Osip Mandelstam Read online

  François de Montcorbier (de Loges) was born in Paris in 1431, during the time of English rule. The poverty that surrounded his cradle matched the misfortune of the people and, specifically, the misfortune of the capital. One might have expected that the literature of the time would be suffused with a patriotic pathos and a thirst for revenge for the offended dignity of the nation. However, neither in Villon nor in his contemporaries do we find such feelings. France, occupied by foreigners, showed herself a real woman. Like a woman in captivity, she devoted her main attention to the details of her customary and cultural toilette, sizing up the conquerors with curiosity. High society, right behind its poets, was carried away as before by fantasy into the fourth dimension of the Gardens of Love and the Gardens of Delight, and for the common people the lights of the taverns were lit in the evenings, and on holidays farces and mysteries were played.

  The feminine-passive nature of the epoch left a profound imprint on the fate and on the character of Villon. Throughout his whole aimless life he carried the firm conviction that someone had to look after him, to manage his affairs and extract him from difficult situations. Even as a mature man, thrown into the basement-dungeon of Meung sur Loire by the Bishop of Orléans, he called plaintively to his friends: “Le laisserez-vous là, le pauvre Villon?”1 The social career of François de Montcorbier began from the time that Guillaume de Villon, the worthy canon of the monastery church of Saint Benoît-le-Bétourné, took him under his tutelage. By Villon’s own acknowledgement, the old canon was “more than a mother” to him. In 1449 he received the baccalaureate degree; in 1452, the licenciate and master’s degree. “O Lord, if I had studied in the days of my heedless youth and dedicated myself to good morals, I would have received a house and a soft bed. But what’s the use of talking! I escaped from school like a cunning urchin: as I write these words, my heart bleeds.” Strange as it may seem, Maître François Villon had several students, at one time, and instructed them, as best he could, in scholastic wisdom. But, with his characteristic self-honesty, he acknowledged he had no right to be called Maître and in his ballads preferred to call himself a “poor little scholar.” And it really was especially difficult for Villon to keep working because, as luck would have it, the years of his study coincided with the student agitations of 1451–1453.

  Medieval people loved to consider themselves children of the city, of the church, of the university. But the “children of the university” were exceptionally inclined to mischief. A heroic hunt was organized for the most popular signboards of the Paris market. The Stag was to marry off the She-Goat to the Bear, and the Parrot was meant to be a gift. The students stole a boundary stone from the estate of Mademoiselle de Bruyères, erected it on top of Mount St. Genevieve, calling it la vesse, and, having won it from the authorities by force, fastened it to the spot with iron bands. On this round stone they placed another one, oblong in shape—“Pet au Diable”2—and they worshipped there nights, strewing the stones with flowers, dancing around them to the sounds of flute and tambourine. The furious butchers and the offended lady brought suit. The provost of Paris declared war on the students. Two jurisdictions clashed, and the audacious ringleaders had to go on their knees with lit candles in their hands to beg mercy of the rector. Villon, who undoubtedly stood at the center of these events, engraved them in his romance “Le Pet au Diable,” which has not come down to us.

  Villon was a Parisian. He loved the city and idleness. Toward nature he nourished no tenderness of any sort, and even mocked at her. Even in the fifteenth century, Paris was the kind of sea in which one could swim without being bored, forgetting about the rest of the universe. Yet how easy to run aground on one of the numberless reefs of an idle existence! Villon becomes a murderer. The passivity of his fate is remarkable. Almost as though it awaits the occasion of its realization, all the same whether that be good or bad. In a foolish street brawl of the fifth of June, Villon kills the priest Sermoise with a heavy stone. Sentenced to hanging, he appeals; pardoned, he makes his way into exile. Vagabondage decisively shattered his morality, bringing him in touch with the Coquille criminal band, a member of which he then became. On returning to Paris, he takes part in the great burglary in the Collège de Navarre and immediately flees to Angers—because of a broken heart, as he would assert; in actual fact, to make preparations for robbing his rich uncle. Disappearing from the Parisian horizon, Villon publishes his Petit Testament. Years of aimless wandering follow, with pauses at feudal courts and in prisons. Amnestied by Louis XI on October 2, 1461, Villon experiences a deep creative unrest, his thoughts and feeling become exceptionally sharp, and he composes the Grand Testament, his memorial for the ages. In November, 1463, François Villon was the eyewitness of a quarrel and a murder on the Rue St. Jacques. Here our information about his life comes to an end and his dark biography breaks off.

  The fifteenth century was cruel to personal destinies. It turned many of its respectable and sober people into Jobs, murmuring in the depths of their gloomy dungeons and accusing God of injustice. A special kind of prison poetry was created, suffused with biblical bitterness and severity, insofar as these modes were accessible to the courtly Romance soul. From this chorus of convicts, however, Villon’s voice may be sharply distinguished. His revolt is more like a legal action than like a mutiny. He knew how to combine in one and the same person the plaintiff and the defendant. In his attitude to himself, Villon never exceeds certain limits of intimacy. He is tender, attentive, concerned with himself no more than a good lawyer would be with his client. Self-pity is a parasitic emotion, corruptive of the spirit and the organism. But the dry juridical pity which Villon affords himself is for him a source of boldness and firm conviction in the justice of his “case.” A most unscrupulous, “amoral” man, like a proper heir of the Romans, he lives entirely in a legal world and cannot conceive of any relationships outside of feudal jurisdiction and the norm. A lyric poet is by his nature a bisexual being capable of endless fission in the name of interior dialogue. In none was this “lyrical hermaphroditism” more pronounced than in Villon. What a varied selection of enchanting duets: the offended and the comforter, mother and child, judge and accused, property-owner and beggar.

  All his life, property beckoned to Villon like a musical siren and made a thief out of him . . . and a poet. A pathetic vagabond, he appropriated for himself goods that were inaccessible to him, with the aid of his witty irony.

  Our contemporary French Symbolists are in love with things, like property-owners. Perhaps the very “soul of things” is nothing other than the feeling of the property-owner, spiritualized and ennobled in the laboratory of subsequent generations. Villon was highly conscious of the abyss between subject and object, but understood it as the impossibility of possession. The moon and other neutral “objects” are irrevocably excluded from his poetic usage. But then he comes instantly to life when the talk turns to roast duck in sauce, or to eternal bliss, which he never loses final hope of acquiring.

  Villon depicts a bewitching intérieur, in Dutch taste, while peeking through the keyhole.

  Villon’s sympathies for the dregs of society, for everything suspect and criminal, are by no means an expression of his demonism. The shady company which he so quickly and intimately joined captivated his feminine nature with its abundance of passion, its powerful rhythm of life, which he could not find in other spheres of society. One ought to listen with what taste Villon tells in the “Ballade de la grosse Margot” about the profession of souteneur (pimp), to which he obviously was no stranger: “When clients come I grab the jug and run for wine.” Neither waning feudalism nor the newly emergent bourgeoisie, with its tendency to Flemish headiness and importance, could provide an outlet for the immense dynamic ability stored and concentrated by some kind of miracle in this Parisian clerc. Dry and dark, eyebrowless, thin as a chimera, with a head that suggested according to his own testimony a husked and roasted nut, hiding his sword in the half-feminine dress of the student, Villon lived in Paris lik
e a squirrel in a wheel, without knowing a moment’s rest. He loved in himself the predatory lean little beast and cherished his own shabby little hide: “Is it not true, Granier, I did well that I appealed,” he writes to his own prosecutor after having been spared the gallows; “it isn’t every beast would know how to extricate himself that way.” If Villon had been able to give his poetic credo, he undoubtedly would have exclaimed like Verlaine: “Du mouvement avant toute chose!”3

  A powerful visionary, he dreams his own hanging on the eve of probable execution. But, strangely enough, with incomprehensible acrimony and rhythmic animation, he depicts in his ballad how the wind rocks the bodies of the unfortunate, to and fro, capriciously . . . Even death he endows with dynamic qualities and even here he contrives to manifest his love for rhythm and movement . . . I think it was not demonism that captivated Villon, but the dynamism of crime. For all I know there is an inverse relationship between the moral and the dynamic development of the soul. In any case, both the Testaments of Villon, the big and the little (that feast of magnificent rhythms the like of which French poetry had not previously known) are incurably amoral. Twice the pathetic vagabond writes his will, disposing of his imaginary property to the right and to the left, as a poet, ironically asserting his mastery over all the things that he wished to possess: if Villon’s spiritual experiences, for all their originality, were not distinguished by any special depth, his human relationships, the tangled web of his acquaintances, links, calculations, formed a pattern of genial complexity. This man contrived to place himself in a vital, urgent relationship to an immense number of people of the most varied callings, from all levels of the social hierarchy, from thief to bishop, from bar girl to prince. With what pleasure he tells their little secrets! How precise and keen he is! Villon’s Testaments are captivating if for no other reason than that such a mass of accurate information is communicated in them. It strikes the reader that he can use them, and he feels himself the poet’s contemporary. The present moment can bear the weight of centuries, preserve its wholeness, and retain it “now.” One only needs to know how to dig it out of the soil of time without damaging its roots—otherwise it will wither. Villon knew how to do this. The bell of the Sorbonne that interrupted his work on the Petit Testament sounds to this day.

  Like the princes of the troubadours, Villon “sang in his own Latin.” Once, as a scholar, he heard about Alcibiades—and, as a result, the unknown lady Archipiade joins the graceful procession of ladies of former times.

  The Middle Ages hung on tight to its children and did not voluntarily relinquish them to the Renaissance. Authentic medieval blood flowed in the veins of Villon. To this he owed his integrity, his temperament, his spiritual originality. The physiology of the Gothic—there was such a thing, after all, and the Middle Ages were precisely a physiologically gifted epoch—substituted for a world view for Villon and rewarded him, and then some, for the absence of a traditional link with the past. Moreover it secured him a worthy place in the future, because nineteenth-century French poetry drew its strength from the very same national treasure house of Gothic. It will be said: what does the splendid rhythm of the Testaments, now tricky, like bilboquets, now slow, like a church cantilena, have in common with the craftsmanship of the Gothic builders? Yet isn’t Gothic the triumph of dynamics? One more question: what is more mobile, more fluent, the Gothic cathedral or the oceanic surge? How if not by a sense of architectonics is that magical balance of stanzas to be explained in which Villon dedicates his soul to the Trinity by way of the Virgin in “Chambre de la divinité”—nine heavenly legions. This is no anemic flight on the little wax wings of immortality, but an architecturally based ascension, corresponding to the tiers of the Gothic cathedral. He who first proclaimed in architecture the mobile equilibrium of masses and built the crossed vault genially expressed the psychological essence of feudalism. The medieval man considered himself part of the world-building, as necessary and as constrained as any stone in the Gothic structure, bearing with dignity the pressure of his neighbors and entering as an inevitable stake into the general play of forces. To serve meant not only to be active for the common good. Unconsciously, the medieval man considered the bare fact of his existence as a service, as a kind of heroic deed. Villon, the last-born, epigone of the feudal world-sense, turned out to be unreceptive to its ethical side, to the sense of mutual commitment and guarantee! The steadfast, the moral in Gothic was quite foreign to him. On the other hand, to make up for that, by no means indifferent to its dynamics, he lifted it to the level of amoralism. Villon twice received pardons—lettres de rémission—from kings: Charles VII and Louis XI. He was firmly convinced that he would receive just such a letter from God, forgiving him all his sins. Perhaps in the spirit of his dry and rational mysticism he projected the ladder of feudal jurisdictions into infinity, and in his soul there dimly wandered a wild, but profoundly feudal insight, that there is a God beyond a God . . .

  “I know well that I am not the son of an angel crowned by the diadem of a star or of another planet,” said of himself that poor Parisian scholar, capable of much for the sake of a good supper.

  Such negations are worth as much as positive certitude.

  Note

  Note: This translation was originally published in New Literary History 1 (1974–1975) 633–639.

  Uncollected Essays and Fragments

  Pushkin & Scriabin (Fragments)

  Pushkin and Scriabin1 are two transmutations of a single sun, two transmutations of a single heart. Twice the death of an artist gathered the Russian people and kindled the sun over them. They served as an example of a collective Russian demise, they died a full death, as people are said to live a full life; their personality, while dying, extended itself to a symbol of the whole people, and the sun-heart of the dying remained forever at the zenith of suffering and glory.

  I wish to speak of Scriabin’s death as of the highest act of his creativity. It seems to me the artist’s death ought not to be excluded from the chain of his creative achievements, but rather examined as the last conclusive link. From this wholly Christian point of view, Scriabin’s death is amazing. It not only is remarkable as the fabulous posthumous growth of the artist in the eyes of the masses, but also serves as it were as the source of this creativity, as its teleological cause. If one were to tear the veil of death from this creative life, it would flow freely from its cause—that is, death—which disposes itself around it as if around its own proper sun, and absorbs its light.

  Pushkin was buried at night. Was buried secretly.2 The marble of St. Isaac’s—that magnificent sarcophagus—never did receive as expected the solar body of the poet. At night they placed the sun in its coffin, and the runners of the sled that carried the poet’s dust off to the funeral service squeaked in the January frost.

  I recall the picture of the Pushkin funeral to evoke in your memory the image of a nighttime sun,3 the image of the last Greek tragedy created by Euripides—a vision of the unfortunate Phaedra.

  In the fateful hours of purification and storm, we have raised Scriabin aloft, whose sun-heart burns above us; yet alas! this is not the sun of redemption but the sun of guilt. Affirming Scriabin as her symbol at the time of the World War, Phaedra-Russia . . .

  . . . Time can go backward: the whole course of our most recent history, which with terrific force has turned away from Christianity to Buddhism and theosophy, testifies to this . . .

  There is no unity! “Worlds are many, all dispose themselves in their orbits, god reigns over god.” What is this: hallucination or the end of Christianity?

  There is no personality! “I”—it’s a transient condition; you have many souls and many lives! What is this: hallucination or the end of Christianity?

  There is no time! The Christian chronology is in danger, the frail ledger of the years of our era is lost—time tears backward with a roaring hum and a swoosh, like a blocked torrent—and the new Orpheus flings his lyre in the seething spume: there is no more art . . .<
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  Scriabin is the next stage after Pushkin of Russian Hellenism, one more consistent disclosure of the Hellenistic nature of the Russian spirit. Scriabin’s immense value for Russia and for Christianity was determined by the fact that he was a raving Hellene. Through him, Hellas entered into a blood relationship with the Russian sectarians who burned themselves in their coffins. In any case, he is much closer to them than to the Western theosophists. His chiliasm was a purely Russian passion for salvation; what there is of antiquity in him is the madness with which he expressed this passion.

  . . . Christian art is always an action based on the great idea of redemption. It is an “imitation of Christ” infinitely various in its manifestations, an eternal return to the single creative act that began our historical era. Christian art is free. It is, in the full meaning of the phrase, “art for art’s sake.” No necessity of any kind, even the highest, clouds its bright inner freedom, for its prototype, that which it imitates, is the very redemption of the world by Christ. And so, not sacrifice, not redemption in art, but the free and joyful imitation of Christ—that is the keystone of Christian esthetics. Art cannot be a sacrifice, for a sacrifice has already been made; cannot be redemption, for the world along with the artist has already been redeemed. What then is left? A joyful commerce with the divine, like a game played by the Father with his children, a hide-and-seek of the spirit! The divine illusion of redemption, which is Christian art, is explained precisely by this game Divinity plays with us, permitting us to stray along the byways of mystery so that we would, as it were of ourselves, come upon salvation, having experienced catharsis, redemption in art. Christian artists are as it were the freedmen of the idea of redemption, rather than slaves, and they are not preachers. Our whole two-thousand-year-old culture, thanks to the miraculous mercy of Christianity, is the world’s release into freedom for the sake of play, for spiritual joy, for the free “imitation of Christ.”