Osip Mandelstam

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.