Osip Mandelstam Read online

  Fear of a concrete interlocutor, a listener from the same “epoch,” that very “friend in my generation,” has persistently pursued poets at all times. The more genius a poet had, the more acutely the form in which he suffered this fear. Hence the cursed hostility of artist and society. What is true with regard to the litterateur, the man of letters, is absolutely inapplicable to the poet. The difference between literature and poetry is the following: the litterateur always addresses a concrete listener, a living representative of the epoch. Even if he prophesies, he has in view the contemporary of a future time. What the litterateur has to say, he pours out to his contemporaries on the basis of the physical law of unequal levels. Consequently, the litterateur is obliged to be “above,” “better” than society. Instruction is the central nerve of literature. For that reason, the litterateur has to have a pedestal. Poetry is another matter. The poet is bound only to his providential interlocutor. He’s not obliged to be above his epoch or better than his society. That same François Villon stands much lower than the average moral and intellectual level of the culture of the fifteenth century.

  Pushkin’s quarrel with the rabble can be regarded as a manifestation of that same antagonism between the poet and his concrete listener to which I am trying to call attention. With amazing dispassion, Pushkin allows the rabble to vindicate itself. It turns out that the rabble is not so very terribly savage and unenlightened. In what way was this rabble, so delicate as Pushkin describes it and so infused with the best intentions, guilty before the poet? As the rabble justifies itself, it gives vent to a certain incautious expression; and this is what causes the poet’s cup of tolerance to overflow and inflames his hatred: “And we will listen to you”—that’s the tactless expression. The obtuse vulgarity of these seemingly innocent words is apparent. It’s not for nothing the indignant poet interrupts the rabble at just this point . . . The sight of a hand held out to receive charity is disgusting, and an ear primed to listen may dispose whom you will to inspiration—the orator, the tribune, the litterateur—but not the poet . . . The people of whom this rabble is concretely composed, the “philistines of poetry,” would permit him “to give them bold lessons,” and would in general be ready to hear out almost anything, so long as the poet’s message had the precise address: “such-and-such rabble.” In this way children and simple people feel themselves flattered when they read their own name on the envelope of a letter. There have been whole epochs when the charm and essence of poetry was brought as a sacrifice to this far from harmless demand. Such were the pseudo-civic poetry and the tedious lyric of the eighties. The civic orientation or the tendentiousness is fine in and of itself:

  You need not be a poet,

  But a citizen you’re obliged to be—4

  is an excellent verse, flying on powerful wings to its providential interlocutor. But put in his place the Russian philistine of this-or-that decade, thoroughly familiar, known ahead of time, and immediately it will turn into something trite.

  Yes, when I speak to somebody, I do not know with whom I speak, and I do not wish, I cannot wish to know him. There is no lyric without dialogue. Yet the only thing that pushes us into the arms of the interlocutor is the desire to be surprised by our own words, to be captivated by their novelty and unexpectedness. The logic is ineluctable. If I know to whom I speak, I know ahead of time how he will regard what I say, whatever I might say, and consequently I shall manage not to be astonished by his astonishment, to be overjoyed by his joy, or to love through his love. The distance of separation wipes away the features of a beloved person. Only then does the desire arise in me to say to him that important thing I could not have said to him when I had his image before me in the fullness of its reality. I permit myself to formulate this observation thus: the sense of communication is inversely proportional to our real knowledge of the interlocutor and directly proportional to the felt need to interest him in ourselves. It isn’t about acoustics one should concern oneself: that will come of itself. More likely, about distance. It’s boring to be whispering to a neighbor. It’s infinitely tedious to pressure-drill one’s own soul (Nadson).5 But to exchange signals with Mars—without fantasizing, of course—that is a task worthy of a lyric poet. Here we’ve come right up against Fedor Sologub. In many ways Sologub is a most interesting antipode to Balmont. Several qualities that Balmont lacks are found in abundance in Sologub: to wit, love and respect for the interlocutor and a consciousness of his own poetic rightness. These two excellent qualities of Sologub’s poetry are closely connected with “the distance of enormous space,” which he places between himself and his ideal friend-interlocutor.

  My secret friend, my distant friend,

  Look.

  I am the cold and sad

  Light of dawn . . .

  And cold and sad

  In the morning,

  My secret friend, my distant friend,

  I will die.

  Maybe, for these lines to reach their address, it will take the same hundreds of years that it does for the light of a planet to reach another planet. As a result, Sologub’s lines continue to live after they have been written, as events, not merely as tokens of emotional experience.

  And so, if individual poems (in the form of missive or dedication) can actually address concrete persons, poetry as a whole is always directed at a more or less distant, unknown addressee, in whose existence the poet may not doubt without doubting himself. Metaphysics has nothing to do with it. Only reality can call to life another reality. A poet is not a homunculus and there is no reason why one should ascribe to him the characteristics of spontaneous generation.

  The matter may be put very simply: if we had no acquaintances, we would not write them letters and would not take pleasure at the psychological freshness and novelty that is characteristic of this occupation.

  About the Nature of the Word

  But we worry about things, and forget

  that only the word glows and shines,

  and the Gospel of John

  tells us this word is God.

  We’ve surrounded it with a wall,

  with the narrow borders of this world,

  and like bees in a deserted hive

  the dead words rot and stink.

  N. Gumilev*

  The only question I want to ask is whether Russian literature constitutes a unity. Is contemporary Russian literature really the same as the literature of Nekrasov, Pushkin, Derzhavin, or Simeon Polotsky?1 If continuity has been preserved, then how far back does it go? If Russian literature has always been one and the same, then what determines its unity, what is its essential principle, its so-called criterion?

  The question I have put acquires a special edge, thanks to acceleration of the historical process. No doubt it would be an exaggeration to consider each year of our present history an entire century, yet something in the nature of a geometric progression, a consistent quickening, may be noted in the stormy discharge of this accumulated historical energy. Thanks to such change in our time, the conception of the unity of time has been shaken, and it is not by accident that contemporary mathematical science has advanced the principle of relativity.

  In order to rescue the principle of unity in the whirlpool of change and the ceaseless current of events, contemporary philosophy in the person of Bergson, whose profoundly Judaic mind, obsessed by the urgent practical need of sustaining monotheism, proposes to us a doctrine of the systematization of phenomena. Bergson examines phenomena not through the logic of their subordination to the law of temporal sequence, but, as it were, through the logic of their distribution through space. It is exclusively the inner bond of phenomena that interests him. This bond he liberates from time and examines separately. In this way, interconnected phenomena form a kind of fan, the folds of which may develop in time, while at the same time the fan may be collapsed in a way that allows the mind to grasp it.

  Comparing phenomena united in time to such a fan merely emphasizes their inner bond, and instead of the prob
lem of causality, bound so slavishly to thinking in time, which for long held the minds of European logicians in thrall, it advances the problem of connection, without any flavor of metaphysics and, for precisely that reason, more fruitful in producing scientific discoveries and hypotheses.

  A science built on the principle of connection rather than causality exempts us from the “foolish infinity” of evolutionary theory, not to mention its vulgar appendage, the theory of progress.

  The movement of an infinite chain of phenomena, without beginning and end, is really a foolish infinity that says nothing to the mind seeking unity and connection. It hypnotizes scientific thought with this easy and accessible evolutionism that gives, to be sure, an appearance of scientific generalization, but at the price of rejecting any synthesis or inner structure.

  The diffuseness, the unstructured nature of nineteenth-century European scientific thought, by the time of the turn of the present century, had completely demoralized scientific thought. Intellect, which does not consist of a mere aggregate of knowledge, but rather of “grasp,” technique, method, abandoned science, since intellect can exist independently and can find its own nourishment where convenient. Searching for intellect in precisely this sense in European scientific life would be futile. The free intellect of man had removed itself from science. It turned up everywhere, but not there: in poetry, in mysticism, in politics, in theology. As for scientific evolutionism and its concern with the theory of progress (insofar as it did not wring its own neck as the new European science had), it puffed along in the same direction and flung itself on the shores of theosophy, like an exhausted swimmer who had achieved a joyless shore. Theosophy is the direct heir of that old European science which had theosophy as its inevitable destination: the same foolish infinity, the same absence of backbone in the doctrine of reincarnation (karma), the same coarse and naïve materialism in the vulgar understanding of a supersensate world, the same absence of will, the same taste for the cognition of activity, and a certain lazy omnivorousness, an enormous, ponderous chewing of the cud, intended for thousands of stomachs, an interest in everything that at the same time verges on apathy, an omniscience that resembles know-nothingness.

  Applied to literature, evolutionary theory is especially dangerous, and the theory of progress is downright lethal. Listen to the evolutionist literary historians and it might seem that writers think only of how to clear the road for those who are to go ahead of them, and not at all about how to finish their own job of work; or that they all take part in some inventors’ contest for the improvement of some sort of literary machine, while it isn’t at all clear where the jury is hiding, or what purpose this machine serves.

  The theory of progress in literary studies is the coarsest, most repulsive façade of academic ignorance. Literary forms change, some forms give way to others. But every change, every such innovation, is accompanied by bereavement, by a loss. There can be no “better,” no progress of any kind in literature, simply because there is no literature-machine of any kind, and there’s no finish line to which you have to rush to get ahead of anybody else. This senseless theory of betterment is not even applicable to the manner and form of individual writers—here every innovation is similarly accompanied by bereavement and loss. Where does the Tolstoy who in Anna Karenina mastered the psychological power and the highly structured quality of the Flaubertian novel show the animallike sensitivity and the physiological intuition of War and Peace? Where does the author of War and Peace show the transparency of form, the “Clarism”2 of Childhood and Boyhood? Even if he had wanted to, the author of Boris Godunov could not have repeated the lyceum poems, and similarly no one now could write a Derzhavin ode. Who likes what better is another matter. Just as there are two geometries, Euclid’s and Lobachevsky’s, there may be two histories of literature, written in two different keys: one that speaks only of acquisitions, another only of losses, and both would be speaking of one and the same thing.

  Returning to the question of whether Russian literature is a unity and, if it is, what the principle of that unity might be, let us cast aside the amelioration theory from the very beginning. Let us speak only of the inner connections of phenomena, and above all let us try to seek out a criterion of possible unity, the core which allows the various dispersed phenomena of literature to unfold in time.

  The only criterion that can serve to indicate the unity (conditional, to be sure) of the literature of a given people is that people’s language, to which all other criteria are secondary. The language, although it changes from period to period, although it does not stand still and congeal, retains a certain common constant that to the philologist’s mind at least is blindingly clear. An inner unity remains. Any philologist grasps when a language retains and when it changes its personality. When Latin speech, which had spread to all the Romanic lands, brought forth new bloom and began sprouting the future Romance languages, a new literature began, childish and impoverished compared with Latin, but already “Romance.”

  When the vibrant and graphic speech of The Tale of Igor’s Men3 resounded, thoroughly worldly, secular, and Russian in its every turn of phrase, Russian literature began. And while Velemir Khlebnikov, the contemporary Russian writer, immerses us in the very thick of Russian root words, in the etymological night dear to the mind and heart of the clever reader, that very same Russian literature is still alive, the literature of The Tale of Igor’s Men. The Russian language, like the Russian national identity itself, was formed out of endless mixtures, crossings, graftings, and foreign influences. Yet in one thing it will remain true to itself, until our own kitchen Latin resounds for us, too, and on that powerful body which is language, the pale young runner-shoots of our life come up, as in the Old French song about Saint Eulalia.4

  The Russian language is a Hellenic language. Due to a whole complex of historical conditions, the vital forces of Hellenic culture, which had abandoned the West to Latin influences, and which found scant nourishment to prompt them to linger long in childless Byzantium, rushed to the bosom of Russian speech and communicated to it the self-confident secret of the Hellenic world view, the secret of free incarnation, and so the Russian language became indeed sounding and speaking flesh.

  While Western cultures and histories tend to lock language in from the outside, hem it in with walls of church and state and become saturated with it in order that they might slowly decay and slowly come into bloom as the language in due course disintegrates, Russian culture and history are washed and girdled on all sides by the awesome and boundless element of the Russian language, which does not fit into church or state forms of any kind.

  The life of language in Russian history outweighs all other factors through the ubiquity of its manifestations, its plenitude of being, a kind of high goal that all other aspects of Russian life strive to attain without succeeding. One can identify the Hellenic nature of the Russian language with its capacity for achieving concrete modalities of existence. The word in the Hellenic conception is active flesh that resolves itself in an event. Therefore, the Russian language is historical even in and of itself, the incessant incarnation and activity of intelligent and breathing flesh. There is not a single other language that stands more squarely opposed than the Russian to merely denotative or practical prescription. Russian nominalism, that is, a doctrine of the reality of the word as such, animates the spirit of our language and links it with Hellenic philological culture, not etymologically and not literarily, but through a principle of inner freedom that is equally inherent in them both.

  Utilitarianism of any sort is a mortal sin against Hellenic nature, against the Russian language, quite regardless of whether it be a tendency toward a telegraphic or stenographic code, whether for reasons of economy or simplified expediency, or even whether it be utilitarianism of a higher order, offering language in sacrifice to mystical intuition, anthroposophy, or word-hungry, omnivorous thinking of any kind.

  Andrei Biely,5 now, turns out to be a painful and negative phenome
non in the life of the Russian language. This is only because he pursues the word so single-mindedly and yet is guided in this pursuit exclusively by the fervor of his own speculative thought. He gasps, with a kind of refined garrulity. He cannot bring himself to sacrifice a single shading, a single fragment of his capricious thought, and he blows up the bridges he is too lazy to cross. As a result, we have, after momentary fireworks, instead of a fullness of life, an organic wholeness, and a moving balance, a heap of paving-stones, a dismal picture of ruin. The basic sin of writers like Andrei Biely is their lack of respect for the Hellenic nature of the word, their merciless exploitation of it for their own intuitive goals.

  Russian poetry more than any other brings up as a motif again and again that ancient doubt of the word’s capacity to express feeling:

  How can the heart express itself?

  How can another understand you?

  (Tiutchev)6

  —Thus our language secures itself from unceremonious encroachments.

  The rate at which language develops is not the same as that of life itself. Any attempt to adapt language mechanically to the requirements of life is doomed in advance to failure. Futurism, as it is called, is a conception created by illiterate critics that lacks any real content or scope; it is, however, more than a curiosity of philistine literary psychology. Futurism acquires an exact sense if one understands by it precisely this attempt at a forced, mechanical adaptation, this lack of faith in our language itself which is at one and the same time Achilles and the turtle.

  Khlebnikov busies himself with words, like a mole, and he provides for the future by burrowing enough passageways in the earth to last for a whole century. The representatives of the Moscow metaphorical school who call themselves Imaginists, on the other hand, exhaust themselves adapting our language to modern life. They have remained far behind language, and it is their fate to be swept away like litter.