2. Osip Mandel’shtam, Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works], ed. Gleb Struve and Boris Filipoff, 2d ed., 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Inter-Language Library Associates, 1967–1971) (henceforth cited as Mandel’shtam), 2: 484. See also Brown, Mandelstam, p. 35.
3. Brown, ed., The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, p. 111.
4. See the essays “The Morning of Acmeism” and “About the Nature of the Word.”
5. Osip Mandel’shtam, Stikhotvoreniia [Poems] (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel, 1973); see the English translation of the introduction by Alexander Dymshits, “I Enter the World . . . ,” Soviet Studies in Literature 9, no. 4 (Fall 1973).
6. The translation in this volume first appeared as “Talking about Dante,” Delos, no. 6 (1971): 65–107. In connection with this essay, the commentary by Mandelstam’s Italian translator, A. Ripellino, “Note sulla prosa di Mandel’stam,” in La Quarta Prosa (Bari, 1967), p. 10, is of considerable interest.
7. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), p.229.
8. See the essay “François Villon,” p. 118.
9. N. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, pp. 184–190.
10. Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, trans. Colette Grandin (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), p. xxiii. Bachelard’s account of Novalis as a “poet of earth” would have pleased Mandelstam (Bachelard, La Terre et les reveries de la volonté [Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1948], p. 285).
11. “Pushkin and Scriabin.” Neither Pushkin nor Scriabin was in any conventional sense of the word a Christian. Pushkin was an agnostic, Scriabin a kind of diabolist and practitioner of white magic. Yet Mandelstam refers to Scriabin in this tantalizing fragment—the full version of which seems to have been irretrievably lost—as both a Christian and “a raving Hellene.” The reference to the curious police activities around the funeral of Pushkin as “the sun’s burial by night” has many echoes in Mandelstam in the image of the “black sun.” See also Iurii Ivask, “Khristianskaia poeziia Mandel’shtama” [The Christian poetry of Mandelstam], Novyi Zhurnal 103 (1971): 109–123.
12. “Pushkin and Scriabin.”
13. “The Morning of Acmeism.”
14. Mandelstam, no. 117. Throughout this volume, where Mandelstam’s poems are cited, I use the numbering of the Struve-Filipoff edition (see note 2 above), which the Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, trans. Raffel and Burago, also follows.
15. “The Word and Culture.”
16. Boris Pasternak, “Pro eti stikhi” [About these lines], in Stikhi i poemy, 1912–1932 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), p. 4.
17. “The Word and Culture.”
18. “The Nineteenth Century.”
19. “Humanism and Modern Life.”
20. “The Word and Culture.” See the extremely interesting essay by Victor Terras, “Osip Mandel’shtam i ego filosofiia slova” [Osip Mandelstam and his philosophy of the word], in Slavic Poetics: Essays in Honor of Kirill Taranovsky, ed. R. Jakobson, C. van Schooneveld, and D. Worth (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), pp. 455–460; also of considerable interest, Kirill Taranovsky, “Pchely i osy v poezii Mandel’shtama” [Bees and wasps in Mandelstam’s poetry], in To Honor Roman Jakobson (The Hague: Mouton, 1967). Basing himself on Mandelstam’s remarks on the importance of knowing where a poet comes from (“Badger’s Burrow”), Taranovsky makes a strong case for his “emergence” from Viacheslav Ivanov. His notion of a subtext, interesting in itself, becomes, more and more as he illustrates its meaning, somewhat academic. Russian Literature, no. 2 (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), a special issue devoted to the poetry of Osip Mandelstam, contains articles by Iu, Levin, D. Segal, R. Pshibylcki, and K. Taranovsky. Russian Literature, no. 7/8 (1974), contains articles by K. Taranovsky, “The Jewish Theme in the Poetry of Osip Mandel’shtam,” idem, “Osip Mandel’shtam: ‘Na rozval’njach, ulozhennych solomoj’”; N. A. Nilsson, “Mandel’shtam’s Poem ‘Voz’mi na rodost’”; J. van der Eng-Liedmeier, “Mandel’shtam’s Poem ‘V Peterburge my sojdemsja snova’”
21. In a number of essays and poems, Mandelstam uses “Buddhist” rather curiously to denote a kind of detachment in which the observer has no participation in the scene which he observes but looks on it with the privileged eye of God. In this sense, Mandelstam viewed nineteenth-century science as Buddhist—but also the transparent realism of Flaubert (and, with more justice, the Goncourts) and anthroposophy in religion. He owes the conception to his early reading of Alexander Herzen, the father of Russian socialism and a brilliant stylist. In Herzen’s book Dilettantism in Science, the chapter dealing with the right-Hegelians is called “Buddhism in Science.” See Alexander Herzen, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow, 1956), pp. 71–96.
22. “Literary Moscow.”
23. Elena Tager, quoted by Brown, Mandelstam, p. 69.
24. William Arrowsmith, “Aristophanes’ Birds: The Fantasy Politics of Eros,” Arion, n.s. 1, no. 1 (1973): 119–167. See also the charming account of Mandelstam’s attempt to learn Greek in Brown, Mandelstam, p. 47.
25. “About the Nature of the Word.”
26. “Pushkin and Scriabin.”
27. Victor Terras, “Classical Motives in the Poetry of Osip Mandelstam,” Slavic and East European Journal 3 (1966): 251–267; Brown, Mandelstam, pp. 253–375.
28. Cohen, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, p. 60.
29. “The Word and Culture.”
30. “Storm and Stress.”
31. N. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, p. 264.
32. Mandel’shtam, 1: 239, no. 352.
33. Cohen, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, p. 69.
34. Journey to Armenia. The “termenvox” was an electrical musical instrument, invented by Mandelstam’s friend Lev Termen.
35. Journey to Armenia.
36. N. Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned, p. 549.
“Before that I nonetheless have seen
Rich Ararat draped in its Bible cloth
And I spent 200 days in the Sabbath Land
They call Armenia.”
(Mandelstam, no. 237)
37. Journey to Armenia.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. “The Morning of Acmeism.”
Conversation about Dante
Although this essay was probably the last written (1933–1934) of those included in this volume, it expresses more fully than any other the range and the focus of Mandelstam’s sensibility as a critic, and so there is a certain logic in placing it first. It is not so much an attempt to characterize Dante as a literary figure as it is the elaboration of a poetics inspired by the reading of Dante, an attempt to get at the mainsprings of poetry, what poetry is and what it does, rather than an enumeration of its devices or the elaboration of a theoretical system based on a study of these devices. For Mandelstam, Dante is the archpoet, as Italy (the Mediterranean) is the home, the childhood, of modern European culture. Mandelstam is interested in the source, the basic physical impulse of poetry, and its elaboration in form—though he is no more a “Formalist” in his approach, for all his elaboration on rhyme and the terzina, than he is “sociological,” for all the importance he attaches to Dante’s social origins and the Italian class structure of his time.
During his student years at Heidelberg and the Sorbonne, long before the Revolution, Mandelstam may have spent a few weeks in Italy as a tourist. He knew the Divine Comedy in the superb Russian translation of his friend Lozinsky, but began to study Italian seriously only in the 1930’s. In the summer of 1933, in Koktebel, in the Crimea, he read a draft of this essay aloud to Andrei Biely, whom he had previously regarded as a literary enemy, but about whom he then severely revised his opinion, and to whom he subsequently dedicated a cycle of poems. Biely may in a certain sense be taken as the gifted and highly cultivated poet, novelist, and man of letters with whom this “conversation” takes place.
1. Dante, Inferno, XVI, 22–24. Brown and Hughes have translated directly from Mandelstam’s Russian. Dante’s Italian reads
:
“Qual soleano i campion far nudi ed unti,
avvisando lor presa e lor vantaggio,
prima che sien tra lor battuti e punti.”
I would translate: “As stripped and oiled wrestlers used to do, looking for a grip and an advantage before they started hitting out at each other.”
2. For a strikingly similar account of lyrical composition, see Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) pp. 275–277.
3. Dadaism was the modernist movement in the arts, originating in Switzerland during the years of the First World War, whose founders were Tristan Tzara and Kurt Schwitters. The name suggests children’s word-formation, baby talk.
4. “And soothingly would speak the language
that used to delight fathers and mothers:
. . . . . . . . . . .
would tell her family tales
about the Trojans and Fiesole and Rome.”
5. In Russian, zaum. Translated elsewhere in this volume as “metalogic.” Zaumnyi means “metalogical.” The reference is to Khlebnikov and the Futurists and their experiments with “transsense” or “metalogical” language. See Dante, Purgatorio, XI, 103–108.
6. The Italian reads:
“Poi si rivolse, e parve di coloro
che corrono a Verona il drappo verde
per la campagna; e parve di costoro
quegli che vince e non colui che perde.”
Mandelstam seems to have made a slight mistake in the translation, which should read: “Then he turned back, and seemed like one of those who run through the open field at Verona for [the prize of] the green cloth; and of them he seemed like him who wins, not like him who loses.”
7. “Averroës, who composed the great commentary.”
8. “Turn around: what are you doing?”
9. “Io avea già il mio viso nel suo fitto;
ed el s’ergea col petto e colla fronte,
com’ avesse l’inferno in gran dispitto.”
10. “‘And if,’ continuing what he had said before,
‘they have learnt that art badly,’ he said,
‘it torments me more than this bed.’”
11. “O Tosco, che per la città del foco
vivo ten vai così parlando onesto,
piacciati di ristare in questo loco.
La tua loquela ti fa manifesto
di quella nobil patria natio,
alla qual forse fui troppo molesto.”
(Inferno, X, 22–27)
12. Raznochinets (razno-, “various”; chin, “rank”): in the nineteenth century, a member of the intelligentsia who was not of noble origin. He could be the son of a priest or a merchant who did not follow in his father’s footsteps, or someone of even lower social origin, who had managed to acquire an education. The term might also be used ironically in connection with the declassing of the old Russian nobility into a service class, a class in which status was more and more determined by rank in the civil service. Thus, a raznochinets is not necessarily a “commoner” by origin, but he might well be. In the Russian literary tradition, the pathos of the “noble raznochinets” is exemplified in the character of Evgeny in Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman,” a poor clerk whose ancestors were prominent nobility. In the 1860’s, however, “the decade of the raznochintsy,” as it was commonly called, these were men of different but humble class origins (sons of priests, merchants, etc.) who received a higher education and qualified for medium civil-service rank for the first time—i.e., “the newly educated,” but also those of lowly or obscure origins hobnobbing for the first time with their social and economic superiors by virtue of their education. Mandelstam identified himself, as well as Dante, as a raznochinets. He was not well acquainted with the social history of Florence, but poetic instinct suggested Dante’s social awkwardness—in this instance, I suspect, mistakenly.
13. A reference to Pushkin’s very complex relationship to the Emperor Nicholas I and the St. Petersburg court. Pushkin was very proud of his ancestry, of what he called his “six hundred years of nobility,” although painfully aware that it counted for little in the St. Petersburg of the 1830’s. He often contrasted the position of powerful parvenus with his own. At the same time, he referred to himself as a meshchanin (that is, a bourgeois, but of a special kind; an artisan who peddles his own wares on the market)—in part ironically and in a derogatory sense, in response to a parvenu’s slur on his ancestry; yet in part proudly, as someone who made his own way, who was someone in his own right, without reference to ancestors. At the same time, Pushkin was appalled at the low level of literary taste, the contempt in which Russian letters were held by snobs who preferred French, and in general the difficulty of being a poet in Russia. These feelings were exacerbated by the fact that the emperor be stowed on Pushkin the dubious honor of making him a Kammerjunker—an honorary court position that required attendance in uniform. It was, however, an honor normally bestowed on youths in their teens, and Pushkin was in his thirties; there was also some suspicion that either the emperor himself or persons close to him had designs on Pushkin’s wife. For a number of reasons connected with the institution of autocracy and the personality of Nicholas I, as well as for reasons of economic dependence, it was impossible for Pushkin to refuse the position, in which he writhed miserably during his last years, and which contributed much to the final impasse of his life, a fatal duel.
14. “As though insulting Hell with his immense disdain.” (See note 9 above.)
15. “Their eyes, which were only moist inwardly before,
overflowed down to the lips . . .”
Mandelstam follows those commentators who interpret le labbra, “the lips,” as referring to the eyelids, hence “the labial eye.” But see Singleton’s commentary (Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton, Bollingen Series 80 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970], 1 [pt.2]: 588).
16. “I was already in a place where the resounding
of the water that fell into the next circle
could be heard like the hum beehives make.”
17. Obviously those of Gustave Doré.
18. From Blok’s poem “Ravenna.”
19. “Two paws he had, hairy to the armpits;
his back and his chest and both his sides
were painted with knots and rings:
With more color, groundwork, and patterning
than ever Tatars or Turks made cloth;
nor did Arachne ever weave such webs on her loom.”
20. “Cimabue believed that in painting.”
21. “Thus I cried with face uplifted.”
22. The Italian text reads:
Quante ’l villan ch’al poggio si riposa,
nel tempo che colui che ’l mondo schiara
la faccia sua a noi tien meno ascosa,
come la mosca cede a la zanzara,
vede lucciole giù per la vallea,
forse colà dov’ e’ vendemmia e ara:
di tante fiamme tutta risplendea
l’ottava bolgia, sì com’ io m’accorsi
tosto che fui là ‘ve ’l fondo parea.
E qual colui che si vengiò con li orsi
vide ’l carro d’Elia al dipartire,
quando i cavalli al cielo erti levorsi,
che nol potea sì con li occhi seguire,
ch’el vedesse altro che la fiamma sola,
sì come nuvoletta, in sù salire:
tal si move ciascuna per la gola
del fosso, ché nessuna mostra ’l furto,
e ogne fiamma un peccatore invola.”
A more literal translation would read:
As many as the fireflies the peasant sees, taking his rest on the hill—
in the season when he who lights the world
least hides his face from us,
and at the hour when the fly yields to the mosquito—
when he looks down into the valley,
down there perhaps
where he gathers the grapes and where he plows:
with so many flames was all aglitter
the eighth ditch, as I perceived
as soon as I came to where the bottom could be seen.
And as he who revenged himself with the help of the bears
saw Elijah’s chariot at its departure,
when the horses rose straight up to heaven,
could not so follow it with his eyes
as to see anything except the flame alone,
like a little cloud ascending:
so each flame moves along the throat of the ditch,
not one showing its theft,
yet each flame concealing a sinner.”
23. Mikhail Vasilevich Lomonosov (1711–1765). Russian polymath, of peasant origin. (His father was a prosperous peasant-entrepreneur who owned many boats and engaged in trade.) Best known for his contribution to chemistry, but also a poet, grammarian, historian, and reviver of handicrafts. He played a vital role in the reform of Russian versification.
24. This is a very free version of Inferno, XXVI, 112–120. The Italian reads:
“‘O frati,’ dissi, ‘che per cento milia
perigli siete giunti all’occidente,
a questa tanto picciola vigilia
de’ vostri sensi, ch’è del rimanente,
non vogliate negar l’esperienza,
di retro al sol, del mondo senza gente.
Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.’”
A literal translation would read:
“‘O brothers,’ I said, ‘who through a hundred thousand
dangers have reached the West,
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