Image and Likeness

The similitude that Mandelstam sought with such fervor as he was sketching in the air the portrait of Stalin, as he was creating the "twin," involved not only the morphological essence of Stalin's face (a portrait arranged around the axis of facial symmetry) but also—indeed, primarily—the identity between his famous tormentor and himself. This identification of the poet's persona with the subject of his poetic portrait is common in poetic iconography^[106] and is related to confessional literature, both medieval and modern.^[107] But it had a special significance for the tradition in which an author's place in the culture was in large measure predicated on his capacity to project onto himself, by means of challenge, the aura of the focused, charismatic authority of the supreme ruler.

The authority of one both undermined and supported the authority of the other in a relation of mutually reinforced rivalry. This conflict the "Ode" was meant to resolve by drawing on the paternalistic vocabulary of the Stalin cult^[108] while making the Aeschylean version of the myth of Prometheus coextensive with the sacred narrative about the Son and the Father.^[109] Consider the fifth stanza: "Granted, I have not been sated with gall or tears" (line 10). Here, the poem's artist with a burning coal in his hand (recall Prometheus, Pushkin's "The Prophet," and the calling of Isaiah) wore the transparent mask of the one who accepted the bitter cup predestined for him by his Father.^[110] To leave no doubt about the parallelism—a kenotic imitatio Christi —Mandelstam offers a prophecy concerning his own resurrection in the final stanza: "in tender books and in children's games, I shall be resurrected to say that the sun—shines." But what can this imitation of Christ's voluntary submission to an ordeal have to do with the pagan myth of Prometheus that opens the poem?

The conjuncture of the two narratives bore the unmistakable signature of Mandelstam, "the last Helleno-Christian poet,"^[111] who had once imagined that a poet's life resembled a "game played by the Father with His children" ("Pushkin and Skriabin"). This view of "Christian art" defined the use of the Aeschylean myth in the "Ode to Stalin." The story of Joseph the dreamer who was once Pharaoh's prisoner was also summoned up to effect the transition from a relationship of conflict to one of indispensable service and ultimate identification (neither of the namesakes was an ethnic Russian). Prometheus of Aeschylus, recalled at the outset, passed almost imperceptibly into another mythic register where the guilty poet, his once-misused creative gift, and the Zeus of the Soviet Olympus could be presented as, respectively, Christ and God

the Father. After all, Prometheus, like Christ, was a transgressor with respect to established authority. But his offense, even though beneficial for mankind, served to set the tragic cycle in motion, whereas Christ's much later violation of the Law and his subsequent Crucifixion put the tragic cycle to rest. Mandelstam's personal misfortune thus recapitulated the religious and moral evolution of humanity—or, to put it differently, the phylogeny of history was recapitulated in the ontogeny of Mandelstam.

Emphasizing the dynamic aspect in the development of the "Ode's" central myth, that is, by having the Christian view supersede its Greek counterpart, Mandelstam was pleading for a different interpretation of his predicament, integrating it into the framework of universal Christian redemption and forgiveness. "Where is the bound and nailed-down groan, Where is Prometheus—the rock's support and likeness? . . . That is not to be—tragedies cannot be brought back," wrote Mandelstam shortly after completing the "Ode," almost in an attempt to exorcise the tragic pattern from his own life.^[112]

The "Ode to Stalin," too, seems to have been meant as an exorcism, at least to the extent that it bore some features of an elaborate magic spell. The coincidences of the first name of the poet and his addressee and the talismanic "charcoal" point to such a pattern. Before Mandelstam, the burning coal of the archetypal rebel had touched the lips of the prophet Isaiah, replaced the heart of Pushkin's Prophet, and in more recent times—and mined in fabulous quantities—earned a singular fame for Stakhanov (one can expect an Acmeist Mandelstam to outline his paradigms with this kind of precision). Such a history is bound to confer transcendent powers on the mineral, transforming it, by contagion,^[113] not only into a magical tool with which to fashion a fitting image of Stalin but also into a talisman that would grant the poet his wishes. This was not the first time Mandelstam had occasion to recall Pushkin's "talismanic" words: "Guard me in the days of persecution, / In the days of remorse and agitation: / You were given me on the day of sorrow."^[114]

Finally, the structure of the poem provides an even stronger indication of a magical subtext, for the "Ode" follows the twofold formula of a homeopathic spell,^[115] that is, one based on analogy or comparison.^[116] The first part of such a spell recounts a phenomenon that has already taken place—here the development of tragedy into the Christ event—and the second contains a wish for a similar outcome with respect to an unrelated but in some ways comparable situationMandelstam's desire to have his predicament interpreted within the Christian rather than the Promethean or Old Testament framework.

Thus the initial analogy with Prometheus would yield to the desired imitatio Christi, the "stolen fire" to the magnanimity of the "debtor stronger than any claim," and the angry Zeus-Stalin to God the Father.

This Helleno-Christian myth, tragic and heroic as well as kenotic and redemptive in its specific generation in the "Ode," became the foundation (a concealed one, as myths require) ^[117] of a book that more than any other work contributed to Mandelstam's revival: the two volumes of Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoirs. There, of course, Stalin was revealed as a false god, but the "Ode"'s pattern of self-presentation, the "twins," could function well without him: the "prodigal son" could practice his divine gift and even return to his Father.^[118] The very first paragraph of her memoirs defines the reader's frame of reference, tuning him to the correct "mythology," once again imperceptibly, as myths require, and establishing a theme that will inform the entire narrative like a Wagnerian leitmotiv:

Having slapped Aleksei Tolstoy [the author of the famous Road to Calvary ], O. M. without delay returned to Moscow and there telephoned Anna Andreevna [Akhmatova] every day, pleading with her to come to Moscow. She tarried; he was getting angry. With her ticket purchased and ready to go, she paused by the window and became pensive. "Praying that this cup may pass you?" asked Punin, an intelligent, bilious, and brilliant man. It was he who suddenly said to Akhmatova, as they were strolling through the Tretiakov Gallery: "And now let us look how you are going to be conveyed to the execution" [reference to Surikov's "Boiarynia Morozova"]. This prompted the poem "And afterwards, on a peasant cart . . ." But she was not fated to make this journey: "They are saving you for the very end," Nikolai Nikolaevich Punin would say, and his face would become distorted by a tic. But at the very end, they forgot about her and did not arrest her.

The scandalous slap belongs to the Dostoevskian tradition of unmasking an antichrist in a sudden breakdown of social conventions (viz. scandals in The Possessed ). Here, the slap exposes the "other" Tolstoy as a false prophet. By implication, his famous trilogy Khozhdenie po mukam is a diabolical perversion of the Road to Calvary or the apocryphal story of the Virgin's Descent into Hell (the Russian title alludes to both), which will be set aright in Nadezhda Mandelstam's own narrative.^[119] As befits an imitator of the one who prayed at Gethsemane, Mandelstam pleads with his friend Akhmatova to come and keep vigil with him; and as befits one assigned the role of the poet's apostle, she delays. An allusion to the prayer at Gethsemane follows, and Punin's biliousness once again reminds the reader of the "bitter cup" (zhelch

is bile or gall). Christ's Passion is implicit in Punin's comparison of Akhmatova with a martyred disciple of the archpriest Avvakum, the archetype for Russia's martyred authors. Without any apparent motivation, the narrator finally focuses on Punin's nervous tic. In part a mimetic ploy, this isolated detail begins to generate its own associations in a densely allusive context. Punin, formerly a militant Futurist, is represented by a feature that he shares with Mikhail Bulgakov's Pontius Pilate as he is interrogating leshua, and with Dostoevsky's Tikhon as he is listening to the most inspired portions of Stavrogin's confession.^[120] Like most other "intelligent and brilliant" people one encounters in the memoirs, Punin bears the mark of possession—or so the context seems to suggest.

The symbolism of Gethsemane would once again reappear in the chapter devoted to the "Ode," where the poem itself would be referred to as the "prayer of the cup."^[121] Few of the things that happened to Mandelstam are excluded from this scenario. The key event was the death of the poet in a transit concentration camp, so important also because it had at once converted into prophecy all the kenotic topoi of Mandelstam's oeuvre. What remained was to align the facts of the poet's life with the mythologies of his writings. "My goal," explained Nadezhda Mandelstam, "was to justify Mandelstam's life by means of preserving what constituted its meaning."^[122] If what she had in mind was a demonstration of the poet's identification with the values and concerns of the Russian intelligentsia, her mission could not have been better served. Enveloped in another's speech, he has become a letter, an intoxicating line, a book that we are now dreaming.