The Theater of The Lyric

And how simple everything was! Art was called tragedy. Just as it should be called. The tragedy was called Vladimir Maiakovskii. The title concealed a brilliantly simple discovery that a poet was not an author but a subject of lyric poetry who addressed the world in the first person. The title was not the name of the writer, it was the name of the content.
BORIS PASTERNAK, Safe Conduct

What will you do in the theater of half-words And half-masks, heroes and kings?
OSIP MANDELSTAM, "There is an unshakable scale of values" (1914)

As the French Revolution drew nearer, the pseudo-antique theatricalization of life and politics was gaining ever greater ground, and by the time of the revolution, the practical leaders had already been forced to move and struggle in a dense crowd of personifications and allegories, in the narrow wings of an actual theater, on stage in the scenes of a revived antique drama. When the real Furies of antique ravings descended into this pathetic cardboard play house. . . .
OSIP MANDELSTAM, "The Nineteenth Century" (1922)

An October (1913) issue of a left-wing newspaper, Den', carried Mandelstam's review of the central dramatic work of Innokentii Annenskii, Thamyra the Cithara Player.^[1] Even if the assignment of this "Bacchic drama," as the play was subtitled, to Mandelstam was a matter of accident (which was unlikely), it was one of those coincidences that in retrospect seem to have left nothing to chance. For the main protagonist

of the drama was an artist, and the action pivoted around the connection Annenskii saw between art and eros, in this case specifically, incest and poetic art. Mandelstam was deeply moved by the play, and his brief review may serve as an introduction to his mythologies of self-presentation circa 1913.^[2] The questions I want to ask are what it meant for the poet Mandelstam to be a poet, and what, if anything, being a poet had to do with incest, culture's most fundamental taboo.

Annenskii's play (for the younger generation, a welcome relief from Wagnerian ponderousness) centered around a legendary musician, Thamyris, who had the reputation of being a dreamy and withdrawn ascetic among artists, a reputation not very different from the poetic persona in Mandelstam's Stone. Indeed, Thamyris's dictum, "I play not for women, I play for stars," might well have become Mandelstam's if we allow for the different vocabularies: the "stars" of the scorned Symbolists^[3] would take the place of the "women," and the Acmeist architectural élan the place of Thamyris's "stars." Consider this 1912 programmatic incantation:

I hate the light
Of uniform stars.
Welcome my ancient dream—
A Gothic tower's height!

Stone, turn into lace,
A cobweb thou shalt be;
The slender spire pierce
The empty breast of the sky.^[4]

To return to Annenskii, the other protagonist is Thamyris's mother, the nymph Agriopé, who has not seen her son since she gave birth to him twenty years earlier. The action is propelled forward by what might be called a passion to possess—for Thamyris, divine beauty, and for Agriopé, Thamyris—until the grapes of Dionysus turn sour with the tragic irony of a fulfilled wish. All that Thamyris wants is to have the Muse Euterpe perform for him (he even fancies marrying her), and all that Agriopé wants is for her son (a replica of his

father) to respond to her intense and rather unsettling affection. Both wishes are eventually granted through the good offices of the jovial drunkard "papa Silenus,"^[5] although not in a way that the protagonists could anticipate. To have the Muse perform for him Thamyris enters into a competition with her, only to lose and be punished for his presumption. Having realized that he has become tone-deaf, he blinds himself in despair. His mother, who had once involuntarily offended Zeus, is transformed into a tamed bird, to serve as guide for her listless son. She can have him now. From time to time, as the stage directions indicate, one could see the delicate and enigmatic smile of Zeus fleeting faintly across the cloudless heaven.^[6]

What did Mandelstam make of it? "Annenskii," he wrote,

transformed the theme of a mother in love with her own son into a tormenting feeling of a lyric infatuation. . . .

While Thamyris was in communion with music, he was torn between women and stars. But when his cithara refused to serve him and the music of rays grew dark in the eyes burnt out with charcoal, he—so terribly indifferent to his fate—became alien to tragedy, like the bird sitting on his outstretched hand.^[7]

Let us take a close look at this passage. As a programmatic anti-Symbolist insistence on wonderment before the irreducible mystery of the universe, the review worked well, echoing the still-fresh Acmeist manifestos,^[8] but as an interpretation of Annenskii's "Bacchic drama," it could have fared better. The first item to strike anyone familiar with Thamyris is Mandelstam's insistence on conflict, on being "torn between women and stars," as a necessary condition for being an artist. In fact, it is very difficult to conclude this from Annenskii's text. After all, Thamyris had achieved great renown well before the appearance of his ever-youthful nymph mother, who confronted him with the fatal choice. The conflict itself, therefore, was not of Thamyris's making. He merely wished to attain otherworldly perfection, and it was his mother, Agriopé, who fixed the transgression of the incest taboo as the price he would have to pay for his hubris. A man possessed by an idée fixe can hardly be presented as torn by a conflict, and indeed, Thamyris appeared to be indifferent to the ways the gods, including his mother, might put his obsession to use.

At least in one important respect, the review served Mandelstam as a pretext for a declaration of his own, rather than Annenskii's, idea of the poet. If you wish to be a poet, he suggests, you must be torn—whether between "women and stars" (ultimately, your "mother" and the stars) or between a given and a desired identity. As soon as this

conflict is resolved, you cease to "hear music," becoming as an artist both deaf and blind. Reverse this picture, and you get Mandelstam's poet. He is one who is blessed (or cursed) with this tormenting state—a fulcrum of "tragedy," a hero who in this particular case is forced to choose between succumbing to his mother's advances or giving up his dream of being a bridegroom to the Muse. Although it should not be taken for granted, Mandelstam's insistence on a close kinship between the mask of a tragic hero and the persona of a lyric poet could hardly be called idiosyncratic. Two months after the publication of Mandelstam's review, Maiakovskii was playing the protagonist in Vladimir Maiakovskii: A Tragedy, a work that Pasternak would find emblematic of the modern attitude to verbal art.^[9]

Apart from the association of tragedy with the central drama of Christianity, something that many contemporaries took as a matter of course,^[10] the "tragic" metaphor qualifying lyric poetry suggests the presence of the cathartic function in the lyric and, significantly for us, presupposes a theatrical pattern of interaction between the poet, who is a "tragic hero," and his "audience," namely, the listener, even if he were the reader.^[11] The tradition of public recitals, needless to say, provided a natural environment for this metaphor,^[12] but it also brought into sharper focus the unsettling questions concerning the nature of the interaction between the poet and his audience. Was the public to be entertained, was it to dictate to the poet what it wished to listen to? And if the poet scorned its advice or command, who was it, then, that served him as the addressee of his poem? These were questions with a long history in Russian letters,^[13] and the changing fortunes of modern poetry made it imperative that they be addressed once again.

The epoch of "eternal recurrence"^[14] laid bare the archaic roots of art and especially drama, so that for Viacheslav Ivanov or for any younger, fairly educated poet, the origin of tragedy in a communal ritual of sacrifice^[15] was almost self-evident.^[16] In some cases what was self-evident became transparent, as happened with the modernist actress and director Vera Komissarzhevskaia (1864–1910), who died in the bloom of her career, extending the metaphor of ritual sacrifice into real life.^[17] By superimposing the tragic mask on the persona of a lyric poet, Mandelstam was not merely broadening the boundaries of the genre but nudging the lyric, as it had evolved in modern Russia, in the direction of the archetypically central aspect of his culture—a ritual, redeeming sacrifice of the poet.^[18] Granted, Mandelstam was speaking only of art, of action taking place in aesthetic imagination, but to the extent that the convention of art demands a suspension of disbelief, what he was saying represented a matter of high seriousness. In the

ultimate sense, the audience that came to see the performance of such a poet sought to participate in a reenactment of the drama of salvation.

One who experiences the command of a leader as an inner compulsion or duty, Weber maintained, has recognized the "charisma" of the leader.^[19] In the case of a "charismatic" poet, just about the only command involves a request to the audience to remain in their seats and to accept the intimate association between the poet's drama and its other, loftier counterpart. These bonds of "recognition of charisma" between the poet, who "imitates" Christ, and the reader, who does not even wince at it, did, no doubt, exist in Mandelstam's time. "Who does the poet speak to?" he wrote in 1913, and in partial answer to his own question he outlined the "juridical aspect, so to speak, of the interaction accompanying an act of [a poet's] speech": "I speak, therefore people listen to me, listen not just because they have nothing better to do, or out of politeness, but because it is their duty " [italics are mine].^[20] Alone, these words could not enforce what Weber called "devotion born out of distress and enthusiasm,"^[21] but the very fact that they were uttered testifies to a firm belief in the possibility of an ideal charismatic bond uniting the author with his audience.