Osip Mandelstam Read online

  The bow rings, the arrow trembles,

  And, spiraling, Pithon died . . .

  The liturgy was a thorn in the side of the eighteenth century. It saw nothing around itself that one way or another was not connected with the liturgy, that did not issue from it. Architecture, music, painting—all radiated from a single center, and this center was destined for destruction. In the composition of painting there is a certain question which conditions the movement and balance of colors: where is the source of light? Thus, the eighteenth century, which had rejected the source of light it had historically inherited, was obliged to resolve this problem all over again for itself. And it resolved it in an original way, having broken a window through to a paganism invented by itself, to a sham antiquity, inauthentic and by no means based on philology, but helpful, utilitarian, composed to satisfy a ripened historical need.

  The rationalistic moments of mythology met this need of the time as well as anything could, permitting it to settle the waste sky with human images, pliant and obedient to the capricious vanity of the age. As for Deism, it tolerated anything; Deism was ready to tolerate everything as long as the modest significance of the underpainting was retained, as long as what was painted was not an empty canvas.

  As the great French Revolution approached, the pseudoantique theatricalization of life and politics made greater and greater headway, and by the time of the Revolution itself, the practical participants were already moving and struggling in a thick crowd of personifications and allegories, in the narrow space of actual theatrical wings, on the boards of a staged antique drama. When real furies of ancient rage gathered within this pathetic cardboard theater, when they walked into the pompous gabble of civic holidays and municipal choruses, it was hard to believe at first; and only Chenier’s poetry, a poetry of authentic antique rage, clearly showed that a union of intellect and the furies does indeed exist, that the ancient iambic spirit which had once inspired Archilochus to produce the first iambs still lived in the rebellious European soul.

  The spirit of antique rage, with its festive luxury and dark majesty, made its appearance in the French Revolution. Isn’t this what flung the Gironde at the Mountain and the Mountain at the Gironde? Wasn’t this what broke out in the tongues of fire of the Phrygian cap and in the unprecedented thirst for mutual extermination that ripped open the womb of the Convention? Freedom, equality, and brotherhood—this triad left no place for the furies of authentic raging antiquity. They had not invited her to the feast, she came herself; they had not called her, she appeared unasked; they spoke with her in the language of intellect, but little by little she converted her most outspoken opponents into her followers.

  The French Revolution ended when the spirit of antique rage departed; it had burned the priesthood, killed social determinism, completed the secularization of Europe. And then, there splashed out onto the shore of the nineteenth century, already misunderstood—not the head of the Gorgon, but a fascicle of seaweed. Out of the union of mind and the furies there was born a mongrel cur, equally strange to the high rationalism of the Encyclopedia and the antique madness of the revolutionary storm—Romanticism.

  But, as it unfolded, the nineteenth century left the past a lot further behind than Romanticism had.

  The nineteenth century was the carrier of Buddhist influence in European culture.2 It was the bearer of an alien, hostile, and powerful principle with which all our history has struggled—an active, pragmatic, thoroughly dialectical and vital conflict of forces which had brought each other to fruition. The nineteenth century was the cradle of a Nirvana which did not allow a single ray of active knowledge to shine through.

  In an empty cave

  I am the rocking of a cradle

  Under somebody’s hand,

  Silence, silence.

  Latent Buddhism, an inclination inward, a wormhole. The age did not preach Buddhism but bore it within, like an inner night, like a blindness of the blood, like a secret terror and a head-spinning weakness. Buddhism in science under the thin mask of a bustling positivism; Buddhism in art in the analytical novel of the Goncourts and Flaubert; Buddhism in religion peeking out from all the holes in the theory of progress, preparing the triumph of the newest theosophy, which is nothing other than the bourgeois religion of progress, the religion of the apothecary Monsieur Homais, in preparation for further sailing rigged with metaphysical gear.

  It seems to me not accidental, the inclination of the Goncourts and those who thought like them, the first French Impressionists, to Japanese art, to the print of Hokusai, to the form of the tanka3 in all its aspects; to a composition, that is, entirely immobile and self-enclosed. All of Madame Bovary is written according to the system of the tanka. The reason Flaubert wrote it so slowly and so painfully is that after every five words he had to begin all over again.

  The tanka is the favored form of molecular art. It is not a miniature, and it would be a gross mistake to confuse it with a miniature because of its brevity. It has no scale because there is no action in it. It doesn’t relate to the world in any way, because it is itself a world. It is the constant vortical movement inward of molecules.

  The cherry branch and the snowy peak of a favorite mountain, the patronesses of Japanese engravers, are reflected in the shining lacquer of each phrase of the polished Flaubertian novel. Here everything is covered with the lacquer of pure contemplation, and, like the surface of the rosewood tree, the style of the novel is capable of reflecting any object. If such works did not frighten contemporaries, this would be attributed to their striking insensitivity and lack of artistic perceptiveness. Of all Flaubert’s critics perhaps the most penetrating was the royal prosecuting attorney, who sensed a certain danger in the novel. Unfortunately, however, he did not seek it where it was hidden.

  The nineteenth century at its extreme simply had to arrive at the form of the tanka—a poetry of nonbeing and Buddhism in art.

  Essentially Japan and China are not at all the East, but rather the extreme West: they are more Western than London or Paris. Our past century really kept moving deeper into the West, and not the East, but it merged with the Far East in its striving for the outer limit.

  Looking at the analytical French novel as the peak of nineteenth-century Western Buddhism, we become convinced of its total literary sterility. It has had no heirs, nor could it really have any—only naïve epigones, of which a large number still remain. Tolstoy’s novels are pure epic and an entirely healthy European form of art. The synthetic novel of Romain Rolland broke sharply with the tradition of the French analytical novel and was related to the synthetic novel of the eighteenth century, mainly to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, with which its basic artistic technique links it.

  There exists a special kind of synthetic blindness to manifestations of the individual. Goethe and Romain Rolland depict psychological landscapes, landscapes of characters and spiritual conditions; but the form of the Japano-Flaubertian analytical tanka is alien to them. In the veins of every century there flows a foreign blood, not its own, and the stronger, the more intensive historically the age, the more heavily this foreign blood weighs.

  After the eighteenth century, which understood nothing, possessed not the least feeling for the comparative-historical method, like a blind kitten in a basket, left abandoned amidst worlds incomprehensible to it, there arrived the century of omnicomprehension—the century of relativism with its monstrous capacity for reincarnating past ages—the nineteenth. Yet this taste for historical reincarnations and omnicomprehension proved to be not steady but transient, and our own century has begun under the sign of a sublime intolerance, exclusively, and the conscious noncomprehension of other worlds. In the veins of our century there flows the heavy blood of extremely distant monumental cultures, perhaps the Egyptian and Assyrian.

  The wind brought us comfort,

  And in the azure we sensed

  The Assyrian wings of the dragonflies,

  Partitions of elbow-jointed darkness.4

&
nbsp; In relation to this new age, turned cruel and immense, we appear as colonizers. To Europeanize and humanize the twentieth century, to make it glow with a theological warmth—that is the task facing the survivors of the collapse of the nineteenth century, those who have been cast ashore by the will of the fates on a new historical continent.

  And in this work it is easier to find support in the more remote rather than in the more immediate past. The elementary formulas, the general conceptions of the eighteenth century may once again come in handy. “The skeptical assessment of the Encyclopedia,” the legal spirit of the social contract, naive materialism once so arrogantly mocked, schematic intellect, the spirit of expediency may yet serve mankind. Now is not the time to fear rationalism. The irrational root of the oncoming epoch, the gigantic inextirpable double-stranded root, like the stone temple of an alien god, casts its shadow upon us. In days like these, the intellect of the Encyclopedists is the sacred fire of Prometheus.

  Note

  Note: This translation was originally published in New Literary History 1 (1974–1975): 641–646.

  Peter Chaadaev

  I.

  The trace Chaadaev left on Russian consciousness was so deep and unerasable as to suggest it had been made by diamond on glass. It is all the more remarkable in that Chaadaev was not what you might call a “public figure,” neither a professional writer nor a tribune. By his whole turn of mind, he was a “private” man; what is called a privatier. Yet, as though aware that his personality belonged not to him but to posterity, he regarded it with a certain humility. Whatever he did, it turned out that he “served,” that he performed a sacred task.

  All those qualities that Russian life lacked, the existence of which it did not even suspect, joined together as if on purpose in the person of Chaadaev: an enormous inner discipline, a high-minded intellectualism, moral architectonics, and the cold of a mask, of a metal casing with which he encircled himself, aware that by the measure of the ages he was merely a shape, and so he went about preparing ahead of time the specific mold of his immortality.

  Still more unusual for Russia was Chaadaev’s dualism, the clear distinction he made between matter and spirit. In an unformed country, a country of half-animated matter and half-dead spirit, that ancient antinomy of the inert clod and the organizing idea was almost unknown. In Chaadaev’s eyes, all of Russia still belonged to the world of the unformed and unorganized. He himself was flesh of the flesh of this Russia, and he regarded himself as raw material. The results achieved were amazing. The Idea organized his personality, not merely his mind, and gave this personality a structure, an architecture, subordinated it entirely to itself, overlooking nothing, and as a reward for this absolute subordination endowed it with absolute freedom.

  A deep harmony, the virtual fusion of the moral and intellectual element, gives Chaadaev’s personality its special firmness. It is hard to say where Chaadaev’s intellectual personality leaves off and where his moral personality begins, so close are they to complete fusion. The strongest requirement of intellect was for him at the same time the greatest moral necessity.

  I speak of the requirement of unity, which determines the structure of chosen intellects.

  “What could we talk about, then?” he asked Pushkin in one of his letters. “I have, you know, just one idea, and if some other ideas should inadvertently pop into my brain, they would certainly get stuck on to that very idea immediately: and would that suit you?”

  What then was the nature of this renowned “intellect” of Chaadaev’s, this “proud” intellect, sung deferentially by Pushkin, hissed by the provocative Iazykov, if not a fusion of the moral with the intellectual principle, a fusion so characteristic of Chaadaev, in pursuit of which his personality came to its maturity.

  With this deep, ineradicable demand for unity, for a higher historical synthesis, Chaadaev was born in Russia. The native of the plains wanted to breathe the air of Alpine heights, and, as we see, he found them within himself.

  II.

  In the West there is unity! From the time these words flared up in Chaadaev’s consciousness, he no longer belonged to himself and tore himself away forever from “domesticity.” He had enough manliness to tell Russia to her face the frightening truth—that she was cut off from global unity, severed from history, from “God’s teachers of peoples.”

  The thing is that Chaadaev’s understanding of history excludes the possibility of any setting forth on the historical path. According to his understanding, one could be on the historical path only prior to any beginning. History was a Jacob’s ladder by which angels descended to earth. It must be called sacred, because of the continuity of the spirit of grace which lives in it. And so Chaadaev does not even mention “Moscow, the Third Rome.” In this idea he could have seen only the stunted contrivance of the Kievan monks. Neither readiness alone nor good intentions are sufficient to “begin” history. It is unthinkable to begin it at all. Continuity is lacking, and unity. Unity cannot be created or invented or learned. Where there is no unity, at best there is “progress,” but not history; the mechanical movement of a clockhand, but not the sacred linkage and succession of events.

  Like a man enchanted, Chaadaev kept staring at the one place where this unity had become flesh, cautiously preserved, inherited from generation to generation. “But the Pope! the Pope! Well, what of it? Isn’t he, too, simply an idea, a pure abstraction? Take a look at this old man, being carried in his palanquin under a canopy, in his triple crown, now just as a thousand years ago, as if nothing in the world had changed: really, where in all this is the man? Isn’t this an all-powerful symbol of time—not of that time which passes, but of that which remains motionless, through which everything else passes, but which itself stands imperturbable and in which and by means of which everything is brought to completion.”

  Such was the Catholicism of the snob of Zamoskvorech’e.

  III.

  And so, in August, 1825, a foreigner made his appearance in a sea-coast village near Brighton, who united in his bearing the solemnity of a bishop with the correctness of a worldly mannequin.

  This was Chaadaev, who had fled Russia on the first boat that came along, with such haste, as if some danger threatened him, without any external need, but with the firm intent never to return.

  The sickly, hypochondriacal, odd patient of foreign doctors, who had never known any other contact with people except a purely intellectual one, concealing even from those close to him his terrible spiritual upheaval, came to see his West, the realm of history and majesty, native land of the spirit embodied in the church and in architecture.

  This strange journey which occupied two years of Chaadaev’s life, about which we know very little, is more like a languishing in the desert than a pilgrimage. And then Moscow, the wooden separate-wing residence, the “Apology of a Madman,” and the long, measured years of preaching in the “Anglish” Club.

  Is it that Chaadaev wearied? Is it that his Gothic thought submitted and ceased to raise up to the sky its lancet turrets? No, Chaadaev did not submit, although time’s blunt file scraped his thoughts as well as others.

  O precious scraps of the thinker’s heritage! Fragments that break off just where one wishes elaborations above all, grandiose introductions about which one doesn’t know whether they indicate a projected plan or its actual fulfillment. In vain the conscientious researcher sighs over what has been lost, the missing links. They never existed, and they were never lost: the fragmentary form of the Philosophical Letters is inherent in them, as is their essential nature of an extended introduction.

  To understand the form and spirit of the Philosophical Letters, one needs to imagine that Russia serves them as an immense and awesome foundation. The yawning emptiness among the well-known written fragments is the thought of Russia that absents itself from them.

  It is best not to touch on the “Apology.” Certainly, it is not here that Chaadaev said what he thought about Russia.

  And, like a hope
less flat plain, the last unfinished period of the “Apology” stretches on, this dreary, broadly prophetic beginning which at the same time promises nothing, after so much has already been said: “There is a certain fact which rules authoritatively over our historical movement, which passes like a red thread through our entire history, which contains within itself, so to speak, all its philosophy, which manifests itself in all the epochs of our social life and determines their character . . . And this is the fact of geography . . .”

  From the Philosophical Letters one can learn only that Russia was the mainspring of Chaadaev’s thought. What he thought about Russia remains a mystery. Having inscribed the excellent words, “Truth is more precious than country,” Chaadaev did not reveal their prophetic meaning. Yet is it not an amazing sight, this “truth,” surrounded on all sides as by some sort of chaos, by this alien and strange “native land”?

  Let us try to develop the Philosophical Letters as if they were a photographic negative. Perhaps those places that become light will turn out to be precisely about Russia.

  IV.

  There is a great Slavic dream of the end of history in the Western sense of the word, as Chaadaev understood it. It is a dream of universal spiritual disarmament, after which a certain condition will arrive, called “peace.” The dream of spiritual disarmament has taken such a hold on our domestic horizon that the rank-and-file member of the Russian intelligentsia cannot imagine the final goal of progress other than in terms of this unhistorical “peace.” Not very long ago Tolstoy himself addressed mankind with the summons to bring to an end the false and unnecessary comedy of history and to begin “simply” to live. It is this simplicity that makes the idea of “peace” so irresistible:

  Pathetic man . . .

  What does he want? . . . The sky is clear,

  Beneath the sky, much room for all.

  Earthly and heavenly hierarchies are forever being abolished for their uselessness. Church, state, law disappear from consciousness like stupid chimeras, with which man, to while away the time, through stupidity, populated the “simple,” “God-made” world, and finally there remain, tête-à-tête, without tiresome intermediaries, a pair—man and the universe: