do not deny this so brief remaining
vigil of your senses
experience of the unpeopled world
behind the sun.
Consider your origin:
you weren’t made to live like brutes,
but to follow virtue and knowledge’”
25. “We see like one who has bad light.”
26. “And if it had already come to pass, it would not be too early.
So let it be, since it really must be so;
it will weigh on me the heavier as I grow older.”
27. Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (1892–1941). Mandelstam’s friend and contemporary, who emigrated in 1922, returned to the Soviet Union in 1938, committed suicide in 1941. The quotation is from a cycle of her poems about Moscow, written in 1916.
28. “With which the little child runs to his mother—
29. “Fold on fold,” or “layer within layer.” Literally, “skirt within skirt.”
30. The Italian should read: “. . . da la Muda.” Translation: “A narrow hole in the Tower.”
31. “Never did the Danube in Austria,
nor the Don away off there under its cold sky,
make so thick a veil over their current in winter
as there was here: for even if Tambernic
had fallen on it, or Pietrapana,
it would not have given, even at its edge, so much as a creak.”
32. “O you who are two within one fire,
if I merited of you while I lived,
if I merited much or little of you.”
33. “All were saying: ‘Benedictus qui venis,’
strewing flowers up and about,
‘Manibus o date lilia plenis.’”
(“Benedictus qui venis”: “Blessed are you who come.” “Manibus . . .”:
“Oh, with full hands give lilies.”)
34. “Crowned with olive over a white veil,
a lady appeared to me, clothed, under a green mantle,
in the color of living flame.”
35. “Like birds which, risen from the bank,
as if rejoicing at their pasture,
make themselves now into a rounded, now into an elongated flock,
so within lights the holy creatures
flying, sang, and made themselves
now into a D, now into an I, now into an L in their configurations.”
36. Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg (1772–1801). Romantic poet, mystic. Studied philosophy under Fichte and history under Schiller. Later studied geology, became assessor of salt mines. Catholic. Reference is to his unfinished novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Ch. 5.
37. “Let the Fiesolan beasts make
themselves into fodder, and not touch the plant,
if any still grows on that dung heap of theirs.”
38. “He took away the shade of our first parent,
Abel his son, and Noah,
Moses, obedient law-giver;
Abraham the patriarch and David the king,
Israel with his father and his children
and with Rachel, for whom he did so much.”
39. Konstantin Batiushkov (1787–1855). Pushkin’s contemporary, a poet Mandelstam very much admired. The image is from his poem “Shadow of a Friend.”
About Poetry
O Poezii was published in Leningrad in 1928. The collection was chosen by Mandelstam himself, and reworked by him—but also by the censor. I have used here the texts of the Struve-Filipoif edition, which uses the texts of original publication, with variants in the notes.
THE WORD AND CULTURE
First published, 1921.
1. Pushkin, The Gypsies. In this passage the old gypsy tells Aleko an old legend about Ovid in Moldavia, without recalling the poet’s name, or age. He tells it as if it happened yesterday.
2. Ovid, Tristia, 1.3.1–4.
“When the gloomy memory steals upon me
of the night that was my last time in the city,
when I bring to mind that night on which I left so many things dear to me,
even now, the teardrops fall from my eyes.”
3. Jacques Louis David (1748–1825). French painter. Before the Revolution, leading exponent of the Classical trend in painting; court painter to Louis XVI. Became an ardent republican, was elected to the Convention, and voted for the king’s death. Later, under Napoleon, became first painter to the emperor. Under the Restoration spent his last years in Brussels.
4. Catullus, no. 46. “Away let us fly, to the famous cities of Asia.”
5. Reference is to Ovid’s Amores, I.4.65, not to the Tristia.
6. See Mandelstam’s essay “The Nineteenth Century,” which quotes in full the poem referred to here. See also “About the Nature of the Word,” note 2, concerning Derzhavin.
7. Mandelstam, no. 103.
8. Verlaine, “Art poétique,” stanza 6. “Take eloquence and wring its neck!”
9. Mandelstam, no. 104.
10. “Listen to the tipsy song.” This appears to be a misquoting of “Art poétique,” stanza 2:
“Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise
Où l’Indécis au Précis se joint.”
(“Nothing more precious than the tipsy song [or gray song] in which the Vague is joined to the Precise.”)
ATTACK
First published, 1924.
1. Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (1875–1936). Poet, novelist, playwright, composer, critic. Author of an important and influential essay, “On Beautiful Clarity,” whence “Clarism”—the first of a series of revolts against the literary dominance of Symbolism. Homosexual, slightly decadent. A poet of the Alexandria theme, whom it might be interesting to compare with Cavafy, L. Durrell, E. M. Forster. Remained in the USSR, but published almost nothing after 1930.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893–1930). The poet of the Revolution. But a strange, complex, contradictory character. A great poet. Futurist. Committed suicide.
Velemir Vladimirovich Khlebnikov (1885–1922). Futurist. Yet also a kind of primitive mystic. Magician with words, who broke words down to their primitive roots and then built them up again. Died in extreme poverty.
Nikolai Aseev, or Aseyev (1889–1973). Second-string Futurist poet, friend and disciple of Mayakovsky, who showed more early promise than he later developed.
Viacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov (1866–1949). Poet, historian, scholar, classicist, critic, philosopher. An outstanding Symbolist poet. Studied Roman history under Theodor Mommsen. Came under influence of Nietzsche. One of the central figures of the Silver Age. Left Russia in 1924, but did not break completely with the Soviet Union until much later. Converted to Catholicism and became a Roman Catholic priest. He was mentor to the young Mandelstam, as to many other younger poets. His book on the cult of Dionysus, especially, in the popularized form in which it appeared in Novy Put’, had considerable influence.
Fedor Sologub, pseudonym of Fedor Kuzmich Teternikov (1863–1927). Symbolist poet and novelist.
Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, born Gorenko (1888–1966). Acmeist poet. First wife of Gumilev, whom she divorced in 1918. Her lover, Nikolai Punin, was, like Gumilev, arrested, and he died in prison. During the period of which Mandelstam writes she was a splendid and influential poet; but in the period between the Second World War and her death she wrote her very greatest poetry, in a strikingly different mode, and her role and influence were unique.
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890–1960). Probably better known to an American audience than any other Russian poet; the author of Doctor Zhivago.
Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev (1886–1921). Head of the Acmeist group. Executed in August, 1921, as a conspirator. See Selected Works of Nikolai S. Gumilev, trans. Raffel and Burago.
Vladislav Felitsianovich Khodasevich (1886–1939). Poet, critic, essayist. Parents partly Jewish, partly Polish. Went into emigration; partly rehabilitated in the USSR in 1963, though still not published there. See the moving account of him by his former wife
, Nina Berberova, in The Italics Are Mine, trans. Philippe Radley (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969).
2. Vesy, a journal, published by Valery Iakovlevich Briusov (1873–1924), between 1904 and 1909, as an enterprise of the publishing house of which he was the head. Although Symbolist in orientation, the journal was the most urbane, cosmopolitan, and generally sensitive literary journal in Russia.
3. One of Krylov’s verse fables (I. A. Krylov, “Svin’ia pod dubom” [The pig under the oak tree], in Basni [Fables] [Moscow and Leningrad, 1956], p. 191). The fable is said to be based on an anecdote about Peter the Great and his courtiers.
4. Dmitry Nikolaevich Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky (1853–1920). Prominent critic and literary scholar of the period around the turn of the twentieth century. His work was characteristically sociological in its approach to literature, with a strong concern as well for the “psychology” of the author. His political views were “advanced” and “progressive.” His work also reflects the strong influence of Comte and Taine.
ABOUT AN INTERLOCUTOR
First published, 1913.
1. From his long poem The Gypsies.
2. Evgeny Abramovich Baratynsky, or Boratynsky (1800–1844). Russian poet, contemporary of Pushkin. One of the great Russian poets of the nineteenth century, though more appreciated in the twentieth than by his contemporaries.
3. Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont (1867–1942). Early Russian Symbolist poet, who emigrated in 1921 and died in Paris. Recently, critics like Professor Vladimir Markov have tried to revive a certain interest in his work.
4. Nekrasov, “Poet i grazhdanin” [Poet and citizen]. See “Badger’s Burrow,” note 8.
5. Semen Iakovlevich Nadson (1862–1887). Melancholy poet of partly Jewish descent, who died of tuberculosis at an early age. Sentimental, diffuse, his poetry of regret and frustration nevertheless had an enormous impact on the Russian generation that came of age in the 1880’s.
ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE WORD
First published, 1922.
1. Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743–1816). Greatest Russian poet of the eighteenth century. Cultivated an odd, interesting and passionate baroque style, sometimes eloquent and solemn, sometimes even grandiloquent, and sometimes “rough,” unpolished and very expressive.
Simeon Polotsky, or Simon of Polotsk (1629–1680). Monk, important church leader, writer and translator. Tutor of Tsar Aleksei’s children. Experimented with Russian syllabic verse and with dramaturgy.
2. An oblique reference to the well-known essay by Kuzmin.
3. Also called The Song of Igor’s Campaign. The title has other variants. It is often referred to briefly as the I gor Tale. An anonymous heroic epic dealing with the campaign of the Russian prince Igor against the Turkic Polovtsy. Believed by most scholars to have been composed in the late twelfth century. There has nevertheless been a prolonged scholarly controversy, by no means as yet resolved, as to its authenticity, with a number of scholars concluding the likelihood of an eighteenth-century forgery in the manner of Ossian. For an English version, see the translation by Sidney Monas and Burton Raffel, Delos, no. 6 (1971): 13.
4. In an earlier draft, cited by Struve and Filipoff in their notes, Mandelstam quotes two lines of the song:
“Bona puella fur Eulaluà
Bel anret corps bellerzonr, anima.”
(Mandel’shtam, 2: 632)
These are the first two lines of the ninth-century “‘Séquence’ de Sainte Eulalie,” quoted as follows by Albert Henry, ed., Chrestomathie de la littérature en ancien français, 3d ed. rev. (Bern: A. Francke, 1965), p. 3:
“Buona pulcella fut Eulalia:
Bel auret corps, bellezour anima.”
(“A virtuous maiden was Eulalia: she had a beautiful body and a more beautiful soul.”)
5. Pseudonym for Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev (1880–1934). Poet, novelist, critic, mystic, literary theoretician; Symbolist, disciple in anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner. His father was a brilliant mathematician and a well-known conservative figure in university politics. Brilliant in many fields, Biely is best known in English for his novel St. Petersburg, trans. John Cournos (New York: Grove Press, 1959). When Biely died in January, 1934, Mandelstam wrote a cycle of poems dedicated to him.
6. Fedor Ivanovich Tiutchev (1803–1873). One of Russia’s very greatest poets. A great philosophical poet, and the poet of chaos. Lived for many years abroad, serving as a diplomat in Munich and Turin. The herovictim of an intensive love affair late in life with his daughter’s governess that resulted in an intense group of love poems. In his political views, a right-wing Slavophile.
7. Peter Iakovlevich Chaadaev (1794–1856). See Mandelstam’s essay “Peter Chaadaev.” See also Peter Chaadaev, Philosophical Letters and Apology of a Madman, trans. Mary-Barbara Zeldin (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969). After a brilliant military career and early retirement as colonel of hussars, Chaadaev began those musings on Russian culture, history, and destiny that resulted in the Philosophical Letters. They were never intended for publication; whether the one letter that found its way into print had been so intended by Chaadaev is not altogether clear. But it was his first and last published work, for on publication he was declared “officially insane” by the political police—the first famous instance, but unfortunately not the last. It is quite impossible to separate the intrinsic quality of Chaadaev’s writings from their historical impact, which was so enormous that almost all of subsequent Russian intellectual history may be said to devolve from it.
8. Vasily Vasilevich Rozanov (1856–1919). A strange and controversial writer almost impossible to classify. A “ruminator” on all manner of subjects, whom the Formalist critic Victor Shklovsky called a “novelist” because his works are put together somewhat in the manner of fiction, though they are composed not only of narration and dialogue, but also of diary entries, aphorisms, private letters, and newspaper clippings. He exulted in the “privacy” and “intimacy” of his style.
9. Innokenty Fedorovich Annensky (1856–1909). Russian poet and critic. Headmaster of the Tsarskoe Selo lyceum, Annensky was a superb classicist and a translator from the Greek and from the French. He was one of the inspirers of the revolt against Symbolism in the direction of Acmeism.
10. Sergei Mitrofanovich Gorodetsky (b. 1884). Early Acmeist poet, who introduced notion of “Adamism.” (See Selected Works of Nikolai S. Gumilev, trans. Raffel and Burago.) He accepted the Revolution whole-heartedly, managed to adapt himself to Stalinism, and enjoyed considerable success as well after the thaw.
Vladimir Narbut (1888–?). Acmeist poet; joined the Communist Party in the Ukraine during the Civil War; afterward, ran a small publishing house. He was expelled from the Party in 1928 and is rumored to have been arrested in 1937 or 1938.
Mikhail Alexandrovich Zenkevich (b. 1891). Early Acmeist; poet and translator. Joined Party in 1947.
11. Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (1776–1822). German Romantic writer and jack-of-all-trades. Ingenious writer of macabre fantasies and great storyteller. Substituted Amadeus for Wilhelm in his name, as homage to Mozart. The full range of his talents was most clearly displayed in his collection of stories Die Serapionsbrüder (4 vols., 1819–1821)—the name of a club of Hoffmann’s more intimate friends.
12. Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862). English historian, author of the History of Civilization in England, a monument to the hope for a “science” of history.
13. Antonio Salieri (1750–1825). Director of the Italian Opera at Vienna. Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt were his students, and they seem to have learned from him especially in the matter of dramatic composition. His intrigues against Mozart gave rise to the stories that he poisoned Mozart. (See A. Delia Corte, Un italiano all’estero [Torino: G. B. Paravia, 1936].) Pushkin uses this legend in his “little tragedy,” Mozart and Salieri. There, Salieri poisons Mozart to balance the equation of cosmic justice; i.e., he feels that the musical genius that eludes him in spite of all his incredibly hard work and perfect
ionist habits must not be allowed to be seen to settle on Mozart, portrayed as a “natural,” without any effort at all. It is a play in which “hard-working talent,” burdened by a sense of cosmic injustice, avenges itself on “natural genius,” Mandelstam interpreted the poetic drama differently. For him, Salieri represented the principle of hard, even superhuman, work and effort—the obligation imposed by genius—while Mozart represented “inspiration” alone. Nadezhda Mandelstam has pointed out that Mandelstam thought of Mozart and Salieri as two principles, to some degree antagonistic, yet both essential to the creative process. He tended, however, to emphasize the importance of Salieri, regarded by other readers of Pushkin as the villain of the piece. (See N. Mandelstam, Mozart and Salieri.] Mrs. Mandelstam suggests very acutely that when Mandelstam talked of Salieri the figure he really had in mind was Bach.
NOTES ABOUT POETRY
First published, 1923.
1. Nikolai Mikhailovich Iazykov (1803–1846). A major Russian poet in the 1820’s. Pushkin thought his poetry too much champagne, not enough water. But he was Gogol’s favorite poet. Iazyk means “language” or “tongue,” and Gogol wrote: “Not in vain was he given such a name; he is master of his language as an Arab is of his fiery steed” (quoted by D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature [New York: Knopf„ 1949], p. 104.)
2. The “apostles to the Slavs”; brothers. Cyril, originally named Constantine, died in 869; Methodius in 885. They were born in Thessalonica, of Greek descent, but acquainted with Slavonic. Cyril was educated at Constantinople and went on a mission to the Jewish Khazars on the Sea of Azov. Later, both brothers participated in the struggle between the native Slavic nobility of Bohemia and Moravia against the German clergy, which included a struggle over the liturgical language, the Germans commanding a monopoly of Latin. Under the patronage of Rostislav, Prince of Moravia, Cyril attempted to translate parts of the liturgy into Slavonic. What is called Cyrillic script was probably not invented by him, though it is not unjustly associated with his name. Cyril was welcomed back to Rome, where he brought the relics of Saint Clement. He is buried in the Church of San Clemente in Rome.
3. One of the first artificial international languages, like Esperanto.
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