Christianity took its place and stood there in an absolutely free relationship to art, and this no human religion of any kind has been able to do either before or after it.
Nourishing art, giving art of its flesh, offering it in the way of a sturdy metaphysical foundation the most real fact of redemption, Christianity demanded nothing in return. Christian culture is therefore not threatened by the danger of inner impoverishment. It is inexhaustible, infinite, because, triumphing over time, again and again it condenses grace into magnificent clouds and lets it pour out in life-giving rain. One cannot be sufficiently emphatic in pointing out the fact that, for its character of eternal freshness and unfadingness, European culture is indebted to the mercy of Christianity in its relationship to art.
Still unstudied is the realm of Christian dynamics—the spirit’s activity in art as a free self-affirmation in the basic fact of redemption—in particular, music.
In the ancient world music was considered a destructive element. The Hellenes feared flutes, considering Phrygian harmony dangerous and seductive, and Terpander had to fight for each new string of the lyre with great effort. The untrusting attitude toward music as a dark and suspicious element was so strong that the state took music under its tutelage, declaring it a state monopoly, civic harmony, eunomia. But even in this form, the Hellenes could not bring themselves to grant music its independence: the word seemed to them a necessary antidote, a loyal guard, a constant companion of music. The Hellenes did not know pure music, properly speaking—it belongs entirely to Christianity. The mountain lake of Christian music managed to hold out against enemy attacks only after that profound transformation that turned Hellas into Europe.
Christianity did not fear music. With a smile, the Christian world said to Dionysus: “Well, go ahead, give it a try; order your maenads to tear me apart: I am all wholeness, all personality, all welded unity!” This confidence that the new music has in the decisive triumph of personality, integral and unharmed, is as strong as that. This confidence in personal salvation—I would say—enters Christian music as an overtone, while working the coloration of Beethoven’s sonority into the white marble of Sinai’s glory.
Voice is personality. The piano is a siren. Scriabin’s break with the voice, his great bewitchment with the siren of pianism, signals the loss of the Christian sense of personality, of the musical “I am.” The wordless, strangely mute chorus of Prometheus goes on being the same seductive siren.
Beethoven’s catholic joy, the synthesis of the Ninth Symphony, that “triumph of white glory,” is inaccessible to Scriabin. In this sense he broke away from Christian music and went his own way . . .
The spirit of Greek tragedy has awakened in music. Music has completed its cycle and returned from whence it came: once again, Phaedra calls out to the nurse, once again Antigone demands libation and burial for the beloved body of her brother.
Something has happened to music, some sort of wind has swooped down and broken the dry and sonorous rushes. We demand a choir; the murmur of the thinking reed has begun to bore us. . . . For a long, long time we played with music, without suspecting the danger that lurks in it, and while (perhaps from boredom) we were inventing a myth not invented but born, foam-born, purple-born, of imperial origin, the legitimate heir of the myths of antiquity—the myth of forgotten Christianity.
. . . of the vineyards of the old Dionysus: I seem to see the closed eyes and the light, triumphant, small head, tilted slightly upward. This is the muse of remembering—the lightfoot Mnemosyne, senior in the circle of the dance. From her light, fragile face, the mask of oblivion falls, her features smooth out; memory triumphs, though it be at the cost of death: to die means to remember, to remember means to die. . . . To remember no matter what it might entail! To fight oblivion, even to the death: that is Scriabin’s motto, that is the heroic tendency of his art! In this sense I said Scriabin’s death was the highest act of his creativity, that it showers him with a blinding and unexpected light.
. . . finished—was in full swing. Anyone who feels himself a Hellene must be on his guard now as two thousand years ago. You can’t Hellenize the world once and for all the way you can repaint a house. The Christian world is an organism, a living body. The tissues of our world are renewed by death. We have to struggle with the barbarism of a new life, because there, in the new life which is in full bloom, death is unvanquished! While death exists in the world Hellenism will be, because Christianity Hellenizes death. . . . The Hellenic, fructified by death, is just what Christianity is. The seed of death, having fallen on the soil of Hellas, burst miraculously into bloom: our whole culture has grown from this very seed; we keep the ledger of the years from that moment when the land of Hellas accepted it. Everything Roman is sterile, because the soil of Rome is stony, because Rome is Hellas deprived of grace.
Scriabin’s art has a direct relationship to that historical task of Christianity that I call the Hellenization of death, and through this receives its profound meaning.
. . . there is music—it contains in itself the atoms of our being. To the degree that melody in its pure form corresponds to the unique feeling of personality as Hellas knew it, so harmony is characteristic of the complex post-Christian sense of “I.” Harmony was a sort of forbidden fruit for the world as yet not implicated in the Fall. The metaphysical essence of harmony is in the narrowest sense connected with the Christian concept of time. Harmony is crystallized eternity, it is all in a cross section of time, in that section of time that knows only Christianity. . . . the mystics energetically reject eternity in time, while accepting this cross section available only to the righteous, while affirming eternity—a Kantian category cloven by the sword of the seraph. The center of gravity of Scriabin’s music lies in harmony: harmonic architectonics.
The Morning of Acmeism
I.
Amidst the immense emotional excitement surrounding works of art, it is desirable that talk about art be marked by the greatest restraint. For the immense majority, a work of art is enticing only insofar as it illuminates the artist’s perception of the world. For the artist, however, his perception of the world is a tool and an instrument, like a hammer in the hands of a stonemason, and the only thing that is real is the work itself.
To live is the artist’s highest self-esteem. He wants no other paradise than being, and when he’s told about reality, he only smiles bitterly, because he knows the infinitely more convincing reality of art. The spectacle of a mathematician proclaiming the square of a ten-digit number without stopping to think about it fills us with a certain astonishment. Too often, however, we overlook the fact that the poet raises a phenomenon to its tenth power, and the modest exterior of a work of art often deceives us concerning the prodigiously condensed reality that it possesses. In poetry this reality is the word as such. Just now, for example, while expressing my thought as accurately as possible, yet not at all in poetic form, I am speaking essentially with the consciousness, not with the word. Deaf-mutes understand one another very well, and railroad signals perform their quite complicated assignments without recourse to help from the word. Thus, if one is to regard the sense as the content, one must regard everything else in the word as mechanical ballast that only impedes the swift transmission of the thought. The “word as such” was slow to be born. Gradually, one after the other, all the elements of the word were drawn into the concept of form; only the conscious sense, the Logos, is regarded even to this day erroneously and arbitrarily as the content. From this needless honor, Logos only loses; Logos requires only an equal footing with the other elements of the word. Our Futurist, who could not cope with the conscious sense as creative material, frivolously threw it overboard and in essence repeated the same crude error as his predecessors.
For the Acmeists the conscious sense of the word, the Logos, is just as splendid a form as music for the Symbolists.
And if, among the Futurists, the word as such still crawls on all fours, in Acmeism it has for the first time assumed the
more dignified upright position and entered upon the Stone Age of its existence.
II.
The cutting edge of Acmeism is not the stiletto and not the pinprick of Decadence. Acmeism is for those who, seized by the spirit of building, do not meekly renounce their gravity, but joyfully accept it in order to arouse and make use of the forces architecturally dormant in it. The architect says: I build. That means, I am right. The consciousness of our own rightness is what we value most in poetry, and scornfully discarding the pick-up-sticks of the Futurists, for whom there is no higher pleasure than to hook a tough word with a crochet hook, we are introducing the Gothic into the relationships of words, just as Sebastian Bach established it in music.
What kind of idiot would agree to build if he did not believe in the reality of his material, the resistance of which he must overcome? A cobblestone in the hands of an architect is transformed into substance, and the man for whom the sound of a chisel splitting stone is not a metaphysical proof was not born to build. Vladimir Soloviev used to experience a special kind of prophetic horror before gray Finnish boulders. The mute eloquence of the granite block disturbed him like an evil enchantment. But Tiutchev’s stone that “rolled down from the mountain to the valley floor, torn loose itself, or flung by a sentient hand,” is the word. The voice of matter sounds in this unexpected fall like articulate speech. To this call one can answer only with architecture. Reverently the Acmeists pick up the mysterious Tiutchevan stone and lay it in the foundation of their building.
The stone thirsted as it were for another being. It was itself the discoverer of the dynamic potential concealed within it, as if it were asking to be let into the “groined arch” to participate in the joyous cooperative action of its fellows.
III.
The Symbolists were bad stay-at-homes. They loved voyages; yet they felt bad, ill at ease, in the cage of their own organisms and in that universal cage which Kant constructed with the help of his categories.
The first condition for building successfully is a genuine piety before the three dimensions of space—to look on the world not as a burden or as an unfortunate accident, but as a God-given palace. Really, what is one to say about an ungrateful guest who lives off his host, takes advantage of his hospitality, yet all the while despises him in his soul and thinks only of how to put something over on him. One can build only in the name of the “three dimensions,” because they are the conditions for all architecture. That is why an architect has to be a good stay-at-home, and the Symbolists were bad architects. To build means to fight against emptiness, to hypnotize space. The fine arrow of the Gothic belltower is angry, because the whole idea of it is to stab the sky, to reproach it for being empty.
IV.
We tacitly understand a man’s individuality, that which makes him a person, and that which forms part of the far more significant concept of the organism. Acmeists share a love for the organism and for organization with the Middle Ages, a period of physiological genius. In its pursuit of refinement the nineteenth century lost the secret of genuine complexity. That which in the thirteenth century seemed a logical development of the concept of the organism—the Gothic cathedral—now has the esthetic effect of something monstrous; Notre Dame is a celebration of physiology, its Dionysian orgy. We do not wish to divert ourselves with a stroll in a “forest of symbols,” because we have a more virgin, a denser forest—divine physiology, the infinite complexity of our own dark organism.
The Middle Ages, while defining man’s specific gravity in its own way, felt and acknowledged it for each individual quite independently of his merits. The title maître was used readily and without hesitation. The most humble artisan, the very least clerk, possessed the secret of down-to-earth respect, of the devout dignity so characteristic of that epoch. Yes, Europe passed through the labyrinth of a fine tracery-work culture, when abstract being, unadorned personal existence, was valued as a heroic feat. Hence the aristocratic intimacy that links all people, so alien in spirit to the “equality and fraternity” of the Great Revolution. There is no equality, no competition—there is the complicity of those united in a conspiracy against emptiness and nonbeing.
Love the existence of the thing more than the thing itself and your own being more than yourself—that is the highest commandment of Acmeism.
V.
A = A: what a splendid poetic theme. Symbolism languished and longed for the law of identity; Acmeism makes it its watchword and offers it instead of the dubious a realibus ad realiora.*
The capacity for astonishment is the poet’s greatest virtue. Still, how can one not be astonished by that most fruitful of all laws, the law of identity? Whoever has been seized with reverent astonishment before this law is undoubtedly a poet. Thus, once having acknowledged the sovereignty of the law of identity, poetry acquires in lifelong feudal possession all that exists, without condition or limitation. Logic is the kingdom of the unexpected. To think logically means to be perpetually astonished. We have fallen in love with the music of proof. For us logical connection is not some little ditty about a finch, but a symphony with organ and choir, so intricate and inspired that the conductor must exert all his powers to keep the performers under his control.
How persuasive is the music of Bach! What power of proof! One must demonstrate proof, one must go on demonstrating proof endlessly: to accept anything in art on faith alone is unworthy of an artist, easy and tiresome . . . We do not fly; we ascend only such towers as we ourselves are able to build.
VI.
The Middle Ages are dear to us because they possessed to a high degree the sense of boundary and partition. They never mixed different levels, and they treated the beyond with immense restraint. A noble mixture of rationality and mysticism and the perception of the world as a living equilibrium makes us kin to this epoch and impels us to derive strength from works that arose on Romance soil around the year 1200. And we shall demonstrate our rightness in such a way that the whole chain of causes and consequences from alpha to omega will shudder in response; we shall teach ourselves to carry “more lightly and more freely the mobile chains of being.”
Note
* Symbolism’s slogan, as provided by Viacheslav Ivanov in the collective work Borozdy i mezhi [Furrows and boundaries]. (Mandelstam’s note.) Slogan means “from the real to the more real.”
Literary Moscow
Moscow-Peking: here it is continentality that triumphs, the spirit of a Middle Empire; here the heavy tracks of the railroads have been spliced together into a tight knot; here the Eurasian continent celebrates its eternal name day.
Whoever isn’t bored by Middle Empire is a welcome guest in Moscow. There are some who prefer sea-smell and some who prefer world-smell.
Here the cabdrivers drink tea in the taverns as if they were Greek philosophers; here, on the flat roof of a modest skyscraper, they show nightly an American detective drama; here, without attracting anybody’s attention, a decorous young man on the boulevard whistles a complex aria from Tannhäuser in order to earn his bread, and in half an hour an artist of the old school, sitting on a park bench, will do your portrait for you on a silver academic medal; here the boys selling cigarettes travel in packs, like the dogs of Constantinople, and do not fear competition; people from Iaroslav are selling pastries, and people from the Caucasus have sat down in the coolness of the delicatessen. There isn’t a single man here, provided he’s not a member of the all-Russian union of writers, who would go to a literary discussion in the summertime, and Dolidze,1 at least for the summer, moves in spirit to Azurketa, where he’s been planning to move these past twelve years.
When Mayakovsky went about scouring poets in alphabetical order at the Polytechnic Museum, there were some young people in the auditorium who actually volunteered to read their own poems when their turn came, to make Mayakovsky’s job easier. This is possible only in Moscow and nowhere else in the world; only here are there people who, like Shiites, are ready to prostrate themselves so that the chariot of that s
tentorian voice might pass over them.
In Moscow, Khlebnikov could hide himself from human eyes, like a beast of the forest, and, without even being noticed, he exchanged the hard beds of the Moscow flophouses for a green Novgorodian grave. And yet it was in Moscow, too, that I. A. Aksenov, when that happened, in the most modest of modest literary gatherings, placed a beautiful wreath of analytical criticism on the grave of the departed great archaic poet, illuminating Khlebnikov’s archaicism by means of Einstein’s principle of relativity and revealing the link between his creative work and the old Russian moral ideal of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And this was at the very time that the enlightened Petersburg Literary Messenger could respond at best with an insipid, arrogant remark about the “great loss.” From out of town, with a different perspective, one can see more easily: all is not well with Petersburg; it has forgotten how to speak in the language of time and wild honey.
As far as Moscow is concerned, the saddest symptom is the pious needlework of Marina Tsvetaeva,2 who seems to echo the dubious solemnity of the Petersburg poetess Anna Radlova.3 The worst thing about Literary Moscow is women’s poetry. The experience of the last years has shown that the only woman who has entered the circle of poetry with the rights of a new muse is the Russian study of poetry called to life by Potebnia4 and Andrei Biely and nourished to maturity in the formalist school of Eikhenbaum, Zhirmunsky, and Shklovsky.5 To the lot of women has fallen the enormous realm of parody, in the most serious and formal sense of this word. Feminine poetry is an unconscious parody of poetic inventiveness as well as of reminiscence. The majority of Muscovite poetesses are bruised by metaphor. These are poor Isises, doomed to an eternal seeking for the second part of the poetic comparison which has been lost somewhere, and which must return its primal unity to the poetic image, to Osiris.
Osip Mandelstam Page 17