Osip Mandelstam Read online

  With the sky opposite, on the earth,

  An old man lived in a certain village.1

  Chaadaev’s thought is constructed as a strict perpendicular to traditional Russian thinking. He fled this formless paradise as from the plague.

  Certain historians have seen in colonization, in striving to settle as freely as possible in expanses as vast as possible, the dominant tendency in Russian history.

  In the powerful striving to populate the external world with ideas, with values, and with images, in the striving which has already for so many centuries formed the agony and the ecstasy of the West and hurled its peoples into the labyrinth of history where they wander to this day—one can perceive a parallel to this external colonization.

  There, in the forest of the social church where the Gothic pine needle admits no other light than the light of the idea, Chaadaev’s main thought took shelter and ripened, his mute thought about Russia.

  Chaadaev’s West did not at all resemble the cleared paths of civilization. In the full meaning of the word, he discovered his own West. Verily, into these thickets of culture the foot of man had not yet entered.

  V.

  Chaadaev’s thought, national in its sources, is national even where it joins with Rome. Only a Russian man could have discovered this West, which is denser, more concrete, than the historical West itself. Chaadaev, precisely by this right of being a Russian, entered upon the sacred soil of a tradition to which he was not bound by inheritance. There, where all is necessity, where each stone, covered by the cobweb of time, dreams, immured in its arch, Chaadaev carried moral freedom, the gift of the Russian land, its best flower. This freedom is worthy of the majesty congealed in architectural forms, it is as valuable as everything the West created in the realm of material culture, and I see how the Pope, “this old man, being carried in his palanquin under a canopy, in his triple crown,” raised himself up that he might greet it.

  It would be best to characterize Chaadaev’s thought as national-synthetic. A synthetic nationality does not bow its head before the fact of national self-consciousness but rises above it in sovereign personality, characterized by its own way of life and therefore national.

  Contemporaries were astonished at Chaadaev’s pride; and he believed himself in his chosenness. In him there slumbered a hieratic solemnity, and even children felt the significance of his presence, although he did not in any way depart from common good manners. He felt himself chosen, the vessel of true nationality; yet the nation was no longer a fitting judge!

  What a striking contrast to nationalism, to that beggary of the spirit which appeals incessantly to the monstrous tribunal of the crowd!

  For Chaadaev, there was only one gift that Russia had: moral freedom, the freedom of choice. Never in the West had it been realized in such majesty, in such purity and fullness, Chaadaev took it up like a sacred staff and went to Rome.

  I think that a country and a people have already justified themselves, if they have created even one completely free man who wanted and knew how to use his freedom.

  When Boris Godunov, anticipating Peter’s idea, sent young Russians abroad, not one of them returned. They did not return for the simple reason that there was no way back from being to nonbeing, that in stuffy Moscow they would have been stifled, who had partaken of the immortal spring of undying Rome.

  But then, neither did the first doves return to the dovecote.

  Chaadaev was the first Russian who, in actual fact, ideologically, had lived in the West and found the road back. His contemporaries felt this instinctively and valued terribly Chaadaev’s presence among them.

  They could point to him with superstitious awe, as once to Dante: “He was there, he saw—and came back.”

  And how many of us have spiritually emigrated to the West! And how many among us who live in unconscious duplicity, whose bodies are here, but whose spirits have remained there!

  Chaadaev signifies a new deepened understanding of nationality as the highest flowering of personality and of Russia as the source of absolute moral freedom.

  Having allotted us inner freedom, Russia presents us with a choice, and those who have made this choice are genuine Russian people, wherever they may attach themselves. But woe unto those who, after having circled about close to their home-nest, faintheartedly return!

  Notes about Chénier

  The eighteenth century is like a dried-up lake: with neither depth nor moisture, every underwater thing found itself on the surface. To people themselves, it was frightening, due to the transparency and emptiness of the concepts. La Vérité, la Liberté, la Nature, la Déité, especially la Vertu; they call forth an almost dizzying head-whirl of thought, like transparent, evaporated ponds. This century, which had been forced to walk along the ocean bottom as on a parquet floor, turned out to be preeminently a century of moralizing. People were astonished by the most trivial moral truths as if by rare sea shells. Human thought was suffocating from a cornucopia of false truths and yet could find no rest. Because, obviously, these all turned out to be insufficiently effective, it followed that they had to be endlessly repeated.

  The Great Principles of the eighteenth century were always in motion, in a kind of mechanical flurry, like a Buddhist prayer wheel. Here is an example: the thought of antiquity had understood the Good as bounty or well-being; nothing here, as yet, of that inner emptiness of hedonism. The Good, well-being, health merged in a single representation, as a fully weighted, single-natured golden globe. Inside this concept there was no vacuum. And so this seamless nature of antique moralizing, by no means imperative, and by no means hedonistic, permits one even to doubt the moral nature of this consciousness: isn’t it rather just a kind of hygiene; that is, a prophylaxis of spiritual health?

  The eighteenth century lost a direct link with the moral consciousness of the ancient world. The seamless golden globe no longer made any music of its own. Cunning devices were used to draw sounds from it, considerations of the usefulness of the pleasant and the pleasure of the useful. This divested consciousness simply could not bear the idea of duty, and it made its appearance in the image “Roman Virtue,” more suitable for supporting the equilibrium of bad tragedies than for administering the spiritual life of man. Yes, the link with authentic antiquity was lost for the eighteenth century; much more powerful was the link with the rigidified forms of scholastic casuistry, so that the Age of Reason appears as the direct heir of scholasticism, with its rationalism, allegorical thinking, personifications of ideas, quite in the manner of the Old French poetics. The Middle Ages had its own soul and an authentic knowledge of antiquity; and, not only in the matter of writing, but also in the loving reproduction of the Classical world, it left the Age of Enlightenment far behind. The muses had no fun around Intellect, and they were bored with it, though they only reluctantly acknowledged this. Everything living and healthy went into knickknacks and trivia, because there was less surveillance over these, while a child with seven nurses (Tragedy) degenerated into a luxuriant sterile flower, precisely because the Great Principles had spent so much time bending over her cradle and nursing her along. Younger forms of poetry that fortunately escaped this deadly tutelage would outlive the old that had withered under its hand.

  Chenier’s1 poetic path was a departure, almost a flight, from the Great Principles to the living water of poetry, by no means to antiquity, but to a completely contemporary understanding of the world.

  In Chénier’s poetry one seems to see a religious and perhaps a childishly naïve presentiment of the nineteenth century.

  The Alexandrine verse goes back to antiphony; that is, to a roll-call exchange of the chorus, divided into two halves, which have the same amount of time at their disposal for the expression of their will. However, this equality of right is violated when one voice relinquishes part of the time belonging to it to the other. Time is the pure and unvarnished substance of the Alexandrine. The distribution of time along the runnels of verb, subject, and predicate composes th
e autonomous inner life of the Alexandrine verse, regulates its breathing, its tension, and its degree of saturation. Amidst all this there takes place as it were a “struggle for time” among the elements of the verse, during which each of them, like a sponge, tries to absorb into itself as large a quantity of time as possible, while encountering in this effort the claims of the others. The triad of subject, verb, and predicate, is not, in an Alexandrine verse, something invariable, because these keep absorbing an alien content, and often the verb appears with the significance and weight of the subject, the predicate with the significance of action, that is, of the verb, and so forth.

  Thus we have a fluidity of the relationships of the separate parts of speech, their fusibility, their capacity for chemical transmutation while retaining the absolute clarity and transparency of syntax that is extremely characteristic of Chénier’s style. The strictest hierarchy of predicate, verb, and subject on the monotonous canvas of the Alexandrine verse pattern traces the line of the image, communicates a prominence to the alternation of the paired lines.

  Chénier belongs to a generation of French poets for whom syntax was a golden cage, from which they never dreamed of springing out. This golden cage was definitively constructed by Racine and furnished as a magnificent palace. The syntactical freedom of the medieval poets—Villon, Rabelais, the whole Old French syntax—remained behind, while the romantic uproar of Chateaubriand and Lamartine had not yet begun. A mean parrot guarded the golden cage—Boileau. Chénier faced the problem of creating an absolute plenitude of poetic freedom within the limits of the narrowest canon, and he solved this problem. The sense of the separate line as a living, indivisible organism and the sense of verbal hierarchy within the confines of this integral line are unusually characteristic of French poetry.

  Chénier loved and sensed the separate, wandering line: he took a liking to the “Verse from the Epithalamion of Bion,” and he preserved it.

  It is in the nature of the new French line, founded by Clément Marot, father of the Alexandrine,2 to weigh a word before it is uttered. Romantic poetics, however, assumes an outburst, unexpectedness, seeks after effect, unanticipated acoustics, and never knows what the song itself is costing it. From the powerful harmonic wave of Lamartine’s “Lake” to the ironical little songs of Verlaine, Romantic poetry affirms the poetics of the unexpected. The laws of poetry sleep in the larynx, and all of Romantic poetry, like a necklace of dead nightingales, will not transmit, will not relinquish its secrets, knows no testament. A dead nightingale teaches nobody how to sing. Chénier ingeniously found a middle way between the Classical and the Romantic manner.

  Pushkin’s generation had already surmounted Chénier, because there had been Byron. One and the same generation could not grasp simultaneously “the sound of the new, miraculous lyre, the sound of the lyre of Byron,” and the abstract, externally cold and rational poetry of Chénier which was nevertheless full of the obsessed rage of antiquity.

  That by which Chénier still spiritually burned—the Encyclopedia, Deism, the rights of man—was already for Pushkin the past, pure literature:

  . . . Diderot sat down on his rickety three-legged stool,

  Threw off his wig, shut his eyes in rapture,

  And preached away . . .

  The Pushkinian formula—the union of mind and the furies—contains the two elements of the poetry of Chénier. The age was such that no one managed to escape obsession. Only its direction changed and it went off, now into the pathos of restraint, now into the power of the accusatory iamb.

  The iambic spirit descends upon Chénier like a fury. The imperative. The Dionysian character. Obsession.

  Chénier would never have said, “You live for life’s sake.” He was completely removed from the Epicureanism of the age, from the Olympianism of the bigwigs and aristocracy.

  Pushkin is more objective and more dispassionate, than Chénier in his appraisal of the French Revolution. Where Chénier feels only hatred and a living anguish, Pushkin knows how to contemplate and has historical perspective: “Do you remember as well, Trianon, the whir of those times of fun?”

  Allegorical poetics. Very broad allegories, by no means fleshless, among them, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—for the poet and his time these are almost living persons and interlocutors. He tries to capture their features, he senses their warm breathing.

  In “Jeu de paume” one observes a struggle between a journalistic theme and the iambic spirit. Almost the entire poem is in thrall to the newspaper.

  The commonplace of a journalistic style:

  Pères d’un peuple, architectes des lois!

  Vous qui savez fonder d’une main ferme et sûre

  Pour l’homme un code solonnel.3

  The Classical idealization of contemporaneity: the crowd of the estates’ representatives, making their way to the riding hall, accompanied by the people, is compared with the pregnant Latona, almost a mother.

  Comme Latone enceinte, et déjà presque mère,

  Victime d’un jaloux pouvoir,

  Sans asile flottait, courait la terre entière.4

  The dissolution of the world into intelligently operating forces. The only one who turns out to be singularly unintelligent is man. The entire poetics of civil poetry is a search for curbs—frein: “. . . l’oppresseur n’est jamais libre . . .”5

  What are Chénier’s poetics? Maybe he has not one but several in different periods or, more precisely, moments of poetic consciousness?

  These can be differentiated: the pastoral-shepherdly (Bucoliques, Idylles)6 and the grandiose construction of an almost “Scientific Poetry.”

  Is the influence of Montesquieu and of English common law on Chénier not confirmed, in connection with his stay in England? Isn’t there anything he wrote, like the Pushkinian line, “Here a flaming onslaught, there a stern rebuff . . .”? Or is his abstract mind alien to Pushkinian practicality?

  Although the Old French literary tradition had been completely forgotten, some of its devices went on being automatically reproduced, because they had entered into the blood.

  Strange, after the antique elegy with all its accessories, where there are the earthenware jug, the reed, the brook, the beehive, the rosebush, the swallow, and the friends and interlocutors and witnesses and spies of the lovers, to find in Chénier an inclination to a completely worldly elegy in the spirit of the Romantics; almost Musset-like, as, for example, the third elegy to “Camille,” a worldly love letter delicately unforced and agitated, where the epistolary form is almost liberated from its mythological contingencies, and the animated conversational style of a man who thinks and feels in the Romantic manner flows freely forth:

  Et puis d’un ton charmant, la lettre me demande

  Ce que je veux de toi, ce que je te commande!

  Ce que je veux! dis-tu. Je veux que ton retour

  Te paraisse bien lent; je veux que nuit et jour

  Tu m’aimes (nuit et jour hèlas! je me tourmente).

  Présente au milieu d’eux, sois seule, sois absente;

  Dors en pensant à moi! rêve-moi près de toi;

  Ne vois que moi sans cesse, et sois toute avec moi.7

  In these lines one hears Tatiana’s letter to Onegin, the same domesticity of language, the same sweet heedlessness, better than any caution, and it is just as much at the heart of the French language, just as spontaneous in French as Tatiana’s letter is in Russian. For us, through the crystal of the Pushkinian lines, these lines sound almost Russian:

  The pink wafer goes dry

  On the inflamed tongue.

  Thus in poetry the boundaries of the national are destroyed, and the elements of one language exchange greetings with those of another over the heads of space and time, for all languages are linked by a fraternal bond, which strengthens itself on the freedom and domesticity of each, and within this freedom they are fraternally akin, and, each from its own home, they call out to each other.

  François Villon

  Astronomers a
ccurately predict the return of a comet after a long interval of time. For those who know Villon, the phenomenon of Verlaine presents just such an astronomic wonder. The vibrations of these two voices are strikingly similar. Yet, in addition to tone of voice and biography, the two poets are linked by an almost identical mission with regard to the literature contemporary to them. Both were fated to emerge in epochs of artificial hothouse poetry, and, just as Verlaine destroyed the serres chaudes of Symbolism, Villon flung his challenge to the powerful Rhetorical school, which could quite rightly be considered the Symbolism of the fifteenth century. The well-known Roman de la Rose built for the first time the impermeable wall within which that tepid atmosphere went on thickening, which the allegories created by this Romance needed in order to breathe. Love, Danger, Hatred, Perfidy are not dead abstractions. They are not fleshless. Medieval poetry lends these phantoms an astral body as it were and fusses tenderly over the artificial atmosphere so vital to the support of their fragile existence. The garden where these peculiar personages live is enclosed by a high wall. The lover, as the beginning of the Roman de la Rose narrates, has been wandering around this wall for a long time in a vain search for the elusive entry.

  Poetry and life in the fifteenth century were two independent, hostile dimensions. It is difficult to believe that Maître Alain Chartier was subjected to real persecution and suffered mundane discomforts after having incensed the public opinion of his day by too stern a judgment on the Cruel Lady, whom he drowned in the well of tears, after a brilliant trial which observed all the niceties of medieval jurisprudence. Fifteenth-century poetry was autonomous: the place it occupied in the culture of its time resembled that of a state within the state. Let us recall the Court of Love of Charles VI: there were over seven hundred varied official ranks, beginning with the highest signory and ending with petty bourgeois and lower clercs. The exclusively literary nature of this institution explains its contempt for social partitioning. The hypnotic power of literature was so great that members of similar associations wandered about the streets adorned with green wreaths—the symbol of being in love—wishing to extend the literary dream into reality.