Selected Poems

Osip Mandelshtam: an Introduction

Born in 1891, Mandelshtam came early enough into Russian literature to be formed by the cultural surge of the 1900s known as the Silver Age. His father, an unprosperous leather merchant, was a Latvian Jew whose written language was German; his mother, from Vilno, was Russified in speech and outlook: ‘Was she not the first of her whole family,’ wrote her son, ‘to achieve pure and clear Russian sounds?’ Mandelshtam’s first years were spent in Riga and Warsaw. A decade earlier he might have become a Yiddish, German or Polish poet, but in the 1900s discrimination in Russia was breaking down and Jews who were Russian citizens began to feel the Russian language to be their natural means of expression.

Jewish infancy was overlaid by a childhood spent in St Petersburg, and the education he received at the Tenishevsky school (where Vladimir Nabokov was to study) helped to make him a complete Hellene and European. His first lyrics show a passive receptiveness to the Symbolist other-worldliness typical of the times: Mandelshtam’s receptiveness grew into a thirst for universal culture once he had spent several terms listening to Henri Bergson at the Sorbonne and studying at Heidelberg from 1907 to 1909. From now on he was convinced that the poet’s immortal creation far outweighed in importance his mortal life: ‘condensation vanish without trace: The cherished pattern no one can efface.’

Mandelshtam’s views on culture and the poet’s vocation were much influenced by the poet and poet’s mentor Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949), whose dualities of Dionysian disorder and Apollonic order became the energizing polarities in Mandelshtam’s thought, like the contrast of negative Judaic and positive Hellene, or Henri Bergson’s objective and subjective time. Equally important was Mandelshtam’s encounter with another great Symbolist, Innokenty Annensky (1856–1909), headmaster of the Tsarkoye Selo lyceum (the Eton of Russia). Annensky was a decadent poet of almost pathological modesty, who likewise saw European and Russian culture as indissolubly linked to ancient Greece, a balancing act between orderly art and chaotic numinous forces. Annensky, as translator and disciple of Verlaine, Rimbaud and Euripides, inculcated a respect for language and poetic responsibility.

Meeting Annensky’s pupil, Nikolay Gumilev, was even more crucial for Mandelshtam’s future: Mandelshtam, Gumilev and the latter’s wife, the charismatic poet Anna Akhmatova, formed the core of a new poetic grouping which formally declared itself in 1913 to be the Acmeists. The word and the ideology are in themselves insignificant: Acmeism was to be for the rest of these poets’ lives ‘a yearning for world culture’, a sense of the priority of poetic tradition over individual lyrical ego, a reaction against the worst of Symbolism – its pursuit of the occult, of empty musicality, its cult of decadent autobiography. Although Gumilev was shot in 1921 and Akhmatova spent most of her life many hundreds of miles away, Mandelshtam always felt them to be addressees and collocutors.

Mandelshtam never renounced Symbolism: in Silentium he gave priority to the idea over the reality: ‘Remain foam, Aphrodite,/And – word – return to music…’ But his early poetry that was to be published in 1913 as Stone turns more and more to symmetry, affirming architectural principles not only as the criteria for lasting poetry, but as the means of surmounting the poet’s own personal inadequacy. Notre Dame cathedral is seen to unite the negative and positive, Northern chaos and Mediterranean order in European culture, ‘The Gothic soul’s rational abyss,/Egyptian power and Christian shyness’, and inspires him to declare: ‘I too one day shall create/Beauty from cruel weight.’

The Acmeists, like the Bolshevik conspirators calling themselves ‘hammer’, ‘steel’ and ‘stone’ – Molotov, Stalin, Kamenev – stressed the positive with their ‘hard’ titles: Mandelshtam’s ‘Stone’ matches Gumilev’s ‘Pearls’, Akhmatova’s ‘Beads’, Zenkevich’s ‘Porphyry’, in tribute to Théophile Gautier’s ‘Émaux et Camées’. But their greatness lay in their ‘softness’, the vulnerable, tragic side that eventually breaks through. In Mandelshtam, the victim and exile are never utterly silenced: if not ‘Joseph, sold into Egypt’, then Ovid (exiled to the Black Sea steppes, like Pushkin and eventually Mandelshtam) is an ominous precursor. Ovid was to give Mandelshtam the title of his second book, Tristia, in 1922: but in ‘Horses’ hooves…’ of 1914 the poet already acknowledges him as the poet who ‘sang of the ox- and bullock-waggons/In the march of the barbarians’.

Unlike the other Acmeists, but like their French counterparts such as Paul Valéry and Jean Moréas, Mandelshtam had by 1912 become a Neo-classicist, reinterpreting the Mediterranean world as a timeless imaginary resource: the greatest poems of Stone, such as The casino, ‘There are orioles…’, ‘Sleeplessness. Homer. Taut sails’, merge the poet’s mind with Homeric epic and Anacreontic idyll, so that the word becomes a world in itself: ‘There are orioles in the woods, and length of vowels/Is the sole measure in accentual verse.’ Time is bridged and the Hellenic world with its insecurity, an island surrounded by barbarians, undermined by Hades, is an analogue of the present: ‘Now Homer falls silent,/And a black sea, thunderous orator,/Breaks on my pillow with a roar.’

By 1913, Mandelshtam was an original thinker as well as a mature poet. What is implicit in his poetics – the poet’s ability to bridge time, to recreate past experiences in new languages – was made explicit in a daring series of intellectual forays. His essay on François Villon establishes a model for the poet as victim of the state; another essay, ‘On the Addressee’, makes imaginary conversation the basis of poetry; an essay on the first Russian thinker of note, the historiosopher Pyotr Chaadayev, argues the cyclic nature of history, for the need to interpret present experience as recognition of the past. These essays establish the role of the poet in history; they insist on continuity, on poetic language as a universal means of expression, constantly refined: they make Mandelshtam a proponent of Neoclassicism, which is to infuse and deepen his poetry for another twenty-five years, to an extent matched only in the work of T. S. Eliot.

The classical emphasis in Mandelshtam’s Stone marked him apart from his fellow Acmeists: his lyrics have none of the egocentric, biographical core that we find in the best and worst of Gumilev and Akhmatova. Mandelshtam was even further in spirit and language from the Symbolists, whether the imprecise musicality of Blok or the occult rhetoric of Andrey Bely, while the dynamic barbarism of the Futurists, such as Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky, who were now denouncing European tradition in favour of experimental, aggressive poetics, could not have been more alien to him. Like Khodase-vich, Mandelshtam had to wait for recognition simply because poets who were out to shock by self-dramatization or provocative manifestos drew more critical fire.

The outbreak of war brought unexpected roles to the Acmeists. Very few Russian poets, however, took refuge in patriotic self-immolation: Gumilev was virtually the only poet to expose himself to front-line bullets. The Acmeists were too heavily committed to a united European culture to feel anything but horror at the disintegration of centuries-old contours and unities. The omens of 1914 and 1915, the smouldering peat bogs around Petrograd (as St Petersburg became), the death of Russia’s first challenger to Beethoven, Skry-abin, seemed harbingers of an apocalypse; fire, the extinction of the sun and of genius. Rachel’s shattering performance in Petrograd of Racine’s Phèdre left a deep impression, as though not just a mythological queen, but a sun goddess and an entire culture were perishing. Premonitions turned Akhmatova into a Cassandra, made even the warrior Gumilev into a ‘poète maudit’ and gave the last poems of Mandelshtam’s Stone an insight into historical necessity which made him from now on the most contemporary and, in the deepest sense, the most political poet in Russia.

Like Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, Blok and almost every Russian poet liable for service, Mandelshtam got exemption from the army. His perambulations over Russia and its Black Sea territories began: a brief affair with Marina Tsvetayeva led him to the Crimea, the setting for much of his later poetry, Russia’s only overlap with the ancient Hellenic world, and then to Moscow, which Mandelshtam, like Baratynsky a hundred years before him, could not help fearing as a threateningly medieval Asiatic world. The disasters of war and the outbreak of revolution, culminating in the irreversible October 1917, drove him not only to flight but to acts and words of desperate heroism: his protests to the head of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky, against arbitrary terror, his willingness to collaborate in the highest sense, but not in the lower, with such amenable Bolsheviks as Lunacharsky and Bukharin, match the poems of his that greet the revolution as the ‘twilight of freedom’, ‘the unbearable weight of power’. He not only mourns, but interprets and admonishes.

Mandelshtam begins to detect cycles in Russian poetry, too: the events of 1917 and 1918 lead him back to his precursors in the eighteenth century. Marina Tsvetayeva had acclaimed him as a ‘young Derzhavin’: he follows Derzhavin in his treatment of the dying Petrograd as a city about to pass into Elysium, ‘transparent Petropolis,/Where Proserpina rules over us’. The poetry of Tristia aligns with the Petersburg themes of doom so powerfully stated in Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman and in Dostoevsky’s novels; only now Mandelshtam has allied them to imagery of the black sun that pervades French tradition, from the lines he attributes to Phèdre, ‘With my black love I have sullied the sun’, to Nerval’s ‘Soleil noir de la mélancolie’.

He was never again allowed by fate or the authorities to reestablish himself in Petrograd/Leningrad: for the rest of his life it remained what Rome was to Ovid, a dying homeland, the centre of a lost empire. Mandelshtam never proclaimed allegiance to a new proletariat order; he refused to redirect his poetry to the masses; his peregrinations during the revolution to the Crimea under the Whites or to Georgia under the Mensheviks were suspect; his loyalties to poets executed, like Gumilev, or exiled, like Vyacheslav Ivanov, condemned him to homelessness and eventually exile. In the eyes of the Soviet establishment he was a shadowy, even a shady figure: and the frequency of the word ten’, shade, shadow, in his poetry must be significant.

The Crimea, where Mandelshtam, like so many Russian writers, fled for warmth and food, became a fragile dreamworld. Here the White armies hung on until 1921 and it was possible to drink milk and honey, to relegate the reality of the north to the status of a recurrent nightmare. The title poem and the central poems of Tristia oppose a carefully nurtured Hellenic dreamworld of sensuality to a threatening outside temporal force: these poems re-enact an opposition between internal time (in Russian, vek) and external time (vremya), very like the contrast we find in another assimilated Jew, Marcel Proust.

The sensuality of Tristia gives Mandelshtam’s love poetry an almost palpable sonority: in 1919, he met Nadezhda Khazina; in 1921 he married her and a life-long dependence began, surviving his periodic infatuations which inspired some of the richest love poetry in the language. Like Catullus, whom Mandelshtam had studied very closely (despite failing his Latin examinations at university), he is moved by love when most threatened by death. The poem Tristia deals with the pain of separation from physical love, from life and from inspiration and from a culture as though they were all variants of one ‘science of separations’. It is the culmination of the Russian elegy, which amounts to the major lyrical genre of the language, celebrating loss not merely of life but of love and language. Thus the first stanza’s ‘nocturnal laments when hair flows loose’ are linked to the political betrayal implicit in the ‘cock’s clamour’ of the second stanza and the poetic frustration – ‘How threadbare the language of rejoicing!’ – in the third stanza. After linking all three levels of experience – amatory, political and poetic – as firmly as Ovid ever had, Mandelshtam is able to draw the first of a number of statements on the separate role of men and women in tragic times. ‘Wax is for women what bronze is for men,’ he concludes, an idea which grows out of the different roles of himself as a victim and Akhmatova as a survivor, both Cassandra and Antigone, and amounts to a completely classical tragic philosophy. It holds true until the year before his death, when he addresses his young friend Natasha Shtempel with an almost unbearable summons: ‘There are women who are natives of the sodden earth:/Their every step a hollow sobbing,/Their calling to accompany the risen’.

The Neo-classical craftsmanship of Tristia was greeted by sympathetic critics as ‘the overcoming of Symbolism’; in fact, Tristia’s precision of tone is a preparation for the more starkly expressed revelations of the poetry of the 1930s. In 1922, however, Mandelshtam’s achievement was more noticeable than a decade earlier: the Symbolists had died, emigrated or abandoned poetry; surviving Futurists, such as Mayakovsky, had lapsed for a while into versifying propaganda; the new proletarian poets were disappointing in their incompetence. Only Pasternak’s My Sister Life – ‘a cure for tuberculosis’, as Mandelshtam generously acclaimed it – made a greater impact than Tristia, for Pasternak flooded his readers with sense impressions, private allusions and breathless inventiveness, quite unlike the orderly Hellenic imagery, the elegiac cadences and traditional sonorities of Mandelshtam. Before his execution, Gumilev had become disorientated enough to develop into a Symbolist; Akhmatova, on the verge of silence, had reduced poetry to austere aphorism: Mandelshtam was the only recognizable major Acmeist poet still writing.

Eventually, he made his way back from the Hellenic hinterland to Moscow, travelling over the Black Sea to Georgia three times between 1919 and 1922. Unlike Pasternak and Zabolotsky, however, he was never able to establish himself in the more hospitable Caucasus; too unsettled and outspoken to fit in with the ritual respect offered to poets, too preoccupied with the need to confront the moral vacuum at the centre of power, he returned to Petrograd and Moscow.

The proof that Mandelshtam was political is to be found in his heroic protests to Dzerzhinsky and Bukharin about Blyumkin, a secret policeman whom he caught filling in a blank signed death warrant with innocent names: this act put Mandelshtam’s life at risk and may have contributed to his final doom. More important still are his much misinterpreted ‘historiosophic’ poems, such as The Twilight of Freedom, where the revolution is seen as a cosmic catastrophe, the earth out of its orbit, and the poet reacts with sympathy, not condemnation, for the leaders attempting to take the helm. Like Blok’s The Twelve, such poems were misunderstood and condemned by left and right: the left could not forgive the elegiac tone and the right could not share the sense of tragic necessity. Those Bolsheviks, such as Lunacharsky and Bukharin, who could value such interpretations of their revolution, were few and very vulnerable. The real menace of the times was brought home to Mandelshtam in 1921 by the execution of Gumilev which, for all its self-willed martyrdom, was the first of several events that shifted Mandelshtam’s allegiance to the world of the dead.

The world of the dead is ever-present in Tristia: Mandelshtam is constantly trying to retrieve his thoughts from the shadowy realm of Persephone, the refuge of Psyche, who symbolizes for him the free spirit, the unspoken word. ‘The blind swallow flies back to her palace of shadows;/A nocturnal song is sung in a frenzy.’ Swallows, the classical symbol of communication between the land of the living and the city of the dead, represent both free poetic thought and political freedom to Mandelshtam: the coming of totalitarianism he imagines as the ‘binding of swallows into battle legions’. His poetics and his historical thinking are indivisible.

Mandelshtam’s long-term view was perhaps even less acceptable to Soviet ideology than Gumilev’s straightforward hostility. After Tristia Mandelshtam found his access to publishers more and more difficult. His attempts to settle in Leningrad foundered on hostility and he was forced by 1928 to settle in Moscow. The last poems of Tristia date from 1921: in any case the atmosphere for lyrical poetry was growing too rare. Russian literature felt itself to have reached an epic phase, where only narrative prose and the cinema could hope to assimilate what had happened. From 1922, Akhmatova and Pasternak virtually deserted lyricism for other fields, Akhmatova for the ‘genre of silence’, Pasternak for the illusive objectivity of narrative poetry, and Mandelshtam likewise moved towards prose as self-expression and translation as a means of earning a living. The Soviet reader naturally benefited from the influx of talent in translation and children’s books, written by those who were refugees from their own thoughts, but the history of Russian poetry came to a decade or so’s hiatus in 1923.

The ‘other voice of prose’ which Mandleshtam revealed in the mid-1920s was no mere surrogate, but an equally penetrating and perhaps even more original alternative to verse. The ‘anti-memoirs’ of The Noise of Time are a haunting evocation of the cultural influences – texts, teachers, childhood friends – on the adolescent poet, and the novella The Egyptian Stamp is a dense hallucinatory vision of the revolution and its effect on the naïve poetic persona. (Both works have been translated by Clarence Brown.) But this is more than autobiography, fictionalized or not: ‘I want to speak about something other than myself, to follow the age, the noise and growth of time… Revolution is itself life and death and cannot bear hearing people trivialising life and death. Its throat is dry with thirst but it will not accept a single drop of moisture from an outsider’s hands.’ But for all its importance as a vehicle for tracing his spiritual growth and measuring his distance and involvement, Mandelshtam, unlike Pasternak, never allowed prose to supplant verse. For a few years his poetry was undergoing a period of pupation before it burst out, metamorphosed and not immediately recognizable.

The relatively few poems of 1921 to 1924 lie halfway between the musicality of Tristia and the silence of the later 1920s: one’s first reaction is to dismiss them as cryptic. But a reading of earlier Mandelshtam makes deciphering straightforward: the difference is that these are written for a familiar reader, who has mastered the code for his images’ symbolic values. The density of ‘I was washing at night in the courtyard,’ which sets with minimal text a starlit night reflected in a rainwater butt, expands into sense when we remember the value of starlight as unalterable truth, salt as an image of painful realization, so that the eight-line poem becomes a cosmic contrast of eternal clarity and temporary murk, as stark and unmusical as a mathematical equation.

The compression of Mandelshtam’s ideas of private and public time is most powerful in My time of 1923, where time is seen as a beast with a broken spine, turned cruel and vindictive, the poet unable to restore its unity. Here Mandelshtam has compressed an idea that goes back through Mayakovsky and Cubist painting to Verlaine, the idea of a whole human being as a musical instrument (the flute as the image of the spine, the vertebrae its keys), whose only purpose is harmony and which is destroyed when its integrity is broken: Verlaine’s Art poétique and Mayakovsky’s Flute-Spine are subsumed here, as is the classical tradition of Russian poetry, Pushkin and Tyutchev, in the vision of nature still ‘gushing out greenly’ while human life is crushed to death.

Before his six years’ silence, Mandelshtam also experimented with freer, more expansive forms, explicitly or implicitly odes, to deal with the vast disparities between an increasingly threatening Moscow and the starry eternity by which he had always measured events and time. Political imagery gives way to metaphors of predation, oppression and summary execution, traditional in Russian fable and urban folklore: 1 January 1924 has imagery of judicial murder: ‘Lips sealed with tin’, the Underwood typewriter with the cartilage of a pike and deadly ‘layers of lime’. The imagery of threat and the astral symbols lie dormant until they surface with renewed effect in the 1930s. These six years, however unhappy in their wanderings and insecurity, were not entirely wasted. Like other Acmeists, Mandelshtam sought refuge in new spheres of activity, notably reading and translating Italian poetry, which seemed to hold the secret of survival in an age of lethal political conflict. Dante and Petrarch were soon to be of enormous significance to Mandelshtam as sources of themes, even new sounds, but above all as mapmakers of hell.

Hostility and suspicion in literary circles, even from such established pre-revolutionary figures as Andrey Bely, drove Mandelshtam into new intellectual regions. In the Soviet Union speculation was still relatively free among natural and physical scientists: the biologists and physicists so valuable to the Communists’ development plans were the last reservoir of free thinking and international communication. It was among them that Mandelshtam found new acquaintance and ideas. Not until the 1930s were these new themes assimilated into Mandelshtam’s poetics, but they were to give his poetry, and that of his younger contemporary Zabolotsky, resources almost unprecedented in European literature.

Even in My time of 1923, Mandelshtam shows an impressive familiarity with biological terminology; biology is the first of the sciences – followed by physics and cosmology – to enlarge his poetics. By 1930 he had made friends with Boris Kuzin, an eager proponent of neo-Lamarckism, a theory of evolution discredited before and since which propounds the inheritance of acquired characteristics and supposes that species evolve by an almost spiritual response to the demands of their environment. Stalin and his charlatan agronomist Lysenko favoured this pre-Darwinian theory for its implications in creating Homo sovieticus out of Homo sapiens and for the promise of training wheat to grow in the Arctic: very soon, however, the neo-Lamarckists were to be purged for the implicit idealism, even theism, of their doctrines. Mandelshtam went back to the original Philosophie zoologique of 1809 and saw something the biologists had ignored: Lamarck treats evolution as though it were literally a descent from warm-blooded humanity through the reptiles to the insensate protean forms of life and implies, as well he might after his bitter experience of the French revolution, that evolution is a reversible process, a ladder (une échelle) that nature could well descend or even snatch away. Furthermore, Lamarck’s hierarchical survey of the genera and families of animals uncannily echoes Dante’s nine circles of hell, each circle blacker and more painful.

Biology and Italian poetry are linked: the narrative thread spun by Ariosto in the poem of that name, the cult of the dead Laura in the Petrarch sonnets that Mandelshtam so lovingly translated in 1933, the yearning for an unattainable Florence and Tuscany in the poems of the 1930s all correspond to Lamarck’s exploration of nature’s abysses, the unattainable sixth sense in ‘the lizard’s pineal eye’ (the fourth eight-line poem of 1934): these are secret worlds: as a variant of Ariosto puts it, ‘Friend of Ariosto, Petrarch and Tasso –/ Senseless, salty-sweet language/And the charming bivalves of clinched sounds, –/I’m afraid to open the clam’s pearl with a knife.’ Their labyrinthine symmetry creates a structure that enables Mandelshtam to make tragic sense of Stalin’s epoch.

This relevance of the Italian classics and of natural sciences to his predicament struck Mandelshtam on his last journey into Asia, a trip with biologists to Armenia that Bukharin’s patronage had gained for him. The 1930s brought about the ‘impact of Asia’ on Mandelshtam and many of his contemporaries: for Russian poets, Armenia and Georgia had replaced Italy and France as lands where lemon trees bloomed. Given the traditional Russian associations of Asia with the blind tyranny of Medes and Persians as opposed to Europe’s Hellenic freedom, it is only natural that Soviet poets should see ominous relevance in the cultural switch they were forced to make that accords with MacNeice’s lines: ‘For we are obsolete who like the lesser things,/Who play in corners with looking-glass and beads;/It is better we should go quickly, go into Asia…’

Dante, biology and Asia were the explosive: the detonator was provided by the second important death in Mandelshtam’s career, that of Mayakovsky, which ‘released the stream of poetry’ in him, as his widow phrased it. If Mayakovsky, sympathizer and propagandist, could not live under the regime, then the ‘genre of silence’ appeared to offer no safeguards. However irrational the reasoning, both Pasternak and Mandelshtam experienced a ‘second birth’ on Mayakovsky’s death: between 1930 and 1932 they wrote what are arguably their finest and boldest lyrics, using the last bubbles of freedom and the incomprehension of their censors to get them into print before twenty years of terror took poetry back to a purely oral genre.

In Tbilisi, on his way back from Armenia, in November 1930 Mandelshtam wrote a remarkable chain of stanzas to celebrate his reawakening to new, harsher textures, a ‘cat language’ of oral and written scratches and an Asiastic endurance of history’s oppression. Years later, when Armenia has faded from his themes, the new sensations of being blinded and deafened by menacing colours and sounds are permanently incorporated into Mandelshtam’s phonetic line and images. Armenia thus gives Mandelshtam not just a landscape for a new era – ‘a costly clay’ – but a new Asiatic language, rich in whispered consonants, fit for sotto voce and hermetic writing. But its history, the fall of a kingdom to imperial tyranny, is of allegorical importance in the prose account Mandelshtam wrote of his Journey. This poetic prose mingles history, landscape and travelogue with an account of Mandelshtam’s induction into science, ‘Around the Naturalists’, and eventually gives rise to poems such as Lamarck of 1932 in which he identifies with the neglected ‘patriarch’ of evolution and prepares to experience his descent into the world of the arachnids, a typically spidery hell for Russian writers.

Between 1932 and his first arrest in 1934 Mandelshtam treats Russian, Italian and German poets in the same way as he does Lamarck, as precursors whom he must follow to the bitter end, whether the deviously self-sustaining narration of Ariosto or the arrogance of Pushkin’s predecessor, Batyushkov, who pursued his ‘eternal dreams, samples of blood,/From one glass to another’ at the cost of his own sanity. Alien tongues are not just sources of new ideas, material for translation but – as Latin and Greek had been in the 1920s and 1920s – means for personal survival. Addressing the heroic Sturm und Drang poets in To the German language, Mandelshtam declares that ‘An alien language will be a foetal membrane for me,/And long before I dared be born.’

Literary survival, however, was harder: the editor who published the Journey to Armenia was lucky to lose merely his job. Mandelshtam had enormous difficulty finding the meanest housing, was provoked by attacks and accusations into leaving the newly formed Union of Writers and was barred from publication. Then with suicidal spirit he composed a lampoon on Stalin – a talent for satirical verse had made him a successful children’s versifier – and no one could save him. Stalin, who had himself been a Romantic poet in Georgia as an adolescent, took a close and deadly interest in Russian poetry: he would have been unlikely to forgive Mandelshtam’s allusiveness, and the lines on ‘His fat fingers slimy as worms’, for all the acknowledgement of his power (‘He forges his decrees like horse-shoes’), were an eventual death warrant.

The intervention of Pasternak and Bukharin reprieved Mandelshtam. He was sent to a remote town in the Urals and after a suicide attempt was allowed to choose the steppe town of Voronezh for three years’ exile. But his mental and physical health was broken and after the first wave of purges began in 1934 it was clear that this first arrest was only the prelude to a second and final blow.

For thirty years it was assumed that Mandelshtam had been destroyed as a poet: it was natural that, like almost everyone else, he should be silenced by fear if not by depression. Only after 1961, when his widow and the others who had stood by him – Akhmatova and Natasha Shtempel – released the manuscripts they had preserved in pillowcases and saucepans or reconstructed from memory and scraps of paper, did it become clear that there was a posthumous Mandelshtam, at first barely compatible with the known poet, to be disinterred from Voronezh. Slowly the poems have emerged in the Soviet Union, in Literary Georgia or Questions of Linguistics, and quickly they amassed in the West. Despite the loss of Mandelshtam’s original manuscripts, the theft and destruction of much of his archive by self-appointed trustees or the NKVD, enough friends committed them to paper or memory for us to be sure that the versions now in print are as good as originals. (Many are variants, but as the notebooks were not fully prepared for publication we cannot always say whether one version of a poem supersedes another.) The Voronezh poems amount to a quarter of Mandelshtam’s work and are arguably his finest. It has taken time for those who love the measured sonority of the early work to come to terms with the sometimes harsh, nervous and very dense language of the later work, and for the continuity between the two to become apparent.

What are now known as the Voronezh notebooks are 189 pages spanning three years: they represent three intense spurts spaced by long months of almost total silence: twenty-three poems date from spring and summer 1935; the second notebook’s fifty poems come from nine weeks of the winter of 1936/7, while the last notebook holds about two dozen poems from spring 1937. The poems are precisely dated and show some thematic grouping: the first volume of Nadezhda Yakovlevna’s memoirs, Hope Against Hope, should be read for the evidence of their authenticity and their origin.

The first notebook has to cope with a new landscape – the forests of the Urals and the black earth of the steppe so alien to Mandelshtam’s urban or Hellenic scenery. Drawing on the phrase of Voronezh’s famous nineteenth-century pseudo-folk poet Koltsov – ‘step-mother steppe’ (a pun in English, not in Russian) – Mandelshtam makes literal his own image of poetry as a plough digging up time, (‘it ploughs the ear with a chilly, morning clarinet’) and arrives at a surrogate of the musicality he needs in his surroundings: ‘a mildewed flute’. That sense of a ruined instrument stays with his Voronezh poetry, culminating in the ‘Greek flute’ that slips from the poet’s hands and lips in 1937. Far from the sea that moulded St Petersburg and the Crimea, Mandelshtam feels his new element, the black earth, to be fit only for the burial of ‘This charred, bony flesh’.

A little work for radio in 1935, a sanatorium stay in Tambov, a visit by Anna Akhmatova, support from Pasternak and from Natasha Shtempel (who risked her own and her family’s lives to befriend the Mandelshtams) enabled the poet, despite the new wave of purges sweeping the country, to gather his strength for the extraordinarily productive few months of the second and third Voronezh notebooks, in which all his interests, imagery and linguistic resources combined. Modern physics and Christianity he had already discovered to be linked in the work of Pavel Florensky, priest and mathematician, who proved that Dante’s cosmology could only be reconciled with Einstein’s theory of relativity: this stimulates Mandelshtam to new syntheses. Writing his Conversation about Dante, he treats himself as an explorer of hell, and he learns to face Christian demonology in the steppes. His lines, ‘What can we do with the murderous plains?/… And is not he who makes us shriek in our sleep/Slowly crawling across them – /The space for Judases not yet born?’, sound the same apocalyptic alarm as Yeats’ ‘rough beast… slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.’

Like every interpreter of the apocalypse, Mandelshtam begins to detect ominous parallels. His verse had always invested much of its power in rhyme, in the significance of assonance. In the poems of the second Voronezh notebook, coincidences of sound between opposites take on extraordinary meaning. The whispering ‘cat language’ – k, p, t, ch – of Armenian is combined with rich earthy sounds – or, ar; traditional Russian puns, such as the rhyme of guby, lips, with gubit’, to destroy, are enlarged. Words such as os’, axis, become crucial, since they link the poet (Osip) with his persecutor, Josef Stalin, and negative images such as wasps (osy). The weft is so elaborate that Mandelshtam now begins to defy translation.

A full understanding of this poetry is perhaps unattainable, even with the help of Nadezhda’s memoirs, so varied and often private are the sources and references: Voronezh’s art gallery, chance remarks by visitors as well as new reading merge with Mandelshtam’s rekindled sense of his own Jewishness: ‘I am plunged into a lion’s den…/Under the leavening shower of these sounds:/… more potent than the Pentateuch.’ Only in 1987, for instance, were Natasha Shtempel’s memoirs published and the dedicatory import of many poems, such as ‘With her delightful uneven way of walking’, confirmed.

One clear development links the fate of the cosmos, the starry firmament, to that of the human skull, both vaults, repositories of truth now vulnerable to extinction. Poem after poem connects the movement of the human face, e.g. The birth of a smile, with the creation of order out of chaos, ‘A rainbow ties them both together,/ A glimmer of Atlantis strikes both eyes’, so that imagery of doom latent in the tender infant’s cartilage and the lost city of Atlantis coexist with the affirmation of creation. Mandelshtam, at his serenest, achieves a Lamarckian acceptance that the ‘escalator’ of evolution has to go into reverse. Just as women’s role is to mourn men, so the male poet’s role is to mourn the universe: poetry remains for him what it always was – elegy. ‘And I have accompanied the rapture of the universe/As muted organ pipes/Accompany a woman’s voice.’

Serenity did not silence protest: by the end of February 1937, Mandelshtam’s longest and most devious poem was finished: Verses on the unknown soldier. The title clearly destined it for publication: the naive could read it as a lament for the victims of the First World War, as today the Soviet editors introduce it as a prophecy of the Second. It is only too obviously a lament for the still unsung victims of the purges, and ends with a cry of fear. But the most frightening aspect of the poem is its incorporation of modern quantum physics and astronomy (a subject on which Mandelshtam’s namesake was then lecturing in Moscow University) and the anticipation of ideas yet to be born: the universe seen as a ‘black oyster’ in which starlight, once the source and image-bearer of ineradicable truths, is to be swallowed up. The starry vault whose image the human skull reflects is about to collapse. In this sense Stalin is a Copernicus capable of destroying cosmic harmony.

Mandelshtam redirected his attention to Stalin, forcing himself to the act of degradation inflicted on almost every poet, doomed or saved, in the 1930s: an ode to Stalin. But, incapable of simulation, he failed. Stalin appears as a counterpart to himself, the negative of the poet, sometimes through the same image, as an ‘idol in a cave’ surrounded by bones, trying ‘to recollect his human guise’. Only in ambiguity could Mandelshtam attempt any conciliation. Like novelists such as Bulgakov and Zamyatin, he was interested in the mind and pathology of his enemy to the point of sympathy, but not of panegyric.

In April 1937, Mandelshtam was denounced as a Trotskyist: although his exile was coming to an end, he was living on borrowed time. That spring, inspired by the marriage of Natasha Shtempel as well as the suicides and disappearances in Voronezh, there is a final burst of lyricism, as though he were confident that the survival of his verse was assured. The influence of Keats (Nadezhda knew English poetry) seems to underlie his poems on the Cretan urns and the Greek flute, which stand for a continuous creative spirit that moves from one ephemeral vessel to another. The Greek flute commemorates not only a Voronezh musician who was purged, but the Hellenic creative spirit which the poet no longer has the strength to express: ‘Clods of clay in the sea’s hands… My measure has become disease.’ The Russian language seems to prove the involvement of death in creation: mor, disease, links with mera, measure, just as the syllable ub is present in the words for lips, murder, diminish. The Greek thalassa and thanatos, sea and death, are the beginnings and endings of poetry, as their assonance shows.

Mandelshtam was virtually the only important Russian poet writing in the mid 1930s. The purges had silenced every major talent. Pasternak wrote his Artist in 1936, during a brief lull in the terror, but soon succumbed to the prevailing atmosphere; Nikolay Zabolotsky relied on his Aesopic, fauve technique to write about the disjointing of the times, while appearing to praise the brave new world around him, but the censors understood him and he was swept away in the same wave that destroyed Mandelshtam. Even abroad, poetic inspiration had apparently deserted Marina Tsvetayeva: Mandelshtam had no cultural milieu, no critical response, no publications after 1934 and even his private readers were too frightened to respond. The Voronezh poems were written for the poet and a shadowy posterity: the lack of feedback is one of the reasons for their nervous, cryptic and compressed tone.

Their exile officially expired, the Mandelshtams managed to spend only three days in Leningrad and Moscow: they found temporary shelter in Kalinin. Then in spring 1938, with suspicious ease, they were found a place in a country sanatorium: on 2 May, Osip Mandelshtam was arrested. The protectors of poets at the court of Stalin were soon themselves to face the firing squad: Mandelshtam was processed as a counter-revolutionary and, starved, perhaps deranged, died in a transit camp in far-eastern Siberia on 27 December 1938.

With extraordinary determination, like the women at the cross, Nadezhda, Natasha Shtempel and Anna Akhmatova ensured his resurrection and the eventual triumphant entry of his poetry into the Judaic and Hellenic tradition. At enormous risk they preserved what they could in the chaos of the war years and the repressive years of Stalin’s senility. A very few Russian critics, such as Khardzhiev and Shklovsky, and a few intrepid foreign scholars ensured that Mandelshtam’s name, by the mid 1960s, became known not only to two new generations of Russian readers, but to virtually the entire world. As James Greene and, before him, Paul Celan have shown, Mandelshtam’s concern for precision, musicality and continuity make him one of the most translatable poets Russia has ever produced. In Russian poetry, his influence began in the 1960s: as a protégé of Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky became a vector of Mandelshtamian poetics for Russian poets. While we cannot say that a tradition of Jewish verse exists in Russia, Judaism, as Mandelshtam puts it, ‘like a drop of musk filling a whole house’, adds a tension and internationalism to a lyrical tradition which could not otherwise have survived the rarefaction of the atmosphere.