Osip Mandelstam Read online

  Mandelstam’s involvement is immediate and personal. For him, the essential question is “How many sandals did Alighieri wear out in the course of his poetic work, wandering about on the goatpaths of Italy?” For him, poetry is movement, the embodying, the incarnation, of movement. Elsewhere, Mandelstam repeatedly refers to Verlaine’s “Art poétique,” and often he substitutes the word mouvement for Verlaine’s musique.8 His own synonym for poetry was “moving lips,” and composition was inseparable from physical movement, from pacing and gesturing. Mandelstam wrote his poems—that is, “fixed” them on paper; abstracted them—only after they had already been composed.9 The composition of a poem was a physical process and “another poet” a physical presence.

  Mandelstam tries to erase the impression left by Dante’s face in the well-known portraits; the aquiline profile, the haughty and superior gaze. Dante, he says, was an exile and a raznochinets (like Mandelstam!), a man of uncertain social background, nervous about his deportment in the presence of the mighty, all too capable of swinging to extremes of self-abasement and self-assertion. It is clear that Mandelstam knew little of the social history of Florence. Dante’s pride of lineage is not quite so easily dismissed. Nevertheless, Mandelstam finds his grounding in the text: Dante needed his guide, to make his way properly among the mighty shades!

  The visual is by no means absent from the “Conversation about Dante,” and even the musical “instruments” with which the essay begins soon turn out to be “images.” It is not the visual stasis of a tableau. One senses the physical: incipient movement. In his obsession with architecture, Mandelstam sees the Goethean erstarrte Musik, “frozen music”; and, inweaving, the flow of rivers. Music is motion; words are motion. When he writes about Italian vowels, he talks of their place in the mouth, the mode of their issuance, the movement of the muscles. In his discussion of the “mineralogical” nature of Dante’s work—an image of stone borrowed from Novalis—he sees the most solid thing in the world, a rock, as a product of the motion of time and the weather.

  It is not that Mandelstam has less than Eliot the sense of a “different” age. What he has is a physical confidence in the rightness of his own presence there, and it is a confidence that survives anachronism and incongruity. To catch the motion—there he concentrated. Mandelstam was obsessed with birds and bird flight to the degree that many of his contemporaries referred to him as “bird-like,” though he was in fact a tall, rather well-built and solid man. He is not slow to pick up the images of flight in Dante. This gift of physical sympathy, of susceptibility to motion, is apparent also in his almost physical sense for the presence and movement of cultural epochs. Where does it come from? Where does it go? These are questions he is always asking. For Mandelstam, an epoch is also a presence in motion. And he has the sense that Dante’s epoch, like his own, is transitional.

  He does not in any case attempt to use his acquaintance with Dante as an occasion for feeling superior to his own time. He was of the earth, earthy; and, rightly or wrongly, Mandelstam believed that Dante was a raznochinets like himself. If the great French critic Gaston Bachelard is right, and a poet’s work tends to be dominated metaphorically by one of the four medieval archetypal elements, Mandelstam’s “dominant” was earth.10 In his reading of Dante, he scarcely notices the fire; and, although air (ascent; flight) and water (rivers; the ocean) recur in powerful images, there is no doubt that the basic element for Mandelstam is earth. Other images acquire their significance fundamentally in their relation to the earth. There is no Nietzschean climbing into the stratosphere, no Zarathustran ascent, the aim of which is to leave earth behind, so that even the return to earth has as its purpose the telling of what is above the earth, what belongs to the heights. For Mandelstam, space is empty and takes on significance only insofar as it can be populated—“colonized,” he wrote—with earthy images by the human imagination. Of the two aspects of earth, building and burial, Mandelstam emphasized the earth as material crying out to be built: stone as potential sculpture.

  If earth and the materials of earth are his “ground bass,” the poetic process of building out of the materials of earth is inextricably connected with the Christian music of redemption. Mandelstam’s Christianity was by no means a decorative, that is to say, a purely esthetic phenomenon. Nor was it merely the form taken by his deep resistance to barbaric Stalinism. It was more fundamental and more complex.

  “Christian art,” he wrote, “is always an action based on the great idea of redemption.” This is from the fragments of the unpublished essay “Pushkin and Scriabin.” It was written, or at least begun, as early as 1915, on the occasion of Scriabin’s death. The passage on Christian art seems to me central and deserves quotation at length:

  It [Christian art] 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.11

  It is a strange kind of estheticism—the imitation of Christ! Like Jesus, the artist redeems the world—but in his art. We are close here to Jakob Böhme, to the old mystic himself, without the intermediacy of Schelling and the German Romantics:

  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.12

  What an extraordinary explication of “art for art’s sake” and its consequent “freedom of the artist”! As a kind of Christianity, it places its emphasis not on the crucifixion, not on Golgotha, but on resurrection and transfiguration. It conceives of art as play—the play of a game in which the artist imitates Christ by redeeming the world.

  The poet and the architect imitate Christ by endowing the world with meaning, by giving it a form and pattern in their works that is analogous to the form and pattern God made out of the world. The poet is a colonizer, a settler, a kind of Saint George, like the intrepid Russian monks of the period of the Mongol Yoke that Kliuchevsky wrote about; like Chaadaev with his need for form, his vision of unity, his “West.” Anticipating Heidegger, Mandelstam wrote: “To build means to fight against emptiness, to hypnotize space. The fine arrow of the Gothic belltower is angry, because the whole idea of it is to stab the sky, to reproach it for being empty.”13 Poets were the shepherds of being.

  This freedom of the artist and the builder is therefore not the empty liberty of the unimportant. His mission is to hypnotize space and, like Joshua in the Old Testament or the priest in performance of the Eucharist, to make time stand still.

  Behold the chalice like a golden sun

  Suspended in the air—a splendid moment;

  Here must only Greek resound:

  To take the whole world in its hands, like a simple apple.

  Festive height of the service,

  Light in a rounded structure under the dome in July,

  That, beyond time, we might, full-chested, sigh

  For that meadow where time does not run.

  And like eternal noon the Eucharist endures—

  All take part, all play and sing,

  And in the sight of all, the holy vessel

  Flows with unending joy.*14

  The poet may rede
em the most recalcitrant materials: “There is nothing hungrier than the contemporary state, and a hungry state is more terrible than a hungry man. To show compassion for the state which denies the word is the contemporary poet’s civic ‘way,’ the heroic feat that awaits him.”15 That is a long way from the mere “defense” of poetry, or from the notion, wearily conceded by Eliot, that poetry is probably little more than a superior form of amusement. For Mandelstam, too, it is a game—but a game to be played as seriously as children play games, that is, as a sacred and heroic calling.

  For all his juxtaposing of Chinese junks and racers at Verona, Jesus and Joshua, Beethoven and Dante, Verlaine and Villon, incarnation and Ovidian metamorphosis, Mandelstam knows very well what time it is. He never asks, as does the lyrical voice in a Pasternak poem, “What millennium is it out there?”16 His feeling for “the age” is one of the qualities of his gift. Not clock time (he disliked clocks and would never have one in his flat), time spatially conceived, but rather Bergsonian time, time as durée, a system of intuited inner connections. Like the lover in his essay, he “gets tangled up in tender names and suddenly remembers that all this has happened before.”17 Shaping form out of matter, life creates pattern; and pattern is repetition.

  It is dangerous, the time he lives in. He feels the ominous shift of direction. The nineteenth century, weighed down by “the enormous wings” of its cognitive powers, cannot lift itself from the exhausted shore.18 One feels the shadow of an oncoming night. Those essays of the Civil War period, “The Word and Culture” and “Humanism and Modern Life,” still vibrate with a certain optimism, still hold the early conjunction of his religious sensibility and his unorthodox interpretation of Marxism. He hopes for a new “Social Gothic,” that universalized domesticity, an all-human family. But he sees the other alternative: a new Assyrian age in which “captives swarm like chickens under the feet of the immense king.”19

  It is a time of crisis and there is magic in it; the tree is about to become a girl again. It is a time when

  Social distinctions and class antagonisms pale before the division of people into friends and enemies of the word. Literally, sheep and goats. I sense, almost physically, the unclean goat smell issuing from the enemies of the word.20

  Who are these goat-smelling enemies of the word?

  Those for whom the word had merely a denotative, a utilitarian meaning. Those for whom its living nature is a secondary or subordinate quality. Propagandists of political parties, philosophers, anthroposophists like Andrei Biely, who, in Mandelstam’s view, yoked his great poetic gift to a “Buddhist” worldview.21 Those who used the word as slave labor to support some other external structure—a church, a state, a party, a program.

  “Friends” were those who believed in the sacred and redemptive power and the psychic nature of the word.

  Luther was a poor word-lover; he departed from verbal argument to fling his inkpot at the devil. The literary critics whose response to the anniversary of the death of the great poet Blok was mere lyrical effusion served the word badly, for a critic’s minimal task is to establish where the poet’s words came from—that is, his poetic genealogy—where he stood in relation to the larger pattern-forming, historical energies of the word. The Moscow “poetesses” pay only half-tribute to the word, for, of the constituent elements of poetry, remembrance and invention, they honor remembrance alone; they are all genealogy, mere traditionalists; while the Futurists blaringly honor invention alone.22

  “Culture has become a church,” Mandelstam wrote in 1921, and he hailed the separation of this “church” from the state. It is in this time of transformation and transfiguration that culture assumes a sacred quality, a sacred mission. Within the state, those are friends of the word who acknowledge the statutory independence of culture, who “consult” it, as the princes of old Moscow used to consult the monasteries. But within these monasteries, there were monks and laymen; and Mandelstam identified himself as a layman. Monkish structure—whether Byzantine, or whether the new monasticism of the secularized Russian intelligentsia—was hostile to the word.

  Even Literature, with a capital L, was hostile. Mandelstam was an Acmeist, but he did not like schools. Still less did he like the way these schools were organizing themselves in the 1920’s—preparation for their own slaughter, in which the Stalinist organization of Socialist Realism would later use the rivalries and the acrimonies as well as the phrases and slogans of contending schools in order definitively to decimate them all. As the 1920’s came to an end and Literature tightened the clamp on Mandelstam, invoking even antisemitism against him, Mandelstam increased the angle of the defiant tilt to his head. More and more he came to distinguish “poetry” from “Literature.” Reading his poems at occasional “evenings,” he intoned them, I suspect, rather in the manner we have heard from Joseph Brodsky, liturgically. One memoirist writes: “He sang them like a shaman.”23

  For friends of the word there was the blessing of the Russian language itself; its Hellenic nature. By “Hellenic,” Mandelstam explains, he does not mean that Russian derives etymologically from the Greek. Still less does he refer to the Byzantine cultural heritage—which, in a certain slant of light, he tends to see as “monkish” and dead and hostile or confining to the word. He calls it “the gift of free imagination,” or “free embodiment.” Just as Aristophanes in The Birds creates a structure out of the rootword eros, the manifold play and stresses of the meaning of “desire” and “desiring,” so Mandelstam sees the genius of the Russian language in the great depth and multiple branchings of its root meanings.24 So, too, he sees the writer Rozanov looking for “church walls” and finding only Russian words; for Russia had produced no Acropolis, no lasting legal or political structure, and the Russian language was Russian history.25 For that reason among others, history is a subject close to Mandelstam. When he listens, he hears it breathe.

  A Hellenic language is one in which the word-psyche finds rich opportunity for embodiment, without the hindrance of authoritative utilitarian standards.

  Mandelstam’s Hellenism should not be confused with that program of classical studies that for so long dominated the higher education of Europe and Great Britain. It is not that aristocratic/priestly key to possession of a mystery that wielded power in a secularizing world still stunned by the sacred. For Mandelstam, “Hellenic” means “human.” Perhaps it would be better to call it a kind of creative, procreative projection of the human onto the emptiness of the world. Crucial here is the conception of the utvar’, which one may translate as “utensil,” except that it has at its root a sense that is not that of “use” but is rather closer to the notions of “creation” and “creature,” something “creaturized.” It is, he tells us, the insistence on a relatedness between the warmth in the stove and the warmth in the human body. “Christianity,” in Mandelstam’s definition, is “the Hellenization of death.”26

  Both Victor Terras and Clarence Brown have written eloquently of Mandelstam’s “Classicism.”27 It should not be confused with a preference for “high style.” There is, as Brown points out, a strong Flemish element, a transformation of the lowliest details of the everyday. Like Villon, Mandelstam has a keen sense of “roast duck,” and the vow of which he speaks in his poetry “to the fourth estate,” to his fellow raznochintsy, he took as a binding oath.

  Yet his interest in Ovid is surely more than identification with a fellow exile, as Brown implies. He cares as much for the poet of the Metamorphoses and the Amores as for the exile of Tristia and Ex Ponte. One is reminded of Ovid’s absorption into medieval Christian cosmology as “Saint Ovid the Martyr.” It is possible that Mandelstam saw in metamorphosis a kind of resurrection: the creative process itself as death and rebirth, an arresting of the flow of time, “and then, after dwelling in the protracted moment wrested from it,” a return, changed by contact with the external, to life.28

  Nor is “the Classical” simply a matter of Greeks and Romans. “Classical poetry,” Mandelstam tells us,
“is the poetry of revolution.”29 He is not referring to David’s historical tableaux or to eighteenth-century pseudo-Classical “tragedy.” The Classical is that which is remembered when the mere piety of remembrance fails. It is remembrance energized by a powerful sense of the new, by a sense of what the new requires from the past. The trouble arises, Mandelstam writes, “when, instead of the real past with its deep roots, we get ‘former times.’” This is a poetry that has not had to wrestle with its conventions: “easily assimilated poetry, a henhouse with a fence around it, a cosy little corner where the domestic fowl cluck and scratch about. This is not work done upon the word but rather a rest from the word.”30 The Classical is what is required to complete a mode of experience: its necessity. In that sense, Mandelstam refers to the “genuinely Classic” style of Racine and the Classical furies of André Chénier.

  He does not see the Classical as mere translation. In spite of his real devotion to the craft of translating—though his efforts are uneven, they contain some examples of the highest skill—he tended to speak of translation in the pejorative, implying use of the readymade phrase, the formula, the pat device, something mechanical and ready to hand. He did not see the task of the “Classicist” as releasing from the resources of the Russian language those qualities which might make it phonetically or syntactically resemble Latin or Greek, but rather as building out of Russian phonetic materials and the history of the Russian language (Hellenic only in its latent powers of incarnation) its own equivalents of Catullus, Ovid, Racine. It is not Latin or Greek that slumbers in Russian, Mandelstam insists, but the power of Russian itself. “Latin Russian” is therefore a pejorative, and even the commentary on Balmont, that he is the brilliant translator of a nonexistent original, is not praise.