Osip Mandelstam Read online

  The Dan Danciger Publication Series

  Osip Mandelstam: Selected Essays

  Translated by Sidney Monas

  University of Texas Press,

  Austin

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Mandel’shtam, Osip Emil’evich, 1891–1938.

  Osip Mandelstam, selected essays.

  (The Dan Danciger publication series)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Russian literature—History and criticism—Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Literature—Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Monas, Sidney. II. Title.

  PG2933.M2713 1977 809 76–22456

  ISBN 0–292–76006X

  Copyright © 1977 by University of Texas Press

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 978-0-292-76162-9 (library e-book)

  ISBN 978-0-292-76163-6 (individual e-book)

  doi 10.7560/760066

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction: Friends and Enemies of the Word

  Conversation about Dante

  Translated by Clarence Brown and Robert Hughes

  About Poetry

  From the Author

  The Word and Culture

  Attack

  About an Interlocutor

  About the Nature of the Word

  Notes about Poetry

  The End of the Novel

  Badger’s Burrow

  The Nineteenth Century

  Peter Chaadaev

  Notes about Chénier

  François Villon

  Uncollected Essays and Fragments

  Pushkin and Scriabin (Fragments)

  The Morning of Acmeism

  Literary Moscow

  Literary Moscow: Birth of the Fabula

  Storm and Stress

  Humanism and Modern Life

  Fourth Prose

  Journey to Armenia

  Sevan

  Ashot Ovanesian

  Zamoskvorech’e

  Sukhum

  The French

  Around the Naturalists

  Ashtarak

  Alagez

  Notes

  Index of Names

  Preface

  Osip Emilevich Mandelstam was a great poet, a great critic, and a profound humanist, perhaps even one of the last of the breed, though let us hope not. There is much interest in him now, if not exactly a “bandwagon.” In any case, I am not a bandwagon man; my aim is to serve.

  I thought Mandelstam better served by a careful, if broad, selection than by a complete volume of his prose. Inevitably a certain subjective element has entered into my choices of what to include. I have included all the essays that Mandelstam himself collected in the volume of literary essays published in his lifetime, About Poetry. In addition, I have tried to limit myself to the literary essays. I have excluded the journalistic pieces, though some of them, like the interview with Ho Chi Minh or the account of the Mensheviks in Georgia, are quite interesting. I feel I would have Mandelstam’s approval here. The charming little radio play that he wrote in Voronezh about the early life of Goethe gave me more pain, as did the piece called “Sukharevka,” but I decided finally they did not fit well into the “mix.” Some of Mandelstam’s reviews are interesting, especially his review of Huysmans; yet they do not really display Mandelstam at his best, nor do the two articles dealing with problems of translation.

  On the other hand, the fragment “Pushkin and Scriabin,” which Mandelstam himself seems to have rejected, seems to me so central to his thought, so full of the swelling of all his major themes, that in spite of its clearly fragmentary nature and its many obscurities it had to be included. “Fourth Prose,” which might as easily have been included among Mandelstam’s autobiographical writings, is nevertheless so important a commentary on his idea of his calling and his distinction between “poetry” and “Literature” that it similarly could not be left out. I must also confess that I could not resist the eloquence of its angry style; after a first, superficial impression of incoherence, the profundity and impersonality of its anger cannot but make a lasting impression on the reader. It should be more obvious that Journey to Armenia is not simply a travel piece. Even more than Andrei Biely’s book about Armenia, to which it bears a previously unacknowledged kinship, it is an essay on culture, on literature, on life; and it is quite central to Mandelstam’s thought.

  A number, though by no means the greater number, of these essays have been previously translated by other hands. Of those I have seen, the only one that struck me as unimprovable upon was the “Conversation about Dante” in the version by Clarence Brown and Robert Hughes. With their permission, the essay is included in this volume in their translation. Other translations are my own; I have worked on them long and hard, and with English cadences as much on my mind as the Russian. I wish I could have done better; but I have done my best.

  Although “Conversation about Dante” is the last of the essays included here in its date of composition, I have placed it first, because it seems to me the most comprehensive statement of Mandelstam’s ideas about poetry and poetics. The essays that were included by Mandelstam in his volume About Poetry follow in the order in which he arranged them.

  I have tried to keep scholarly apparatus to a minimum. Names and events presumably well known to every educated reader have been neither footnoted nor endnoted. I have had my Interlocutor in mind throughout; but he (or she) is at times, I must admit, a conveniently nebulous figure. He is an educated, intelligent reader, interested not only in Russian literature, but in literature. He is not a specialist. He may or may not know Russian. The idea that even “specialists” (i.e., graduate students in Russian literature) actually read Mandelstam in the original Russian, if they don’t have to for a given seminar or assignment, is a kind of fond Cloudcuckooland that I have no wish to disrupt, though I don’t believe in it for a moment. I hope this book will help them, as I hope the previous Mandelstam volume that I edited helped them, in spite of its regrettable mistakes (Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, translated by Burton Raffel and Alla Burago, edited by Sidney Monas [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972]). But the book is not primarily, and certainly not exclusively, for them. Mandelstam is a world figure, and he should be known to anybody who cares at all about literature and has the sensitivity to respond to a major poet. I do not really know whether the Interlocutor will coincide with the actual readers of this book. He may be somewhere among them.

  Most of the notes are endnotes, so that the reader may consult them or not as he sees fit. In some cases, where a brief and simple explanation seemed more immediately called for, I have used a footnote.

  The system of transliteration used here is based on that of the Library of Congress, but it may be overstatement to call it a system. I have deferred to common usage: Tolstoy, and not Tolstoi; Biely, not Belyi; Scriabin and not Skriabin. In some cases, where the person involved seems to prefer a given usage, I have retained it: Filipoff, for instance, rather than Filippov. I have preferred to keep Russian names ending in -skii in the more familiar -sky. It isn’t entirely satisfactory, but I tend to eschew fanatic spelling.

  In the course of preparing this volume, I have had much help from a large number of individuals, and I hope, if I have not managed to acknowledge them all, none will be offended. Clearly, final responsibility is mine alone, and none of the good people mentioned here should be held to blame in any way for the book’s shortcomings.

  All students and readers of Mandelstam must first and foremost acknowledge their debt to his indefatigable widow, Nadezhda Iakovlevna. I have profited not only from her two books of memoirs and her interesting critical essay, but also from personal int
erviews and brief correspondence. The Struve-Filipoff edition of the Collected Works (Sobranie Sochinenii, 3 vols. [New York: Language Library Associates, 1972]), especially volume 2, which contains all the Russian essays translated here, is an indispensable source. I have not only used the Struve-Filipoff texts but have also taken information from many of their notes and have taken much light from the essays by various hands that are included in the three volumes. I wish to thank Clarence Brown and Robert Hughes for permission to include their translation of “Conversation about Dante.” In addition, I have had much valuable help and advice from them both. Translations from the poems of Gumilev and Mandelstam are by Burton Raffel and Alla Burago, with some emendations by me. Translations from the French are by Carolyn Cates Wylie, who has also served as an exceptionally alert and conscientious copy editor. All other translations are mine. George Ivask has been unstinting of his time and deep knowledge of Russian literature, and I owe him a great deal. Two readers from a university press submitted criticisms of the translations that I at first could not help resenting but in the long run came very much to appreciate, along with the comments of two readers for the present press, one of them most helpfully detailed. I have had help and encouragement from many people: Rita and David Monas, Alla Burago, Elnora Carrino, and Louis Iribarne. William Arrowsmith gave me good cheer when I needed it. Carol Monas, my wife, was a stalwart support, a good critic. The person who seemed to identify with the work of getting Mandelstam into English almost as much as I did, who worked unstintingly and indefatigably, typing, correcting, criticizing, arranging was Gianna Kirtley, and I wish to thank her specially.

  Introduction: Friends & Enemies of the Word

  Osip Mandelstam was born in 1891 of middle-class Jewish parents, grew up in St. Petersburg, and received his formal education in part there, in part in France and Germany. He studied philology, and, though he never took an academic degree or acquired much erudition, his word-love was deep and very sure of itself and became in his imagination a kind of substitute for the warm and secure domesticity he was not otherwise to know. His first poems, published in 1909–1910, whatever traces they might show of his apprenticeship to Symbolism, were of a marked originality, and the sense of a stillness in them, the sense of a motion arrested and about to resume, the sense of transition now strike the attentive reader as the distinctive features of his early work. Crowded between two worlds, the nineteenth century dying, the twentieth in ominous labor, it is small wonder that Mandelstam’s talent, like that of so many of his contemporaries, lent itself to apocalyptic expectations—to a vision of the end of the world that at the same time saw a terrible beauty stirring to be born out of that death—grass growing in the streets of St. Petersburg, paradoxically making of it “the most advanced city in the world.”1

  No doubt these apocalyptic expectations had been nourished by the mystical Marxism of his early years as well as by his later Christianity. Writing from Paris in 1908 to his former teacher, V. V. Gippius, Mandelstam affirmed: “My first religious experiences date from the period of my childish infatuation with Marxist dogma and can’t be separated from that infatuation.”2 He saw a culture marked for death, and a new barbarism, terrifying yet perhaps potentially creative, waiting at the gates. Looking back on his youth through the acquired irony of maturity, Mandelstam wrote: “I perceived the entire world as an economy, a human economy—and. . . . I heard . . . the burgeoning and increase, not of the barley in its ear . . . but of the world, the capitalist world, that was ripening in order to fall!”3

  Mandelstam was early associated with the journal Apollon and with Acmeism, a literary movement that had strong Classicist, Neo-Parnassian overtones. Its leader was Nikolai Gumilev, whose stance, given the Russian context, had strong analogies with that of the early Ezra Pound.

  The Acmeists were at least as opposed as the Symbolists to the powerful Russian-intelligentsia tradition of a socially useful and uplifting art. Like the Symbolists, they believed in the sacred nature of the word and the autonomy and integrity of the work of art—but not, like the Symbolists, in the priesthood of poets. And they rebelled against a certain excess, the decadence of Symbolism—its obscurity, its glorification of self-indulgent and self-pitying attitudes, its love of oblivion and the abyss, its compulsive obsession with “other worlds.” The Acmeists tried to emphasize clarity, lucidity, forthrightness, and, above all, this-worldliness, a sense of being of the earth, earthy. At the same time they attempted to restore a traditional, rational formality, and Gumilev, though certainly not Mandelstam, indulged a certain heroic, Hemingway-like, aristocratic athleticism, meant among other things to distinguish him from the mob. I think it fair to sum up the major thrust of the Acmeist revolt against Symbolism not in its aristocraticism but, on the contrary, in its emphasis on the poet as a man among men, its this-worldliness, its attempt to return to earth. Mandelstam’s association with Acmeism was an important chapter in his life; yet, although his essay “About the Nature of the Word” was the most complete and the most eloquent expression of Acmeism and its relation to Symbolism, he was never a “leader” or even much of a “member” of that or any other group. He did, however, participate in that will toward a new taste-formation in which he himself saw the historical significance of Acmeism.4

  Like other poets of his generation, Mandelstam reacted to the Bolshevik Revolution at first in terms of his apocalyptic expectations, welcoming it with some hope, not unmixed with dread and apprehension. From the 1920’s on, he saw that apprehension more and more insistently confirmed. It became increasingly clear that the revolution he had thought might produce a new universalizing human domesticity, the new “Social Gothic” he had hoped for, was not taking place. The barbarism at the gates was a repressive, not a creative barbarism. He found it increasingly difficult to survive in the Soviet context, though his spirit remained in general cheerful and indomitable. In 1934, the Soviet press ceased to publish his work; he was exiled, under very harsh circumstances, to the provincial town of Voronezh. In 1937, he was arrested and sent to the Far East, where, in a transit camp in Vladivostok, in the winter of 1938, he died. For almost two decades, his name disappeared from print in the USSR.

  In 1973, a slender volume of Mandelstam’s poems appeared in the Biblioteka poeta series, in a limited edition, more than half of which was exported abroad, and then by curious circumnavigations much of it reimported! From the introduction to this volume by the Socialist Realist critic Alexander Dymshits, in his own way trying, I suppose, to bring Mandelstam back, one might gather that Mandelstam “cut himself off” from literature in 1934 as an act of eccentric self-isolation and that he died in 1938 of some unnamed but probably self-inflicted and equally eccentric illness!5 Nevertheless, thanks very largely to the efforts of his widow and a number of devoted scholars and admirers both in the Soviet Union and abroad, Mandelstam is now commonly, even if still too often in the USSR only tacitly, acknowledged as one of the great Russian poets of the twentieth century.

  Mandelstam’s criticism has to this day been seriously under-estimated. He does not provide us with a new methodology and in general tends to take a deflating view of the importance of methodologies. Nor is he quick to put on the judge’s robes and consign his fellow poets to this or that circle of critical hell. There are poets he speaks of frowningly and with displeasure in one context who often appear with vibrantly positive force elsewhere in his work. In his essays, there is some sarcasm directed at poets like Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, whom he was elsewhere to cherish. Andrei Biely appears as a kind of villain, yet became the inspiration later for a whole cycle of poems; and it is Biely who must be thought of as a kind of interlocutor for the essay on Dante. A number of figures who appear in these essays are particularly close to Mandelstam in an almost intimate, personal sense—Villon, Chaadaev, the historian Kliuchevsky—without his necessarily making universal claims for them. A number of poets whom he treats rather harshly—Mayakovsky, Kruchenykh, Balmont—at the same time clearly command
his respect. He offers us neither the luxury of an imitable method nor that of an authoritative juridical decision, and so interest in him as critic in our age of luxurious criticism has been limited to the illumination his criticism provides his poetry.

  This is of course no mean interest. He was a poet first, and no doubt his criticism must be approached from the perspective of his poetry and in relation to his poetic practice. At the same time, it becomes immediately apparent that the quality and gift of his criticism partake of the quality and gift of his poetry while remaining, properly, prose.

  Just as T. S. Eliot’s interest in Dante and the English metaphysical poets, Pound’s in the troubadors and Confucius, Wallace Stevens’ Symbolist essays in esthetics cannot be seen apart from their own poetry, so Mandelstam’s “Conversation about Dante” has to be read, I think, as an incipient project for a new Divine Comedy, or at the very least as the ringing affirmation of a sense of poetic identity so closely and passionately held as to make mere mistakes of historical detail or social interpretation seem relatively insignificant.6

  It is interesting to compare it with Eliot’s essays on Dante. The poets attempt to rescue Dante from the Dante scholars. Each, while respectful of the need for knowledge about Dante’s time and its cultural assumptions so very different from our own, makes a powerful effort to remain true to his own “amateur” reading of the poem. Each rejects the “antiquarian” Dante and seeks in his work what is potentially alive as poetry.

  Yet Eliot’s Dante is more like that of the scholars—a formidable and remote figure. Eliot’s immediate involvement is with the visual, not far away from the conceptual. “Dante’s,” he writes, “is a visual imagination,” adding that “it is visual in the sense that he lived in an age in which men still saw visions.”7 There follows a typically Eliotic distinction between “then” and “now.” “Then,” having been a religious age, turns out to have been better. Its visions were superior to the mere dreaming of “now.” For vision, he writes, “was once a more significant, interesting and disciplined kind of dreaming.” It might even be presumed to come from above, whereas we “take it for granted that our dreams spring from below.” The essays on Dante by Eliot are permeated by a nostalgia for a remote, more integral, more spiritually grounded age.