IV—
Setting the Stage:
Prolepsis in Tristia, 1915–1917
What else? Death appears to me sometimes as a magical afternoon dream, which sees far—its gaze frozen—and brilliantly. But death may and must be beautiful in a different way, too, because it is the only child of my will, and in the harmony of the world, it will be, if I so wish, another golden sun.
INNOKENTII ANNENSKII, "Lermontov's Humor"
Three Books
A book of poetry should be not a random collection of heterogeneous poems but precisely a book, a self-contained whole united by a single idea. Like a novel, like a treatise, a book of poetry reveals its theme consistently from the first page to the last. . . . Parts in a book of poems are nothing more than chapters, one clarifying another, which cannot be randomly rearranged
VALERII BRIUSOV, Urbi et orbi (1903)
We have before us a book, like a song—not a word can be taken out of it.
ALEKSANDR BLOK (1904)
Mandelstam used the "biographical" principle for plotting his narrative, and thus the order of poems in a collection is almost as important as the order of chapters in a Bildungsroman or of themes and parts in a musical composition. This is not to say that Mandelstam's poems cannot be read in isolation. After all, many were first published in newspapers and magazines. But placing an individual piece within a specific context and a fixed order endows both the poem and what surrounds it with a "narrative" meaning that they would not otherwise possess.[1] I shall examine the poems I discuss here and in subsequent
chapters as parts of such a hypothetical narrative. I use the word hypothetical for two reasons: first, because a narrative line of a collection of lyric poetry is suggested or implied (in the manner of the Formalists' fabula or Wagner's leitmotiv)[2] and therefore cannot be precisely defined; and second, because the reader's identification of a poet with the chief protagonist of such a narrative inevitably defers understanding until the book of poems comes to an end. What is more, these rules of a contemporary lyric narrative were intimately related to their archetypal referent point in the Gospels—a link made apparent, for example, in Pasternak's "The Garden of Gethsemane," where Christ speaks about his destiny in almost narratological terms ("But the book of life has come to the page that is dearer than everything holy. Now what has been written shall come to pass, so let it come to pass. Amen").[3] In this sense, both the opening and the closing of any but that last "book" are forever contingent. At the moment of its appearance, however, every new collection has the finality of a testament, and it can remain the last. I shall examine Mandelstam's writings of the post-Stone decade from this perspective.
During the period 1915–28, Mandelstam published four books of poetry. All of them included some poetry composed after the publication of the second Stone in 1916 (printed in December 1915). Each of the books began and ended in a different way, and each was a significant landmark in the narrative of the poet's fate. I shall discuss them in the order of their appearance, but before doing so I offer this brief bibliographical note. After Stone II, the first collection of new poetry to be published was Tristia. This book, issued by a Russian publisher in Berlin in 1922, consisted mostly of new poetry but included a number of earlier pieces. Unlike the poems composed in 1915–20, these were interspersed throughout the collection and bore no date, blending with the chronological drift of the later cycles. Because of difficulties in communicating with his Berlin publisher, Mandelstam, who had intended to call the book The New Stone, had little to do with this edition except to supply copies of poems. Even its title, echoing the eponymous 1918 poem, is reputed to have been invented by Mikhail Kuzmin.[4]
A few of the poems of the 1915–21 period, as well as one 1923 poem, "He Who Found a Horseshoe," were included in the third Stone, subtitled The First Book of Poetry (1923). This Stone was issued by the State Publishing House (a certain measure of Mandelstam's reputation as being sympathetic to the regime)[5] and was devoted on the whole to the 1908–15 period. Once again, the sequence of poems, all undated, was not strictly chronological. The only collection of
post-1915 verse Mandelstam is known to have designed himself, The Second Book (1923), was published by Krug, a state-sponsored press headed by A. K. Voronskii that was meant to compete with privately owned presses for the work of fellow travelers.[6] Similar to Tristia, The Second Book included in addition eleven poems composed during 1921–23. As in Stone III, poems here followed a more or less chronological order and were undated—another sign that the author wished to stress an implied (rather than chronological and therefore random) integrity of his book.
The last edition published in Mandelstam's lifetime, the 1928 Poems, came out in the middle of a five-year period when he wrote virtually no poetry. The most complete edition, Poems, encompassing most of what he had produced since 1908, consisted of three parts: "Stone," the poetry of 1908–15; "Tristia," 1915–20; and "1921–1925," a self-explanatory and meaningful title for an author who had previously avoided dates. The order of poems, too, was significant. Both Stone III and The Second Book concluded with Mandelstam's longest and latest poems: one with the wistful and retrospective "He Who Found a Horseshoe," the other with the forward-looking, oratorical resolution for the future, "The Slate Ode." By contrast, Poems ended with a short, ambivalent, perhaps embittered meditation of an exhausted "aging" poet. This piece, echoing the "cruel romances" of Apollon Grigor'ev and Pushkin's sarcastic parody of Dante's Inferno, conveyed an ironic mixture of hope and resignation, indicative of Mandelstam's uncertainty about his future as poet:
And what is left of the light is in the starry, prickly untruth,
And life will float by like the froth of a theater bonnet,
And I have no one to whom to say: "Out of the gypsy camp of a
dark street" . . .[7]
According to the memoirs of his widow, Mandelstam exercised no control over the 1928 Poems. Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that he literally had no hand in dividing the book into parts and choosing the opening and closing poems.[8] However heavily censored and errorridden this book might be, it was Mandelstam himself who divided his legacy into three periods, 1908–15, 1915–20, and 1921–25; acknowledged his paternity over the 1922 Tristia, christened though it was by Mikhail Kuzmin; and invited his readers to accept the col-
lection as legitimate, reservations notwithstanding.[9] I shall treat it accordingly.
In light of this history, how are we to interpret Mandelstam's choice of the "overture" to the poetry of 1915–20? This body of poems was introduced by what I shall refer to as "Phaedra II" and "Bestiary." Both editions of Tristia (1922 and 1928) opened with "Phaedra II" followed by "Bestiary," the order conforming to the chronology of their composition, which The Second Book nevertheless reversed. Although both poems were patterned on the familiar Nietzschean dichotomy of Apollo and Dionysus, each set a distinct tone for the collection. Indeed, a book of poems opening with a monologue on "unfortunate Phaedra" produces a beast entirely different from the one that emerges following a poem echoing Schiller's chiliastic "Ode to Joy" and Beethoven's Ninth.
From the vantage point of late 1922, the second year of the New Economic Policy, "Bestiary" could resonate powerfully with the desire for peaceful "work and constancy" in Russia and the world ("A Decembrist," 1918), and as a political statement it could support Mandelstam's "Hellenistic" program for rebuilding postwar Europe as a nonpolitical commonwealth—a sort of a grand-scale mir, Russia's celebrated peasant commune.[10] The choice of "Bestiary" may have been determined by commercial reasons as well. Following on the heels of Tristia, The Second Book had to look, feel, and be different (despite the fact that two-thirds of The Second Book had been printed in the Berlin edition) if it were to sell more than a few copies. This Valerii Briusov understood well when, in an act of particular biliousness, he pronounced The Second Book to be identical with Tristia.[11] Be that as it may, The Second Book offered a different periodization and a somewhat different narrative of self-presentation, one that was at odds with the editions of 1922 and that had ceased to be viable by the time the collected Poems came out in 1928.
Unlike "Bestiary," "Phaedra II" was essentially an ambiguous poem, capable of serving a greater repertoire of "plots" generated by the "myth of forgotten Christianity" that Mandelstam outlined in "Pushkin and Skriabin." As it did in Tristia (1922), "Phaedra II" could function as a metonym of the fate of man before the Christian revelation, which was to be contrasted with the Christian regeneration of the last poem, where the Hagia Sophia and St. Peter's are described as "granaries of universal good."[12] Or, as it did in the 1928 edition, the poem could formulate an inner conflict that would find its ironic resolution in "I intruded into the round dance of shades" ("Ia v khorovod tenei"), a poem that makes light of the earlier "petrified" timidity of
the author of Stone when he was confronted with eros.[13] Finally, placing it at the head of a collection immediately following Stone could emphasize both the continuity and the change in Mandelstam's poetic persona—a theme that preoccupied him all through the 1920s. Indeed, Stone (1916 and 1928) concluded with another "Phaedra," a nostalgic yearning for the forever—gone theater of Euripides and Racine, whereas Tristia opened with a scene in which both Phaedra and her time, as Mandelstam had insisted in "Pushkin and Skriabin," came back to recapitulate the Christian drama of history. Indeed, the ending of Stone II and the beginning of Tristia constitute a most remarkable case of asymmetrical anaphora, its two members represented not by words, lines, or even poems but by two large collections of poetry. Behind this oversized rhetorical figure was the overwhelming sense of historical catastrophe, at once a break with the past and a recurrent apocalypse à la Nietzsche and Vico.[14] In Russia's Christian culture, Mandelstam, of course, was not the only poet to predicate the outcome of recent events on the ability of his countrymen to recollect "forgotten Christianity," a process in which a poet was to play a central role. What was specifically Mandelstamian about this mnemonic imitatio Christi was the plot around which it revolved, namely, the myth of incest. Such are the reasons prompting me to rely on Tristia for the periodization of Mandelstam's work.
An Ending and a Beginning:
1915–1916
The wake counters death with birth and rebirth and—joined with the beliefs in afterlife and the world of the night sun—creates the whole of the dual idea of the deity. Sexual union is the polar opposite of death, and the wedding corresponds to the funeral.
VIACHESLAV IVANOV, "Religion of Dionysus"
Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard.
STÉPhane MALLARMé
Life is without beginning or end.
Chance stalks us all;
Over us hangs the unavoidable gloom
Or brightness of God's face.—
But you, artist, believe firmly
In beginnings and ends.
ALEKSANDR BLOK, Retribution
Mandelstam's progress during the period spanned by the first two collections may be seen as a continuous working through of the implied myth, with the ultimate aim of finding a more adequate expression for
it within contemporary poetic conventions and beliefs. After he had interpreted the incest myth in terms of Christian martyrdom, the screen concealing it from the reader lifted, exposing a different stage whose existence had been only suspected by a few initiates into the mysteries of modernist hide-and-seek.[15] Let us consider these two poems that marked the crossroads in Mandelstams career. [16] I shall cite them here in full, based on a translation by Clarence Brown.[17]
I shall not see the famous Phaedra
In the old, many-tiered theater
With its high smoke-blackened gallery
By the light of melting candles.
And, indifferent to the vanity of actors
Gathering the harvest of applause,
I shall not hear it—directed at the footlights,
The verse feathered with the coupled rhyme.
"How repellent and fatiguing are these veils to me . . ."
Racine's theater! A powerful screen
Separates us from the other world;
Stirring with its deep folds,
A curtain lies between it and us.
Classical shawls are slipping from shoulders;
A voice, melted by suffering, is gathering strength,
And, forged in indignation, the style
Achieves the tempering of grief . . .
I've missed the festival of Racine!
Again the worn-out posters rustle,
And, faintly, orange peel emits its scent,
And, as though awakened from an age-old lethargy,
My neighbor speaks to me:
"In torment from the madness of Melpomene,
In this life, all I am thirsting for is peace,
Let us leave before the jackal spectators
Arrive to tear the Muse apart!"
What if a Greek should see our games . . .
Even for such a master of ambiguity as Mandelstam, this poem was unusual. Constructed around a nostalgic topos—a Russian reader will readily recall Tiutchev's "Blessed is he who visited this world in its fateful moments"[18] —the text nevertheless belies the nostalgic protestation by all available Acmeist means. The unrhymed iambic pentameter, emblematic of the high romantic drama of Pushkin's Little Tragedies or Boris Godunov, the intricate alternations of feminine and masculine endings, a rising crescendo of the thrice-repeated feminine ending and the falling intonation of the masculine line (3 + 1, 3 + 1), and finally its dazzling alliterative play on the liquids [r] and [l] (consider Racine, Phaedra, Melpomene, gallery) betray the kind of mastery and control that Racine himself might have envied.
Thematic ambiguity, too, is apparent. What the poet bemoans not to have seen is described with such gusto that one wonders whether the original could have lived up to Mandelstam's imaginary copy. In fact, the first stanza functions rhetorically as an antithetical incantation, creating the presence it affirmatively denies. Hence the appearance of what passes for the actual text of Racine (Phèdre, act 1, scene 2) in the line following the stanza:
Que ces vains ornements, que ces voiles me pèsent.
If only for a moment, Racine's theater had indeed returned.
The incantation reaches an almost Maiakovskian level of intensity[19] in the second stanza. Remarkably, Mandelstam was able to maintain Acmeist equilibrium while the antithetical aspects of the poem were pulling it apart like two linked locomotives going in opposite directions. One powerhouse was the force of historical and metaphysical concealment, the Apollonian "heavy curtain" hiding that "other world"; the other was the Dionysian elimination of all boundaries that made the "classical shawls" slip and confessions fly. Add to this the archetypal, spellbinding potency of Juvenal's "indignant verse" (fecit indignatio versum ) and you have a striking Mandelstamian brew in which fiery poisons were mixed with an equal measure of cooling antidotes. As soon as the Bacchic element (lines 15–18) began to overwhelm the classical stoicism of the preceding quatrain, the poet, terrified by the power he himself conjured up, pulled back with the rather unconvincing but nevertheless deflating line "I've missed the festival of Racine!"
The last stanza, written in a minor key, completes the poem's two central and antithetical paradigms: one elegiacally nostalgic and full of irretrievable loss, the other ample and restorative. What screened the past from the present in the first stanza[20] yielded to transparency in the second, where nothing separated the "games" played in Petrograd in 1915 from those played in the France of Racine or the Rome of Juvenal, or, of course, from the Greek "sacrificial feasts that gave birth to Melpomene, the favorite muse of Dionysus," in the words of Viacheslav Ivanov. In this context, the words of the "lethargic" aesthete who wished to close his eyes to this world must appear vacuous indeed. Unlike him, the poet could appreciate his own implicit analogy between those ancient games and the contemporary sacrificial ones. The war, the "symbolic" death of Skriabin, and the Skriabin "vigils"[21] —all could be classified as that "game of hide-and-seek . . . played by the Father with His children"; thus they, as if by themselves, might stumble across the idea of redemption and God.[22] This was how Mandelstam put it in "Pushkin and Skriabin."
After the pressured atmosphere of this concluding poem of Stone II, we read the far more somber second "Phaedra," which opens Tristia, almost with a sigh of relief. For here the reader, wearied by nostalgia for Racine, is transported to the still center of tragedy, that archetypal sphere whence the divine "idea" of Phaedra and Hippolytus sprang forth to be "imitated" by Euripides and Seneca, Racine and Mandelstam.
"O the splendor of these veils and this attire—how
Heavy it is to me amid my shame!"
—In stone Troezen, there will come to pass
A famous misfortune,
The steps of the royal stairs
Will turn red from shame.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And for the enamored mother
A black sun will rise.
"O if only it were hatred seething in my breast—
But, you see, the confession of itself flew from my lips."
—With a black flame Phaedra burns
In bright daylight.
The funeral torch smolders
In bright daylight.
Fear your mother, Hippolytus:
Phaedra-night is stalking you
In bright daylight.
"I have stained the sun with black love . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ."
—We fear, we dare not
Relieve the royal grief.
Stung by Theseus,
The night assaulted him.
But, following the dead home
With our funeral song,
We shall appease the black sun
Of wild and sleepless passion.
This version of the poem, completed in January 1916, differed from the earlier drafts (1915) in showing less narrative fidelity to Racine.[23] The poet eliminated lines in the earlier drafts and replaced some of them with the far more meaningful suspension points.[24] Obviously Mandelstam wished to put considerable distance between this poem and Racine, a wish made further apparent by his inclusion in Stone III (1923), right after the first "Phaedra," of a fragment from Racine's tragedy in his own much later rendering.
The second "Phaedra" had to appear as a collage, not a pastiche, and its bonds with its sources had to be considerably weakened to accommodate as much of the present-day meaning as possible, shaped in the image of this proleptic imitation of the kenotic Christ. In this respect, the Acmeist Mandelstam did nothing different from what, say, the Futurist Maiakovskii did with a greater abandon and less equivocation. Consider the concluding lines from Maiakovskii's "The Backbone Flute" (1915):
Into a holiday paint today's date.
Arise,
Magic equal to the Crucifixion.
See—
With words, nails,
I have been nailed to paper.
Compared to this Christ figure, Mandelstam's martyrs avant la lettre, even when their oppressive shawls were slipping, appeared overdressed. And in fact we can read Mandelstam's opening quotation from Racine as a confession of a poet who felt burdened by the "well-balanced" Acmeist shawls. Nevertheless, "Phaedra II," though still "classical,"[25] owes far more to the contemporary discourse on the primitive archaic culture of Ancient Greece (according to Nietzsche and Frazer) than to the style of Louis XIV, and as such it shares an emphasis on the unbridled and primitive with the works of Russian Futurists, whom Mandelstam, polemics aside, deeply respected.[26]
"What if a Greek should see our games," wrote Mandelstam in concluding Stone —and the second "Phaedra" does answer this wistful rhetorical question. The poet had resolved the conflict posed by the taboo and the attraction of "incest" by interpreting it as martyrdom, and there was no longer any need to erect elaborate screens concealing either the theme or the myth itself. More important, in the context of war and anticipation of civic cataclysm, the "Hellenized" and primitive version of the myth possessed the expressive potential that its earlier "distant" counterpart could not begin to rival. On the "personal" level, too, the myth could give a far more "open" expression to the theme of eros, aligning the poet's narrative of self-presentation with the convention of the "mystical marriage" between the poet and his land. Finally, to look at "Phaedra II" through the prism of Viacheslav Ivanov's theory, this perversely nuptial poem was a sign of the poet's "descent" from the heights of his individual communion with the world spirit; it symbolized his return to earth, to the famous metaphysical "soil" of Dostoevsky, in which he would plant himself as the proverbial "corn of wheat," redeeming the people with his self-imposed martyrdom and hastening the realization of the "symphonic" ideal.[27] In this respect, the opening poem of Tristia was a turning point, and it served as an introduction to Mandelstam's poetry after Stone, defining it as a record of ordeals and bringing together various masks of the suffering "bridegroom" to form a totality of a martyr's fate. Let us focus on a few specifics of the second "Phaedra."
First a word about the structure of the poem. As with its counterpart in Stone, "Phaedra II" falls into three parts. Unlike the first "Phaedra," however, it contains no authorial speech. Instead we hear
only two voices: Phaedra, who, as Clarence Brown has shown, speaks the words of Racine's Phèdre; and the chorus, which is Mandelstam's own invention. Thus each of the three parts consists of a fragment of Phaedra's monologue, written in refined Alexandrines, and the commentary of the chorus, written, as befits a vox populi, in "primitive" rhymed trochaics (a "folk song" meter in the Russian tradition) full of ominous, incantatory repetitions.
After Phaedra had complained about the constraints imposed by her marriage and royal station, the chorus issues its first prolepsis, addressed indirectly to Phaedra: "In the stone Troezen, there shall come to pass a famous misfortune, the steps of the royal stairs will turn red from shame . . . And for the enamored mother a black sun will rise" [italics are mine]. How can one read these words in the context of Mandelstam's "narrative"? A poet who had named two of his previous collections Stone and was planning to issue the third, Tristia, under the title New Stone[ 28] was, no doubt, fully aware that "stone" connoted a metonym of the poet Mandelstam. Indeed, it is hardly possible to think of this epithet except as a metonym referring the reader to Mandelstam's earlier poetry, with its ambience of highbrow, petrified decorum. Taken together with the "stone" modifying Troezen, the "veils" oppressing Phaedra in both poems also become transparent, no longer an impassive facade concealing the flame of unrequited passion. Of course, such "confessions" do not suddenly "fly from one's lips," and indeed, Mandelstam began to prepare the reader for a change of course as early as 1914. "A flame is destroying my dry life" are the first words of his 1914 poem; "and now I am singing, not a stone, but a tree.[29] In "Phaedra II," to use a Jamesian formula, he was no longer "telling" but "showing," and the "classical shawls" that began "slipping from shoulders" in the last poem of Stone were very nearly cast off in the "confessional" overture to the poems of 1916–21.
"Phaedra II" could also be interpreted as effective apocalyptic prophecy: the "enamored mother" connoted Russia, oppressed by her imperial "splendor amid the shame" of injustice and slaughter, and the "stone Troezen" pointed to the imperial capital, Petrograd. The "royal stairs" of this city had already once turned "red from shame" over the famous "Bloody Sunday" that set off the 1905 revolution. And as many then suspected, it might be put to shame again. This view of the poem becomes less farfetched if we consider the essay Mandelstam composed six years later commemorating the event. The telling title of the essay, "The Bloody Mysterium of January 9," and the central simile of the roving crowd of demonstrators as a leaderless Greek chorus[30] make it possible for us to view as related the opening poem of Tristia,
"Pushkin and Skriabin," and Skriabin's unfinished apocalyptic Mysterium, as well as the contemporary discourse on tragedy as a form originating in sacrificial rituals of mystery religions that paved the way for the advent of Christianity. These two readings—the self-referential and the social—are not mutually exclusive; they are complementary and interdependent, like a microcosm and a macrocosm and, most important, like Christ's Passion and the suffering of humanity in the Christian mystery of the world redeemed.
The drama of Hippolytus and Phaedra, two innocents entrapped by Aphrodite and both eventually submitting to their fate, received in Mandelstam a Christian, kenotic interpretation. In "Pushkin and Skriabin," the "black sun"—the "sun of guilt" when it connoted the composer's death—had become the "sun of redemption" for Russia's archetypal poet, Pushkin—the double meaning itself recapitulating the ambiguity of Christ's Passion as it was understood by Mandelstam. For the very ambiguity of the word passion, which denotes either eros or the torment of martyrdom, suggests a link between sexual desire and a martyr's acceptance of pain and death in imitating Christ.[31] V. V. Gippius made much of this ambiguity in his Pushkin and Christianity,[32] and his "etymological" usage, typical of Mandelstam's milieu, associates the "incest" plot with the Christian aura enveloping Mandelstam's poem. The table of symbolization to which this vocabulary belonged was apparently so fixed that Phaedra's "black sun," its incestuous connotation notwithstanding, could reappear in Mandelstam's poem about his mother's funeral and function there as an unequivocal metonym of Christ's death on the cross.
This night cannot be undone,
But you still have light.
At Jerusalem's gate,
The black sun has risen.
The yellow sun is more terrifying.
Lulla-lulla-by,
In a light temple, Judeans
Were burying my mother.
Not possessing grace
And deprived of sanctification,
In a light temple, Judeans
Were holding a wake over the remains of a woman.
And over the mother, rang
The voices of the Israelites.
—I awoke in my cradle,
Illuminlated by the black sun.[33]
Evidently, for the poet's mother, death under the aegis of the Jewish "yellow sun" was just that, death, whereas for her poet son, born under the black rays of Christianity, it was an occasion potentially full of sanctity and grace (blagodat', charisma) as in the kenotic imitatio Christi.
To continue with "Phaedra II," why did Mandelstam use the word mother, when stepmother would have been far more appropriate ("Fear your mother, Hippolytus: Phaedra-night is stalking you in bright daylight")? This was inexactness uncharacteristic of the Acmeists. More striking, for one who was intimately familiar with the myth of Hippolytus, a substitution of one kinship term for another could not be a matter of indifference, all the more so since in Russian the words for "mother" and "stepmother" are identical prosodically when used in the genitive singular: boisia materi, boisia machekhi. If one cannot dismiss this confusion of terms as a casual slip, what was the significance of this substitution? Most likely Mandelstam, who, like every poet before him, felt free to embroider on the classical pattern, wished to emphasize the specifically "incestuous" aspect of the myth, fearing it would otherwise appear contaminated by a folkloric topos: the proverbial enmity between stepmother and stepchild.
And the final question: how do we locate the poet's self in a poem that generically represents a dramatic fragment? To appeal to the au-
thority of T. S. Eliot, a lyric poet's choice of dramatic form implies a dispersal of the "I" among the cast of characters,[34] in this case the chorus, Phaedra, and Hippolytus, whose presence is implied in the warning to him spoken by the chorus. A conflict in Mandelstam's narrative of self-presentation could either take the "lyric" (or inner) form or, as in this poem, become dramatized. Here, the dramatization was performed in an emphatically "archaic" manner. An appeal to Greek tragedy—a genre of sacred drama embodying the synthesis of religion and art[35] —had a particular significance in Mandelstam's milieu. For a contemporary, then, the poem-fragment referred not merely to an ancient dramatic form but also to a genre comparable to a liturgy celebrating the gods and uniting and purifying the community. (Needless to say, the ritual notion of "catharsis" had not yet acquired the rational psychoanalytic meaning it has in our day.) The author of "Pushkin and Skriabin," who described himself as a true "Hellene," that is, one who combined in one person the tragic and the Christian essences, could not have thought otherwise. Aiming beyond Euripides at the very origins of tragedy, Mandelstam set up a clash between the lines from Racine's Phèdre and the song of the chorus, which, although composed by Mandelstam himself, possessed a more "ancient" and "primitive" air than either Phèdre or Hippolytus taken alone.
The thrice-repeated refrain in the chorus's second entry is not a feature found in Euripides but one belonging more properly to the epic, to folk laments, and to incantations.[36] The poem's closure, the concluding lines of the chorus, suggests the nature of Mandelstam's usage: "But . . . with our funeral song, we shall appease the black sun of wild and sleepless passion." In Euripides, on the contrary, the chorus expresses no such intentions; it merely broadcasts the story about the great grief of royalty. For Mandelstam, then, the chorus's song, and perhaps song in general, served a healing, purifying function, not so much as a narrative with which the audience could identify but as an incantation and an exorcism—a catharsis achieved by means of verbal magic.[37] Hence the incantatory refrain "in bright daylight"—or, more precisely, "in white daylight" (sredi belogo dnia )—which has two connotations: the topos of Russian folk poetry on the one hand, and the mystical high noon that blinds the soul in a passionate afflatus before endowing it with the ultimate vision of divine light on the other.[38]
A conflation of several referents, Mandelstam's "Phaedra" was meant to present the myth in an archetypal, distilled fashion, to interpret it as an instance of martyrdom, to locate the dramatic action in mystical time at the point of epiphany, between Darkness and Light, and, no less important, to exorcise the spirit of the "famous misfor-
tune." (Clearly this "mystical" and "magical" interpretation was coextensive with "erotic" and "social.") In short, Mandelstam endeavored to recreate an archaic, syncretic, undifferentiated ritual in which art and eros were fused with the sacrament. According to one of the most authoritative comparativists of the time., A. N. Veselovskii (1838–1906), whose writings Mandelstam must have studied at the university, such were the conditions of modern drama at its very origins, when it was as yet unseparated from the primitive sacral "games":
When the most primitive animistic view of the world evolved in the direction of the more definite concepts of the deity and the framework of myth, [then] ritual took a more stable form of a cult, and this development found its expression in the stability of choric action: there appeared religious games [sic ] in which the element of prayer and sacrifice was supported by symbolic mime. . . .
Drama[, then,] was an exorcism in personae.[39]
As it functions in the Tristia, the second "Phaedra" sets up a mythic pattern, a frame to be imposed on the poems that follow. In them, to paraphrase Mandelstam's remarks about Villon, the poet plays the roles of both the perpetrator and the victim of "incest," martyred in a proleptic imitatio Christi, a prophet of the imminent "famous misfortune" that makes the "steps of the royal stairs . . . turn red from shame"; and finally, he is a mourner, even a chorus of mourners, accompanying those who have passed away in order to make the way straight for the coming new and yet unknown age. And while there is no proof that Mandelstam had the entire Tristia outlined in his mind as he was composing the second "Phaedra," the poems of 1916–20 followed the script of "Pushkin and Skriabin" and its companion, "Phaedra II." In the poetry of 1915–16, Mandelstam entered a new thematic and stylistic period in which the Blokian myth of the poet and his mystical bride would be transformed into the Mandelstamian poet-Hippolytus and Russia-Phaedra. These two or, including the chorus, three roles formed a basic design for a patchwork of masks—the primary colors of Joseph's coat.
Exchanging Gifts:
Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam
Dis manibusque sacrum.
It was in Moscow, in the spring of 1916, and I was giving him, instead of myself, the gift of Moscow.
MARINA TSVETAEVA, Letter to Bakhrakh (1923)[40]
But False Dmitrii viewed himself quite differently: his deportment was that of a legitimate, natural tsar, completely certain of his royal origin. . . .
How he came to believe this about himself has remained a mystery, historical as much as psychological.
V. KLIUCHEVSKII, Lectures on Russian History
The Latin phrase above, a frequent inscription on Roman tombs, was chosen by Innokentii Annenskii as an epigraph to his "bacchic drama" Thamyris the Cythara Player. The words mean roughly, "A place sacred to gods and shades," and as a verbal frame of the play they served as a metaphor for Annenskii's view of the origin and function of art. In short, art was a tomb—a human monument associated with the ordeal of death and functioning as a place where the exchange between the gods above and the spirits below was effected.
Dis manibusque sacrum is interesting in yet another respect. For an ear attuned to folk etymology, it may evoke a gesture of outstretched hands (manus ) holding out a gift or, in the context of funeral rites, an offering for a deity (which is, perhaps, why the 1957 edition of Annenskii translated it as "For gods and the shades of the dead this offering"). The gesture itself, whether sacred or not, remains the same, and even in its modern form can be traced to the religious and social rituals of exchange that establish or maintain bonds among all the members of a community, including the dead, the living, and the gods they worship.[41] For gods also give, not only receive, gifts. From them come misfortunes (the box of the "all-giving" Pan-dora), or they can make a person unusually "gifted," that is, endowed with a special charisma, for which one must give thanks in the hope of avoiding hubris—for gods, a singularly offensive sin.[42] As the story of Pandora suggests, gifts also carry an aura of surprise, mystery, indeterminacy. This aspect of gift-giving found its counterpart in Weber's ideal type of a charismatic figure, who has to prove to his followers that he possesses the special gift as much as he is possessed by it.[43]
Receiving a coveted gift (etymologically, gifts are hortatory, venal, and venomous as well as charismatic)[44] often leads to unanticipated consequences. We do well to fear the Danaeans bearing gifts, even though we cannot do much about it, since we are not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth. These jack-in-the-box surprises, combining the freedom of gift-giving with the compulsion to give and receive in order to appease, occur not only in exchanges among people or among gods (Hades and Persephone) but also in those involving gods and mortals. Annenskii's Thamyris learned about the price of gods' gifts, just as Zeus eventually learned about the generous-looking and savory but, in fact, mean sacrifices offered him by mortals on the advice of the trickster Prometheus. All of this serves to introduce a poem com-
posed as part of a poetic exchange —a conventional genre whose ritual origins were laid bare by the modernists Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva. That is to say, the traditional form of an "epistolary" exchange between two poets (hence, poems may be addressed ) took the form of a more archaic, and therefore supremely modern, ceremonial exchange of gifts, a Russian potlatch of sorts.
In this exchange Osip Mandelstam courted Marina Tsvetaeva, who, "instead of herself," offered the Petersburg Hippolytus a "gift of Moscow," a city as emblematic of native Russia as St. Petersburg was of the country's turn to the West. Prompted as it was by a "foreigner's" visit to the ancient capital city, the exchange was conducted for the most part in the native key. The poems centered around stylistic and thematic emblems of Russia: "folksy" vocabulary and occasionally syntax, set epithets, churches and icons. Most important for Mandelstam, the exchange revolved around significant junctures in Russia's relations with the West, those tangible symbols, or synecdoches, of the country's ambiguous self-image: the Time of Troubles, the Schism, and, of course, the reign of Peter the Great. The historical drama of Russia's lasting encounter with the West, presented as a nationalhistorical identity crisis, was reenacted by the two poets; or, to rely on a different vocabulary, the macrocosm of history, itself a recapitulation of Christian revelation in Mandelstam's scheme ("Pushkin and Skriabin"), had "returned" to be embodied in the microcosm of the romance between the two poets.
Whoever first set these terms for the exchange, both Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva adhered to them faithfully. Let us now take a look at Tsvetaeva's part, particularly her adumbration of the Boris Godunov script. Styling herself Maryna Mniszek, the Polish wife of the first pretender, and Mandelstam, False Dmitrii, Marina Tsvetaeva produced the following "Nativity" scene:
Over your dark cradle,
Dmitrii, over the luxurious cradle
Of yours, Maryna Mniszek,
There stood one and the same
Ambiguous star.[45]
Composed twelve days before the beginning of Easter, this poem points to the two fundamental and related themes of the exchange: the ordeals of martyrdom that a poet must endure to fulfill his mission (which consists of redemptive ordeals) and the ambiguity involved in presenting oneself in terms of another (False Dmitrii) pretending to be someone else (St. Dmitrii the Tsarevich) who, if he had indeed been murdered, died in imitation of Christ, who had died on the cross in order to redeem all. (Analogies of this sort are better grasped in the twilight rather than the light of reason.) To make it less confusing, if the son of Ivan the Terrible, Tsarevich Dmitrii (later canonized), had indeed been assassinated on the orders of Boris Godunov (allegedly in 1591, at the age of nine), then the first False Dmitrii was indeed a pretender, even though his mother (by then, nun Martha) claimed to have recognized in him her son. But what if the pretender's claims were genuine? Then the False Dmitrii was the true Dmitrii, his violent death acquiring the attributes of martyred saints. Tsvetaeva continued with her essay in extended historical analogy:
In Martha's black cell,
A bright necklace
—The sun in the night!—burns.
With remembering eyes,
She thrust—people froze.
With remembering lips,
She thrust—into whose?—mouth.
The nun herself
Recognized her son!
How, then, can you—for us—not be the one!
Over the "Bethlehem" of their view of poetry and history there indeed hung the same "ambiguous star." Those born under it were subject to its astral influence and vacillated between holiness and damnation,
though avoiding at all costs what generations of Russian intellectuals since Herzen had avoided—the "bourgeois European" juste milieu.
It is tempting to hear in these lines the echo of possible confessions offered to Tsvetaeva by Osip Mandelstam (can a Jew be a Russian poet, rather than just pretend to be one?), just as one can discern in them an echo of Mandelstam's second "Phaedra" (the "sun in the night," the mother's ambiguous kiss of no less ambiguous recognition). I shall yield to this temptation only so far as it helps substantiate the theme of ambiguity—a poet's uncertainty about his mission, about his self and his country, in short, about everything. Uncertainty is among the oldest afflictions—as old, at least, as the world's first visionary, unsure of the nature of his vision. In prerevolutionary Russia, however, a country ill equipped for the modern age yet rushing into it, uncertainty reached epidemic proportions. Now it manifested itself in social and economic crises, now in mysticism, now in a sudden crop of political agents-provocateurs like Degaev, Azef, and Malinovskii, who maintained a dual allegiance to the police and to the revolution. (Andrei Belyi's St. Petersburg [1912] comes readily to mind.) A barely "emancipated" middle-class Jew with a vocation rather than a safe profession, one whose mission was to "remind" Christian Russians of the Resurrection of Christ, was bound to suffer from uncertainty most acutely. Why else would he have insisted with such ardor on the poet's "sense of inner rightness?"[46] Hence the motif of the pretender, central to the exchange between Tsvetaeva—herself in need of inventing less "prosaic" origins[47] —and Mandelstam.
In another poem offered to Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva (this time casting off the mask of Maryna Mniszek) presented herself as a sort of bonne soeur sans merci, conferring on her "brother" a very special and complex gift. In part a blessing, this was a gift one could not get enough of, but as an offer of a new identity, it conferred on the recipient an obligation to risk everything for the cause to be pursued under the protection of this same blessing. This was, as Tsvetaeva put it, the "gift of Moscow"—unlike St. Petersburg, a city "not wrought by hands"[48] —a present that imposed a very specific historical framework on the vocation of poet. And Mandelstam felt compelled to respond to the "call." I shall cite Tsvetaeva's poem in toto:
Out of my hands—this city not wrought by hand—
Accept, my strange, my beautiful brother.
All the forty times forty churches—one by one,
And the little doves hovering over them;
And with flowers the [Kremlin's] Savior's Gates,
Where a Russian Orthodox man takes off his hat;
The starry chapel—a haven from evils—
Where the floor is worn by kisses.
The incomparable five-cathedral ring—
Accept, my ancient, my inspired friend.
To the Unhoped-for Joy, which stands in a garden,
I shall lead my guest from a foreign land.
The red cupola will begin to shine,
The sleepless bell will begin to chime,
And from the crimson clouds, the Mother of God
Will let her shroud fall over you,
And you will rise, full of wondrous strength . . .
You won't regret that you've loved me.[49]
To have loved her, even without reciprocity as the closing implies, meant to receive "Russianness" as a gift, including the protection of the Mother of God and her fortifying blessing—a "charisma" that could assure the success of the poet's pursuit. And if he persisted in his unwelcome wooing, the following poem warns him, he would be
wise to light a candle at the Iverskaia church and pray to the Mother of God to shield him from the evil spells issuing from the other corner of Marina's mouth:
My mouth is fiery,
Even if holy the looks.
Like a golden box.
The Iverskaia is shining.
You'd better snuff out your pranks
And have a candle lit
Not to have now happen to you-
What I wish would happen.[50]
The silver of divine magnanimity lined a wrathful cloud.
Mandelstam wrote four poems that can be considered part of this exchange of gifts. All four of them appeared only in Tristia but, significantly, not as a single cycle; two followed "Phaedra II" and "The Bestiary," and the other two were inserted in different places in the collection. The one least relevant for the exchange develops the theme of native Russia's ambiguity: her tendency to unbridled turmoil, as in the emblematic Smutnoe vremia (Time of Troubles), and the blessed Hellenic "fire" of Orthodox Christianity, Dionysus made meek,[51] embodied in the Kremlin cathedrals.
O this air, drunk with trouble[!]
In the black square of the Kremlin,
The troublemakers are rocking the shaky "peace,"
The linden trees smell alarming.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The [cathedrals of the] Archangel and the Resurrection
Are translucent like the palm of your hand—
Concealed burning is everywhere,
Fire hidden in the jugs . . .[52]
Of the two poems placed together, "In the Diaphony of a Maidenly Chorus" and "In a Peasant Sledge Lined with Straw," the first seems to record Mandelstam's settling into the unfamiliar environment of Moscow. Here is an Acmeist unpacking his bags to surround himself with dear reminders of "European" identity (if not ancestry). Viewed through the forest of such lares and penates, the Kremlin became the Acropolis (a justifiable transposition etymologically); the Dormition Cathedral, built by Fioravanti, led to Florence (perhaps via Tsvetaeva's name, meaning "of flowers");[53] and the addressee herself blended with the five-cupola cathedrals, Homer's "rosy-fingered Eos," and what looks like an eighteenth-century Russian painting in the classical idiom, "reminding" the poet of
. . . the appearance of Aurora,
But with a Russian name and in a coat of fur.
For her part, Tsvetaeva insisted that Mandelstam accept her Russia, one unmediated by the Acmeist catalog of Europe's "great works." This offering Mandelstam—a precursor in reverse[54] —could not refuse in spirit, even if the flesh was hesitant and wanting. The poem that followed the "diaphonic maidenly chorus" of the "tender" and "Florentine" Moscow cathedrals accounted for both his hesitancy and his willingness to accept Tsvetaeva's flattering, challenging, and apparently terrifying gift. I would like to read this poem with special care.
Barely covered with fateful sackcloth,
We were riding in a peasant sledge lined with straw,
From the Sparrow Hills to the familiar little church
Across enormous Moscow.
And in Uglich, children are playing dice,
And it smells of bread left in the oven.
They are carting me through the streets without a hat,
And in a chapel, three candles are flickering warmly.
It wasn't three candles burning, but three encounters—
One of them blessed by God himself,
A fourth there shall not be, and Rome is far away,—
And never did he love Rome.
The sledge was diving into black pothole;,
And the folk were returning from their revelries.
Thin muzhiks and their angry women
Were nibbling at sunflower seed by the gates.
The wet yonder turned black with flocks of birds,
And the tied hands have swollen.
They are carting the tsarevich, the body is growing terribly numb,
And the rust-colored straw has been set on fire.[55]
No other Russian poet of this century could represent both the historical and the tangible, material nature of a scene in a single sweep of the eye with as much mastery as could Mandelstam. The principle of composition here is similar to that of the preceding "Moscow-Florence" piece: to set up a network of correspondences between "this" world and the "other". Ever since Baudelaire, the symbolists had been
educating the European reader to make sense of these puzzles, but Mandelstam's correspondences had a particular Acmeist bent to them. They involved (1) the choice of other worlds to correspond to this one, and (2) a "balanced" relationship among them.
With regard to the first characteristic, Mandelstam linked in this poem present-day Moscow to the landmarks of Russia's past: the seventeenth-century Schism and Alexander Herzen; Tsarevich Dmitrii and the son of Peter the Great, Tsarevich Aleksei; the messianic doctrine of the Muscovite State and the brutal mass executions accompanying the reign of the two most fateful Russian tsars, Ivan the Terrible and Peter. All of these were highly potent and highly ambiguous historical symbols, and at first glance Mandelstam's use of them seems to have nothing in common with the Symbolists' preference for the more abstract and mystical "higher reality"—the realiora of Viacheslav Ivanov.[56] Yet we need only recall the historical view that Mandelstam shared with many of his contemporaries—eternal recurrence and the historical cycles of Nietzsche and Vico in a christological, chiliastic interpretation—to realize that the poet's "history" was as evocative of the angelic or infernal spheres as anything that a Symbolist guru could appropriate or coin.
The difference lay, rather, in the role that major historical events played in the formative years of the older and younger generations. Nothing that transpired in the last two decades of the nineteenth century could measure up to the Revolution of 1905–7, when Mandelstam was in his teens; to the tumultuous 1912, when he was barely twenty; or, of course, to the Great War, whose full brunt fell on the men of his generation. Combined with the "classical," decorous world of St. Petersburg (architecturally as much as politically and socially), these circumstances help explain why the Petersburg-dwelling Acmeists felt they could settle for a seemingly modest program, one calling for an Apollonian balance between the one and the "other" world. This one, surrounded by the sea of an uncouth, "Scythian" Russia, had already come to the edge of the precipice,[57] and unlike the Futurists, these Petersburg poets were satisfied with the dramatic contrast and disinclined to give it another push.[58]
Perhaps of greater relevance to poetry, the network of correspondences accumulated in the Romantic tradition (including the Symbolists) had condensed and become routinized.[59] Even if unmentioned, this network was always taken for granted, just as the astral meaning of the zodiac was in the back of the mind of a medieval astronomer charting a planet's course. To dwell on these basics of contemporary con-
sciousness, to spell them out, was, to follow the Acmeists' Petersburg parlance, ethically "unchaste" and in aesthetic "bad taste."[60]
But there is a volume of difference between not mentioning an a priori assumption and suggesting that it does not exist. The Symbolists' critical investment—the years of hammering into the brain of the Russian reader the ABCs of magic, mysticism, and myth—was beginning to pay off, even if the Acmeists and the Futurists were now collecting most of the profits. For the more "tangible" the Acmeists' descriptions (specifically Mandelstam's) and the more "vulgar" and streetwise the poetry of Maiakovskii, the greater must be the weight of the angels and devils sitting on the other invisible pan of the scale. After all, even such a vintage Acmeist as Mandelstam of the Stone period could be pronounced by a sympathetic and knowledgeable observer to be a "philosophical poet in the manner of Aleksandr Blok.[61] A similar equilibrium existed between a poem's "actual" detail and the corresponding historical "symbol." In the poem preceding "In the Sledge," "Muscovy" was in perfect equilibrium with "Florence"; with "In the Sledge" the balance may have shifted toward the symbolic, but still not enough to upset appreciably the Acmeist scale. "Things are what they appear to be" and "things are never what they appear to be." For Mandelstam and the poets of his generation, who did not need to waste their breath pointing out "correspondences" to the unsophisticated reader, these were complementary rather than mutually exclusive statements.
Briefly, how is one to read this poem? Mocking the Symbolists in the early 1920s, Mandelstam wrote that in their world no single thing could be itself, that their "every broom" refused to sweep but asked instead to be taken to a witches' Sabbath.[62] But Mandelstam's new Acmeist broom was no more designed for sweeping, in however inventive a manner, than was that of the Symbolists. Reading this poem, we wonder whether the "fateful sackcloth" or the "straw" or the "peasant sledge" had much to do with actual sacks, stuffing, or transportation, or only with those of the mind (even though there exists undoubtedly a greater immediate kinship between the two parallel series of signifiers and signifieds than between flying and brooms). Rather, these objects remind a Russian reader of the famous painting by Vasilii Surikov, Boiarynia Morozova, which portrays with great emotional intensity a disciple of the Schismatic archpriest Avvakum as she is being carted to the stake in a peasant sledge lined with straw. (It is worth noting that Avvakum's Vita was purported to be one of Mandelstam's "companion books.")[63] The somber tones of public humiliation, death, and mourn-
ing that Surikov had conveyed with color and line were condensed by Mandelstam in the highly alliterative rogozhei rokovoi (fateful sackcloth),[64] with all the melancholy and sinisterness that these two veteran words of human misfortune connote. The poem thus opens thematically in the "martyrdom" key, and stylistically in the key of native, hard-core Russia. The challenge of Tsvetaeva's gift was accepted.
Given these two tonalities, the Sparrow (now Lenin) Hills also perform a double duty: first as a landmark, the high point of Moscow, and second as a synecdoche of Mandelstam's other "companion book," My Past and Thoughts, by the father of Russian socialism, Alexander Herzen. For Herzen, as for his friend the poet Nikolai Ogarev, these were the "holy hills," where the two of them (mere boys then) stood "leaning against each other and, having suddenly embraced, . . . made a vow, in the sight of the whole of Moscow, to sacrifice our lives to the cause of our chosen struggle."[65] The cause of political struggle for Herzen and Ogarev was for Mandelstam the mission of a Russian poet. In 1923, in an essay devoted to Pasternak's My Sister—Life, he once again resorted to this Russian synecdoche of "sacred cause" and "struggle," this time in order to praise the talent of the Moscow poet for conveying the revolutionary élan and—the highest praise for Mandelstam—for upholding Russia's "Hellenic spirit":
Of course, Herzen and Ogarev, when in their youth they were standing at the top of the Sparrow Hills, experienced the physiologically sacred enthusiasm of space and a bird's flight. Pasternak's poetry has spoken to us about those moments: this was the glittering Nike translated from the Acropolis to the Sparrow Hills.[66]
Although it may not be readily apparent, Herzen and Avvakum went well together. Herzen was the first to present modern Russian authorship as martyrdom,[67] and Avvakum, seen in this light, was Russia's first martyred author,[68] completing his autobiography shortly before he was burned at the stake. So much for the Sparrow Hills, the origin of the poet's journey through Moscow.
The destination of this journey is much harder to determine. In fact, there is no reason to believe that the poem refers to any specific church. But even as an anonymous item, the "familiar little church," as the opposite of the "holy hills," defines the coordinates of the entire "Moscow" gamut: from fiery "revolutionary" martyrdom to the meek and diminutive Russian Orthodox piety. In fact, since the mention of this church introduces the theme of Uglich, the town where Tsarevich Dmitrii was murdered (or was he?), it might be related to the first pretender (or was he the true Dmitrii?). Another possibility, if we use
Tsvetaeva's blessings and warnings as a clue, might be the famous church of the miracle-working Iverskaia icon of the Mother of God, the protectress of Moscow.[69] In any case, the "familiar little church" is no more (nor less) an actual church than the "straw," the "sledge," the "sackcloth," and the "Sparrow Hills" are their realistic counterparts. For what we have in this stanza, and in the poem at large, is a palimpsest of corresponding and mutually transparent historical layers that allows the reader to see the present as a return of the past. What makes these layers correspond thematically is a complex polyvalent motif of uncertainty about the nature of one's mission: for Dmitrii (or Dmitriis), sainthood and royalty or damnation; for Avvakum, sainthood or infernal heresy; for Russia, a "Western" or "Eastern" way; for Herzen, the illegitimate son of a Russian nobleman, who spent most of his life in European exile, a commitment to the grand scale of "Russian" values or the "just milieu" of the bourgeois West;[70] for the poet Mandelstam, the degree to which the "charisma" of his vocation was genuine. Although the formula was lucid, its "terms" were barely sketched out, thus enabling the reader to project his own terms onto the poet's persona,[71] which would then reflect them back in a condensed form. Tsvetaeva's gift tested Mandelstam's "charisma," that is, his ability to carry out his mission. Mandelstam responded by trying on the masks lying close at hand—all compatible with the ambiguous martyrdom of Hippolytus and Phaedra.
As the poem continues, the masks become limited to an indeterminate, generic tsarevich, in fact, a conflated image: the true Dmitrii of Uglich, a child of nine who accidently fell on a knife and died (or was murdered, or was wounded and survived); the pretender (if that is indeed what he was); and finally, the son of Peter the Great, Tsarevich Aleksei, whom his father (was he really the father, or was he some infinitely more infernal impostor, the Antichrist?)[72] ordered executed for conspiring against him.
Even without Tsvetaeva's vaguely folkloric "gift" poem, it is obvious that Mandelstam was measuring himself against the figure of a folkloric prince who had just been given or promised the Moscow crown. In Russian the words for Christian marriage and for being crowned king are the same, and in fairy tales the tsareviches frequently combine the two exploits (an etymological and folkloric justification for Tsvetaeva's offering Moscow in place of herself), as did Hippolytus and Oedipus, if in a peculiar sense, in Euripides and Sophocles. This "peculiar sense" Mandelstam conveyed through his choice of masks: his tsareviches, like those of Troezen and Thebes, came to an ambiguous end. As heroes of fairy tales, they ended badly, but as tragic figures,
especially in Mandelstam's christological sense, like Morozova and Avvakum, they died the redeeming death of a martyr. This requires further elaboration.
According to the official report, Tsarevich Dmitrii was playing the game of tychka or svaika when he had an epileptic seizure and fell on a knife.[73] The game Mandelstam had children play in Uglich was a form of dice played with bones, babki[ 74] —a substitution that endowed a wellknown story with a powerful symbolic meaning. One of Heraclitus's more famous aphorisms, translated literally from its Russian rendering into English, reads: "Eternity is a child playing dice [kosti ]—a child's kingdom."[75] In these specific historical circumstances, this obscure aphorism of the Eleatic philosopher functions as a prolepsis, recalling the two famous prophecies about the child who would rule over the peaceful world (Isa. 11:6) or the pax romana (Virgil's Fourth Eclogue).[76] Does the "babe" have to be sacrificed again and again? Mandelstam's focus on martyrdom begged the question.
Later on, in the early 1920s, looking back at the years of the Great War and the revolution, he would return to the image of the child "playing dice," once again puzzling over why people could not settle for the one all-redeeming sacrifice. In "The Age" (1922), he wrote:
My age, my beast, who shall be able
To look into your eyes
And glue together with his own blood
The vertebrae of the two centuries?
And further on:
Like a tender cartilage of a child,
Is the age of the infant earth,—
Again, as if it were a lamb,
The crown of life has been sacrificed.
In the 1923 "He Who Found a Horseshoe," the image became part of Mandelstam's melancholy apocalyptic prophecy:
Children are playing dice [babki ] with the vertebrae of dead animals.
Our era's fragile count of years is coming to an end.
In the "Slate Ode" (1923), Mandelstam assumed a more upbeat attitude when speaking about history reaping the mature harvest of time:
The fruit was swelling. The vine maturing.
The day was raging as a day can rage.
And the tender game of dice [babki ],
And the fur of vicious sheepdogs at high noon;
Like rubbish coming down from the icy heights—
The other side of verdant images—
Hungry water is rushing,
Swirling, playing, like a baby beast.[77]
This "sacrificial" context of "In the Sledge" makes less enigmatic the smell of the "bread left in the oven." Broadly evocative of the peasant, native Russia, it brings to mind the sacramental bread of the Eucharist—in apposition to the human sacrifice of the preceding line. For a reader belonging to the Russian Orthodox culture, for one who had lived through the first year and a half of the world war and had seen recruits, some as young as seventeen, go to the front, these thoughts and associations would not appear unusual. The last two lines of the stanza sharply focus this juxtaposition of actual victimization with the "bloodless sacrifice." Written in the immediate present indicative, as is the rest of the stanza, the third line introduces the speaker directly, in the first person, and in a state—transported hatless—that traditionally signified the public humiliation of a criminal condemned to die.[78] A man in this predicament would do well to have a candle lit (and three would be better) before the miracle-working Icon of Our Lady. These alternations between the spirit and the letter of history (the Eucharist and the ongoing slaughter)[79] spill over into the next stanza via what A. N. Veselovskii termed "negative parallelism." This device, inti-
mately associated with magic spells and riddles, is characteristic of Russian folk poetry and may be classified as an intermediary trope, standing somewhere between simile and metaphor, at once differentiating between and bringing together a trope's vehicle and tenor.[80]
This negative (not candles but encounters) parallelism (three of both) introduces a thematic alternation from the motif of protection, intercession, and "bloodless sacrifice" to the motif of the "reason of state." Part of the stanza invokes the famous messianic political formula that assigned to the Muscovite state, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the role of the third Rome. Its author, monk Filofei (Philotheus), wrote to Basil III, the father of Ivan the Terrible:
Hear this, oh pious Tsar! Two Romes have fallen, the third—Moscow—stands, and a fourth there shall not be. In Your powerful Tsardom, our catholic [sobornaia ] Church alone shines, under the heaven, with its piety brighter than the sun; all the Orthodox tsardoms have gathered together in Your one Tsardom; on the whole earth, You alone are a Christian Tsar.[81]
The wistful "and Rome is far away" (an evocation of Pushkin)[82] that follows Filofei's formula contrasts sharply with the stern and solemn reminder of one's loyalty and suggests that the speaker of the poem might have wished to be nearer the Eternal City. The melancholy tone of this line is in turn drowned in another categorical statement, which concludes the stanza:"And never did he love Rome." Three voices are discernible in this patchwork of quotations: the harsh and accusing voice of the state, the small and wistful voice of one who seems to have been contemplating betrayal, and finally, the voice coming in the latter's defence.
This classification of voices assumes that the "wistful" speaker functions here as the antecedent of the one who "never did love Rome." If Mandelstam had in mind God, as has been suggested,[83] he would surely have capitalized the personal pronoun, as the Russian orthography then required.[84] Because he did not, the reader has no choice but to locate the antecedent among the poet's many masks. One of them, Mandelstam himself, was not entirely without blame, for only six months before his trip to Moscow he had published an essay, "Petr Chaadaev," in which he called Filofei's doctrine "a sickly invention of Kievan [sic ] monks."[85] To add insult to injury, the penultimate poem of Stone (1916), its print barely dry when "In the Sledge" was composed, contained a poetic birth certificate that hardly accords with the claim of an ordinary Russian Orthodox poet: "I was born in Rome and Rome has returned to me."[86] But then the False Dmitrii, too, was a Catholic
(secretly converted) who, as tsar of Russia, attended Orthodox services in Moscow. And yet another unfortunate tsarevich might fit the bill: Aleksei, the miserable, scheming son of Peter the Great, who had taken refuge from his father in Italy and was tricked into coming back.
The text that mediates between Tsarevich Aleksei as an actual historical personage and Mandelstam's "tsarevich" seems to be none other than D. S. Merezhkovskii's novel, The Antichrist: Peter and Alexis (1905), part of a trilogy with the very serious title Christ and the Antichrist.[87] Its two previous parts, The Death of the Gods: Julian the Apostate (1896) and Gods Resurrected: Leonardo da Vinci (1901)—a "home university" for the contemporary Russian reader, in the words of D. S. Mirsky[88] —served as the novelistic credo of an advocate of Hellenistic, pagan antiquity, of its sensibility, sensuality, and worldview, both in their historical realm and during their rebirth in Renaissance Europe. Peter and Alexis, however, was written after Merezhkovskii had switched from his Nietzschean worship of the Greeks to advocacy of the Third Testament that would produce a synthesis of Hellenic corporeality and Christian spirituality, a new humanity of spiritualized flesh.[89] More important, the novel rested on two basic patterns: marriage, in both the specific and the most general sense, and the mission of a kenotic imitatio Christi culminating in the martyr's transubstantiation.[90] Tsarevich Aleksei and the author's alter ego, the wanderer Tikhon, participate in both these patterns.
I do not mean to suggest that Mandelstam would have been otherwise unaware of the life history of the tsarevich, particularly that he died under torture before he was to be executed on his father's orders. His education was too good for that. Nevertheless, Merezhkovskii's novel popularized this period of Russian history and, more important, presented it using the historiosophical, mystico-religious vocabulary on which Mandelstam and his generation had been weaned. Dealing with the time of great religious and civil dissension, the novel transformed this period into an elaborate historical metaphor for modern Russia, which was undergoing an equally profound crisis marked by dislocations, civil strife, and the rapid collapse of notions defining the individual and the collective self. According to Merezhkovskii, the beginning of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth both offered Russia a historical opportunity for the ultimate religious synthesis, and the pathos of Peter and Alexis aimed at taking advantage of history's generous second "throw of the dice." It showed the present-day players how their predecessors had not only missed their chance but also suffered to clear the way for the game in the country's future.
Finally, for Merezhkovskii—if we follow the implications of the
trilogy's title—the history of Europe, including Russia, could be read as a symbolic record of the struggle between the Antichrist (the ultimate "pretender-tsarevich") and the one authentic "tsarevich," Christ the Savior. Recall Nikolai Stavrogin of Dostoevsky's The Possessed. This novelistic incarnation of the Antichrist had the name of "Ivan-Tsarevich" bestowed on him by Peter Verkhovenskii, the Devil's unambiguous emissary, who was trying to arrange a marriage between the charismatic Stavrogin and "Maria-Tsarevna," Russia the bride in a revolutionary pandemonium. Neither Peter nor Alexis, nor any other specific actor in Merezhkovskii's narrative, filled the bill of Christ or Antichrist completely. But their aspects, taken in isolation, do fall rather neatly into the dual, and essentially Manichaean, scheme, suggesting that all that was required for the desired redemptive synthesis was to break off the tsarevna's engagement to the impostor and arrange for her betrothal to the true tsarevich. Mandelstam—not to speak of Blok, Viacheslav Ivanov, Belyi, and his cohorts Maiakovskii and Tsvetaeva—was, of course, also partial to gnostic nuptials, and judging by "Pushkin and Skriabin," he shared in the chiliastic pathos of the novel's author. For Mandelstam's poet, however, this tsarevna appeared as a femme fatale, a version of the "unfortunate Phaedra." For this reason, among others, Mandelstam chose as a mask Tsarevich Aleksei, who had to compete with his father for the possession of Mother-Russia and whose defeat in the competition could be interpreted as kenotic martyrdom.
Three brief quotations from Merezhkovskii's novel will help invoke the contemporary meaning of the figure of Tsarevich Aleksei. The first involves the metaphor of marriage implied in the tsarevich's musings about his father's program of Westernization:
The Tsarevich . . . recalled a picture that his father brought home from Holland: the Tsar dressed in sailor's garb embracing an enormous Dutch girl. Alexis smiled involuntarily, thinking to himself that this red-skinned girl was as unlike the [story's] Princess of Florence—"shining like the uncovered sun"—as the whole of Russian Europe was unlike the real one.[91]
The second quotation involved the tsarevich's betrayal, so to speak, of the doctrine of Moscow the Third Rome. Homesick for Russia, he is moved by two songs, one Russian, one Italian:
The Tsarevich could hardly suppress his tears. It seemed that he had never loved Russia as much as he did now. But he loved her with a new, universal love, together with Europe; he loved the alien land as if it were his own. And his love for the native and his love for the alien
land, like these two songs, were fusing into one. . . . That the third Rome, as the old men called Moscow, had a long way to go before it could be compared with the first true Rome, as long a way as the Petersburg Europe had to go before it could be compared with the real Europe that he had seen with his own eyes.[92]
The third quotation comes from the end of the story, after Aleksei had been tortured and interrogated, and describes the tsarevich's last communion, which is administered by the otherworldly "John the Son of Thunder"—apparently the apostle of the Third Testament, and as such a composite of St. John of the Apocalypse and the son of Zeus's thunderbolt, Dionysus.[93]
It seemed as though John was holding in his hands the sun: this was the Chalice with the Flesh and the Blood. "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost."
He administered the Eucharist. And the sun entered him [the tsarevich], and he felt that there was neither grief, nor fear, nor pain, nor death, but only eternal life, the eternal sun—Christ.
In the morning, while examining the sick [tsarevich], Dr. Blumenthrost was very surprised: the fever had ended, the wounds were healing; the improvement was so sudden that it seemed miraculous.[94]
The acceptance, indeed the incorporation, of these "gifts" by Tsarevich Aleksei (the Russian word for the Host is "holy gifts," a calque from the Greek eucharistia ), obligated him to give of himself to Christ accordingly, to recapitulate the original sacrifice. Thus there emerges a fundamental similarity between this pattern and the one followed by Mandelstam's poet when he committed himself to an obligation by accepting Tsvetaeva's "gift."
I do not mean to suggest that one should put Merezhkovskii's label on Mandelstam's tsarevich. The novel is only one of the poem's referents, but one fully in accord with its kenotic, and implicitly mysticoerotic, thematics. By the end of the poem, what began as a sightseeing tour, having passed through the prism of Russian history, became the road to Calvary. The possibly romantic "we" of the first stanza yielded to the first or third person singular, just as the innocuous straw became the sinister burning kindling of the poem's ending. It is worth noting that the fourth stanza, the one least weighed down by allusions, presents a picture of Moscow that was as characteristic of the city in 1718, when Aleksei was executed, as in 1916, when Mandelstam had to contend with Tsvetaeva's generosity. That immutable quality only emphasized the inevitability of the route the "peasant sledge" takes in the poem. But then, the cards had already been stacked in the opening
poem of Tristia, and the reader should not be surprised that Mother-Russia treated her tsarevich in the same manner as Phaedra-Russia had treated her Hippolytus.
According to Marcel Mauss, the recipient of a gift is compelled not only to accept it—thereby coming into possession of, and becoming possessed by, it—but also to return it in the form of a token, however big or small. To do otherwise would reinforce the spell that the gift's spirit maintains over the beneficiary—to remain indebted, to lose face, to offend the giver—indeed, to cause a catastrophe.[95] In June 1916, after he had left the village where he was visiting Tsvetaeva and had gone on to the Crimea, Mandelstam produced his thanksgiving poem. The courtship was over, and for the most part the poem consisted of recollections and mementos presented in a slightly distanced and ironic light. It opened with the following stanza, in which the poet's suspension points leave plenty of room for the reader's ironic fancy.
Incredulous of the miracle of resurrection,
We were strolling in a graveyard.
"You know, land everywhere
Reminds me of those hills
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Where Russia breaks off
Over the black and muted sea."
The actual thanksgiving takes place at the end:
All we are left with is the word:
A miraculous sound, long-lasting.
Do take [this] sand I am pouring back and forth
From one palm to the other.[96]
The motif of the hands offering a gift, manibus sacrum, at once sacred ("not wrought by hand") and personal ("Out of my hands"), had begun to reflect back upon itself as a verbal construct. Initially, the motif of manibus sacrum might have been prompted by the modernist fascination with the primitive and archaic (common to both scholarship and poetry), functioning as a purposeful imitation of an indeterminate ancient rite. The underlying pattern, in the Saussurian sense of langue, could be alienated from the "practice," that is, parole, and subjected to a reflective modernist scrutiny—a poetic anthropology of sorts. If I understand the poem correctly, this is what Mandelstam did in juxtaposing the uncertain "miracle of resurrection" of the first line with the "miraculous sound, long-lasting"[97] in the penultimate couplet. The poem focused on the word, the phenomenon of representation, rather than the noumenal Word; on the "nominalist" recollection rather than the "realist" resurrection. The poem's closure was also selfreflective. A formulation of Mandelstam's poetic credo, it deserves a more detailed examination.
The closing two lines, consisting of what was literally at hand on a Crimean beach—sand and the poet's two hands—may be read as an ideogram of time and gift-giving. From one perspective, the lines form an allegory of time, an hourglass. From another, hands function as a synecdoche of gift-giving and -receiving. In his The Gift (1925), Mauss suggests that since the institution of the gift involves compulsive reciprocation, one of its central functions is the creation of time (when was the gift given, or a challenge issued, and when is the time for the return, and the return of the return, and so forth). In the most immediate sense, time is relevant here because the exchange between Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam did involve historical projections. Tsvetaeva gave Mandelstam the gift of Muscovite history and historical milieu, and Mandelstam's poem of acceptance was a response worthy of the challenge. But in a more profound sense, the particular gift of poetry and the poetry of gift-giving produced by Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam relied on allusions to other poets and poetry, most obviously the classical Russian authors Derzhavin and Pushkin and their reworkings of Horace's "Exegi monumentum." What Mauss calls the state of "prestation," a never-ending exchange of gifts characteristic of primitive societies,[98] obtained also in poetry, with the authors of the same and different tribes, centuries, or generations involved in perpetual thanksgiving, or, as the Greeks called it, eucharistia. Which brings me to the
final point—the relationship between the gift in this exchange and the poet's "charisma," the gift of Mandelstam's Christian Mnemosyne ("Pushkin and Skriabin").
As in the "pretender" poem, Mandelstam juxtaposed two ways of celebrating Christ, two ways of acknowledging him in the "Russian" milieu: bloodless sacrifice—the sacrament of the Eucharist; and imitation of the kenotic Christ, or martyrdom. However different they may be, both are a form of a return gift, a fulfillment of the obligation incurred at the first communion when a communicating member of the church takes possession of and, in a manner of speaking, becomes possessed by the Host (recall the Pentecost). What makes the Eucharist a unique gift is the very special eternal clock the ritual creates. And just as the Eucharist imitates and in a mysterial way reenacts the Christ event by the ever-repeated giving of thanks, so poetry approaches eternity and "imitates" Christ by following the pattern of "thanks-giving."[99] "To die means to remember, to remember means to die," Mandelstam wrote in "Pushkin and Skriabin," and we can also interpret this polemical thrust at Viacheslav Ivanov[100] as a complex periphrasis of the two forms of imitatio Christi: martyrdom and the Eucharist.[101] All we need do to unpack this periphrasis is to replace "to die" with the more transparent "to return the gift of life in a form worthy of this gift" (as a martyr does), and replace "to remember" with the notion of thanksgiving, or the Eucharist, which liturgically in fact includes "remembering," in the term anamnesis.[102]
Returning to Mandelstam's closing ideogram, we can read this as an allegory of the immutable archetype of the gift and the mutable time that forever passes through it—two images that in combination constitute an allegory of poetry. An analogous image from his 1932 poem "Batiushkov," one of the last published in his lifetime, may illustrate. This poem, too, was a thanksgiving, an homage to the nineteenthcentury poet who, like Mandelstam, was inspired by the Italian muse. The closing exhortation reads:
Pour back and forth from one glass to another
Eternal dreams like samples of blood . . .[103]
Although this may not be apparent at a chronological, ethnic, and linguistic distance, Mandelstam's poetry was saturated with the most sacred symbolism of the Russian Orthodox culture. One would be hard put to account for the effectiveness, even the meaning, of these two
lines without relating them to the central, phenomenally suggestive Christian sacrament.[104] This poem was composed in 1932, a time when the European rationalist tradition and the absurdly bloated police apparatus dictated a skeptical attitude toward all religion. Hence, an allusion to the Eucharist that was capable of escaping the censor of both the mind and the state must have been experienced by the reader with at least as much satisfaction as one is supposed to derive, according to Sigmund Freud, from a clever joke.
I conclude this discussion by quoting another poem, composed in the summer of 1915, which itself represents a celebration of the Eucharist. Significantly, Mandelstam's usage of the poem's central term, daronositsa (a case holding the viaticum), is neologistic and based on transparent etymology: that in which the consecrated Host, dary (gifts), is carried or contained. Obviously, it was important for Mandelstam to emphasize the twofold nature of the symbol, its mutable time ("July") and permanent time ("outside time") united in a single representation. Thus, in rendering the poem into English I chose to translate daronositsa not as Host (from the Latin hostia, sacrifice) or Monstrance (a distant kin to Mnemosyne), but as Gift, with its multiplicity of connotations.
Here is the Gift, like the golden sun,
Suspended in the air—a glorious moment.
Greek speech alone must here ring:
Oh, to hold the entire world in your hands—like a plain apple.
The solemn zenith of the liturgy,
The light under the cupola in the round temple in July
So that we may breathe a deep sigh outside time
About that pasture where time does not fly.
And the Eucharist lasts like the eternal noon—
All are taking communion, playing, singing,
And in the sight of all, the divine vessel
Is streaming an inexhaustible stream of gaiety. [105]
It should not be surprising that this poem, too, was part of an exchange. As Omry Ronen has pointed out, it was composed in response to Mikhail Lozinskii's apocalyptic "That year was the last," dated July 1914, on the very eve of the Great War.[106]
In the essay "Petr Chaadaev," composed in 1914 but not published until the summer of 1915, Mandelstam reproduced Chaadaev's expression of reverence and awe before the idea of the pope: "Is he not an omnipotent symbol of time—not that which flies, but that which is motionless, through which everything passes, but which itself stands impassively and in which and by which all comes to be?"[107]
In the "Eucharist" poem above, a similar formulation became a vessel containing, for a Christian, the gift of gifts. This ability of the "miraculous sound, long-lasting," to convey and define different timebound contents while remaining the same made poetry resemble the institution of the gift. Even apart from the Christian kenotic thematics and poetics of "Pushkin and Skriabin," poetry for Mandelstam represented a substance imbued with charismatic spirit, for its vehicle was the inherently charismatic word—the medium and the message of the never-ending poetic exchange,[108] or what Mauss would call poetic "prestation." Mandelstam's thanksgiving poem to Tsvetaeva suggested as much. In fact, we can suppose that in one form or another this view of poetry (in part, underlying the poetics of Acmeism)[109] was shared by Mandelstam's generation, including the trendsetters among the readership. Consider the appearance in 1914 of another emblem of verbal prestation: one of the earliest statements of Formalist criticism, Viktor Shklovskii's pamphlet The Resurrection of the Word. Better still, consider a passage from Mauss: "The themes of the gift, of freedom and obligation in the gift, of generosity and self-interest in giving, reappear in our own society like the resurrection of the dominant motif long forgotten." [italics are mine].[110]
The self Mandelstam presented in his poetry of the early Tristia period appears to have originated a conflict, both cultural and psychological, which duplicated the relational pattern of complementarity and antagonism that was, as he and his contemporaries saw it, a fundamental pattern of Russia's "identity." The outcome of such a strategy of self-presentation was not a metaphoric relation between the "poet" and his land (a relation based on similarity) but rather a synecdochic one,[111] with the self functioning as a microcosm of its broader historical and cultural environment, which in its turn was the source and the
cause of this very self. Conversely, Mandelstam's "Russia" appropriates from the "poet" the psychological dilemmas of the myth of incest. She is Phaedra-Russia, who stalks her Hippolytus in the night and who in her debasement might pay a high ransom to redeem her own transgression.
Even the poet's "execution," his martyrdom ("In the Sledge"), is within this framework. Indeed, it functions in the poem as a counterpart of yet another hypostasis of Russia: a messianic nation, a savior of humanity, who in her proverbial suffering and humiliation had been imitating the redemptive kenosis of Jesus Christ.[112] This association of the self with the world recalls Kafka's "Penal Colony," a story in which a machine executes a convict by carving into his body the laws he ought not to have transgressed. Similarly in Mandelstam, the "phylogeny" of Russian historical consciousness was recapitulated, or rather inscribed, on the ontogeny of the poet's self.
Whether intentional or involuntary, partial or complete, this was an effective strategy for one engaged in a charismatic project. Mandelstam combined in his figure not only the features of a martyr and the image of Russia that occupied a privileged position in the imagination of Mandelstam's fellow countrymen but also the very terms of the nation's reflections upon her destiny. In the realm of letters, it is hard to think of a more complete identification with what was "serious" and "central" in Mandelstam's milieu. "My poor Tsarevich," Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote in her memoirs, recalling "In the Sledge"; "he remembered that his blood was burdened with the 'heritage of the shepherds, patriarchs, and kings.' "[113] In more than one sense, this was an offer of a gift of one's self.