V—
The Question of Return:
Themes and Variations, 1918–1920

Je t'apporte l'enfant d'une nuit d'Idumée!
STÉPhane MALLARMÉ, "Don du poème"

We know in fact what ravages a falsified filiation can produce, going as far as the dissociation of the subject's personality when the constraint of the environment is used to sustain its error. They may be no less when, as a result of a man having married the mother of the woman of whom he has had a son, the son will have for a brother a child who is his mother's brother. But if he is later adopted . . . , he will find himself once again the half-brother of his foster mother, and one can imagine the complex feelings with which he will await the birth of a child who will be in this recurrent situation his brother and his nephew at the same time.
JACQUES LACAN, "The Empty Word and the Full Word"^[1]

Flight from Ilium

Among the Tristia poems is one on which Mandelstam interpreters differ most widely. An important link in Mandelstam's narrative of self-presentation, "Return to the incestuous womb"^[2] is particularly significant both as a rare text that develops the theme of incest overtly and as a striking example of Mandelstam's use of the "incest" vocabulary, perhaps even as a model for it.

"Return" was composed sometime in 1920 during Mandelstam's stay in the Crimea, where he had gone after a few months' sojourn in

Kiev. The prototype for the addressee of the poem was Mandelstam's future wife, Nadezhda Khazina, then a twenty-year-old avant-garde painter working at the studio of Alexandra Exter. The biographical and historical background is particularly important in understanding "Return," not only because the poem was composed in a densely "con-textualizing" epoch of the revolution and civil war or because it explores the Jewish theme explicitly (a rarity in Mandelstam's poetry),^[3] but also because this background has become inseparable from readings of the poem in the literature on Mandelstam. I shall sketch this background briefly.

Situated on the border of the Pale of Settlement, a circumscribed area within which the empire's Jews were required to reside, Kiev was a foremost urban center in the Ukraine and as such had a high concentration of Jewish intelligentsia even before the revolution. We can assume that when he arrived in this city in the spring of 1919, Mandelstam found himself for the first time in an emphatically, if not predominantly, Russian Jewish milieu of leftist artists, writers, and intellectuals, many of whom, like Mandelstam, considered themselves sympathetic to the revolution. Since February, Kiev had been in the hands of the Reds. It was still affluent and hospitable, untouched by the current turmoil and devastation that drove southward the natives of the northern capitals, including many prominent members of the country's cultural elite.^[4] It was there that Mandelstam and Nadezhda Khazina (according to her, the only Jewish woman in his life) met and, their romance commencing on May 1, 1919,^[5] spent a few months together. By late summer, however, the situation in Kiev had substantially deteriorated. Food was becoming scarce, and in anticipation of an imminent retreat the Bolshevik authorities began to carry out a brutal housecleaning.^[6] Although Nadezhda Mandelstam is ambiguous on this point, we can imagine that this environment, growing grimmer by the day, prompted Mandelstam to contemplate departing the city for the seemingly more inviting Crimea.

On August 31, 1919, Kiev was occupied, first by the Ukrainian nationalists and a few hours later by the Denikin Army—a double changing of the guard which, in the words of one historian, the population of the city "celebrated by murdering a large number of Jews."^[7] Shortly afterward, Mandelstarn managed to board a train bound for Khar'kov, leaving behind Nadezhda Khazina, who as a woman ran a greater risk traveling under conditions of civil war.^[8] A few weeks later Mandelstam arrived in the Crimea, where he stayed until July 1920; he then departed for Georgia, moving on from there to Moscow and, finally,

Petrograd.^[9] He and Nadezhda Khazina were reunited in Kiev early in 1921, a year and a half after they had separated and a few months after Mandelstam's romance with a Petersburg actress, Ol'ga Arbenina, which had yielded the largest single cycle of love poetry in Tristia, had come to an end.^[10]

In the fall of 1919, the Crimea was controlled by the Whites (Denikin, followed by Wrangel). Although Mandelstam's sojourn there was less dangerous than his crisscrossing front lines would have been, the area was no safe haven for an educated Jew from the north, especially a former official of the People's Commissariat of Culture.^[11] The operation of the Wrangel counterintelligence, if not directed specifically at Jews, left no doubt that the designations "Jew" and "Red" were treated with ominous frequency as coextensive or synonymous.^[12] As might be expected, Mandelstam, who could boast neither a Slavic appearance nor the demeanor of a respectable citizen, was arrested on suspicion of being a Bolshevik spy. As his friends later recalled, once incarcerated, Mandelstam banged on the cell door and shouted that he "was not made for prison," but to no avail.^[13] He would surely have been executed had it not been for the intervention of Maksimilian Voloshin and a certain Colonel Tsygal'skii, who managed to arrange the poet's release.^[14] Combined with the news of the Kiev pogroms, which must have reached him in the Crimea, this terroristic atmosphere was no doubt sufficient to stir up some questions relating to the "Jewish theme." These found expression—by however circuitous a route^[15] —in this poem:

Return to the incestuous womb
Whence, Leah, thou hast issued,
Because over the sun of Ilium
Thou hast preferred the yellow gloom.

Go, no one shall touch thee;
Onto her father's bosom, into deep night,
Let the incestuous daughter
Drop her head.

But a fateful transformation
Is to be fulfilled in thee:
Leah thou shalt be, not Helen,
Called, not because

It is harder for royal blood
To course in veins than for any other—
No, thou shalt come to love a Judean,
Disappear in him—and God be with you.^[16]

What are we to make of this poem? Let us first follow the suggestions of the alleged addressee of "Return": Nadezhda Mandelstam.

The Addressee As Reader

Mandelstam has one strange poem he wrote in the Crimea when he was thinking about me. He did not reveal to me the meaning of these verses at once: in my youth I would have rebelled if I had found out what fate he had foretold for me. . . .

People should not think that we had a cult of poetry and work. Nothing of the sort: we lived ardently, intensely, made noise, played, had fun.
NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM, Hope Abandoned

As the poem's addressee, or more precisely, as the prototype of one, Nadezhda Mandelstam interpreted "Return" as a verbal spell cast upon her by her lover who wished that she undergo certain changes before becoming his life's companion. Although she did not describe "Return" in so many words, her discussion strongly implies that she experienced the poem, even if unconsciously, as a magic spell: "Once during our Kievan days, Mandelstam mysteriously informed me: when I compose poetry, nobody refuses me anything."^[17] And toward the middle of her second volume of memoirs, she spoke about the poem in a way strongly suggestive of verbal magic. The spontaneous, unbidden composition of "Return," she maintained, endowed it with the credentials of a communication de profundis —those mysterious depths where human destiny takes shape. In effect, her own fate was determined by the poem (italics are mine):

The verses about Leah who has fallen in love with a Jew emerged from the very depth of consciousness [and] were a surprise for Mandelstam himself, who, it would seem, sought in me only tenderness, and he simply did not want to understand that they had predetermined my fate. Always and in every detail, he expected from me what he expected from himself and was incapable of separating my fate from his own.^[18]

As her future husband came to know her in Kiev in 1919, this avantgarde painter (at twenty, eight years his junior) seemed too independent, perhaps even unreliable, and because of this not exactly a suitable mate for one devoted to a poet's vocation.^[19] Not that she believed in any hard-and-fast rule for a poet's choice of companion; rather, Mandelstam's demand for a complete fusion (that she "disappear in him") may have affected the way he perceived his vocation in the first place—a charismatic mission involving ordeals and therefore requiring not submission to a person but a total identification with the mission itself. Reflecting on her eventual choice to follow his "cruel" call (as she put it), she hesitated to attribute it to love alone and spoke particularly about the "incredible intensity" projected by Mandelstam. This signified her acknowledgment of Mandelstam's charismatic gift. To use the terminology of Edward Shils, it was the "centrality" of poetry in contemporary culture, coupled with the poet's "intensity," that made Mandelstam "extraordinary," a bearer of charisma—provided, of course, that his intensity was recognized.^[20] And recognized it was (italics are mine):

There did not and could not exist a separate Leah. Living with him was difficult, but also easy. Difficult because he lived his life with an incredible intensity and I always had to run to catch up with him. And easy because it was him; and to me, our life together was never boring. Perhaps, because I loved him. I can't be sure.^[21]

Hence, the faithful, completely devoted "Leah," and "not Helen." After all, the wife of Menelaus, unlike Jacob's "second best" wife, had taken an extended leave from her conjugal and royal duties.

Where are you sailing? If not for Helen,
What would Troy mean to you, Achaean men?^[22]

The Russian Ol'ga Arbenina, with whom Mandelstam became involved while he was separated from his future wife, was definitely a "Helen." For the sake of her kind, men go to war, deceive, murder, and tremble like leaves while sitting in the belly of the wooden beast

before leading an assault on the enemy city. One of the poems addressed to Arbenina speaks of the torment awaiting a man who had imprudently abandoned Leah while pursuing the unattainable feminine ideal. For such a man, the morning shall be like a gray swallow beating against the window pane (a harbinger of death in Russian folklore)^[23] and his days slow and barren like an ox (hardly a symbol of virility) who is clumsily stirring, trying to shake off the remnants of a long night's slumber:

Because I knew not how to hold on to your hands,
Because I've betrayed your lips, salty and tender,
I must wait for the dawn in a wild and primeval Acropolis.
How I hate the odoriferous, ancient logs of this woodwork.

The Achaean men are outfitting the horse in the dark,
The many-toothed saws sinking deep into timber,
The dry bustling of blood just wouldn't come to rest,
And for you, there is no name, no sound, no imprint.

How could I think that you would return, how dared I!
Why did I wrench myself away before it was time!
The dark has not yet dispersed and the cock has not yet crowed,
The hot battle-axe has not yet been plunged into wood.

A transparent tear, resin oozing from the walls,
And the city is sensing its ribs made of timber,
But blood rushed to the ladders and went on the assault,
And the men dreamed three times an alluring image.

Where's dear Troy? where's the royal, where's the maidenly home?
It shall be destroyed, the high roost of Priam.
And arrows fall in a dry, wooden rainfall,
And other arrows shoot from the earth like a grove of nut trees.

The painless sting of the last star is almost extinguished,
And a gray swallow, the morning, will knock on the window pane.
And the slow day, like an ox awakened on his straw bed,
Is stirring on rough streets after a long sleep.^[24]

A desire for the "incredibly" intense kinship projected in "Return" could, of course, easily spawn a motif of incest. Hence the conflation of Leah's story and that of Lot's daughters. There was another reason, however: Mandelstam, his wife noted, believed Jews to be all interrelated^[25] —a notion fairly consistent with the poet's anti-incestuous, "assimilationist" ethos. In "Pushkin and Skriabin" he spoke eloquently about this abomination on a worldwide historical scale.

The interpretation offered by Nadezhda Mandelstam, even though it does not present an exhaustive reading of the poem, renders "Return," for all intents and purposes, transparent. She accounts for the enigmatic incest motif by asserting Mandelstam's idiosyncratic conviction that all Jews were related, by pointing out the addressee's Jewishness, and finally, by suggesting a momentary lapse in Mandelstam's biblical recall, his confusing the nameless daughters of Lot with Laban's Leah and Rachel.^[26] The juxtaposition of "Leah . . . , not Helen" is elaborated as a typology of the stable "workhorse" quality of the one and the essential unreliability (the Trojan horse, Helen of Troy ) of the beautiful other. We understand the tone of the poem, particularly Mandelstam's use of the imperative, once the function of "Return" is implicitly defined: it is a binding conjugal spell that the poet casts on his future wife in order to make her identify with him completely.^[27]

Finally, the biographical context suggests that the poem may also represent an elaboration, in a sense, of the forms of address that Nadezhda Khazina and Osip Mandelstam used with each other in their correspondence, and perhaps on other occasions. Her only surviving

letter, written in Kiev in 1919 when the two were separated, begins with the puzzling salutation "My dear little brother."^[28] Similar echoes of this poem in a letter written by Mandelstam have already been noted in scholarship^[29] but are worth citing here nevertheless (italics are mine):

My dear little child!
There is almost no hope [nadezhda ] that this letter will reach you. Tomorrow, Kolachevskii is going to Kiev via Odessa. I pray to God that you may hear what I shall tell you: my dear little child, I cannot and do not want to be without you, you are my entirejoy, you are my dear [rodnaia; literally, my close kin]. You have become so close to me [rodnaia ] that I speak to you all the time, call you, complain to you . . . You are a "kinechka" [Ukrainian for "dear little daughter"] for your mother, and you are my "kinechka," too. I am rejoicing and praising God for giving you to me. With you, nothing will be frightening, nothing will be heavy. . . . My dear daughter, my sister, I smile with your smile and hear your voice in the silence. . . .

I cannot forgive myself that I left without you. Goodbye, my friend! May God preserve you! My little child! Goodbye!^[30]

The poem stands in an inverse relation to the letter in that its author wishes to return and be with the addressee rather than the other way around, as seems to be the case with the poem.

Two More Readers Reading

Leah is wedded to me in the night.
ST. GREGORY THE GREAT

Personal circumstances, even if convincingly demonstrated, rarely tell a poem's entire story. Both Kiril Taranovsky and Omry Ronen chose in their interpretations to treat "Return" as an important juncture in Mandelstam's writings, the point at which he paused to look at himself both as a Jew and as a Russian poet.

Writing in 1973 for the Encyclopaedia Judaica Yearbook, Ronen offered the following interpretation of "Return" (italics are mine):

Mandelstam's realization that the Jewish predicament cannot be escaped by turning to alien cultures and religions was expressed with greatest force in his 1920 poem addressed to Leah, the exegetic symbol of creative life. Here he predicts the eventual return of his muse to the bosom of Judaism, a reunion that he describes as "incestuous."^[31]

As yet unaware of Nadezhda Mandelstam's second volume of memoirs (1973), where the personal connotations of "Return" were discussed in detail, Ronen succeeded in providing a convincing and therefore legitimate interpretation of the poem, especially in view of Mandel-

stam's later writings with their occasionally strong affirmation of his Jewish heritage.^[32] Using this concise and rather cryptic statement (it was, after all, written for an encyclopedia) as a point of departure, how would one go about interpreting "Return"? Let us start with Leah as an exegetic symbol.

In one of the obituary poems composed after Andrei Belyi's death in 1934, Mandelstam drew on Dante's use of exegetic symbolism to compare his own work with the heritage of the foremost mystical theoretician of modern Russian letters:

The crowds of intellects, influences, impressions—
He experienced [them] as only a mighty one might.
Rachel was looking into the mirror of the phenomena,
But Leah sang and wove her wreath.^[33]

Compare this with Dante's Leah, who appeared to the Pilgrim in his sleep as he was resting near the summit of Mount Purgatorio (Purgatorio 27:91–109; italics are mine):

. . . cantando  dicea:
'Sappia qualunque il mio nome dimanda
ch' i' mi son Lia, e vo movendo intorno
le belle mani  a farmi una ghirlanda.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

ma mia suora Rachel mai non si smaga
dal suo miraglio,  e siede tutto giorno.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
lei lo vedere, e me l'ovrare appaga.'

. . . she  sang,  saying: 'Know, whoever asks my name, that I am
Leah, and I go plying my fair hands here and there  to make me
a garland; . . . but my sister Rachel never leaves her mirror  and sits
all day. . . . She with seeing and I with doing am satisfied.'^[34]

Assuming that Mandelstam was aware in 1920 of Leah's symbolic, even anagogical, meaning in medieval exegetic literature (vita activa, hence, I assume, Ronen's "creative"), he must also have been aware of the meaning of her counterpart, Rachel—vita contemplativa, a life devoted to the contemplation of God in mystical plenitude. Furthermore, he must have known also that the two were treated in this same literature as Old Testament prefigurations of Martha and Mary, a paral-

lelism that Dante developed in the Divine Comedy by producing his own two counterparts: Matilda (Leah and Martha in Purgatorio ) and Beatrice (Rachel and Mary in Paradiso ).^[35] Matilda introduced Dante's pilgrim to Earthly Paradise, whereas with the help of Beatrice he was able to contemplate the celestial spheres and the abode of the godhead. Within this framework, Mandelstam's Helen would replace Rachel, Mary, and Beatrice, who, on the anagogic level, the level of divine meaning, were figures dearer in the sight of God than their counterparts, Leah, Martha, and Matilda. To say the least, the poet's choice of Leah—and the terse syntax of "Return" supports this—was ambivalent.

In his earlier poetry, particularly in the early Tristia, Mandelstam preferred to keep a distance between himself and all those who were "thirsting for special names," as he put it in one of his first surviving poems. In the famous diptych "Solominka" (a play on Salome and the Russian word for "a straw"), the addressee was scorned because she had betrayed the icy perfection of her literary namesakes (St. Mark's and Mallarmé's)^[36] by showing "tenderness" and even "breaking."^[37] In a sense, she had failed her first name, and if the poet was prepared to offer her recompense, it was only by recontextualizing her: he would enter her new, private name, Solominka, in the catalog of famous and fictional women, which itself seems to have come from either Théophile Gautier or Walter Pater (or both):^[38]

I have learned you, blessed words:
Lenore, Solominka, Ligeia, Seraphita.
The heavy Neva in the enormous room,
And blue blood is coursing out of the granite.

As to solominka' s palpable, "tender" hypostasis, it was no longer welcome. Indeed, it was a disappointment for one who wished to play a literary, Acmeist version of the precursor's role:

In my blood, there lives the December Ligeia
Whose blessed love sleeps in a sarcophagus.

And that one, a  solominka,  perhaps Salome,
Is killed by pity and shall never return.^[39]

There can hardly be a worse fate for a Mandelstam protagonist than banishment from literary "prestation," never to return as a slightly altered item in the never-ending literary exchange.

Yet it was precisely such a fate that violation of the incest taboo signified in Mandelstam's writings. Why, then, did Mandelstam settle on Leah—this truncated version of the "December Ligeia," phonetically and otherwise? Could he have hoped, if we follow the exegetic usage, that the earthly paradise she might open to him would serve as a passage to the higher bliss of the Christian celestial Paradiso? Perhaps. After all, Jacob's unloved wife, by the sheer number of her progeny, laid a sound foundation for the future glory of Israel, her fecundity abundantly compensating for her looks, an area in which she could not compete with Joseph's mother, Rachel, her sister.

"I am drinking Christianity's cool mountain air." This line from Mandelstam's 1919 poem, together with the opening exclamation, "How precipitous is this crystal pool!" suggests that he might have had something of the sort in mind as he cast his spell on the obstreperous vita activa. This hypothesis is not farfetched, especially if one considers his earlier sharp discrimination between the fixedly "Jewish" connotation of the "pool"^[40] and the decidedly Christian connotations of verticality he seems to have derived from Chaadaev.^[41]

Finally, in trying to escape the Jewish predicament, as Ronen put it, Mandelstam took an unusual tactic: rather than denying his origins, he integrated them into a specific historiosophical scheme—as his 1911 poems about the "pool," the "reed," and the "straw" convincingly demonstrate. Together with the related use of the incest motif, they indicate that Mandelstam's view of himself as a Jew was fundamental to his very Christian lyric narrative, in which the "predicament" became part of the pattern of kenotic imitatio Christi. The historical succession of Judaism by Christianity, "fertilized" by the tragic world view of the Greeks ("Pushkin and Skriabin"), constituted for Mandelstam that universal phylogenetic pattern that the ontogeny of self-presentation in his poetry was supposed to recapitulate.

Kiril Taranovsky's reading of "Return" proceeds from the same basic premise as Ronen's, but his conclusions conflict with Ronen's and complement Nadezhda Mandelstam's reading. (Unlike Ronen, Taranovsky had the benefit of her memoirs.) Tracing the image of the "incestuous daughter" to, on the one hand, a superimposition of two biblical referents—Laban's daughters who became Jacob's wives and

Lot's truly incestuous but nameless daughters—and, on the other, Mallarmé's "Don du poème" in Annenskii's translation, Taranovsky interprets "Return" in terms of Mandelstam's long-standing discomfort with his ethnic and religious origins.^[42] He summarized his arguments as follows: "If my assumption is valid, and the incestuous daughter is Mandelstam's Muse, then the poem seemingly says that the victory of the Judaic element in his philosophy and his poetry would lead the poet to silence. This is, I strongly believe, the 'deep meaning' of the poem."

These conflicting interpretations need not be considered irreconcilable, for there are many "types of ambiguity" essential to poetry. But even less theoretically, these readings are consonant both with the fundamental multiplicity of Mandelstam's projections and with the deeper pattern of conflict on which he drew repeatedly in the composition of his poetry and prose. To the extent that the interpreters identified the basic elements of the poem, their readings are compatible. Where they differed, as any reader would,^[43] is in the frame they imposed on the poem. For Nadezhda Mandelstam, it was her personal involvement with the poet and the relationship between her fate and his. For Omry Ronen, it was Mandelstam's coming to terms with the Jewish aspect of his identity, something that Ronen treats as a process of progressive reconciliation; and Mandelstam's poetry can amply support such a view. Taranovsky, too, approaches the poem as a dynamic entity, but he sees in it an outgrowth of the poet's earlier attitude, his often harsh attacks on "Judaism" that came to be interspersed with the expression of "Jewish pride" in his later years.^[44]

Extended Family

And with a firm hand he led blind Leah into Jacob's bridal chamber.
ANNA AKHMATOVA, "Rachel" (1921)

But alarm spoke loudly to the woman:
It's not late, you can still look

At the red towers of the native Sodom,
At the square where you sang, the yard where you spun,
At the empty windows of the tall house
Where you bore children for your dear man.
ANNA AKHMATOVA, "Lot's Wife" (1924)

"Return" clearly has some significance as a report filed by Mandelstam in the middle of his life's way. But I am also concerned here with the generative principle of the poem's composition that emerges when "Return" is approached as a "dream"—not an ordinary dream, but an

oracular, commanding dream, a supernatural communication already verbalized by a divinely ordained mouthpiece, a Joseph for instance. Not at all a private affair, this sort of dream possesses a social significance (it is, after all, addressed to someone other than the speaker), and to be effective, it must be recognized as an omen transcending the immediate context and cause. Concentrating on the code and generative formulas on which "Return" appears to rest, I shall treat this poemprophecy as if it were an epiphenomenal dream interpretation, that is, a text mediating between antecedent phenomena and the catalog of cultural patterns capable of organizing these facts and events in a meaningful and open way.

Let us first examine the poem on its own terms—as a prophecy conveying a set of commands. Thematically it is most remarkable in being both a divine sanction and a divine order to violate the incest taboo. So far, this most fundamental of all prohibitions had been the animating force of Mandelstam's poetry, motivating the ambiguous position of his lyric protagonist in the plot of mystical marriage between the poet and his country. As a Hippolytus or a Joseph,^[45] as a tsarevich or a Jokanaan ("Solominka"), that protagonist had so far been able to remain chaste and to benefit, as a charismatic persona, from the high value Christian culture places on the redemptive energy released (as it intensifies the sense of guilt) when an innocent is sacrificed.^[46] Nothing short of divine intervention would suffice for lifting the hitherto heroically observed taboo. We may therefore conclude that the voice of the poem's speaker emanated from a divine presence and signaled a switch from one register of the incest myth (Phaedra and Hippolytus) to another, in which the violation of the prohibition had on balance a salutary effect. The well-known versions of this myth are the Oedipus cycle of Sophocles and, directly relevant to "Return," the story of the former citizen of Sodom and the progenitor of the Moabites and the Ammonites, Lot, whose daughters "went unto him" in order to prevent the termination of the family line and, as one dictionary of the Bible (McKenzie's) maintains, to fulfill their destinies as women.

Now, if the speaker has a divine voice, how are we to treat the two characters directly affected by the prophecy: the bridegroom, referred to as father and a Judean, and the bride, who is both Helen of Troy and Leah? Students of folklore ordinarily distinguish between two parts of a magic spell: the so-called epic part, which establishes a background; and the spell itself, often (as in "Return") an imperative construction.^[47] The epic part of this particular spell tells us that the central commandment is less an order than a sanction to fulfill the incestuous wish manifested in Leah's preference for the "yellow gloom" (the color of Juda-

ism in Mandelstam)^[48] over the Hellenic "sun of Ilium." As to the "father's" role in this scenario—the context implies this strongly—he was not supposed to object. Once again, in Mandelstam's repertoire of dramatic situations, the two do not appear foreign to the basic misogynist plot of Euripides. The difference is that their roles, gender, and kinship status have been reversed, for now a female youth wishes to commit incest with a willing father.^[49] In interpreting his patients' dreams, Freud noted that the presence of reversal in one element of dream work signals its presence elsewhere in the dream,^[50] and in a poem where this operation is so pervasive we would do well to take this heuristic advice to heart. Indeed, the "father" whom Leah is to wed performs two functions at once. As a father involved in incest, he is Lot, and as husband of Leah, he is Jacob, the father of Joseph.^[51] Where the maternal line is continuous with the filial line (Leah is wife and daughter), the son's role may be made continuous with that of the father. Mandelstam did not identify Leah's bridegroom by name but only by his kinship status and religion, leaving plenty of room for elasticity in kinship relations.

The relationships established as a result of these operations, though flexible, were by no means random, corresponding to the plot lines basic to Mandelstam's earlier poetry. There, too, the relationship between the sexes was identified with the relationship between mother and son and presented in terms of Phaedra's desire for Hippolytus. Now, with kinship and gender reversed, it was identified with the relationship of daughter to father according to the story of Lot and his daughters: what Lot's daughters were to Lot, daughters were to fathers, wives to husbands, and women to men. Gender overrode filiation, and the female figures, whether mothers, daughters, or wives, formed one class—perpetrators of incest.

For the sake of illustration, this part of Mandelstam's kinship scheme may be tabulated as follows ("===" indicates the point of reversal):

The other part accounts for the extension of the reversibility of kinship relations to the male line, making it possible for the son to assume the other male roles and function with respect to his mother as father, husband, and son. It followed that gender polarity in the incest drama would now be reversed.

That Rachel, not her sister Leah, was Joseph's mother further "overdetermined," or overmotivated, the incest theme: the mother still remained inaccessible, the highest object of desire, despite the prodigious "kinship flexibility."

To follow the exegetic tradition, Mandelstam's Helen of Troy was in this regard identical to Rachel. The two easily blended into one conflated image—Helen—Rachel—encapsulating the essentials of the incest myth and myth in general, namely, its capacity for a narrative realization of the paradox of identity between irreconcilable relational patterns: taking one's own mother for a bride or marrying far outside one's own tribe.^[52] Significantly, because it is cast in the rhetoric of a divine commandment, the act of incest the poem's speaker advocates must be seen as a lesser of two evils. It would have been a greater abomination for Helen-Rachel to resist such powerful rhetoric and to prefer the illicit "sun of Ilium" to the "yellow gloom. " The implications of "Return" for Mandelstam's mythology ofself-presentation were considerable. Previously, his master narrative propelled itself by the protagonist perpetually resisting the temptation of incest. Now a way was found to incorporate the violation of the taboo without diminishing dramatic tension. On the one hand the choice of Leah as the bride of Jacob-Joseph greatly attenuated the incestuous aspect of the theme of marriage; on the other the poem greatly intensified the power of the taboo, which alone motivated the inaccessibility of and continued striving for Leah's ideal counterpart—the sister-daughter-mother-bride Helen-Rachel.

This is the pattern that "Return," as a mediating text, establishes for the reader, and the meaning of the poem depends on the perspectives that it mediates between. In this sense, the three conflicting interpretations presented above are fully reconcilable. Confronted with a different set of perspectives, a poem would yield a different set of results. Let us examine it through the eyes of Mandelstam's contemporary—say, a woefully incomplete version of Mandelstam himself in 1919, somewhere in Koktebel', a tiny mountain village on the shore of the Crimean peninsula.

For a man like Mandelstam, who was accustomed to apocalyptic vocabulary, the association of Petersburg and Petersburg Russia with Sodom came naturally, perhaps even inevitably, when, amid revolution and civil war, he found himself away from his native city and in a mountain retreat resembling Lot's rocky hideout. The association was

a rhetorical commonplace, a symbol of the times waiting for a poet capable of elaborating its meaning in the form of a mythic narrative. Mandelstam's turning to the story of Lot, however, had also been determined by his earlier mythic schemata: the abomination of Petersburg,^[53] and Phaedra-Russia's ("history running backward") perverse claim on the poet-Hippolytus.

Now that Imperial "stepmother Russia" was no more, Phaedra's role in the script was taken over by the wife of the sole virtuous citizen of Sodom, and that of Hippolytus by her husband, Lot. The mystical, potentially incestuous union of Phaedra and Hippolytus, which had never been consummated, was replaced by an act of incest by the two daughters of the widowed father fleeing the sulphur and brimstone raining down on their native Sodom. Or could it be that, viewed from afar, Phaedra-Russia had become transformed into Helen of Troy–Petersburg, and the poet who had fled the "Ilium" of the "night sun" of St. Petersburg was now forced to settle for a Jewish girl from Kiev^[54] and the "yellow gloom" of the Crimean sun? Or was "Return" simply an objectified expression of the fear of having perpetually to look back, a passéistic petrification combined with the realization that the previous life had been irretrievably lost and that now one had to learn to make do even at the price of poetic silence? Or finally, what if "Return," like a talisman, could spell future fecundity and attract the astral influences of the exegetic Leah?

Obviously, as a prophecy-oracle, "Return" could have been all this and more. Certainly, like the opening poem of Tristia, it constituted a fundamental revision of the basic "plot," which, although modified, still revolved around the incest taboo. Moreover, as no other poem had done before, it spelled out the symbolic grammar and vocabulary Mandelstam had been developing all throughout Tristia. Some rudiments of this lexicon and grammar can be tabulated, if in an adumbrated form, along the paradigmatic (vertical) and the syntagmatic (horizontal) axes. A basic statement in this language—that is to say, a poem—would consist of one or, more often, several items taken from each of the three columns. Later on, I shall examine several "variant" versions of Mandelstam's fundamental "mythology."^[55]

The elements in this table represent members of an algebraic formula of sorts and can assume a whole series of compatible values that the poet or the reader might choose to assign. At its most condensed this "formula" produces two contradictory statements: (1) because of the incest taboo, what you want most you cannot have, and (2) for the same reason, what you absolutely cannot have is what you most want. In either case, the penalty for possessing it is an ordeal, perhaps silence or death. Of course, this interpretation, suitable in the structural study of myths, is inadequate for the hermeneutics of poetry, in which the embroidery, the poet's and the reader's, has far more value than the cloth or the pattern itself.^[56] For this reason I have emphasized the significance of Mandelstam's vocabulary and grammar in the contemporary context as much as I have focused on his "myth," the lowest common denominator of his poetry. This play with the incest myth and the specific form that it took in his art (for example, the redemptive martyrdom of "Pushkin and Skriabin") has been correlated with the turn-of-the-century Christian revival, Russian Nietzscheanism, comparative mythology, and the historiosophical, social, and political issues of Mandelstam's time. Nevertheless, this "mythological" analysis helps to grasp, to use Roman Jakobson's formula, the grammar of Mandelstam's poetry and the poetry of his grammar,^[57] without which the meaning of his poetry would be hard to define.

The "symphonic" (sobornyi ) pathos of Mandelstam's writings led him to establish ever more intricate metonymic and synecdochic links among the significant aspects of such cultural entities as Greece, Russia, the West, Rome and Italy, and, of course, Judaism—the compass of his intellectual universe. On the one hand, these cultural complexes acquired a paradigmatic equivalence. That is, although both the "syntax" and the predicate of Mandelstam's statements on culture remained the same, the subject could be represented by any one of these "analogous" sets. In short, they were progressively interchangeable, allowing Mandelstam, for example, to project the legend of Helen of Troy onto the Hebrew story of Jacob's wooing of Rachel. Not only was Mandelstam a good student of comparative mythology à la James Frazer,

Aleksandr Veselovskii, Tadeusz Zielinski, and Viacheslav Ivanov, but he also could put this knowledge to good use. Like a squirrel preparing for winter, he shelled the cultural ideological formulas of his time to extract from them kernels of similarity to be stored for future use as elements of the poet's expressive vocabulary. These stockpiles then provided Mandelstam for years to come with highly complex, intensely allusive images of the Russian condition.

On the other hand—and here the incest archetype may have been especially helpful—the analogies and similarities reinforced the sense of kinship among disparate elements of the world, the kinship that Mandelstam had always sought and that he believed had to obtain in the "real," if not the actual, universe. In this respect, he, like many of his contemporaries in Russia, proved a faithful heir to the utopian thought of Chaadaev, Herzen, and Dostoevsky. In his famous "Pushkin speech," Dostoevsky described the archetypal Russian poet (Mandelstam's proverbial "sun") as a genius of metamorphosis who could imitate the essences of all cultures and, as such, represented a prefiguration of the eventual universal union of humanity that Russia was destined to champion.^[58] Mandelstam's plethora of poetic identities, his "coat of many colors," also could function as such a prefiguration.

This implied for the grammar of his poetry and the poetry of his grammar that the analogies and similarities were not only mutually interchangeable but also interrelated. As such, they were members of a single family and could be manipulated along synecdochic-metonymic and metaphoric lines.^[59] The Hebrew Rachel could be "displaced" onto the Greek Helen, Leah could become the sister of the proverbial toast of Troy, and both could serve as "condensed" representations of their respective cultures. The poetic function, wrote Roman Jakobson, consists of the projection of the principle of similarity (or of metaphor) from the axis of selection (the paradigmatic axis) onto the axis of combination (the syntagmatic, metonymic axis).^[60] Thanks to the incest archetype that Mandelstam employed in his writings, the reverse—the projection of the principle of contiguity from the axis of combination onto the axis of selection—also held true. Thus, a poem in which these two operations were performed could serve not only as poetry, or to use the definition of Northrop Frye, as a "hypothetical verbal statement imitating action or thought," but also as metapoetry—as an inscription in which the principle of "imitation" was encoded. I shall return to this subject in the next chapter.

"Return," in keeping with Mandelstam's eloquently expressed desire to "Hellenize the world," established kinship bonds (albeit not free of antagonism) between two of these cultural complexes, the Hellenic

and the Jewish, which hitherto seemed separated by a wide gulf. The tension of the incest conflict was becoming attenuated. After all, was not the marriage, however incestuous, ordered by the highest authority for both Christian and Jew? Likewise, the notion of "return"—which constituted a "dear" but nevertheless abominable act in the earlier "pool" poem and took the form of the "black sun" in "Pushkin and Skriabin" and the second "Phaedra"—had become progressively acceptable.

Variations

In a 1914 essay, "Petr Chaadaev," Mandelstam had already sanctioned the "return home," provided that one took an extended tour of distant and alien, and therefore "electively" related, lands. He himself had done so in his "pilgrim" poem ("The Staff"). At first, however, taking a grand tour turned out to be far easier than coming back, to judge by the poem about the unfortunate tsarevich ("In the Sledge," 1916). But in 1917, when Mandelstam found himself in a Crimea that was far more hospitable under Kerenskii than it would be under Wrangel, the return had a much sweeter taste:

Golden, a stream of honey was flowing from a jar,
So viscous and slow that the hostess could utter:
Here, in the sad Taurida where our destiny brought us,
We don't feel bored at all—and then glanced behind her.

Everywhere Bacchus is celebrated, as if there were only
A shepherd and dogs—as you walk, not a soul around you-
Quiet days, like heavy wine barrels, calmly rolling along:
Voices from a faraway tent—you cannot understand or answer.

After tea, we walked out into a garden, brown and large,
Like eyelashes, dark blinds in the windows had been drawn down.
Past white columns, we went on to look at the vines
Where sleepy mountains bathe in the liquid glass of the air.

I spoke: the vines, like the battle of yore, are alive,
Where the curly-haired horsemen engaged in a curlicued combat.
The science of Hellas in the rocky Taurida—and behold,
The noble rusty rows of golden acres and acres.

Now, in the white room like a spinning wheel silence stands.
Scents of vinegar, paint, and young wine from the cellar.
Remember the Greek house: the wife so loved by them all—
No, not Helen, the other—oh how long she embroidered.

Golden fleece, where are you at last, golden fleece?
All along sea waves heaved and heavily rumbled,
And after leaving the ship with its canvas worked over at sea,
Odysseus returned, filled with space and time.

Ostensibly, "The Vine" deals with the return to the Crimea, not Russia, but nevertheless a return.^[61] Because the poem ingeniously shows that absence can make presence—Odysseus's absence from home yields Penelope's tapestry (or "embroidery," in Mandelstam's pointedly Russified version)—the poem may legitimately be read as Mandelstam's reply to those critics who had despaired of finding a Russian subject in his poetry.^[62] But it is equally tempting to read it as a counterpart, indeed as a Hellenic precedent, that legitimized the return of Mandelstam's Leah to her father's bosom. Like Leah, who had spent years pursuing the elusive image of Helen before returning to her "Judean" bridegroom-father, Odysseus returned to his wife. Did he not, after all his adventures, prefer the modest daylight of Ithaca to the "sun of Ilium"? A reader may be justified in "projecting the principle of similarity" from the poem about Leah and Helen onto the poem about

Helen and Penelope. Following Dante's example of complementing the proverbial Leah-Martha and Rachel-Mary with the poet's own Matilda and Beatrice, Mandelstam elaborated on the "exegetic sisters," but he did so by drawing on the storehouse of tradition for his own "blessed names."^[63]

If in "Return" Leah takes second place to Helen, does not Helen take second place to Penelope in the poem about Odysseus's return? The answer is yes and no.^[64] As we have seen, displacement and condensation—or, in tropological terms, metonymy and synecdoche—often imply in Mandelstam a possibility for identification on the basis of similarity. To put it differently, the contiguity or proximity of characters stemming from their kinship breeds likeness among them. In this sense the poet's attitude toward the symbolic sisters appears ambivalent and indeterminate. There is, in fact, a 1931 "occasional" poem in which the name of Mary, also an allusion to an "easy woman" from Pushkin's Feast During the Plague, plays the role of Martha or Leah, and Helen is mentioned as Mandelstam's exegetic Mary. Nadezhda Mandelstam assumed that here, too, she was forced to play second fiddle to the beautiful Helen.^[65]

I shall tell you as directly
As I can:

All is bunk. Drink, angel Mary,
Drink again!

Where the beauty-bedazzled Hellas
Saw its bliss,

There stared at me shame from
Her abyss.

With their Helen sailed the Greeks
Across the waves,
All I got was salty foam,
Just a taste!

Just a taste of nothing ever
On my lips,
Ancient poverty will wave at me
Her fists.

Hither-thither, up or down,
Yours or mine—
All is bunk—so sip your cocktails,
Gulp your wine!

But if in this much later poem Mandelstam drew a sharp line between the celestial, unreachable Helen and the profane angel Mary, accessible and close at hand, the picture he offered in the poem that preceded "Return" in The Second Book of Poetry was far more indeterminate. There, the archetypal two sisters appeared as a paradoxical pair of nonidentical twins:

Sisters—heaviness and tenderness—your tokens are the same.
Bees and wasps suck on a heavy rose.
Man dies, sand warmed by him cools,
And yesterday's sun is borne away on a black stretcher.

Oh, heavy honeycombs and tender snares,
Lifting a stone is easier than repeating your name!
In this world, all I have is but one care:
A golden care—to be rid of the burden of time.

I am drinking, like dark water, this air growing turbid.
Time has been ploughed under, and the rose, too, once was earth.
In a slowly turning whirlpool, heavy, tender roses,
Rose's heaviness and tenderness she wove into a double wreath.

According to Nadezhda Mandelstam, The Second Book was the only one of Mandelstam's post-1916 collections that he personally supervised.^[66] The order, therefore, is both significant and important. Indeed, juxtaposing the poem above with "Return" helps to bring into sharper focus the meaning of the "sisters—heaviness and tenderness,"^[67] because the phrase becomes part of Mandelstam's poetic vocabulary and subject to his grammar.

The first striking feature of the poem is its capacity for echoing the earlier Mandelstam. Just as in the second "Phaedra," the poet alludes here, perhaps nostalgically, to the architectural simplicity of his first two collections (Stone I and II). "Lifting a stone," he puns, turned out to be much easier than speaking in the name of love—the invocational fulcrum of Tristia and, of course, lyric poetry in general (hence, Mandelstam's "to repeat"). And it is love, a feminine noun in Russian, that weaves the double wreaths in the classical vortex amoris of the poem's closure. Although it retains the mysterious aura of a taboo subject, it is love that combines the crown of thorns with a flower garland.^[68] The "golden care" also becomes comprehensible. To establish bonds of kinship between Russia and alien cultures, between the distant past and the present—the very essence of Mandelstam's poetic project—meant to create proximity where there was distance, similarity where there was difference, and simultaneity where time brought about a chronological gap. The latter served him—as it did countless other poets, if rarely with such intensity—as a synecdoche of verbal art. This is not surprising in a "mythological" poet, because in myth, space and time can be made equivalent and interchangeable (isomorphous). Inscribing his own narrative on an ancient tradition allowed him to have his forefathers, as N. Fedorov would have put it, come alive, or as a Freudian might say, to resolve the Oedipal crisis—or, to bring the poem closer to "Pushkin and Skriabin," to defeat, to "Hellenize," death, to "imitate playfully" the mystery of the Resurrection.

Which brings me to the first stanza of the poem. According to Akhmatova, Aleksandr Pushkin served as the referent for the poem's

"yesterday's sun."^[69] Indeed, Pushkin's nighttime funeral was a key scene in Mandelstam's symbolic vocabulary ("Pushkin and Skriabin"), but it is my sense (and also Nadezhda Mandelstam's) that the image is not a specific one. The poet was casting a wider net, meditating on the paradox of life, love, death, and resurrection. The rose, after all, is the traditional image of the Virgin and the all too traditional symbol of love;^[70] the sun, particularly in Mandelstam, is often the sun of redemption and as such might refer to any "martyred redeemer," including the "canonized" Pushkin, who imitated Christ. As to Pushkin—not the historical poet, but the focus of the Pushkin cult—Mandelstam had already linked his death with the Crucifixion. But even with these two clear referents, the image is indeterminate enough to allow for the "sun" of any reader who happens to be shaped by Christian culture. "Man dies." So Mandelstam begins the third line of the first stanza. The universal spareness of the statement speaks for itself. All the more significant, then, was Akhmatova's refusal to see in the image anything but another relic of Pushkin worship. For Mandelstam, it seems to have been far more important to formulate the paradox than to clutter the Russian literary pantheon with yet another haloed bust.

Let us not forget the time and place of the poem's composition: March 1920, the last months of the civil war and three years after the revolution, in the Crimea under Wrangel. Death quite literally stared one in the eye, out of the empty sockets of corpses strung up on the lampposts of Crimean cities.^[71] How can a new life be born out of this hecatomb? Intellectuals everywhere, especially those with leftist sympathies, were asking this question. The poem offers a rationalization, not an answer, to this paradox. "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."

Mandelstam's poem is an elaboration on this parable from the Gospel according to John (John 12:24),^[72] an elaboration based also on the parable of the two sisters, Martha and Mary, and their by now numerous cousins: Leah and Rachel, Leah and Helen, Matilda and Beatrice, the two hypostases of the mystical Aphrodite, Helen and Penelope, Helen and Pushkin's wayward Mary, as well as heaviness and tenderness, the bees and the wasps, the earth and the rose. And, to do justice to their other counterparts: the heavy rose, yesterday's sun, turbid air, dark water, heavy honeycombs, tender snares, golden care, and, of course, the double wreath. And is not the slowly turning whirlpool with the floating double wreaths a conflation of the still pool and the forbidden air of the early "twin" poems? The list goes on almost indefinitely. Far more important, all of these twin oxymorons consti-

tute, not a parliament of warring and compromising parties (an evil assembly to some Russian eyes), but a harmonious chorus (or is it polyphonic?) in the manner of the universal "symphony," the sobor or mir of Russian Orthodox theology and social thought. As it proceeds from the dominant differentiation of the first two stanzas to the harmonious unity in the closure of the last two lines, the poem in a sense imitates the progress toward that cherished goal. Mandelstam had traveled a long way from the simple antagonisms of the early Tristia, but not long enough to prevent them from resonating with a powerful force in this "symphonic" meditation.

What could be the significance of these seemingly endless variations? I suggest that the poem actually represents a form of semantic incantation, a verbal exorcism of the demons of division, who have to be cast out by an invocation of angels reconciling the opposites.^[73] The device Mandelstam employs is sympathetic magic, which is supposed to work by attracting the like with the like.^[74] Hence the hypnotically magical repetitions^[75] of the paradigm of Martha and Mary as well as that of the "corn of wheat," and hence the binary alternations (rhyme, rhythm, semantics) enclosed in a ternary overall structure that may vaguely allude to the Trinity. Intoned over and over again, this is, nevertheless, a sophisticated prayer in which each repetition invokes its own particular angel, or angels, or patron saint—all of them celebrating the god of love. Gertrude Stein, the author of a similar magic spell—"A rose is a rose is a rose"—cast from the anagram EROS-ROSE, might have appreciated the refined complexity of Mandelstam's incantation, which, curiously, echoes a 1920s Fats Waller hit, "Honeysuckle Rose." Considering the task Mandelstam set himself—"to be rid of the burden of time"—he could hardly ignore the power of verbal magic.

I conclude this chapter with "Venetian Life," a poem that must be seen as part of the Crimean "cycle." Its implicit kinship with "Return" reveals one way Mandelstam came to treat the incest motif after the "Leah" poem.

Venetian life, so dark and barren—
For me, its meaning is bright.
Here she is, looking with a cold smile
Into a blue and decrepit mirror.

The subtle scent of skin. Blue veins.
White snow. Green brocade.
All are placed on cypress-wood stretchers,
Warm, sleepy, removed from their capes.

And candles in baskets keep on burning,
As if a dove flew into the ark.
On stage and in idle assembly,
Man dies.

For there is no salvation from love and fear:
Heavier than platinum is Saturn's ring!
Executioner's block, draped in black velvet
And a beautiful face.

Heavy, Venice, are your adornments,
Mirrors are framed in cypress wood.
Your air is faceted. In the bedroom
Mountains of blue, decrepit glass melt.

But what's in her fingers: a rose or a vial?
Green Adriatic, do forgive!
So why are you keeping silent, tell me, Venetian donna,
How does one escape this festive death?

Black Vesper is flickering in the mirror.
Everything passes. Truth is dark.
Man is born. Pearl dies.
And Susanna must await the elders.

Like "Return," "Venetian Life" may be read as a complex version of the story of Joseph. Indeed the two poems are linked not only by the theme of a doomed city, with the dying "pearl of the Adriatic" replacing the moribund Troy, or by the common air of sinfulness, implicit violence, and intrigue, but also by a "wandering motif" of slandered innocence familiar from the Joseph legend. Not until the last line of the poem does the reader realize that the collage of emblems constituting "Venetian Life"^[76] is framed in a story of the entrapment and eventual vindication of a virtuous woman who—like Joseph when he declined the entreaties of Potiphar's wife or like Hippolytus with Phaedra—preferred to accept the consequences of a false accusation rather than betray her primary loyalties. I have in mind the final line, with its transparent allusion to "Susanna and the Elders" by Tintoretto. Some of the visual allegories of this painting are echoed in Mandelstam's verbal puns: a broken necklace of pearls placed between the diaphanous, Venus-like Susanna and the mirror she is staring at, unaware of the presence of two pink-clad and decrepit-looking old men.^[77] By no means the last^[78] instance of the "Joseph" motif in Mandelstam, "Venetian Life" greatly attenuates the earlier emphasis on conflict. As a result, it resembles not so much the second "Phaedra," with its drama of intense polarization, as the kenotic reconciliation of opposites in "Sisters—heaviness and tenderness," whose "tokens are the same."

The poem's sense appears to emerge from the oxymoronic, in part folk etymological, associations prompted by the word Venice (Venetsiia): venok (wreath or garland), venets (crown), Venus, venerial, and, of course, venal and venum.^[79] As the poem develops the Tristia theme of the "double wreath," its key images, such as "Saturn's ring,"join the vocabulary that already includes Leah and Rachel,^[80] a crown of thorns, a lover's flower garland, a laurel wreath, love and death, and, in art, the eternal expectation of a resurrection. The flickering black Vesper plays the role of an etymologically and therefore, in Mandelstam, magically justified astral guide of Venice, the city of beauty and death. As a "fraternal" counterpart of this oxymoronic play,^[81] "Saturn's ring" brings a

greater emphasis to the "Saturnian" aspect of Mandelstam's myth of mystical marriage. As a result of this accumulation of analogous images, the fabric of allusion becomes dense enough to ensure that the reader associates the name of the city with the ambivalent object held in a "Venetian donna's" hand—a rose? or poison, venum ?—recalling both Pushkin's Feast During the Plague and Blok's cycle "The Dances of Death":

And I drink the breath of maiden-rose,
Perhaps . . . filled with Plague.
(Pushkin)

An empty street. One light in a window.
A Jew chemist moans in his sleep.

And before the cabinet with a sign  Venena, . . .^{[ 82]}
(Blok)

Nor can the reader avoid recalling the tradition by which the Doge of Venice is symbolically bound to his city (hence the "ring").^[83]

In the late fall of 1920, Mandelstam's Petrograd audience no doubt appreciated this cluster of images. It was to them an open-ended emblem of their own attitude about the "death" of the old Petersburg ("Venice of the North") and the old Russia, which, now that they were no more, could be recalled with nostalgia. Many of them had not yet had time to form an opinion about whether the revolution and the civil war signaled a regeneration or a national suicide. To borrow an allusion from "Venetian Life," the chaos of the revolutionary "flood" had not yet receded (the dove returning to Noah's ark), and the future was still in darkness. Thus understood, the question of the penultimate stanza could have been asked by any of Mandelstam's Russian readers. And in the interval between the penultimate and the final stanza, the poet of "Venetian Life" transformed himself from a man a reader could easily identify with to a mouthpiece issuing the answer in the staccato of an enigmatic Pythian oracle. But lest his readers miss his political points, Mandelstam inserted into the otherwise rarified and pointedly European vocabulary not only the up-to-date, topical nosilki, or "stretcher" (as he did in "Sisters"), but also the old Russian veche, a term designat-

ing the popular assembly in preautocratic Russia, which, beginning with the Decembrists, served as a shibboleth for the intelligentsia disinclined to recognize the legitimacy of the tsar's rule.

The density of allusions and the collage structure of the poem allow multiple readings of "Venetian Life. " To some, the poem may even have sounded perilously close to self-parody. In a review of an almanac containing the poem, Briusov could write (and, given the format, convincingly): "Everything that the Petersburg poets offer is all too familiar, customary; [such poetry] used to be read and written long ago. . . . 'For there is no escape from love and fear' or 'Why did I tear myself away from you before it was time.' "^[84] The poem's oracular closure, however, offers a hint of how Mandelstam wanted his poem to be perceived, if not of how it was actually understood by his readers, even though we know that Mandelstam assumed the appearance of a visionary as he was reciting "Venetian Life."^[85] Considering the "narrative" drift of Tristia and the Pythian introduction of the Susanna legend in the final line, we can hardly argue that the previously unreconciled opposites, including Mandelstam's Rachel and Leah, became fused here into Venice, a "wreath" (venok), a "crown" (venets), and a looking glass, while the pair Phaedra-Russia and Hippolytus became transformed into the single figure of Tintoretto's Susanna, who "must await" forever the advances and the slander of the "elders" to be vindicated at the appointed time. We discern here a voice similar to the one that had ordered the "return" of Leah to the incestuous womb.

The chairman of the Petrograd Union of Poets, Aleksandr Blok, who could appreciate the pun "Venice-Venus-Venum," happened to be in the audience at the Poet's Club in Petrograd on October 21, 1920, when Mandelstam publicly recited "Venetian Life."Judging by Blok's response, the recital was a success. Above all, Mandelstam convinced Blok that his poetry did indeed arise out of the generative center of humanity's dreams, even if these dreams were strictly circumscribed by the boundaries of art. Nor did Blok miss the principle the poem was constructed on, namely, the paronomastic, folk-etymological "sprouting" of verse from a key word, which he pondered with the help of Gumilevian commentary. The day after Mandelstam's recital, Blok wrote in his diary:

The focus of the evening was I. Mandelstam, who came [to Petrograd] after having spent time in a Wrangel prison. He has grown enormously. At first it is unbearable to hear the sing-song common to the Gumilevists. Gradually you get used to it . . . The artist is there to see. His verses emerge out of dreams—very particular—that lie in

the sphere of art alone. Gumilev defines his way thus: from the irrational to the rational (the opposite of mine). His [Mandelstam's] "Venice." According to Gumilev, everything is rational (including both love and being in love), the irrational lies only in language; in its roots, it is ineffable. (In the beginning was the Word, out of the Word emerged thoughts, words that no longer resembled the Word but that nevertheless had It as their source; and everything will end with the Word—everything will disappear; It alone will remain.)^[86]