Selected Essays

Notes

Introduction: Friends and Enemies of the Word

1. “The Word and Culture.”

The reader without Russian wishing to learn something about Mandelstam will find the following works indispensible: Clarence Brown, Mandelstam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973; this is the first volume of what promises to be a two-volume critical biography of Mandelstam; it contains a number of sensitive translations and exegeses of his poems—it was Brown’s intention that his book serve as an anthology as well—and some of the critical essays; unfortunately, it stops as of 1928); Brown’s edition of The Prose of Osip Mandelstam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965; contains Mandelstam’s only “novella” and his fictionalized autobiographical works); Nadezhda Iakovlevna Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, trans. Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1970) and Hope Abandoned, trans. Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1974) (Mandelstam’s widow’s two books of memoirs, still the most authoritative source on his life and attitudes to life and poetry); and her single venture into interpretive criticism, Mozart and Salieri, trans. R. A. McLean (Ann Arbor: Ardis Press, 1973; the title is from a short play by Pushkin, on which Mandelstam himself had commented); the two volumes that I edited, with introductions and notes, published in the series Russian Literature in Translation by the State University of New York Press: Selected Works of Nikolai S. Gumilev, trans. Burton Raffel and Alla Burago (Albany, 1972), and Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, trans. Burton Raffel and Alla Burago (Albany, 1973; contains, in addition to a long interpretive essay that is the companion of the present one, two chapters from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs that did not appear in the English translation cited above); a recent issue of Soviet Studies in Literature, 9, no. 4 (Fall 1973), which includes Soviet writing on Mandelstam, ranging from the “apologetic” introduction by Alexander Dymshits to the truncated Soviet edition of Mandelstam’s poems, to the perceptive and subtle essay by Lidia Ginzburg; Arthur A. Cohen, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam: an Essay in Antiphon (Ann Arbor: Ardis Press, 1974), which takes up the complex question of Mandelstam’s Jewishness and its relation to his Christianity.

2. Osip Mandel’shtam, Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works], ed. Gleb Struve and Boris Filipoff, 2d ed., 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Inter-Language Library Associates, 1967–1971) (henceforth cited as Mandel’shtam), 2: 484. See also Brown, Mandelstam, p. 35.

3. Brown, ed., The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, p. 111.

4. See the essays “The Morning of Acmeism” and “About the Nature of the Word.”

5. Osip Mandel’shtam, Stikhotvoreniia [Poems] (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel, 1973); see the English translation of the introduction by Alexander Dymshits, “I Enter the World . . . ,” Soviet Studies in Literature 9, no. 4 (Fall 1973).

6. The translation in this volume first appeared as “Talking about Dante,” Delos, no. 6 (1971): 65–107. In connection with this essay, the commentary by Mandelstam’s Italian translator, A. Ripellino, “Note sulla prosa di Mandel’stam,” in La Quarta Prosa (Bari, 1967), p. 10, is of considerable interest.

7. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), p.229.

8. See the essay “François Villon,” p. 118.

9. N. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, pp. 184–190.

10. Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, trans. Colette Grandin (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), p. xxiii. Bachelard’s account of Novalis as a “poet of earth” would have pleased Mandelstam (Bachelard, La Terre et les reveries de la volonté [Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1948], p. 285).

11. “Pushkin and Scriabin.” Neither Pushkin nor Scriabin was in any conventional sense of the word a Christian. Pushkin was an agnostic, Scriabin a kind of diabolist and practitioner of white magic. Yet Mandelstam refers to Scriabin in this tantalizing fragment—the full version of which seems to have been irretrievably lost—as both a Christian and “a raving Hellene.” The reference to the curious police activities around the funeral of Pushkin as “the sun’s burial by night” has many echoes in Mandelstam in the image of the “black sun.” See also Iurii Ivask, “Khristianskaia poeziia Mandel’shtama” [The Christian poetry of Mandelstam], Novyi Zhurnal 103 (1971): 109–123.

12. “Pushkin and Scriabin.”

13. “The Morning of Acmeism.”

14. Mandelstam, no. 117. Throughout this volume, where Mandelstam’s poems are cited, I use the numbering of the Struve-Filipoff edition (see note 2 above), which the Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, trans. Raffel and Burago, also follows.

15. “The Word and Culture.”

16. Boris Pasternak, “Pro eti stikhi” [About these lines], in Stikhi i poemy, 1912–1932 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), p. 4.

17. “The Word and Culture.”

18. “The Nineteenth Century.”

19. “Humanism and Modern Life.”

20. “The Word and Culture.” See the extremely interesting essay by Victor Terras, “Osip Mandel’shtam i ego filosofiia slova” [Osip Mandelstam and his philosophy of the word], in Slavic Poetics: Essays in Honor of Kirill Taranovsky, ed. R. Jakobson, C. van Schooneveld, and D. Worth (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), pp. 455–460; also of considerable interest, Kirill Taranovsky, “Pchely i osy v poezii Mandel’shtama” [Bees and wasps in Mandelstam’s poetry], in To Honor Roman Jakobson (The Hague: Mouton, 1967). Basing himself on Mandelstam’s remarks on the importance of knowing where a poet comes from (“Badger’s Burrow”), Taranovsky makes a strong case for his “emergence” from Viacheslav Ivanov. His notion of a subtext, interesting in itself, becomes, more and more as he illustrates its meaning, somewhat academic. Russian Literature, no. 2 (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), a special issue devoted to the poetry of Osip Mandelstam, contains articles by Iu, Levin, D. Segal, R. Pshibylcki, and K. Taranovsky. Russian Literature, no. 7/8 (1974), contains articles by K. Taranovsky, “The Jewish Theme in the Poetry of Osip Mandel’shtam,” idem, “Osip Mandel’shtam: ‘Na rozval’njach, ulozhennych solomoj’”; N. A. Nilsson, “Mandel’shtam’s Poem ‘Voz’mi na rodost’”; J. van der Eng-Liedmeier, “Mandel’shtam’s Poem ‘V Peterburge my sojdemsja snova’”

21. In a number of essays and poems, Mandelstam uses “Buddhist” rather curiously to denote a kind of detachment in which the observer has no participation in the scene which he observes but looks on it with the privileged eye of God. In this sense, Mandelstam viewed nineteenth-century science as Buddhist—but also the transparent realism of Flaubert (and, with more justice, the Goncourts) and anthroposophy in religion. He owes the conception to his early reading of Alexander Herzen, the father of Russian socialism and a brilliant stylist. In Herzen’s book Dilettantism in Science, the chapter dealing with the right-Hegelians is called “Buddhism in Science.” See Alexander Herzen, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow, 1956), pp. 71–96.

22. “Literary Moscow.”

23. Elena Tager, quoted by Brown, Mandelstam, p. 69.

24. William Arrowsmith, “Aristophanes’ Birds: The Fantasy Politics of Eros,” Arion, n.s. 1, no. 1 (1973): 119–167. See also the charming account of Mandelstam’s attempt to learn Greek in Brown, Mandelstam, p. 47.

25. “About the Nature of the Word.”

26. “Pushkin and Scriabin.”

27. Victor Terras, “Classical Motives in the Poetry of Osip Mandelstam,” Slavic and East European Journal 3 (1966): 251–267; Brown, Mandelstam, pp. 253–375.

28. Cohen, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, p. 60.

29. “The Word and Culture.”

30. “Storm and Stress.”

31. N. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, p. 264.

32. Mandel’shtam, 1: 239, no. 352.

33. Cohen, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, p. 69.

34. Journey to Armenia. The “termenvox” was an electrical musical instrument, invented by Mandelstam’s friend Lev Termen.

35. Journey to Armenia.

36. N. Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned, p. 549.

“Before that I nonetheless have seen

Rich Ararat draped in its Bible cloth

And I spent 200 days in the Sabbath Land

They call Armenia.”

(Mandelstam, no. 237)

37. Journey to Armenia.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. “The Morning of Acmeism.”

Conversation about Dante

Although this essay was probably the last written (1933–1934) of those included in this volume, it expresses more fully than any other the range and the focus of Mandelstam’s sensibility as a critic, and so there is a certain logic in placing it first. It is not so much an attempt to characterize Dante as a literary figure as it is the elaboration of a poetics inspired by the reading of Dante, an attempt to get at the mainsprings of poetry, what poetry is and what it does, rather than an enumeration of its devices or the elaboration of a theoretical system based on a study of these devices. For Mandelstam, Dante is the archpoet, as Italy (the Mediterranean) is the home, the childhood, of modern European culture. Mandelstam is interested in the source, the basic physical impulse of poetry, and its elaboration in form—though he is no more a “Formalist” in his approach, for all his elaboration on rhyme and the terzina, than he is “sociological,” for all the importance he attaches to Dante’s social origins and the Italian class structure of his time.

During his student years at Heidelberg and the Sorbonne, long before the Revolution, Mandelstam may have spent a few weeks in Italy as a tourist. He knew the Divine Comedy in the superb Russian translation of his friend Lozinsky, but began to study Italian seriously only in the 1930’s. In the summer of 1933, in Koktebel, in the Crimea, he read a draft of this essay aloud to Andrei Biely, whom he had previously regarded as a literary enemy, but about whom he then severely revised his opinion, and to whom he subsequently dedicated a cycle of poems. Biely may in a certain sense be taken as the gifted and highly cultivated poet, novelist, and man of letters with whom this “conversation” takes place.

1. Dante, Inferno, XVI, 22–24. Brown and Hughes have translated directly from Mandelstam’s Russian. Dante’s Italian reads:

“Qual soleano i campion far nudi ed unti,

avvisando lor presa e lor vantaggio,

prima che sien tra lor battuti e punti.”

I would translate: “As stripped and oiled wrestlers used to do, looking for a grip and an advantage before they started hitting out at each other.”

2. For a strikingly similar account of lyrical composition, see Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) pp. 275–277.

3. Dadaism was the modernist movement in the arts, originating in Switzerland during the years of the First World War, whose founders were Tristan Tzara and Kurt Schwitters. The name suggests children’s word-formation, baby talk.

4. “And soothingly would speak the language

that used to delight fathers and mothers:

. . . . . . . . . . .

would tell her family tales

about the Trojans and Fiesole and Rome.”

5. In Russian, zaum. Translated elsewhere in this volume as “metalogic.” Zaumnyi means “metalogical.” The reference is to Khlebnikov and the Futurists and their experiments with “transsense” or “metalogical” language. See Dante, Purgatorio, XI, 103–108.

6. The Italian reads:

“Poi si rivolse, e parve di coloro

che corrono a Verona il drappo verde

per la campagna; e parve di costoro

quegli che vince e non colui che perde.”

Mandelstam seems to have made a slight mistake in the translation, which should read: “Then he turned back, and seemed like one of those who run through the open field at Verona for [the prize of] the green cloth; and of them he seemed like him who wins, not like him who loses.”

7. “Averroës, who composed the great commentary.”

8. “Turn around: what are you doing?”

9. “Io avea già il mio viso nel suo fitto;

ed el s’ergea col petto e colla fronte,

com’ avesse l’inferno in gran dispitto.”

10. “‘And if,’ continuing what he had said before,

‘they have learnt that art badly,’ he said,

‘it torments me more than this bed.’”

11. “O Tosco, che per la città del foco

vivo ten vai così parlando onesto,

piacciati di ristare in questo loco.

La tua loquela ti fa manifesto

di quella nobil patria natio,

alla qual forse fui troppo molesto.”

(Inferno, X, 22–27)

12. Raznochinets (razno-, “various”; chin, “rank”): in the nineteenth century, a member of the intelligentsia who was not of noble origin. He could be the son of a priest or a merchant who did not follow in his father’s footsteps, or someone of even lower social origin, who had managed to acquire an education. The term might also be used ironically in connection with the declassing of the old Russian nobility into a service class, a class in which status was more and more determined by rank in the civil service. Thus, a raznochinets is not necessarily a “commoner” by origin, but he might well be. In the Russian literary tradition, the pathos of the “noble raznochinets” is exemplified in the character of Evgeny in Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman,” a poor clerk whose ancestors were prominent nobility. In the 1860’s, however, “the decade of the raznochintsy,” as it was commonly called, these were men of different but humble class origins (sons of priests, merchants, etc.) who received a higher education and qualified for medium civil-service rank for the first time—i.e., “the newly educated,” but also those of lowly or obscure origins hobnobbing for the first time with their social and economic superiors by virtue of their education. Mandelstam identified himself, as well as Dante, as a raznochinets. He was not well acquainted with the social history of Florence, but poetic instinct suggested Dante’s social awkwardness—in this instance, I suspect, mistakenly.

13. A reference to Pushkin’s very complex relationship to the Emperor Nicholas I and the St. Petersburg court. Pushkin was very proud of his ancestry, of what he called his “six hundred years of nobility,” although painfully aware that it counted for little in the St. Petersburg of the 1830’s. He often contrasted the position of powerful parvenus with his own. At the same time, he referred to himself as a meshchanin (that is, a bourgeois, but of a special kind; an artisan who peddles his own wares on the market)—in part ironically and in a derogatory sense, in response to a parvenu’s slur on his ancestry; yet in part proudly, as someone who made his own way, who was someone in his own right, without reference to ancestors. At the same time, Pushkin was appalled at the low level of literary taste, the contempt in which Russian letters were held by snobs who preferred French, and in general the difficulty of being a poet in Russia. These feelings were exacerbated by the fact that the emperor be stowed on Pushkin the dubious honor of making him a Kammerjunker—an honorary court position that required attendance in uniform. It was, however, an honor normally bestowed on youths in their teens, and Pushkin was in his thirties; there was also some suspicion that either the emperor himself or persons close to him had designs on Pushkin’s wife. For a number of reasons connected with the institution of autocracy and the personality of Nicholas I, as well as for reasons of economic dependence, it was impossible for Pushkin to refuse the position, in which he writhed miserably during his last years, and which contributed much to the final impasse of his life, a fatal duel.

14. “As though insulting Hell with his immense disdain.” (See note 9 above.)

15. “Their eyes, which were only moist inwardly before,

overflowed down to the lips . . .”

Mandelstam follows those commentators who interpret le labbra, “the lips,” as referring to the eyelids, hence “the labial eye.” But see Singleton’s commentary (Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton, Bollingen Series 80 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970], 1 [pt.2]: 588).

16. “I was already in a place where the resounding

of the water that fell into the next circle

could be heard like the hum beehives make.”

17. Obviously those of Gustave Doré.

18. From Blok’s poem “Ravenna.”

19. “Two paws he had, hairy to the armpits;

his back and his chest and both his sides

were painted with knots and rings:

With more color, groundwork, and patterning

than ever Tatars or Turks made cloth;

nor did Arachne ever weave such webs on her loom.”

20. “Cimabue believed that in painting.”

21. “Thus I cried with face uplifted.”

22. The Italian text reads:

Quante ’l villan ch’al poggio si riposa,

nel tempo che colui che ’l mondo schiara

la faccia sua a noi tien meno ascosa,

come la mosca cede a la zanzara,

vede lucciole giù per la vallea,

forse colà dov’ e’ vendemmia e ara:

di tante fiamme tutta risplendea

l’ottava bolgia, sì com’ io m’accorsi

tosto che fui là ‘ve ’l fondo parea.

E qual colui che si vengiò con li orsi

vide ’l carro d’Elia al dipartire,

quando i cavalli al cielo erti levorsi,

che nol potea sì con li occhi seguire,

ch’el vedesse altro che la fiamma sola,

sì come nuvoletta, in sù salire:

tal si move ciascuna per la gola

del fosso, ché nessuna mostra ’l furto,

e ogne fiamma un peccatore invola.”

A more literal translation would read:

As many as the fireflies the peasant sees, taking his rest on the hill—

in the season when he who lights the world

least hides his face from us,

and at the hour when the fly yields to the mosquito—

when he looks down into the valley,

down there perhaps where he gathers the grapes and where he plows:

with so many flames was all aglitter

the eighth ditch, as I perceived

as soon as I came to where the bottom could be seen.

And as he who revenged himself with the help of the bears

saw Elijah’s chariot at its departure,

when the horses rose straight up to heaven,

could not so follow it with his eyes

as to see anything except the flame alone,

like a little cloud ascending:

so each flame moves along the throat of the ditch,

not one showing its theft,

yet each flame concealing a sinner.”

23. Mikhail Vasilevich Lomonosov (1711–1765). Russian polymath, of peasant origin. (His father was a prosperous peasant-entrepreneur who owned many boats and engaged in trade.) Best known for his contribution to chemistry, but also a poet, grammarian, historian, and reviver of handicrafts. He played a vital role in the reform of Russian versification.

24. This is a very free version of Inferno, XXVI, 112–120. The Italian reads:

“‘O frati,’ dissi, ‘che per cento milia

perigli siete giunti all’occidente,

a questa tanto picciola vigilia

de’ vostri sensi, ch’è del rimanente,

non vogliate negar l’esperienza,

di retro al sol, del mondo senza gente.

Considerate la vostra semenza:

fatti non foste a viver come bruti,

ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.’”

A literal translation would read:

“‘O brothers,’ I said, ‘who through a hundred thousand

dangers have reached the West,

do not deny this so brief remaining

vigil of your senses

experience of the unpeopled world

behind the sun.

Consider your origin:

you weren’t made to live like brutes,

but to follow virtue and knowledge’”

25. “We see like one who has bad light.”

26. “And if it had already come to pass, it would not be too early.

So let it be, since it really must be so;

it will weigh on me the heavier as I grow older.”

27. Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (1892–1941). Mandelstam’s friend and contemporary, who emigrated in 1922, returned to the Soviet Union in 1938, committed suicide in 1941. The quotation is from a cycle of her poems about Moscow, written in 1916.

28. “With which the little child runs to his mother—

29. “Fold on fold,” or “layer within layer.” Literally, “skirt within skirt.”

30. The Italian should read: “. . . da la Muda.” Translation: “A narrow hole in the Tower.”

31. “Never did the Danube in Austria,

nor the Don away off there under its cold sky,

make so thick a veil over their current in winter

as there was here: for even if Tambernic

had fallen on it, or Pietrapana,

it would not have given, even at its edge, so much as a creak.”

32. “O you who are two within one fire,

if I merited of you while I lived,

if I merited much or little of you.”

33. “All were saying: ‘Benedictus qui venis,’

strewing flowers up and about,

‘Manibus o date lilia plenis.’”

(“Benedictus qui venis”: “Blessed are you who come.” “Manibus . . .”:

“Oh, with full hands give lilies.”)

34. “Crowned with olive over a white veil,

a lady appeared to me, clothed, under a green mantle,

in the color of living flame.”

35. “Like birds which, risen from the bank,

as if rejoicing at their pasture,

make themselves now into a rounded, now into an elongated flock,

so within lights the holy creatures

flying, sang, and made themselves

now into a D, now into an I, now into an L in their configurations.”

36. Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg (1772–1801). Romantic poet, mystic. Studied philosophy under Fichte and history under Schiller. Later studied geology, became assessor of salt mines. Catholic. Reference is to his unfinished novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Ch. 5.

37. “Let the Fiesolan beasts make

themselves into fodder, and not touch the plant,

if any still grows on that dung heap of theirs.”

38. “He took away the shade of our first parent,

Abel his son, and Noah,

Moses, obedient law-giver;

Abraham the patriarch and David the king,

Israel with his father and his children

and with Rachel, for whom he did so much.”

39. Konstantin Batiushkov (1787–1855). Pushkin’s contemporary, a poet Mandelstam very much admired. The image is from his poem “Shadow of a Friend.”

About Poetry

O Poezii was published in Leningrad in 1928. The collection was chosen by Mandelstam himself, and reworked by him—but also by the censor. I have used here the texts of the Struve-Filipoif edition, which uses the texts of original publication, with variants in the notes.

THE WORD AND CULTURE

First published, 1921.

1. Pushkin, The Gypsies. In this passage the old gypsy tells Aleko an old legend about Ovid in Moldavia, without recalling the poet’s name, or age. He tells it as if it happened yesterday.

2. Ovid, Tristia, 1.3.1–4.

“When the gloomy memory steals upon me

of the night that was my last time in the city,

when I bring to mind that night on which I left so many things dear to me,

even now, the teardrops fall from my eyes.”

3. Jacques Louis David (1748–1825). French painter. Before the Revolution, leading exponent of the Classical trend in painting; court painter to Louis XVI. Became an ardent republican, was elected to the Convention, and voted for the king’s death. Later, under Napoleon, became first painter to the emperor. Under the Restoration spent his last years in Brussels.

4. Catullus, no. 46. “Away let us fly, to the famous cities of Asia.”

5. Reference is to Ovid’s Amores, I.4.65, not to the Tristia.

6. See Mandelstam’s essay “The Nineteenth Century,” which quotes in full the poem referred to here. See also “About the Nature of the Word,” note 2, concerning Derzhavin.

7. Mandelstam, no. 103.

8. Verlaine, “Art poétique,” stanza 6. “Take eloquence and wring its neck!”

9. Mandelstam, no. 104.

10. “Listen to the tipsy song.” This appears to be a misquoting of “Art poétique,” stanza 2:

“Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise

Où l’Indécis au Précis se joint.”

(“Nothing more precious than the tipsy song [or gray song] in which the Vague is joined to the Precise.”)

ATTACK

First published, 1924.

1. Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (1875–1936). Poet, novelist, playwright, composer, critic. Author of an important and influential essay, “On Beautiful Clarity,” whence “Clarism”—the first of a series of revolts against the literary dominance of Symbolism. Homosexual, slightly decadent. A poet of the Alexandria theme, whom it might be interesting to compare with Cavafy, L. Durrell, E. M. Forster. Remained in the USSR, but published almost nothing after 1930.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893–1930). The poet of the Revolution. But a strange, complex, contradictory character. A great poet. Futurist. Committed suicide.

Velemir Vladimirovich Khlebnikov (1885–1922). Futurist. Yet also a kind of primitive mystic. Magician with words, who broke words down to their primitive roots and then built them up again. Died in extreme poverty.

Nikolai Aseev, or Aseyev (1889–1973). Second-string Futurist poet, friend and disciple of Mayakovsky, who showed more early promise than he later developed.

Viacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov (1866–1949). Poet, historian, scholar, classicist, critic, philosopher. An outstanding Symbolist poet. Studied Roman history under Theodor Mommsen. Came under influence of Nietzsche. One of the central figures of the Silver Age. Left Russia in 1924, but did not break completely with the Soviet Union until much later. Converted to Catholicism and became a Roman Catholic priest. He was mentor to the young Mandelstam, as to many other younger poets. His book on the cult of Dionysus, especially, in the popularized form in which it appeared in Novy Put’, had considerable influence.

Fedor Sologub, pseudonym of Fedor Kuzmich Teternikov (1863–1927). Symbolist poet and novelist.

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, born Gorenko (1888–1966). Acmeist poet. First wife of Gumilev, whom she divorced in 1918. Her lover, Nikolai Punin, was, like Gumilev, arrested, and he died in prison. During the period of which Mandelstam writes she was a splendid and influential poet; but in the period between the Second World War and her death she wrote her very greatest poetry, in a strikingly different mode, and her role and influence were unique.

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890–1960). Probably better known to an American audience than any other Russian poet; the author of Doctor Zhivago.

Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev (1886–1921). Head of the Acmeist group. Executed in August, 1921, as a conspirator. See Selected Works of Nikolai S. Gumilev, trans. Raffel and Burago.

Vladislav Felitsianovich Khodasevich (1886–1939). Poet, critic, essayist. Parents partly Jewish, partly Polish. Went into emigration; partly rehabilitated in the USSR in 1963, though still not published there. See the moving account of him by his former wife, Nina Berberova, in The Italics Are Mine, trans. Philippe Radley (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969).

2. Vesy, a journal, published by Valery Iakovlevich Briusov (1873–1924), between 1904 and 1909, as an enterprise of the publishing house of which he was the head. Although Symbolist in orientation, the journal was the most urbane, cosmopolitan, and generally sensitive literary journal in Russia.

3. One of Krylov’s verse fables (I. A. Krylov, “Svin’ia pod dubom” [The pig under the oak tree], in Basni [Fables] [Moscow and Leningrad, 1956], p. 191). The fable is said to be based on an anecdote about Peter the Great and his courtiers.

4. Dmitry Nikolaevich Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky (1853–1920). Prominent critic and literary scholar of the period around the turn of the twentieth century. His work was characteristically sociological in its approach to literature, with a strong concern as well for the “psychology” of the author. His political views were “advanced” and “progressive.” His work also reflects the strong influence of Comte and Taine.

ABOUT AN INTERLOCUTOR

First published, 1913.

1. From his long poem The Gypsies.

2. Evgeny Abramovich Baratynsky, or Boratynsky (1800–1844). Russian poet, contemporary of Pushkin. One of the great Russian poets of the nineteenth century, though more appreciated in the twentieth than by his contemporaries.

3. Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont (1867–1942). Early Russian Symbolist poet, who emigrated in 1921 and died in Paris. Recently, critics like Professor Vladimir Markov have tried to revive a certain interest in his work.

4. Nekrasov, “Poet i grazhdanin” [Poet and citizen]. See “Badger’s Burrow,” note 8.

5. Semen Iakovlevich Nadson (1862–1887). Melancholy poet of partly Jewish descent, who died of tuberculosis at an early age. Sentimental, diffuse, his poetry of regret and frustration nevertheless had an enormous impact on the Russian generation that came of age in the 1880’s.

ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE WORD

First published, 1922.

1. Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743–1816). Greatest Russian poet of the eighteenth century. Cultivated an odd, interesting and passionate baroque style, sometimes eloquent and solemn, sometimes even grandiloquent, and sometimes “rough,” unpolished and very expressive.

Simeon Polotsky, or Simon of Polotsk (1629–1680). Monk, important church leader, writer and translator. Tutor of Tsar Aleksei’s children. Experimented with Russian syllabic verse and with dramaturgy.

2. An oblique reference to the well-known essay by Kuzmin.

3. Also called The Song of Igor’s Campaign. The title has other variants. It is often referred to briefly as the I gor Tale. An anonymous heroic epic dealing with the campaign of the Russian prince Igor against the Turkic Polovtsy. Believed by most scholars to have been composed in the late twelfth century. There has nevertheless been a prolonged scholarly controversy, by no means as yet resolved, as to its authenticity, with a number of scholars concluding the likelihood of an eighteenth-century forgery in the manner of Ossian. For an English version, see the translation by Sidney Monas and Burton Raffel, Delos, no. 6 (1971): 13.

4. In an earlier draft, cited by Struve and Filipoff in their notes, Mandelstam quotes two lines of the song:

“Bona puella fur Eulaluà

Bel anret corps bellerzonr, anima.”

(Mandel’shtam, 2: 632)

These are the first two lines of the ninth-century “‘Séquence’ de Sainte Eulalie,” quoted as follows by Albert Henry, ed., Chrestomathie de la littérature en ancien français, 3d ed. rev. (Bern: A. Francke, 1965), p. 3:

“Buona pulcella fut Eulalia:

Bel auret corps, bellezour anima.”

(“A virtuous maiden was Eulalia: she had a beautiful body and a more beautiful soul.”)

5. Pseudonym for Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev (1880–1934). Poet, novelist, critic, mystic, literary theoretician; Symbolist, disciple in anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner. His father was a brilliant mathematician and a well-known conservative figure in university politics. Brilliant in many fields, Biely is best known in English for his novel St. Petersburg, trans. John Cournos (New York: Grove Press, 1959). When Biely died in January, 1934, Mandelstam wrote a cycle of poems dedicated to him.

6. Fedor Ivanovich Tiutchev (1803–1873). One of Russia’s very greatest poets. A great philosophical poet, and the poet of chaos. Lived for many years abroad, serving as a diplomat in Munich and Turin. The herovictim of an intensive love affair late in life with his daughter’s governess that resulted in an intense group of love poems. In his political views, a right-wing Slavophile.

7. Peter Iakovlevich Chaadaev (1794–1856). See Mandelstam’s essay “Peter Chaadaev.” See also Peter Chaadaev, Philosophical Letters and Apology of a Madman, trans. Mary-Barbara Zeldin (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969). After a brilliant military career and early retirement as colonel of hussars, Chaadaev began those musings on Russian culture, history, and destiny that resulted in the Philosophical Letters. They were never intended for publication; whether the one letter that found its way into print had been so intended by Chaadaev is not altogether clear. But it was his first and last published work, for on publication he was declared “officially insane” by the political police—the first famous instance, but unfortunately not the last. It is quite impossible to separate the intrinsic quality of Chaadaev’s writings from their historical impact, which was so enormous that almost all of subsequent Russian intellectual history may be said to devolve from it.

8. Vasily Vasilevich Rozanov (1856–1919). A strange and controversial writer almost impossible to classify. A “ruminator” on all manner of subjects, whom the Formalist critic Victor Shklovsky called a “novelist” because his works are put together somewhat in the manner of fiction, though they are composed not only of narration and dialogue, but also of diary entries, aphorisms, private letters, and newspaper clippings. He exulted in the “privacy” and “intimacy” of his style.

9. Innokenty Fedorovich Annensky (1856–1909). Russian poet and critic. Headmaster of the Tsarskoe Selo lyceum, Annensky was a superb classicist and a translator from the Greek and from the French. He was one of the inspirers of the revolt against Symbolism in the direction of Acmeism.

10. Sergei Mitrofanovich Gorodetsky (b. 1884). Early Acmeist poet, who introduced notion of “Adamism.” (See Selected Works of Nikolai S. Gumilev, trans. Raffel and Burago.) He accepted the Revolution whole-heartedly, managed to adapt himself to Stalinism, and enjoyed considerable success as well after the thaw.

Vladimir Narbut (1888–?). Acmeist poet; joined the Communist Party in the Ukraine during the Civil War; afterward, ran a small publishing house. He was expelled from the Party in 1928 and is rumored to have been arrested in 1937 or 1938.

Mikhail Alexandrovich Zenkevich (b. 1891). Early Acmeist; poet and translator. Joined Party in 1947.

11. Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (1776–1822). German Romantic writer and jack-of-all-trades. Ingenious writer of macabre fantasies and great storyteller. Substituted Amadeus for Wilhelm in his name, as homage to Mozart. The full range of his talents was most clearly displayed in his collection of stories Die Serapionsbrüder (4 vols., 1819–1821)—the name of a club of Hoffmann’s more intimate friends.

12. Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862). English historian, author of the History of Civilization in England, a monument to the hope for a “science” of history.

13. Antonio Salieri (1750–1825). Director of the Italian Opera at Vienna. Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt were his students, and they seem to have learned from him especially in the matter of dramatic composition. His intrigues against Mozart gave rise to the stories that he poisoned Mozart. (See A. Delia Corte, Un italiano all’estero [Torino: G. B. Paravia, 1936].) Pushkin uses this legend in his “little tragedy,” Mozart and Salieri. There, Salieri poisons Mozart to balance the equation of cosmic justice; i.e., he feels that the musical genius that eludes him in spite of all his incredibly hard work and perfectionist habits must not be allowed to be seen to settle on Mozart, portrayed as a “natural,” without any effort at all. It is a play in which “hard-working talent,” burdened by a sense of cosmic injustice, avenges itself on “natural genius,” Mandelstam interpreted the poetic drama differently. For him, Salieri represented the principle of hard, even superhuman, work and effort—the obligation imposed by genius—while Mozart represented “inspiration” alone. Nadezhda Mandelstam has pointed out that Mandelstam thought of Mozart and Salieri as two principles, to some degree antagonistic, yet both essential to the creative process. He tended, however, to emphasize the importance of Salieri, regarded by other readers of Pushkin as the villain of the piece. (See N. Mandelstam, Mozart and Salieri.] Mrs. Mandelstam suggests very acutely that when Mandelstam talked of Salieri the figure he really had in mind was Bach.

NOTES ABOUT POETRY

First published, 1923.

1. Nikolai Mikhailovich Iazykov (1803–1846). A major Russian poet in the 1820’s. Pushkin thought his poetry too much champagne, not enough water. But he was Gogol’s favorite poet. Iazyk means “language” or “tongue,” and Gogol wrote: “Not in vain was he given such a name; he is master of his language as an Arab is of his fiery steed” (quoted by D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature [New York: Knopf„ 1949], p. 104.)

2. The “apostles to the Slavs”; brothers. Cyril, originally named Constantine, died in 869; Methodius in 885. They were born in Thessalonica, of Greek descent, but acquainted with Slavonic. Cyril was educated at Constantinople and went on a mission to the Jewish Khazars on the Sea of Azov. Later, both brothers participated in the struggle between the native Slavic nobility of Bohemia and Moravia against the German clergy, which included a struggle over the liturgical language, the Germans commanding a monopoly of Latin. Under the patronage of Rostislav, Prince of Moravia, Cyril attempted to translate parts of the liturgy into Slavonic. What is called Cyrillic script was probably not invented by him, though it is not unjustly associated with his name. Cyril was welcomed back to Rome, where he brought the relics of Saint Clement. He is buried in the Church of San Clemente in Rome.

3. One of the first artificial international languages, like Esperanto.

4. Pillar saints; i.e., saints who practiced the ascetic discipline of sitting for prolonged periods of time on top of a pillar, flagpole-sitters of the ancient world, though of course with a very different purpose, that being to emphasize their complete separation from the world and the temptations and distractions of the world. The most famous of these was Simeon of Syria, who, in the fifth century, built himself a pillar, climbed it, and between the years 420 and 459 remained sitting there.

5. Christoph Willibald von Gluck (1714–1787). German composer from Bohemia. Strongly influenced by Handel. By lending to recitative a special weight and an effect of its own, he gave opera a new dramatic force.

6. Afanasy Afanasievich Fet (1820–1892). Illegitimate son of a Russian landowner named Shenshin and a German woman named Foeth. Great lyric poet of nature, love, and despair, at a time when major poetry seemed otherwise to have dried up in Russia.

7. Alexander Ivanovich Herzen, or Gertsen (1812–1870). Illegitimate son, or “child of the heart,” of a great senatorial nobleman, Iakovlev. Author of one of the great books of memoirs of the nineteenth century (My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. Humphrey Higgins, 4 vols. [New York: Knopf, 1968]). Author of an important essay, “Buddhism in Science.” Early Russian socialist, and perhaps more than any other single person the intellectual “daddy” of narodnichestvo, or Russian populism, through his conception of the mir, or village commune, as a kind of primal education in socialism. Influential as a publicist, who changed the European view of Russia: before Herzen, European intellectuals tended to see Russia as a monolith; Herzen persuaded them to make a crucial distinction between the government and the people. From London, Herzen published his Russian newspaper, Kolokol [The bell], which played an important role in the immediate background of the emancipation of the serfs between 1857 and 1861. In 1863, the newspaper began to lose influence, and Herzen was displaced in the minds of the radical Russian public as an important figure by more extreme and strident personalities. The scene referred to here is a vivid one from the early pages of Herzen’s memoirs.

Nikolai Platonovich Ogarev (1813–1877). Interesting minor poet of melancholy reflection and unfulfilled yearning; friend and political ally of Herzen’s.

THE END OF THE NOVEL

Published for the first time in the collection About Poetry, 1928.

BADGER’S BURROW

First published, 1922.

1. Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (1880–1921). Great Russian poet, to some degree a Symbolist, but above all schools, as Mandelstam indicates. He used the great themes—country, love, destiny—and wrote exalted verse often in the mode and form of popular songs. His long poem The Twelve is called by many the poem of the Revolution.

2. Razumnik Vasilevich Ivanov-Razumnik (1878–1946). Critic, historian, prominent figure in both Russian political and literary circles, closely associated with the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, a friend of Blok’s and Biely’s. Left Russia in 1943, died in a D.P. camp. Published interesting prison memoirs, My Prisons. It was he who, in one of his early books, called the Russian intelligentsia “a spiritual brotherhood.” His literary criticism was not of a kind that Mandelstam approved.

Iuly Isaevich Aikhenvald (1872–1928). Impressionist critic, an emigré from 1921.

Wilhelm Alexandrovich Sorgenfrei (1882–1938). Critic, poet, and translator.

3. Boris Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum (1886–1959). One of the Formalist critics, author of brilliant essays on Gogol, on Tolstoy, and on poets and poetry. Later, turned more to long, scholarly-biographical works.

Victor Maksimovich Zhirmunsky (1889–1972). Distinguished scholar and critic. In his youth, he was very close to the Formalists. Still earlier, he was, with Mandelstam, a student at the Tenishev School in St. Petersburg.

4. Apollon Alexandrovich Grigoriev (1822–1864). One of the Russian poètes maudits, author of an interesting book of memoirs, My Literary Wanderings, much admired by Dostoevsky. An intense Slavophile, he praised the Russianness of the Moscow region called Zamoskvorech’e (the area beyond the Moscow River from the main city, populated by merchants and artisans) and placed a high poetic value on things distinctively Russian.

5. Sophie Perovsky (1853–1881). A Russian revolutionary, member of the People’s Will Party (Narodnaia Volia). Born into a noble family, she joined the “Going to the People” Movement of 1872–1873. She was arrested several times. She worked very closely with A. I. Zheliabov and became his common-law wife. With him, she led the conspiracy to assassinate Alexander II, in which she played a decisive part.

6. Nikolai Ivanovich Kostomarov (1817–1885). Russian and Ukrainian historian and ethnographer, who had an early reputation as a radical. His notion of the distinctive features of Ukrainian history opposed him to “official” historians.

Sergei Mikhailovich Soloviev (1820–1879). The founder of modern historical studies in Russia, the Russian Ranke. He was also the father of the philosopher and mystic Vladimir Soloviev.

Vasily Osipovich Kliuchevsky (1841–1911). Historian noted for the elegance of his style in lecturing and writing as well as for his scholarship; his interest focused on the nonstate aspects of historical development, especially the social and the sociocultural. He emphasized the importance of geographical factors in Russian history and the shaping influence of the process of colonization.

7. Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev (1853–1900). Theologian and philosopher, poet and mystic; tried to promote the reunion of Christendom under the leadership of the Pope. His intuition of Sacred Wisdom, or Sophia, produced three visions of the feminine embodiment of that Wisdom, the Eternal Womanly, or Ewige Weibliche. Both his poetry and his teachings had enormous impact on the development of Symbolism.

8. Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov (1821–1878). Leading Russian poet of the second half of the nineteenth century. Above all, the poet of Russian Populism. Many of his poems are sentimental and rhetorical; yet he probably was the most influential of all Russian poets and helped to shape the sensibilities of Dostoevsky, Blok, and the whole Russian radical intelligentsia. His specialty was the pathos of poverty, in a mode very close to folk traditions and resonant for Russian culture.

9. A special form of folk song, usually very short, associated with a factory or working-class milieu, usually witty, often ribald.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

First published, 1922.

1. Not quite. Mandelstam is using Baudelaire for his own purposes. Baudelaire’s albatross is laid out on the deck of a boat, not the earth, and is rather a different kind of bird:

“Souvent, pour s’amuser, les hommes d’équipage

Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,

Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,

Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

A peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,

Que ces rois de l’azur, maladroits et honteux,

Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches

Comme des avirons traîner à côté d’eux.”

(Les Fleurs du mal: “L’Albatros”)

(“Often, for fun, the men of the crew catch albatrosses, vast sea birds, which follow, indolent travel companions, the ship gliding over the bitter abysses. No sooner have they laid them on the planks than these kings of the blue, awkward and ashamed, woefully let their great white wings languish like oars at their sides.”)

The last line concludes a comparison of the albatross “out of his element” with the poet: “Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.” (“His giant’s wings prevent him from walking.”)

2. See “Buddhism in Science,” in Alexander Herzen’s Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1956).

3. An intricately prescribed Japanese verse form.

4. Mandelstam, no. 133.

PETER CHAADAEV

First published, 1915. For Chaadaev, see “About the Nature of the Word,” note 7.

1. These are the opening lines of Ershov’s well-known fairy-tale poem of the hump-backed horse (“Skazka o kon’ke-gorbunke”), which exists in many editions and many translations. The horse is a magic animal that can fly.

NOTES ABOUT CHÉNIER

First published, 1928.

1. André Chénier (1762–1794). French poet, son of a diplomat, poet of liberty. At first, he approved of the French Revolution; later, he wrote an ode to Charlotte Corday upon her assassination of Marat; he was arrested and guillotined on 8 Thermidor. Pushkin admired him.

2. Clément Marot (1496–1544). French Renaissance poet and humanist, translator of Ovid. In his poems there are traces of imitations of Villon. Marot did not father the line known as the Alexandrine, which takes its name from the twelfth-century Roman d’Alexandre, and which Marot rarely if ever used. Ronsard, a generation later, popularized it. Aleksan-driitsa, genitive form of aleksandriets, the word Mandelstam uses, is not the one normally used for the Alexandrine and causes some puzzlement.

3. “Fathers of a people, architects of the laws!

You who know how to establish with a firm, sure hand

A solemn code for man.”

4. “As Latona, pregnant, almost a mother,

Victim of a jealous power,

Without refuge wandered over the earth.”

5. “The oppressor is never free.”

6. Les Bucoliques is a collection of poems by Chénier; there is no comparable work called Idylles, although there is a series of poems within the Bucoliques called “Idylles marines.”

7. “And then in a charming way the letter inquires

What I want of you, what commands I have for you!

What do I want? you say! I want your return

To seem very slow to you; I want you to love me

Day and night (night and day, alas, I am in torment).

Present in their midst, be alone, be absent;

Sleep, thinking of me! Dream that I am near;

See only me, unceasingly, and be completely with me.”

FRANÇOIS VILLON

First published, 1913.

1. “Will you leave him here, poor Villon?”

2. Cassell’s New French Dictionary translates pet as “fart” and vesse as “silent evacuation of wind.”

3. “Movement above all!” As was mentioned in the introduction, Verlaine’s line (in “Art poétique”) actually reads: “De la musique avant toute chose” (“Music above all”).

Uncollected Essays and Fragments

PUSHKIN AND SCRIABIN (Fragments)

Published by Struve and Filipoff from an incomplete typed copy found by Nadezhda Mandelstam among Mandelstam’s papers. The essay probably dates back to the time of the composer’s death in 1915. According to the editors, the essay was completed in 1919 or 1920. It was submitted to a Miscellany of some sort, which never appeared. Later, Mandelstam, who apparently felt some misgivings about the essay, was unable to find it in its completed form. These fragments have appeared in the Russian emigré press, in 1963 and 1964, as well as in the Struve-Filipoff edition. The essay shows traces of a muted polemic with Mandelstam’s former mentor, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Ivanov’s notions of the “suffering god,” the cult of Dionysus and its resemblance to Christianity. Perhaps polemic is too strong a word. The choice of Scriabin and Pushkin as exemplars of Christian art is odd, to put it mildly. Scriabin was a kind of demonist and Pushkin an agnostic, certainly a religious man but hardly a Christian.

1. Alexander Nikolaevich Scriabin (1872–1915). Russian modernist composer. Pasternak worshipped him and was an ardent disciple in his youth. Experimented with synesthetic effects of light and sound.

2. Having died from wounds received in a duel with a foreigner, Pushkin, in the winter of 1837, was buried secretly at night—his body was secretly removed from St. Petersburg to a monastery graveyard near Pskov, because the government of Nicholas I feared “nationalist” demonstrations.

3. The motif of the black sun, or nighttime sun, recurs many times in Mandelstam’s work. George Ivask has traced it to Gérard de Nerval’s poem “El Desdichado,” where the poet writes of the “soleil noir de la Mélancolie” (“black sun of Melancholy”). The image has, in fact, a number of origins: The Tale of Igor’s Men (image of the solar eclipse), Racine, Viacheslav Ivanov, the Talmud. The pun in Russian on “sun-heart” (solntse-serdtse), lost in English, refers to Pushkin. For a discussion of the image see the Struve-Filipoff edition (Mandel’shtam, 3: 404–411). See also George Ivask’s essay in that same volume, “Ditia Evropy” [Child of Europe], especially pp. x–xi; Taranovsky, “Pchely i osy v poezii Mandel’shtama”; and Brown, Mandelstam, pp. 231–237.

THE MORNING OF ACMEISM

First published in 1919. But probably written much earlier, in 1912 or 1913, as a third “manifesto” of Acmeism, following those of Gumilev and Gorodetsky. For discussions of Acmeism as a movement, see my introductions to Selected Works of Nikolai S. Gumilev and Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, both trans. Raffel and Burago. The striking similarity between the tenets of Imagism (before it became, as Ezra Pound put it, “Amygism,” referring to the coarse but indubitable energies of Amy Lowell) and Acmeism have been pointed out several times, most recently, and with great acumen, by Brown, Mandelstam. In his literary essays, Mandelstam tends to minimize the importance of “Adamism,” associated with Gorodetsky. Nevertheless, he continues to emphasize the biological metaphor, the notion of the image as an “organ.” It might perhaps be added that among the many meanings of Acme or Akme—peak, pinnacle, height—is that of climax, including the notion of sexual climax.

LITERARY MOSCOW

First published, 1922.

1. Fedor Iaseevich Dolidze (b. 1883), used to organize poetry readings both in Petrograd and Moscow and in the provinces. On one particular evening, according to the notes in the Struve-Filipoff edition (Mandel’shtam, 2: 647), he arranged for the election of a “King of Poetry,” and Igor Severianin’s followers, who packed the hall, got their favorite elected. This was in February, 1918, in Moscow. Mayakovsky, apparently, wasn’t too happy about it. On another occasion, an evening of “feminine poetry” was arranged, at which Marina Tsvetaeva read.

2. Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (1892–1941). A great and splendid poet. Mandelstam is most unfair to her here. In fact they were close at one time, and three of his poems are dedicated to her. Her fate was a tragic one. She emigrated and lived in Czechoslovakia for many years, isolated from the “emigration” as such. She returned to the Soviet Union after the disillusionment of Munich. Her husband was killed; her daughter was arrested, but survived. She herself committed suicide in Elabuga, not far from Kazan. She has been posthumously “rehabilitated.”

3. Anna Dmitrievna Radlova, born Darmolatova (1891–1949). Poet, translator of Shakespeare and Marlowe.

4. Alexander Afanasievich Potebnia (1835–1891). Literary scholar, professor at the University of Kharkov; along with A. N. Veselovsky, one of the main proponents of Neo-Kantianism in literary and linguistic theory. In attacking him, as they did, the Formalist critics could scarcely conceal their great debt to him and Veselovsky. See Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism, 2d. ed. (The Hague: Mouton, 1965.)

5. Victor Borisovich Shklovsky (b. 1893). The youngest, most brilliant, and possibly also the most erratic of the Formalists. He founded the group called Opoyaz. Later, he showed great courage in honoring his friendship with the Mandelstams. See his volumes, recently translated by Richard Sheldon and published by Cornell University Press, A Sentimental Journey (Ithaca, 1970) and Zoo (Ithaca, 1971).

For Eikhenbaum and Zhirmunsky, see “Badger’s Burrow,” note 3.

6. Pseudonym for Adelina Efron (b. 1900). She later converted to a standard, cheery Socialist Realist style in the 1930’s.

7. Sophie Iakovlevna Parnok (1885–1933). Poet and translator. Mandelstam is, apparently, as unfair to her as to Tsvetaeva. She published some poems under the name of Andrei Polianin, but the bulk of her work remained unpublished. I have been told by scholars who are familiar with her Nachlass and whose judgment I trust that she is an unrecognized poet of the magnitude of Tsvetaeva or Akhmatova. The family name was originally Parnakh, and her brother, who emigrated to Paris, was known as a poet and a critic of the dance. See Brown, ed., The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, p. 47.

8. See “Attack,” note 1.

9. MAF: Moscow Association of Futurists. The Lyrical Circle: a circle of poets whose one published Miscellany included poems by Mandelstam.

10. Aleksei Eliseevich Kruchenykh (1888–1973). Futurist poet who attempted to create an entirely new language. See his Izbrannoe [Selected works], introduced by V. Markov (Munich: Fink, 1973).

11. See “Attack,” note 1.

LITERARY MOSCOW: BIRTH OF THE Fabula

First published, 1922.

1. Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev, or Andreyev (1871–1919). Author of The Seven Who Were Hanged and the play He Who Gets Slapped. He often moved from a Realist-Naturalist style to something approaching Surrealism. A prolific and well-known writer in his time, he has since fallen from fashion.

Maxim Gorky, pseudonym of Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov (1868–1936). Very well known; a gifted, if extremely uneven writer. He was, between quarrels, a friend of Lenin’s. Having supported the Bolsheviks for a long time by means of his royalties, he became a prominent and important political figure at the time of the Revolution, when he criticized the Bolsheviks severely and finally, after a quarrel with Lenin, left Russia in 1921, only to return again in the late 1920’s, at Stalin’s urging, to become the official idol of Soviet literature and the patron saint of Socialist Realism. During the time of the Civil War, he did more than any other single man to keep writers and the literary intelligentsia alive. See the very interesting observations about him in Berberova, The Italics Are Mine, pp. 174–197 and passim.

Ivan Sergeevich Shmelev (1875–1950). Prerevolutionary Russian Realist writer of the Znanie school (from the publishing house Znanie, or “Knowledge,” under Gorky’s tutelage). Emigrated in the early 1920’s.

Sergeev-Tsensky. Pseudonym of Sergei Nikolaevich Sergeev (1875–1958). “Realistic” writer of the sad lot of the peasant and the provincial intelligentsia. Later he did Socialist Realism.

Evgeny Ivanovich Zamiatin (1884–1937). Author of the antiutopian novel We; also a brilliant essayist and critic. In 1971, he was allowed to leave the Soviet Union and go to Paris. Although one of the few gifted writers with some real understanding of Marxism as well as a commitment to the Revolution, he has never been rehabilitated.

2. Almanacs, in the publication of which Gorky played a large role. See note 1 above on the Znanie school. For the most part, the writers involved were Realists like Gorky.

3. Pseudonym for Boris Andreevich Vogau (1894–1937). Author of The Naked Year; a gifted and innovative writer. Got into trouble, arrested. Recently rehabilitated.

4. The Serapion Brothers, a group of ten young and talented writers and poets, founded in the 1920’s. Their manifesto tried to proclaim some sort of political and stylistic independence, and what they had in common was a commitment to craftsmanship. Their title derived from the novella by Hoffmann.

5. Nikolai Nikolaevich Nikitin (1895–1963). A member of the Serapion Brothers, but managed to adjust to the 1930’s. He won the Stalin Prize in 1951 for a novel about Anglo-American intervention in Russia at the time of the Civil War (1918–1919).

Konstantin Aleksandrovich Fedin (b. 1892). Author of Cities and Years.

Mikhail Iakovlevich Kozyrev (b. 1892). A novelist of great unimportance.

Vadim Germanovich Lidin (b. 1894). Minor writer, was a war correspondent in the Second World War; author of a moderately interesting book of memoirs published in 1957.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin (1873–1954). A remarkably gifted nature and travel writer.

6. Nikolai Leskov (1831–1895). Storyteller and novelist. At his best, one of the greatest of Russian prose writers, but very uneven. His story “The Enchanted Wanderer” is well known.

7. Vsevolod Ivanov (b. 1895). Novelist, whose early prose showed a certain poetic sense of exotic detail. Member of the Serapion Brothers’ literary circle, which tried to establish a certain independence from ideology for literature. In his youth he worked at some odd jobs, including that of fakir in Central Asia.

STORM AND STRESS

First published, 1923. The Russian title, “Buria i natisk,” is the standard translation of the German Sturm und Drang.

1. Aleksei Nikolaevich Apukhtin (1840–1893). Sentimental poet of melancholy Weltschmerz; in some of his works, a civic, reform-oriented poet.

Arseny Arkadievich Golenishchev-Kutuzov (1841–1913). Author of many long narrative poems, close to Apukhtin in spirit; mood of melancholy world-weariness.

2. Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (1875–1936). Poet, novelist, critic, composer, with a decadent yellow-ninetyish flavor. Both imaginative and prolific. Wrote a novel about Cagliostro. It was he who gave Mandelstam’s collection of poems, published in Berlin, the title Tristia. See also “Attack,” note 1.

3. Evdokia Petrovna Rostopchina (1811–1858). An amateur poet. She wrote an allegorical poem about oppression in Poland which got her into trouble with the political police of Nicholas I. Khodasevich has written a splendid essay about her.

Peter Andreevich Viazemsky (1792–1878). Pushkin’s friend, a minor poet and gifted critic.

4. Balagannyi raeshnik. At Russian fairs and carnivals, the side-show barker usually announced the attractions of his booth in rhymed lines.

5. Sergei Esenin (1895–1925). Poet of peasant origin, friend and protégé of Kliuev, though eventually more famous. Wrote elegiac poems about the Russian countryside; indulged in a desperate pose called “hooliganism”; married Isadora Duncan. Committed suicide.

Nikolai Kliuev (1885–1937). Poet of peasant origin. A mystical revolutionary, his enthusiasm began to wane as early as 1918. Arrested in1933 and died in Siberia.

6. François Coppée (1842–1908). French poet and novelist, known as poète des humbles; wrote about cares, loves, and sorrows of common people. Late in life reconverted to Catholicism, became violent nationalist and anti-Dreyfusard.

HUMANISM AND MODERN LIFE

First published, 1923.

FOURTH PROSE

First published, 1966, in the first New York edition of Mandelstam. A samizdat version, which had been circulating for some time, was published by Grani [Facets] in 1967. A revised version was published by Struve and Filipoff in their edition of 1971. A section of the manuscript, apparently dealing with Mandelstam’s views on socialism, was destroyed. The title “Fourth Prose,” according to Nadezhda Iakovlevna, was a kind of amiable code name by which she and Mandelstam referred to the piece. However, it also signified, literally, Mandelstam’s fourth piece of prose: i.e., after “The Hum of Time,” “The Egyptian Stamp,” and About Poetry. It is also a playful reference to the “fourth estate” and Mandelstam’s “vow” to it (See Mandelstam, no. 140). There is also a suggestion of the “Fourth Rome” that was never to be. It is Mandelstam’s “declaration of independence” and statement of solidarity with the fourth estate. It was written in 1929–1930, before the Mandelstams’ trip to Armenia, and tinkered with as late as 1931. This spirited outburst against the notion of an “authorized” literature, against all the still relatively genteel but extremely ominous beginnings of totalitarian thought control, was inspired by the “Eulenspiegel affair.”

The ZIF (Zemlia i Fabrika, “Land and Factory”) publishing house commissioned Mandelstam to revise an edition of a translation of Till Eulenspiegel (Ulenspiegel, in the Russian transliteration) in 1928. The translation had been once revised by V. N. Kariakin in 1916, from one made in 1915 by A. G. Gornfeld under the pseudonym of Korshan. When the new edition appeared in 1928, Mandelstam alone was credited with it on the title page. Neither Mandelstam nor the original translators knew of this or had given their consent. In that world of Literature with a capital L, in which Mandelstam was considered a maverick, and which was itself in the process of being organized for the slaughter yard, the affair was rapidly blown up into a scandal. Mandelstam was accused of plagiarism. The bitter tone of his references to “translation” and “translators” has something of its origins here; but of course the real enemies were Literature and Totalitarianism.

Mandelstam might have used the occasion to make his amends, to conform and join the literary sheep. He refused. He answered the charges with the pledge of the entire body of his literary work. In May, 1929, Mandelstam wrote an article (not included in this volume) about the wretched current state of translation. This was answered by a crude attack. A number of writers came to his defense—among them, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Valentin Kataev, and even such Bolshevik and proletarian stalwarts as Alexander Fadeev and Leopold Averbakh. (Zoshchenko [1895–1958] was a brilliant satirist and master of comic melancholy, much admired by Mandelstam for his sense of the “new” Soviet language and its relation to reality; see his Scenes from the Bath-House, trans. S. Monas [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961]. Kataev [b. 1897] was the author of The Embezzlers, trans. I. Zarine [New York: Dial Press, 1929], and the play Squaring the Circle; he was liberal and protective in his attitude to younger writers. Fadeev [1901–1956] was an old-fashioned “monumental” novelist, generally an orthodox Socialist Realist writer; his novel The Young Guard, first published in 1945, was rewritten drastically to conform to Stalin’s orders. He became secretary-general of the Writers’ Union. Averbakh [1903–?] was a literary critic, militant advocate of a proletarian literature, and leader of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers [RAPP]; he was later liquidated as a Trotskyite.)

The Federation of Unions of Soviet Writers (the centralized Writers’ Union had not yet been formed) resolved the “controversy” by declaring that, though Mandelstam had been unfairly attacked, he was morally to blame for having failed to draw up a contract with the original translators. The affair was not really forgotten until Bukharin intervened and arranged for Mandelstam’s trip to Armenia.

“Fourth Prose” is an outburst, an anathema directed against those who defame “Mother Philology,” a therapeutic release of all that Mandelstam had been holding back since the early 1920’s. As therapy, it ended the writing block which had left almost a five-year gap in his poetry. It also helped him clarify to himself his own position as an outsider, for whom there could no longer be any thought of compromise or concession. It was a full-voiced assertion of his own identity as well as a denunciation of “the enemies of the word.” (See N. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, pp. 177–178; also, Hope Abandoned, pp. 526–530.)

1. Benjamin Fedorovich Kagan (1869–1953). Well-known mathematician. Professor at Moscow University since 1923. Won a Stalin Prize in 1923. Not clear why he was brought into the Mandelstam “case”; perhaps because he had himself translated numerous mathematical texts.

2. Isaiah Benediktovich Mandelstam, a namesake, but not a relative. Also a translator.

3. In Mecca, one of the highlights of the Moslem pilgrimage to Mecca, formerly a pagan shrine, then site of Mohammed’s early preachments.

4. Groups of Komsomols or young Communists, organized to help the Party ostensibly in its struggle against bureaucracy and mismanagement. Their activity was greatly expanded with the conclusion of the New Economic Policy in 1928. Often, “the light cavalry” was used, as Struve and Filipoff point out, to pry into the personal life of members of the intelligentsia, people accused of retaining some sort of inner allegiance to the prerevolutionary way of life. Struve and Filipoff suggest that the assignment of cripples to such a task was not uncommon; there may have been some deliberate selection of people who could in some way be counted on to carry a grudge.

5. Commission for the Improvement of the Living Conditions of Scholars, created in 1921.

6. Pseudonym for Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky (1880–1932), a writer with an unusual and exceptionally adventurous biography; he had been a sailor, a fisherman, a prospector for gold, a soldier, a Socialist Revolutionary, a convict in exile and in prisons. Had a considerable reputation even in the pre-Soviet period for his stories of fantasy and adventure; no less successful in the Soviet period with novels along those lines.

7. One of the charges that kept coming up against Mandelstam, associating him with the “old regime,” was the one that he wore a “fur coat.”

Nadezhda Iakovlevna has eloquently described the poor tattered coat that was the pale spring from which this great rumor gushed forth. But she also refers to it symbolically: “In [‘Fourth Prose’] he spoke of our bloodstained land, cursed the official literature, tore off the literary ‘fur coat’ he had momentarily donned and again stretched out his hand to the upstart intellectual, ‘the first Komsomol, Akaky Akakievich’” (N. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, p. 178).

8. Organized in 1920 as the Writers’ Club; later the house of the Writers’ Union. There is a splendid satirical description of the goings-on there in Michael Bulgakov’s novel, Master and Margarita, trans. Mirra Ginsburg (New York: Grove Press, 1967). It is called Griboedov House there. Griboedov was also a Russian “classic,” but his name means, literally, “mushroom eater,” and the outstanding “cultural” feature of the house is its excellent, cheap restaurant.

9. Arkady Georgievich Gornfeld (1867–1941). A well-known scholar and critic. Before the Revolution he was a prominent contributor to the populist-oriented journal Russian Wealth (Russkoe bogatstvo) and the author of a number of books on Russian and foreign literature.

10. This is an admittedly poor attempt to render khaldy-baldy, a nonsense phrase to be sure, but one that suggests a number of things. Balda is a blockhead, or a hammer. Khalda isn’t anything, but suggests khaltura, or hack work. Since the phrase is repeated several times, my incapacity to translate it has some seriousness. Clarence Brown suggests “idiot-shmidiot.” That has advantages, and disadvantages.

11. Askanaz Artemevich Mravian (1886–1929). People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs for the Republic of Armenia in 1920–1921. From 1923 until his death he was Commissar of Public Education and vice-chairman of the Armenian Sovnarkom. Muravei means “ant,” on which Mandelstam puns the commissar’s name; hence “antic,” an attempt to convey Mandelstam’s pun.

12. Antisemitism was part of the campaign against Mandelstam.

13. The line is from Sergei Esenin’s poem, “I will not begin to deceive myself . . .” (“Ia obmanyvat’ sebia ne stanu . . .”) from his poem-cycle called Taverns of Moscow (Moskva kabatskaia, 1922).

14. Dmitry Dmitrievich Blagoi (b. 1893). Soviet literary scholar.

15. D’Anthès was the man who killed Pushkin in a duel. He was also, much later, a senator under Napoleon III.

16. Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko (1853–1921). Novelist, populist, humanitarian social reformer. Wrote many stories and novels of peasant life, somewhat sentimentalized. Interesting book of memoirs, A History of My Contemporary.

17. The Stock Exchange News (Birzhevye Vedemosti or Birzhevka) was a well-known newspaper before the Revolution and printed much more than stock-exchange news. After the Revolution, it changed its title several times, but expired in 1918; that is, it was closed. It had been owned by Stanislav Maksimovich Propper. The Evening Red Gazette was a popular Petrograd-Leningrad newspaper.

18. Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1888–1938). An Old Bolshevik, member of the Party since 1906; Lenin, in his Testament, called him the Party’s ablest theoretician. Later, one of Stalin’s victims. He was at the time the editor of Pravda, the official organ of the Party. Pravda, of course, means “truth” (or “justice”). He was later editor of Izvestiie. In 1929, Stalin’s noose was already beginning to tighten around Bukharin. He was finally made to participate in the Great Purge Trials and was executed in 1938. He was Mandelstam’s only important official Party “protector” and benefactor. Nadezhda Iakovlevna has pointed out in her memoirs that Mandelstam and Bukharin had in common the traits of impulsiveness and honesty, of doing things without careful calculation of the cost.

19. Angelina Bosio was an Italian soprano who sang four seasons in St. Petersburg before she died there in 1859. Her death is the subject of a poem by Nikolai Nekrasov, “About the Weather” (“O pogode”). In Mandelstam’s story “The Egyptian Stamp,” she plays a notable role, and Mandelstam seems to associate her with overtures and finales, beginnings and ends. See Brown, ed., The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, pp. 149–189; also, Brown’s notes to same. Mandelstam planned to write more, perhaps a novel, about Bosio.

20. Vechnaia Pamiat’. Penultimate part of the Requiem Mass of the Russian Orthodox service, repeated three times.

21. Marie-Joseph, the younger brother of André Chénier, was a successful playwright. He is said to have remained silent when his speaking out might have saved his brother André (who had begun by welcoming the French Revolution, but later wrote in praise of Charlotte Corday) from the guillotine. He survived the Terror and was lavishly successful under Napoleon. So much for “literature”!

22. Dante is very much on Mandelstam’s mind. It is not too fanciful to assume that something like a darkly modern Divine Comedy is beginning to stir.

23. Central figure of Gogol’s short story “The Overcoat.”

24. “Hey, Ivan”—from a poem by Nikolai Nekrasov of that title. Many of Nekrasov’s poems deal with and are dedicated to outcasts and the suffering poor. Moiseich means “son of Moses.” Nekrasov’s figure is also called Ivan Moiseich.

25. A bublika in the original, which is almost a cross between a doughnut and a pretzel.

26. The well-known statue of the great Russian fabulist, which depicts all around and below him the animals that were the characters of his verse fables. The linking of Zoshchenko and Krylov is, in my opinion, a flash of critical inspiration.

27. Moscow Union of Consumer Associations.

28. Viy—from Gogol’s story of that name. A gnomelike creature, whose eyelids reach to the ground, and who therefore cannot see. Once his eyelids have been raised with outside help, however, he can point to the source of evil.

29. See Mandelstam, no. 354.

Journey to Armenia

First published, 1933. I have relied basically on the text in the Struve-Filipoff edition (Mandel’shtam, 2: 137–176) but have collated this with the text published in Literaturnaia Armenia 167, no. 3: 83–99, to which is added an interesting postscript by Nadezhda Mandelstam.

Armenia appealed to both the Christian and the Hellene in Mandelstam. The journey was at once a reprieve, a symbolic journey, and an apocalypse. The essay on Dante is also closely linked with the journey. Mandelstam took it at a time when Soviet writers were in the habit of visiting far corners of the USSR to report back on the strides of progress made by the first five-year plan and the collectivization of agriculture—two revolutions within the Revolution, with more drastically far-reaching effects than the October Revolution itself, for it was these that actually “Sovietized” or, rather, Stalinized the Soviet Union. A number of talented writers at this time were singing the praises of the White Sea Canal, built with slave labor. This is one of the themes of Solzhenitsyn’s richly orchestrated Gulag Archipelago. Of course, Mandelstam’s “travel piece” turned out altogether differently.

While others celebrated the organization of time and place into a totalitarian knot through the minutely detailed and severely imposed five-year plans, Mandelstam sang timelessness, or rather a different kind of time; time linked to the “all-human” world of the Mediterranean, Classical and Christian. He sang Bergsonian time and the power of the word and of “building.”

The Journey is also a vision of the end; Mandelstam’s own end certainly. He identifies very closely with the captured Armenian king at the end of his account. Yet the survival of Armenia encourages him to ride on. It is not likely he hoped much for his own physical survival; but the journey taught him something of his place in time; and that was heartening.

A considerable role in Mandelstam’s life in Armenia belongs to B. S. Kuzin (the biologist B. S. K.), who, at a time when literary people were shunning Mandelstam, spoke to him long and earnestly about evolutionary theory, and who also prompted him, through his interest in German literature, to reread many of the German writers who were close to him.

1. From On Guard (Na Postu), the journal of RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers). A militantly proletarian tendency in pre-1934 Soviet literary life.

2. Reference is probably to Pushkin’s Mazepa (Poltava) rather than Byron’s. I use Byron’s spelling, assuming it more familiar to the English reader.

3. Khlysty: a religious sect. The meaning is literally “flagellants,” but they were not known for their dour ascetic self-scourging as much as for their ritualized joyous responses to the divine; they were “ecstatics.”

4. Another religious sect. Literally means “milk-drinker.”

5. “Official” language. The charge was often leveled against Mandelstam.

6. Nikolai Iakovlevich Marr (1864–1934). Gifted linguist; Marxist. Persuaded Stalin of the truth or at least the usefulness of his theory of the class origins of language. For a time, he occupied a place in linguistics almost equivalent to that of Lysenko in genetics. After his death, he and his work were denounced by Stalin himself, in Stalin’s last major theoretical pronouncement, in 1952, his essay on linguistics.

7. That part of Moscow beyond the Moscow River from the main city, associated with the playwright Ostrovsky and with Apollon Grigoriev, a place inhabited by merchants and artisans, and redolent of the spirit of old, traditional Russia.

8. Paul Signac, D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionisme (Paris, 1911).

9. The Russian word obyvateli, which means literally “the inhabitants, those who live there,” also carries the connotation of “philistines.”

10. Boris Godunov, regent during the reign of Tsar Fedor I (1584–1598), Fedor’s brother-in-law, and one of the last close companions of Fedor’s father, Ivan the Terrible. Later himself elected Tsar (1598–1605) by the Zemsky Sobor. His reign inaugurated the Time of Troubles. Godunov was the descendant of a minor boyar family that was Tatar in origin, and it was sometimes said that the Tatar shone through.

11. To my query, Clarence Brown responded: “The termenvox is the well-known musical instrument named after its inventor, the immortal Lev Termen (b. 1896),” to which he added, “of course.”

12. Alexander Ilyich Bezymensky (b. 1898). Poet, member of the Party since 1916. During the period 1923–1936, he had been an active member of RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) and one of the basic contributors to its journal On Guard (Na Postu).

13. The Russian says literally “shoe tree.” It did not strike me as correct to stretch a glove on a shoe tree. However, the play of words in Russian justifies the usage: na kolodku, “on a shoe tree”; okolodok, “neighborhood.”

14. In Russian, fruits ripen and eyes become bloodshot by means of the same verb: nalivaiushchikhsia plodov, “ripening fruits”; glaza nalivaiutsia krov’iu, “eyes become bloodshot.”

15. Lipovyi means “deceptive,” but also suggests lipa, a linden or lime tree; i.e., “linden-lined.”

16. Nedotroga may mean either the flower or an especially touchy person.

17. One of the oldest settlements in Armenia, at one time an important cultural center. It is about twenty miles from Erevan and contains a number of ancient ruins, some going back as far as the fifth century.

18. A suburb of Erevan, on the way to Ashtarak.

19. King of the Arshakide dynasty, which ruled Armenia from 63 to 428 A.D. In the fourth century the kingdom was divided into Roman and Iranian spheres of influence.

20. Shapur, or Sapores (Greek), or Pahlavi Shahpur II (310–379), defeated the Romans in 363 (death of Julian), and overran Armenia; made some attempt to impose Zoroastrianism on Christian Armenia. Shapur imprisoned the Parthian King Arshak (Arsaces III) in a fortress, where the latter committed suicide. In spite of the political unrest that characterized it, the fifth century that followed these events was the Golden Age of Armenian culture.

21. Mandelstam works in the “stolen air” theme, central to “Fourth Prose.”