Sergeev-Tsensky. Pseudonym of Sergei Nikolaevich Sergeev (1875–1958). “Realistic” writer of the sad lot of the peasant and the provincial intelligentsia. Later he did Socialist Realism.
Evgeny Ivanovich Zamiatin (1884–1937). Author of the antiutopian novel We; also a brilliant essayist and critic. In 1971, he was allowed to leave the Soviet Union and go to Paris. Although one of the few gifted writers with some real understanding of Marxism as well as a commitment to the Revolution, he has never been rehabilitated.
2. Almanacs, in the publication of which Gorky played a large role. See note 1 above on the Znanie school. For the most part, the writers involved were Realists like Gorky.
3. Pseudonym for Boris Andreevich Vogau (1894–1937). Author of The Naked Year; a gifted and innovative writer. Got into trouble, arrested. Recently rehabilitated.
4. The Serapion Brothers, a group of ten young and talented writers and poets, founded in the 1920’s. Their manifesto tried to proclaim some sort of political and stylistic independence, and what they had in common was a commitment to craftsmanship. Their title derived from the novella by Hoffmann.
5. Nikolai Nikolaevich Nikitin (1895–1963). A member of the Serapion Brothers, but managed to adjust to the 1930’s. He won the Stalin Prize in 1951 for a novel about Anglo-American intervention in Russia at the time of the Civil War (1918–1919).
Konstantin Aleksandrovich Fedin (b. 1892). Author of Cities and Years.
Mikhail Iakovlevich Kozyrev (b. 1892). A novelist of great unimportance.
Vadim Germanovich Lidin (b. 1894). Minor writer, was a war correspondent in the Second World War; author of a moderately interesting book of memoirs published in 1957.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin (1873–1954). A remarkably gifted nature and travel writer.
6. Nikolai Leskov (1831–1895). Storyteller and novelist. At his best, one of the greatest of Russian prose writers, but very uneven. His story “The Enchanted Wanderer” is well known.
7. Vsevolod Ivanov (b. 1895). Novelist, whose early prose showed a certain poetic sense of exotic detail. Member of the Serapion Brothers’ literary circle, which tried to establish a certain independence from ideology for literature. In his youth he worked at some odd jobs, including that of fakir in Central Asia.
STORM AND STRESS
First published, 1923. The Russian title, “Buria i natisk,” is the standard translation of the German Sturm und Drang.
1. Aleksei Nikolaevich Apukhtin (1840–1893). Sentimental poet of melancholy Weltschmerz; in some of his works, a civic, reform-oriented poet.
Arseny Arkadievich Golenishchev-Kutuzov (1841–1913). Author of many long narrative poems, close to Apukhtin in spirit; mood of melancholy world-weariness.
2. Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (1875–1936). Poet, novelist, critic, composer, with a decadent yellow-ninetyish flavor. Both imaginative and prolific. Wrote a novel about Cagliostro. It was he who gave Mandelstam’s collection of poems, published in Berlin, the title Tristia. See also “Attack,” note 1.
3. Evdokia Petrovna Rostopchina (1811–1858). An amateur poet. She wrote an allegorical poem about oppression in Poland which got her into trouble with the political police of Nicholas I. Khodasevich has written a splendid essay about her.
Peter Andreevich Viazemsky (1792–1878). Pushkin’s friend, a minor poet and gifted critic.
4. Balagannyi raeshnik. At Russian fairs and carnivals, the side-show barker usually announced the attractions of his booth in rhymed lines.
5. Sergei Esenin (1895–1925). Poet of peasant origin, friend and protégé of Kliuev, though eventually more famous. Wrote elegiac poems about the Russian countryside; indulged in a desperate pose called “hooliganism”; married Isadora Duncan. Committed suicide.
Nikolai Kliuev (1885–1937). Poet of peasant origin. A mystical revolutionary, his enthusiasm began to wane as early as 1918. Arrested in1933 and died in Siberia.
6. François Coppée (1842–1908). French poet and novelist, known as poète des humbles; wrote about cares, loves, and sorrows of common people. Late in life reconverted to Catholicism, became violent nationalist and anti-Dreyfusard.
HUMANISM AND MODERN LIFE
First published, 1923.
FOURTH PROSE
First published, 1966, in the first New York edition of Mandelstam. A samizdat version, which had been circulating for some time, was published by Grani [Facets] in 1967. A revised version was published by Struve and Filipoff in their edition of 1971. A section of the manuscript, apparently dealing with Mandelstam’s views on socialism, was destroyed. The title “Fourth Prose,” according to Nadezhda Iakovlevna, was a kind of amiable code name by which she and Mandelstam referred to the piece. However, it also signified, literally, Mandelstam’s fourth piece of prose: i.e., after “The Hum of Time,” “The Egyptian Stamp,” and About Poetry. It is also a playful reference to the “fourth estate” and Mandelstam’s “vow” to it (See Mandelstam, no. 140). There is also a suggestion of the “Fourth Rome” that was never to be. It is Mandelstam’s “declaration of independence” and statement of solidarity with the fourth estate. It was written in 1929–1930, before the Mandelstams’ trip to Armenia, and tinkered with as late as 1931. This spirited outburst against the notion of an “authorized” literature, against all the still relatively genteel but extremely ominous beginnings of totalitarian thought control, was inspired by the “Eulenspiegel affair.”
The ZIF (Zemlia i Fabrika, “Land and Factory”) publishing house commissioned Mandelstam to revise an edition of a translation of Till Eulenspiegel (Ulenspiegel, in the Russian transliteration) in 1928. The translation had been once revised by V. N. Kariakin in 1916, from one made in 1915 by A. G. Gornfeld under the pseudonym of Korshan. When the new edition appeared in 1928, Mandelstam alone was credited with it on the title page. Neither Mandelstam nor the original translators knew of this or had given their consent. In that world of Literature with a capital L, in which Mandelstam was considered a maverick, and which was itself in the process of being organized for the slaughter yard, the affair was rapidly blown up into a scandal. Mandelstam was accused of plagiarism. The bitter tone of his references to “translation” and “translators” has something of its origins here; but of course the real enemies were Literature and Totalitarianism.
Mandelstam might have used the occasion to make his amends, to conform and join the literary sheep. He refused. He answered the charges with the pledge of the entire body of his literary work. In May, 1929, Mandelstam wrote an article (not included in this volume) about the wretched current state of translation. This was answered by a crude attack. A number of writers came to his defense—among them, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Valentin Kataev, and even such Bolshevik and proletarian stalwarts as Alexander Fadeev and Leopold Averbakh. (Zoshchenko [1895–1958] was a brilliant satirist and master of comic melancholy, much admired by Mandelstam for his sense of the “new” Soviet language and its relation to reality; see his Scenes from the Bath-House, trans. S. Monas [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961]. Kataev [b. 1897] was the author of The Embezzlers, trans. I. Zarine [New York: Dial Press, 1929], and the play Squaring the Circle; he was liberal and protective in his attitude to younger writers. Fadeev [1901–1956] was an old-fashioned “monumental” novelist, generally an orthodox Socialist Realist writer; his novel The Young Guard, first published in 1945, was rewritten drastically to conform to Stalin’s orders. He became secretary-general of the Writers’ Union. Averbakh [1903–?] was a literary critic, militant advocate of a proletarian literature, and leader of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers [RAPP]; he was later liquidated as a Trotskyite.)
The Federation of Unions of Soviet Writers (the centralized Writers’ Union had not yet been formed) resolved the “controversy” by declaring that, though Mandelstam had been unfairly attacked, he was morally to blame for having failed to draw up a contract with the original translators. The affair was not really forgotten until Bukharin intervened and a
rranged for Mandelstam’s trip to Armenia.
“Fourth Prose” is an outburst, an anathema directed against those who defame “Mother Philology,” a therapeutic release of all that Mandelstam had been holding back since the early 1920’s. As therapy, it ended the writing block which had left almost a five-year gap in his poetry. It also helped him clarify to himself his own position as an outsider, for whom there could no longer be any thought of compromise or concession. It was a full-voiced assertion of his own identity as well as a denunciation of “the enemies of the word.” (See N. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, pp. 177–178; also, Hope Abandoned, pp. 526–530.)
1. Benjamin Fedorovich Kagan (1869–1953). Well-known mathematician. Professor at Moscow University since 1923. Won a Stalin Prize in 1923. Not clear why he was brought into the Mandelstam “case”; perhaps because he had himself translated numerous mathematical texts.
2. Isaiah Benediktovich Mandelstam, a namesake, but not a relative. Also a translator.
3. In Mecca, one of the highlights of the Moslem pilgrimage to Mecca, formerly a pagan shrine, then site of Mohammed’s early preachments.
4. Groups of Komsomols or young Communists, organized to help the Party ostensibly in its struggle against bureaucracy and mismanagement. Their activity was greatly expanded with the conclusion of the New Economic Policy in 1928. Often, “the light cavalry” was used, as Struve and Filipoff point out, to pry into the personal life of members of the intelligentsia, people accused of retaining some sort of inner allegiance to the prerevolutionary way of life. Struve and Filipoff suggest that the assignment of cripples to such a task was not uncommon; there may have been some deliberate selection of people who could in some way be counted on to carry a grudge.
5. Commission for the Improvement of the Living Conditions of Scholars, created in 1921.
6. Pseudonym for Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky (1880–1932), a writer with an unusual and exceptionally adventurous biography; he had been a sailor, a fisherman, a prospector for gold, a soldier, a Socialist Revolutionary, a convict in exile and in prisons. Had a considerable reputation even in the pre-Soviet period for his stories of fantasy and adventure; no less successful in the Soviet period with novels along those lines.
7. One of the charges that kept coming up against Mandelstam, associating him with the “old regime,” was the one that he wore a “fur coat.”
Nadezhda Iakovlevna has eloquently described the poor tattered coat that was the pale spring from which this great rumor gushed forth. But she also refers to it symbolically: “In [‘Fourth Prose’] he spoke of our bloodstained land, cursed the official literature, tore off the literary ‘fur coat’ he had momentarily donned and again stretched out his hand to the upstart intellectual, ‘the first Komsomol, Akaky Akakievich’” (N. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, p. 178).
8. Organized in 1920 as the Writers’ Club; later the house of the Writers’ Union. There is a splendid satirical description of the goings-on there in Michael Bulgakov’s novel, Master and Margarita, trans. Mirra Ginsburg (New York: Grove Press, 1967). It is called Griboedov House there. Griboedov was also a Russian “classic,” but his name means, literally, “mushroom eater,” and the outstanding “cultural” feature of the house is its excellent, cheap restaurant.
9. Arkady Georgievich Gornfeld (1867–1941). A well-known scholar and critic. Before the Revolution he was a prominent contributor to the populist-oriented journal Russian Wealth (Russkoe bogatstvo) and the author of a number of books on Russian and foreign literature.
10. This is an admittedly poor attempt to render khaldy-baldy, a nonsense phrase to be sure, but one that suggests a number of things. Balda is a blockhead, or a hammer. Khalda isn’t anything, but suggests khaltura, or hack work. Since the phrase is repeated several times, my incapacity to translate it has some seriousness. Clarence Brown suggests “idiot-shmidiot.” That has advantages, and disadvantages.
11. Askanaz Artemevich Mravian (1886–1929). People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs for the Republic of Armenia in 1920–1921. From 1923 until his death he was Commissar of Public Education and vice-chairman of the Armenian Sovnarkom. Muravei means “ant,” on which Mandelstam puns the commissar’s name; hence “antic,” an attempt to convey Mandelstam’s pun.
12. Antisemitism was part of the campaign against Mandelstam.
13. The line is from Sergei Esenin’s poem, “I will not begin to deceive myself . . .” (“Ia obmanyvat’ sebia ne stanu . . .”) from his poem-cycle called Taverns of Moscow (Moskva kabatskaia, 1922).
14. Dmitry Dmitrievich Blagoi (b. 1893). Soviet literary scholar.
15. D’Anthès was the man who killed Pushkin in a duel. He was also, much later, a senator under Napoleon III.
16. Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko (1853–1921). Novelist, populist, humanitarian social reformer. Wrote many stories and novels of peasant life, somewhat sentimentalized. Interesting book of memoirs, A History of My Contemporary.
17. The Stock Exchange News (Birzhevye Vedemosti or Birzhevka) was a well-known newspaper before the Revolution and printed much more than stock-exchange news. After the Revolution, it changed its title several times, but expired in 1918; that is, it was closed. It had been owned by Stanislav Maksimovich Propper. The Evening Red Gazette was a popular Petrograd-Leningrad newspaper.
18. Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1888–1938). An Old Bolshevik, member of the Party since 1906; Lenin, in his Testament, called him the Party’s ablest theoretician. Later, one of Stalin’s victims. He was at the time the editor of Pravda, the official organ of the Party. Pravda, of course, means “truth” (or “justice”). He was later editor of Izvestiie. In 1929, Stalin’s noose was already beginning to tighten around Bukharin. He was finally made to participate in the Great Purge Trials and was executed in 1938. He was Mandelstam’s only important official Party “protector” and benefactor. Nadezhda Iakovlevna has pointed out in her memoirs that Mandelstam and Bukharin had in common the traits of impulsiveness and honesty, of doing things without careful calculation of the cost.
19. Angelina Bosio was an Italian soprano who sang four seasons in St. Petersburg before she died there in 1859. Her death is the subject of a poem by Nikolai Nekrasov, “About the Weather” (“O pogode”). In Mandelstam’s story “The Egyptian Stamp,” she plays a notable role, and Mandelstam seems to associate her with overtures and finales, beginnings and ends. See Brown, ed., The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, pp. 149–189; also, Brown’s notes to same. Mandelstam planned to write more, perhaps a novel, about Bosio.
20. Vechnaia Pamiat’. Penultimate part of the Requiem Mass of the Russian Orthodox service, repeated three times.
21. Marie-Joseph, the younger brother of André Chénier, was a successful playwright. He is said to have remained silent when his speaking out might have saved his brother André (who had begun by welcoming the French Revolution, but later wrote in praise of Charlotte Corday) from the guillotine. He survived the Terror and was lavishly successful under Napoleon. So much for “literature”!
22. Dante is very much on Mandelstam’s mind. It is not too fanciful to assume that something like a darkly modern Divine Comedy is beginning to stir.
23. Central figure of Gogol’s short story “The Overcoat.”
24. “Hey, Ivan”—from a poem by Nikolai Nekrasov of that title. Many of Nekrasov’s poems deal with and are dedicated to outcasts and the suffering poor. Moiseich means “son of Moses.” Nekrasov’s figure is also called Ivan Moiseich.
25. A bublika in the original, which is almost a cross between a doughnut and a pretzel.
26. The well-known statue of the great Russian fabulist, which depicts all around and below him the animals that were the characters of his verse fables. The linking of Zoshchenko and Krylov is, in my opinion, a flash of critical inspiration.
27. Moscow Union of Consumer Associations.
28. Viy—from Gogol’s story of that name. A gnomelike creature, whose eyelids reach to the ground, and who therefore cannot see. O
nce his eyelids have been raised with outside help, however, he can point to the source of evil.
29. See Mandelstam, no. 354.
Journey to Armenia
First published, 1933. I have relied basically on the text in the Struve-Filipoff edition (Mandel’shtam, 2: 137–176) but have collated this with the text published in Literaturnaia Armenia 167, no. 3: 83–99, to which is added an interesting postscript by Nadezhda Mandelstam.
Armenia appealed to both the Christian and the Hellene in Mandelstam. The journey was at once a reprieve, a symbolic journey, and an apocalypse. The essay on Dante is also closely linked with the journey. Mandelstam took it at a time when Soviet writers were in the habit of visiting far corners of the USSR to report back on the strides of progress made by the first five-year plan and the collectivization of agriculture—two revolutions within the Revolution, with more drastically far-reaching effects than the October Revolution itself, for it was these that actually “Sovietized” or, rather, Stalinized the Soviet Union. A number of talented writers at this time were singing the praises of the White Sea Canal, built with slave labor. This is one of the themes of Solzhenitsyn’s richly orchestrated Gulag Archipelago. Of course, Mandelstam’s “travel piece” turned out altogether differently.
While others celebrated the organization of time and place into a totalitarian knot through the minutely detailed and severely imposed five-year plans, Mandelstam sang timelessness, or rather a different kind of time; time linked to the “all-human” world of the Mediterranean, Classical and Christian. He sang Bergsonian time and the power of the word and of “building.”
The Journey is also a vision of the end; Mandelstam’s own end certainly. He identifies very closely with the captured Armenian king at the end of his account. Yet the survival of Armenia encourages him to ride on. It is not likely he hoped much for his own physical survival; but the journey taught him something of his place in time; and that was heartening.
A considerable role in Mandelstam’s life in Armenia belongs to B. S. Kuzin (the biologist B. S. K.), who, at a time when literary people were shunning Mandelstam, spoke to him long and earnestly about evolutionary theory, and who also prompted him, through his interest in German literature, to reread many of the German writers who were close to him.
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