Osip Mandelstam
Page 28
4. Pillar saints; i.e., saints who practiced the ascetic discipline of sitting for prolonged periods of time on top of a pillar, flagpole-sitters of the ancient world, though of course with a very different purpose, that being to emphasize their complete separation from the world and the temptations and distractions of the world. The most famous of these was Simeon of Syria, who, in the fifth century, built himself a pillar, climbed it, and between the years 420 and 459 remained sitting there.
5. Christoph Willibald von Gluck (1714–1787). German composer from Bohemia. Strongly influenced by Handel. By lending to recitative a special weight and an effect of its own, he gave opera a new dramatic force.
6. Afanasy Afanasievich Fet (1820–1892). Illegitimate son of a Russian landowner named Shenshin and a German woman named Foeth. Great lyric poet of nature, love, and despair, at a time when major poetry seemed otherwise to have dried up in Russia.
7. Alexander Ivanovich Herzen, or Gertsen (1812–1870). Illegitimate son, or “child of the heart,” of a great senatorial nobleman, Iakovlev. Author of one of the great books of memoirs of the nineteenth century (My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. Humphrey Higgins, 4 vols. [New York: Knopf, 1968]). Author of an important essay, “Buddhism in Science.” Early Russian socialist, and perhaps more than any other single person the intellectual “daddy” of narodnichestvo, or Russian populism, through his conception of the mir, or village commune, as a kind of primal education in socialism. Influential as a publicist, who changed the European view of Russia: before Herzen, European intellectuals tended to see Russia as a monolith; Herzen persuaded them to make a crucial distinction between the government and the people. From London, Herzen published his Russian newspaper, Kolokol [The bell], which played an important role in the immediate background of the emancipation of the serfs between 1857 and 1861. In 1863, the newspaper began to lose influence, and Herzen was displaced in the minds of the radical Russian public as an important figure by more extreme and strident personalities. The scene referred to here is a vivid one from the early pages of Herzen’s memoirs.
Nikolai Platonovich Ogarev (1813–1877). Interesting minor poet of melancholy reflection and unfulfilled yearning; friend and political ally of Herzen’s.
THE END OF THE NOVEL
Published for the first time in the collection About Poetry, 1928.
BADGER’S BURROW
First published, 1922.
1. Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (1880–1921). Great Russian poet, to some degree a Symbolist, but above all schools, as Mandelstam indicates. He used the great themes—country, love, destiny—and wrote exalted verse often in the mode and form of popular songs. His long poem The Twelve is called by many the poem of the Revolution.
2. Razumnik Vasilevich Ivanov-Razumnik (1878–1946). Critic, historian, prominent figure in both Russian political and literary circles, closely associated with the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, a friend of Blok’s and Biely’s. Left Russia in 1943, died in a D.P. camp. Published interesting prison memoirs, My Prisons. It was he who, in one of his early books, called the Russian intelligentsia “a spiritual brotherhood.” His literary criticism was not of a kind that Mandelstam approved.
Iuly Isaevich Aikhenvald (1872–1928). Impressionist critic, an emigré from 1921.
Wilhelm Alexandrovich Sorgenfrei (1882–1938). Critic, poet, and translator.
3. Boris Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum (1886–1959). One of the Formalist critics, author of brilliant essays on Gogol, on Tolstoy, and on poets and poetry. Later, turned more to long, scholarly-biographical works.
Victor Maksimovich Zhirmunsky (1889–1972). Distinguished scholar and critic. In his youth, he was very close to the Formalists. Still earlier, he was, with Mandelstam, a student at the Tenishev School in St. Petersburg.
4. Apollon Alexandrovich Grigoriev (1822–1864). One of the Russian poètes maudits, author of an interesting book of memoirs, My Literary Wanderings, much admired by Dostoevsky. An intense Slavophile, he praised the Russianness of the Moscow region called Zamoskvorech’e (the area beyond the Moscow River from the main city, populated by merchants and artisans) and placed a high poetic value on things distinctively Russian.
5. Sophie Perovsky (1853–1881). A Russian revolutionary, member of the People’s Will Party (Narodnaia Volia). Born into a noble family, she joined the “Going to the People” Movement of 1872–1873. She was arrested several times. She worked very closely with A. I. Zheliabov and became his common-law wife. With him, she led the conspiracy to assassinate Alexander II, in which she played a decisive part.
6. Nikolai Ivanovich Kostomarov (1817–1885). Russian and Ukrainian historian and ethnographer, who had an early reputation as a radical. His notion of the distinctive features of Ukrainian history opposed him to “official” historians.
Sergei Mikhailovich Soloviev (1820–1879). The founder of modern historical studies in Russia, the Russian Ranke. He was also the father of the philosopher and mystic Vladimir Soloviev.
Vasily Osipovich Kliuchevsky (1841–1911). Historian noted for the elegance of his style in lecturing and writing as well as for his scholarship; his interest focused on the nonstate aspects of historical development, especially the social and the sociocultural. He emphasized the importance of geographical factors in Russian history and the shaping influence of the process of colonization.
7. Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev (1853–1900). Theologian and philosopher, poet and mystic; tried to promote the reunion of Christendom under the leadership of the Pope. His intuition of Sacred Wisdom, or Sophia, produced three visions of the feminine embodiment of that Wisdom, the Eternal Womanly, or Ewige Weibliche. Both his poetry and his teachings had enormous impact on the development of Symbolism.
8. Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov (1821–1878). Leading Russian poet of the second half of the nineteenth century. Above all, the poet of Russian Populism. Many of his poems are sentimental and rhetorical; yet he probably was the most influential of all Russian poets and helped to shape the sensibilities of Dostoevsky, Blok, and the whole Russian radical intelligentsia. His specialty was the pathos of poverty, in a mode very close to folk traditions and resonant for Russian culture.
9. A special form of folk song, usually very short, associated with a factory or working-class milieu, usually witty, often ribald.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
First published, 1922.
1. Not quite. Mandelstam is using Baudelaire for his own purposes. Baudelaire’s albatross is laid out on the deck of a boat, not the earth, and is rather a different kind of bird:
“Souvent, pour s’amuser, les hommes d’équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.
A peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l’azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d’eux.”
(Les Fleurs du mal: “L’Albatros”)
(“Often, for fun, the men of the crew catch albatrosses, vast sea birds, which follow, indolent travel companions, the ship gliding over the bitter abysses. No sooner have they laid them on the planks than these kings of the blue, awkward and ashamed, woefully let their great white wings languish like oars at their sides.”)
The last line concludes a comparison of the albatross “out of his element” with the poet: “Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.” (“His giant’s wings prevent him from walking.”)
2. See “Buddhism in Science,” in Alexander Herzen’s Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1956).
3. An intricately prescribed Japanese verse form.
4. Mandelstam, no. 133.
PETER CHAADAEV
First published, 1915. For Chaadaev, see “About the Nature o
f the Word,” note 7.
1. These are the opening lines of Ershov’s well-known fairy-tale poem of the hump-backed horse (“Skazka o kon’ke-gorbunke”), which exists in many editions and many translations. The horse is a magic animal that can fly.
NOTES ABOUT CHÉNIER
First published, 1928.
1. André Chénier (1762–1794). French poet, son of a diplomat, poet of liberty. At first, he approved of the French Revolution; later, he wrote an ode to Charlotte Corday upon her assassination of Marat; he was arrested and guillotined on 8 Thermidor. Pushkin admired him.
2. Clément Marot (1496–1544). French Renaissance poet and humanist, translator of Ovid. In his poems there are traces of imitations of Villon. Marot did not father the line known as the Alexandrine, which takes its name from the twelfth-century Roman d’Alexandre, and which Marot rarely if ever used. Ronsard, a generation later, popularized it. Aleksan-driitsa, genitive form of aleksandriets, the word Mandelstam uses, is not the one normally used for the Alexandrine and causes some puzzlement.
3. “Fathers of a people, architects of the laws!
You who know how to establish with a firm, sure hand
A solemn code for man.”
4. “As Latona, pregnant, almost a mother,
Victim of a jealous power,
Without refuge wandered over the earth.”
5. “The oppressor is never free.”
6. Les Bucoliques is a collection of poems by Chénier; there is no comparable work called Idylles, although there is a series of poems within the Bucoliques called “Idylles marines.”
7. “And then in a charming way the letter inquires
What I want of you, what commands I have for you!
What do I want? you say! I want your return
To seem very slow to you; I want you to love me
Day and night (night and day, alas, I am in torment).
Present in their midst, be alone, be absent;
Sleep, thinking of me! Dream that I am near;
See only me, unceasingly, and be completely with me.”
FRANÇOIS VILLON
First published, 1913.
1. “Will you leave him here, poor Villon?”
2. Cassell’s New French Dictionary translates pet as “fart” and vesse as “silent evacuation of wind.”
3. “Movement above all!” As was mentioned in the introduction, Verlaine’s line (in “Art poétique”) actually reads: “De la musique avant toute chose” (“Music above all”).
Uncollected Essays and Fragments
PUSHKIN AND SCRIABIN (Fragments)
Published by Struve and Filipoff from an incomplete typed copy found by Nadezhda Mandelstam among Mandelstam’s papers. The essay probably dates back to the time of the composer’s death in 1915. According to the editors, the essay was completed in 1919 or 1920. It was submitted to a Miscellany of some sort, which never appeared. Later, Mandelstam, who apparently felt some misgivings about the essay, was unable to find it in its completed form. These fragments have appeared in the Russian emigré press, in 1963 and 1964, as well as in the Struve-Filipoff edition. The essay shows traces of a muted polemic with Mandelstam’s former mentor, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Ivanov’s notions of the “suffering god,” the cult of Dionysus and its resemblance to Christianity. Perhaps polemic is too strong a word. The choice of Scriabin and Pushkin as exemplars of Christian art is odd, to put it mildly. Scriabin was a kind of demonist and Pushkin an agnostic, certainly a religious man but hardly a Christian.
1. Alexander Nikolaevich Scriabin (1872–1915). Russian modernist composer. Pasternak worshipped him and was an ardent disciple in his youth. Experimented with synesthetic effects of light and sound.
2. Having died from wounds received in a duel with a foreigner, Pushkin, in the winter of 1837, was buried secretly at night—his body was secretly removed from St. Petersburg to a monastery graveyard near Pskov, because the government of Nicholas I feared “nationalist” demonstrations.
3. The motif of the black sun, or nighttime sun, recurs many times in Mandelstam’s work. George Ivask has traced it to Gérard de Nerval’s poem “El Desdichado,” where the poet writes of the “soleil noir de la Mélancolie” (“black sun of Melancholy”). The image has, in fact, a number of origins: The Tale of Igor’s Men (image of the solar eclipse), Racine, Viacheslav Ivanov, the Talmud. The pun in Russian on “sun-heart” (solntse-serdtse), lost in English, refers to Pushkin. For a discussion of the image see the Struve-Filipoff edition (Mandel’shtam, 3: 404–411). See also George Ivask’s essay in that same volume, “Ditia Evropy” [Child of Europe], especially pp. x–xi; Taranovsky, “Pchely i osy v poezii Mandel’shtama”; and Brown, Mandelstam, pp. 231–237.
THE MORNING OF ACMEISM
First published in 1919. But probably written much earlier, in 1912 or 1913, as a third “manifesto” of Acmeism, following those of Gumilev and Gorodetsky. For discussions of Acmeism as a movement, see my introductions to Selected Works of Nikolai S. Gumilev and Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, both trans. Raffel and Burago. The striking similarity between the tenets of Imagism (before it became, as Ezra Pound put it, “Amygism,” referring to the coarse but indubitable energies of Amy Lowell) and Acmeism have been pointed out several times, most recently, and with great acumen, by Brown, Mandelstam. In his literary essays, Mandelstam tends to minimize the importance of “Adamism,” associated with Gorodetsky. Nevertheless, he continues to emphasize the biological metaphor, the notion of the image as an “organ.” It might perhaps be added that among the many meanings of Acme or Akme—peak, pinnacle, height—is that of climax, including the notion of sexual climax.
LITERARY MOSCOW
First published, 1922.
1. Fedor Iaseevich Dolidze (b. 1883), used to organize poetry readings both in Petrograd and Moscow and in the provinces. On one particular evening, according to the notes in the Struve-Filipoff edition (Mandel’shtam, 2: 647), he arranged for the election of a “King of Poetry,” and Igor Severianin’s followers, who packed the hall, got their favorite elected. This was in February, 1918, in Moscow. Mayakovsky, apparently, wasn’t too happy about it. On another occasion, an evening of “feminine poetry” was arranged, at which Marina Tsvetaeva read.
2. Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (1892–1941). A great and splendid poet. Mandelstam is most unfair to her here. In fact they were close at one time, and three of his poems are dedicated to her. Her fate was a tragic one. She emigrated and lived in Czechoslovakia for many years, isolated from the “emigration” as such. She returned to the Soviet Union after the disillusionment of Munich. Her husband was killed; her daughter was arrested, but survived. She herself committed suicide in Elabuga, not far from Kazan. She has been posthumously “rehabilitated.”
3. Anna Dmitrievna Radlova, born Darmolatova (1891–1949). Poet, translator of Shakespeare and Marlowe.
4. Alexander Afanasievich Potebnia (1835–1891). Literary scholar, professor at the University of Kharkov; along with A. N. Veselovsky, one of the main proponents of Neo-Kantianism in literary and linguistic theory. In attacking him, as they did, the Formalist critics could scarcely conceal their great debt to him and Veselovsky. See Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism, 2d. ed. (The Hague: Mouton, 1965.)
5. Victor Borisovich Shklovsky (b. 1893). The youngest, most brilliant, and possibly also the most erratic of the Formalists. He founded the group called Opoyaz. Later, he showed great courage in honoring his friendship with the Mandelstams. See his volumes, recently translated by Richard Sheldon and published by Cornell University Press, A Sentimental Journey (Ithaca, 1970) and Zoo (Ithaca, 1971).
For Eikhenbaum and Zhirmunsky, see “Badger’s Burrow,” note 3.
6. Pseudonym for Adelina Efron (b. 1900). She later converted to a standard, cheery Socialist Realist style in the 1930’s.
7. Sophie Iakovlevna Parnok (1885–1933). Poet and translator. Mandelstam is, apparently, as unfair to her as to Tsvetaeva. She published some poems under the na
me of Andrei Polianin, but the bulk of her work remained unpublished. I have been told by scholars who are familiar with her Nachlass and whose judgment I trust that she is an unrecognized poet of the magnitude of Tsvetaeva or Akhmatova. The family name was originally Parnakh, and her brother, who emigrated to Paris, was known as a poet and a critic of the dance. See Brown, ed., The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, p. 47.
8. See “Attack,” note 1.
9. MAF: Moscow Association of Futurists. The Lyrical Circle: a circle of poets whose one published Miscellany included poems by Mandelstam.
10. Aleksei Eliseevich Kruchenykh (1888–1973). Futurist poet who attempted to create an entirely new language. See his Izbrannoe [Selected works], introduced by V. Markov (Munich: Fink, 1973).
11. See “Attack,” note 1.
LITERARY MOSCOW: BIRTH OF THE Fabula
First published, 1922.
1. Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev, or Andreyev (1871–1919). Author of The Seven Who Were Hanged and the play He Who Gets Slapped. He often moved from a Realist-Naturalist style to something approaching Surrealism. A prolific and well-known writer in his time, he has since fallen from fashion.
Maxim Gorky, pseudonym of Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov (1868–1936). Very well known; a gifted, if extremely uneven writer. He was, between quarrels, a friend of Lenin’s. Having supported the Bolsheviks for a long time by means of his royalties, he became a prominent and important political figure at the time of the Revolution, when he criticized the Bolsheviks severely and finally, after a quarrel with Lenin, left Russia in 1921, only to return again in the late 1920’s, at Stalin’s urging, to become the official idol of Soviet literature and the patron saint of Socialist Realism. During the time of the Civil War, he did more than any other single man to keep writers and the literary intelligentsia alive. See the very interesting observations about him in Berberova, The Italics Are Mine, pp. 174–197 and passim.
Ivan Sergeevich Shmelev (1875–1950). Prerevolutionary Russian Realist writer of the Znanie school (from the publishing house Znanie, or “Knowledge,” under Gorky’s tutelage). Emigrated in the early 1920’s.