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.