vse idut, idut Nohlegi, nohi, nohkió Kak by slepyx vezut . . . I’m stuck around Koltsov, Shackled like a falcon, And no courier comes to me, And my house has no porch. A deep blue pine forest Is tethered to my leg, The horizon is wide open, Like a messenger with no decree. Hummocks wander in the steppe— And nightrests, nights, nightlets Keep on moving, moving— As if leading the blind . . .

The poem is not actually about Koltsov, although its language evokes his life and writings in indirect ways to which I will return later in my discussion. It is difficult, in fact, to say what exactly the poem is about. Like many of Mandelstam’s late lyrics, it is a puzzlement. Such poems, which stubbornly refuse to yield all their secrets to would-be interpreters, call to mind accusations made against some of Emily Dickinson’s more obscure and gnomic poems, poems apparently “written in code, for which we need the key.”76 The key to this lyric, such as it is, lies not so much in Koltsov’s work or fate as in his name, or rather, in his life and work as perceived through the prism of his name. The poem’s first two lines set the acoustic tempo for what follows; they circle vertiginously around the sounds of Koltsov’s name—Ia okolo Koltsova,/Kak sokol zakol’tsovan—and alert us to the less insistent repetition of the same sounds in the poem’s remaining ten lines; the letter k, for example, appears sixteen times in the space of twelve lines. I have said that the opening lines circle around the sounds of Koltsov’s name, but they are no less bound up with its sense. Indeed, such circling is, in a manner of speaking, the sense of this name. Kol’tso is the Russian for

270

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

“ring,” and the circumscribed, thwarted motion that the opening phrases describe—“I’m stuck around Koltsov,/Shackled like a falcon”—acts out the potential confinement that lies hidden within Koltsov’s very name. The poem opens, then, with Mandelstam trapped in a peculiarly vicious circle, or ring, in which linguistic and spatial constraints appear to converge, if anything, with even greater force than they had in “Let me be, set me free, Voronezh.” The Russian for “vicious circle” is “enchanted circle,” zakoldovannyi krug, and the phrase returns us, aptly enough, to Welsh’s definition of the riddle as the figure of spatial confinement and magic imprisonment. “I’m stuck around Koltsov” finds Mandelstam confined within yet another riddling prison. This enchanted circle takes on new dimensions, though, when its spells are woven not from a place-name, Voronezh, but from a poet’s name, Koltsov—when it becomes, in other words, not merely a zakoldovannyi krug, but a zakol’tsovannyi krug. The poet’s name takes us back, for one thing, to the Russian poetic tradition of playful name-calling traced by Jakobson. The specimens Jakobson gives from Mandelstam’s Futurist coevals involve precisely the same kind of punning deformation of precursors’ names that Mandelstam employs in his poem: in Khlebnikov’s hands, for example, Pushkin dispenses his pushknoty, his “pushknesses”; Dostoevsky becomes an adverb, dostoevskiimo; and Tiutchev reveals his etymological affinities with clouds, tuchi in Russian. Most strikingly, Jakobson cites Koltsov for his contributions to this tradition; he was among the first to turn such linguistic tomfoolery to serious ends with the verb he derived from the name of Pontius Pilate, pilatit’.77 Mandelstam, however, goes far beyond these humble beginnings in his play on the peasant-poet’s name. He turns one of Koltsov’s favorite poetic images, the falcon—sokol in Russian—into an anagram of Koltsov’s name and thus gives us, if not the key to the poem, then at least a key to approaching its enigmas. In Russian folk poetry the falcon traditionally stands for fearlessness, freedom, and flight, and Koltsov’s falcons are by and large true to type: “I will race, I will fly up/Lighter than the falcon”; “Spirits of the heavens, grant to me/A falcon’s wings speedily”; “Like a swift falcon,/ I will traverse the forest on [my steed].” One of Koltsov’s last falcons, though, comes closer in spirit to Mandelstam’s captive bird. It appears in a late poem entitled “The Falcon’s Meditation” (1840), which opens as follows: Dolgo l; budu q Sidnem doma 'it;, Mo[ molodost; Ni za hto gubit;? Dolgo l; budu q Pod oknom sidet;,

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

271

Po doro'ke vdal; Den; i noh; glqdet;? Il; u sokola Kryl;q svqzany, Il; puti emu Vse zakazany? Must I remain for long A stay-at-home, Destroying my youth All in vain? Must I remain for long By the window, Gazing down the road Day and night? Or are the falcon’s Wings bound, Are all roads Forbidden to him?

“What is both bound and free, both powerful and helpless?” might read the conundrum that lies behind Mandelstam’s riddling anagrams. And the answer to this paradox can only be Koltsov, whose name produces both the falcon (sokol) and the rings that bind him (the root of the verb zakol’tsevat’, is “ring,” kol’tso).78 Mandelstam’s riddle is an apt summation of his precursor’s dilemma. Koltsov’s lament in “The Falcon’s Meditation” was heartfelt; he found himself bound, as his other writings reveal, to a landscape, a trade, and a culture that were profoundly out of sympathy with his poet’s calling; and yet he lacked the strength or means to leave for more hospitable environs. Letters written to friends in the last years of his life express sentiments that must have seemed all too familiar to Mandelstam himself: “My circle (krug) is narrow, my world is dirty; my life here is bitter”; “Of course this is not life, but exile and hard labor (katorga), and every day I feel my deadly solitude more strongly.” “The fields are not my friend,” one poem mourns. “The scythe is my stepmother,/Good people are/Not my neighbors.” And another lyric, ironically entitled “I’m at home (Ia doma)” takes up the refrain: “Once again in the backwoods (glush’), at leisure once more/To suffer, body and soul,/And to feed the disease of loneliness,/With ceaseless longing.” What Mandelstam apparently finds in Koltsov, then, is a kind of cultural or historical rhyme for his own situation. He suggests his affinities with the poet indirectly, by his use in this poem of a diction that evokes the world of Koltsov’s poems. Falcons, porches, steppes, nightrests (nochlegi), wandering blind men—all summon up the imagery of Koltsov’s peasant

272

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

poetry even as they take on a distinctively Mandelstamian coloration. Even the trimeter that Mandelstam employs here suggests the folk tradition that fed Koltsov’s best work.79 We might read this cultural rhyme as expressing liberation in time, if not space, and find in it evidence yet again of Mandelstam’s ability to create tradition from the recalcitrant materials of his own life by finding echoes for his situation in the near or distant past. We have seen such rhymes at work before in Mandelstam’s writing; through them he asserts his ability to move, if not in space, then through time, as he claims kinship with artists of other nations and ages. To read the poem in this way, however, would be to misread it, for its final lines suggest not liberation but senseless motion and sterile repetition in time as well as space: “Hummocks wander in the steppe—/And nightrests, nights, nightlets,/Keep on moving, moving—/As if leading the blind . . .” The spirit of these lines is, moreover, completely in keeping with Koltsov’s own pervasive sense of mournful, hopeless immobility. “For a long time a broad road/ Has stretched before me,” he laments in his poem “The Road” (Put’). “But along it I can neither/Walk nor fly . . .” When he does finally succeed in setting out, his maneuvers do not inspire confidence: “Like a blind man, I edge along/The rugged road,” he writes in another lyric, touchingly entitled “What Do I Mean?” (Chto ia znachu?). To entrust one’s fate to such a guide would leave the blind leading the blind, and this is scarcely the surest way out of a vicious circle.80 The cultural or historical rhyme that Mandelstam finds in Koltsov’s life and writing is, then, an imperfect one at best. The sufferings, poetic silence (Koltsov gave up writing in the last years of his life), and finally death of a peasant-poet unable to free himself, either personally or poetically, from his provincial origins could hardly prove an inspiring model to a poet seeking to wrest freedom from Voronezh’s unpromising plains, as he works to create a world culture that defies both space and time. Mandelstam’s poem ultimately suggests that Voronezh’s poetic past is no less oppressive than its endless steppes; to return once again to the punning simile of the opening lines, Koltsov is to Mandelstam’s “I” as shackle is to falcon. Literary history, in other words, conspires with geography (“A deep blue pine forest/Is tethered to my leg”) to keep the exile’s poetic force in check. “I’m stuck around Koltsov” is finally a poem about failure—though its failures prove to be fruitful in the long run. “Break down the four-square walls of standing time,” Ezra Pound bids the modern poet in an early lyric, and his image conflates, in true modernist fashion, both time and space: history sets up barriers that the poet is duty-bound to challenge.81 Similar precepts shape Mandelstam’s vision of poetic culture from the start—but the constraints of time and space take on new meaning for the exile stranded in Voronezh. Mandelstam may achieve a qualified victory over the place of his exile in “Let me be, set me free, Voronezh”; to judge by the

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

273

evidence of “I’m stuck around Koltsov,” though, he has not yet found a way to invest this space with historical resonance. He has not yet managed to transplant his multilingual, transhistorical company of poets to Voronezh’s inhospitable steppes, and Koltsov, with his limited resources, can be of no real service here. The circle or ring that shapes his name predicts his fate, or so Mandelstam suggests, for unlike Pushkin, Dante, or Villon, Koltsov is a closed circuit. He cannot be used to open up the lines of cultural communication between this place and other places, this time and other times, that inform all true art according to Mandelstam. Images of failed communication punctuate “I’m stuck around Koltsov.” “The horizon is wide open,/Like a messenger with no decree,” Mandelstam writes in the second stanza, and this messagelessness is the poem’s message. Voronezh’s open space does not speak to Mandelstam and he, in turn, has trouble making himself heard and understood: “And no courier comes to me,/And my house has no porch.” There is no way to bridge the distance between the plains’ speechless openness and the closed space, the “house,” of the poet; there is no porch, half-open and half-closed, on which Mandelstam and the steppes might meet each other halfway. “Where am I?” Mandelstam asks in another lyric of the period, and his answer is inconclusive: has he discovered at last “the homeland of the goldfinch,” the homeland, that is, of the wandering Jew and his world culture? Or is he trapped forever by the barren and forbidding land that is “Koltsov’s stepmother (machekha Koltsova)” (#338)? One of Mandelstam’s greatest Voronezh lyrics suggests, however, that the distance between these opposing worlds is not insurmountable and that a path between them may be forged by means of the same kind of puns and proper names that fail him in “I’m stuck around Koltsov.” This time, though, he does not confine himself to local linguistic resources alone, and his interrogation of the Voronezh plains takes on new dimensions as a result. When you have not made yourself properly understood in conversation, you rephrase your observation. When your interlocutor fails to answer your questions, you ask your questions differently in hopes of receiving the information you need. In the splendid late lyric “Do not compare” (#352), Mandelstam learns both to ask and to listen differently and so finds the means in meager Voronezh to pun his way into the vicinity of world culture. Ne sravnivaj% 'ivu]ij nesravnim. S kakim-to laskovym ispugom Q soglawalsq s ravenstvom ravnin, I neba krug mne byl nedugom. Q obra]alsq k vozduxu-sluge, "dal ot nego uslugi ili vesti I sobiralsq v put;, i plaval po duge Nenahina[]ixsq putewestvij.

274

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

Gde bol;we neba mneótam q brodit; gotovó I qsnaq toska menq ne otpuskaet Ot molodyx e]e vorone'skix xolmov K vseheloveheskimóqsne[]im v Toskane. Do not compare: the living are incomparable. With a kind of tender fright, I acceded to the plains’ equality, And the heavens’ sphere was illness to me. I turned to the servant-air, Awaited service or news from him And planned a trip, and swam along the arc Of unbeginning voyages. Where I have more sky—there I’m prepared to wander— And bright longing (toska) won’t release me From the still-young hills of Voronezh To the universal hills—brightening in Tuscany (v Toskane).

Both in criticism and in the speech of poetry-loving Russians, the poem’s first line has come to have something like the aphoristic status of, say, the famous conclusion to Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “’Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” The ambiguity of Keats’s aphorism is well-known; depending on where the quotation marks are placed in the poem’s various editions, it may be either Keats’ speaker or the vase itself that utters the poem’s final phrases. The command that opens Mandelstam’s poem is no less ambiguous, and its ambiguity likewise stems from our difficulty in locating the voice that speaks the line. Whose commandment is this? Can it be that of the Mandelstam who announces, through his Dante, that “I compare, therefore I am” (CPL, 451)? “The living are incomparable,” Mandelstam’s poem warns— and yet Mandelstam’s Dante, like his latter-day disciple, compares as though his life depends on it. He compares “because there is no existence outside of comparison, because existence itself is comparison” (CPL, 451). Mandelstam places comparison at the very heart of Dante’s great enterprise—“The comparative relationship of Rome to Florence served as the impulse to form-creation that resulted in the Inferno” (CPL, 451)—and this relationship, in turn, bears comparison with Mandelstam’s own endeavor in “Do not compare.” “Do not compare,” the poem bids us—but it ends by violating its own precept as it juxtaposes Voronezh’s young hills with the “universal hills” of Dante’s Tuscany in its final stanza. This apparent self-contradiction should not, perhaps, surprise us by now. Mandelstam’s late poetry thrives on paradoxes and oxymorons, and the poems that surround “Do not compare” in the “Voronezh Notebooks” indicate that he has learned to find life-giving contradictions even in his unchosen new environs. “What should we do with the plains’ dead weight (ubitost’),/With the drawn-out hunger of

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

275

their miracle?” (#350) he asks in a poem written, like “Do not compare,” in January of 1937, and his richly oxymoronic question points the way to the answer he gives in another lyric of the period, “I have not yet died” (1937; #354): E]e ne umer q, e]e q ne odin, Pokuda s ni]enkojópodrugoj Q nasla'da[sq velihiem ravnin I mgloj, i golodom, i v;[goj. V prekrasnoj bednosti, v roskownoj ni]ete "ivu odinóspokoen i utewen . . . I have not yet died, I am not yet alone, While my darling beggar-friend and I Still delight in the greatness of the plains, And in darkness, and hunger, and the winter storm. In stunning poverty, in splendid squalor, I live alone—serene and comforted . . . .

The poet and the plains share the same stunning poverty; what remains is to extend this wealth of emptiness into history. And this, in turn, returns us to the Tuscan hills that conclude a poem built on open-ended propositions and unresolved, unresolvable contradictions. “The horizon is wide-open,/Like a messenger with no decree,” Mandelstam mourns in “I’m stuck around Koltsov.” In “Do not compare,” however, he learns to read this seemingly vacant landscape differently; he must attend to the contradictory messages of land and sky before he can achieve the final, moving pun in which his very yearning (toska) ties him to the homeland of all longing, to Dante’s native Tuscany (Toska-ne). The aphoristic weight of the poem’s opening line dissipates in light of this reading. The line would seem to stand alone, finished, self-sufficient, and incontrovertible. It is in fact the only line in the poem that does not depend syntactically on other lines to complete its sense; it is a self-contained sentence that ends with the line itself. Its seeming finality is deceptive, though, and, as the poem progresses, we find that its message is partial at best. The commandment “Do not compare” issues, I would argue, not from Mandelstam, or from his speaker-surrogate, but from the steppes themselves. More precisely, this is the message that Mandelstam derives etymologically from the egalitarian plains, which share a common root with the action they disclaim: Ne sravnivai: zhivushchii nesrav nim. . . . Ia soglashalsia s ravenstom ravnin. The plains assert their claim on Mandelstam’s undivided attention, and he agrees to their demands, albeit in typically ambivalent fashion: “With a kind of tender fright,/I acceded to the plains’ equality.” To compare the plains to what lies above or beyond them would mean to see them not as they are, but in the shadow of what they ought to be. It would mean to miss their meaning entirely.

276

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

Mandelstam learns, then, to accept the message of the plains, but his acceptance is temporary and qualified; it marks only the first step in the psychic “journey with conversations” (CPL, 447) that he undertakes in this brief lyric. The plains’ advice is, I’ve noted, partial, and it is partial in more than one sense: it is both incomplete and partisan. It argues for a particular and restricted point of view, and Mandelstam, under the influence of the level steppes, can no longer tolerate the sky: “And the heavens’ sphere was illness to me.” The illness he suffers from is, moreover, peculiar to the plains. It is a nedug, that is, a non-arc (ne-duga), as Mandelstam’s punning poetic etymology would have it.82 The steppes, which resist unflattering comparisons with the arching sky, succeed in ironing out their competitor’s curves by way of this disease, and they have left the poet stranded between two expanses, heaven and earth, that are equal in their unrelieved monotony. In the poem’s second stanza, Mandelstam seeks to counterbalance the message of the steppes by attending to the lessons of the air: “I turned to the servant-air,/Awaited service or news from him.” This servant-air is magic and mobile, a russified Ariel, and he seems to hold out the prospect of release from bondage, of the reprieve or pardon that would end the poet’s exile to the steppes. The heaven’s vault is restored—the poet swims along its arc (duga)—but its promise of freedom is short-lived and illusory: “And [I] planned a trip and swam along the arc/Of unbeginning voyages.” The poet is caught once again in a vicious circle, as the revolving heavens trap him no less surely, for all their seeming motion, than the static plains had earlier. Historically, of course, it is true that Mandelstam the man would have sought his freedom in vain from earth or air while his fate lay in the hands of Joseph Stalin. But absolute freedom from the constraints of time and space, of history and fate, had never been the goal of Mandelstam the poet in any case. We achieve such freedom as we have, the Acmeist insists, by testing the limits of our circumscribed lives, not by seeking to transcend them entirely. We create, in culture and in nature, an endless chain of dynamic interrelationships with what lies beyond us, in time as well as space, and we thus attain a tenuous, temporary reprieve from “the cage of our own organisms” and from the “world’s prison” (CPL, 63; #8). The poet of the “Voronezh Notebooks” remembers these early lessons as he plots his escape from a bondage his younger self could not have imagined. “I compare, therefore I am,” says Mandelstam’s Dante, and comparison, juxtaposition, the uneasy counterbalancing of seeming opposites: these prove to be the chinks in the transparent walls of Mandelstam’s open-air prison, as he lays claim to the larger being he desires in the final stanza of “Do not compare.” The struggles of the earlier stanzas culminate in one crucial oxymoron that marks the final stage of the poet’s thwarted journeys. “Bright longing” keeps him in Voronezh, and the Russian for “bright,” iasnyi, can also mean “clear,” as in “clear eyes,” “clear gaze,”

•

P O W E R F U L

I N S I G N I F I C A N C E

•

277

“clear” or “lucid judgment.” In a poem written two days earlier, Mandelstam calls for a blindfold to shield him from the steppes’ “slow, shortwinded vastness”: “A bandage for both my eyes!” (#351). The poet of “Do not compare” responds to his bondage more subtly. Having absorbed the lessons of the steppes and skies, he no longer tries to escape his fate, even when part of that fate is precisely the longing to escape. He accepts his painful destiny with clear and open eyes. And this acceptance becomes, in turn, his paradoxical means of liberation, as Mandelstam’s inescapably mixed feelings prove to be a blessing in disguise. Just as all roads lead to Rome, so all longing (toska) takes us to Tuscany (Toskania), even though this same yearning may appear to bar the way. “Bright longing (toska ) won’t release me,” Mandelstam insists, from his Voronezh exile (my italics)—but it is precisely this longing that lights the path to Dante’s native land, as Mandelstam’s iasnaia toska expands acoustically to become the brightening hills of Tuscany (kholmy iasneiushchim v Toskane), in what is both a magnificent pun and a perfect cultural rhyme. For it is indeed the very fact of exile that finally ties Mandelstam to his beloved “Great European”; fourteenth-century Florence was as inaccessible to Dante, banished from the city for his political beliefs, as it is to his latter-day interlocutor, banished from another town for another set of crimes. What the two share is not a common homeland but a common loss, and this loss, in turn, serves to catalyze their writing. It becomes “a magnetized impulse: a yearning (toska) for the stern of a ship, a yearning for worm’s fodder, a yearning for an unpromulgated law, a yearning for Florence” (CPL, 438; II, 408). Energized by the endless quest for his lost city, Dante becomes “a strategist of transmutation and hybridization” (CPL, 397). The punning image that grows from Mandelstam’s own longing likewise sets in motion a chain of creative transformations. From within the confines of his exile, he manages to change the shape of Russian language and culture as Dante’s Tuscany enters Russia by way of that quintessentially Russian word, toska, which now will bear forever both “an Italian and a Russian soul,” (#84) courtesy of its newly expanded poetic etymology. It is a prime example of the linguistic and literary cross-fertilization of which Mandelstam is a proven master. Moreover, the very landscapes of Tuscany and Voronezh are transformed through Mandelstam’s new vision. The Tuscan hills grow bright from the reflected light of his longing; and, wonder of wonders, young hills begin to sprout where a few lines earlier there had only been hopeless plains. We might see this as yet another kind of creative cross-fertilization, in nature this time, not in culture, as Mandelstam manages to impregnate the steppes’ flat expanse by way of their archenemy, the heavens’ curve, and thus brings their offspring, the newborn hills, into being. But I would argue that the force behind this change in nature is culture, and culture of a peculiarly Mandelstamian kind. “Having combined the uncombinable,”

278

•

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

Mandelstam asserts, “Dante altered the structure of time” in the Divine Comedy (CPL, 439). Mandelstam himself achieves similar results within the restricted space of his little lyric’s closing lines. Through the mediation of the poet-alchemist, past (Dante’s Tuscany) and present (Mandelstam’s Voronezh plains) crossbreed to produce new potential for the future. The past appears in a new light, and the empty, open space of the Voronezh plains stands revealed as pure possibility. Its hills, after all, are still young— they may even be invisible to the untutored eye—but there is no telling what heights they may reach if they are willing to submit to their master’s guiding hand. For, in the grandest inversion of all, the prisoner of the steppes becomes their master. The tacit comparative relationship that lies behind the poem’s final lines may be summarized as follows: as Dante was to the Tuscan hills, so Mandelstam is to his Voronezh steppes. Without Dante, Tuscany’s hills would have been forgotten long since; their universality lies in the hands of the poetic interpreter whose words withstand the wear of time. And without Mandelstam, there would be no Voronezh hills to remember. They would be lost without the compelling force of his form-creating comparisons. The last stanza is finally a brilliant poetic gloss on the phrase summarizing Mandelstam’s ongoing creation of tradition, namely, his definition of Acmeism as a “yearning for world culture,” which dates from his years in exile.83 Mandelstam’s world culture is never present; it exists only as a call to action, as unfulfilled potential. It lies forever hidden in a cultural past waiting to be put to future use. What appears to be mere nostalgia is transformed, for a time, into perfect poetic power as past and future change places by means of the poet’s creative longing for the all-embracing culture that can never entirely be his. It is this power that generates the epiphanic moment that concludes, “Do not compare,” as the landscape of world culture is altered forever by way of a single proper name.

•

C

H

A

P

T

E

R

E

I

G

H

T

•

Chaplinesque, or Villon Again: In Place of an Ending We will sidestep, and to the final smirk Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us, Facing the dull squint with what innocence And what surprise! And yet these fine collapses are not lies More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane; Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise. We can evade you, and all else but the heart: What blame to us if the heart live on. —Hart Crane, from “Chaplinesque” (1921)

“IN MY BEGINNING is my end,” Eliot writes in “East Coker,” the second of his Four Quartets (1944). “My future is in my past,” reads one of the many epigraphs to Akhmatova’s “Poem without a Hero”(1940–66). Akhmatova echoes not only Mary, Queen of Scots, whose motto she quotes, but the Eliot who observes in “Burnt Norton” that “Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past.”1 Both the Quartets and Akhmatova’s late masterpiece are examples of the kind of poem that Lawrence Lipking has in mind when he speaks of the aging poet’s drive toward a final harmonium, toward a summation in verse that will give meaning and wholeness to his life’s work. “The aging poet is haunted by the ghost of his past. . . . [He is] agonizingly aware that every poem is an epitaph.”2 Lipking’s phrases refer to Eliot’s Quartets, but he could just as easily be describing the haunted antiheroine of the “Poem without a Hero,” and, indeed, we might read that poem’s endless epigraphs, false starts, postscripts, and addenda—Akhmatova continued to expand and revise the poem up until the time of her death—as a doomed attempt to postpone the ending to which there could be no further revision. Akhmatova both sums up and resists the inevitable conclusion to her life’s work. Mandelstam left us no such poem, no magnum opus that would show us

280

•

C H A P T E R

E I G H T 3

•

how he intended his life’s work to be read. The ending of his life-in-art has been left open in more ways than one. The tragic conclusion of Mandelstam’s life might seem the most obvious reason for his failure to compose the kind of harmonium that preoccupied Eliot and Akhmatova. Mandelstam’s last years, spent in privation and fear—to say nothing of the final months in prison and the slow death from starvation and disease in a Gulag penal camp—do not lend themselves to the considered, contemplative creation that characterizes the harmonia discussed in Lipking’s study. As Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs reveal, though, it is not just Mandelstam’s art that is missing its ultimate summation; his life itself still lacks a definitive ending. In the heart-wrenching last pages of her first volume, she recounts the multiple, contradictory accounts of his final days passed on to her by survivors of the camps, and she refuses to do more than speculate about the plausibility of any of these accounts. “I know only one thing,” she concludes. “Somewhere a person, a victim, a martyr finally died.” History, it would seem, and not the poet, decided when and how to end Mandelstam’s poetic career; and history, in its singularly brutal Stalinist incarnation, decided where to place the final period in his life as well, and it resolved apparently, or so it seemed until quite recently, to keep the definitive version of this ending to itself.4 Though this inconclusive conclusion, in both art and life, may seem initially to be a form of open-endedness, one might, with equal justice, argue just the opposite, that Mandelstam’s tragic death has in fact led to a peculiar closing off of his life-in-art. “A man who dies at the age of thirty-five,” Walter Benjamin remarks, “is at every point of his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-five.” Iurii Tynianov makes a similar point when he notes in an early essay how often in the Russian tradition the poet’s fate has overtaken his writing: “Venevitinov, a complex and curious poet, died at twenty-two, and since then only one thing has been really remembered about him—that he died at twenty-two.”5 The poet who dies—or survives, for that matter— under Stalin is in even greater danger of having the complexity of both his life and work eclipsed by his, and his age’s, history. The poet’s martyrdom, or survival, may come so to dominate perceptions of the life and writing that it becomes nearly impossible to retrieve the intricacies of the life as lived, the text as written, from beneath the all-engulfing shadow of the poet’s troubled fate. Indeed, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s tentative, touching description of Mandelstam’s death suggests the far less hesitant direction that her reading of her husband’s life and work takes elsewhere in the memoirs. Earlier in the first volume, she suggests that Mandelstam’s grim death was in fact the necessary, freely chosen conclusion to an exemplary life-in-art. “The death of an artist,” she writes, “is never accidental. It is the final creative act, and, like a shaft of light, it illuminates his life’s path”: “After all, the end, death—is a most powerful structural element, and it determines the entire thrust of the life. [Mandelstam] masterfully directed his life toward the doom that lay in wait for him. . . .” The victim, the martyr, the scapegoat

•

C H A P L I N E S Q U E ,

O R

V I L L O N

A G A I N

•

281

who accepts, even embraces, his unenviable fate: in this reading of the poet’s life as imitation of Christ, it is little wonder that the death takes on a kind of retrospective necessity as the final structural element that marks completion of the paradigm.6 Knowledge of Mandelstam’s grim fate has, perhaps inevitably, prejudiced critical discussions of his late work. In articles otherwise distinguished by their modesty, sensitivity, and critical tact, Iurii Levin uses the final paragraphs of his two-part study of the late poetry to launch an attack on a modern European culture that has proved unworthy of the great gift of Mandelstam’s life, death, and art. He might be Paul preaching to the Romans when he warns that “Mandelstam must ‘change something in the structure and composition’ not only of Russian poetry, but of world culture as well. And if world culture does not heed and understand him, it will suffer.”7 Other students of the late work have ended their studies less ambitiously, but no less tellingly. Let us turn in this context to the poem that several critics have chosen to take as “Mandelstam’s last word,” which is the last but one in the Filipoff/Struve edition of Mandelstam’s work, “To the empty earth” (1937; #394 ).8 The lyric, a beautiful and moving one, concludes as follows: Est; 'en]iny syroj zemle rodnye, I ka'dyj wag ixógulkoe rydanie, Soprovo'dat; umerwix i vpervye Privetstvovat; voskreswixóix prizvan;e. I laski trebovat; u nix prestupno, I rasstavat;sq s nimi neposil;no. Segodnqóangel, zavtraóherv; mogil;nyj, A poslezavtraótol;ko ohertan;e. Hto byloópostup;,óstanet nedostupno, Cvety bessmertny. Nebo celokupno. I to, hto budetótol;ko obe]an;e. There are women kin to the damp earth, And their every step resounds with sobbing, To accompany the dead—that is their calling, And to be the first who greet the resurrected. To demand caresses from them is a crime, To part from them exceeds all strength. Today an angel, tomorrow a worm in the grave, And the day after, only an outline remains. What had been footsteps will be out of reach. Flowers are deathless. Heaven is whole. And what will be is only a promise.

The poem all but demands to be read in the light, or the shadow, of Mandelstam’s subsequent death. It apparently anticipates the mission of the devoted women—Anna Akhmatova, Natasha Shtempel, and of course,

282

•

C H A P T E R

E I G H T

•

Nadezhda Mandelstam herself—who were determined, often at great personal cost, to keep the poet’s legacy alive in spite of the almost unsuperable odds facing them in Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia. It was, in fact, Nadezhda Mandelstam who chose to end Mandelstam’s final “Voronezh Notebook” with this poem; he himself had originally planned to conclude with a different lyric. She thus anticipates and consecrates her fate by way of this editorial decision.9 The poem lends itself beautifully, moreover, to the christological reading of the poet’s life and art, of which Nikita Struve is, with Nadezhda Mandelstam, the prime exponent; and indeed, Struve ends his study of Mandelstam with this lyric’s final lines, after having carefully prefaced them with the following homily: “[Mandelstam worked] to save time, history and humanity through the miracle of poetry, but [he knew] that true salvation lies outside of literature, outside even of poetry, in the imitation of Christ even unto martyrdom.”10 Just as important, the poem looks backward as well as forward. It returns us to predictions made in one of Tristia’s loveliest lyrics even as it apparently anticipates the shape that Mandelstam’s life and art will take after his death. “In the black velvet of the Soviet night/ . . . The dear eyes of blessed women keep on singing,/The immortal flowers still bloom on”— so run perhaps the most famous lines from Mandelstam’s celebrated poem, “We will meet again in Petersburg,” and these blessed women reappear in his poetry shortly before he himself is consumed by the dark and empty Soviet night (1920; #118). Poetry, fate, and destiny join hands, then, in the “circle dance of shadows” (#123), both commemorative and prophetic, that concludes Mandelstam’s poetic labors. This, at least, is how Jennifer Baines and Jane Gary Harris choose to interpret the meaning of this poem as they end their studies of Mandelstam’s writings. “The hope which transforms [the poem] into an act of faith,” Baines asserts, “illuminates not only the collection which it crowns but Mandelstam’s entire life and poetry—and not least the tragedy of his death.” And Harris concludes her discussion of the poem and the poet on a similar note: “His last will and testament, his final collection containing both his requiem and hymn to humankind, offers as the poet’s greatest gift the ‘promise’ of poetic testimony to his ‘reader in posterity.”’ For all their differences—and Struve, Baines and Harris differ greatly both in the aims and in the execution of their studies—all three critics feel compelled to make sense of the poet’s ending in life by locating the appropriate ending to his work. If the poet himself is unable to provide the reconciling harmonium that brings his poetic biography full circle, the critic, it appears, may undertake to do it for him.11 Lipking, however, raises the possibility of another kind of ending, or non-ending, to the poet’s life and art. “Must the poet’s career,” he asks, “always describe a closed circle, a faithful rounding-off of obligations?” Or “might it stay open at every point to unexpected directions and new beginnings?” “Can the work of a great poet,” he wonders, “consist entirely of

•

C H A P L I N E S Q U E ,

O R

V I L L O N

A G A I N

•

12

283

beginnings?” I have noted the external causes that may have kept Mandelstam from composing his poetic testament; however, the most important reason is part and parcel of Mandelstam’s poetic project as such. In his introduction to a recent two-volume Soviet edition of Mandelstam’s work, S. S. Averintsev notes Mandelstam’s “profound fear” of “tautology in the broadest sense of the word, his fear of dead ends (mertvye tochki), of unproductive stasis.” “He runs entirely crosswise and counter to himself” in his writing as in his life, and his “poetics of contradiction” require him to create and preserve the poetic “doublets” (dvoichatki) and “triplets” (troichatki; the terms are Nadezhda Mandelstam’s), the multiple variants on the same theme or text, that keep his readers from determining which is the rough and which is the final draft.13 Mandelstam, like his Dante, “stands outside literature as a finished product” (CPL, 438), and he refuses to give us the satisfaction of reaching a final destination in our journey through his work. Unlike Eliot, who imagines in his “Little Gidding” the “end of all our exploring,” Mandelstam anticipates, through his Dante, a “reader in posterity” who will be given a good run for his money, who will never be sure that he has actually crossed the finish line, or that such a line even exists. “The reading of Dante,” he warns, “is an endless labor, for the more we succeed, the further we are from our goal”; “The teacher is younger than the pupil,” Mandelstam insists, “for he ‘runs faster.’ ”(CPL, 400).14 Let us return briefly to the poem that concludes so many discussions of Mandelstam’s work, “To the empty earth,” and instead of reading forward, by placing it in the shadow of Mandelstam’s imminent death, let us read backward for a moment and reroot it in the context of his intentionally contradictory, inconclusive poetics. The poem that immediately precedes this lyric in the Filipoff/Struve edition, “The pear and bird-cherry trees took aim at me” (1937; #393), warns us lightheartedly against settling accounts too easily in our search for Mandelstam’s “last word”: Na menq nacelilas; gruwa, da heremuxaó Silo[ rassyphatoj b;et menq bez promaxa. Kisti vmeste s zvezdami, zvezdy vmeste s list;qmió Hto za dvoevlast;e tam? v h;em socvet;i istina? S cvetu li, s razmaxu liób;et vozduwno-belymi V vozdux, ubivaemyj kistenqmi celymi. I dvojnogo zapaxa sladost; neu'ivhivaó Boretsq i tqnetsq, smewana, obryvhiva. The pear and bird-cherry trees took aim at me— And with crumbling strength they beat me flawlessly. Clusters mixed with stars, stars mixed with leaves— What is that doubled power? In which flowering lies truth?

284

•

C H A P T E R

E I G H T

•

With its bloom or with its might—it beats with airy-white Whole bludgeons into the dying air. And the sweetness of the double scent is quarrelsome— It does battle, it drags on, mixed and rupturing.

This poem, written on the same day as Mandelstam’s “Testament,” reminds us of the unsettling “double scent” of Mandelstam’s own verse. And, indeed, we have only to move a little further backward to find a troublesome double to “To the empty earth,” a double that picks a poetic quarrel with the solemn tone and lofty diction of the later poem. “To the empty earth” was dedicated to the Mandelstams’ closest friend in exile, Natasha Shtempel. It is not the only poem, however, that bears her name among Mandelstam’s last works, and if “To the empty earth” consecrates the sacred role of the “blessed women” destined to mediate between the living and the dead, then another poem, written only two days earlier, anticipates an entirely different fate for the Natasha who is the heroine of its playful narrative. This poem, “The buds smell of sticky vows” (#389), is a charming, comic epithalamion, in which all of nature conspires with the poem’s folksy speaker in persuading Natasha to marry at last: “Everyone keeps urging her:/Bright Natasha,/Marry for our happiness,/Marry for our health.” This lyric represents a strain of poetry that coexists, however restlessly, with Mandelstam’s more somber, solemn verses up until the point where his “Notebooks” break off. “The buds smell of sticky vows,” with its “matchmaker birds” and chatterbox skies, its jingly rhythms and childlike diction, hardly fits with the image of the poet-martyr marching bravely onward to meet his unearned fate. And yet it is not at all exceptional in the late verse, which abounds with playful, charming, apparently frivolous poems, “infantile” works that nonetheless demand to be taken as seriously as are their more “grown-up,” sober counterparts.15 Intimations of mortality do run throughout the late poems, as well they might, given the circumstances in which Mandelstam lived and wrote during the last years of his life. But even death is played in more than one key in the late poetry—and one poem in particular reminds us that death presented as a form of playfulness is an active force in Mandelstam’s work from the start. This poem, “So that the friend of wind and raindrops” (1937; #382), comes close to the end of the “Voronezh Notebooks,” but its subject returns us inevitably to Mandelstam’s beginnings, and to his first and dearest literary kinsman, François Villon. Death always follows close behind the inventive outlaw of Mandelstam’s early essay, who outwits his preordained fate time and again through a series of hairbreadth escapes. Even when his end appears to be imminent, though, he manages to channel it into his poetry, where it becomes, paradoxically, a source of boundless creative force and energy: “A dynamic visionary, Villon dreamed of his own hanging on the eve of his own probable execution. But, oddly enough, in his ‘Ballade des pendus,’ he combined incredible cruelty with rhythmic in-

•

C H A P L I N E S Q U E ,

O R

V I L L O N

A G A I N

•

285

spiration in depicting the wind swinging the bodies of the condemned back and forth, back and forth, at will” (CPL, 59). Death does not mark a standstill or dead end for the irreverent Villon any more than it does for his self-appointed descendant. On the contrary, the arbitrary rhythms Villon sets in motion even in death will outlast his physical self and thus become his guarantee of immortality. The “frivolous . . . juggler” of rhythms and fates, “adroit and careless,” is destined to outlive his persecutors by virtue of his endlessly energetic ending (CPL, 60). The battlelines that divide Mandelstam’s late Villon from Villon’s age and culture have become far less fluid and flexible than they had been in the early essay, and this Villon takes on the enemy state precisely by combatting its inhuman, monumental way of death with his own ferocious, cheeky form of immortality. This “Egyptian state,” Mandelstam proclaims, can only “provide the dead with odds and ends,/And it juts like trifling pyramids.” Villon’s legacy to posterity, on the other hand, is whimsical and provocative, as the poem’s final stanzas demonstrate: Razmotavwij na dva zave]an;q Slabovol;nyx imu]estv klubok I v pro]an;e otdav, v vere]an;e Mir, kotoryj kak herep glubok% Rqdom s gotikoj 'il ozoru[hi I pleval na pauh;i prava Naglyj wkol;nik i angel voru[]ij, Nesravnennyj Villon Fransua. On razbojnik nebesnogo klira, Rqdom s nim nezazorno sidet;% I pred samoj konhino[ mira Budut 'avoronki zvenet; . . . Having unwound his tangle Of weak-willed possessions in two testaments, And having passed on in parting, in chirping, A world as deep as a skull: He lived alongside the Gothic, playing pranks And spat on its spidery laws, A shameless schoolboy, an avenging angel, The incomparable Villon, François. He’s the brigand in heaven’s clergy, And it’s no disgrace to sit by him: And before the world’s final ending Skylarks will be ringing . . .

Which legacy will last longest, the poem asks: Villon’s tangled, playful testaments or the Egyptian monuments of his enemies, and its answer takes us

286

•

C H A P T E R

E I G H T

•

back into the realm of Mandelstamian oxymoron: Villon, the high priest of witty insignificance, will outlast the trivial pyramids of his foes. His gnashing teeth, his schoolboy pranks, his chirping verse will be audible long after the centuries have silenced those who sought to silence him. Indeed, as the world itself draws to a close, it too will be playing his song: “And before the world’s final ending/Skylarks will be ringing . . .”16 Critics have interpreted Mandelstam’s return to Villon, and to other themes and topoi of the early poetry as his way of bidding farewell to the world culture he had served so long.17 Even Mandelstam’s celebration of a nonsensical, defiant Villon who triumphs over death itself may be, and has been, read as a tying up of loose ends before Mandelstam reaches his own inevitable conclusion. Once again, though, Mandelstam resists our efforts to tidy up his ending. His Villon is a comic, even blasphemous, counterweight to the sacerdotal image of poet-prophet or poet-Christ that Mandelstam continues to cultivate in the late poetry; Villon is, Mandelstam reminds us, the “brigand in heaven’s clergy.” But Mandelstam goes one step further than this in his struggle to keep future readers from confining him to the culture of the European tradition and his own poetic past. In his ceaseless creation of poetic doublets and triplets, he gives even his Villon a tragicomic counterpart drawn not from the ranks of the lofty poetic fraternity he had envisioned in earlier works—Homer, Ovid, Pushkin, Chénier, and so on—but from the lowbrow domain of American popular culture. He and Villon acquire a new kinsman in the form of a fellow outcast artist, Charlie Chaplin, in the two late poems Mandelstam devotes to his transAtlantic comrade-in-arms, “As I’d ask for charity and mercy” (1937, #373) and “Charlie Chaplin” (1937; #386). For, true to form, Mandelstam gives us not one but two Chaplins, a Parisian and a Muscovite. He refuses, even here, to allow us or himself to settle comfortably into one way of reading the fate and meaning of the “little tramp” who wanders through Parisian boulevards and Moscow’s chilly streets in Mandelstam’s final poem-strolls. The Chaplin doublets, written two months apart in two different cities, coexist uneasily at best as they articulate their unsettling, double-edged message: Q prowu, kak 'alosti i milosti, Franciq, tvoej zemli i 'imolosti, Pravdy gorlinok tvoix i krivdy karlikovyx Vinogradarej v ix razgorodkax marlevyx. V legkom dekabre tvoj vozdux stri'ennyj Indeveet dene'nyj, obi'ennyj, No fialka i v t[r;meós uma sojti v bezbre'nosti@ Svi]et pesenka-nasmewnica, nebre'nicaó

•

C H A P L I N E S Q U E ,

O R

V I L L O N

A G A I N

•

Gde burlila, korolej smyvaq, Ulica i[l;skaq krivaq. A teper; v Pari'e, v Wartre, v Arle Gosudarit dobryj Haplin Harlió V okeanskom kotelke s rasseqnno[ tohnost;[ Na warnikax on kura'itsq s cvetohnicej. Tam, gde s rozoj na grudi, v dvubawennoj isparine Pautiny kameneet wal;, "al;, hto karusel; vozduwno-blagodarnaq Oborahivaetsq, gorodom dywa,ó Nakloni svo[ we[, bezbo'nica, S zolotymi glazami kozy, I krivymi kartavymi no'nicami Kupy skarednyx roz razdrazni. As I’d ask for charity and mercy, I beg you, France, for your land and honeysuckle, For your turtledoves’ truth and the falseness of midget Wine-growers in their gauze partitions. In light December your close-cropped air Frosts over, well-heeled and indignant . . . But a violet even in jail—the nonchalance could drive you crazy! The flapper-song, cheeky, whistles on— Where July’s crooked street Seethed, sweeping kings away. But now in Paris, in Chartres, in Arles Good Charlie Chaplin reigns supreme. In his oceanic bowler, with absentminded precision He swaggers restlessly with his flower girl. There, with a rose on her breast, in two-towered sweat, Her spiderweb shawl turns to stone, What a shame that the airy, grateful carousel Keeps spinning, inhaling the city— Bend down your neck, little atheist With a goat’s golden eyes, And with crooked, lisping scissors Tease the heaps of cheapskate roses.

287

288

•

C H A P T E R

E I G H T

•

Harli Haplin Vywel iz kino, Dve podmetki, Zaqh;q guba, Dve glqdelki, Polnye hernil I prekrasnyx Udivlennyx sil. Harli Haplinó Zaqh;q guba, Dve podmetkió "alkaq sud;ba. Kak-to my 'ivem neladno vseó Hu'ie, hu'ie. Olovqnnyj U'as na lice, Golova ne Der'itsq sovsem, Xodit sa'a, Vaksa semenit, I tixon;ko Haplin govorit% Dlq hego q slaven i l[bim I da'e znamenit, I vedet ego wosse bol;woe K hu'im, k hu'im. Harli Haplin, Na'imaj pedal;, Haplin, krolik, Probivajsq v rol;. Histi korol;ki, Roliki naden;, A tvoq 'enaó Slepaq ten;,ó I hudit, hudit hu'aq dal;. Othego u Haplina t[l;pan, Pohemu Tak laskova tolpa? Potomuó Hto /to ved; Moskva.

•

C H A P L I N E S Q U E ,

O R

V I L L O N

A G A I N

Harli, Harlió Nado riskovat;, Ty sovsem ne vovremq raskis. Kotelok tvojó tot 'e okean, A Moskva tak blizka, xot; vl[bis; v dorogu, dorogu. Charlie Chaplin Left the movie house, Two soles, And a hare lip, Two peepers, Full of ink And marvelous Astonished powers. Charlie Chaplin Hare lip, Two soles— Sorry fate. We’re all living wrong somehow— Strangers, strangers. Tin Terror on his face, Head won’t Quite stay perched upright, Soot falls, Shoe polish pirouettes, And very softly Charlie says: Why am I known and loved Even famous, And the big highway takes him off To strangers, strangers. Charlie Chaplin, Press the pedal down, Chaplin, rabbit, Get into your role. Peel blood oranges, Put on roller skates, But your wife Is a blind shadow, And the stranger-distance clowns around, around.

•

289

290

•

C H A P T E R

E I G H T

•

Why Does Chaplin have a tulip, Why Is the crowd so kind? Because This is Moscow after all. Charlie, Charlie, You must keep taking risks, You went soft At exactly the wrong time. Your bowler hat Is an ocean, too, And Moscow is so close, even if you love The road, the road.18

These lyrics mark Chaplin’s first and only appearance in Mandelstam’s poetry. Chaplin, however, was no stranger to Russian critics and artists of the twenties and thirties—to say nothing of his immense popularity with the Russian moviegoing public at large. (“Why am I known and loved?” Mandelstam’s Chaplin wonders, and the poem answers: “Because this is Moscow after all.”) A prominent group of scholars and critics, including Viktor Shklovsky and other Formalists, devoted an entire collection of essays to Chaplin in 1923, and Tynianov, in a later study, even chooses to read Russian cultural history through the prism of “Chaplinism,” as he casts Pushkin’s friend and schoolmate, the poet Wilhelm Küchelbecker, in the “role of the Decembrist Charlie Chaplin.” Chaplin’s appeal crossed party lines among the modernist poets; Mayakovsky embraces Chaplin’s antibourgeois épatage in his poem “Cinemania” (1923), while Akhmatova, in a late poem, shares a park bench with two fellow outcasts, Chaplin and Kafka, and boasts in her memoirs of having been born in the same year as were those landmarks of the modern era, Chaplin, Eliot, and the Eiffel Tower. Mandelstam’s own favorite film, his widow tells us, was City Lights (1931), and images from the film surface in both of his Chaplin poems.19 This does not exhaust the list of Chaplin’s poetic admirers—they range, in the West, from André Breton and Paul Eluard to T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Hart Crane—but though such lists may be cited in support of Chaplin’s cultural pedigree, they do not explain his sudden emergence in Mandelstam’s late poetry.20 Yet another of Chaplin’s unexpected enthusiasts, Hannah Arendt, suggests, however, ways in which we might see the comedian’s cameo appearance in the late poems not as a startling departure from Mandelstam’s past poetics but as a natural, even inevitable continuation of the poetic concerns that had preoccupied him from “Fourth Prose” on. In her essay on “The Jew as Pariah” (1944), Arendt argues for a “hidden tradition” of Jewish writers and artists who struggled to shape an image of the Jewish pariah as a crucial “human type” who could speak for and to the central dilemmas of the modern age. Three

•

C H A P L I N E S Q U E ,

O R

V I L L O N

A G A I N

•

291

of her four examples are unexceptionable: the German-Jewish romantic poet Heinrich Heine; the French-Jewish writer and advocate of Jewish rights, Bernard Lazare; and finally, of course, the great Jewish articulator of modern nightmares, Franz Kafka. Her fourth choice, however, is more surprising; he is that non-Jewish ex-vaudevillian, Charlie Chaplin, or rather, the endlessly persecuted little tramp who served as Chaplin’s alter ego in film after film. The origins of this fugitive, Arendt argues, lie not so much in British music halls as in the centuries-long trials of the endlessly oppressed and harried Jewish people: “In Chaplin the most unpopular people in the world inspired what [became] the most popular of contemporary figures.” Chaplin is, in short, Arendt’s addition to a tribe we already know from “Fourth Prose”; he is an honorary “honorable Jew.”21 The outcast Jew-manqué who emerges in Arendt’s essay bears a striking resemblance to Mandelstam’s endlessly persecuted poet-Jew. “In the eyes of society,” Arendt writes, “the type which Chaplin portrays is always fundamentally suspect”: “Because he is suspect, he is called upon to bear the brunt of much that he has not done. Yet at the same time, because he is beyond the pale, unhampered by the trammels of society, he is able to get away with a great deal. Out of this ambivalent situation springs an attitude both of fear and of impudence, fear of the law as if it were an inexorable natural force, and familiar, ironic impudence in the face of its minions.”22 This mischievous outsider is clearly akin to the impudent Jew who takes on the Soviet guardians of law and order in “Fourth Prose,” as Mandelstam plays out his Russian variant on the archetypal dilemma that Chaplin’s tramp faces time and again in his films. (Just as Mandelstam’s description elsewhere of the archetypal film scenario as “pursuit, persecution, and flight” might be taken straight from Chaplin’s master plot [IV,104].) Mandelstam himself particularly admired the film that the Soviet critic I. V. Sokolov describes, in a 1938 study, as the most pessimistic of Chaplin’s comedies, City Lights. In City Lights the quixotic little tramp loses the beautiful blind flower seller he loves as soon as she regains her sight and can see her would-be wealthy suitor for what he really is: an impoverished outcast dressed in rags. Sokolov gives a predictable socialist-realist reading of the film’s bittersweet ending: bourgeois society holds no place for the little man’s dreams of happiness, dreams that find their true fulfillment only in the Soviet people’s paradise.23 Both this film, however, and the more hopeful Modern Times, the two comedies that Mandelstam draws on in creating his Chaplin diptych, lend themselves to another interpretation, one that brings them close to issues at work elsewhere in Mandelstam’s late lyrics. The films share a common concern with the capacity of the perennial outsider to reshape the world through wit, emotion, and imagination, or, failing that, to create an imaginative safe haven from the ruthlessly conformist society that surrounds him. In City Lights these efforts end in apparent failure, while in Modern Times they meet with qualified success as the little tramp finds at least a charming fellow traveler to share his dreams. Mandel-

292

•

C H A P T E R

E I G H T

•

stam likewise gives us a lighter and a darker Chaplin as he tests the limits and possibilities of his own vision through Chaplin’s tramp. Let us turn first to the Chaplin who most clearly takes up where Villon had left off, the Chaplin who appears, apparently out of nowhere, in the midst of Mandelstam’s poignant, fantastical celebration of the France, the Paris, and the Notre Dame that haunt his poetic imagination from the start. “As I’d ask for charity and mercy” is not about Chaplin per se, but he emerges, nonetheless, in mid-lyric as the guiding spirit of a magical France that has fallen under his spell: “But now in Paris, in Chartres, in Arles/ Good Charlie Chaplin reigns supreme (A teper’ v Parizhe, v Shartre, v Arle/Gosudarit dobryi Chaplin Charli).” This couplet, which appears precisely at the poem’s midpoint, sets the tone for the entire lyric. It alerts us to the distance that Mandelstam’s culture has traveled since the early days of “The Morning of Acmeism” and “Notre Dame,” even as it calls attention to the crucial continuities that link the early work to the late. The couplet’s cultural rhyme, which ties Chaplin to the great centers of French medieval culture, is as audacious as the acoustic rhyme that pits a “sacred” place-name, Arles (v Arle) against a comic nickname, Charlie (Charli). Aristocrat and commoner, high culture and low meet and rub elbows in this rhyme, much as they had in the earlier poem-jokes.24 Here, however, this irreverent rhyme signals not the imminent demise of world culture but its unexpectedly tenacious grip on life, and its renewed vitality comes to us courtesy of the little outcast who swaggers with such unwarranted aplomb through the streets of France present and past. In his essay on “Lyric Poetry and Society” (1957), Theodor Adorno argues that poetry “proclaims the dream of a world in which things would be different”; through “the idiosyncracy of poetic thought” and poetic imagination, the poet frees himself, and us with him, from the modern world’s dehumanizing constraints and enables us, at least for a moment, to envision a world in which such restrictions do not obtain.25 Chaplin’s films celebrate just such moments of imaginative release, and Mandelstam follows his lead as he spins out his own vision of a world in which things might be different. His very stance in the poem’s opening lines evokes the Chaplin of City Lights, as a timid admirer begs a flower from a beautiful lady, and indeed Mandelstam’s courtship here of a flowery, feminine France sets in motion the sequence of imagistic transformations that will lead, in the seventh stanza, to Chaplin’s triumphant promenade with a companion who is both his own little flower girl and Mandelstam’s Notre Dame. Mandelstam’s artistry, however, unlike Chaplin’s, is verbal to the core, and he uses linguistic sleight-of-hand to convert his wants and needs into imaginative abundance. “As I’d ask for charity and mercy,/I beg you, France, for your land and honeysuckle,” the poet-supplicant implores, and the contours of his vision miraculously emerge from the very terms of his entreaty. “Charity and mercy,” zhalost’ i milost’, anagramatically shuffle themselves to become the “honeysuckle,” zhimolost’, from which a distinctively Mandelstamian landscape will grow in the stanza that follows. This

•

C H A P L I N E S Q U E ,

O R

V I L L O N

A G A I N

•

293

diminutive, enchanted stage set, in which “turtledove truths” are endangered only by “the falseness of midget winegrowers,” evokes earlier poetic dominions governed by Mandelstam’s imagination at its most charmingly childlike and vulnerable: the pistachio dovecotes of “Today you can make decals,” for example, or the fragile, airy moonscapes of “On the moon” (1914; #58). Mandelstam is, however, both too ambitious and, like his Chaplin, too restless to settle down in this miniature playground of the imagination, and the stanzas that follow raise serious issues by way of their very volatility and apparent playfulness. With its kaleidoscopic rush of shifting, surreal imagery, Mandelstam’s poem militates against any kind of closed and tidy, line-by-line reading. Indeed, this shifting imagery is itself part of Mandelstam’s bid for poetic freedom; he is practicing a very specific form of poetry in motion, in which his language and vision constitute a strategically moving target that eludes all efforts to take aim at it. But Mandelstam was himself, of course, well acquainted with the kind of society in which poetry’s imaginative countervision could not be countenanced, and the core of the poem concerns precisely his fantasy of a society in which things might be otherwise. In the poem’s idealized and whimsical France, he finds a world where impudent song (another flowery female) keeps on singing even behind bars: “But a violet even in jail . . . The flapper-song, cheeky, whistles on.” It is a world where revolutions may indeed “sweep kings away”—the reference is to the July Revolution of 1830, which ended the Bourbon monarchy—but they do not take art’s free play along with them. Indeed, this revolution’s “crooked street” will lead a century later to the coronation of a king who is also the court jester—“Good Charlie Chaplin reigns supreme”—and whose crown is an “oceanic bowler.” The crooked street of French history serves to remind us that, though we may be on foreign territory, we have entered it by way of a route that is familiar in its very strangeness. Crooked streets are, of course, the native turf of the poet-Jew, and the poem’s concluding stanzas provide other clues that we are once again in the homeland of Mandelstam’s ideally oxymoronic, powerfully insignificant artist. Chaplin’s comic crown is perhaps the most telling of these clues. To begin with, it reminds us of the paradoxes involved in Chaplin’s own position in modern culture. The hapless outcast who appeared in film after film was at the same time the most universally loved figure in the cinema of the time; metaphorically speaking, his bowler did indeed span continents and seas. And the little hat that perches uneasily on the top of Chaplin’s head did of course actually appear to be vastly larger than life on movie screens around the globe. To turn more specifically to Mandelstam’s own imagery and ambitions, this “oceanic bowler” recasts in a comic key an image that is central to the more somber vision of the poet’s mission presented in the “Verses on the Unknown Soldier” (1937; #362). The sixth segment of the “Verses” consists of a complex play on the relation between the restricted space of the human cranium and the vast creative capacities it contains:

294

•

C H A P T E R

E I G H T

•

Dlq togo l; dol'en herep razvit;sq Vo ves; lobóot viska do viska,ó Htob v ego dorogie glaznicy Ne mogli ne vlivat;sq vojska? Razvivaetsq herep ot 'izni Vo ves; lobóot viska do viska,ó Histotoj svoix wvov on draznit sebq, Ponima[]im kupolom qsnitsq, Mysl;[ penitsq, sam sebe snitsqó Hawa haw i othizna othizneó Zvezdnym rubhikom wityj hepecó Hephik shast;qóWekspira otec. Is that why the skull must develop, Become all brow—temple to temple— So that troups might helplessly pour Into its precious sockets? The skull takes its shape from life, Becomes pure brow—temple to temple— It teases itself with the cleanness of its seams, It clarifies itself like a comprehending cupola, It froths with thought, it dreams itself— Cup of cups, fatherland’s fatherland, Cap sewn with a starry seam— Caplet of happiness, Shakespeare’s father.

Chaplin’s hat, modest container of cosmic contents, rings a comic variation on the same theme—but as the late poetry reveals, an image’s seeming triviality does not necessarily diminish its resonance. It is worth remembering, after all, that the skull which prompts first Hamlet’s meditations, and centuries later, Mandelstam’s, comes from the grave of one of Chaplin’s Shakespearean precursors, Yorick the fool, and that the fool’s cap may, as in Mandelstam’s elegy on Belyi, conceal the mind of a master. Mandelstam’s vision of the poet’s calling depends on just such unlikely combinations.26 The consort that Mandelstam selects for his Chaplin is a measure of the regard in which he holds his comic alter ego. For, in another of the poem’s vertiginous transformations, Chaplin’s flower girl—the latest incarnation of Mandelstam’s belle dame France—becomes, in the poem’s final stanzas, none other than Mandelstam’s beloved Notre Dame. This Notre Dame, however, bears little resemblance to the monumental cathedral that the young Acmeist both celebrated and challenged a quarter century earlier. “Culture has become the Church,” Mandelstam proclaims in “The Word and Culture” (1921; CPL, 110), and his early Notre Dame keeps all the multiplicitous, conflicting energies of world culture in tenuous check. Mandelstam’s late flower girl/Notre Dame represents, however, a very dif-

•

C H A P L I N E S Q U E ,

O R

V I L L O N

A G A I N

•

295

ferent culture, as her dual identity suggests. She is both cathedral and waif, both Our Lady and a “little atheist (bezbozhnitsa)”; she is thus the ideal muse and companion for the oxymoronic artist, both king and fool, who swaggers by her side. Like the earlier church, she is simultaneously building and body: “There, with a rose on her breast, in two-towered sweat,/Her spiderweb shawl turns to stone.” And Mandelstam’s description is faithful, once again, to specifics of the church’s design; the rose window between two towers becomes the flower pinned between the gamine’s breasts, while the Gothic lace of the flying buttresses is recast as her enveloping shawl. This is manifestly not the body, however, of the colossal church-as-mother that overpowers the young poet, much less the virile form of an overgrown Adam testing his strength. It is the sensual, feminine shape of a coy mistress, who teases her would-be lover as she hesitates between imposing stone and inviting flesh. Mandelstam’s flower girl/Notre Dame is vertiginous in her mercurial motion. “What a shame that the airy, grateful carousel/Keeps spinning, inhaling the city,” Mandelstam writes in yet another irreverent depiction of the church’s rose window, and his image evokes Robert Delauney’s famous Futurist paintings, in which monstrous, jaunty Eiffel Towers promenade through Parisian streets, more than his own relatively well-behaved Notre Dame of 1912, which had at least the decency to keep its “Dionysian orgies” concealed behind a more or less respectable façade. We cannot stop this carousel’s flight, for its essence lies precisely in its motion, and to identify it with any one of its guises would mean to mistake it entirely: it both is and is not Notre Dame, Chaplin’s companion, Mandelstam’s imprisoned song; it is and is not a flapper, a flower girl, an atheist, France itself.27 This protean feminine principle represents a kind of irreverent, elusive, creative energy that keeps Mandelstam himself in constant motion as he continuously seeks out new forms and new images in which to cloak its force. The poet’s own identity, moreover, is infected by the instability of his companion, for he has his own doppelgänger in the poem and, as is usual with doubles, the two never appear on screen at the same time; the “I” that opens the poem gives way in the middle to Chaplin’s reign only to reappear again in the poem’s final stanzas, as Mandelstam himself addresses Chaplin’s erstwhile companion, the flower girl/church. And the shape of the poem itself reflects this pervasive restlessness. The earlier Notre Dame was safely encased in a conventional, metrically regular structure of four-line, rhyming stanzas made up of six-foot iambs. Mandelstam’s Chaplinesque Notre Dame demands more mobile, unpredictable poetic accommodations. The couplets that make up the poem’s first part do rhyme, but their end-rhymes are inventively irregular at best and are, on occasion, overshadowed by conspicuous internal rhymes and other forms of acoustic play. Even this limited rhyme scheme changes in midstream as, in the poem’s final lines, the couplets are replaced by four-line stanzas with alternating rhymes, or, more precisely, alternating near-rhymes. Of the poem’s metri-

296

•

C H A P T E R

E I G H T

•

cal structure, it is perhaps safest to say that it follows the lead of its poetic precursors, the poem-strolls. The poem proceeds, in other words, along the metrical equivalent of Mandelstam’s own crooked, winding road. Though it would be a mistake to identify the poem’s fickle Frenchwoman with any single incarnation, there is a larger force with which we might tentatively align this inconstant muse, a force that shapes Mandelstam’s poetics and vision from the start. The church and culture are one and the same for the young Acmeist, and Gothic churches, as refashioned by modernist writers, are his first and favorite vessel for the world culture he seeks to incarnate in his work. In “As I’d ask,” Mandelstam fuses his quest for an all-encompassing culture with the poignant, comic plot of a Chaplin comedy, with Chaplin playing Mandelstam or Mandelstam playing Chaplin. And in this frivolous remake, world culture (grammatically feminine in Russian) is played by the beautiful girl, be she flower seller or waif, whom Chaplin woos and loses throughout his films. Mandelstam’s ongoing search for world culture is replayed in the key of powerful insignificance; it becomes the energizing courtship of an enchanting girl whose resistance pushes her suitor to new heights of invention as he seeks to win her favor. By the end of the poem, he seems to have won her over, at least for the time being. “Bend down your neck, little atheist,” Mandelstam bids his companion in the poem’s final lines, and his next request suggests that this gamine world culture may consent to play the role if not of paramour, then of poetic partner-in-crime: “And with crooked, lisping scissors/Tease the heaps of cheapskate roses.” These closing commands do not signal the end of the intricate, ongoing courtship between Mandelstam and his beloved culture. They do point, however, to yet another change that has taken place in their relationship since the early days of Stone and the first manifestos in prose and verse. “Notre Dame” ends with the challenge of a defiant child addressing his towering parent: “I too will create beauty some day.” In “As I’d ask,” an easy give-and-take between equals replaces the blatant inequality that marks the early relations between the poet and his ideal culture. In the domain of the powerfully insignificant artist, both poet and culture are equally large (King Charlie, Notre Dame) and equally small (the little tramp and his flower girl), and we might imagine a final fade-out for the poem in which Mandelstam and his world culture wander off together as Chaplin and his gamine do at the end of Modern Times, playfully squabbling as they make their way down a road that seems strangely familiar to Mandelstam’s readers. This, however, is not Mandelstam’s final word on Chaplin, or on the prospects for their shared vision; “As I’d ask” gives us only one possible conclusion to this Chaplinesque adventure in world culture. In one of his final poetic zigzags, Mandelstam leaves open the possibility of a far less cheering finale in the last of his two Chaplin poems. “Charlie Chaplin,”

•

C H A P L I N E S Q U E ,

O R

V I L L O N

A G A I N

•

297

written in Moscow after the Mandelstams’ return from exile, does not belong to the “Voronezh Notebooks” proper; it comes past the point where we should, according to some critics, strategically draw the curtain on Mandelstam’s work, for fear that his final Moscow poems might leave us with a “distressing impression.”28 And the last poems of his life, as recorded in a recent two-volume Russian edition of his work, do darken and complicate our portrait of the artist’s final days in multiple ways that I will not discuss in detail here. The most disturbing element in these poems, however, is no doubt Mandelstam’s return to the mode of the so-called “Stalin Ode” (#517), the paean to the Soviet leader he had composed several months earlier. “Stalin’s thunderous name” resounds in the climax of one poem, while in another, “Stalin’s book,” the new sacred text, takes up where the “Voronezh Notebooks” had left off. Perhaps most dishearteningly, in the same lyric “Mandelstam Street” is tacitly rechristened, in true Soviet fashion, as the “road to Stalin,” as Mandelstam’s poetic path apparently converges with the triumphal progress of the wise warrior and father he had sought to appease in the ode. This “road to Stalin,” Mandelstam insists, is “no fairy tale”—but there is one last poem that casts doubt on Mandelstam’s ability to follow this resolutely anti-lyrical road to the end. This is the poetic portrait of Chaplin that we find incongruously sandwiched between various poeticized Stalins and stalinistki, Stalinist enchantresses, in the new Russian edition.29 “Moscow will repeat itself in Paris,” Mandelstam writes in perhaps the most chilling of his final poems, the “Stanzas” of July 1937, and this line forcefully articulates what is clearly a prime objective of the last Moscow lyrics: the complete obliteration of the creative countervision that he had expressed with such wit and energy in “As I’d ask,” and that he had located precisely in a fabulous, decidedly un-Muscovite, France.30 Mandelstam’s last Chaplin cannot resurrect this France even in his imaginings—“This is Moscow after all,” the poem warns—but Mandelstam’s cinematic alter ego does permit him to act out the painful vacillations and hesitations that hide behind his seeming newfound allegiance to the name, book, and road of Joseph Stalin. Through his first Chaplin, Mandelstam celebrates his sovereignty in a realm of unfettered artistic imagination; through his second, he attempts to estimate the price he has paid in relinquishing this kingdom. Indeed, he goes further than this. He addresses, by way of his bewildered, childish Chaplin, the dilemma of the poet in a state where such kingdoms of the mind cannot be countenanced, in which allegiance to imagination is suspect at best and constitutes, in the most flagrant cases, a form of high treason punishable by death. The state found an unlikely mouthpiece for its case against the imagination in the great film director Sergei Eisenstein, an early champion of Chaplin’s work. In his essay “Charlie the Kid” (1945–46), Eisenstein links Chaplin to what he sees as a typically American love for liberating play and

298

•

C H A P T E R

E I G H T

•

an irresponsible desire “to create our world for ourselves.” This is the impulse, according to Eisenstein, that Chaplin represents, and this is why he is finally so retrograde, so out of place in the brave new Soviet state: “Flight from reality. . .” “Return to childhood . . .” “Infantilism . . .” In the Soviet Union, we don’t like these words. We don’t like these concepts. We don’t sympathize with the fact of their existence. At the other end of the world we do not flee from reality into fairy-tales; we make fairy-tales real. . . . And that is why the genius of Chaplin could only be born at the other end of the earth, and not in the country where everything is done so that the golden paradise of childhood can become reality (final ellipses mine).31

Mandelstam could not have known Eisenstein’s essay—it was first published seven years after his death—but the parallels between what Eisenstein describes as Chaplin’s failings and the ambiguous virtues that Mandelstam ascribes to his little tramp are striking. Mandelstam’s poem might almost have been written from the point of view of Eisenstein’s infantile antihero, whose very popularity renders him suspect in a state that programmatically opposes his bourgeois individualism and his fantastical vision. Eisenstein’s Chaplin is both literally and figuratively alien to Soviet culture, and Mandelstam’s Chaplin is likewise a stranger in a stranger land: “Strangers, strangers” runs the poem’s disturbing refrain, and the Russian adjective here, chuzhoi, can mean “foreign” or “alien” as well as “strange.” Mandelstam’s alter ego is conspicuously foreign at a time when, with Stalinist xenophobia at its height, any sort of foreignness would mark one as automatically suspect (just as his characteristically shuffling gait, which gives the poem its shape, is out of synch with the party’s official lockstep). For Mandelstam’s Chaplin, who emerges from his native realm, the cinema, only to find himself in Moscow at the height of Stalin’s terror, there can be no escape from this pervasive mistrust and fearfulness: “We’re all living wrong somehow,” Mandelstam mourns through his Chaplin. The elusive distances are no less alien than the Moscow that surrounds him— “And the big highway takes him off/To strangers, strangers”—and, by the poem’s end, even this dubious escape route has been blocked by a Moscow grown entirely too close for comfort: “But Moscow is so close, even if you love/The road, the road.” But why should one wish to escape from what is, according to Eisenstein, the people’s paradise, the land where childhood wishes all come true? In this insidious Stalinist Disneyland, the very need for escape betrays the trait that is, in Eisenstein’s eyes, both Chaplin’s great gift and his fatal flaw: the infantilism that lies at the heart of his comedy. The Chaplin who reigns over a domain of free imagination in Mandelstam’s earlier lyric becomes in Eisenstein’s essay “His Majesty the Baby,” the petty, if gifted, tyrant in a

•

C H A P L I N E S Q U E , 32

O R

V I L L O N

A G A I N

•

299

realm of childish fantasies. The infantilism that is the key to Eisenstein’s understanding of Chaplin is also the key to Mandelstam’s final poem on the comedian, although he and Eisenstein predictably come at Chaplin’s childishness from opposite directions. Mandelstam’s poem takes its very shape from this childishness, specifically from Chaplin’s comic, shuffling walk; its progress down the page, with its broken lines hopping forward, first left and then right, seems to imitate the comedian’s distinctive gait. The poem’s metrics reinforce this impression. Its basic meter is trochaic tetrameter, but Charlie apparently favors one leg, for the poem’s stresses are lopsided; they hop, skip, and jump in every line. More precisely, the first hemistich, with two feet, is generally regular, while the second hemistich, with three feet, skips a beat in the middle and lands its second stress only on the line’s final syllable. Metrical feet and human feet meet in Mandelstam’s poetics, as Chaplin’s famous walk (“Shoe polish pirouettes”) meets its poetic equal in this visual and rhythmic play. Iurii Levin notes that the poem’s skipped stresses and other metrical irregularities create “an unusual effect of almost childlike immediacy and vulnerability” and contribute to the lyric’s pervasively “infantile character.” And the poem’s jingly, jaunty rhythms evoke not so much Mandelstam’s “serious” work as the children’s verses that were virtually the only lyrics he composed during his poetic dry spell of the late twenties.33 The poem’s opening lines, with their repetitions, rhythmic singsong and comic shorthand references to Chaplin’s trademark features—upper lip, inky eyes, oversized shoes—might seem right at home in some anthology of Russian children’s verse. But the same rhythms that serve to signal the poem’s infantilism also lead in quite a different direction. A childishly singsong trochaic tetrameter offsets the chilling content of one of Mandelstam’s most haunting lyrics, “We’ll sit together in the kitchen” (1931; #224), in which the poem’s “we” seek to escape discovery by nightmarish, unnamed pursuers. The story that Mandelstam tells through his second Chaplin is no less chilling, and the lines that mark the poem’s change in direction form the first of the poem’s refrains: “We’re all living wrong somehow—/Strangers, strangers.” The poem’s focus suddenly shifts from Chaplin himself to an entire society gone astray, and it is not difficult to imagine what society Mandelstam had in mind as he wrote these lines in the Moscow of 1937. As Hannah Arendt describes him, the Chaplin of the silent comedies had always relied either on his own wits or on the kindness of strangers as he sought to escape the persecutions of an unjust, unfeeling world. Kindhearted strangers were literally an endangered species in the Moscow of the late thirties, as Mandelstam himself, homeless and jobless in the Soviet capital, knew only too well. The society of strangers that he describes in the poem’s seventh and eighth lines seems equally inhospitable, for these lines stop the little tramp’s promenade short, both visually (a full, unbroken line places a barricade in front of Chaplin’s moving feet) and metrically, as the poem’s rhythms cease to coincide with the distinctive pattern that marks

300

•

C H A P T E R

E I G H T

•

Chaplin’s walk. In “As I’d ask,” the poem’s erratic rhythms signal the imaginative freedom of a Mandelstamian Chaplin, or a Chaplinesque Mandelstam, who is free to reshape reality as he creates on his feet. In “Charlie Chaplin,” however, the rhythmic irregularities that accompany the poem’s refrains set up periodic metrical roadblocks to Chaplin’s free progress, as the poet and his surrogate repeatedly come up against an intransigent reality that refuses to comply with the artist’s vision. These blocks, in turn, repeatedly precipitate a shift in tactics or tone as Mandelstam and his Chaplin are forced, time and again, to set out in yet another direction. On first reading, Chaplin’s Soviet obstacle course appears to begin with the first refrain. Retrospectively, however, one can see that he is bound for trouble from the start. He is, from the poem’s opening line, a fish out of water, a king without a throne: “Charlie Chaplin left the movie house.” He abandons the safe haven of the imagination, and his encounters with Soviet reality take their toll almost immediately, for the Chaplin who reappears after the first refrain is not the same Chaplin who saunters through the poem’s opening lines: the most distinctive elements of his artistry have been virtually erased. The Chaplin of the thirties categorically refused to speak on screen long after “talkies” had eclipsed the silent film. He refused to cater to changing, “modern times” and continued to rely on the brilliant gifts—the expressive face, the uncanny physical agility—that had served him so well in earlier films. The Chaplin of Mandelstam’s second stanza still moves in Chaplinesque fashion (“Shoe polish pirouettes”). He can no longer hold his head upright, however, and his mobile features have frozen over. The eyes full of “marvelous, astonished powers” have apparently witnessed something so astonishing in the Soviet streets that only one expression remains to them—the “tin terror” that, in this context, looks something like a travestied Soviet version of a tragic Greek mask. This Chaplin, moreover, violates his own precepts and resorts to speech, and his voice, though feeble, carries what must have been a powerful autobiographical charge for a poet desperately attempting to tailor his own gifts to suit a ruthlessly demanding Soviet state. “Why am I known and loved,” Mandelstam’s Chaplin asks quietly, and the question seems incongruous, to say the least, in a poem written by an official nonperson whose name and writings had long since vanished from the pages of Soviet literature proper. But Mandelstam had never entirely reconciled himself to his loss of an audience, and the yearning to make peace with the Russian public, even at great cost to himself, recurs throughout the “Voronezh Notebooks”: the Mandelstam who vows in one lyric to “live on, breathing and bolshevizing” (#312) might well have envied Chaplin’s fame. The lines that follow Chaplin’s question show, however, that Mandelstam has not forgotten the price one pays for popularity within the Soviet state: “And the big highway takes him off/To strangers, strangers.” Chaplin no longer follows his own path. He is swept up by a more powerful road that cannot take him where he wants to go, and this great highway, which dominates the artist and his

•

C H A P L I N E S Q U E ,

O R

V I L L O N

A G A I N

•

301

vision, looks suspiciously like the road to Stalin that Mandelstam choses to follow in the Moscow poems of 1937. Through his Chaplin, Mandelstam is apparently assessing the costs of his own efforts to join in the collective paean to Russia’s great father and teacher. The historical Chaplin flew in the face of public expectations by refusing to cater to the new demand for “talkies,” and he was rewarded for his obstinacy by the tremendous popular success of both City Lights and Modern Times. Mandelstam’s Chaplin, unlike his real-life prototype, can expect no such happy ending. He cannot reconcile his artist’s gifts with the need for popular acclaim, for the two are fundamentally at odds in Stalin’s Moscow. They are also at odds in Mandelstam’s ideal vision of the oxymoronic artist, in which the poet’s true power is in inverse proportion to his seeming insignificance. The fantastic, “infantile” Chaplin of the poem’s first lines is larger than life, and his comic “peepers” hold marvelous powers. The Muscovite Chaplin of the poem’s second stanza has, however, been cut down to size by a society that does not require his gifts. He has relinquished his distinctive powers, and in the third stanza, an anxious Mandelstam addresses his comic counterpart directly, as he exhorts this surrogate self to return to the rebellious pranks that are his genuine strength: “Charlie Chaplin,/Press the pedal down,/Chaplin, rabbit,/Get into your role./Peel blood oranges,/Put on roller skates.” Chaplin must, in short, follow no one’s path but his own. He must move at his own speed (“Press the pedal down”) and choose his own means of locomotion, however impractical and foolish it may seem (“Put on roller skates”). One has only to remember Chaplin’s improbably elegant antics in Modern Times, as he courts disaster by skating blindfolded at the edge of an abyss, to sense the aptness of the image for Mandelstam’s own dilemma. “Charlie, Charlie—/You must keep taking risks,” Mandelstam reminds his alter ego near the poem’s end, and his own verbal acrobatics in the third stanza show that he is struggling to heed the advice he gives his Chaplin. Sounds and meanings playfully ricochet off one another for the space of a few lines—krolik, rol’, korol’ki, roliki—until two unexpected rhymes in the poem’s third refrain put an abrupt end to this nonsensical interlude. The very lines in which Mandelstam urges Chaplin to cut loose—Nazhimai pedal’ (Press the pedal down), and Roliki naden’ (Put on roller skates)— are paired with lines that pointedly demonstrate the futility, or worse, of such rebellion. The distances to which Chaplin/Mandelstam might escape are alien and mocking: I chudit, chudit chuzhaia dal’ (And the strangerdistance clowns around, around). And, in what is perhaps the poem’s most unsettling and striking line, it is hinted that the little rebel on roller skates may do damage to lives other than his own: A tvoia zhena—Slepaia ten’ (But your wife Is a blind shadow). These two lines taken together effectively cancel out the hopeful ending of Modern Times, in which Chaplin and his charming companion escape the inhospitable city by sauntering off together down the open road. This wife is no gamine. She is not even the

302

•

C H A P T E R

E I G H T

•

flower girl of the more melancholy City Lights, whose blindness is cured with the help of the little tramp she spurns in the film’s conclusion. There is in general little room for wives in the world of Chaplin’s films, and when they do appear, it is only as the emblem of that respectable, settled realm that the impudent outsider is destined to disrupt time and again. Mandelstam’s Chaplin, however, dwells not in film fantasies but in Stalin’s Russia, where rebellious pranksters may well have wives, who will almost surely be called on to pay the price for their loved ones’ stubbornness. Mandelstam’s image finally calls to mind not so much Chaplin’s sweethearts as the shadow wife of Greek legend, Eurydice, who is lost to light and life itself as the consequence of her poet-husband’s thoughtless disobedience. Mandelstam continues to incite his cinematic double to action in the poem’s closing stanza. “Charlie, Charlie,” he pleads, “You must keep taking risks”: You went soft/At exactly the wrong time.” He reminds his friend indirectly of the fantastic powers contained within what had been his comic crown: “Your bowler hat/Is an ocean, too.” But the reality, if that is the right word, of Stalinist Russia is closing in around these fantasies by the poem’s end. Moscow literally surrounds this Chaplin: “This is Moscow after all . . . But Moscow is so close . . .” The unbroken penultimate line, moreover, acts as the poem’s final roadblock: visually as well as semantically, it cuts this Chaplin off from the beloved road that is, one senses, his final hope. This chapter has focused from the beginning on various forms of ending; and the note on which it itself draws to a close may appear to be thoroughly disheartening. My own argument to the contrary, this is not, I think, entirely the case. For Mandelstam, who was so thoroughly what Lipking might call a poet of initiation and who was plagued, or blessed, with a “persistent desire to start ab ovo” in his verse,34 finds himself unable, even in what would prove to be his final days, to bring his life’s work to the only kind of conclusion that might have kept him from his grim, anonymous death in the Gulag. He cannot allow “Stalin’s book” to become the final, definitive version of his own life and writing; and he cannot permit “the road to Stalin” to replace “Mandelstam Street” as the principle thoroughfare through his life in art, as he demonstrates in the very poem that apparently dramatizes his failure to follow his own path to the end. For Mandelstam, again true to form, gives us not one but two roads in his final Chaplin poem. “Charlie Chaplin” does hold the “big highway” that leads relentlessly to “strangers, strangers,” the Stalinist highway that is, as Mandelstam warns, “no fairytale”—but it ends on an entirely different street, on what is, in one variant of the text, the “beloved road” (#386). Within the world of the poem, and of Stalin’s Russia, Mandelstam, like his comic fellow traveler, may find himself unable to take the “fairy-tale” road that he had used, time and again, to such advantage in his artist’s quest for new beginnings. The poem itself ends, nonetheless, quite literally on this road. It ends, in spite of everything, open-endedly, and if we take this road as yet

•

C H A P L I N E S Q U E ,

O R

V I L L O N

A G A I N

•

303

another variant on Mandelstam’s mobile, shifting tradition and culture, then his final Chaplinesque ought to conclude not with the portentous phrase “The End,” but, true to form, with the more provocative words “To be continued. . . .” Mandelstam himself would not live on to create the sequels that would have taken this adventure, this tradition in other equally unexpected, equally necessary directions. Yet his modernist, invented tradition continues, nonetheless, to involve us in questions that are, if anything, even more pointed in what has come to be known as the postmodern literary scene than they were when Mandelstam first addressed them: What is the Western tradition? How, if at all, does it permit the participation of the outsider? Can strangers to this tradition engage with it without betraying their own heritage, their outsider’s beginnings? Should they even try? What’s in it, as they say, for them? Other questions raised by contemporary criticism come to mind as well: Can writers reshape this tradition in their work or are they themselves created by it? Is there a middle ground between wholesale revision of the past and slavish veneration and repetition of tradition? The avant-garde rhetoric of much recent criticism invites us to admit no compromise. Just as postmodern thought, in all its variants, has labored to interrogate the past and revise our relation to it, so the past may, if we allow it, return to challenge and reshape the present. Mandelstam’s tradition derives from such a notion, and Mandelstam himself is a master at setting in motion restless dialogues between past, present, and future that refuse to allow us to settle our accounts with history in any easy, predictable fashion. To speak, Mandelstam insists, means to be forever on the road. To speak about or, better yet, with Mandelstam means to engage in a work in endless progress, a work that demands that we set aside received notions about poetry, history, and tradition, be they yesterday’s or today’s.

•

A

P

P

E

N

D

I

X

•

RUSSIAN TEXTS OF “THE HORSESHOE FINDER,” “I’M STILL NOTHING LIKE A PATRIARCH,” “MIDNIGHT IN MOSCOW,” “TODAY YOU CAN MAKE DECALS”

Nawedwij podkovu (Pindariheskij otryvok) Glqdim na les i govorim% Vot les korabel;nyj, mahtovyj, Rozovye sosny Do samoj verxuwki svobodnye ot moxnatoj nowi, Im by poskripyvat; v bur[ Odinokimi piniqmi V raz=qrennom bezlesnom vozduxe; Pod soleno[ pqto[ vetra ustoit otves, prignannyj k plq]u]ej palube. I moreplavatel;, V neobuzdannoj 'a'de prostranstva, Vlaha herez vla'nye rytviny xrupkoj priboj geometra, Slihit s pritq'en;em zemnogo lona Weroxovatu[ poverxnost; morej. A vzdyxaq zapax Smolistyx slez, prostupivwix skvoz; obwivku korablq, L[buqs; na doski Zaklepannye, sla'ennye v pereborki Ne vifleemskim mirnym plotnikom, a drugimó Otcom putewestvij, drugom morexodaó Govorim% I oni stoqli na zemle, Neudobnoj, kak xrebet osla, Zabyvaq verxuwkami o kornqx, Na znamenitom gornom krq'e, I wumeli po presnym livnem, Bezuspewno predlagaq nebu vymenqt; na ]epotku soli Svoj blagorodnyj gruz. S hego nahat;? Vs∏ tre]it i kahaetsq. Vozdux dro'it ot sravnenij. Ni odno slovo ne luhwe drugogo,

306

•

A P P E N D I X:

R U S S I A N

T E X T S

•

Zemlq gudit metaforoj, I legkie dvukolki, V broskoj uprq'i gustyx ot natugi ptih;ix staj, Razryva[tsq na hasti, Sopernihaq s xrapq]imi l[bimcami ristali]. Tri'dy bla'en, kto vvedet v pesn; imq% Ukrawennaq nazvan;em pesn; Dol;we 'ivet sredi drugixó Ona otmehena sredi podrug povqzkoj na lbu, Iscelq[]ej ot bespamqtstva, sliwkom sil;nogo odurq[]ego zapaxaó Bud; to blizost; mu'hiny, Ili zapax wersti sil;nogo zverq, Ili prosto dux horba, rastertogo me'du ladonej. Vozdux byvaet temnym, kak voda, i vs∏ 'ivoe v nem plavaet kak ryba, Plavnikami rastalkivaq sferu, Plotnu[, uprugu[, hut; nagretu[,ó Xrustal;, v kotorom dvi'utsq kolesa i waraxa[tsq lowadi, Vla'nyj hernozem Neery, ka'du[ noh; raspaxannyj zanovo Vilami, trezubcami, motygami, plugami. Vozdux zamewan tak 'e gusto, kak zemlq,ó Iz nego nel;zq vyjti, a v nego trudno vojti. Worox razbegaet po derev;qm zelenoj laptoj; Deti igra[t v babki pozvonkami umerwix 'ivotnyx. Xrupkoe letoishislenie nawej /ry podxodit k koncu. Spasibo za to, hto bylo% Q sam owibsq, q sbilsq, zaputalsq v shete. ?ra zvenela, kak war zolotoj, Polaq, litaq, nikem ne podder'ivaq, Na vsqkoe prikosnovenie otvehala“da” i “net.” Tak rebenok otvehaet% “Q dam tebe qbloko,” ili% “Q ne dam tebe qbloko.” I lico ego tohnyj slepok s golosa, kotoryj proiznosit /ti slova. Zvuk e]e zvenit, xotq prihina zvuka ishezla. Kon; le'it v pyli i xrapit v myle, No krutoj povorot ego wei E]e soxranqet vospominanie o bege s razbrosannymi nogamió Kogda ix bylo ne hetyre, A po hislu kamnej dorogi, Obnovlqemyx v hetyre smeny Po hislu ottalkivanij ot zemli pywu]ego 'arom inoxodca.

•

A P P E N D I X:

R U S S I A N

T E X T S

•

307

Tak, Nawedwij podkovu Sduvaet s nee pyl; I rastiraet ee werst;[, poka ona ne zablestit, Togda On vewaet ee na poroge, Htoby ona otdoxnula, I bol;we u' ej ne pridetsq vysekat; iskry iz kremnq. Heloveheskie guby, kotorym bol;we nehego skazat;, Soxranq[t formu poslednego skazannogo slova, I v ruke ostaetsq o]u]enie tq'esti, Xotq kuvwin napolovinu rasplekalsq, poka ego nesli domoj. To, hto q sejhas govor[, govor[ ne q, A vyryto iz zemli, podobno zernam okameneloj pwenicy. Odni na monetax izobra'a[t l;va, Drugieó golovu; Raznoobraznye mednye, zolotye i bronzovye lepewki S odinakovoj pohest;[ le'at v zemle. Vek, probuq ix peregryzt;, ottisnul na nix svoi zuby. Vremq srezaet menq, kak monetu, I mne u' ne xvataet menq samogo. 1923 (#136) E]e daleko mne do patriarxa, E]e na menq polupohtennyj vozrast, E]e menq ruga[t za glaza Na qzyke tramvajnyx perebranok, V kotorom net ni smysla, ni aza% óTakoj, sqkoj!—Nu hto', q izvinq[s;, No v glubine nihut; nihut; ne izmenq[s;. . . Kogda podumaew;, hem svqzan s mirom, To sam sebe ne veriw;% erudna. Polnohnyj kl[hik ot hu'oj kvartiry, Da grivennik serebrqnyj v karmane, Da celluloid fil;my vorovskoj. . . Q, kak ]enok, brosa[s; k telefonu Na ka'dyj isteriheskij zvonok,ó V nem slywno pol;skoe% “Dzenkue, pane!”ó

308

•

A P P E N D I X:

R U S S I A N

T E X T S

•

Inogorodnij laskovyj uprek Il; neispolnennoe obe]an;e. Vse dumaew;% k hemu by prioxotit;sq Poseredi xlopuwek i wutixó Perekipiw;óa tam, glqdi, ostanetsqó Odna sumqtica da bezraboticaó Po'alujsta, prikurivaj u nix! To usmexnus;, to robko priosan[s; I s belokuroj trost;[ vyxo'uó Q sluwa[ sonaty v pereulkax, U vsex lotkov oblizyva[ guby, Lista[ knigi v glybkix podvorotnqx I ne 'ivu, no vse-taki 'ivu. Q k vorob;qm pojdu i k reporteram, Q k ulihnym fotografam pojdu, I v pqt; minut, lopatoj iz vederka, Q poluhu svoe izobra'en;e Pod konusom lilovoj Wax-goroj. Ili e]e pu]us; na pobeguwki V rasparennye duwnye podvaly, Gde histye i hestnye kitajcy Xvata[t palohkami wariki iz testa, Igra[t v uzkie narezannye karty I vodku p;[t, kak lastohki s Qn-Czy. L[bl[ raz=ezdy skvorha]ix tramvaev I astraxansku[ ikru asfal;ta, Nakrytogo solomennoj rogo'ej, Napomina[]ej korzinku asti, I strausovye per;q armatury V nahale strojki leninskix domov. Vxo'u v vertepy hudnye muzeev, Gde puhatsq ka]eevy Rembrandty, Dostinguv Bleska kordovanskoj ko'i; Divl[s; rogatym mitram Ticiana I Tintoretto pestromu divl[s; Za tysqhu kriklivyx popugaev . . . I do hego xohu q razygrat;sq, Razgovorit;sq, vygovorit; pravdu, Poslat; xandru k tumanu, k besu, k lqdu, Vzqt; za ruku kogo-nibud;%óbud; laskov,ó Skazat; emu,ónam po puti s toboj . . . 1931 (#251)

•

A P P E N D I X:

R U S S I A N

T E X T S

•

Polnoh; v Moskve Polnoh; v Moskve. Roskowno buddijskoe leto. S drobotom melkim rasxodqtsq ulicy v hobotax uzkix 'eleznyx. V hernoj ospe bla'enstvu[t kol;ca bul;varov, Net na Moskvu i noh;[ ugomonu. Kogda pokoj be'it iz-pod kopyt, Ty ska'ew;ógde-to tam, na poligone, Dva klouna zaselióBim i Bom, I v xod powli grebenki, molotohki. To slywitsq garmonika gubnaq, To detskoe molohnoe p;qninoó Do-re-mi-fa I sol;-fa-mi-re-do . . . Byvalo q, kak pomolo'e, vyjdu V prokleenom rezinovom pal;to V wiroku[ razlapicu bul;varov, Gde spihehnye no'ki cyganohki v podole b;[tsq dlinnom, Gde arestovannyj medved; gulqetó Samoj prirody vehnyj men;wevik. I paxlo do otkazu lavroviwnej . . . Kuda 'e ty? Ni lavrov net, ni viwen . . . Q podtqnu butylohnu[ gir;ku Kuxonnyx, krupnoskahu]ix hasov. U' do hego weroxovato vremq, A vse-taki l[bl[ za xvost ego lovit;% Ved; v bege sobstvennom ono ne vinovato, Da, ka'etsq, hut;-hut; 'ulikovato. Hur! Ne prosit;, ne 'alovat;sq! Cyc! Ne xnykat;! Dlq togo li raznohincy Rassoxlye toptali sapogi, htob q teper; ix predal? My umrem, kak pexotincy, No ne proslavim ni xi]i, ni poden]iny, ni l'i! Est; u nas pautinka wotlandskogo starogo pleda,ó Ty menq im ukroew;, kak flagom voennym, kogda q umru. Vyp;em, dru'ok, za nawe qhmennoe gore,ó Vyp;em do dna! . . . Iz gusto otrabotavwix kino, Ubitye, kak posle xloroforma, Vyxodqt tolpy. Do hego oni venozny, I do hego im nu'en kislorod!

309

310

•

A P P E N D I X:

R U S S I A N

T E X T S

•

Pora vam znat;, q to'e sovremennik, Q helovek /poxi Moskvowveq, Smotrite, kak na mne topor]itsq pid'ak, Kak q stupat; i govorit; ume[! Poprobujte menq ot veka otorvat;!— Ruha[s; vam, sebe svernete we[! Q govor[ s /poxo[, no razve Duwa u nej pen;kovaq i razve Ona u nas postydno pri'ilas;, Kak smor]ennyj zverek v tibetskom xrame,ó Pohewetsq i v cinkovu[ vannuó Izobrazi e]e nam, Mar; Ivanna! Pust; /to oskorbitel;noópojmite% Est; blud truda, i on u nas v krovi. U'e svetaet. Wumqt sady zelenym telegrafom. K Rembrandtu vxodit v gosti Rafael;. On s Mocartom v Moskve duwi ne haetó Za karij glaz, za vorob;inyj xmel;. I slovno pnevmatihesku[ pohtu Il; studenec meduzy hernomorskoj Pereda[t s kvartiry na kvartiru Konvejerom vozduwnym skvoznqki, Kak majskie studenty-welaputy . . . 1932 (#260) Segodnq mo'no snqt; dekal;komani, Mizinec okunuv v Moskvu-reku, S razbojnika-Kremlq. Kakaq prelest; Fistawkovye /ti golubqtnió Xot; prosa im nasypat;, xot; ovsa! A v nedoroslqx kto? Ivan Velikijó Velikovozrastnaq kolokol;nq, Stoit sebe e]e bolvan-bolvanom Kotoryj vek. Ego by zagranicu, Htob douhilsq. Da kuda tam! . . . Stydno. Reka-Moskva v hetyrextrubnom dyme, I pered nami ves; raskrytyj gorodó Kupal;]iki-zavody i sady Zamoskvoreckie. Ne tak li, Otkinuv palisandrovu[ krywku Ogromnogo koncertnogo roqlq, My pronikaem v zvuhnoe nutro? Belogvardejcy, vy ego vidali? Roql; Moskvy slyxali? Guli-guli!

•

A P P E N D I X:

R U S S I A N

T E X T S

•

311

Mne ka'etsq, kak vsqkoe drugoe, Tyóvremq, nezakonno. . . Kak mal;hiwka, Za vzroslymi v mor]inistu[ vodu, Q, ka'etsq, v grqdu]ee vxo'u I, ka'etsq, ego q ne uvi'u. U' q ne vyjdu v nogu s molode';[ Na razlinovannye stadiony. Razbu'ennyj povestkoj motocikla, Q na rassvete ne vskohu s posteli, V steklqnnye dvorcy na kur;ix no'kax Q da'e ten;[ legkoj ne vojdu. Mne s ka'dym dnem dywat; vse tq'elee, A me'du tem nel;zq povremenit;ó Ved; ro'deny dlq nasla'den;q begom Liw; serdce heloveka i konq . . . A Fausta besósuxoj i molo'avyjó Vnov; stariku kidaetsq v rebro, I podbivaet vzqt; pohasno qlik, Ili maxnut; na Vorob;evy gory, Il; na tramvae oxlestnut; Moskvu . . . Ej nekogda% ona segodnq v nqn;kaxó Vse mehetsq na sorok tysqh l[lek, Ona odna i prq'a na rukax. 1932 (#265)

•

N

O

T

E

S

•

CHAPTER ONE 1. For recent skeptical accounts of the notion of cultural crisis in modernist art, see Matei Calinescu, “The Idea of Modernity,” in his Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 13–94; James Longenbach, “Matthew Arnold and the Modern Apocalypse,” PMLA , vol. 104, no. 4 (October, 1989), 844–55; Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); and Perry Meisel, The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism after 1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). The precursor of all such works is Frank Kermode’s invaluable study, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). 2. Kermode, Sense, 101–2. On the forms that Judeo-Christian eschatology has taken in Russian history and literature, see David Bethea, The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 3. Michel Décaudin quotes Péguy in his essay “Being Modern in 1885 or Variations on ‘Modern,’ ‘Modernism,’ ‘Modernité,’ ” in Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives, ed. Monique Chefdor, Ricardo Quinones, and Albert Wachtel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 26. Stephen Kern discusses the relationship between new technologies and modernist culture in The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). For the impact of the First World War on Anglo-American modernism, see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 4. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane quote Lawrence and Woolf in their essay “The Name and Nature of Modernism,” in Modernism: 1890–1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (New York: Penguin, 1976), 33. Akhmatova’s phrase comes from her “Poema bez geroia” (Poem without a Hero), in Sochineniia, ed. G. P. Struve and B. A. Filipoff (vols. 1 and 2, Munich: Interlanguage Literary Associates, 1967–68; vol. 3, Paris: YMCA Press, 1983), vol. 2, 118. 5. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 67. Feidelson and Ellmann, Preface to The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), vi. “Pastist” is Ezra Pound’s coinage, as quoted in James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot and the Sense of the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 12. 6. The Futurists’ steamship comes to us by way of their famous “Slap in the Face of Public Taste (Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu; 1912); rpt. in Russkaia literatura XX veka: Dooktiabr’skii period, ed. I. T. Kruk (Leningrad: Prosveshchenie, 1991), 492. Clarence Brown quotes Mandelstam’s response in his Mandelstam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 48. On the personal and poetic ties between the Acmeists and Futurists, see P. D. Timenchik, “Zametki ob Akmeizme,” Russian Literature, no. 7/8 (1974), 23–46, and “Zametki ob Akmeizme, II,” ibid., 5/3 (1977), 281–99. 7. Both Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam quote Mandelstam’s famous definition of Acmeism. See Akhmatova, Sochineniia, vol. 2, 185; and Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vospominaniia: kniga pervaia, 3rd ed. (Paris: YMCA Press, 1970),

314

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

O N E

•

264. The phrase “an apocalypse of cultural community” is Bradbury’s and McFarlane’s, from “The Name and Nature of Modernism,” 27. 8. Gregory Freidin, “The Whisper of History and the Noise of Time in the Writings of Osip Mandel’shtam,” The Russian Review, vol. 37, no. 4 (October, 1978), 436. Vissarion Belinsky, Izbrannye sochineniia (Moscow-Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1949), 184. 9. On Mandelstam’s Nietzschean poetics of “eternal recurrence,” see Clare Cavanagh, “Mandelstam, Nietzsche and the ‘Conscious Creation of History,’ ” in Nietzsche in Soviet Culture: Adversary and Ally, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), 338–66; Gregory Freidin, A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 108; Iu. I. Levin, D. M. Segal, P. D. Timenchik, V. N. Toporov, T. V. Tsiv’ian, “Russkaia semanticheskaia poetika kak potentsial’naia kul’turnaia paradigma,” Russian Literature, no. 7/8 (1974), 47–82; Omry Ronen, An Approach to Mandel’shtam (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1983), xii, 87–88. 10. Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes, trans. Anne Hyde Greet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 343; Charles Russell, Poets, Prophets, and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avant-Garde from Rimbaud through Postmodernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 23; Ellmann and Feidelson, Preface to The Modern Tradition , vi; Renato Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 84. 11. The most important works to develop this method include Kiril Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel’shtam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); Ronen, An Approach; Iu. I. Levin, et al., “Russkaia semanticheskaia poetika kak potentsial’naia kul’turnaia paradigma.” For an overview of structuralist approaches to Mandelstam, see Peter Steiner, “On Semantic Poetics: O. Mandel’shtam in the Discussions of the Soviet Structuralists,” Dispositio, vol. 1, no. 3 (1976), 339–48. 12. There is one brief, early Russian essay on the work of Ezra Pound, by the critic Zinaida Vengerova. The article, which appeared in the futurist journal Strelets, abounds in half-truths, confusions, and misconceptions of all kinds; its venue and title (“English Futurists”) indicate, nonetheless, the difficulties involved in separating pastists from futurists in modernist writing (Zinaida Vengerova, “Angliiskie futuristy,” Strelets: sbornik pervyi [1915], 92–104). Acmeism’s guiding spirit, Nikolai Gumilev, did travel to London on two occasions in 1917 and 1918, where he apparently encountered F. S. Flint, who had been a leading member of Pound’s already defunct Imagist movement. Gumilev’s notebooks, though, make no mention of Pound or Eliot. For an account of his visits, see Elaine Rusinko, “Gumilev in London: An Unknown Interview,” Russian Literature Triquarterly , no. 16 (1979), 73–85. Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam became aware of Eliot’s writings only many years after Mandelstam’s death. On Akhmatova and Eliot, see V. N. Toporov, “K otzvukam zapadnoevropeiskoi poezii u Akhmatovoi (T. S. Eliot),” International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics, 16 (1973): 157–76. 13. The best exemplar of such a “synthetic” criticism remains Clarence Brown’s sensitive, wide-ranging account of the poet’s life and writing, Mandelstam. More recently Gregory Freidin has used modernist discoveries in comparative anthropology to develop new and illuminating ways of reading Mandelstam’s “mythologies of self-presentation” in A Coat of Many Colors (1987). S. S. Averintsev’s introduc-

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

O N E

•

315

tion to a recent Russian edition of Mandelstam’s writings is another example of a broadly synthetic critical approach to Mandelstam’s life and work (“Sud’ba i vest’ Osipa Mandel’shtama,” Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, ed. A. D. Mikhailov and P. M. Nerler [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990], 5–64). 14. Roman Jakobson, “Retrospect,” in his Selected Writings (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), vol. 2, 631–32. Akhmatova, “Otryvok iz vospominanii,” Sochineniia , vol. 2, 289. 15. On the Eiffel Tower and the European avant-garde, see Kern, The Culture of Time and Space , 81; and Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 200–213. 16. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Kniga pervaia, 175. Chukovsky, “Akhmatova and Mayakovsky,” trans. John Pearson, in Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism, ed. Edward J. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 33–53, 52–53. Amanda Haight quotes Mayakovsky in Anna Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 71. Leon Trotsky, “The Formalist School in Poetry and Marxism,” in his Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 171. 17. Though Mandelstam was spared little else by a regime whose hostility to his work became evident early on. See Nadezhda Mandelstam’s harrowing accounts of Mandelstam’s life during the early twenties in the first volume of her memoirs (Kniga pervaia, passim). Mandelstam himself joined in the chorus against Akhmatova in two essays of 1923, in which he attacks his fellow Acmeist as a vulgarizer of Annensky and purveyer of “parquet” poetry (CPL, 167, 175). Nadezhda Mandelstam interprets these remarks as expressions of her husband’s own confusion, and his “tribute” to the spirit of the times (Kniga pervaia , 181). 18. Zhirmunsky, “Preodolevshie simvolizm” (1916), in Voprosy teorii literatury (Leningrad, 1928; rpt. The Hague: Mouton, 1962), 305–6. Roman Jakobson, “Noveishaia russkaia poeziia. Nabrosok pervyi. Viktor Khlebnikov” (Prague, 1921); rpt. in Texte der russichen formalisten, ed. Wolf-Dieter Stempel and Inge Paulmann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1972), 140. Iurii Tynianov, “Promezhutok,” in his Arkhaisty i novatory (Priboi, 1929; rpt. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985), 572–73. 19. Eikhenbaum’s essay on Mandelstam was never completed, and his notes were published only in 1967, as “O Mandel’shtame,” Den’ poezii (Leningrad, 1967), 167–68. 20. For Bloom’s version of poetic tradition, see The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1973). 21. Iurii Tynianov, “Literaturnyi fakt,” in his Arkhaisty i novatory, 6, 10–11. Osip Mandelstam, “Pshennitsa chelovecheskaia,” in his Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, vol. 2, 192. One of Mandelstam’s most trenchant later critics, Iurii Levin, tacitly calls attention to the kinship between Tynianov’s vision and Mandelstam’s as he describes the workings of Mandelstamian world culture in the “Conversation About Dante.” It proceeds through “war and not a peaceful progression (techenie),” through “catastrophes and metamorphoses, not gradual evolution” (“Zametki k Razgovoru o Dante O. Mandel’shtama,” International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics, 15 [1972], 186). 22. Iurii Tynianov, Arkhaisty i novatory , 10, 558–59, 562. Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist quote Shklovsky in Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

316

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

O N E

•

University Press, 1984), 192. On Mandelstam’s relationship with the Formalists and their theories, see Omry Ronen, “Ustnoe vyskazyvanie Mandel’shtama o ‘Smerti Vazir-Mukhtara’ i Tynianovskii podtekst ‘Egipetskoi marki,’ ” Tynianovskii sbornik: chetvertye tynianovskie chteniia (Riga: Zinatne, 1990), 35–39; Agnes Sola, “Mandel’shtam, Poèticien formaliste?” Revue des études slaves, L/1 (1977), 37–54; E. A. Toddes, “Mandel’shtam i opoiazovskaia filologiia,” Tynianovskii sbornik: Vtorye tynianovskie chteniia (Riga: Zinatne, 1986), 78–102. 23. Eliot develops his notion of a “world culture” in his “Notes towards the Definition of Culture” (1948), in Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), passim. A number of critics have noted the affinities between the Acmeists and their Anglo-American contemporaries. See, for example, Clarence Brown’s incisive comparison of Acmeism and Imagism in Mandelstam, 136–39; Elaine Rusinko’s essay on “Russian Acmeism and Anglo-American Imagism,” Ulbandis Review, vol. 1, no. 2 (Spring 1978), 37–49; Serge Fauchereau’s remarks on Gautier’s influence on Acmeism and Imagism alike (“Ou Pound et Eliot Recontrent Goumilev, Mandelstam et Akhmatova,” Europe: Revue Littéraire Mensuelle, no. 601 [May, 1979], 57–73); or Harry Levin’s observations on Mandelstamian world culture in the context of Anglo-American modernism (“Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and the European Horizon,” in his Memories of the Moderns [New York: New Directions, 1980], 29). 24. Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1957), 61. 25. For a more detailed discussion of the Russia Mandelstam discovers through Chaadaev, see Clare Cavanagh, “Synthetic Nationality: Mandel’shtam and Chaadaev,” Slavic Review, vol. 49, no. 4 (Winter, 1990), 597–610. 26. “Imperfect Critics,” in Eliot’s The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920), 32. 27. Kniga pervaia, 266; “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture,” 87. 28. Ezra Pound, “Dante,” in his The Spirit of Romance (1910; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1968), 162. T. S. Eliot, “Philip Massinger” (1920), “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), both in The Sacred Wood, 125, 49. The phrase “Displaced Person” comes from Eliot’s essay on “Virgil and the Christian World,” in his On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961), 143. Sam Baskett observes that “writing in a British periodical in 1945, [Eliot] referred to himself as métoikos, the Greek word for ‘resident alien’ ” (“T. S. Eliot as an American Poet,” The Centennial Review, vol. 26, no. 2 [Spring, 1982], 150). 29. T. S. Eliot, “Henry James,” The Little Review (1918); rpt. in The Shock of Recognition, vol. 2, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: Octagon, 1955), 857. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 855; Eliot, “Imperfect Critics,” in his The Sacred Wood, 44, 42. Peter Gay speaks of the “wholeness hunger” of modern poetry in Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 70. 32. “A living and central tradition” comes from Eliot’s After Strange Gods (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1934), 53. Gregory S. Jay describes Pound and Eliot as “exiled, wandering poets” in T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 51. Pound’s remarks on his new culture are quoted in Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History , 127, and in Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 217. Eliot speaks of

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

O N E

•

317

“the main stream of culture” in his “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture,” 148–49. 33. Nadezhda Mandelstam notes that Eliot and Mandelstam were alike in their veneration for the “Great European,” though she takes issue with Eliot’s version of a “world” or “Christian culture” elsewhere (Vospominaniia: vtoraia kniga [Paris: YMCA Press, 1972], 274). Eliot’s 1929 essay on Dante testifies to important similarities: “[Dante] is the most universal of poets in the modern languages” (206); “Dante, none the less an Italian and a patriot, is first a European” (207); “The culture of Dante was not of one European country, but of Europe” (207); “He wrote when Europe was still more or less one” (209) (Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975], 206, 207, 209). The differences, though, are equally salient; Mandelstam’s uncouth, avantgarde Dante is often at odds with the far more decorous poet whom Eliot extols in his essay. 34. “Virgil and the Christian World,” 146. The phrase “a wanderer with no fixed abode” comes from Eliot’s essay “From Poe to Valéry” (1948), in his To Criticize the Critic (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965), 29. 35. Ricardo Quinones speaks of the modernist artist “cut off from the world of time and its connections” in Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 81. 36. Hugh Kenner quotes Ford Madox Ford in The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 81. Pound, The Spirit of Romance , 6. Eliot, The Sacred Wood, 49. 37. Fredric Jameson uses the phrase “perpetual present” to describe Ferdinand de Saussure’s modernist vision of “language as a total system” (The Prison-House of Language [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972], 5–6). For discussions of the relationship between modern poetry and Saussurean linguistics, see ibid., 10– 19, and Steven Cassedy, Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 38. The Pound Era , 96, 99. Hugh Kenner, “Ezra Pound,” in Voices and Visions: The Poet in America , ed. Helen Vendler (New York: Random House, 1987), 234. 39. “Ezra Pound,” 207, 210. 40. The Pound Era , 141. 41. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), 40. The comments on Pound are Sanford Schwartz’s, from his The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot and Early Twentieth Century Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 117. 42. “The Waste Land,” in The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1971), 50. Eliot’s apocalyptic remarks on modern history are taken from “Ulysses , Order and Myth” (1923; in Selected Prose, 177). 43. “I have tried to write Paradise,” Pound writes in his elegaic final Canto (CXX) (The Cantos of Ezra Pound [New York: New Directions, 1975], 803. Canto I appears in the same edition (3–5). Christine Froula’s remarks are taken from her Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1983), 129. 44. For the Greek and Roman origins of Delia’s name, see Victor Terras, “Classical Motives in the Poetry of Osip Mandel’shtam,” Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 10, no. 3 (1966), 260. Steven Broyde discusses her Russian incarnations in “Osip Mandel’shtam’s ‘Tristia,’ ” in: Russian Poetics, ed. Thomas Eekman and Dean S. Worth (Columbus: Slavica Press, 1976), 76–77. Mandelstam may also

318

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

have come upon his Delia by way of Anton Delvig (1798–1831): “In beautiful Delia’s name,” Delvig writes in an 1823 lyric, “I give you freedom, Sweet-voiced flier—Fly!” (quoted in Vladislav Khodasevich, Sobranie sochinenii , vol. 2, ed. John Malmsted and Robert Hughes [Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1990], 543). 45. Boris Bukhshtab, “Poeziia Mandel’shtama,” Voprosy literatury, no. 1 (1989), 136. Bukhshtab’s essay was written in 1929 but was not published in Russia for the first time until sixty years later. 46. Quoted in Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History, 20. 47. Ezra Pound, “In Durance” (1907), “Histrion” (1908), in Collected Early Poems (New York: New Directions, 1976), 86, 71. Alfred Kazin quotes Pound’s self-criticism in “Language as History: Ezra Pound’s Search for the Authority of History,” in The Problem of Authority in America, ed. John P. Diggins and Mark E. Kann (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 115. On Mandelstam’s composite speakers, see Iurii Levin, “O sootnoshenii mezhdu semantikoi poeticheskogo teksta i vnetekstovoi real’nost’iu,” Russian Literature , no. 10/11 (1975), 150. 48. A “spiritual heir” is Eliot’s phrase. Both quotations are cited in Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History, 219, 209. 49. The phrase “the successful self-exile” is from “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture,” 128. Kermode quotes Eliot’s description of his newfound identity in his introduction to the Selected Prose, 18–19. Frank Lentricchia, “Lyric in the Culture of Capitalism,” American Literary History, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1989), 67–68. 50. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 136. 51. Kenner, “Ezra Pound,” 206. The phrase takes on a different sense when we recall that Pound himself was literally a “son of Homer”—his father’s name was Homer Pound. Perhaps Akhmatova is responding to such notions of world poetry as hereditary boys’ club when she remarks in her poem “Prehistory” (1945) that “The fathers and grandfathers are incomprehensible (Ottsy i dedy neponiatny)” (Sochineniia, vol. 1, 309). 52. “The Function of Criticism,” in Selected Prose, 68–69; “American Literature and the American Language,” To Criticize the Critic, 56–59. CHAPTER TWO 1. Nikolai Berkovsky, “O proze Mandel’shtama,” in his Tekushchaia literatura (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1930), 170. Boris Tomashevsky, “Literatura i biografiia,” Kniga i revoliutsiia, 4(1923), 6–9; trans. Herbert Eagle in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1978), 47–55. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975), 40. Boris Pasternak, “Okhrannaia gramota,” in his Vozdushnye puti: proza raznykh let, ed. E. B. Pasternak (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1982), 198, 201. 2. “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 43. 3. For a more detailed discussion of this passage in the context of The Noise of Time, see Jane Gary Harris, “Mandel’shtam’s Aesthetic of Performance,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 19, no. 4 (Winter 1985), 426–42. 4. The first edition included only twenty-three poems and appeared in 1913. A

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

319

second, expanded edition with sixty-seven poems was published in 1916, and modified versions of this edition appeared in Mandelstam’s collected poems of 1923 and 1928. For detailed discussions of the collection’s publication history, see A. G. Mets’ recent essays, “O sostave i kompozitsii pervoi knigi stikhov O. E. Mandel’shtama ‘Kamen,’ ” Russkaia literatura, no. 3 (1988), 179–82; and “ ‘Kamen’ (k tvorcheskoi istorii knigi),” in Osip Mandelstam, Kamen’, ed. L. Ia. Ginzburg, A. G. Mets, S. V. Vasilenko, Iu. L. Freidin (Leningrad: Nauka, 1990), 277–85. Mandelstam apparently exercised limited editorial control over the later editions of this collection; still, I agree with Gregory Freidin, who sees Mandelstam’s hand at work in important decisions involving their contents and organization (A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation [Berkeley: University of California, 1987], 86–87). 5. Roman Jakobson, “What is Poetry” (1933–1934), in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 369. The phrase “modernist making and self-making” comes from A. Walton Litz’s review essay by that name (“Modernist Making and SelfMaking,” TLS [Oct. 10, 1986], 1142). Gregory Freidin’s recent study of Mandelstam’s life in writing, A Coat of Many Colors, also focuses on Mandelstam’s strategies of self-creation, though his emphasis—on Mandelstam’s responses to the Russian literary institution of the charismatic poet-priest—is different than my own. I am drawing here on the methodology that Lawrence Lipking has developed in order to evade the problems entailed in stilted discussions of the “lyric hero” or “poetic speaker,” as if this speaker bore no relation to his creator, on the one hand; and a naive identification of the poet’s “I” with his autobiographical self, on the other (The Life of the Poet : Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981]). For Mandelstam’s biography, see Clarence Brown, Mandelstam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 1–134; and Jane Gary Harris, Osip Mandelstam (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988), 1–12. 6. Viktor Zhirmunsky, “Preodolevshie simvolizm” (1916), in his Voprosy teorii literatury (Leningrad, 1928; rpt. The Hague: Mouton, 1962), 305. A. Deich, “Nezhivoi poet,” Zhurnal zhurnalov, no. 13 (March 1916), 14; rpt. in Osip Mandelstam, Kamen’ (Leningrad, 1990), 226). I. Oksenov, untitled review, Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh, no. 2–3 (1916), 74 (rpt. in Kamen’, 227); and Konstantin Balmont, “Zmeinyi glaz” (1901), in his Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1969), 232. These responses are not entirely determined by the Symbolist milieu in which the reviewers operated. One of Mandelstam’s best and most sympathetic later critics concurs. “Mandelstam,” Lydia Ginzburg observes, “is a poet without a lyric hero,” and she cites “Komissarzevskaia”—“My memory is inimical to everything personal”—in support of her statement (“Poetika Osipa Mandel’shtama,” in O starom i novom [Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1982], 255). It can be a mistake, though, to take Mandelstam at face value in either his poetry or his prose; the elaborate pro and contra that informs all his writing frequently invites us to read him directly against the grain of his own declared intentions. 7. Fedor Tiutchev, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1984), vol. 1, 73. Mandelstam goes one step further than does Tiutchev himself, who concludes his lyric by noting that “no one yet has solved this question (Nikto eshche ne razreshil voprosa).” Mandelstam also replaces Tiutchev’s “alien will” (voleiu chuzhoi) with a “sentient hand” (mysliashchei rukoi). 8. Mandelstam originally intended to call the collection The Shell (Rakovina);

320

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

and the shift to Stone indicates his altered vision of himself; he is no longer a fixed form passively waiting to be filled, but raw material to be shaped by the artist’s active will. 9. Mandelstam, 174. “This stanza is the falling fruit itself . . . from which are born a fantastically wide network of associations” (Tsvetaeva, “Poety s istoriei i poety bez istoriei,” Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1980], vol. 2, 438). 10. Marina Tsvetaeva, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy v piati tomakh (New York: Russica, 1982), vol. 2, 301. Fedor Tiutchev, “Den’ i noch,’ ” in Sochineniia, vol. 1, 113. For Tiutchev’s influence on Mandelstam, see E. Toddes, “Mandelstam i Tiutchev,” International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics, 17 (1974), 59– 85; and V. V. Musatov, “Ranniaia lirika Osipa Mandel’shtama,” Izvestiia akademiia nauk: Seriia literatury i iazyka, vol. 50, no. 3 (1991), 236–47. 11. I will return to Mandelstam’s use and abuse of his family name in later chapters. For other comments on Mandelstam’s surname, see Omry Ronen, “Osip Mandelshtam,” European Writers: The Twentieth Century, ed. George Stade (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 1624; and particularly Nancy Pollack, “Mandel’shtam’s ‘First’ Poem,” Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 32, no. 1 (1988), 98–109. 12. Fedor Tiutchev, “Pevuchest’ est’ v morskikh volnakh,” in his Sochineniia, vol. 1, 202. Konstantin Balmont, “Akkordy,” in his Stikhotvoreniia, 131. Valerii Briusov, “Tvorchestvo,” in his Izbrannye sochineniia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1980), 38. According to Mallarmé, one should include on the “subtle paper” of poetry only “for example, the horror of the forest, or the silent thunder scattered in the leaves; not the intrinsic dense wood of the trees” (“Crise de vers,” in Writings of Mallarmé, ed. Anthony Hartley [New York: Penguin, 1965], 170). 13. I am quoting Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s remarks on T. S. Eliot in American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 59. 14. For discussions of this lyric’s expressive awkwardness, see Brown, Mandelstam, 170–71; and Freidin, Coat of Many Colors, 34–37. 15. Gregory Freidin, “Osip Mandelstam: The Poetry of Time (1908–1916),” California Slavic Studies, vol. 11, 147. 16. Victor Terras, “Classical Motives in the Poetry of Osip Mandelstam,” The Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 10, no. 3 (1966), 257. Omry Ronen lists a range of other possible subtexts in the Preface to An Approach to Mandel’shtam (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1983), xiii–xiv. I disagree, however, with Ronen’s conclusion that this poem, with its emphasis on “careful rearrangement” of past poetry and poets, represents a convincing articulation of Mandelstam’s mature vision of tradition. 17. I have borrowed the phrase “poetry of stasis” from Freidin, “The Poetry of Time,” 145. 18. Andrei Polianin (S. Parnok), untitled review, Severnye zapiski, no. 4–5 (April/May, 1916), 242–43; rpt. in Kamen’, 230. V. Ryndziun, untitled review, Priazovskii krai, Aug. 11, 1916, 5; rpt. in Kamen’, 235. 19. Though there is, Brown notes, no evidence that he ever considered it (Mandelstam, 164). 20. I am paraphrasing Viacheslav Ivanov as quoted by John Malmsted in “Mandelshtam’s ‘Silentium’: A Poet’s Response to Ivanov,” in Vyacheslav Ivanov: Poet,

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

321

Critic and Philosopher, ed. Robert Louis Jackson and Lowry Nelson, Jr. (New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1986), 236–53. “Our most recent poets do not weary of celebrating silence,” Ivanov remarks ironically in 1904, after bearing witness to a decade of vociferous Symbolist soundlessness (“Mandelshtam’s ‘Silentium,’ ” 243). 21. Nikolai Gumilev speaks of Mandelstam’s “magical invocation of pre-being (do-bytiia)” in “Silentium” in his 1916 review of Stone (Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh [Washington: Victor Kamkin, 1968], vol. 4, 363). 22. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 13, 15. Like so many of Bloom’s apparently arbitrary or whimsical pronouncements, these observations prove remarkably apt when applied not just to the Anglo-American poets who are his chief subject, but to Mandelstam and other writers in the Russian tradition as well. One need only think in this context of Mandelstam’s fellow Acmeist, Anna Akhmatova, and her early account of her poetic beginnings “by the sea’s very edge” (U samogo moria, 1914), in her Sochineniia, vol. 1, ed. G. P. Struve and B. A. Filipoff (Munich: Interlanguage Literary Associates, 1967), 349–57. 23. On this poem as a reworking both of Tiutchev and Symbolism, see Kiril Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel’shtam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 141–44; Jan Meijer, “The Early Mandelshtam and Symbolism,” Russian Literature, 7, no. 5 (1979), 529; Ryszard Przybylski, Wdzi‘czny gósâ Boga (Paris: Libella, 1980), 62–69; John Malmsted, “Mandelshtam’s ‘Silentium.’ ” 24. Brown, Mandelstam, 167. The description of Aphrodite is Lucretius’, as quoted in Michael Grant, Myths of the Greeks and Romans (New York: Mentor, 1962), 101. 25. The description of Aphrodite is taken from Mark P. O. Morford and Robert J. Lenardon, Classical Mythology (New York: David McKay, 1971), 105. 26. Omry Ronen, “Mandelshtam, Osip Emilyevich,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica Year Book (1973), 294–96; Taranovsky, Essays, 51–54. 27. The poems first appeared together in the version of Stone that opens Stikhotvoreniia (1928). 28. Vyros, a past perfective verb, indicates completed action; it is a form of the same verb that gives us the Russian for “adult,” vzroslyi. 29. Tiutchev, “Pevushest’ est’ v morskikh volnakh,” in his Sochineniia, vol. 1, 202. On the genealogy of Mandelstam’s reed, see Taranovsky, Essays, 52–53. 30 In early versions “I’ve been given a body” was actually called “Breathing,” “Dykhanie.” 31. On “Sisters—heaviness and tenderness,” see D. M. Segal, “Mikrosemantika odnogo stikhotvoreniia,” Slavic Poetics: Essays in Honor of Kiril Taranovsky, ed. Roman Jakobson, C. H. Van Schooneveld, and Dean S. Worth (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 395–405; and Ronen, Approach to Mandelstam, 130–31. 32. Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), xiii. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vospominaniia: Kniga pervaia, 3rd ed. (Paris: YMCA Press, 1970), 185. 33. Quoted in James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot and the Sense of the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 20. 34. Jane Gary Harris, “The Impulse and the Text,” in Harris, ed., Complete Critical Prose and Letters (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), 6. 35. On Villon’s resurrection among the Romantics and Symbolists, see ibid.,

322

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

5–6, and 581; and Georgette Donchin, The Influence of French Symbolism on Russian Poetry (The Hague: Mouton, 1958), 98. 36. “Sobytie bytiia,” from Bakhtin’s “Architectonics,” plays on the double sense of the Russian for “event,” literally “co-being” (quoted in Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984], 77, 157). Mandelstam hints at a similar pun in “On the Interlocutor,” when he insists that poems exist only as “events” (sobytiia) shared by the author and his “reader in posterity” (CPL, 70,73; II, 237, 240). 37. On Villon among the moderns, see Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, “The Name and Nature of Modernism,” in Modernism, ed. Bradbury and McFarlane (New York: Penguin, 1976), 22; Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War II (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 24; Marcel Adéma, Apollinaire, trans. Denise Folliot (London: William Heinemann, 1954), 97. 38. Ezra Pound, “What I Feel about Walt Whitman” (1909), in Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 115–16); Pound, “Montcorbier, alias Villon,” in The Spirit of Romance (rpt. New York: New Directions, 1968), 166–79. 39. Nancy Freeman Regalado, “I the Scholar François Villon,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 120–24. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 267. 40. The Poems of François Villon, ed. and trans. Galway Kinnell (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1982), 75, 177. 41. Ibid., 43. 42. The phrase is Tiutchev’s, from “O veshchaia dusha moia,” in his Sochineniia, vol. 1, 173. 43. Jane Gary Harris, “The Impulse and the Text,” 6. 44. Clark and Holquist, Bakhtin, 93. 45. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 240. 46. Gumilev, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, 173, 175. For an incisive discussion of the manifestos and the movement they initiated, see Jane Gary Harris, “Acmeism,” in Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. Victor Terras (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 3–8. For more detailed accounts of the movement’s evolution and poetics, see Sam Driver, “Acmeism,” Slavic and East European Journal, 12, no. 2 (1968), 141–56; R. D. Timenchik’s three-part essay, “Zametki ob Akmeizme,” Russian Literature, no. 7/8 (1974), 24–45; no. 5/3 (July 1977), 281–300; no. 9/11 (February 1981), 175–90; Elaine Rusinko, “Adamism and Acmeist Primitivism,” Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 32, no. 1 (1988), 84–97. 47. Gumilev, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, 176. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 59. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Kniga pervaia, 185. 48. The term progenitor comes from Gumilev’s manifesto (Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, 172). 49. Ibid., 173. Gorodetsky plays on the Russian bezobrazno, which requires only a shifted stress to change its sense from “ugly” to “formless” or “vague” (“Nekotorye techeniia, v sovremennoi russkoi poezii,” Apollon, no. 1 [1913], 48). 50. Gumilev, review of Sergei Gorodetsky, Iva (1913), in his Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, 309. Mikhail Kuzmin, “O prekrasnoi iasnosti,” Apollon, no. 4

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

323

(1910), 5. Gumilev, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, 171. Gorodetsky, “Nekotorye techeniia,” 48–49, and “Adam,” Apollon, no. 3 (1912), 57. See Elaine Rusinko, “Adamism and Acmeist Primitivism,” for a discussion of the group’s dual christening. This causes Gorodetsky in particular some consternation as he attempts to accommodate Akhmatova, by far the group’s best-known member, into his new Adamist aesthetic. Adam, he claims, must give way to Eve when it comes to dealing with Adam’s degenerate offspring, the spiritual cripples of modernity. These unhappy creatures require what he calls a “woman’s touch (zhenskaia ruka),” and Akhmatova “caresses these ‘remnants’ with almost a master’s hand” (my emphasis; “Nekotorye techeniia,” 48–50). One wonders what Akhmatova, who scrupulously refrained from her generation’s compulsive polemicizing and manifesto-writing, made of such “manly” condescension. 51. Viktor Zhirmunsky, “Preodolevshie simvolizm,” 283. Gumilev, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 170–73, 309. 52. “The Morning of Acmeism,” though written at the same time as Gumilev’s and Gorodetsky’s manifestoes, was published only in 1919, in the neo-Acmeist journal Sirena. 53. Zhirmunsky, “Preodolevshie simvolizm,” 282. Gumilev, Sobranie sochineniia, vol. 4, 173, 309. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 25. Mikhail Kuzmin, “O prekrasnoi iasnosti,” 5. Sergei Gorodetsky, “Adam,” 57; “Nekotorye techeniia,” 49. Boris Eikhenbaum, Anna Akhmatova (Paris: Lev, 1923), 25. The question of the Acmeists’ poetic paternity is a vexed one, and the opposition within the movement between Adam and Akme, between new beginnings and culmination, carries over into the critical debates on Acmeism’s origins. According to Zhirmunsky, the Acmeists overcame their Symbolist sources in creating a genuinely new poetic. Eikhenbaum, on the other hand, sees them as the Symbolists’ “last word,” or last gasp, as the continuation and culmination of Symbolist poetics. Nadezhda Mandelstam, who clearly wishes to preserve her husband from what she sees as the taint of unsavory Symbolist origins, insists that the Futurists, not the Acmeists, were Symbolism’s rightful heirs (Vospominaniia:Vtoraia kniga [Paris: YMCA Press, 1972], 56–55). 54. Sidney Monas. “Gumilev: Akme and Adam in Saint Petersburg,” in Selected Works of Nikolai S. Gumilev, ed. and tr. Burton Raffel and Alla Burage (Albany: SUNY Press, 1972), 18. 55. On Futurism’s own Adamist pretensions, see Rusinko, “Adamism and Acmeist Primitivism,” 85. 56. On Gumilev’s ill-fated attempts to found a neo-Acmeist movement following the revolution, see Nadezhda Mandelstam, Kniga vtoraia, 138–41. 57. Clarence Brown, Mandelstam, 92. See also Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vtoraia kniga, 41–47. 58. Gumilev, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, 363–66. 59. On Mandelstam’s careful orchestration of this confluence of names, see Omry Ronen, “Leksicheskii povtor, podtekst i smysl v poetike Osipa Mandel’shtama,” Slavic Poetics: Essays in Honor of Kiril Taranovsky, ed. Roman Jakobson, C. H. Van Schooneveld, and Dean S. Worth (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 368–69; and Freidin, A Coat of Many Colors, 296. 60. The phrase “stonemasons of every time and nation” is taken from an early variant of Gumilev’s “Five-foot Iambs” (Piatistopnye iamby; 1912–15), in his Sti-

324

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

khotvoreniia i poemy (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1988), 500. Gumilev returns to the figure of Adam at several points in his work. This particular Adam, taken from a poem of 1910 (“Adam”) is still a neo-romantic fallen rebel and has not yet become the Acmeists’ heroic master builder (Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, 272). Harold Bloom paraphrases Kierkegaard in the phrase I have cited (The Anxiety of Influence, 56). CHAPTER THREE 1. T. S. Eliot, “Notes towards the Definition of Culture,” Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 114. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1888), The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 522. “Empty vessel” is Gregory Freidin’s phrase, from“Osip Mandelstam: The Poetry of Time,” California Slavic Studies, vol. 11, 152–54. 3. Gumilev, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, ed. G. P. Stuve, and B. A. Filipoff (Washington: Victor Kamkin, 1968), vol. 4, 174, 162–63. 4. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vospominaniia: kniga pervaia, 3rd ed. (Paris: YMCA Press, 1970), 208–9. For other discussions of Mandelstam’s cathedrals, see inter alia Clarence Brown, Mandelstam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 183–93; Ryszard Przybylski, Wdzic‘czny goçâ Boga (Paris: Libella, 1980), 79–96; Peter Steiner, “Poem as Manifesto: Mandelstam’s ‘Notre Dame,’ ” Russian Literature, vol. 3 (July 1977), 239–56. 5. Heinz Kahler, Hagia Sophia, trans. Ellyn Childs (New York: Praeger, 1967), 13, 30. Mandelstam was forced to adopt Christianity for the purposes of a more mundane kind of inclusion. To judge by his poems on Lutheranism (#37, #43), his conversion in 1910 to a faith that scholars have identified variously as Lutheranism or Finnish Methodism was not based on an affinity with the creed itself. It was undertaken to enable him to circumvent St. Petersburg University’s quotas on Jewish admissions. On his conversion see Brown, Mandelstam, 46; Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vospominaniia: Vtoraia kniga, (Paris: YMCA Press, 1982), 503; Gregory Freidin, A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 29–30. Joseph Nedava observes that Russian Jews who chose to convert for pragmatic reasons most frequently converted to Lutheranism, which made the fewest demands on its new converts and whose procedures for conversion were relatively simple (Trotsky and the Jews [Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1972], 45). 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), nn. 5, 71. 7. Roland Bainton, Christendom, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 110–12. See also Herbert Muller, The Uses of the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 8. Muller’s remarks are anachronistic; the modern idea of nationality did not exist in the Byzantine age. The idea of a conglomerate, heterogeneous empire would have appealed nonetheless to a modern poet looking to the past in hopes of finding an alternative to the nineteenth-century notion of an organically unified nation. 8. Steiner, “Poem as Manifesto,” 245. 9. Kahler, Hagia Sophia, 28. See also Procopius, as quoted in ibid., 116–17; and Lord Kinross, Hagia Sophia (New York: Newsweek, 1972),141–42.

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

325

10. N. l. Khardzhiev translates the title in his notes to “Hagia Sophia” in the 1974 Soviet edition of Mandelstam’s work, indicating that the Soviet reader at least would not have been expected to know the meaning of the original Greek (Osip Mandelstam, Stikhotvoreniia [Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1974], 259). 11. All the poem’s feet are either iambic or pyrrhic, and stresses are frequently omitted. 12. Kinross, Hagia Sophia, 17, 30–31; Kahler, Hagia Sophia, 19. 13. Kahler, Hagia Sophia, 11; Kinross, Hagia Sophia, 36. 14. Kahler, Hagia Sophia, 9. 15. This accurately reflects the paradoxical nature of Justinian’s own reign. Justinian’s Hagia Sophia, David Talbott Rice notes, marks the greatest achievement of an age of innovation. Yet this innovation came, like God’s commands, from above, as Justinian struggled to create “a unified ideal of one Christian empire with one Church, one emperor, and one body of laws.” Indeed, within Justinian’s court “the words originality and innovation were used . . . only as terms of reproach” (Art of the Byzantine Era [New York: Oxford University Press, 1963], 52–55). See also William Fleming, Art, Music and Ideas (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), 92–93; Bainton, Christendom, 112; Muller, Uses, 18–19. 16. The stanza’s other verb forms, which refer to the temple’s design, are raspolozhil (“placed,” “distributed”), and ukazav (“having shown”). Both are perfective. 17. Ozhegov’s dictionary offers as one definition “rendering assistance widely (shiroko okazyvaiushchii pomoshch’)”; an English translation of the Russian shchedroi rukoi would be “openhandedly.” 18. Aleksandr Pushkin, “Mednyi vsadnik,” Sobranie sochinenii (10 vols.; Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975), vol. 3, 255. 19. Kahler, Hagia Sophia, 26. 20. The stanza’s tripartite structure seems indeed to be tacitly organized around the positive, comparative, and superlative degrees of the adjective beautiful. The very notion of the superlative is rooted in both English and Russian in the idea of elevation. The Russian prevoskhodnyi, as in prevoskhodnaia stepen’, derives from the verb that means “to ascend,” vskhodit’/vzoiti, while the English superlative is built from the Latin super-, “above,” and latus, “carried.” The stanza’s grammatical structure seems to mimic or emphasize the upward motion of the poet’s eyes within the stanza. 21. Brodsky, “Flight from Byzantium,” Less Than One (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986), 406–7. 22. It suffers from the same failings that the young Mandelstam ascribes to his early mentor Viacheslav Ivanov’s collection, By the Stars (Po zvezdam, 1909): “Your book is magnificent in the beauty of its great architectural creations and astronomical systems. . . . However, it seems to me that your book is too—how shall I say it? too circular, without any angles. No matter which direction one approaches it from, one cannot cause injury to it or to oneself, since it has no sharp edges” (CPL, 477). 23. One need only compare the missing present tense of “Hagia Sophia” with the abundance of active, present verb forms in “The Admiralty” or “Notre Dame” to sense the possibility of a completely different kind of building and being. Only two of the poem’s twenty lines actually have all five stresses. 24. Kinross, Hagia Sophia, 63, 110.

326

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

25. Ibid., 56, 67–73, 101; Kahler, Hagia Sophia, 61. 26. Kahler, Hagia Sophia, 46. 27. The chief image of Christ in Hagia Sophia, as Mandelstam may have known, represented not a human Christ, but “Christ as God,” Christ Pantocrator, the emperor of the universe on whom the Byzantine emperors modeled their rule (Kinross, Hagia Sophia, 62). 28. Vtoraia kniga, 550. 29. Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Stanford: Stanford University Pres, 1979), 95, 380–83. Kahler, Hagia Sophia, 42. Vladimir Soloviev, A Solovyov Anthology, ed. S. L. Frank, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York: Scribner, 1950), 76. Soloviev’s critique of Eastern Orthodoxy is close in some ways to Mandelstam’s own. It is, he claims, static, fixed in the past, and divorced from this world and its history in its focus on otherworldly being. On Soloviev’s notion of light in art as matter redeemed, see A Solovyov Anthology, 132, 129. 30. Walicki, Russian Thought, 95. Walicki renders this term as “conciliarism.” 31. Steiner, “Poem as Manifesto,” 245. On judgment in the lyric, see Steiner, “Poem as Manifesto,” 245; Brown, Mandelstam, 187. 32. In Gogol’s “arabesque” “On the Middle Ages,” medieval culture arises from “the fusion of two lives,” the confluence of “the dying elements” of ancient Rome and the “chaos,” the “wild and powerful elements” of a new world (“O srednikh vekakh,” Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii [Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1952], vol. 8, 14–17, 514). The term Gothic itself points to the “barbaric” roots of latemedieval Christian art. Mandelstam and his Acmeist colleagues were both drawing on and revising the romantic cult of the Middle Ages that informs Gogol’s essay. Where Romantic writers valued above all what they saw as the untamed exuberance of medieval art, the Acmeists stress that medieval grotesqueries are in fact achieved through the architect’s careful planning and the craftsman’s calculated labors. On the influence of Gogol’s “arabesques” on Mandelstam’s views of architecture, see Steiner, “Poem as Manifesto,” 243; Omry Ronen, An Approach to Mandel’shtam (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1983), 122. 33. Art, Music and Ideas, 137. On the multiple functions of the Roman basilica and of the Gothic cathedral, see Kinross, Hagia Sophia, 18; Fleming, Art, Music and Ideas, 126. 34. The syntax of the first stanza’s final two lines is ambiguous. The adjectives “joyful and first,” which would logically seem to describe Adam, refer instead grammatically to the “light groined arch.” This is puzzling—in what way is the arch “first”? It was certainly not the first groined arch to be used in a Gothic cathedral. This syntactic haziness may be another trick through which Mandelstam links historical evolution with new creation. 35. Petr Chaadaev, whose writings on architecture were an important influence on Mandelstam, insists that only the newcomer can truly appreciate the Gothic style: “The inhabitants of Europe, who have become too accustomed to th[ese] strange work[s] of architecture, cannot, in my opinion, appreciate them properly. It is left to us, the inhabitants of another world, to understand them” (Sochineniia i pis’ma, ed. M. Gershenzon [Moscow, 1913-14], vol. 2, 22). 36. Mandelstam, 191. 37. Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Notre Dame,” Sochineniia v trekh tomakh (Mos-

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

•

327

cow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978), vol. 2, 433–34. Fleming, Art, Music and Ideas, 126, 143. Mayakovsky’s Notre Dame is clearly not a fitting poetic vessel for a passenger bound for the future on modernity’s steamship: it is merely “an exalted/ship of the past,/that got snagged on time/and ran aground” (Sochineniia, vol. 2, 433). 38. Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 1944), 296. On Bergson and Mandelstam, see: Jane Gary Harris, “Mandelstamian Zlost’, Bergson and a New Acmeist Esthetic?” Ulbandus Review, vol. 2, no. 2 (Fall 1982), 112–30; Frances Nethercott, “Elements of Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution in the Critical Prose of Osip Mandel’shtam,” Russian Literature, 30–4 (November 1991), 455–66; and Elaine Rusinko, “Acmeism, Post-Symbolism and Henri Bergson,” Slavic Review, vol. 41, no. 3 (Fall 1982), 494–510. 39. The Gothic cathedral, that “logical development of the concept of the organism . . . now has the esthetic effect of something monstrous” (“The Morning of Acmeism”; CPL, 63). 40. Fleming, Art, Music and Ideas, 143. 41. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1984), 317, 355. 42. Rabelais, 353. 43. It is the counterweight to taran, “battering ram,” in the stanza’s rhyme scheme as well, and it is also phonically tied to the church’s earlier incarnations as Notre Dame and Adam, to which it forms an imperfect, assonant rhyme. 44. The poem’s “saddle-girth arches” also suggest the metaphor of Notre Dame as a restive horse whose force has been harnessed and turned to human ends—for the time being at least. 45. Fleming, Art, Music and Ideas, 130, 139. 46. Gumilev, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, 372. 47. The constructs of nature and culture converge in other poems of Stone as well. In #61 (“Na ploshchad’ vybezhav svoboden”) and #65 (“Priroda—tot zhe Rim”), for example, building and nature come together in complementary ways. In #61 the worshiper who enters Kazan’ cathedral passes through “a grove of porticoes,” while in #65, the attentive onlooker perceives the structures of Rome at work in nature itself. 48. Fleming, Art, Music and Ideas, 143. 49. Ronen, Approach, 120–24; Steiner, “Poem as Manifesto,” 250. 50. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 341. 51. Ibid., 335, 318. 52. Ibid., 73–75. 53. Ibid., 88, 268. For an excellent critique of Bakhtin’s vision of medieval and Renaissance culture on historical grounds, see Richard M. Berrong, Rabelais and Bakhtin: Popular Culture in Gargantua and Pantagruel [Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1986], 8–10, 38. For a skeptical examination of Bakhtinian carnival from an ethical and philosophical point of view, see Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 433–70. 54. Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, trans. and ed. John D. Sinclair (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 373. 55. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 119, 145, 142–43.

328

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

56. Mandelstam’s vision of Hellenism is not his alone. He, Bakhtin, and Viacheslav Ivanov, among others, were crucially influenced by the “Hellenistic” vision of the Polish Classicist Faddei Zelinsky (Tadeusz Zielinski), who taught at St. Petersburg University for many years: both Bakhtin and Mandelstam attended his lectures while studying at the university. I will return to Zelinsky’s influence on Mandelstam in Chapter Four. 57. See Steiner, “Poem as Manifesto,” 251. 58. Mandelstam turns again to an apt source in shaping his version of tradition. The songs of the Scottish bard were at least as much products of James Macpherson’s eighteenth-century imagination as they were of ancient Gaelic tradition, and Macpherson’s chief goal in “translating” Ossian’s songs was to provide the Scottish people with a venerable cultural tradition, even if this entailed considerable invention on his part. 59. “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 38. 60. By the time of “Pushkin and Skriabin,” Mandelstam had turned away from his early favorite, Rome, as Greece becomes the center of his universal culture. This shift produced a rapprochement, for a time, with “childless” Byzantium. Christianity’s origins remain in any case Classical, not Jewish, in Mandelstam’s vision until the time of “Fourth Prose” (1930) and “Conversation about Dante” (1933). 61. The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 290. 62. Bloom uses the phrase to describe all poetic activity in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 83. 63. On anagrams in Mandelstam, see Viacheslav Vs. Ivanov, “Dva primera anagrammaticheskikh postroenii v stikhakh pozdnego Mandelstama,” Russian Literature, no. 3 ( 1972), 81–87. 64. Anxiety of Influence, 32, 5. 65. “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 38–39. 66. “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 44; Anxiety of Influence, 56. 67. T. S. Eliot, “Henry James,” The Little Review (1918); rpt. in The Shock of Recognition, vol. 2, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: Octagon, 1955), 857. 68. Northrop Frye, Anatomy, 141. CHAPTER FOUR 1. Omry Ronen, “Osip Mandelshtam (1891–1938),” in European Writers: The Twentieth Century, ed. George Stade (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), vol. 10, 1627. 2. The pioneering works on Mandelstam’s relationship to his Jewish past are Omry Ronen’s entry on Mandelstam in Encyclopedia Judaica Yearbook 1973 (Jerusalem: Keter, 1973), 294–96, and Kiril Taranovsky, “The Black-Yellow Light,” in Essays on Mandel’shtam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 48–67. Other studies that treat the topic include Arthur Cohen, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam: An Essay In Antiphon (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1974); Gregory Freidin, A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Jane Gary Harris, “The Impulse and the Text,” in Osip Mandelstam, The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris, trans. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), esp.

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

329

22–29; Charles Isenberg, Substantial Proofs of Being: Osip Mandelstam’s Literary Prose (Columbus: Slavica, 1987); Maia Kaganskaia, “Osip Mandel’shtam—poet iudeiskii,” Sion, no. 20 (1977), 174–95; Ephraim Sicher, “The ‘Color’ of Judaism: Timespace Oppositions in the Synaesthesia of Osip Mandel’shtam’s Shum vremeni,” in Aspects of Modern Russian and Czech Literature, ed. A. McMillin (Columbus: Slavica, 1989), 31–54. 3. Maurice Freidburg, “Jewish Contributions to Soviet Literature,” in The Jews in Soviet Russia Since 1917, ed. Lionel Kochan (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 212. Salo Baron quotes the story of Nicholas’s minister in The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets (New York: MacMillan, 1976), 56. See chapter 4 of Baron’s study for a discussion of anti-Semitism and Jewish persecution under Nicholas II. 4. See Baron, The Russian Jew, 48, and Ilya Trotsky, “Jews in Russian Schools,” in Russian Jewry (1860-1917), ed. Jacob Frumkin, Gregor Aronson, Alexis Goldenweiser; trans. Mirra Ginsburg (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1966), 411–12. Sergei Kablukov speaks of Mandelstam’s studies in Heidelburg as an effort to evade Russian quotas in one of his diary entries on the poet (“O. E. Mandel’shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika i perepiske S. P. Kablukova,” in Osip Mandelshtam, Kamen’, ed. L. Ia. Ginzburg, A. G. Mets, S. vol. Vasilenko and Iu. L. Freidin [Leningrad: Nauka, 1990], 241). 5. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vospominaniia: vtoraia kniga (Paris: YMCA Press, 1983), 589. Omry Ronen quotes Blok in “Osip Mandelshtam (1891–1938),” 1639. On anti-Semitism among the Symbolists, see Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “Wagner and Wagnerian Ideas in Russia,” in Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, ed. D. Large and W. Weber (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 222– 25. 6. Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 304. 7. Fedor Tiutchev, “Den’ i noch,’ ” in his Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1984), vol. 2, 113. Aleksandr Pushkin, “Mednyi vsadnik,” in his Sobranie sochinenii (10 vols.; Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975), vol. 3, 255. On the relationship of Tiutchev’s lyric to Mandelstam’s “Judaic chaos,” see Isenberg, Substantial Proofs of Being, 60, 82; and E. M. Toddes, “Mandel’shtam i Tiutchev,” International Journal of Slavonic Linguistics and Poetics 17 (1974), 67–68. 8. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 31. 9. Osip Mandelstam, Sochineniia, ed. S. S. Averintsev, P. M. Nerler (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), vol. 2, 390. 10. Carol A. Luplow, “Isaac Babel’ and the Jewish Tradition: The Childhood Stories,” Russian Literature 15 (1984), 256. For all their differences in background, Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Babel share what Ronen calls “the tragic ambivalence that no great Jewish writer working in European literature could every escape” (Encyclopedia Judaica, 295). On Pasternak, Babel, and Jewishness, see, inter alia Judith Stora’s “Pasternak et le Judaïsme,” Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique, 9 (Juillet-décembre 1968), 352–64; George Gibian, “Doctor Zhivago, Russia, and Leonid Pasternak’s Rembrandt,” in The Russian Novel from Pushkin to Pasternak, ed. John Garrard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 203–26; Simon Markish, “The Example of Isaac Babel’,” Commentary, vol. 64, no. 5 (November 1977), 36–45; Maurice Friedberg, “Jewish Contributions to Soviet Litera-

330

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

ture,” in The Jews in Soviet Russia Since 1917, ed. Lionel Kochan (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 210–37. 11. Daniel Bell, “Reflections on Jewish Identity,” in The Ghetto and Beyond: Essays on Jewish Life in America, ed. Peter I. Rose (New York: Random House, 1969), 465, 471. Milton Gordon, “Marginality and the Jewish Intellectual” (in The Ghetto and Beyond, 477). On Simmel’s study see Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 123. 12. Arthur Levin quotes Waxman in his introduction to vol. Lvov-Rogachevsky, A History of Russian Jewish Literature, ed. and trans. Arthur Levin (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), 39. 13. Lvov-Rogachevsky, History, 159–60. 14. Allan Megill discusses Jabès as a Jewish writer in relation to Jacques Derrida in Prophets of Extremity (317–18). Murray Baumgarten, City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 23. 15. Lazar Fleishman quotes Pasternak in Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 148. Fleishman comments that this statement is atypical for Pasternak, who elsewhere takes pride in the contributions made to Russian verse by “foreign blood,” with Pushkin as his prime example. However, Doctor Zhivago, with its extended meditations on a hereditary Jewishness that opposes true creativity of all kinds, indicates that Pasternak felt more discomfort with his Jewish past than Fleishman’s remarks suggest. 16. For a discussion of this passage’s place in “Pushkin and Skriabin,” see Freidin, Coat of Many Colors, 312–13. 17. Lawrence Lipking discusses Blake in the context of apocalyptic self-creation in modern poetry in The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago: University of Chicago,1981), 18, 35–36. 18. Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) and the poem cycle that concludes it are a belated contribution to this tradition, and Pasternak’s poet-Christs bear a marked family resemblance to Mandelstam’s own would-be poet-saviors. Indeed, Pasternak’s historiosophical meditations on the Christian tradition in Doctor Zhivago converge quite strikingly with Mandelstam’s vision of Christian art in “Pushkin and Skriabin.” 19. On self-hatred among European Jewish writers, see Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 20. “Hamlet and His Problems,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 48. 21. For a brief discussion of this imagery, see Ronen, “Osip Mandelshtam (1891–1938),” 1624. 22. For a recent discussion of Mandelstam’s imitation of Christ, see Gregory Freidin’s essay “Sidia na saniakh: Osip Mandel’shtam i kharizmaticheskaia traditsiia russkogo modernizma” (manuscript). 23. “Prorok,” in Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 2, 82. 24. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vospominaniia: kniga pervaia (Paris: YMCA Press, 1970), 238. 25. For a discussion of these two Josephs, see Freidin, Coat of Many Colors, 1–5. 26. The verb here, ischezaet, is a different form of the same verb, ischeznut’, that had presaged the poet’s own fate in “I’ve become afraid of living life out.” 27. Richard Wagner, “Jews in Music,” quoted in Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred,

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

331

209–10. On the influence of Wagner’s essay in Russia, see Rosenthal, “Wagner and Wagnerian Ideas in Russia,” 222–25. 28. Recent Russian editions of Mandelstam’s writing have corrected Filipoff and Struve’s version of this poem, which replaces “implacable” (neumolimyi) with “unappeasable” (neutolimyi) and fails to reproduce the stanzaic divisions of the original text. These editions also correct the date that Filipoff and Struve assign to this lyric, 1915. See Osip Mandelstam, Kamen’, ed. L. Ginzburg, et al. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1990), 133, 322; and Mandelstam, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh ed. S. S. Averintsev and P. M. Nerler (Moscow: khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), vol. 1, 279, 575. 29. For Freidin’s reading of Mandelstam in relation to the Russian kenotic tradition, see Coat of Many Colors, passim; and “Sidia na saniakh.” For his discussion of this particular lyric, see Coat, 50–53. 30. The cup that Jesus begs God to spare him in Gethsemane is not literally described as heavy, but the destiny it represents is heavy indeed (Matthew 26:39, Luke 22:42). 31. Coat of Many Colors, 48–50. 32. The Russian okamenet can mean either literally “to turn to stone” or “to become hardened or callous.” The Russian phrase for a “hard heart” has the same root: kamennoe serdtse. 33. The verb here, ponikla, echoes the “[I] droop,” niknu, of “From an evil, marshy pond” and occurs once again in “Implacable words”: “I tsarstvoval i niknul On,” “He reigned and He drooped.” 34. On the poem’s lily, see Freidin, Coat of Many Colors, 53. 35. On the biblical implications of these lines, see Ronen, An Approach to Mandel’shtam (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1983), 219–23. 36. On this shift in allegiances, see Taranovsky, Essays, 48; and Freidin, Coat of Many Colors, 81–83. 37. Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 120, 133. 38. F. F. Zelinsky, Drevne-grecheskaia religiia (Petrograd: Ogni, 1918), 158. Translations taken, with modifications, from Thaddeus Zelinsky, The Religion of Ancient Greece, trans. George Rapall Noyes (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 219. 39. For Zelinsky’s influence on Mandelstam, see Taranovsky, Essays, 146; G. A. Levinton, “ ‘Na kamennykh otrogakh Pierii’ Mandel’shtama: materialy k analizu,” Russian Literature vol. 2 (April 1977), 123–70, vol. 3 (July 1977), 201–38, passim; Irina Paperno, “O prirode poeticheskogo slova: Bogoslovskie istochniki spora Mandel’shtama s simvolizmom,” Literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 1 (1991), esp. 34. For Zelinsky’s influence on Silver Age Russian culture generally, see Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 30–33; and James M. Curtis, “Mikhail Bakhtin, Nietzsche, and Russian Pre-Revolutionary Thought,” in Nietzsche in Russia, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), esp. 331, 344–48. 40. Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, 32; Johnson, History of the Jews, 101. 41. Zelinsky, Drevne-grecheskaia religiia, 82, 85; Religion, 113, 117, 100. Mandelstam’s Hellenistic legacy came to him by way of Ivanov as well as Zelinsky. Ivanov was himself an admirer of Zelinsky’s writings, though his interpretation of Christianity’s origins deviated from Zelinsky’s in ways I will return to later in this chapter. On Mandelstam, Ivanov, and Zelinsky, see Vasily Rudich, “Vyacheslav Iva-

332

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

nov and Classical Antiquity,” in Vyacheslav Ivanov: Poet, Critic and Philosopher, ed. Robert Louis Jackson and Lowry Nelson, Jr. (New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1986), 275–89. 42. I am quoting from Clark and Holquist’s discussion of Zelinsky’s thought in Mikhail Bakhtin, 32–33; and from Johnson, History of the Jews, 134, 101. The importance of the opposition between Hebrew and Greek in Zelinsky’s thought is clear from the title of a later study written in Polish: Hellenizm a Judaizm (Warsaw: J. Mortkowicz, 1927). 43. Quoted in Johnson, History of the Jews, 134. 44. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968), 225; Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969), 143–44. On Nietzsche and Zelinsky, see Curtis, “Mikhail Bakhtin, Nietzsche, and Russian Pre-Revolutionary Thought,” 331, 344–48. Zelinsky’s version of the Judeo-Hellenic roots of Christian culture apparently derives from Hegel, for whom the Jews “are an ahistorical people, living outside the progress of Western civilization. . . . The Jews separate the essential spirit from life and thus are the antithesis of the Greeks, in whom the union of these two forces is a wellspring of creativity” (quoted in Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 191). 45. F. Zelinsky, Soperniki khristianstva, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg, 1910) 255–56; Religion, 118, 216. On the opposition of Jew to Greek in nineteenth-century German thought, see Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 169–90. For a detailed examination of Hebraism versus Hellenism in nineteenth-century theology and historiography generally, see Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). See Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity, 309– 16, for a discussion of the opposition of “Greek/Jew/Jew/Greek” in modern philosophy. Olender’s study in particular reveals how deeply Mandelstam’s own myths and prejudices were rooted in mainstream nineteenth-century historosophical visions of the Jewish role in world and Western history. 46. The first quote is taken from N. Bentwich, Hellenism (1919), as quoted in Abram Leon Sachar, A History of the Jews (New York: Knopf, 1966), 108. Zelinsky, Soperniki khristianstva, 256; Religion, 206. 47. Zelinsky, Religion, 218, 211, 86, 217. Paul Johnson notes that Jesus’ cultural and theological background was indeed “the heterodox Judaism and increasing Hellenization of Galilee,” but his teachings were an original, indissoluble fusion of Jewish and Hellenic practices and beliefs (History, 125–31). 48. Viacheslav Ivanov, “K ideologii evreiskogo voprosa,” in Shchit: Literaturnyi sbornik, 3rd ed., ed. Leonid Andreev, Maksim Gorky, and Fedor Sologub (Moscow: Russkoe obshchestvo dlia izucheniia evreiskoi zhizni, 1916), 97–98. This volume of essays, poems, and stories by various well-known writers was directed against the widespread anti-Semitism that was the insidious inverse of the chauvinistic rhetoric that flourished in Russia during the First World War. Freidin speculates that Mandelstam may have omitted the most pronouncedly anti-Semitic passages from “Pushkin and Skriabin” because their “anti-Jewish tone” would have been inappropriate in light of the period’s rampant anti-Jewish rhetoric (Coat of Many Colors, 76). That Mandelstam would have even written this passage at such a time might, however, be construed as evidence of the depths of his “Jewish selfhatred.”

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

333

“Hellenic filial relation” is Zelinsky’s phrase (Religion, 217). Nadezhda Mandelstam’s remarks are taken from her first volume of memoirs (kniga pervaia, 238). 49. Many of the most appealing moments in “Pushkin and Scriabin”—the passages in which Mandelstam celebrates a generous, joyful, energetic Christianity— have little in common with the intolerant Christian tradition he espouses elsewhere. The Christianity of “Pushkin and Skriabin” clearly has stronger affinities with the creative, life-affirming Christianity that another erstwhile mentor, V. V. Gippius, describes in his essay on “Pushkin and Christianity” (Pushkin i khristianstvo [Petrograd, 1915]) than it does with Zelinsky’s more disturbing version of Christian history. 50. Zelinsky’s influence was not confined to Russia alone. Modernism’s most notorious anti-Semite, Ezra Pound, developed his own version of “Judea versus Greece” in Western history with the help of English translations of Zelinsky’s work. See Peter Nicholls, Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (London: Macmillan, 1984), 157. Closer to home, the most disconcertingly anti-Semitic passages in Doctor Zhivago—Misha Gordon and Lara both inveigh at various points in the novel against the “shameful” “loyalty to an outworn, antediluvian identity” that kept the Jews from accepting Christian revelation and “dissolving among the rest”—sound suspiciously like Zelinsky’s insidious teachings (Doktor Zhivago [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958], 310). 51. This last translation (“Return”) is taken with slight modifications from Gregory Freidin (Coat of Many Colors, 127); and I have followed his lead in translating lono as “womb” throughout my discussion. For other readings of these lyrics, see Taranovsky, Essays, 54–63; Ronen, Encyclopedia Judaica, 295–96; Ronen, “Osip Mandelshtam (1891–1938),” 1623, 1637–38; Freidin, Coat, 78–79, 96– 97, 124–27. 52. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vtoraia kniga, 120, 262. 53. On the “synthetic” Russianness that Mandelstam forges with Chaadaev’s help, see Clare Cavanagh, “Synthetic Nationality: Mandel’shtam and Chaadaev,” Slavic Review vol. 49, no. 4 (Winter 1990), 597–610. 54. Ronen, “Osip Mandelshtam (1891–1938),” 1637. 55. Quoted in Clarence Brown, Mandelstam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 46. 56. It would be misguided to take the sentiments of the poem’s Jewish convert for those of the poet himself; what little evidence we have suggests that Mandelstam’s actual relations with his mother were affectionate, and his widow recalls him preserving his mother’s letters carefully after her death (Kniga pervaia, 183, 287). 57. Ivanov, “K ideologii evreiskogo voprosa,” 98. 58. My quotations are taken from John J. Collins, “Apocalyptic Literature,” and Phyllis A. Bird, “Sun,” both in Harper’s Bible Dictionary, ed. Paul J. Achtemeier (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985), 35–36, 1000; and Ronen, Encyclopedia Judaica, 295. For other discussions of the apocalyptic imagery in these lyrics, see Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vtoraia kniga, 127–28; Taranovsky, Essays, 54; and the Struve/Filipoff edition of Mandelstam’s work, III, 404–11. 59. On the identity of the “young Levite,” see Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vtoraia kniga, 130. 60. For Nadezhda Mandelstam’s commentary on this imagery, see Vtoraia kniga, 130–31. 61. Ibid., 262.

334

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

F O U R

•

62. Ibid. The second quotation is taken from Taranovsky (Essays, 60), who is paraphrasing from a private conversation with Nadezhda Mandelstam. 63. See Ronen, Encyclopedia Judaica, 296; Freidin, Coat of Many Colors, 124– 27. 64. The pamphleteer I cite is one Martin Engländer, himself a converted Jew; Sander Gilman quotes his pamphlet on The Evident Most Frequent Appearances of Illness in the Jewish Race (1902) in Jewish Self-Hatred, 292. On the nineteenth century’s anti-Semitic literature on alleged Jewish sexual perversion, see Jewish SelfHatred, 243–46 and 287–98. Zelinsky’s phrase is taken from The Religion of Ancient Greece, 77. One of Mandelstam’s early mentors, Sergei Kablukov, speaks in a diary entry of 1917 about the strange, even “blasphemous” tie between “religion and sensuality (erotika )” he observed at work in Mandelstam’s writing and thought: “He himself acknowledged the connection, saying that the opposite sex was especially dangerous to him as a converted Jew” (“O. E. Mandel’shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika i perepiske S. P. Kablukova,” 256). Kablukov speculates that this entry was a response to Mandelstam’s infatuation with Salomeia Andronikova, a gentile; it might apply equally well, though, to his “incestuous” involvement with the Jewish Nadezhda Khazina, who would become his wife. 65. One might see in this imagery of changing names and origins a densely mythologized version of a choice that actually faced modern Europe’s would-be assimiliated Jews, who not infrequently attempted to escape their Jewish past by erasing its traces in their names. 66. I have drawn extensively on Gregory Freidin’s provocative readings of Mandelstam’s “Jewish” lyrics in revising an earlier version of my own argument, and our discussions overlap at a number of points. My disagreement with Freidin on the interpretation of “Return,” though, indicate larger divergences in our arguments. Freidin argues for incest as the master plot or chief myth that Mandelstam employs to enable him, as a Jew, to exploit “the symbolic vocabulary of his native Russian culture” (Coat of Many Colors, 55). My far more negative interpretation of incest in those poems in which it explicitly appears not only leads me to a very different vision of Mandelstam’s understanding of Judaism and Hellenism at this point in his career. (I am finally closer to Taranovsky on this point, who argues that “Return” “seemingly says that the victory of the Judaic element in [Mandelstam’s] philosophy and his poetry would lead the poet to silence” [Essays, 63].) It also leads me to question the viability of incest as master trope for Mandelstam’s work—though the readings of Mandelstam’s texts and their contexts that Freidin generates using this myth are never less than fascinating. 67. On “the backward flow of time” in Mandelstam’s poetics generally, see Victor Terras, “The Time Philosophy of Osip Mandel’shtam,” Slavonic and East European Review 47 (1969), esp. 351. 68. Jean Racine, Phaedra, trans. Richard Wilbur (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 17, 83. Phaedra is not the only sinner of ancient Greece to pollute her family line through incest, whether in desire or in fact. She shares her crime with a still more famous sinner, Sophocles’ Oedipus. I am concerned here, though, with the figure through whom Mandelstam chooses to link the theme of incest with ancient Greece. For discussions of Mandelstam’s Phaedra poems, see Brown, Mandelstam, 207–18; and Freidin, Coat of Many Colors, 89–99.

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

335

69. “To establish bonds of kinship between Russia and alien cultures, between the distant past and the present—the very essence of Mandelstam’s poetic project— meant to create proximity where there was difference, and simultaneity where time brought about a chronological gap” (Freidin, Coat of Many Colors, 146). 70. Racine, Phaedra, 45. 71. On Mandelstam’s substitution of “mother” (mat’) for the more appropriate “stepmother,” see Freidin, Coat of Many Colors, 97–98. 72. See Freidin, Coat of Many Colors, 137–42, for a somewhat different interpretation of the relationship between Mandelstam’s poetic tales of Judaic and Hellenic incest, and the ways they bear on his relationship to “mother Russia.” 73. The phrase is Nadezhda Mandelstam’s, from Vtoraia kniga, 127–28. 74. Freidin, Coat of Many Colors, 206. 75. “The children of Russia’s terrible years” is Aleksandr Blok’s phrase, from his famous lyric “Born into the mute years” (1914), in his Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow-Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1960–63), vol. 3, 278. 76. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 48; Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vtoraia kniga, 121. 77. Worldlessness is Hannah Arendt’s term for the plight of all European Jewry in the modern period. See Ron Feldman’s introduction to Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), esp. 22–27. 78. Isaac Deutscher, “The Non-Jewish Jew,” in his The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, ed. Tamara Deutscher (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 26– 27. CHAPTER FIVE 1. The ancient Greek oikos at the heart of our modern word economy comes still closer to Mandelstam’s ideal Hellas. It signifies, in the words of one classicist, “at once house and household, building and family, land and chattles, slaves and domestic animals, hearth and ancestral grave: a psycho-physical community of the living and the dead and the unborn” (John Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962], 83–84). 2. In this he was following the lead not only of Zelinsky, but of a whole group of disenfranchised poets, philosophers, and classicists who espoused a vision of a “third Renaissance,” of a Hellenized Russia to emerge from the rubble of war and the shadow of revolution. On this “Hellenistic” Third Renaissance, see Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 33. 3. See E. M. Toddes’s essay on “Poetic Ideology” (Poeticheskaia ideologiia) for a penetrating discussion of Mandelstam’s attempts to come to terms with the new regime in his essays of the early twenties ( Literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 3 [1991], esp. 35–43). 4. This is not to say that Lenin and his colleagues embraced the avant-garde aesthetics of their poetic sympathizers, the futurists: “Can’t we find some reliable anti-Futurists?” Lenin begs in a letter to the head of one state publishing house (quoted in Vasilii Katanian, Maiakovskii. Literaturnaia khronika [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1961], 145).

336

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

5. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 168–70, 38, 47. 6. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 102, 170. 7. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 210, 252–55. Stites quotes Lenin’s interview with Wells in Revolutionary Dreams, 42. 8. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 47. 9. Osip Mandelstam, “Pshenitsa chelovecheskaia,” Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, ed. S. S. Averintsev and P. M. Nerler (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), vol. 2, 193. This essay first appeared in the Berlin journal Nakanune in 1922, and has only recently been recovered and reprinted. 10. Toddes (“Poeticheskaia ideologiia,” 38) notes a similar merging of Bolshevik and Hellenistic implements in the poem “The Actor and the Worker” (1920), in which Mandelstam predicts a “union of the lyre and the hammer” (#195; Filipoff and Struve mistakenly identify the poem’s date of composition as 1922). 11. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 9. 12. Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls Mandelstam’s discovery, in the early years of the NEP [New Economic Policy], that he had no place in a Marxist economy—“It turns out that we’ve been living in the superstructure,” she remembers him exclaiming—and thus were of no use to the new state: “After all the superstructure should reinforce the base and O[sip] M[andelstam]’s poetry was no help with that” (Vospominaniia: Kniga pervaia [Paris: YMCA Press, 1970], 276). 13. Alec Nove, An Economic History of the U.S.S.R. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 63–93; Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 82–86. 14. Frank Lentricchia quotes Shelley in After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 12. Aleksandr Pushkin, “Razgovor knigoprodavtsa s poetom,” in his Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1974), vol. 1, 229–34. 15. Velimir Khlebnikov, “O stikhakh,” in his Sobranie sochinenii, 5 vols., ed. Iu. Tynianov and N. Stepanov (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo pisatelei, 1928–33), vol. 5, 225; Khlebnikov, “On poetry,” Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, 2 vols, ed. Charlotte Douglas and Ronald Vroon, trans. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987–89), vol. 1, 152. Velimir Khlebnikov, “Khudozhniki mira,” Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, 216; “To the Artists of the World,” Collected Works, vol. 1, 370. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 98. Roman Jakobson, “Futurism,” in Language and Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 33. Roman Jakobson, “Noveishaia russkaia poeziia. Nabrosok pervyi. Viktor Khlebnikov” (Prague, 1921), rpt. in Texte der russichen formalisten, ed. Wolf-Dieter Stempel and Inge Paulmann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1972), 20; Jakobson, “Recent Russian Poetry,” trans. E. J. Brown, in Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism, ed. E. J. Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 59. Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Rasshirenie slovesnoi bazy,” Novyi lef, no. 10 (1927), 14; Mayakovsky, “Broadening the Verbal Basis,” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, ed. and trans. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 260. 16. Mayakovsky, “Rasshirenie slovesnoi bazy,” 14; “Broadening the Verbal Basis,” 260. On the publication history of “The Twilight of Freedom,” see Katerina Clark, “The ‘Quiet Revolution’ in Soviet Intellectual Life,” in Russia in the Era of

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

337

NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 219, 229; and Nils Ake Nilsson, “Mandel’shtam and the Revolution,” in Art, Society and Revolution: Russia 1917–1921, ed. Nils Ake Nilsson (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1979), 165–78. 17. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 111–12, 171. On the resurgence of the Acmeist movement in its revised, postrevolutionary variant, see Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vospominaniia: vtoraia kniga (Paris: YMCA Press, 1972), 138–41. 18. Brown, Mandelstam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 99. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vtoraia kniga, 141–42. 19. In “Fourth Prose” Mandelstam actually quotes from one of his most wrenching letters to his wife, which dates, like “Fourth Prose,” from 1930: “I’m alone. Ich bin arm. Everything is irreparable,” he writes despairingly (CPL, 545). 20. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution 1917–1932 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 83. 21. T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934 ), 30. 22. Other critics, notably Stephen Broyde, have noted the similar imagery that concludes both “The Horseshoe Finder” and “Humanism and the Present,” and my attempt to place Mandelstam’s poem in its times inevitably overlaps with Broyde’s discussion of “The Horseshoe Finder” at a number of points. Broyde, however, insists on reading “The Horseshoe Finder” in the light of the essay’s more hopeful conclusion and comes up with a strained, finally unconvincing reading of the poem not as an elegy for the passing of the poet and his values, but as a celebration of their vitality and endurance (Osip Mandel’shtam and His Age [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975], 169–99). Clarence Brown’s brief, incisive remarks on the poem are far more in keeping with its overall tonality and message (Mandelstam, 292–93). 23. The Filipoff/Struve edition divides the poem into ten stanzas. I have followed the lead, however, of the 1928 Stikhotvoreniia (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1928; reprinted Berkeley: Berkeley Slavic Specialities, 1984) in preserving the nine stanzaic divisions that Mandelstam apparently intended the poem to have. See the Appendix for the complete Russian text of this poem. 24. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 83. 25. Mandelstam envisions a mending of such broken circles in the “Slate Ode” (1923; #137), as the newly energized poet predicts a “juncture” of “the horseshoe and the ring.” For a discussion of this imagery, see Ronen, An Approach to Mandel’shtam (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1983), 83–90, 223. 26. Maks Fasmer, Etimologicheskii slovar’ russkogo iazyka, trans. O. N. Trubachev, ed. B. A. Larin (Moscow: Progress, 1964), vol. 1, 354–55. 27. Mandelstam uses perevorot, for example, to describe the spiritual apocalypse that marks the beginnings of Christian civilization (II, 316). On the conflicting meanings of the English revolution, see Harry Levin, Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 1–2 ; and Jeffrey Mehlman, Revolution and Repetition: Marx/ Hugo/ Balzac (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 1–4. 28. Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 149.

338

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

29. Stephen Broyde discusses the Pindaric resonances of “The Horseshoe Finder” in his analysis of the poem (Mandel’shtam and His Age, 174–76, 184–85); and Omry Ronen uncovers useful connections between Pindar’s verse and Mandelstam’s odes of the early twenties (Approach to Mandel’shtam, 17–18, 54, 84–85, 188–89, 229, 341–42). Unlike these scholars, though, I am chiefly interested in examining Pindar’s role as a public poet and “poet for hire” in relationship to Mandelstam’s complex position in the new Soviet state as reflected in “The Horseshoe Finder.” 30. For background on Pindar and his age, see C. M. Bowra, Introduction to The Odes of Pindar, ed. and trans. C. M. Bowra (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), ix–xix; Bowra, Pindar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); Anne Burnett, “The Scrutiny of Song: Pindar, Politics and Poetry,” in Politics and Poetic Value, ed. Robert Von Hallberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 21–36; Leslie Kurke, The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Richard Lattimore, “A Note on Pindar and his Poetry,” in The Odes of Pindar, ed. and trans. Richard Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), v–xii. 31. Lattimore, The Odes of Pindar, 14. All quotations from Pindar’s odes are taken from this edition, unless otherwise noted. The degree to which Pindar’s work was influenced by his tumultuous times remains controversial; see Bowra, Pindar, 99–158; and Kurke, The Traffic in Praise, 163–256, for opposing views. 32. The phrase “hired poet” comes from Lattimore’s notes to his translation of Pindar’s odes (The Odes of Pindar, 156). Carol Maddison describes Pindar’s role as “poet, priest and prophet” in Apollo and the Nine: A History of the Ode (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), 4. Quotes from Pindar are taken from Lattimore, The Odes of Pindar, 133, 56, 104. For an illuminating discussion of Pindar’s relationship to his patrons, see Kurke, The Traffic in Praise, esp. 85–162. 33. Kurke, The Traffic in Praise, 164–65, 255. 34. On Mandelstam’s double-voiced speaker, see Iurii Levin, “O sootnoshenii mezhdu semantikoi poeticheskogo teksta i vnetekstovoi real’nost’iu,” Russian Literature, no. 10/11 (1975), 150. 35. The frequent “I” of Pindar’s odes was literally collectivized in actual performances, where it was declaimed or sung chorally. Even on the page, Pindar’s “I” is, like Mandelstam’s, fluid and shifting; it may designate “an ‘I, poet,’ an ‘I, poem,’ an ‘I, chorus,’ or a combination of the three” (Anne Burnett, “The Scrutiny of Song: Pindar, Politics and Poetry,” 34). 36. On Mandelstam’s poetic shipbuilding, see Broyde, Mandel’shtam and His Age, 177–80; and Nils Ake Nilsson, “Ship Metaphors in Mandel’shtam’s Poetry,” in To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), vol. 2, 1436–44. 37. Broyde, Mandel’shtam and His Age, 181. 38. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, ed. M. C. Howatson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 458. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 267. 39. “It was through the myth that the Greeks and their gods were glorified and the present event incorporated into the great national tradition. . . . The myth assimilated the hero to the demi-gods, it idealized the present and transfigured the real, it made the temporal event timeless” (Maddison, Apollo and the Nine, 8). 40. Broyde, Mandel’shtam and His Age, 178–79. Clarence Brown discusses the

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

339

reception and interpretation of “The Twilight/Dawn of Freedom” in Mandelstam, 267–70. Mandelstam gives a wholly unambivalent, celebratory portrait of the Soviet ship of state in “The Actor and the Worker” (192O; #195). 41. The abundance of gerunds in the poem’s early stanzas—“dragging” (vlacha), “inhaling” (vzdykhaia), “admiring” (liubuias’), “forgetting” (zabyvaia)—serves not only to diminish further the active role of the poem’s celebratory chorus; it also begins the process of blurring individual identities that accelerates as the poem progresses. The first gerund refers to the mariner, the second two to the poem’s “we,” and the final gerund to the trees-turned-boards; not all of these referents are immediately clear on first reading, though. 42. On the shifting perceptions and realities of party leadership, see Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 88–93, 97–98. 43. Mandelstam warns of the fate that lies in store for these misguided trees in another lyric of the period: “And the tops stir up trouble/That are destined to be felled” (#129). The ideal living forest that is his model of truly human “social architecture” is a far cry from Lenin’s ship of state and its speechless, weeping planks. In “Humanism and the Present,” Mandelstam calls on the state to emulate “the social Gothic,” that is, “human society conceived as a complex and dense architectural forest wherein everything is efficient and individual, and every detail exchanges greetings with the ponderous mass” (CPL, 181). 44. For a discussion of Mandelstam’s poetry as gift exchange in a different context, see Freidin, Coat of Many Colors, 99–123. 45. Lattimore, The Odes of Pindar, 27. 46. Bowra, Pindar, 323–28; Bowra, Introduction, in The Odes of Pindar, xiv. Broyde and Ronen both comment on the similarities between Pindar’s seemingly disjointed poetic structures and Mandelstam’s shifting imagery in “The Horseshoe Finder” (Broyde, Mandel’shtam and His Age, 174–75; Ronen, Approach to Mandel’shtam, 341–42). Ronen also notes that Mandelstam’s nine stanzas and tripartite construction apparently follow the Pindaric model, with its fixed alternation of strophe, antistrophe, and epode (Approach, 229). 47. On the relationship between Pindar and his audience, see Burnett, “The Scrutiny of Song: Pindar, Politics and Poetry,” 34–35. 48. Burnett, “The Scrutiny of Song,” 21. Lattimore, The Odes of Pindar, 109, 44, 123, 15. 49. Pierre Grimal mentions her name only under his listing for Nereus, the “Old Man of the Sea,” who was the father of one of Greek mythology’s several Nearas (The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, trans. A. R. Maxwell-Hyslop [New York: Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1986], 308). Ronen identifies her as a borrowing not from Greek legend but from André Chénier, who invented this “new one” in order to supply poetry with a “newly created goddess of the avant-garde” (Approach to Mandel’shtam, 203). Such a patroness could hardly protect Mandelstam’s poem from oblivion, since she would presumably be more likely to side with the forces in Soviet art and society that favored cultural amnesia and the creation of new values over the preservation and considered revision of old ones. 50. The Odes of Pindar, xii. 51. Ibid., 38–40, 15; Kurke, The Traffic in Praise, 190. For different interpretations of this headband, see Broyde, Mandel’shtam and His Age, 184–85; and Ronen, Approach to Mandel’shtam, 203. 52. Just as Mandelstam’s Hellenized cosmos resembles the apocalyptically

340

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

transformed universe that Northrop Frye describes in Anatomy of Criticism, so does this mechanized nightmare suggest a miniature version of Frye’s apocalyptic “antiworld”: “Images of perverted work belong here: engines of torture, weapons of war, armor, and images of a dead mechanism which, because it does not humanize nature, is unnatural as well as inhuman” (Anatomy of Criticism [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957], 149–50). 53. The poems of 1921 to 1925 are generally filled with a wintery chill, as the poet mourns his isolation in a world growing ever less welcoming: “A few warm chicken droppings/And some senseless sheep’s warmth;/I’ll give up everything for life—I so need care—/And a sulphur match could warm me up” (#127). 54. Viktor Zhirmunsky speaks of Mandelstam’s “poetry of poetry” in “Preodolevshie simvolizm,” in his Voprosy teorii literatury (Leningrad, 1928; rpt. The Hague: Mouton, 1962), 305–6. Tynianov’s remarks are drawn from his essay “Promezhutok,” in his Arkhaisty i novatory (Priboi, 1929; rpt. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985), 572–73. 55. Kniga pervaia, 29. Andrei Sinyavsky notes that the Soviet Union was the last European state that regularly called for the death penalty as punishment for economic crimes (Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History, trans. Joanne Turnbull [New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1990], 181). 56. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 87. 57. “Christian chronology is endangered, the frail reckoning of the years of our era has been lost,” Mandelstam warns in “Pushkin and Skriabin” (1919–20); and the poems of 1921–25—“The Age” (#135), “January 1, 1924” (#140), and others—are preoccupied with dead and dying eras, and with the place of the poet trapped between the old epoch and the new. In “The Age” and “January 1, 1924,” the age is portrayed as a dying beast. In the sixth stanza of “The Horseshoe Finder,” we find instead the desecrated, dismembered corpse of an age long dead; children play with the vertebrae of dead animals (54), and the apples offered and withdrawn by a capricious child are also the eyeballs of the dead beast (the Russian iabloko can mean both), as “January 1, 1924” shows. For further interpretation of these images, see Broyde, Mandel’shtam and His Age, 189–91; and Ronen, Approach to Mandel’shtam, 154–56, 242–43. 58. The horse and the hippodrome play a special role in apocalyptic imagery generally, and specifically in the modern Russian tradition, as David Bethea demonstrates in The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 59. The racetrack itself, in turn, gives us a form of Mandelstam’s “eternal return”; the same course may be run over and over, but no two races will ever be quite the same, for the context—the competitors, the audience, the age—shifts from one race to the next. 60. Lattimore, The Odes of Pindar, 133. 61. Kurke, The Traffic in Praise, 234. 62. “Classical poetry is perceived as that which must be, not as that which has already been” (“The Word and Culture”; CPL, 114). 63. On Roman coins see The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, 369– 70. 64. And Pindar’s age produced “some of the most beautiful coins ever minted,” as M. C. Howatson notes (The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, 369–70). 65. Ezra Pound, Collected Early Poems (New York: New Directions, 1976), 71.

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

F I V E

•

341

Richard Sieburth, “In Pound We Trust: The Economy of Poetry/The Poetry of Economics,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 14, no. 1 (Autumn, 1987), 163. 66. A lyric of the preceding year gives us an equally poignant image of poverty and exhaustion: “And time cuts me,” the poet mourns, “as it cut down your heel” (1922; #129). 67. On such fraudulent coins and their fate, see Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 85–88. 68. Broyde, Mandel’shtam and His Age, 65. Broyde notes the pessimistic coloration of these final lines but is unable to integrate this observation into his discussion because of his determination to read Mandelstam’s “Pindaric fragment” in the light of the more optimistic essays, rather than reading it as a mournful antithesis to the essays’ hopeful thesis. Broyde’s argument illustrates the potential dangers of subtextual criticism, which in its anxiety to find the appropriate subtext for a given image or line, may overlook or mistake the context that reshapes the newly framed metaphor or phrase. 69. This corrupted coin, moneta, also works to erode Mandelstam’s cherished poetry of proper names; the word derives originally from the temple of Juno Moneta, or Juno the Remembrancer, which neighbored Rome’s city mint in antiquity. The remembrance of such classical names is apparently lost to posterity along with the coins themselves (The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, 307–8). 70. Ezra Pound, A Memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska (1916; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1970), 112. Max Eastman quotes Trotsky in Artists in Uniform: A Study in Literature and Bureaucraticism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934), 52. 71. On language and the Soviet state, see Sinyavsky, Soviet Civilization, 190– 225; and Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 133–35. Sinyavsky quotes the contemporary scholar I have cited (190); he is the same A. G. Gornfel’d who would later accuse Mandelstam of plagiarism and thus precipitate the so-called “Eulenspiegel Affair.” See Chapter 6 for a discussion of this scandal in relation to Mandelstam’s “Fourth Prose.” 72. Shell, The Economy of Literature, 63–64; he quotes John Evelyn’s Numismata (1697) on p. 64. 73. “Relativistic world” is Paul Johnson’s phrase, from Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 1. On the West’s faltering economy at the turn of the century, see ibid., 35–37. 74. Mallarmé discusses language and money in “Crise de vers” (1886–1895), in Writings of Mallarmé, ed. Anthony Hartley (New York: Penguin, 1965), 159–75. For Nietzsche’s observations on language and currency, see Shell, The Economy of Literature, 154; and Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in his Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 216–17. Paul Douglass discusses Bergson’s theories of language and money in “The Gold Coin: Bergsonian Intuition and Modernist Aesthetics,” Thought: A Review of Culture and Ideas, vol. 58, no. 230 (1983), 234–50. Saussure devotes a central passage in his posthumously published “Course in General Linguistics” (1916) to a comparison of value in language and money, in Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), esp. 162–65. 75. Peter Nicholls, Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (London: Macmillan, 1984), 20. 76. Sieburth quotes from “On Orthology” in “In Pound We Trust,” 167.

342

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

S I X

•

77. For extended analyses of these lyrics, see Ronen, Approach to Mandel’shtam 78. Akhmatova refers to the “relatively vegetarian” early years of Soviet rule in her notes on Mandelstam (Sochineniia, ed. Struve and Filipoff [Munich: Interlanguage Literary Associates, 1968], vol. 2, 179). CHAPTER SIX 1. Daniel Bell quotes Auden in “Reflections on Jewish Identity,” in The Ghetto and Beyond: Essays on Jewish Life in America, ed. Peter I. Rose (New York: Random House, 1944), 471. Marina Tsvetaeva, “Poema kontsa,” in her Stikhotvoreniia i Poemy v piati tomakh (New York: Russica Publishers, 1983), vol. 4, 185. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vospominaniia: vtoraia kniga, 3rd ed. (Paris: YMCA Press, 1983), 302, 262–63. Sander Gilman discusses Celan’s notion of the poet as Jew in Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 322. 2. Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin and Scholem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), xii, 34. For other discussions of the Jewish writer as exemplary modernist, see Murray Baumgarten, City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974); and Peter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 3. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vtoraia kniga, 563. Mandelstam was not alone in his efforts to forge a new, Mediterranean Jewish heritage to replace a less exotic Central European past. The German-Jewish romantic poet Heinrich Heine likewise imagines an idealized ancestor, “a Spanish Jew writing in Hebrew, as his alter ego” (Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 179–80). Closer to home, Boris Pasternak and his family also invented a mythical Spanish-Jewish past to replace their Eastern European Jewish lineage (Lazar Fleishman, Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990], 18). 4. Alter, Necessary Angels, 119, 37. 5. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vospominaniia: Kniga pervaia, 3rd ed. (Paris: YMCA Press, 1982), 185. 6. The phrase “dual vision” is from Simon Markish, “The Example of Isaac Babel,” Commentary, vol. 64, no. 5 (Nov. 1977), 39–40. Georg Simmel speaks of Jewish “dual being” in “The Stranger” (quoted in Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans, 123). Thorsten Veblen discusses Jewish “hyphenate identities” in “The Intellectual Pre-eminence of Jews in Modern Europe,” in Essays in Our Changing Order, ed. Leon Ardzrooni (New York: Viking Press, 1934), 225. Other quotations are taken from M. Gordon Milton, “Marginality and the Jewish Intellectual” (in The Ghetto and Beyond, 477); and Max Weber, Ancient Judaism (1952), as quoted in Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility, 86. On “double soul,” “double allegiance,” and “double world” as romantic concepts, see Omry Ronen, An Approach to Mandel’shtam (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1983), 197–98. 7. In this lyric Mandelstam completely reverses the version of Christianity’s origins he had developed with Zelinsky’s help in Tristia. Here it is precisely the Jewish contribution to Greek culture that catalyzes the Western, Christian tradition. For other interpretations of this poem, see Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vtoraia kniga, 617–

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

S I X

•

343

19, and Tre’tia kniga (Paris: YMCA Press, 1987), 157–59; and Kiril Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel’shtam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 64–65. 8. For more detailed discussion of these figures, see Charles Isenberg, Substantial Proofs of Being: Osip Mandelstam’s Literary Prose (Columbus: Slavica, 1987), 56–62. 9. For further background on the two actors, see Jane Gary Harris’s commentary in CPL (651–53). 10. Clarence Brown, “The Prose of Mandelstam,” in The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 51. 11. Isenberg, Substantial Proofs, 96. See the section entitled “The Fire of Time” for a discussion of the “absence of ethnic Russians” in the context of the story’s larger concern with “absences and disappearances” of all kinds (96–106). 12. Brown, “The Prose of Mandelstam,” 51–52. 13. For more extensive discussions of Mandelstam’s modernist masterpiece in miniature, see Brown, “The Prose of Mandelstam,” 32–65; Isenberg, Substantial Proofs, 84–142; Isenberg, “Associative Chains in Egipetskaja Marka,” Russian Literature, vol. 3 (July 1977), 257–76; Isenberg, “Mandelstam’s Egyptian Stamp as a Work in Progress” (unpublished essay); Dmitrii Segal, “Voprosy poeticheskoi organizatsii semantiki v proze Mandel’shtama,” in Russian Poetics, ed. Thomas Eekman and Dean S. Worth (Columbus: Slavica, 1983), 325–52; Svetlana Boym, “Dialogue as ‘Lyrical Hermaphroditism’: Mandel’shtam’s Challenge to Bakhtin,” Slavic Review, vol. 50, no. 1 (Spring 1991), 118–26; A. Feinberg, “Kamennoostrovskii mif,” Literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 1 (1991), 41–45. 14. Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1903), as quoted by Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 245–46. 15. Kniga pervaia, 149. 16. On the evolution of Mandelstam’s staff, see Jane Gary Harris, “The ‘Latin Gerundive’ as Autobiographical Imperative: A Reading of Mandel’shtam’s Journey to Armenia,” Slavic Review, vol. 45 (Spring 1986), 2–3. 17. Taranovsky, Essays, 63. E. A. Toddes notes the kinship between the poetics developed in “Fourth Prose” and “Conversation about Dante” in his discussion of Mandelstam and the formalists, though he does not consider Jewishness as part of this poetics (“Mandel’shtam i opoiazovskaia filologiia,” in Tynianovskii sbornik: vtorye tynianovskie chteniia [Riga: Zinatne, 1986], 95). 18. On the “Eulenspiegel affair,” see Nadezhda Mandelstam, Kniga pervaia, 186–87; Filipoff and Struve, Sobranie sochinenii, II, 604–17; Gregory Freidin, A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 273–74. 19. “Conscious pariah” is Hannah Arendt’s phrase, from “The Jew as Pariah,” in her The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 67. 20. Coat of Many Colors, 292. 21. Jewish Self-Hatred, 233. 22. See Jane Gary Harris on Mandelstam’s “philological perversity” in “The Impulse and the Text” (CPL, 29–33), and Harris, “An Inquiry into the Use of Autobiography as a Stylistic Determinant of the Modernist Aspect of Osip Mandel’shtam’s Literary Prose,” in American Contributions to the Eighth International Congress of Slavists, vol. 2, ed. Victor Terras (Columbus: Slavica, 1978), esp. 253– 55.

344

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

S I X

•

23. Quoted in Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility, 29. 24. By emphasizing Mandelstam’s—very real—concern with “absences,” “gaps,” and “margins” (the terms are his own), I may appear to be willfully “deconstructing” him and his “world culture.” This is not at all my intention. Deconstruction, with its emphasis on the ways that things, and texts, fall apart, seems to me a useful corrective to the tendency in some Mandelstam scholarship to force his writing to cohere by casting an ironclad structuralist net around it all. However, not all texts are equally “self-contesting,” as Tilottama Rajan notes in a recent deconstructive study of English romantic poetry (Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980], 14). Some of Mandelstam’s works—“The Egyptian Stamp” (1928) for example, or “The Horseshoe Finder” (1923)—generated as they are by an “energy of loss” (Svetlana Boym, “ ‘The Egyptian Stamp’: Search for a Dialogue” [unpublished essay]), lend themselves to a deconstructive interpretation more readily than do others. In “Fourth Prose” and “Conversation about Dante,” Mandelstam himself (reports of the “death of the author” seem premature to me) is clearly preoccupied with finding ways to use his disrupted past and present to create new, if volatile, cultural wholes. It is hardly a deconstructive enterprise, though deconstructive interpretive tools may help us to decipher it. 25. For a witty and wide-ranging examination of the poetics of Mandelstam’s surname in the context of another late prose work, the “Journey to Armenia” (1933), see Nancy Pollack, “Mandel’shtam’s Mandel’shtein: Initial Observations on the Cracking of a Slit-Eyed Nut, OR, A Couple of Chinks in the Shchell,” Slavic Review, vol. 46, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 1987), 450–70. 26. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 19, 26–27. For Kafka, mauscheln, Yiddish-inflected German, was marked not so much by diction or accent—he himself wrote a studiedly “pure” high German—but by the ironic wit that accompanies the “self-tormenting usurpation of foreign possessions” (quoted in Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 283–84). 27. The first quote is taken from Kafka’s essay “An Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language,” while the second can be found in Christoph Stölz’s essay “Kafka: Jew, Anti-Semite, Zionist” (in Reading Kafka, ed. Mark Anderson [New York: Schocken Books, 1989], 265, 67). 28. Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of Kafka’s language proves remarkably suggestive for Mandelstam, but it must be used with some caution. Deleuze and Guattari are vague about the “state language” Kafka opposes by creating his “gypsy literature,” and their vagueness is symptomatic of a larger problem in their argument. In a more historically grounded discussion, Christoph Stölz suggests that Kafka’s Judaized German marked his attempt to resist the “German racial nationalists and Czech chauvinists” whose doctrines threatened to exclude him, both literally and linguistically, from Prague literary culture (Reading Kafka, 70). It is thus a response to a historically specific situation, as is Mandelstam’s creation of “Fourth Prose” ’s rebellious poet-Jew. Deleuze and Guattari, however, are postmodern romantics. They glorify rebellion and subversion for their own sakes, and virtually every writer they examine, here or elsewhere, is shown to be, like Kafka, a nomad and a rebel. Kafka himself is useful to them largely as an example of a procedure we should all be encouraged to follow: “To hate all languages of masters . . . To make use of the polylingualism of one’s own language . . . to oppose the oppressed qual-

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

S I X

•

345

ity of this language to its oppressive quality, to find points of nonculture or underdevelopment, linguistic Third World zones by which a language can escape” (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 26–27). Such arguments are in danger of becoming as “totalizing” and monolithic as the social structures they claim to expose. 29. Kafka, “Introductory Talk,” 264. 30. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 68, 76, 77, 83. 31. Ibid., 223–24. 32. Ibid., 86, 226. Gilman’s study of Jewish self-hatred centers on this linguistic dilemma: “The label ‘self-hatred’ has been used to characterize the response of writers to the charge of being unable to command the language, discourse, or both, of the world that they inhabit” (ix). 33. In The Noise of Time, Mandelstam insists, rather too strenuously, that his Hebrew lessons never took: “With all my being [I] revolted against . . . the subject” (POM, 81). Lev Shestov, another profoundly ambivalent Russian Jewish writer, likewise claimed to have forgotten all his childhood Hebrew, although he managed to retain his French, German, Latin, and Greek. (I am grateful to Judith Kornblatt for this information; see also Kornblatt, “The Wandering Jew: Lev Shestov and Russian Religious Thought,” in American Scholars on Twentieth Century Russian Literature, ed. Elizabeth Neatrour and Boris Averin (St. Petersburg: Petro-Rif Publishers, forthcoming). 34. Struve and Filipoff quote Markov and Margolin in the commentary to the first volume of the Sobranie sochinenii (I, 401, 433–34). Gorodetsky’s observations are drawn from his review of Stone’s second edition (rpt. in Osip Mandelstam, Kamen’, ed. L. Ia. Ginzburg, A. G. Mets, S. V. Vasilenko, Iu. L. Freidin [Leningrad: Nauka, 1990], 228). I have taken my translation from Freidin, Coat of Many Colors, 338. Mandelstam was not alone in the suspicion he provoked as a “non-native” speaker of Russian. “Where did that Jew get such magnificent Russian speech?” Merezhkovsky reportedly exclaimed on hearing Lev Shestov (Kornblatt, “The Wandering Jew”). One of Pasternak’s early critics, on the other hand, attributed the eccentric language of the poet’s early verse to an imperfect command of Russian due to Pasternak’s “non-Russian, Jewish” birth (Fleishman, Boris Pasternak, 42). 35. Quoted in Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 209–10. 36. The influence of Wagner’s essay was pervasive in fin de siècle Europe (see Stölz,“Kafka: Jew, Anti-Semite, Zionist,” 69), and Russia was no exception. Among Mandelstam’s contemporaries, both Andrei Belyi and Aleksandr Blok took to Wagner’s notions on the “Jewish question” with a vengeance and opposed, in principle at least, all Jewish participation in Russian culture. See Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “Wagner and Wagnerian Ideas in Russia,” in Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, ed. David C. Large and William Weber, with Anne Dzamba Sessa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), esp. 223–24. 37. Seamus Heaney, “Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet,” Irish University Review, vol. 15, no. 1 (1985), 5. Iurii Levin stresses that Mandelstam’s Dante is an “attempt at self-characterization” in “Zametki k Razgovoru o Dante O. Mandel’shtama,”International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics, 15 (1972), 184. Marina Glazova, on the other hand, carefully traces Mandelstam’s references to the Commedia in his late poetry, but the Dante she finds there, official, sanctioned, “completely at one with the ethos of his society,” is precisely the Dante whom Mandelstam wants to avoid (“Mandelstam and Dante: The Divine

346

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

Comedy in Mandelstam’s Poetry of the 1930’s,” Studies in Soviet Thought, vol. 28, no. 4 [1984], 294). He is in fact far closer to the Dante that haunts T. S. Eliot’s poetry, whom Seamus Heaney explicitly contrasts with the eccentric “Great European” of Mandelstam’s essay (“Envies and Identifications,” 7–16). 38. My discussion here draws both on the finished essay and on Mandelstam’s drafts, published separately in the third volume of the Sobranie sochinenii (179– 90). Nadezhda Mandelstam discusses her husband’s opposition to “official” culture in her second volume of memoirs (Vtoraia kniga, 548–55). 39. Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility, 28–29, 4, 8, 12, 32. 40. Once again Mandelstam draws his portraits of Dante and of poetic speech in his own image. He himself was notorious for his absolute lack of propriety: “Decorous old-fashioned critics, hoodlums of the Young Communist League, genteel old ladies of both sexes, and the Byzantine Soviet officialdom all agreed that his manners were insufferable” (Omry Ronen, “Osip Mandelshtam [1891–1938],” in European Writers: The Twentieth Century, ed. George Stade [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990], vol. 10, 1645). 41. Mandelstam’s embrace of his tongue-tied paternal legacy also strengthens his newfound identity as the descendant of patriarchs: Koznoiazychie (tongue-tie) is the word the Russian Old Testament uses to describe Moses’s speech defect (Ronen, “Osip Mandelshtam,” 1624). 42. It resembles Kafka’s Yiddish, which lives in “continuous flux” at the crossroads of nations: “Great migrations move through Yiddish from one end to the other. All this German, Hebrew, French, English, Slavonic, Dutch, Rumanian, and even Latin, is seized with curiousity and frivolity once it is contained within Yiddish” (“Introductory Talk,” 264). And both Mandelstam’s Russian and Kafka’s Yiddish bear a family resemblance to Dante’s Italian, as Mandelstam describes it: “I see in Dante’s work a great quantity of lexical thrusts. There is the barbarian thrust towards German hushing sounds and Slavic cacaphony; there is the Latin thrust. . . . There is the great impulse towards the speech of his native province— the Tuscan thrust” (CPL, 446). 43. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 275; Nadezhda Mandelstam, Kniga pervaia, 192. 44. Mandelstam’s poetic experiments of the thirties demonstrate not only his inventive recreation of his linguistic legacy, but his affinities with formalist and futurist poetics, with their emphasis on children’s language, foreign language, nonsense, and “trans-sense.” Indeed, Mandelstam’s avant-garde Dante, who practices a form of “infantile ‘trans-sense’ ” (CPL, 399), is not only an “honorary Jew” but a proto-futurist as well. CHAPTER SEVEN 1. Mandelstam was arrested on May 13, 1934. The prime cause was apparently the scathing epigram on Stalin (#286) he had written six months earlier and read only to a small group of friends; he had, of course, no intention of publishing it. He was imprisoned and interrogated in Moscow and sentenced to three years’ exile in the town of Cherdyn in the Ural Mountains. He and his wife were allowed to return a short while later to European Russia, where they spent the duration of Mandelstam’s term of exile in the provincial town of Voronezh, southeast of Moscow. See the opening chapters of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s first volume of memoirs for a

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

347

detailed account of her husband’s arrest and exile (Vospominaniia: kniga pervaia, 3rd ed. [Paris: YMCA Press, 1970]), 5–108. 2. The phrase is Anna Akhmatova’s, from her reminiscences on her friend’s life and death (“Osip Mandel’shtam,” Sochineniia, ed. G. P. Struve and B. A. Filipoff [vols. 1 and 2, Munich: Interlanguage Literary Associates, 1967–68; vol. 3, Paris: YMCA Press, 1983], vol. 2, 179). 3. Lydia Ginzburg, “Poetika Osipa Mandel’shtama,” in her O starom i novom (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1982), 294. 4. When asked about the “apparent incoherence between [his] verse and [his] critical prose,” T. S. Eliot replied that “in one’s prose reflections one may be legitimately occupied with ideals, whereas in the writing of verse one can only deal with actuality” (After Strange Gods [New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934], 30). 5. The Russian original of this chapter’s first epigraph reads as follows: “My vo vlasti novykh tem: nenuzhnost’, bessmyslennost’, taina vlastnoi nichtozhnosti— vospety nami.” (David Burliuk, Elena Guro, et al, [Bez zaglaviia], Sadok sudei, 2 [St. Petersburg: Zhuravl’, 1913], rpt. in Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov, ed. Vladimir Markov [Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1967], 52. I have taken the English translation from Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, ed. and trans. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988], 54). 6. V. I. Lenin, “Partiinaia organizatsiia i partiinaia literatura,” Sochineniia, 4th ed. (Moscow: OGIZ, 1947), vol. 10, 27. “The ideological transformation and education of workers” is taken from the statutes set forth at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, 1934, as quoted in Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz), “On Socialist Realism,” in The Trial Begins & On Socialist Realism, trans. Max Hayward and George Dennis (New York: Vintage Books,1960), 148. Max Eastman quotes Trotsky in Artists in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934), 52. The remaining citations are taken from ibid., 3–4, and Nikolai Bukharin, “Poetry, Poetics and the Problems of Poetry in the USSR,” in Problems of Soviet Literature: Reports and Speeches at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress, ed. H. G. Scott (Westport: Hyperion Press, 1935), 257, 197, 223. 7. Eastman, Artists in Uniform, 45, 9. Sinyavsky, “On Socialist Realism,” 150– 51. 8. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Kniga pervaia, 185–87. 9. Viktor Zhirmunsky, “Preodolevshie simvolizm,” in his Voprosy teorii literatury (Leningrad, 1928; rpt. The Hague: Mouton, 1962), 305–6. Iurii Tynianov, “Promezhutok,” in his Arkhaisty i novatory (Priboi, 1929; rpt. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985), 572–73. Roman Jakobson, “Noveishaia russkaia poeziia. Nabrosok pervyi. Viktor Khlebnikov” (Prague, 1921), in Texte der russichen formalisten, ed. WolfDieter Stempel and Inge Paulmann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1972), 140. 10. Lydia Ginzburg, “Poetika Osipa Mandel’shtama,” 262, 288. I am quoting from Iurii Levin, “Zametki o poezii O. Mandel’shtama tridtsatykh godov, I,” Slavica Hierosolymitana, vol. 3 (1978), 124. For other extended discussions of the late poetry, see Jennifer Baines, Mandelstam: The Later Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Irina Mess-Beier, “Ezopov iazyk v poezii Mandel’shtama 30-x godov,” Russian Literature, vol. 29-3 (April 1991), 243–393; Peter Zeeman, The Later Poetry of Osip Mandelstam: Text and Context (Amsterdam: Rodopi,

348

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

1988); and the materials collected in Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo O. E. Mandel’shtama, ed. S. S. Averintsev et al. (Voronezh: Izdatel’stvo Voronezhskogo universiteta, 1990). 11. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in his Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 256. I have taken the phrase “a barbarian in the garden” from the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s collection of essays on European culture, Barbarian in the Garden, trans. Michael March and Jaroslaw Anders (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985). The barbarian is Herbert himself, the Polish interloper set loose in the garden of Western history and culture. 12. Quoted in Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art (New York: Harcourt and World, 1990), 87; Bukharin, “Poetry,” 242. Mandelstam himself is well aware that he is not in line to receive this cultural legacy from the hands of the triumphant proletariat, as one of his Voronezh poems reveals: “Where are you, three terrific kids from the GPU’s iron gates?/A tribe of Pushkinists grows literate with guns in overcoats,/ So that Pushkin’s miraculous goods won’t get into freeloaders’ hands” (1935; #313). 13. Levin, “Zametki, I,” 110, 127, 136–37, 146. 14. Other poems we might class under this rubric include #219 (“Na politseiskoi bumage verzhe”), #234 (“Roial”’), #248 (“Faetonshchik”), #259 (“Daite Tiutchevu strekozu”), #273 (“Tatary, uzbeki i nentsy”), #274 (“U nashei sviatoi molodezhi”), #294 (“Otkuda privezli”), #303 (“Eta kakaia ulitsa?”), #373 (“Ia proshu, kak zhalosti i milosti”), #386 (“Charli Chaplin”). I will be returning to a number of these sui generis lyrics at various points in my discussion of the late work. 15. Lydia Ginzburg, “Iz starykh zapisei,” in O Starom i novom, 414. 16. Nadezhda Mandelstam notes that she and her husband rarely transcribed the humorous poetry that he improvised constantly and immediately forgot (Vospominaniia: Vtoraia kniga [Paris: YMCA Press, 1983], 144–45). The recent two-volume Russian edition of Mandelstam’s poetry and prose contains a far more complete record of these efforts than does the earlier Filipoff/Struve edition of Mandelstam’s works (Sochineniia, vol. 1, ed. P. M. Nerler and A. D. Mikhailov [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990], 340–64). 17. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 8, passim. Iurii Levin, “Zametki o poezii O. Mandel’shtama tridtsatykh godov, II (Stikhi o neizvestnom soldate’),” Slavica Hierosolymitana, vol. 4 (1979), 212. John M. Munro, “Nonsense Verse,” in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 572. 18. Freud, Jokes, 133. 19. Levin, “Zametki, I,” 116. I have borrowed the phrase “performance-provocation” from Maurice Nadeau’s account of Surrealist poetic proto-happenings; it applies equally well to Futurist staged provocations (The History of Surrealism, trans. Richard Howard [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989], 56). For a more detailed account of Mandelstam’s provocative reading, see Clarence Brown, Mandelstam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1973), 129. 20. Freud, Jokes, 144. 21. The phrase is Pasternak’s, as quoted in Christopher Barnes, Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 386. 22. Nadezhda Mandelstam, as is her wont, interprets this poem biographically; she provides prototypes for its two opposing muses, casting herself as “Angel Mary”

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

349

to her competitor Olga Vaksel’s more lofty, elusive Helen (Vtoraia kniga, 278). Even Mandelstam’s nonsense has a distinguished literary lineage; his nonsensical Mary apparently descends from the singer Mary in Pushkin’s “little tragedy,” “Feast During the Plague” (Pir vo vremia chumy; 1830), as well as from his little lyric “From Barry Cornwall,” which begins “I drink to Mary’s health” (“Iz Barry Cornwall,” in his Sobranie sochinenii [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975], vol. 4, 320–29, vol. 2, 257). 23. Tynianov, “Promezhutok,” 572. 24. Andrew Welsh, Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 158, 151, 153, 158–59). Gregory Freidin discusses the shamanistic impulse behind Mandelstam’s quest for the “blessed, senseless word” in A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 181–82. 25. Freud, Jokes, 20; Omry Ronen, “Osip Mandelshtam (1891–1938),” in European Writers: The Twentieth Century, ed. George Stade, vol. 10 (New York: Scribners, 1990), 1634. 26. Freud, Jokes, 33–34, 43–44; Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vtoraia kniga, 144; Akhmatova, Sochineniia, vol. 3, 128. For a discussion of Akhmatova and Phaedra, see Brown, Mandelstam, 209–10. 27. Nadezhda Mandelstam discusses her husband’s sense of humor in the second volume of her memoirs (Vtoraia kniga), 144–46. For examples of these “margulets,” see #434–35 in the Filipoff/Struve edition of Mandelstam’s work. 28. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vtoraia kniga, 603; Freud, Jokes, 107. 29. Parnok is not explicitly identified as Jewish in Mandelstam’s text; his meager half-life apparently does not permit him to possess what is—for Mandelstam at any rate—even this amorphous, ambiguous identity. He is at home, nonetheless, in the novella’s pervasive atmosphere of Jewishness. I am quoting Freud from Jokes, 133. The book itself had its beginnings as what Freud intended to be a collection of Jewish jokes (Jokes, xxvii). On the anti-Semitic implications of the jokes he tells at his own and his culture’s expense, see Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 250–68; and John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 17–31. 30. On the influence of Wagner’s essay on European and Russian culture, see Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “Wagner and Wagnerian Ideas in Russia,” in Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, ed. D. Large and W. Weber (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 198–246. 31. The intertextual echoes that Mandelstam evokes in this poem attest to the high seriousness of the themes he is mocking. As in “Concert at the Railway Station,” he takes Lermontov to task for his excessive optimism; the opening lines of his poem-joke parody Lermontov’s famous “A Prayer” (Molitva; 1839). Lermontov’s “marvelous prayer” reassures him that even “in life’s troubled moments” a “beneficent power” still reigns in the “harmony of living words.” “What’s the point, Mikhail Iurevich,” Mandelstam’s poem tacitly retorts; this divine harmony is as much a product of the poet’s imagination as the celestial conversations of “I go out along the road” (Vykhozhu odin ia na dorogu ), the poem that Mandelstam refutes in the opening lines of his “Concert” (Lermontov, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh [Moscow: Pravda, 1984], vol. 1, 64). See Ronen, An Approach to

350

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

Mandel’shtam (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1983), passim, for discussions of Lermontovian subtexts in Mandelstam. 32. The fur coat is a potent image in Mandelstam’s postrevolutionary prose and poetry, as other commentators have shown (see, in particular, Freidin, Coat of Many Colors, 216–22), and it invariably points to Mandelstam’s own uncertain status in a new Soviet reality, a status he apparently shares with the unfortunate Aleksandr Gertsovich. 33. I am quoting from Sander Gilman’s paraphrase of the case made against Heine’s suspect wit by a nineteenth-century critic (Jewish Self-Hatred, 250). Perhaps not surprisingly, Heine is Freud’s prime example of the highest forms of wit in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. 34. Freud, Jokes, 190, 214. 35. Ibid., 126. 36. Boris Eikhenbaum, “O Mandel’shtame: 14 marta 1933,” in Den’ poezii 1967, ed. S. V. Botvinnik and P. N. Oifa (Leningrad, 1967), 167. 37. Lipking, The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), xiii. Jean-Paul Sartre, “What is Literature” and Other Essays, trans. Bernard Frechtman, Jeffrey Mehlman, et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 334. 38. Akhmatova, “Mandel’shtam,” in her Sochineniia, vol. 2, 187. The phrase “pre-Gutenberg era” comes from the first volume of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs (Kniga pervaia, 200). 39. See Jennifer Baines’ study of Mandelstam’s late poetry for an opposing view of this lyric. Baines follows Nadezhda Mandelstam’s lead in interpreting this and other poems in the light of the biographical data of Mandelstam’s life; and the results, here and elsewhere, are lopsided, frequently unconvincing readings of the poetry itself (Mandelstam: The Later Poetry [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976], 30–31; Nadezhda Mandelstam, Kniga tret’ia [Paris: YMCA Press, 1987], 155). 40. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Kniga tret’ia, 206. 41. See the Appendix for the Russian texts of these poems. 42. Iurii Levin, “Zametki, I,” 154; Nadezhda Mandelstam, Kniga pervaia, 158. 43. Levin, “Zametki, I,” 127. Jane Gary Harris makes similar observations in her discussion of “Midnight in Moscow” ’s generic singularity (Osip Mandelstam [Boston: Twayne, 1988], 107). 44. “Midnight in Moscow” first appeared in Literaturnaia gazeta, no. 53 (Nov. 23, 1932). I am quoting from Vladimir Veidle’s remarks on the late poetry, in “O poslednikh stikhakh Mandel’shtama,” in Vozdushnye puti: Almanakh II, ed. R. N. Grinberg (New York, 1961), 74. 45. “I’m still nothing like a patriarch” is exceptional in this regard; it takes place entirely in a generalized present. 46. “The Three Voices of Poetry,” in Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1961), 96, 105. 47. Iulii Margolin’s unsympathetic remarks on “Midnight in Moscow” apparently confirm the poet’s worst fears. Margolin quotes from that poem’s most defiant passage—“We’ll die like foot soldiers,/But we won’t glorify greed or day-labor or lies!”—only to deflate its exhalted claims: “But there was no longer any ‘we’— there was only Mandelstam, cut off, helpless in his isolation” (quoted in Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, 503).

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

351

48. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 6. 49. The phrases are Zhirmunsky’s (“Preodolevshie simvolizm,” 305–6). Lydia Ginzburg and Jane Gary Harris discuss this crucial shift in the later verse at some length ( Ginzburg, “Poetika Osipa Mandel’shtama,” esp. 288–300; and Harris, Osip Mandelstam, 98–111). 50. See Freidin, Coat of Many Colors, 249, 267, for a discussion of Mandelstam’s play on his given name, the axis (os’), and the name of his oppressor (Iosif) in the late poems. 51. The Complete Poems and Plays, 13. 52. In the late poetry, Aleksandr Zholkovsky observes, “ ‘warm and kindred’ beginnings absorb ‘alien,’ great and eternal objects (nature, air, history, art) by way of purely human, ‘childish’ means (breathing, eating, drinking, and so on)” (“Invarianty i struktura teksta. II. Mandel’shtam: ‘Ia p’iu za voennye astry . . . ,’ ” Slavica Hierosolymitana, vol. 4 [1979], 163.) The cosmic “physiology of speech” of Mandelstam’s late poetry points to his striking affinities in the late verse with the early theorizing of the Futurists and Formalists concerning what Viktor Shklovsky calls the “singular dance of the speech organs” occasioned by poetic language (“O poezii i zaumnom iazyke,” in Poetika. Sbornik po teorii poeticheskogo iazyka. [Petrograd, 1919], 24). 53. The editors of the Sobranie sochinenii provide the derisive quote describing Mandelstam’s politically incorrect “mandelstamp” but do not give its author. He is identified in Omry Ronen’s entry on Mandelstam in European Writers: The Twentieth Century vol. 10 (“Osip Mandelshtam,” 1631). Ronen has also identified the origins of Mandelstam’s enigmatic “Egyptian stamp,” which had its beginnings in a genuine Egyptian stamp issued early in the century. It defeated efforts to cheat the postal system, as any attempt to remove cancellation marks would cause the entire printed surface of the stamp to vanish (cited in Donald Fanger, “The City of Russian Modernism,” in Modernism, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane [New York: Penguin Books, 1976], 480). 54. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Verso, 1983), 80. See Maurice Nadeau on surrealist “walking tours” (History of Surrealism, 10). Roger Shattuck points to Villon’s influence on French postromantic poetry in The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-garde in France 1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 24. 55. Mandelstam himself tacitly calls our attention to his avant-garde affinities when he celebrates a Dante who practices an “infantile trans-sense,” an “eternal dadaism,” a Dante whose legacy was inherited not by the neoclassical Parnassians, with whom the Acmeists had been linked early on, but by those “damned poets,” Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, who most inspired the twentieth-century avantgarde (CPL, 399, 416). 56. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Kniga pervaia, 295; Hope Against Hope, trans. Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 277. Aleksandr Zholkovsky quotes Kovalenkov in his richly detailed reading of this lyric, “Invarianty i struktura teksta, II. Mandel’shtam: ‘Ia p’iu za voennye astry . . . ,’ ” Slavica Herosolymitana, vol. 4 (1979), 171. 57. Vladimir Veidle, “O poslednikh stikhakh Mandel’shtama,” 81–82. Mandelstam’s Soviet critics are quoted in Zholkovsky, “Invarianty,” 171.

352

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

58. “But the beauty is not the madness,/Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me,” Pound mourns near the end of his life and of his life’s work, the Cantos. “And I am not a demigod,/I cannot make it cohere” (The Cantos of Ezra Pound [New York: New Directions, 1970], 795–96). 59. Levin, “Zametki, I,” 127. 60. The very names of Mandelstam’s clowns send us back to his children’s verses, one of which details the misadventures of two hapless trams, Tram and Klik (we might translate them as Tram and Shriek), as they wander lost through city streets (“Tramvai,” 1925; #406). 61. Nadezhda Mandelstam describes the conditions of their exile—the ceaseless troubles with health, housing, income, and supplies, to say nothing of their shaky status vis-à-vis the Soviet authorities—in painful, painstaking detail in the first volume of her memoirs (Kniga pervaia). Their haphazard housing also provides the subject for several memorable Voronezh lyrics. 62. Vtoraia kniga, 145. 63. “Noveishaia russkaia poeziia,” 118. 64. Lomonosov, “Ia znak bessmertiia sebe vozdvignul,” Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1986), 255; Derzhavin, “Pamiatnik,” Stikhotvoreniia (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1982), 147–48; Pushkin, “Exegi monumentum,” Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1974), vol. 2, 385. 65. “Under Ben Bulben,” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1956), 344. Richard Ellman quotes Pound’s parody in Eminent Domain: Yeats Among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Auden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 83. Mandelstam was not the only modernist to transform this tradition in the process of reviving it, although his idiosyncratic anti-monument is the antithesis of the collective memorial that Mayakovsky erects in “At the Top of My Voice” (Vo ves’ golos) : “I don’t give a damn for monumental bronze/ I don’t give a damn for marble slime/ . . . Let socialism, built in battle, be our common monument” (Sochineniia v trekh tomakh, vol. 3 [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978], 337.) Mandelstam’s poem is, among other things, a reaction against the growth of the monumental, collectivized Soviet culture that Mayakovsky celebrates. Akhmatova, who knew only too well that such common monuments have a habit of turning into mass graves, envisions a very different kind of commemoration in the conclusion of her “Requiem” (1940). The poet’s imagined memorial—“If ever in this land they decide/To erect a monument to me”—becomes a collective testament to mass suffering endured under Stalin’s reign of terror in the thirties (Sochineniia, vol. 1, 369). Igor Golomstock outlines the evolution of Soviet Russia’s monumental culture generally in Totalitarian Art, 111–12. 66. Mandelstam’s elegies to his fellow poet are replete with references to Belyi’s own writings and to his novel Petersburg in particular. On Mandelstam and Belyi, see S. M. Margolina, “O. Mandel’shtam i A. Belyi: polemika i preestvennost,’ ” Russian Literature, 30-4 (Nov. 15, 1991), 431–54; and Andrew Kahn, “Andrei Belyi, Dante and “Golubye glaza i goriachaia lobnaia kost”: Mandel’shtam’s Later Poetics and the Image of the Raznochinets,” Russian Review, vol. 53, no. 1 (January 1994), 22–35. 67. “This is not a literary fact, but an act of suicide,” Pasternak commented, shocked by what he considered the poem’s rash and “unpoetic” accusations

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

•

353

(Fleishman, Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990], 176). It was in fact a little of both. Political invective was hardly new to the poet-Jew who emerges in the wake of “Fourth Prose,” and though the Stalin epigram may have been uncharacteristically straightforward for the perpetually evasive Mandelstam, its poetics, or anti-poetics, clearly link it to other strategically unlyrical lyrics of the “Moscow Notebooks.” As to Pasternak’s second claim, the poem did precipitate Mandelstam’s first arrest and set in motion the chain of events that would ultimately lead to his death. It is difficult to believe, however, that a poet of Mandelstam’s notoriously volatile temperament would have escaped this fate in any case. 68. This pun, left unarticulated, underlies Mandelstam’s own definition of prosody, which comes to us courtesy of his Dante, who “glorif[ies] the human gait, the measure and rhythm of walking, the footstep and its form. The step, linked with breathing and saturated with thought, Dante understood as the beginning of prosody” (CPL, 400). 69. I have taken Whitman’s phrase from Mutlu Konuk Blasing, American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 121. 70. Mandelstam revises a well-known Russian proverb here: “The grave alone will set the hunchback straight (Gorbatogo mogila ispravit).” 71. Jokes, 7. Freud quotes the nineteenth-century German poet and aesthetician Jean Paul Richter. 72. Ibid., 37, 33–34, 43–44. 73. Ibid., 50; Welsh, Roots of Lyric, 245–47, 165–66. 74. Welsh, Roots of Lyric, 158–61. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1950), 54–57, 112. 75. Welsh, Roots of Lyric, 145, 19. 76. Christopher Benfey, “Lady in the Dark,” New York Review of Books (Mar. 26, 1987), 49. 77. “Noveishaia russkaia poeziia,” 118. Koltsov also integrated his own name into his poetry, albeit more conventionally, in a rather awkward acrostic he composed at the age of eighteen. (“Akrostikh,” in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1958], 209). 78. Koltsov, Sobranie Sochinenii, 90, 159, 168, 171. 79. Ibid., 13–14, 104, 155. See Barry Scherr’s Russian Poetry: Meter, Rhythm, and Rhyme for discussions of the relationship between trinary meters and the Russian folk tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 23, 65–66, 87–88. On the increasing use of trimeters in Mandelstam’s late verse, see Boris Gasparov, “”Evoliutsiia metriki Mandel’shtama,” Zhizn i tvorchestvo O. E. Mandel’shtama, ed. S. S. Averintsev, V. M. Akatkin, et al. (Voronezh: Izdatel’stvo Voronezhskogo universiteta, 1990), 336–45. 80. Koltsov, Sobranie Sochinenii, 156, 92. 81. Ezra Pound, “The House of Splendor,” in his Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1957), 15. 82. A more complex version of this pun resurfaces in another late lyric, “Ia videl ozero, stoiashchee otvesno” (#374). 83. According to Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam, Mandelstam first coined this phrase at a reading at the Voronezh Writers’ Union shortly before composing “Do not compare” (Akhmatova, Sochineniia, vol. 2, 185; Nadezhda Mandelstam, Kniga pervaia, 264).

354

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

E I G H T

•

CHAPTER EIGHT 1. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Plays and Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1971), 123, 117. Anna Akhmatova, “Poema bez geroia,” in her Sochineniia, ed. G. P. Struve and B. A. Filipoff (vols. 1, 2. Munich: Interlanguage Literary Associates, 1967–68; vol. 3. Paris: YMCA Press, 1983), vol. 2, 95–136. On Eliot and Akhmatova, see V. N. Toporov, “K otzvukam zapadnoevropeiskoi poezii u Akhmatovoi (T. S. Eliot),” International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics, 16 (1973), 157–76. 2. Lipking, The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 67. I use his here advisedly; one of the shortcomings of Lipking’s splendid study is his exclusive reliance on male poets, although the terms of his discussion would prove equally suggestive if applied to the poetic lives of many women writers. 3. Though it might be possible to see his magnificent “Verses on the Unknown Soldier” (1937; #362) as a final effort to interpret the ultimate meaning not so much of his life, or his life-in-verse, as of his imminent death at the hands of the Soviet state. In this grim and stirring poetic apocalypse, the “unknown soldier,” the “humbled genius of the graves” is authorized by his anonymous demise to address posterity over the heads of his oppressors. As such, this sequence has more in common with Akhmatova’s “Requiem” (1935–40)—in which Akhmatova’s own sufferings under Stalin permit her to transcend her own spatially and temporally bounded being and authorize her to speak for “a hundred million” suffering wives and mothers (Sochineniia, vol. 1, 369)—than it does with the far more personal and selfreferential “Poem without a Hero.” 4. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vospominaniia: kniga pervaia (Paris: YMCA Press, 1982), 409. The demise of the Soviet Union has led to a resurgence of interest in the particulars of Mandelstam’s death, as eyewitness accounts and clandestine state documents on his last days gradually come to light. E. Polianovsky provides the most detailed account of Mandelstam’s arrest and final days in his five-part essay on “The Death of Osip Mandelstam” (Smert’ Osipa Mandel’shtama), which appeared in the newspaper Izvestiia in May of 1992 (May 25–29; Nos. 121–125; each installment appears on the third page of the newspaper). For a more recent account of one British journalist’s efforts to retrieve state documents apparently verifying specifics of Mandelstam’s death, see Oliver Walston, “My hunt for Mandelstam,” The Times of London (Wednesday, January 12, 1994), 14–17. I am grateful to Evgeniia Pekker and Caryl Emerson for calling these articles to my attention. For several eyewitness accounts of Mandelstam’s last days, see “Novye svidetel’stva o posledniakh dniakh O. E. Mandel’shtama,” ed. Pavel Nerler, in Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo O. E. Mandel’shtama, 45–52. 5. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in his Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1978), 100. Iurii Tynianov, “O Khlebnikove,” in his Arkhaisty i novatory (Priboi, 1929; rpt. Ann Arbor: Ardis Press, 1985), 594. 6. Kniga pervaia, 165. A number of critics have commented on Nadezhda Mandelstam’s christological reading of her husband’s life and writing; and Gregory Freidin in particular has argued that this reading had its beginnings in the Christian myths that gave Mandelstam’s own poetic life its overarching shape (A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987]). For a sensitive and acute critique of

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

E I G H T

•

355

Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs, see Charles Isenberg, “The Rhetoric of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope,” in Autobiographical Statements in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, ed. Jane Gary Harris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 193–206. For a satiric, decidedly unscholarly take on Nadezhda Mandelstam as “biographical heretic,” see Danilo Kis’s scathing short story à clef, “Red Stamps with Lenin’s Picture,” in his The Encyclopedia of the Dead, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989), 175–90. 7. Levin, “Zametki o poezii O. Mandel’shtama tridtsatykh godov, II (Stikhi o neizvestnom soldate),” Slavica Hierosolymitana, 4 (1979), 158. 8. The phrase is Jennifer Baines’s, from Mandelstam: The Later Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 235. 9. See Nadezhda Mandelstam, Kniga tret’ia (Paris: YMCA Press, 1987), 263. 10. Nikita Struve, Osip Mandel’shtam (London: Overseas Publications Interchange Ltd, 1988), 275. Struve is careful to inform us in his study’s preface that his work has received the imprimatur of Nadezhda Mandelstam herself, and his interpretations of the poet’s life and writing betray the influence of his mentor throughout. 11. Baines, Mandelstam, 235; Jane Gary Harris, Osip Mandelstam (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988), 145. Apart from its conclusion, Harris’s admirably lucid and balanced overview of Mandelstam’s work bears little in common with Baines’s and Struve’s studies, both of which operate in the shadow of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s reading of Mandelstam’s life and writing. 12. Lipking, Life of the Poet, 93, 114. 13. S. S. Averintsev, “Sud’ba i vest’ Osipa Mandel’shtama,” in Osip Mandelstam, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), vol. 1, 7, 32, 60. T. S. Eliot, Complete Plays and Poems, 145. 14. Even Averintsev, who describes this open-ended poetics so astutely, feels obliged in closing to place the appropriate period at the end of Mandelstam’s career. He describes “To the empty earth” and similar late lyrics as “closing the circle begun long ago with Mandelstam’s youthful poems on Golgotha.” The passion play once again proceeds to its forgone conclusion (“Sud’ba i vest’,” 61). 15. An avid practitioner of biographical heresies, Jennifer Baines follows Nadezhda Mandelstam’s lead with a vengeance in her literal-minded pursuit of prototypes and real-life referents as keys to reading “The buds smell of sticky vows,” among other poems (The Later Poetry, 230–31). 16. Nadezhda Mandelstam informs us that the final version of this poem consisted of only the second and fifth stanzas (Kniga tret’ia, 262). For the purposes of my discussion, however, I draw on all six stanzas preserved in the Filipoff/Struve edition of the poetry. Mandel’shtam had linked Egypt’s monumental splendor with the Soviet state early on; see his remarks on Egyptian social architecture and the modern age in “Humanism and the Present” (1923; CPL, 181–83). 17. See, for example, Levin, “Zametki o poezii O. Mandel’shtama tridtsatykh godov, II,” 157. 18. There are minor textual differences in these poems as they appear in the three editions I have consulted: Filipoff and Struve; Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, vol. 1, ed. P. M. Nerler, 245–46, 313; and Mandelstam,Voronezhskie tetradi, ed. V. Shveitser (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980), 87–88, 130. I have followed the Filipoff/ Struve variant for the most part, although the last line of “Charlie Chaplin” seems more persuasive to me in the Nerler edition, and I have reproduced it accordingly.

356

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

E I G H T

•

19. Chaplin was the subject of a collection entitled Chaplin: Sbornik statei, which appeared in Berlin in 1923. Neia Zorkaia quotes Tynianov’s remarks in her two-part article “Mandel’shtam o kinematografe” (Iskusstvo kino 3 [1988], 10–19; and 4 [1988], 82–95), II, 85. Zorkaia also cites Nadezhda Mandelstam’s remarks on her husband’s enthusiasm for Chaplin and “City Lights” (II, 84). I want to thank Liudmila Pruner for calling this article to my attention. For “Cinemania” (Kinopovetrie), see Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh (Moscow: Pravda, 1968), vol. 3, 249–51. Akhmatova mentions Chaplin both in her late lyric “Drugie uvodiat liubimykh” and in the opening lines of her unfinished memoirs (Sochineniia, vol. 3, 75, 145). Mandelstam himself refers to Chaplin elsewhere only once: in an essay on the Berezil Theater Company, he describes the troupe’s “triumphant” transformation of “raw ‘Chaplinism’ ” into comic art (CPL, 258). 20. On Chaplin and modern Western poetry, see, inter alia, Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism (trans. Richard Howard [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989], 139; F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 156; and David Kalstone, Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 96. 21. Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 67–90, 79. Arendt’s inclusion of Chaplin in her list of Jewish pariahs is less perplexing when we recall that Chaplin was frequently described as Jewish by contemporary journalists, though there is apparently no evidence that he did have Jewish ancestry. Chaplin seems to have taken some pride in this mistaken identity, to judge from his response to one journalist’s question in 1921: “All great geniuses have Jewish blood in them. . . . I am sure there must be some somewhere in me. I hope so” (quoted in David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985], 154–55). 22. Arendt, “Jew as Pariah,” 79–80. 23. I. V. Sokolov, Charli Chaplin : Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo (Moscow: Goskinoizdat, 1938), 97. 24. Acoustically these three loci of highbrow culture seem to serve chiefly as a build-up to the climactic “Charlie” who is a punning synthesis of all that has gone before him: A teper’ v Parizhe, v Shartre, v Arle / Gosudarit dobryi Chaplin Charli. 25. Theodor Adorno, “Lyric Poetry and Society,” Telos, No. 20 (Summer 1974), 58. 26. See Harris, Mandelstam, 142, for a more detailed discussion of this lyric. 27. We may follow Nadezhda Mandelstam’s lead and attempt to end the carousel’s spinning once and for all by locating a real-life prototype. She argues that the poem’s attractive, elusive French female is Romain Rolland’s wife Maia Kudasheva, who visited Moscow in 1937, although, as Nadezhda Mandelstam admits, “I don’t recall her having a lisp” (Kniga tret’ia, 246). See Jennifer Baines for an attempt to interpret this poem in light of this biographical data (The Later Poetry, 204–6). 28. Averintsev, “Sud’ba i vest’ Osipa Mandel’shtama,” 64. Baines insists that Mandelstam’s last Moscow poems were weak at best, and that we should end our consideration of his verse with “To the empty earth” (#394), which is “in effect,” if not in fact, “Mandelstam’s last word” (The Later Poetry, 234–35). 29. It had earlier appeared in a slightly different version, and in far less discon-

•

N O T E S

T O

C H A P T E R

E I G H T

•

357

certing company, in the Filipoff/Struve edition of Mandelstam. Gregory Freidin concludes his study of Mandelstam with a provocative discussion of the “Ode” and its place in Mandelstam’s late work (Coat of Many Colors, 222–73). For the other Stalinist lyrics, see Nerler, ed., Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, vol. 1, 314–16. In the first volume of her memoirs, Nadezhda Mandelstam mentions a certain “sentimental Stalinist,” Liliia Popova, who tried to reeducate Mandelstam in the spirit of the times (Kniga pervaia, 237–38). To judge by the evidence of the last lyrics, her efforts bore some success; she is, according to Averintsev, the enchanting stalinistka to whom Mandelstam dedicates several of his final poems (“Sud’ba i vest’,” 62). For a very different reading of the Stalin Ode and Mandelstam’s “Stalin verses” generally, see Irina Mess-Beier, “Ezopov iazyk v poezii Mandel’shtama 30-x godov,” Russian Literature, vol 29-3 (April 1991), 243–393. 30. Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, vol. 1, 316. 31. Eisenstein, “Charlie the Kid,” 119, 120–22. Eisenstein’s essay does not represent his own views on Chaplin’s art; rather, it gives us the Stalinist era’s party line on Chaplin and “decadent” Western cinema generally, and this is precisely its value for my argument. Eisenstein was an early admirer of the comedian’s films, and this was the sin that “Charlie the Kid” in his Film Essays and a Lecture, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 108–38, here was intended to rectify. It was Eisenstein’s desperate bid to avoid Stalin’s postwar efforts to purge “rootless cosmopolitans” (read “Jewish intellectuals”) from positions of power within the Soviet establishment. “In cinema,” Richard Stites notes, “Eisenstein and other prominent film people—most of them Jewish—were punished or made to confess errors and sins against the people, including excessive admiration for Griffiths and Chaplin” (Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992], 117). 32. Eisenstein, “Charlie,” 129. 33. And this “frivolous” children’s verse is in turn more serious than it seems; its techniques and themes anticipate tendencies in the later poetry in ways that merit further exploration. On the infantile poetics at work in “Charlie Chaplin” and the late poetry generally, see Iurii Levin, “Zametki o poezii O. Mandel’shtama tridtsatykh godov, I,” Slavica Hierosolymitana, 3 (1978), 127. 34. Freidin, Coat of Many Colors, 40.

•

I

N

Acmeism, 5, 6, 7, 9, 34, 35, 36, 47, 48, 54, 59–65, 67–68, 70, 74, 76, 82, 85–86, 88, 90–94, 97, 99–101, 107, 155, 166–67, 179, 208, 219, 228, 229, 259, 264, 278, 294, 315n.17, 323n.53, 351n.55 Adamism, 61–65, 67–68, 82–83, 86, 88, 90– 93, 97–99, 323n.50 Adorno, Theodor, 292; “Lyric Poetry and Society,” 292 Akhmatova, Anna, 5, 9, 10, 55, 114, 155, 217, 229, 266, 279–80, 290, 314n.12, 315n.17, 323n.50, 354n.3; “Poem without a Hero” (Poema bez geroia), 279, 354n.3; “Prehistory” (Predystoriia), 318n.51; “Requiem” (Rekviem), 352n.65, 354n.3 Alter, Robert, 193–94 Annensky, Innokentii, 10 Ansky, Semën Akimych, 196 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 8, 52, 248; “Futurist Anti-Tradition,” 52 Apollon, 59, 61, 70, 98 Arendt, Hannah, 203, 290–91, 299, 356n.21; “The Jew as Pariah,” 290–91 Ariosto, Lodovico, 214, 218 Auden, W. H., 193 Augustus, Caesar, 184 Averintsev, S. S., 283, 315n.13, 355n.14 Babel, Isaac, 110, 199 Baines, Jennifer, 282, 350n.39, 355n.15 Bainton, Roland, 72 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 52, 56, 57, 84–85, 88–90, 124, 328n.56; Rabelais and His World, 57, 84 Balmont, Konstantin, 32–33 Baratynsky, Evgenii, 10, 234 Batiushkov, Konstantin, 24 Baudelaire, Charles, 36, 247–48, 351n.55 Baumgarten, Murray, 111 Belinsky, Vissarion, 7 Bell, Daniel, 110 Belyi, Andrei (Boris Bugaev), 114, 148, 235, 261–62, 294, 345n.36; Gogol’s Mastery (Masterstvo Gogolia), 261–62 Benjamin, Walter, 193–94, 219, 247–48, 280 Bergson, Henri, 83, 190

D

E

X

•

Berkovsky, Nikolai, 29 Bishop, Elizabeth, 290 Blake, William, 113 Blok, Aleksandr, 105, 114, 124, 148, 345n.36 Bloom, Harold, 12, 41, 65, 98–99, 101, 321n.22 Bowra, C. M., 172 Breton, André, 248, 290 Brod, Max, 206 Brodsky, Joseph, 78; “Flight from Byzantium,” 78 Brown, Clarence, 34, 41, 156, 168, 199, 314n.13, 337n.22 Broyde, Stephen, 167, 168, 188, 337n.22, 341n.68 Bukharin, Nikolai, 218, 220 Burliuk, David, 217 Calinescu, Matei, 5 Catullus, 26, 100, 163, 186, 187 Celan, Paul, 193; Die Niemandsrose, 193 Chaadaev, Petr, 15, 16, 17, 26, 33, 51, 52, 112, 119, 200, 240, 326n.35 Chaplin, Charlie, 9, 286–303, 356nn.19 and 21, 357n.31; City Lights, 290–92, 301–2; Modern Times, 291, 296, 301 Chénier, André, 51 Chukovsky, Kornei, 10; “Akhmatova and Mayakovsky” (Akhmatova i Maiakovskii), 10 Clark, Katerina, 124 Constantine, Emperor, 73 Crane, Hart, 290 Cuddihy, John Murray, 212 Dante Alighieri, 16, 17, 19, 25, 28, 53, 90, 93, 200, 210–14, 216, 220, 226, 240, 245, 247, 273–78, 283, 317n.33, 345n.37; Divine Comedy, 17, 22, 46, 90, 200, 210–11, 216, 274, 278 de Coster, Charles, 201; La Légende d’Uylenspiegel, 201 Deich, A., 32 Delauney, Robert, 295 Deleuze, Gilles, 344n.28 Derzhavin, Gavriil, 260; “Monument” (Pamiatnik), 260

360

•

I N D E X

Deutscher, Isaac, 145 Dickinson, Emily, 269 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 157, 197, 270 Duchamp, Marcel, 226 Eastman, Max, 218 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 11–12, 62, 233, 323n.53 Eisenstein, Sergei, 297–99, 357n.31; “Charlie the Kid” (Charli malysh), 297–98, 357n.31 Eliot, T. S., 9, 15–30, 50, 52, 58, 60, 66, 96, 99–100, 114, 143, 216, 241, 243, 244, 245, 279–80, 283, 290, 314n.12, 317n.33; “Burnt Norton,” 279; “East Coker,” 279; Four Quartets, 279; “Little Gidding,” 283; “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 244; “Philip Massinger,” 16; “Preludes,” 245; The Sacred Wood, 15, 17; “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 16, 19, 99–100; The Waste Land, 22, 143 Ellman, Richard, 5–6, 8 Eluard, Paul, 290 Erofeev, Benedikt, 242; Moscow Circles (Moskva-Petushki), 242 Esenin, Sergei, 114, 148, 203, 249 Euripides, 140; Hippolytus, 140 Fedorov, Nikolai, 149 Feidelson, Charles, 5–6, 8 First Soviet Writers’ Congress, 218, 220 Fleming, William, 82–84 Fonvizin, Denis, 252; The Minor (Nedorosl’), 252 Ford, Ford Madox, 19 Formalism, 12, 290, 351n.52 Freidin, Gregory, 6–7, 11, 38, 120–21, 137, 202, 314–15n.13, 319n.5, 334n.66, 357n.29 Freud, Sigmund, 224, 225, 229, 230, 233, 265–66, 350n.33; Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 224, 265–66 Froula, Christine, 23 Frye, Northrop, 91–92, 213, 339–40n.52; Anatomy of Criticism, 91 Futurism, 5–6, 9, 52, 63,148, 154, 208, 217, 218, 226, 228, 248, 259, 270, 323n.53, 348n.19, 351n.52 Gautier, Théophile, 28, 60 Gilman, Sander, 202, 206–7; Jewish SelfHatred, 206–7

•

Ginzburg, Lydia, 219, 220, 223, 227, 319n.6 Gippius, Vladimir, 11 Gippius, Zinaida, 105 Glazova, Marina, 345n.37 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 106, 108, 149, 231 Gogol, Nikolai, 197, 326n.32; “On the Middle Ages” (O srednikh vekakh), 326n.32 Gordon, Milton, 111 Gorky, Maksim (Aleksei Peshkov), 149 Gornfeld, A. G., 201, 202 Gorodetsky, Sergei, 60–63, 208, 323n.50; “Adam,” 61–62 Grimal, Pierre, 174 Guattari, Giles, 344n.28 Gumilev, Nikolai, 9, 59–65, 87, 314n.12, 323–24n.60; “The Life of Verse” (Zhizn’ stikha), 61–62, 68; “The Precepts of Symbolism and Acmeism” (Zavety simvolizma i akmeizm), 59–62 Harris, Jane Gary, 50, 282, 355n.11 Hayward, Max, 249 Heaney, Seamus, 210 Hegel, Georg, 332n.44 Heine, Heinrich, 208, 232, 291, 342n.3, 350n.33 Holquist, Michael, 124 Homer, 19, 24–25, 28; Iliad, 25, 43; Odyssey, 23, 167 Horace, 260 Iakhontov, Vladimir, 197–99 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 124, 127, 133, 248, 250, 325n.22, 328n.56; “The Ideology of the Jewish Question” (K ideologii evreiskogo voprosa), 127 Jabès, Edmond, 111 Jakobson, Roman, 5, 9, 11, 20, 32, 154–55, 218–19, 259, 270 James, Henry, 16 Johnson, Paul, 124–25 Justinian, Emperor, 72–78, 80, 84, 167, 325n.15 Kablukov, Sergei, 334n.64 Kafka, Franz, 193–94, 206, 291, 344n.28, 346n.42 Kahler, Heinz, 71, 74, 77 Keats, John, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 274 Kenner, Hugh, 20–21, 53, 108

• I N D E X

Kerensky, Aleksandr, 153–54 Khlebnikov, Velimir (Viktor Khlebnikov), 148, 154–55, 217, 270; “On Poetry” (O stikhakh), 154 Kliuev, Nikolai, 148 Koltsov, Aleksei, 268–73; “The Falcon’s Meditation” (Duma sokola), 270–72; “The Road” (Put’), 272; “What Do I Mean?” (Chto ia znachu?), 272 Kruchenykh, Aleksei, 217 Küchelbecker, Wilhelm, 290 Kurke, Leslie, 184 Kuzmin, Mikhail, 60, 62; “On Beautiful Clarity” (O prekrasnoi iasnosti), 60 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, 230 Lattimore, Richmond, 175 Lawrence, D. H., 5 Lazare, Bernard, 291 Lenin, Vladimir (Vladimir Ulianov), 148, 149, 168, 169, 198, 217, 232, 251, 335n.4 Lentricchia, Frank, 27 Lermontov, Mikhail, 349–50n.31; “I go out along the road” (Vykhozhu odin ia na dorogu), 349n.31; “A Prayer” (Molitva), 349n.31 Levin, Iurii, 8, 219, 220, 221, 225, 240–41, 253, 281, 299, 315n.21 Lipking, Lawrence, 233, 279–80, 282, 319n.5, 354n.2 Literary Gazette (Literaturnaia gazeta), 225 Livshchits, Benedikt, 217 Lomonosov, Mikhail, 260 Lunacharsky, Anatolii, 148, 149 Lvov–Rogachevsky, V., History of Russian Jewish Literature, 111 Macpherson, James, 96, 328n.58 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 36, 190 Mandelstam, Nadezhda, 10, 50, 60, 70, 131, 136–37, 143–44, 156, 180, 193, 194, 195, 200, 205, 218, 229, 236, 249, 257, 259, 280–82, 283, 314n.12, 315n.17, 317n.33, 323n.53, 348nn.16 and 22, 350n.39, 354n.6, 355nn.15 and 16, 356n.27 Mandelstam, Osip Emilievich: and Acmeism, 5–7, 34–36, 48, 59–65, 67–68, 70, 74, 76, 82, 85–86, 88, 90–94, 97, 99–101, 107, 166–67, 179, 219, 228, 229, 248, 264, 278, 294, 326n.32; and Akhmatova, 10, 63, 229, 266, 315n.17, 354n.3; and

•

361

Anglo-American modernism, 8–9, 15–28, 52–54, 316n.23; and architecture, 71– 102; arrest and exile, 215, 264–68, 271– 72, 275–78, 346–47n.1, 352n.61; and the avant–garde, 217, 248, 351n.55; and Belyi, 235, 261–62, 294; and Byzantium, 55, 72–81, 96, 102, 125; and Chaplin, 286–303; and Christianity, 49, 66–104, 112–14, 116–17, 121–24, 127–28, 131– 36, 138, 141–42, 144, 200, 234, 324n.5, 333n.49, 342n.7; conversion of, 105, 114, 324n.5; death of, 302, 354n.4, 379–85; the Eulenspiegel affair, 201; and family, 31–32, 36, 45, 108–10, 112–13, 119, 131–33, 136–39, 141–42, 194; and Formalism, 12, 290, 351n.52; and Futurism, 63, 208, 217, 218, 226, 228, 248, 259, 270, 351n.52; and Gumilev, 59–65; and Hellenism, 21, 24–25, 43, 82, 90–93, 101–2, 112, 114, 116, 123–45, 147–52, 155, 158, 161–68, 170–74, 176, 178–79, 182, 185–86, 188, 196–97, 201, 226–28, 231, 249, 328n.56, 331n.41, 334n.68, 335n.1, 339–40n.52; and Jewishness, 27, 36, 45, 49, 71, 96, 98, 104–45, 191, 193– 214, 217, 230, 232, 240, 245–48, 257– 58, 290–91, 332n.48, 334n.64, 342n.3, 344n.28, 345n.33, 349n.29; and Marxism, 146–53, 164, 170, 178–79; and Orthodoxy, 80–81, 124, 326n.29; poem– jokes, 220–32; poetics of eternal return, 7– 8, 48, 163; poetics of insignificance, 215– 78 (esp. 216–18); poetics of proper names, 97–99, 174–75, 227–30, 257–72, 278, 341n.69; and the revolution, 31, 114, 130–31, 148–57, 162–65, 168, 195, 236, 339n.43; and Stalin, 17–18, 27, 216–18 (see also [Works Cited:] “Stalin Epigram” and “Stalin Ode”); subtextual criticism of, 8; and Symbolism, 30–34, 36, 38, 41, 43, 51–52, 54–56, 60–63, 65, 68, 80, 91, 104–6, 241 —books of poems cited: “Moscow Notebooks” (Moskovskie tetradi), 213, 215, 218, 224, 240, 245, 247–48, 257–59, 262–63, 353n.67; Poems (Stikhotvoreniia), 163; Stone (Kamen’), 32–34, 36, 40, 45, 49, 55, 58, 63–65, 67, 70, 87, 94– 96, 99, 104, 106, 111, 114, 118, 123, 139, 140, 147, 165, 174, 218, 220, 225, 226, 229, 240, 296, 319–20n.8, 327n.47; Tristia, 104, 111, 120, 123–24, 128, 130, 132, 138–40, 144–45, 162, 165, 174,

362

•

I N D E X

Mandelstam, Osip Emilievich (cont.) 219, 220, 226–29, 282, 342n.7; “VoronezhNotebooks” (Voronezhskie tetradi), 8, 147, 215, 218, 224, 232, 242, 245, 257–58, 262–63, 274, 282, 284, 297, 300 —individual poems cited: “The Admiralty” (Admiralteistvo), 76–78, 166, 325n.23; “The Age” (Vek), 150, 180, 182, 340n.57; “Aleksandr Gertsovich,” 221– 32; “As I’d ask for charity and mercy” (Ia proshu, kak zhalosti i milosti), 286–90, 292–97, 300; “The bread is poisoned and the air’s been drunk” (Otravlen khleb i vozdukh vypit), 118–19; “The buds smell of sticky vows” (Kleikoi kliatvoi pakhnut pochkoi), 284; “Canzonet” (Kantsona), 112, 195–96; “Charlie Chaplin” (Charli Chaplin), 286–90, 296–303; “The cloudy air is damp and resonant” (Vozdukh pasmyrnyi vlazhen i gulok), 49, 121; “Concert at the Railway Station” (Kontsert na vokzale), 231, 349–50n.31; “Do not compare” (Ne sravnivai), 273– 78; “Falling is fear’s faithful companion” (Paden’e—neizmennyi sputnik strakha), 116; “From an evil, miry pond” (Iz omuta zlogo i viazkogo), 44–48, 104, 122; “Hagia Sophia” (Aiia Sophiia), 59, 67–71, 76–82, 325n.23; “The Horseshoe Finder” (Nashedshii podkovu), 158–92, 198, 217, 227, 337n.22; “How the splendor of these veils” (Kak etikh pokryval), 140–42; “I drink to military asters” (Ia p’iu za voennye astry), 224, 248–51, 253; “I have not heard the tales of Ossian” (Ia ne slykhal rasskazov Ossiana), 13, 15, 29, 74, 95–96, 186; “I have not yet died” (Eshche ne umer ia), 275; “I’ll give it to you absolutely straight” (Ia skazhu tebe s poslednei priamotoi), 221–32, 246–50; “Implacable words” (Neytolimye slova), 104, 120–23, 131; “I’m still nothing like a patriarch” (Eshche daleko mne do patriarcha), 224, 227, 236–45, 250–53; “I’m stuck around Koltsov” (Ia okolo Kol’tsova), 263, 268– 73, 275; “In the vast pond it’s transparent and dark” (V ogromnom omute prozrachno i temno), 44–48, 132, 144; “I’ve become afraid of living life out” (Mne stalo strashno zhizn’ otzhit’), 35, 114–17, 131, 136; “I’ve been given a body––what should I do with it” (Dano mne telo––chto mne delat’ s nim), 37–38, 58, 67; “I will not see the famous Phèdre” (Ia ne uvizhu

•

znamenitoi “Fedry”), 95; “January 1, l924” (1 ianvaria 1924), 191, 340n.57; “Leningrad,” 224; “Midnight in Moscow” (Polnoch’ v Moskve), 224, 236–45, 251, 254–55, 350n.47; “Not as a mealy white butterfly” (Ne muchnistoi babochkoiu beloi), 264; “Notre Dame,” 59, 67–70, 72–73, 78, 81–103, 134, 147, 166, 175, 219, 229, 292–96, 325n.23; “The pear and cherry trees took aim at me” (Na menia natselilas’ grusha, da cheremukha), 283–84; “The Piano” (Roial’, 1926), 254; “The Piano” (Roial’, 1931), 235; “Return to the incestuous womb” (Vernis’ v smesitel’noe lono), 120, 128–31, 135–40; “Set me free, let me be, Voronezh” (Pusti menia, otdai menia, Voronezh), 265–68, 270, 272; “Shell” (Rakovina), 67; “Silentium,” 41–44, 46–47, 57–58; “Sisters— heaviness and tenderness” (Sestry— tiazhest’ i nezhnost’), 123; “Sky blue eyes and burning brow bone” (Golubye glaza i goriashchaia lobnaia kost’), 235, 261–62; “Slate Ode” (Grifel’naia oda), 57, 106, 112, 123, 191, 233; “Sleeplessness. Homer. Taut sails” (Bessonnitsa. Gomer. Tugie parusa), 24, 138, 225; “So that the friend of wind and raindrops” (Chtob priiatel’ i vetra i kapel’), 284–86; “The sound, cautious and muted” (Zvuk ostorozhnyi i glukhoi), 34–36; “Stalin epigram” (My zhivem, pod soboiu ne chuia strany), 263, 353n.67; “Stalin Ode,” 297, 357n.29; “Stanzas” (Stansy, l937), 297, 300; “There are chaste charms” (Est’ tselomudrennye chary), 39–41; “There’s nothing to talk about” (Ni o chem ne nuzhno govorit’), 42, 58; “This night is irreparable” (Eto noch’ nepopravima), 120, 128–35; “To the empty earth” ( K pustoi zemle), 281–85; “Today you can make decals” (Segodnia mozhno sniat’ dekal’komanii), 224, 236–45, 251–57, 293; “Tristia,” 7, 23, 135; “The Twilight [Dawn] of Freedom” (Sumerki svobody), 155, 168–89, 173; “Verses on the Unknown Soldier” (Stikhi o neizvestnom soldate), 171, 293–94, 354n.3; “We’ll sit together in the kitchen” (My s toboi na kukhne posidim), 240, 299; “We will meet again in Petersburg” (V Peterburge my soidemsia snova), 227, 282; “What street is this?” (Eta, kakaia ulitsa?), 204–5, 258– 60; “When the grasses of mosaics droop”

• I N D E X

(Kogda mozaik niknut travy), 103–5; “Where can I vanish in this January?” (Kuda mne det’sia v etom ianvare?), 263; “Where’d they get him from?” (Otkuda privezli?), 261–62; “Why is the soul so songful” (Otchego dusha tak pevucha), 98; “Wild cat, Armenian speech” (Dikaia koshka, armianskaia rech’), 225; “With a smoking torch I enter” (Ia s dymiashchei luchinoi vkhozhu), 256–57; “With the world of power” (S mirom derzhavnym), 224; “A young Levite among the priests” (Sredi sviashchennikov levitom molodym), 120, 128–31, 135, 143–44; “You’ve deprived me of seas, running starts, and departures” (Lishiv menia morei, razbega i razleta), 263–64 —prose cited: “Badger Hole” (Barsuch’ia nora), 11, 60, 163; “Conversation about Dante” (Razgovor o Dante), 22, 28, 41, 46, 72, 90, 93, 111, 119, 200, 210–14, 216, 226, 240, 245, 264, 315n.21, 328n.60, 344n.24; “The Egyptian Stamp” (Egipetskaia marka), 106, 198–201, 203, 217, 230, 234, 246–47; “The End of the Novel” (Konets romana), 14; “Fourth Prose” (Chetvertaia proza), 35, 106, 111, 139, 156, 191–92, 194, 200–11, 213, 215–18, 224–25, 231–33, 240, 241, 247, 256, 257–58, 263, 290, 328n.60, 344nn.24 and 28, 353n.67; “François Villon” (Fransua Villon), 32, 37–38, 41, 49–59, 64, 75, 82–83, 87, 132, 134, 170, 201, 240; “Government and Rhythm” (Gosudarstvo i ritm), 147; “Human Wheat” (Pshennitsa chelovecheskaia), 12, 147, 151; “Humanism and the Present” (Gumanizm i sovremennost’), 14, 87, 147, 150–53, 158, 161, 162, 171, 178, 179, 337n.22; “Iakhontov,” 196–99; “On the Interlocutor” (O sobesednike), 33, 54, 56, 243; “Journey to Armenia” (Puteshestvie v Armeniiu), 251, 263; “Kiev” (Kiev), 196; “A Letter on Russian Poetry” (Pis’mo o russkoi poezii), 33; “Literary Moscow” (Literaturnaia Moskva), 8, 64, 233; “Literary Moscow: The Birth of Plot” (Literaturnaia Moskva: Rozhdeniia fabuly), 206; “Mikhoels,” 196–99, 209; “The Morning of Acmeism” (Utro akmeizma), 33, 47, 49, 51, 60–64, 68, 85–86, 88, 189, 234, 292; “On the Nature of the Word” (O prirode slova), 20–21, 40, 63, 68, 80, 91, 94, 107, 110,

•

363

145, 147, 185, 189, 199–200, 209, 213, 226; “The Nineteenth Century” (Deviatnadtsatyi vek), 14, 29; The Noise of Time (Shum vremeni), 7, 29–31, 45, 105– 11, 113, 117, 119, 142, 145, 146, 196, 207, 209, 211, 345n.33; “Petr Chaadaev,” 15, 51, 55, 119, 131, 142; “Pushkin and Skriabin” (Pushkin i Skriabin), 5, 55, 71, 93, 96, 113, 116, 120–21, 123–24, 128, 131, 138–39, 141–42, 144, 147, 328n.60, 330n.18, 332n.48, 333n.49, 340n.57; “Remarks on Chènier” (Zametki o Shen’e), 21, 51, 180; “Storm and Stress” (Buria i natisk), 187; “Theodosia” (Feodosiia), 196–97; “The Word and Culture” (Slovo i kul’tura), 19, 26, 94, 100–2, 128, 139, 147–48, 150–52, 161, 163–65, 177, 185–86, 220, 245, 294 Margolin, Iulii, 208, 350n.47 Margulis, Aleksandr, 229 Markov, Vladimir, 208 Marx, Karl, 149, 182 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 10, 83, 114, 148, 149, 150, 155, 217, 241, 248, 264, 290, 352n.65; “At the Top of My Voice” (Vo ves’ golos), 352n.65; “Cinemania” (Kinopovetrie), 290; “Notre Dame,” 83 Megill, Allan, 111 Mikhoels, Solomon, 197–99 modernism, Anglo-American. See under Mandelstam, Osip Emilievich Muller, Herbert, 72, 324n.7 NEP (New Economic Policy), 155–57, 164, 169, 191 Nicholls, Peter, 190 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 67, 71, 97, 126, 190; The Gay Science, 97; The Will to Power, 126 Oksenov, I., 32 Orshansky, I. G., 109; The Jews in Russia, 109 Ovid, 23, 26, 55, 100, 163, 165, 184, 186 Pascal, Blaise, 46, 122 Pasternak, Boris, 29–30, 110, 217, 330nn.15 and 18, 333n.50, 342n.3, 345n.34, 352– 53n.67; Doctor Zhivago, 330nn.15 and 18; Safe Conduct (Okhrannaia gramota), 29– 30 Paul, St., 71, 134, 281 Péguy, Charles, 4, 5 Peter I, Tsar (Peter the Great), 76–77, 87, 107, 167–68, 252

364

•

I N D E X

Pindar,163–68, 171, 172–78, 182–84, 187, 188, 338nn.29 and 35; Isthmian 2, 183; Isthmian 8, 164; Nemean 5, 173; Nemean 8, 175; Olympian 6, 173, 175; Olympian 9, 172; Pythian 11, 173 Platonov, Andrei, 149 Poggioli, Renato, 8 Pound, Ezra, 9, 15–28, 52–54, 185–86, 188–89, 190–91, 241, 251, 261, 272, 314n.12, 318n.51, 333n.50; Canto I, 23, 25; Cantos, 17, 23; “Histrion,” 25, 185– 86; “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,” 15; “Montcorbier, alias Villon,” 53–54; The Spirit of Romance, 19, 52; “Towards Orthology,” 190–91 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 10, 26, 40, 77, 100, 107, 108, 109, 117, 154, 163, 186–87, 197, 259–60, 270, 273 ;“The Bookseller’s Conversation with the Poet” (Razgovor knigoprodavtsa s poetom), 154; “The Bronze Horseman” (Mednyi vsadnik), 77, 107; “Exegi monumentum,” 256–60; “The Prophet” (Prorok), 117 Rabelais, François, 60 Racine, Jean, 140; Phèdre, 140 Red Militiaman (Krasnyi militsioner ), 155 Red Virgin Soil (Krasnaia nov’),175 Reed, John, 218 Regalado, Nancy Freeman, 53 Rimbaud, Arthur, 226, 351n.55 Ronen, Omry, 8, 45, 103, 133, 137, 229, 320n.16, 339n.49 Rozanov, Vasilii, 200 Russell, Charles, 8 Said, Edward, 50 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 234 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 190 Scholem, Gershom, 193–94 Schubert, Franz, 230–32, 263 Segal, Dmitrii, 8 Selvinsky, Ilia, 247 Shakespeare, William, 28, 53, 60, 108, 294 Shell, Marc, 190 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 154 Shklovsky, Viktor, 12, 290, 351n.52 Shtempel, Natasha, 281, 284 Sieburth, Richard, 185 Simmel, Georg, 111; “The Stranger,” 111 Sinani, Boris, 196 Sinyavsky, Andrei, 218

•

Smith, Sir William, 174 socialist realism, 218, 291. See also Bukharin; Gorky; First Soviet Writers’ Congress Sokolov, I. V. , 291 Soloviev, Vladimir, 80–81, 326n.29 Southey, Robert, 40; “Hymn to the Penates,” 40 Stalin, Joseph, 18, 27, 154, 191, 216–18, 220, 234, 276, 280, 297–98, 301–2, 352n. See also Stalinism Stalinism, 280, 282, 297–98, 302, 357nn.29 and 31 Steiner, Peter, 82 Stevens, Wallace, 107, 241, 290 Stites, Richard, 148 Stölz, Christoph, 344n.28 Struve, Nikita, 282, 355n.10 Surrealism, 226, 348n.19 Symbolism, 5, 30–34, 36, 38, 41, 43, 51–52, 54–56, 60–63, 65, 68, 104–6, 148, 242, 323n.53 Taranovsky, Kiril, 8, 45, 200, 334n.66 Terras, Victor, 40 Tibullus, 24 Tiutchev, Fedor, 33, 35–36, 39, 41–43, 46, 68, 107, 122, 270, 319n.7; “Day and Night” (Den’ i noch’), 107; “Silentium,” 41–43 Tolstoy, Lev, 9, 12 Tomashevsky, Boris, 29 Trotsky, Leon, 10, 148–49, 152, 163, 189, 217, 232; “The Formalist School of Poetry,” 10, 155; “Literary ‘Fellow Travelers,’ ” 155; Literature and Revolution (Literatura i revoliutsiia),149, 152–53 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 34–35, 193, 202; “Poem of the End” (Poema kontsa), 193 Turgenev, Ivan, 16 Tynianov, Iurii, 11–12, 179, 218, 219, 220, 227, 280, 290, 315n.21; Archaists and Innovators (Archaisty i novatory), 12 Valéry, Paul, 13, 59 Veidle, Vladimir, 249 Vengerova, Zinaida, 314n.12 Verlaine, Paul, 39, 41, 51, 244, 351n.55 Villon, François, 16, 25, 27–28, 37–38, 41, 48, 49–59, 64–65, 67, 71–72, 74, 83–84, 86, 88, 91, 99, 112, 132, 134, 147, 248, 273, 284–86, 292; “Ballade des pendus, ” 284; Ballades, 54; Petit and Grand Testaments, 53–54, 59

• I N D E X

Wagner, Richard, 119–20, 207–8, 230, 345n.36; “Jews in Music,” 119, 208, 230, 345n.36 Waxman, Meyer, 111 ; History of Jewish Literature, 111 Weininger, Otto, 200; Sex and Character, 200 Wells, H. G., 149 Welsh, Andrew, 228, 265–67, 270 Whitman, Walt, 264 Woolf, Virginia, 5

•

365

Yeats, William Butler, 261; “Under Ben Bulben,” 261 Zelinsky, Faddei (Tadeusz Zielinski), 124– 28, 132, 134, 137, 139, 144–45, 147, 327n.56, 331n.41, 332n.44, 333nn.49 and 50; Christianity’s Rivals (Soperniki khristianstva), 127 Zhirmunsky, Viktor, 10, 32, 61–62, 218–19, 323n.53 Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 203