Osip Mandelstam Read online

  Chaadaev,7 when he wrote that Russia had no history, that is, that Russia belonged to no organized cultural system, omitted one circumstance—and that is language. Such a highly organized, such an organic language is not merely a door into history, it is history itself. For Russia, a defection from our language would be a defection from history, excommunication from the kingdom of historical necessity and sequence, from freedom and expediency. The “muteness” of two or three generations could bring Russia to its historical death. Excommunication from language has for us a force equal to that of excommunication from history. Therefore it is absolutely true that Russian history walks on tiptoes along the edge, along the bank, over the abyss, and is ready at any moment to fall into nihilism; that is, into excommunication from the word.

  Of contemporary Russian writers, Rozanov8 has felt this danger more keenly than any other, and he spent his whole life struggling to preserve a link with the word, on behalf of a philological culture, which would base itself firmly on the Hellenic nature of Russian speech. My attitude to just about everything may be anarchic, my world view a complete muddle, catch-as-catch-can; yet there is one thing I cannot do—live wordlessly; I cannot bear excommunication from the word. That was more or less Rozanov’s spiritual makeup. This anarchic and nihilistic spirit acknowledged only one authority—the magic of language, the authority of the word. And this, mind you, not while being a poet, a collector and threader of words beyond any concern for style, but while being simply a babbler or a grumbler.

  One of Rozanov’s books is called By the Church Walls. It seems to me that all his life Rozanov rummaged about in a swampy wasteland, trying to grope his way to the walls of Russian culture. Like several other Russian thinkers, like Chaadaev, Leontiev, Gershenzon, he could not live without walls, without an Acropolis. The environment yields; everything is mellow, soft, and pliable. Yet we want to live historically; we have within us an ineluctable need to find the firm hard kernel of a Kremlin, an Acropolis, no matter what this nucleus might be called, whether we name it “state” or “society.” The need for this nucleus and for whatever walls might serve as a symbol for this nucleus determined Rozanov’s whole fate, and it definitely acquits him of the accusation of anarchic tendencies or lack of principle.

  “It’s hard for a man to be a whole generation. All there is left for him to do is to die. It’s time for me to decay, for you to blossom.” And Rozanov did not live; rather, he went on dying a clever, intellectual death, as generations die. Rozanov’s life was the death of philology, the dessication, the withering of letters, and that bitter struggle for the life that glimmers in colloquialisms and small talk, in quotation marks and citations, and yet all the same remains philology and only philology.

  Rozanov’s attitude to Russian literature was as “unliterary” as it could be. Literature is a social phenomenon; philology is a domestic phenomenon, of the study. Literature is a public lecture, the street; philology is a university seminar, the family. Yes, just so, a university seminar where five students who know each other and call each other by first name and patronymic listen to the professor, while the branches of familiar campus trees stretch toward the window. Philology: it is a family because every family sustains itself by intonation and by citation, by quotation marks. In a family, the most lazily spoken word has its special shading. And an infinite, unique, purely philological literary nuancing forms the background of family life. This is why I deduce Rozanov’s inclination to domesticity, which so powerfully determined the whole tenor of his literary activity, from the philological nature of his spirit, which, in incessant search of the kernel, cracked and husked his words and colloquialisms, leaving us only the husk. No wonder that Rozanov turned out to be an inutile and unproductive writer.

  How awful it is that man (the eternal philologue) found a word for it—“death.” Can it be named at all? Does it really have a name? A name is already a definition, already a “we-know-something.” Rozanov defines the essence of his nominalism in such an original way; a perpetual cognitive motion, a perpetual unshelling of the kernel, ending with nothing, because there is no way to crack it. But what kind of a literary critic is this Rozanov? He’s always only plucking at everything, he’s a casual, chancy reader, a lost sheep, neither here nor there.

  A critic has to know how to devour his way through volumes, picking out what he needs, making generalizations: but Rozanov plunges in over his head into the line of almost any Russian poet, as he got stuck in that line of Nekrasov’s: “If I ride at night along the dark street,” the first thing that came to mind one night in a cab. The Rozanovian commentary: one could scarcely find another verse like that in the whole of Russian poetry. Rozanov loved the church for that very same philology for which he loved the family. Here is what he says: “The church pronounced such amazing words over the deceased, as we ourselves would scarcely know how to utter over a father, a son, a wife, a dead mistress; that is, she has felt that any man dying or dead was so close, so ‘near her spirit’ as only a mother can feel her own dead child. How can we not leave her everything in return for this . . . ?”

  The antiphilological spirit with which Rozanov wrestled had burst loose from the very depths of history; in its own way, it was just as much an inextinguishable flame as the philological fire.

  There are on earth just such eternal oil-fed fires; a place catches fire accidentally and burns dozens of years. There is absolutely no way to snuff them out. Luther showed himself to be a bad philologue because, instead of an argument, he let fly an inkwell. The antiphilological fire ulcerates Europe’s body, growing dense with flaming volcanoes in the land of the West, making an everlasting cultural wasteland out of that soil on which it had burst forth. There is no way to put out the hungry fire. We must let it burn, while avoiding the cursed places, where no one really needs to go, toward which no one will hurry.

  Europe without philology isn’t even America; it’s a civilized Sahara, cursed by God, an abomination of desolation. The European castles and Acropolises, the Gothic cities, the cathedrals like forests, and the dome-topped basilicas would stand as before, but people would look at them without understanding them, and even more likely they would grow frightened of them, not understanding what force raised them up, or what blood it is that flows in the veins of the mighty architecture surrounding them.

  What an understatement! America has outdone this Europe that for the time being is still comprehensible. America, having exhausted the philological supply it had carried over from Europe, somehow panicked, then took some thought and suddenly started growing its own personal philology, dug Whitman up from someplace or other; and he, like a new Adam, began to give names to things, provided a standard for a primitive, nomenclatural poetry to match that of Homer himself. Russia is not America; we have no philological import trade; an out-of-the-way poet like Edgar Poe wouldn’t germinate here, like a tree growing from a date pit that had crossed the ocean in a steamer. Except maybe for Balmont, the most un-Russian of poets, alien translator of the Aeolian harp, of a sort never found in the West; a translator by calling, by birth, even in the most original of his works.

  Balmont’s position in Russia is that of being the foreign representative of a nonexistent phonetic power, the rare instance of a typical translation without an original. Although Balmont is actually a Muscovite, between him and Russia there lies an ocean. This is a poet completely alien to Russian poetry; he will leave less of a trace in it than the Edgar Poe or the Shelley who were translated by him, although his own poems lead one to assume a very interesting original.

  We have no Acropolis. Our culture has been wandering until now and has not found its walls. But to make up for it, every word of Dal’s dictionary is a kernel of Acropolis, a small castle, a winged fortress of nominalism, equipped with the Hellenic spirit for incessant struggle with the formless element, with the nonbeing that threatens our history on all sides.

  Just as Rozanov is the representative in our literature of a domestic Hellenism
that plays the holy fool and the beggar, so Annensky9 is the representative of heroic Hellenism, philology militant. The poems and tragedies of Annensky can be compared to the wooden fortifications, the stockades, which were set up deep in the steppe by the appanage princes for defense against the Pechenegs as the time of the Khazar night came on.

  Against my dark fate I no longer feel injury;

  Stripped and unpowered was Ovid once, too.

  Annensky’s incapacity to submit himself to any kind of influence, to be a go-between, a translator, is immediately striking. With a most original swoop he seizes the foreign in his claws, and still in the air, at a great height, he haughtily lets his prey drop, allowing it to fall by its own weight. And so the eagle of his poetry, that had entaloned Euripides, Mallarmé, and Leconte de Lisle, never brought us anything in its clutch but some tufts of dry grass—

  Hark, a madman is knocking at your door

  God knows where and with whom he spent the past night,

  His gaze wanders and his speech is wild,

  And his hand is full of pebbles.

  Before you know it, he empties the other hand.

  He showers you with dry leaves.

  Gumilev called Annensky a great European poet. It seems to me that when the Europeans come to know him, having humbly instructed their future generations in the study of the Russian language as former generations had been instructed in the ancient languages and classical poetry, they will take fright at the audacity of this regal predator, who has seized from them their dove Eurydice and carried her off to the Russian snows; who has torn the classical shawl from the shoulders of Phaedra, and has placed with tenderness, as becomes a Russian poet, an animal hide on the still-shivering Ovid. How amazing Annensky’s fate is! He fingered universal riches, yet saved for himself only a miserable pittance; or rather, he lifted a handful of dust and flung it back into the blazing treasure house of the West. Everyone slept while Annensky kept vigil. The realist moral chroniclers [bytoviki] were snoring. The journal The Scales did not yet exist. The young student Viacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov was studying with Mommsen and writing a Latin monograph on Roman taxes. And at this time the headmaster of the Tsarskoe Selo lyceum was wrestling long nights with Euripides, assimilating the snake poison of crafty Hellenic speech, preparing an infusion of such strong, bitter-as-wormwood poems as no one had written before or would write after him. For Annensky, too, poetry was a domestic affair, and Euripides a domestic writer, just one continuous citation and set of quotation marks. Annensky perceived all of world poetry as a shaft of light thrown off by Hellas. He had a sense of what distance means, felt its pathos and cold; and he never tried to bring together externally the Russian and the Hellenic world. The lesson Annensky’s creative work taught Russian poetry was not Hellenization but an inner Hellenism adequate to the spirit of the Russian language, a domestic Hellenism so to speak. Hellenism is a baking dish, a pair of tongs, an earthenware jug with milk; it is domestic utensils, crockery, the body’s whole ambiance; Hellenism is the warmth of the hearth felt as something sacred; it is any personal possession that joins part of the external world to a man, any clothes placed on someone’s shoulders by a random person, accompanied by that very same sacred shudder with which

  As the swift river froze

  And winter storms raged,

  With a downy hide they covered

  The holy old man,

  Hellenism means consciously surrounding man with utensils [utvar’] instead of indifferent objects; the metamorphosis of these objects into the utensil, the humanization of the surrounding world; the environment heated with the most delicate teleological warmth. Hellenism is any stove near which a man sits, prizing its warmth as something related to his own inner warmth. Finally, Hellenism is the boat of the dead in which Egyptian corpses set sail, in which everything is stored that is needed for continuation of a man’s earthly wanderings, including even an aromatic jar, a hand mirror, and a comb. Hellenism is a system, in the Bergsonian sense of the word, which man unfolds around himself, like a fan of phenomena liberated from temporal dependence, commonly subordinated to an inner bond through the human “I.”

  In Hellenic terms, the symbol is a utensil, and therefore any object drawn into the sacred circle of man can become a utensil; and therefore, a symbol, too. And so we may ask whether Russian poetry needs a deliberately contrived Symbolism. Is this not a sin against the Hellenic nature of our language that creates images as utensils for the use of man?

  Essentially there is no difference between word and image. The word is already a sealed image; one may not touch it. It is not suitable for daily use; no one will light a cigarette from the icon-lamp. Such sealed images are also very much needed. Man loves interdiction, and even the savage puts a magical ban, a “taboo,” on certain objects. And yet, the sealed image, removed from use, is hostile to man; in its own way, it is a scarecrow, a bugbear.

  All that passes is merely a likeness. Let’s take an example: a rose or the sun, a dove or a girl. For the Symbolist not one of these figures is interesting in itself; but rather the rose is an image of the sun, the sun is an image of the rose, the dove is an image of the girl, and the girl is an image of the dove. The figures are gutted like a stuffed owl and packed with a strange content. Instead of a symbolic forest, a taxidermist’s shop.

  That is where professional Symbolism is headed. The power of perception has been demoralized. Nothing is real or authentic. The terrible contredanses of “correspondences,” all nodding to each other. Eternal winking. Not a single clear word; only hints and implications. The rose nods at the girl, the girl at the rose. Nobody wants to be himself. The epoch of Russian poetry dominated by the Symbolists surrounding the journal The Scales was quite remarkable indeed. Over two decades, it developed an enormous structure that stood on clay feet and might best be defined as the epoch of pseudo-symbolism. Let this definition not be understood as a reference to Classicism, denigrating the beautiful poetry and fruitful style of Racine. Pseudoclassicism is a nickname applied by academic ignorance that has since been fastened to a great style. Russian pseudo-symbolism is really pseudosymbolism. Jourdain discovered in the maturity of his years that all his life he had been speaking prose. The Russian Symbolists discovered that very same prose—the primal figurative nature of the word. They put a seal on all words, all images, designating them exclusively for liturgical use. This has very uncomfortable results—you can’t get by or get up or sit down. Impossible to light a fire, because it might signify something that would make you unhappy.

  Man was no longer master in his own house; it would turn out he was living in a church or in a sacred druidic grove. Man’s domestic eye had no place to relax, nothing on which to rest. All utensils were in revolt. The broom asked holiday, the cooking pot no longer wanted to cook, but demanded for itself an absolute significance (as if cooking were not an absolute significance). They had driven the master from his home and he no longer dared to enter there. How is it to be then with the attachment of the word to its denotative significance? Isn’t this a kind of bondage that resembles serfdom? But the word is not a thing. Its significance is not the equivalent of a translation of itself. In actual fact, there never was a time when anybody baptized a thing, called it by a thought-up name. It is most convenient and in the scientific sense most accurate to regard the word as an image; that is, a verbal representation. In this way the question of form and content is removed; assuming the phonetics are the form, everything else is the content. The problem of what is of primary significance, the word or its sonic properties, is also removed. Verbal representation is an intricate complex of phenomena, a connection, a “system.” The signifying aspect of the word can be regarded as a candle burning from inside a paper lantern; the sonic representation, the so-called phonemes, can be placed inside the signifying aspect, like the very same candle in the same lantern.

  The old psychology only knew how to objectivize representations and, while overcoming naïve solipsism, regarded r
epresentations as something external. In this case, the decisive instant was the instant of what was immediately given. The immediately given of the products of our consciousness approximates them to objects of the external world and permits us to regard representations as something objective. The extremely rapid humanization of science, including in this sense epistemology, too, directs us onto another path. Representations can be regarded not only as the objective-given of consciousness, but also as man’s organs, quite like the liver or the heart.

  Applied to the word, such a conception of verbal representations opens broad new perspectives and allows one to speculate on the creation of an organic poetics; not of a legislative, but of a biological character, destroying a canon in the name of a closer inner approximation to the organism, possessing all the features of biological science.

  The organic school of the Russian lyric has taken upon itself the tasks of constructing such a poetics. I refer to the school that rose from the creative initiative of Gumilev and Gorodetsky in the beginning of 1912, to which Akhmatova, Narbut, Zenkevich, and the author of these lines were officially attached.10 The very modest literature of Acmeism and the scarcity of theoretical work by its leaders render its study difficult. Acmeism arose out of repulsion: “Away with Symbolism, long live the living rose!”—that was its original slogan. It was Gorodetsky who in his time tried to graft onto Acmeism the literary world view called “Adamism,” a sort of doctrine of a new earth and a new Adam. The attempt did not succeed. Acmeism did not adopt a world view; it brought in a series of new taste sensations, much more valuable than ideas; mostly, the taste for an integral literary representation, the image, in a new organic conception. Literary schools do not live by ideas, but by tastes; to bring along a whole heap of new ideas but not to bring new tastes means not to make a new school but merely to form a poetics. On the other hand, a school can be created by tastes alone, without any ideas. Not the ideas but the tastes of Acmeism were what turned out to be the death of Symbolism. The ideas seemed to have been partly taken over from the Symbolists, and Viacheslav Ivanov himself helped a good deal in constructing Acmeist theory. Yet behold the miracle: new blood flowed in the veins of Russian poetry. It is said that faith moves mountains, but with regard to poetry I would say: it is taste that moves mountains. Because a new taste developed in turn-of-the-century Russia, we saw such giants as Rabelais, Shakespeare, Racine pick up stakes and move our way to be our guests. Acmeism’s upward thrust, its active love for literature with all its difficulties, is unusually great; and the lever of this active love is precisely a new taste, a masculine will to poetry and to a poetics, in the center of which stands man, not flattened to a pancake by pseudosymbolism, surrounded by symbols, that is by utensils, possessing literary representations, too, as a creature possesses its own organs.