Osip Mandelstam

by Selected Essays (epub)

  And I thanked my lucky stars that I was only an accidental guest of Zamoskvorech’e and would not spend my best years there. Nowhere, never, have I felt with such force Russia’s watermelon-emptiness; the brick-colored sunsets over the Moscow River, the color of the brick-tea brought to mind the red dust of the Ararat blast furnace.

  I felt like getting back as soon as I could to the place where people’s skulls are equally beautiful, whether at work or in the grave.

  All around there were, God help us, such cheery little houses with such nasty little souls and timidly oriented windows. Seventy years ago or less they used to sell serfgirls here, who had been taught to sew and stitch hems, quiet little things, quick to catch on.

  The stale old lindens, deaf with age, lifted their brown forked trunks in the courtyard. Frightening in their somehow bureaucratic thickness, they heard and understood nothing. Time fed them with lightning flashes and watered them with downpours; thunder or bromide, it was all the same to them.

  Once a meeting of the adult males who lived in the house resolved to chop down the oldest linden and cut it up for firewood.

  They dug a deep trench around the tree. The ax began to hack at the indifferent roots. Doing a woodcutter’s work requires certain skills. There were too many volunteers. They fussed about, like the incompetent executors of some foul verdict.

  I called to my wife: “Look, it’s about to fall!”

  Meanwhile, however, the tree was resisting with a kind of sentient force. It seemed to have become fully conscious again. It despised those who were harrassing it and the pike’s teeth of the saw.

  Finally, they threw a noose of thin laundry twine around the dry place where the trunk forked—the very place that marked the tree’s great age, its lethargy, and its verdant outburst—and began to rock it gently back and forth. It shook like a tooth in a gum, but remained king of the hill. A moment later, the children ran up to the toppled idol.

  That year the directors of Tsentrosoiuz [the Central Union of Consumer Cooperatives of the USSR] approached Moscow University with the request that they recommend a man who could be sent to Erevan. They had in mind someone to supervise the production of cochineal, a kind of insect few people knew about. An excellent carmine dye is made from the cochineal when it is dried and ground to powder.

  The university selected B. S. K., a well-educated young zoologist. B. S. lived with his old mother on Bolshaia Iakimanka, belonged to the trade union, would snap to attention, out of pride, before anyone and everyone, and, out of the entire academic milieu, singled out for admiration old Sergeev, who had made and installed with his own hands all the tall red cabinets in the zoology library and who could unerringly name the wood of already finished lumber with his eyes closed, just by running his palm along it, whether it was oak, ash, or pine.

  B. S. was not in any way a bookworm. He studied science as he went; had once had something to do with the salamanders of the famous Viennese professor Kammerer, who had committed suicide; and more than anything else on earth loved the music of Bach, especially one invention for wind instruments that went flying upward like some Gothic firework.

  B. S. was a fairly experienced traveler within the USSR. In both Bukhara and Tashkent his field shirt had been sighted and his infectious military laugh had resounded. Everywhere he went, he planted friends. Not so long ago, a certain mullah, a holy man, since buried on a mountain, had sent him a formal announcement of his death in pure Farsi. In the mullah’s opinion, the fine, erudite young man—when he had used up his supply of health and engendered enough children, but not before—should come join him.

  Hooray for the living! Every labor is worthy!

  Reluctantly, B. S. got ready to go to Armenia. He kept running after buckets and bags to collect the cochineal and complaining about the slyness of bureaucrats who wouldn’t issue him packing materials.

  Parting is the younger sister of death. For those who respect fate’s reasonings, the ritual of farewell contains an ominous nuptial animation.

  Now and then the front door would slam and up the mousy stairs from the Iakimanka guests of both sexes would arrive: students from Soviet aviation schools, those carefree skaters on air; staff members of distant botanical stations; some who specialized in mountain lakes; people who had been in the Pamirs and in western China; and, simply, young people.

  Then began the filling of goblets with Muscovite wines, and the sweet demurrals of the ladies and girls; tomato juice spurted, and so did a general, unsequential chatter: about flying, about looping the loop, when you don’t notice that you’ve been turned upside down, and the earth, like some huge brown ceiling, comes rushing at your head; about the high cost of living in Tashkent, about Uncle Sasha and how he had the grippe, about everything . . .

  Someone told the story about the man with Addison’s disease who sprawled himself out on the Iakimanka and lived there: drank vodka, read the newspapers, vehemently played dice, and at night removed his wooden leg and used it for a pillow.

  Someone else compared this Iakimanka Diogenes with a medieval Japanese woman, and a third person shouted that Japan was a country of spies and bicyclists.

  The subject of the conversation kept merrily slithering away, like a ring passed behind the back, and dominant over the table talk was the knight’s move, which always swerves to one side . . .

  I don’t know how it is for others, but for me a woman’s charm is augmented if she happens to be a young traveler, who has spent five days of a scientific trip lying on a hard bench of the Tashkent train, who knows her way around in Linnaean Latin, who knows where she stands in the dispute between the Lamarckians and the epigeneticists, and who is not indifferent to the soybean, the cotton plant, or the chicory.

  And on the table there is an elegant syntax of confused, heteroalphabetical, grammatically incorrect wildflowers, as if all the preschool forms of vegetative being were coalescing into a pleophonic anthology-poem.

  As a child, a stupid vanity, a false pride, had kept me from ever going out to look for berries or stooping down over mushrooms. Gothic pine cones and hypocritical acorns in their monks’ hoods pleased me more than mushrooms. I would stroke the pine cones.

  They bristled. They were good. They were persuading me. In their shell-like tenderness, in their geometrical harum-scarum, I sensed the rudiments of architecture, the demon of which has accompanied me all my life.

  I almost never spent any time in summer houses on the outskirts of Moscow. Of course, automobile trips to Uzkoe on the Smolensk road don’t count, past those fat-bellied log huts where the truck farmers had piled up heaps of cabbages like cannonballs with green fuses. Those pale green cabbage-bombs, heaped up in shameless abundance, reminded me vaguely of the pyramid of skulls in Vereshchagin’s dull painting.

  It’s not like that now, but I suppose the break came too late.

  Only last year on the island of Sevan in Armenia, as I went strolling in the waist-high grass, I was captivated by the shameless burning of the poppies. Bright to the point of surgical pain, looking like counterfeit badges from some cotillion, big, too big for our planet, fireproof, dream-faced moths, they grew on repulsive hairy stalks.

  I envied the children . . . They hunted enthusiastically for poppy-wings in the grass. I would stoop down, then again . . . Fire in my hands, as if a blacksmith had lent me some coals.

  Once in Abkhazia I came upon whole streaks of northern wild strawberries.

  At a height of several hundred feet above sea level, young forests clothed that whole hilly region. The peasants hoed the sweet reddish earth, preparing little holes for botanical transplants.

  How happy this coral coinage of the northern summer made me! The ripe glandular berries hung in triads and pentads, and they sang in batches, and in tune.

  So, B. S., you’ll be leaving first. Circumstances do not yet permit me to follow you. I hope they’ll change.

  You’ll be staying at 92 Spandarian Street, with those very nice people, the Ter-Oganians. D
o you remember how it was? I’d come running to see you down Spandarian Street, swallowing the acrid construction dust for which young Erevan is famous. I still found pleasure and novelty in the ruggedness, the roughnesses and solemnities of the valley of Ararat, which had been repaired right up to its wrinkles; in the city, which seemed to have been upended by divinely inspired plumbers; and in the broad-mouthed people with eyes that had been drilled straight into their skulls—the Armenians.

  Past the dry pump houses, past the conservatory, where a quartet was being rehearsed in the basement and one could hear the angry voice of the professor shouting “Lower! lower!”—that is, give a diminishing movement to the adagio—to your gateway.

  Not a gate, but a long cool tunnel cut into your grandfather’s house, and at the end of it, as through a spyglass, there flickered a little door covered with greenery, so unseasonably tarnished that one might have thought it had been burnt with sulphuric acid.

  When you look around, your eyes need more salt. You catch forms and colors—and it is all unleavened bread. Such is Armenia.

  On the little balcony you showed me a Persian pen case covered with a lacquer painting the color of blood baked with gold. It was offensively empty. I wanted to sniff its venerable musty little panels which had served sirdar justice and those instantaneous verdicts ordering men to have their eyes put out.

  Then you withdrew into the walnut twilight of the Ter-Oganians’ apartment and returned with a test tube and showed me the cochineal. Reddish-brown peas lay on a little wad of cotton.

  You had taken that sample from the Tatar village of Sarvanlar, about twenty versts from Erevan. From there, you can see Father Ararat quite clearly, and in that dry borderland atmosphere you can’t help feeling like a smuggler. Laughing, you told me a story about a certain splendid glutton of a girl, member of a friendly Tatar family in Sarvanlar . . . Her sly little face was always smeared with sour milk and her fingers were greasy with mutton fat . . . At dinnertime, you, who do not suffer in any way from undue fastidiousness, nevertheless quietly put aside a sheet of the lavash for yourself, because the little glutton was in the habit of resting her feet on the bread as on a stool.

  I would watch as the accordion of infidel wrinkles would come together and draw apart on your forehead; I should think it the most inspired part of your physical appearance. These wrinkles—seemingly rubbed by your lambskin cap—reacted to every significant phrase, and they rambled all over your forehead, staggering and swaggering and stumbling about. There was something Godunov-Tatar10 about you, my friend.

  I used to compose similes for your character and grew more and more accustomed to your anti-Darwinian essence; I studied the living language of your long, ungainly arms, created for the sake of a handshake in a moment of peril and for passionate protestations, while walking, against natural selection.

  In Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister there is a little man named Jarno, a scoffer and a naturalist. He disappears for weeks at a time into the latifundias of his model world, spends his nights in tower rooms or chilly sheets, and emerges for dinner from the depth of his steadfast castle.

  This Jarno belonged to a peculiar order, founded by a large landowner named Lothario for the purpose of educating his contemporaries in the spirit of Faust, Part II. The society had a broad network of secret agents extending all the way to America, a network organized along Jesuit lines. Secret conduct lists were kept, tentacles would stretch out, people would get caught.

  It was this Jarno who had the job of keeping Meister under surveillance.

  Wilhelm was traveling with his little boy Felix, the son of the unfortunate Marianna. A paragraph of his instructions forbade him to spend more than three days in any one place. The rosy-cheeked Felix—a frisky, didactic child—would herbalize and exclaim, “Sag mir, Vater,” would keep shooting distant questions at his father, breaking off bits of mineral rock, and striking up one-day acquaintances.

  Goethe’s well-behaved children are generally a tiresome lot. As Goethe depicts them, children are little Cupids of curiosity, each with a quiver of pointed questions slung over his shoulder . . .

  So Meister meets Jarno in the mountains.

  Jarno literally tears Meister’s three-day pass out of his hands. Behind them and before them lie years of separation. So much the better! All the more resonant the echo for the geologist’s lecture in that sylvan university!

  And that’s why the warm light shed by oral instruction, the clear didacticism of a friendly conversation, greatly surpasses the illuminating and instructive action of books.

  I gratefully recall one of those Erevan conversations of ours, which now, after a year or so has passed, have already been aged by the confidence of personal experience and which possess an authenticity that helps us get a sense of ourselves in our commitment. The talk turned around the “theory of the embryonic field,’ proposed by Professor Gurvich.

  The rudimentary leaf of the nasturtium has the form of a halberd or of an elongated, twofold purse that begins to resemble a little tongue. Or it looks like a flint arrowhead from the Paleolithic. But the tension in the field of force that rages around the leaf first transforms it into a figure of five segments. The lines of the cave arrowhead get stretched into the shape of an arc.

  Take any point and join it by a bunch of coordinates to a straight line. Then extend these coordinates, intersecting the line at various angles, to a section of identical length, then join them together again, and you get convexity!

  But later the force field sharply changes its game and drives the form to its geometrical limit, the polygon. A plant is a sound evoked by the wand of a termenvox,11 pulsating in a sphere oversaturated with wave processes. It is the envoy of a living storm that rages permanently in the universe—akin in equal measure to stone and lightning! A plant in the world—that is an event, a happening, an arrow; and not boring, bearded “development”!

  Not long ago, B. S., a certain writer repented in public for having been an ornamentalist, or for having been one to the extent of his poor, sinful powers.

  I think a place is prepared for him in the seventh circle of Dante’s hell, where the bleeding thornbush grew. And when some tourist or other out of curiosity breaks a twig off that suicide, he will beg in a human voice, like Pier della Vigna: “Don’t touch! You’re hurting me! Or have you not pity in your heart? We were men, who now are trees . . .”

  And a drop of black blood will fall . . . [Dante, Inferno, XIII, 32–37]

  What Bach, what Mozart, composes variations on the theme of the nasturtium leaf? Finally, a phrase flared up: “the world-record speed of the pod of a bursting nasturtium.”

  Who has not felt envious of chess players? You sense in the room a peculiar field of estrangement, from which a chill hostile to non-participants flows.

  But these little Persian horses made of ivory are immersed in a power-solvent. The same thing happens to them as happens to the nasturtium of the Moscow biologist E. S. Smirnov and the embryonic field of Professor Gurvich.

  The threat of removal hangs over each figure throughout the game, during the whole stormy phenomenon of the tournament. The chessboard swells up from the attention concentrated on it. The chess figures grow, when they fall into the radial focus of a maneuver, like milky-cap mushrooms in Indian summer.

  The problem is solved not on paper, and not in the camera obscura of causality, but in a live Impressionist milieu, in Edouard Manet’s and Claude Monet’s temple of air, light, and glory.

  Is it true that our blood radiates mitogenetic rays that the Germans have captured on a phonograph disc, rays which, I was told, help to intensify the cell division of tissue?

  All of us, without suspecting it, are the carriers of an immense embryological experiment: for even the process of remembering, crowned with the victory of memory’s effort, is amazingly like the phenomenon of growth. In one as well as the other, there is a sprout, an embryo, the rudiment of a face, half a character, half a sound, the ending of a name, somethi
ng labial or palatal, sweet legume on the tongue, that doesn’t develop out of itself but only responds to an invitation, only stretches out toward, justifying one’s expectation.

  With these belated musings, B. S., I hope to repay you, if only in part, for having disturbed your chess game in Erevan.

  SUKHUM

  At the beginning of April I arrived in Sukhum—a city of mourning, tobacco, and fragrant vegetable oils. Here is where one should begin studying the alphabets of the Caucasus; here every word starts with a. The language of the Abkhazians is powerful and sonorous, but abounds in the upper and lower guttural compound sounds, which make pronunciation difficult; one might say it was torn out of a larynx overgrown with hair . . .

  I’m afraid the kindly bear Baloo has not yet been born to teach me, as he did the boy Mowgli of Kipling’s jungle, the excellent language of “Achoo!”—although in the distant future I foresee academies for the study of the groups of Caucasian languages, scattered over the whole world. The phonetic ore of Europe and America will run out. Its deposits have their limits. Even now young people are reading Pushkin in Esperanto. To each his own.

  But what an awesome warning!

  One can easily get a panoramic view of Sukhum from Mount Cherniavsky, as it is called, from Ordzhonikidze Square. It is completely linear, flat, and, to the tune of Chopin’s funeral march, it sucks into itself a great crescent of the sea with a heave of its resort-colonial breast.

  It is spread out below like a case of drawing instruments containing a compass ensconced in velvet that has just described the bay, sketched the arched eyebrows of the hills, and closed up.

  Although public life in Abkhazia has about it much that is naïvely crude, and many abuses, one cannot help being captivated by the administrative and economic elegance of this small maritime republic, proud of its rich soils, box-tree forests, its State Farm olive grove at New Athos, and the high quality of its Tkvarchel coal.