F
or almost a quarter century after his death in a remote Siberian labor camp in 1938, Osip Mandelstam’s name was consigned to oblivion in his own country. In the West he was vaguely remembered by a few scholars as one of the Acmeist poets who had rebelled against the mysticism of the Symbolists around 1910, a poet secondary in interest to such leading Acmeists as Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilyov and not to be compared in any meaningful way to such giants of twentieth-century Russian poetry as Aleksandr Blok or Vladimir Mayakovsky. Yet today Mandelstam is a tremendous cult figure in Soviet underground publications (samizdat), and the State Publishing House has just released a collection of his poems that has been repeatedly announced since 1959.2 Articles about him are appearing in the West with increasing frequency, at least two major American universities are offering graduate seminars on his work, and the first full-scale biographical and critical study of him in English has just been published. Almost simultaneously, there has now appeared the second volume of the memoirs of Mandelstam’s widow—whose passionate Hope against Hope was enthusiastically received here four years ago—and two comprehensive collections of his poetry in Eng-lish translation.
1 Review of Hope Abandoned, by Nadezhda Mandelstam, trans. Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1974); Selected Poems, by Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin (New York: Atheneum, 1974); Complete Poetry of Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, trans. Burton Raffel and Alla Burago (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1973); and Mandelstam, by Clarence Brown (New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1973). Originally published in New York Times Book Review, 20 January 1974, 1, 10, 12.
2 O. Mandel’shtam, Stikhotvoreniia, ed. N. I. Khardzhiev, intro. by A. L. Dymshits (Len-ingrad: Sovetskii pistatel’, 1973 [Biblioteka poeta, bol’shaia seriia]). Needless to say, there was a flood of editions and publications of Mandelstam’s poetry and prose in late- and post-Soviet Russia. The editions prepared by Gleb Struve and Boris Filippov and published in the US (and mentioned by SK below) are widely acknowledged as pioneering efforts.—Ed.
It is all part of a momentous rediscovery and reevaluation, currently winning for this poet a reputation of towering proportions and generating among students and lovers of Russian poetry an excitement comparable to that of astronomers who are in the process of discovering that a minor outer planet is actually a solar system’s second sun. Russian poetry’s cen-tral sun—Aleksandr Pushkin—has been considered a figure without peer for a century and a half. Recently, a few brave voices have been raised here and there to suggest that in Mandelstam Russian poetry at last has a poet of a stature comparable to Pushkin’s—a claim that even the most fanatical admirers of Blok, Mayakovsky, or Pa ster nak would not dream of making.
The phenomenon we now call Osip Mandelstam has been put together before our very eyes during the past eighteen years. The first post-Stalinist collection of Mandelstam’s poetry and prose was brought out in 1955 (in New York, and in Russian) by Gleb Struve and Boris Filippov. It contained only what the poet had been able to publish during his lifetime—less than half of his output, as we now know. The early 1960s saw first a trickle, then a minor flood of unpublished Mandelstam manuscripts brought back by visiting Western scholars from the Soviet Union, manuscripts that had been carefully hidden and preserved by the poet’s widow and a few loyal friends during the bleak years when the government was bent on obliter-ating all evidence that Osip Mandelstam had ever existed. By 1964, Struve and Filippov had enough material for an updated two-volume Man del-stam, which was in turn superseded by their three-volume edition, pub-lished between 1967 and 1971.
It is these hitherto unknown later works of Mandelstam—poetry written between 1930 (when he returned to writing verse after a five-year silence) and 1937, including the poems he wrote in his Voronezh exile just before being shipped off to a labor camp, the poems in which he reaches the probable peak of his lyric and visionary powers—that make him the awesome figure he is. They also enable us to see his early poetry in a re-vealing new light.
Osip Mandelstam grew up in St. Petersburg, in a cultivated Russian-Jewish family. The years that followed the unsuccessful Revolution of 1905 (when Mandelstam was fourteen) were an exciting time to be young. Poet-ry was scaling new heights; Russian literature, the visual arts, and political and philosophic thought were as free of governmental pressure and ideo-logical harassment as they would ever be. The young Mandelstam studied
An Emerging Reputation Comparable to Pushkin’s
philosophy, art history, and classical literature, and all these interests were reflected in his early poetry. His poems began appearing in the best literary journals of the time from 1910 on; his first collection of verse, Stone (1913), brought him instant recognition as one of Russia’s finest young poets.
Accomplished and elegant technically, full of fresh perceptions, Man-del stam’s early poetry was concerned with various aspects of human cul-ture from the architeccul-ture of the Hagia Sophia to the cathedral of Notre Dame, from the music of Bach and Beethoven to silent movies and the choreography of a tennis game. Such references to history, literature, and the arts remained a frequent trait of Mandelstam’s later poetry as well, and this preoccupation has led certain critics, both Russian and foreign, to see Mandelstam as a poet divorced from actual life. This was a charge brought against him by his Soviet detractors of the 1920s (who were wont to contrast him with the politically committed Mayakovsky), and we can discern an echo of those old denunciations in a recent American reference book, Atlantic Brief Lives (1971), where we read of Mandelstam’s poetry that it “reflect[s] life in art and literature, rather than direct experience.
Chiefly concerned with form and technique, it is impersonal and erudite.”
Such a view of Mandelstam as some kind of Russian Parnassian is misguided. Like W. B. Yeats and Rainer Maria Rilke—two poets whom he equals in pure power and whose counterpart in Russian poetry he may well be—Mandelstam uses references to cultures of the past not to escape but to grasp and express his own sense of present reality. This is true of such an early masterpiece as the haunting “Solominka” (1916), in which the ghosts of Poe’s and Balzac’s heroines (Lenore, Ligeia, and Séraphita) float through the huge bedroom of a beautiful woman while “the twelve months are singing of the hour of death” and the room itself is gradually invaded by the black river Neva, the whole conveying the poet’s sense of the doom and decay that pervaded the final years of the Russian empire.
In one of the very last poems Mandelstam ever wrote (no. 382 in the Struve-Filippov edition), ancient Egypt, “adorning itself in choice bitchery” and concerned primarily with the welfare of its corpses, whose
“trifling pyramids still jut out,” is strikingly contrasted with the sinful, imperfect, but infinitely more livable age in which that “insolent scholar and thieving angel,” François Villon, could despise illusory “spidery civil rights” and create great humanistic poetry. This ostensible excursus into ancient and medieval history was written in March of 1937, during the
building of the White Sea canal by Soviet slave labor and on the eve of the worst of Stalin’s purges.
As early as 1916, Mandelstam had begun to expand his thematic and emotional range, and his poetry grew in depth and stature in the 1920s and 1930s. Though it has none of the outward trappings of novelty or innovation, Mandelstam’s mature poetry is nevertheless totally unprec-edented in both form and content. Its full originality and the acutely twentieth-century sensibility that underlies it reveal themselves fully only after repeated readings. Turns of phrase, epithets, images, or ideas that may at first appear familiar and clear turn out to be laden with fresh and rich meaning. One keeps returning to these poems month after month, year after year, always discovering new depths, new perspectives, new ambiguities that arise from some intangible substratum on which Man-del stam’s poetry is built.
The postrevolutionary Mandelstam developed into a genuinely vatic poet, an observer and a barometer of his time, able to respond to the changes of his epoch with a kind of visceral totality and to predict future developments accurately in one unbearably beautiful poem after anoth-er—such as “Twilight of Freedom” (1918), “The Age” (1923), “Leningrad”
(1930), “To the German Language” (1932), and the shattering “You’re Still Alive” (1937). The work of Mandelstam’s final years, when he was no lon-ger allowed to publish anything and lived under constant threat of arrest, combines a tragic vision with a warmly expressed love of his country and his people and mingles a defiant defense of Western cultural traditions (his poems on Ariosto and Villon and his great, book-length poetic essay on Dante) with bursts of grateful joy at being alive and experiencing to the very last this world’s beauty and radiance.
These final poems of Mandelstam are as good as anything in twentieth-century poetry, Russian or foreign. His stylistic range reaches from Push-kinian simplicity to visionary Surrealism and metalogical mutterings that bring to mind both García Lorca and William Blake; his thematic variety encompasses love lyrics, reflections on sharply observed contemporary Soviet reality, poems about the horror and despair of his own situation, historical and philosophical meditations, and vivid records of a multitude of visual experiences; and his verbal texture has a grandeur, richness, and density never before attained in Russian poetry, forcing one to turn for comparisons to Villon, Baudelaire and—well, all right—Shakespeare.
An Emerging Reputation Comparable to Pushkin’s
The cresting of the new wave of interest in Mandelstam’s poetry among Western scholars coincided with the publication in 1970 of his wife’s first volume of memoirs, Hope against Hope, which brought Man-del stam to the attention of many people, including some who are not usually concerned with poetry, Russian or otherwise. One of the most eloquent records of life under Stalin, Hope against Hope told the full story of how the outwardly gentle poet of iron inner integrity was hounded, ostracized, exiled, and finally destroyed. It is a book of great passion and immediacy which ought to be read not only by anyone interested in Man-del stam but by those who want to know what the first half of the twentieth century was really all about.
Nadezhda Mandelstam’s new book, Hope Abandoned, is not, strictly speaking, a sequel to her first one. It is, rather, a retelling of the same events from a different point of view. The emphasis is now not on Man-delstam and on his wife’s heroic and successful struggle to save his manu-scripts from destruction, but rather on the author herself, her views and her opinions. The narrative sequence is again deliberately scrambled, and the writing manner is as flamboyantly virtuosic as in the first book. (Max Hayward’s English translations of the two books, while conscientious and adequate, have unfortunately toned down the brilliance and verbal exuberance of Mandelstam’s Russian style and eliminated her occasional flights of colorful vulgarity.)
But there is a new element: “In my old age, there awoke in me a woman convinced of her own infallibility,” Nadezhda Mandelstam con-fesses at one point. It is this infallible woman who now sits in judgment not only over Mandelstam’s enemies and persecutors, but over the whole of Russian twentieth-century culture both before and after the Revolu-tion. The condemnation is sweeping and the verdict grim indeed. With an almost Tolstoyan recklessness, she lashes out at the good along with the bad: Symbolist and Futurist poets (including some about whom Man del-stam himself had written with great admiration), all of Russian Modernist painting, almost all of Soviet literature, the stage productions of Meyer-hold, the films of Eisenstein, and the literary theories of Tynyanov. Even the poet Anna Akhmatova, the most loyal friend Mandelstam had, who in Hope against Hope emerged as a magnificently heroic figure, now comes in for her share of knocks, while every friend or associate Akhmatova ever had is invariably portrayed as either a predator or a silly puppet.
It is all too understandable humanly and, after what she’s been through, Nadezhda Mandelstam is as entitled as anyone to her rages and aversions. Still and all, Hope against Hope was a marvelously gallant and generous book, and it is a pity this cannot be said of Hope Abandoned.
Nadezhda Mandelstam nevertheless remains one of the finest and most informed commentators on Mandelstam’s and Akhmatova’s poetry. Hope Abandoned explains some of her husband’s more difficult poems with an insight and authority no one else could match. (Mandelstam’s memoir is available in Russian from Association Press in New York. Her long essay
“Mozart and Salieri,” published in English as a separate book in a sympa-thetic translation by Robert A. McLean,3 is a meditation on Mandelstam and the nature of poetic creativity which clearly belongs with the literary commentary sections of Hope Abandoned, but was for some reason not included in the body of the book.)
Can Mandelstam’s poetry be translated into another language? His verbal splendors, his deliberate ambiguities, the multiple levels of percep-tion which his Russian conveys would seem to make the task of translat-ing him almost superhuman. Yet Paul Celan has managed to transpose Mandelstam into German almost intact and there exist some astound-ingly resourceful and faithful renditions of his poetry into Polish. Until now, Mandelstam has been far less fortunate in English.
Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin’s attractively turned-out volume Selected Poems comes closer to conveying the flavor of this poetry than any of its predecessors or competitors. Brown and Merwin have an af-finity for Mandelstam, and they have matched his verbal elegance with an elegance of their own. Those able to read Mandelstam in Russian will miss the rich rainbow hues and the magnificent Wagnerian sonorities in these frequently austere and monochromatic renditions. At times there are problems of comprehension, but Mandelstam’s limpid precision and his sharpness of focus are often very much there: “My animal, my age, who will ever be able / to look into your eyes? / Who will ever glue back together the vertebrae / of two centuries with his blood?”
The more ambitious Complete Poetry translated by Burton Raffel and Alla Burago is, regrettably, not likely to enhance anyone’s understanding or appreciation of Mandelstam. At best, these translations manage to
3 Nadezhda Mandelstam, Mozart and Salieri (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1973).
An Emerging Reputation Comparable to Pushkin’s
vey the basic meaning of the poems in plodding, unimaginative prose ar-ranged on the page to look like verse and occasionally varied by pointless repetitions of words (“We drank mead there,” turned into “We’ve drunk honey-wine there, we have, we have,” is one such instance out of many).
Again and again, however, Mandelstam’s text has been read carelessly. For example, could this fastidious poet have written, in a poem that evokes ro-mantic Scotland: “And hear, or seem to hear, crows and harps / Shouting back and forth, in ominous silence”? Shouting harps, doing their shouting in silence? In Russian these lines read: “And I seem to hear a raven and a harp / Calling to each other amidst an ominous stillness.” What does the persona in the poem about Lamarck mean by “I’ll wear a horny robe”? In Russian he was about to wrap himself in the corneous mantle of mollusks.
Non sequiturs, misread idioms, and garbled historical and literary references are all generously scattered throughout the volume. There are also a number of poems where Raffel and Burago clearly don’t have the foggiest notion of what Mandelstam is saying from beginning to end (the poem about ancient Egypt and Villon, cited above, is one of these).
A reader who knows no Russian and is curious about Mandelstam’s poetry and personality would be far better served by Clarence Brown’s ex-cellent critical and biographical study. The author of numerous essays and articles on Mandelstam and a translator of his prose and poetry, Clarence Brown (now professor of comparative literature at Princeton) first became involved with Mandelstam as a graduate student in the mid-1950s. He knows the poet’s widow and his surviving friends. He knows as much about Mandelstam as anyone in the Western world and he has done more than anyone, with the possible exception of Gleb Struve and Boris Filip-pov, to spearhead appreciation in the West of the man he unequivocally calls the greatest modern Russian poet.
An intensely personal book, Brown’s Mandelstam outlines all the known facts about the poet’s life, drawing on and quoting numerous sources—memoirs, historical documents, letters—which until now were not available in English and mostly unknown even to specialists. Mandel-stam’s life and literary development are solidly placed in their historical framework and shown against the background of the brilliant period of poetic flowering which nurtured him and to which he so richly contrib-uted. The significance of the city of St. Petersburg in Mandelstam’s work, the theories of the Acmeist group, of which Mandelstam was one of the
charter members, the poet’s involvement with architecture and with the Greek and Latin classics—all these and numerous other pertinent topics are treated by Brown authoritatively and in depth.
Even more impressive is Brown’s reading of the poetry itself. Draw-ing on his own background in modern English and American literature, Brown quite early in the book puts Mandelstam in the company of Yeats, Joyce, Wallace Stevens, Eliot, and Pound. The real proof of this claim lies in Brown’s extensive examination of Mandelstam’s works, period by pe-riod and sometimes poem by poem, and this adds up to a knowledgeable and wholly convincing demonstration of Mandelstam’s international sig-nificance and stature.
Brown’s analyses of individual poems—which include the Russian text, a verbatim English translation, and a detailed commentary and ex-plication—contain some of the book’s most valuable insights, but these sections are also, unfortunately, its one vulnerable aspect. For all his per-suasive authority and grasp of the subtlest nuances of Mandelstam’s verbal art, Brown now and then misreads some perfectly simple Russian word or grammatical construction (this is also the case with his and Merwin’s translations of the poems), thus undermining his and our understanding of the text.
For example, one of Mandelstam’s best early poems, “Silentium”
(his answer to a famous nineteenth-century poem of the same name by Tyutchev), sets up a dichotomy between silence (refusal to speak) and muteness (inability to speak). But Brown reads “silence” as “stillness” and
“muteness” as “quietness” and therefore fails to notice this contrast, basic to the conception of the poem. Two of Mandelstam’s most important
“muteness” as “quietness” and therefore fails to notice this contrast, basic to the conception of the poem. Two of Mandelstam’s most important