Osip Mandelstam Read online

  More than once in Russian society we have had moments of inspired reading in the heart of Western literature. Thus, Pushkin, and with him his whole generation, read Chénier. Thus, the following generation, the generation of Odoevsky, read Schelling, Hoffmann,11 and Novalis. Thus, the men of the sixties read their Buckle,12 and, although neither party in this case possessed any dazzling genius, a more ideal reader could not be found. The Acmeist wind turned over the pages of Classics and Romantics, and these came open to the very place the age most needed. Racine opened to Phaedra, Hoffmann to The Serapion Brothers. We found Chènier’s iambs and Homer’s Iliad.

  Acmeism was not merely a literary, but also a social phenomenon in Russian history. It brought a reinvigorated moral force back into Russian poetry. “I want to sail my free boat everywhere; and God and the Devil I’ll glorify alike,” said Briusov. This wretched affirmation of the void [nichevochestvo] will never repeat itself in Russian poetry. So far, the social pathos of Russian poetry has risen only to the conceptual level of “citizen”; but there is a higher principle than “citizen”—the concept “man” [muzh].

  In distinction to the old civic poetry, the new Russian poetry has to educate not only the citizen but also the “man.” The ideal of complete manliness is prepared by style and by the practical demands of our time. Everything has become heavier and bigger; so man, too, must stand more firmly, because man should be the firmest thing on the earth and should regard his relation to the earth as that of diamond to glass. The hieratic, that is to say, the sacred character of poetry, is dependent on the conviction that man is the firmest thing in the world.

  The age quiets down, culture goes to sleep, a people is reborn, having given its best forces to a new social class; and this whole current bears the frail boat of the human word into that open sea of the immediate future, where there is no sympathetic understanding, where dreary commentary replaces the fresh wind of the hostility-and-sympathy of one’s contemporaries. How then can one rig this boat for its distant trek, without having supplied it with everything necessary for so alien and so precious a reader. Once more I compare the poem to an Egyptian boat of the dead. In this boat, everything is equipped for life; nothing is forgotten.

  Yet I see many objections beginning to arise and something of a reaction to Acmeism as it was originally formulated; a crisis similar to that of pseudosymbolism. For composing a poetics, pure biology won’t do. However good and fruitful the biological analogy might be, with its systematic application a biological canon comes into being, no less oppressive and intolerable than the pseudosymbolical. From the physiological conception of art, “the superstitious abyss of the Gothic spirit” stares out. Salieri13 is worthy of respect and burning love. It is not his fault that he heard the music of algebra as loudly as that of living harmony.

  In the place of the Romantic, the idealist, the aristocratic dreamer of the pure symbol, of an abstract esthetic of the word, in place of Symbolism, Futurism, and Imaginism, we now have the living poetry of the word-object, and its creator is not the idealist-dreamer Mozart, but the stern and strict master craftsman Salieri, who now holds out his hand to that master of things and material values, the builder and producer of the material world.

  Note

  Note: This translation was originally published in Avion 2, no. 4 (1976).

  * Reprinted, with slight modifications, from Selected Works of Nikolai S. Gumilev, translated by Burton Raffei and Alla Burago, by permission of the State University of New York Press. Copyright © 1972 State University of New York.

  Notes about Poetry

  Contemporary Russian poetry didn’t drop from heaven. It was anticipated by our country’s entire poetic past—after all, didn’t Iazykov’s1 clicking and clattering anticipate Pasternak, and doesn’t this one example suffice to show how the poetic big-guns converse with one another in connecting salvos, not at all embarrassed by the indifference of the time that separates them? In poetry, it’s always wartime. And it is only in epochs of social idiocy that there is peace or a truce. The root-conductors, like regimental commanders, take up arms against one another. The roots of words battle in the darkness, each “deriving” from the other sustenance and vital juices. The Russian conflict of unwritten secular speech, that is of the domestic root word, the language of peasant laymen, with the written speech of monks, with the hostile, Church-Slavic, Byzantine document, is felt to this day.

  The first intelligentsia were the Byzantine monks, and they foisted an alien spirit and an alien form on the language. The black-cassocks, that is to say the intelligentsia, and the laity have always spoken different languages in Russia. The Slavicizing of Cyril and Methodius2 was for its time the same as the Volapük3 of our own day. Colloquial language loves accommodation. Out of hostile chunks it creates an alloy. Colloquial speech always finds the middle, convenient way. In its relationship to the whole history of language it is inclined to be conciliatory and is defined by its diffuse benevolence, that is to say, by its opportunism. Poetic speech on the other hand is never sufficiently “pacified,” and in it, after many centuries, old discords are revealed. It is amber in which a fly buzzes, embedded ages ago in resin, the living alien body continuing to live even in its petrification. Everything that works in Russian poetry to the advantage of an alien monastic literature, any intelligentsia literature, that is, “Byzantium,” is reactionary; and that means evil, bearing evil. Everything that inclines to the secularization of poetic speech, to driving out of it, that is, the monasticizing intelligentsia, Byzantium, brings good to the language, that is longevity, and helps it, as it might help a righteous man, to perform its ordeal of independent existence in the family of dialects. The opposite picture would be possible, let us say, if a people with a native theocracy, like the Tibetans, managed to liberate themselves from secular foreign conquerors like the Manchurians. In Russian poetry only those workers did a first-rate job who directly participated in the great process of making the language worldly, of secularizing it. These are Trediakovsky, Lomonosov, Batiushkov, Iazykov, and, most recently, Khlebnikov and Pasternak.

  At the risk of seeming overly crude, of terribly oversimplifying my subject, I would depict the negative and positive poles in the field of poetic language as a widely luxuriant morphological flowering and a hardening of morphological lava under the semantic crust. A wandering root of multiple meanings animates poetic speech.

  The root’s multiplier, the index of its vitality, is the consonant. (The classical example is Khlebnikov’s “Laughing” poem.) A word multiplies itself not through vowels but through consonants. Its consonants are the seed and the pledge of a posterity for a language.

  A lowered linguistic consciousness amounts to the atrophy of the consonantal sense.

  Russian verse is saturated with consonants and clatters and clicks and whistles with them. Real secular speech. Monkish speech is a litany of vowels.

  Thanks to the fact that the conflict with monkishly intelligentsia-like Byzantium on the battleground of poetry abated after Iazykov, and it was a long time before a new hero appeared in this glorious arena, Russian poets one after the other began to deafen to the hum of the language, and grew deaf to the surf of sound waves, and only through an ear trumpet could they distinguish in the hum of the dictionary their own proper small vocabulary. An example: to the deaf old man in Woe from Wit, the characters yell, “Prince, prince, back.” A small vocabulary is no sin in itself, and it is not a vicious circle. It may even enclose the speaker in a circle of flame, and yet it is a sign that he does not trust his native soil and it isn’t just anywhere that he dares place his foot. The Russian Symbolists were truly Stylites4 of style: all of them together did not use more than five hundred words—the vocabulary of a Polynesian. But at least they were ascetics, performers of ordeals. They stood on logs. Akhmatova, now, stands on a parquet floor—this is already a parquet Stylitism. Kuzmin strews the parquet with grass so that it might resemble a meadow (“Evenings Some Other Where”).


  Pushkin has two expressions for innovators in poetry. One: “to fly away again, having stirred up in us, children of dust, a wingless desire.” The other: “when the great Gluck5 appeared and revealed new mysteries to us.” Anyone who would lead his native poetry astray with the sound and form of alien speech would be an innovator of the first sort; that is, a seducer. It is untrue that Latin sleeps in Russian speech, untrue that Hellas sleeps in it. With as much justice one could conjure up Negro drums and the monosyllabic utterances of the Kaffirs in the music of Russian speech. Only Russian speech sleeps in Russian speech; only itself. It is a direct insult, and not praise, to say of a Russian poet that his verses sound like Latin. But what about Gluck?—Profound, captivating mysteries?—For Russian poetic fate the profound, captivating mysteries of Gluck are not to be found in Sanskrit or in Hellenism, but in the rigorous secularization of poetic speech. Give us the vulgate. We do not want a Latin Bible.

  When I read Pasternak’s My Sister Life, I experience that same pure joy of the quality of the vulgate, freed from the external influences of mundane speech, of Luther’s dark quotidian speech, after the tense Latin, even if it had been understandable to all, certainly understandable to all, but unnecessary, once a kind of metalogic [zaum] but long having ceased to be metalogical, to the great chagrin of the monks. Thus the Germans rejoiced in their tile houses, when they opened for the first time their Gothic Bibles that still smelled of fresh printer’s ink. And reading Khlebnikov can be compared with a still more magnificent and instructive spectacle, how our language could and should have grown, as one of the righteous, unburdened and undesecrated by historical adversities or by coercion. Khlebnikov’s speech is so mundane, so vulgate, it is as though neither monks nor Byzantium nor intelligentsia-letters ever existed. His is an absolutely secular and mundane Russian speech, resounding for the first time in the history of Russian letters. If one takes such a view, the necessity of regarding Khlebnikov as some kind of sorcerer or shaman will vanish. He noted the language’s paths of development, transitional, temporary, and this path of Russian oral destiny which never existed historically, which was realized only in Khlebnikov, was strengthened in his metalogic, which means nothing other than transitional forms that had managed not to be covered over by the semantic crust of the correctly and properly developing language.

  When a ship after sailing near the shore moves out into the open sea, those who can’t bear the rolling return to the shore. After Khlebnikov and Pasternak, Russian poetry moves once more out into the open sea, and many of its customary passengers will have to take leave of the boat. I see them already standing with their suitcases near the gangway that has been dropped to the shore. But then, how welcome is each new passenger who climbs aboard at precisely this moment!

  When Fet6 made his appearance, the “silver and the tossing of a sleepy stream” agitated Russian poetry, and, as he was leaving, Fet said: “And with the burning salt of imperishable speech.”

  This burning salt of speech of some sort, this whistling, clicking, rustling, sparkling, splashing, this fullness of sound, this plenitude of life, this flood of images and feelings has rearisen with unheard- of force in the poetry of Pasternak. Before us is the significant patriarchal phenomenon of the Russian poetry of Fet.

  Pasternak’s magnificent domestic Russian poetry is already old-fashioned. It is tasteless because it is immortal; it is without style because it gasps on banalities with the classic delight of a trilling nightingale. Yes, Pasternak’s poetry is a direct mating call (the partridge in his wood, the nightingale in spring), the direct consequence of a special physiological structure of the throat, just as much a mark of the species as plumage or a bird’s crest.

  It is a suddenly suffused whistling,

  It is a crackling of compressed icicles,

  It is night frosting leaves,

  It is two nightingales in a duel.

  To read Pasternak’s verses is to clear one’s throat, reinforce one’s breathing, renovate the lungs; such verses must be a cure for tuberculosis. We do not have any healthier poetry now. It is kumiss after powdered milk.

  Pasternak’s book My Sister Life is for me a collection of excellent breathing exercises: each time the voice arranges itself anew, each time the powerful breathing apparatus adjusts itself differently.

  Pasternak uses the syntax of a confirmed interlocutor, passionately and excitedly demonstrating something, but what is he demonstrating?

  Does the arum-lily ask

  Charity of the swamp?

  The nights breathe gratis

  Putrescent tropics.

  So, swinging her arms, muttering, poetry plods along, staggering a bit, causing heads to spin, blessedly out of her mind, yet at the same time the only sober one, the only one awake in the whole wide world.

  Certainly, Herzen and Ogarev,7 when they stood on the Sparrow Hills as boys, experienced physiologically the sacred ecstasy of space and birdflight. Pasternak’s poetry has told us about these moments: it is a shining Nike transported from the Acropolis to the Sparrow Hills.

  The End of the Novel

  What distinguishes the novel from the long story, the chronicle, the memoir, or any other prose form is that it is a composed, selfenclosed, extensive narrative, complete in itself, about the lot of a single person or a whole group of people. Saints’ lives, for all their working out of the fabula,* were not novels, because they lacked worldly interest in the life story of their characters, illustrating instead some shared ideal. But the Greek story Daphnis and Chloe is considered the first European novel because this kind of interest appears there as a motive force, independently for the first time. Over a long period of time the novel form went on developing and gathered strength as it became the art of interesting the reader in the fate of individuals. As it does this, the art comes to fruition in two directions. Compositional technique turns biography into a fabula; that is, into a dialectically intelligible narrative, and, coinciding with the appearance of the fabula, another aspect of the novel develops—of an auxiliary nature, essentially—the art of psychological motivation. The quattrocento storytellers and the Cent novelles nouvelles confined themselves in their use of motivation to the juxtaposition of external situations, and this made their stories exceptionally dry and elegantly light and diverting. Novelist-psychologists like Flaubert and the Goncourts turned all their attention to psychological grounding at the expense of the fabula and handled this problem brilliantly, converting what had been an auxiliary device into a self-sustaining art.

  Right up to our own days, the novel has been a central and urgent necessity, the form that summed up European art. Manon Lescaut, Werther, Anna Karenina, David Copperfield, Le Rouge et le noir, La Peau de chagrin, Madame Bovary were events in social life as much as they were artistic events. They produced in contemporaries who looked at themselves in the mirror of the novel a massive self-knowledge and resulted in imitation on a grand scale, as contemporaries adapted themselves to the typical images of the novel. The novel educated whole generations; it was an epidemic, a social mode, a school, and a religion. During the period of the Napoleonic wars, a vortex of imitative, lesser biographies formed around the central historical figure, around Napoleon’s biography, without reproducing it in every detail of course, but playing variations on a theme. In Le Rouge et le noir Stendhal told one of these imitative biographies.

  If originally the personae of the novel were unusual, gifted people, the opposite could be noted as the European novel began to decline: the ordinary man became the hero, and the center of gravity shifted to social motivation. That is, society made its appearance as a character participating in the action, as for example in Balzac or Zola.

  All this prompts conjecture about an existing link between the fate of the novel and how at a given time the fate of personality in history is viewed. There is no need here to speak of the actual fluctuations that occur in the role of personality in history, but only about how this problem might be resolved at a given moment, ins
ofar as such a resolution forms and nourishes the minds of contemporaries.

  And so the nineteenth-century flowering of the novel is directly dependent on the Napoleonic epos, which greatly heightened the stock value of personality in history and, through Balzac and Stendhal, enriched the soil for the whole French and European novel. The typical biography of the usurper and man of destiny Bonaparte was scattered by Balzac through dozens of his so-called “novels of success” [romans de réussite], where the basic motive force is not love but career—that is, the striving to beat one’s way from the lower and middle social layers into the upper.

  Clearly, once we’ve entered the zone of powerful social movements, activities organized on a mass scale, the stock value of personality in history falls, and the power and influence of the novel fall with it. For the novel, the commonly acknowledged role of personality in history serves as a kind of pressure gauge, indicating the pressure of the social atmosphere. The measure of the novel is a human biography, or a system of biographies. From his very first steps, the new novelist felt that an individual fate did not exist, and he tried to transplant what he needed from the soil it grew in, with all its roots, all its accompaniments and attributes. Thus the novel always offers us a pattern of events, controlled by the biographical link, measured by a biographical measure, and sustaining itself compositionally only insofar as it responds to the centrifugal pull of our planetary system; insofar as the centripetal pull, the pull of the center on the periphery, has not decisively asserted itself over the centrifugal.