1. V. L'vov-Rogachevskii, Russko-evreiskaia literatura (Moscow, 1922), pp. 103-129.

2. P. Brown, "The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity," Representations 1, no. 2 (1983): 19 ff.

3. See the chapter entitled "Knizhnyi shkaf" (The Bookcase) in Mandelstam's Shum vremeni (The Noise of Time), SS 2, pp. 56 ff. See also C. Brown's discussion of the poet's father, Emilii Veniaminovich Mandelstam, in Mandelstam (Cambridge, 1973). See further the discussion of the poet's family in NM 2, pp. 568-578.

4. Cf. Gogol's "The Overcoat," specifically the scene of Akakii's birth and christening.

5. Cf. also Marina Tsvetaeva's frequent fashioning of herself as Maryna Mniszek. For name symbolism in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and a polemic concerning its significance, see E. Wilson, "Legend and Symbol in Doctor Zhivago," in his The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950-1965 continue

      (New York, 1965), pp. 447 ff.; M. F. Rowland and P. Rowland, Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (Carbondale, Ill., 1967), pp. 10 ff.; and H. Gifford, Pasternak: A Critical Study (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 191 ff. See also N. Iu. Griakalova, "Fol'klornye traditsii v poezii Anny Akhmatovoi," Russkaia literatura 25, no. 1 (1982).

6. In this way, Joseph distinguished himself from the "wise men magicians" (Gen. 41:8) for whom Egypt remained famous into the Renaissance (viz. Hermes Tristmegistus ). See F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London, 1964), pp. 1-20. By implication, professional diviners did not attribute their skill to the "spirit of God" (Gen. 41:16 and 38) but to themselves or some minor demons. Nevertheless, the whole hermetic thematism of the Joseph legend seems related to the Egyptian culture of the occult, since the divinatory motifs are in general underplayed in the Old Testament. Apparently God addressed his chosen people directly, thus obviating the need for divination. See "Divination" in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings (New York, 1961).

7. In Weber's classification system, charismatic authority represents a power related to and distinguished from the other two "ideal types," namely, traditional authority, based on the "eternal yesterday" ("Politics as a Vocation") and the rational-legal type characterized by systematic regularity and professionalism. I have relied on the following editions of Max Weber: From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1958); and Max Weber on Charisma and Institution Building, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Chicago, 1968); hereafter referred to as Essays and Charisma, respectively. I have also found helpful the exposition of Weber's thought by R. Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (New York, 1960).

8. Weber, Charisma, p. 49. For a discussion of a symbiosis of the traditional and charismatic types of domination, see R. Bendix, "Max Weber's Sociology Today," International Social Science Journal 17 (1965): 19-20. See also note 11.

9. Weber, Charisma, p. 48.

10. I have in mind Durkheim's distinction between the "sacred" and the "profane" as fundamental to any form of religion and, therefore, to all cultures. See E. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York, 1915), pp. 52-63. "Sacredness," in whatever form, is attributed to the "central." See E. Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago, 1975), p. 263. For a discussion of this confluence of the Weberian and the Durkheimian frameworks, see S. N. Eisenstadt's introduction to Charisma, pp. xli-xlv.

11. In developing Weber's thinking, Edward Shils writes: "The need for order and a fascination of disorder persist, and the charismatic propensity is a function of the need for order. The generator or author of order arouses the charismatic responsiveness. Whether it be God's law or natural law or scientific law or positive law or the society as a whole, or even a particular corporate body of institutions like the army, whatever embodies, expresses or symbolizes the essence of an ordered cosmos or any significant sector thereof awakens the disposition of awe and reverence, the charismatic disposition. Men need an continue

      order within which they can locate themselves, an order providing coherence, continuity, justice" (Shils, "Charisma, Order, and Status," in Center and Periphery, p. 261). For case studies making use of Shils's theory, see C. Geertz, "Centers, Kings, and Charisma," in Culture and Its Creators, ed. J. Ben David and T. N. Clarke (Chicago, 1977), pp. 150-171: and P. Brown, "The Saint as Exemplar." For a discussion of the contribution made by Shils and Geertz to the concept of charisma, see S. N. Eisenstadt's introduction to Charisma, pp. xxii-xli.

12. Shils, Center and Periphery, pp. 3-16 and 257 ff.

13. Weber, Charisma, pp. 49 ff.

14. Cor. 12:8-11; Rom. 12. Related and sometimes virtually identical terms in the Bible include "favor," "grace," and "the spirit of God." All are divine gifts. For a more detailed discussion, see "Grace" in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2d ed. (London, 1977). Max Weber's own notion of charisma, as he repeatedly acknowledged ( Essays, p. 246), originated in a discussion of charismatic leadership and organization in the early Christian Church by Rudolph Sohm, Kirchenrecht. See Bendix, Max Weber, p. 325n.

15. Shils, Center and Periphery, pp. 258 ff.

16. Weber, Essays, p. 49.

17. Ibid., pp. 248-250.

18. Ibid.

16. Weber, Essays, p. 49.

17. Ibid., pp. 248-250.

18. Ibid.

16. Weber, Essays, p. 49.

17. Ibid., pp. 248-250.

18. Ibid.

19. On estrangement as a condition of holiness in the late Antique society of the Mediterranean, see P. Brown, "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity," in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982), pp. 115-129. The experience was not irrelevant to the Russian Orthodox institution of "starchestvo" (ibid., p. 152), as any reader of Dostoevsky would readily recognize. In fact, one of the first Russian Symbolists, Aleksandr Dobroliubov (1876-1944?), a legendary and important figure, became one such "holy man." In the late 1890s he became a novice at the Solovetskii Monastery and later founded a sect of "Free Christians" among the Volga peasants that was known as "Dobroliubovtsy." See A. Belyi, Nachalo veka (Moscow and Leningrad, 1933), pp. 363-364; and P. Pertsov, Literaturnye vospominaniia (Moscow and Leningrad, 1933), pp. 237-240. Dobroliubov was a major influence in the early career of Briusov and an old friend and spiritual guide of Mandelstam's teacher of Russian literature, V. V. Gippius. See E. V. Ivanova, "Valerii Briusov i Aleksandr Dobroliubov," Izvestiia Akademii nauk SSSR. Seriia literatury i iazyka 40, no. 3 (1981): 255-273; and V. V. Gippius's autobiographical narrative poem Lik chelovecheskii (St. Petersburg and Berlin, 1922), canto 3:28 ff. and 40 ff.

20. This recollection refers to Mandelstam's recital of his poetry in Petrograd in the winter of 1920. See N. Pavlovich, "Vospominaniia ob Aleksandre Bloke," in Blokovskii sbornik. Trudy nauchnoi konferentsii, posviashchennoi izucheniiu zhizni i tvorchestva A. A. Bloka (Tartu, 1964), p. 472. Cf. the impressions of Vladimir Veidle (Weidlé), who found Mandelstam's manner of recitation "ridiculous" ("O poslednikh stikhakh Mandel'shtama," Vozdushnye puti 2 [1961]: 70). break

21. Blok, SS 7, p. 371. Significantly, "Venetian Life," the poem that particularly struck Blok, has discernible echoes of the Joseph legend. See chapter 5.

22. "O sovremennom sostoianii" was reprinted in 1918. Blok's usage of the word artist, which in Russian has the ambivalent connotation of a performing artist, was a mark of high praise and appreciation of a poet's talent for conveying the "serious" ineffable (hence my use of the French artiste ). Cf. also: "Thoughtful and careful, he [Blok] called the poem read by Mandelstam 'artistic"' (V. A. Zorgenfrei, "A. A. Blok," Zapiski mechtatelei 6 [1922]: 148). In "Iskusstvo i revoliutsiia" (Art and Revolution, 1918), Blok wrote that history would "destroy the age-old lie of civilization [the profane versus the sacred "culture"] and elevate people to the height of artistic mankind" ( SS 6, p. 22). See P. P. Gromov, Blok. Ego predshestvenniki i sovremenniki (Moscow and Leningrad, 1966), p. 380. For a different reading of this characterization, see NM 2, p. 378; and note 85, chapter 5.

23. S. Adrianov, professor of Russian literature at the University of St. Petersburg, cited Blok's drama, Roza i krest, as convincing evidence of Russia's spiritual recovery. See his "'Roza i krest' A. Bloka," Vestnik Evropy 11 (1913): 385. A similar view was expressed by Viacheslav Ivanov (see LN 92 [1983], bk. 3, p. 397). See also S. Bernshtein, "Golos Bloka" (1920), in Blokovskii sbornik, vol. 2 (Tartu, 1977).

24. S. T. Aksakov, Istoriia moego znakomstva s Gogolem, in Gogol' v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, ed. S. Mashinskii (Moscow, 1952), pp. 119 ff.

25. "Maiakovskii recited [his poem] once again but toward the end, he again slid into the shamanistic incantations [ shamanskie zaklinaniia ]." From the diary of A. Lazarevskii (June 21, 1915), cited in V. Katanian, Maiakovskii: Literaturnaia khronika (Moscow, 1961), p. 72.

26. Regarding the response of Mandelstam's contemporaries, see note 65.

27. O. Mandelstam, "Utro akmeizma" (The Morning of Acmeism, 1913), SS 2, p. 321. See also Mandelstam's invocation of glossolalia in "Slovo i kul'tura" (1921), SS 2, p. 227.

28. A juxtaposition of poetry recitals in Russia with the tradition of magical healing, soothsaying, and transcendent communication relying on trance states will make an instructive study. See F. D. Goodman, Speaking in Tongues: A Cross-Cultural Study of Glossolalia (Chicago, 1972); and her Trance, Healing, and Hallucination (New York, 1974). See also note 65.

29. Quoted in C. Brown, Mandelstam, p. 129. For an interpretation of Pasternak's remark, see L. Fleishman, Pasternak v dvadtsatye gody (Munich, [1981]), pp. 327 ff. See also H. Gifford, "Mandelstam and Pasternak: The Antipodes," in Russian and Slavic Literature, ed. R. Freeborn, R. R. Milner-Gulland, and C. A. Ward (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 376-386.

30. L. Ginsburg, "Iz starykh zapisei," in O starom i novom (Leningrad, 1982), p. 354 ("Poety").

31. Cf. a similar characterization of another poet, this time during the "bourgeois" NEP period (1926): "She [Akhmatova] has the demeanor of an ex-queen at a bourgeois resort" (L. Ginzburg, O starom i novom, p. 373). And further, after having been greeted by a slight nod from Akhmatova: "Her ges- soft

      ture came out well, it corresponded to that historico-literary need for adulation [blagogovenie ] that I experience in relation to her" (ibid.).

32. Nadezhda Mandelstam, despite her sober attitude to Khlebnikov, makes a point of relating how Mandelstam, hardly a pragmatist himself, had once taken care of the other wordly, helpless Khlebnikov by demanding that Nicholas Berdiaev (then the chairman of the Writers' Union) provide a room of "at least six square meters" for "the world's greatest poet before whom all world poetry pales" (NM 2, pp. 107 ff.). This anecdote suggests that Pasternak's characterization of Mandelstam in 1932 as the "second Khlebnikov" did not emerge altogether spontaneously but had been cultivated for a long time and had wide currency.

33. On the institution of the "fools in Christ," iurodivye, which commenced in seventh-century Byzantium with St. Symeon the Holy Fool, see, among the more recent works, N. Challis and H. W. Dewey, "The Blessed Fools of Old Russia," Jahrbuch für Geschichte Osteuropas 22 (1974): 1-11.

34. R. Jakobson, "On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets" (1931), in Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism, ed. E. J. Brown (Oxford, 1973), p. 9. Jakobson's essay made a deep impression on Mandelstam, eliciting from him the exclamation "It is written with a biblical might [ Ona napisana s bibleiskoi moshch'iu ]!" (see H. McLean, "Smert' Vladimira Maiakovskogo" [review], Slavic Review 36, no. 1 [1977]: 155). Biblical might, indeed, and not in the figurative sense alone. See also Iu. Tynianov, "O Khlebnikove" (1928): "Khlebnikov's biography—a biography of a poet outside the literature of books and magazines, who is happy in his own way, in his own way unhappy, complex, a 'recluse' and an extrovert—ended terribly. It [the biography] is associated with his poetic persona." See Iu. Tynianov, Problema stikhotvornogo iazyka (Moscow, 1965), p. 298.

35. Based on unpublished memoirs of Pavel Miturich. Among other things, Miturich believed that Khlebnikov was victimized by the Maiakovskii-Brik ménage.

36. "Avtoportret." See also the memoir portraits of Mandelstam in Il'ia Erenburg (1961), Nikolai Chukovskii (1964), Vsevolod Rozhdestvenskii (1958), Sergei Makovskii (1962). For a discussion of the memoir record of Mandelstam's appearance, see C. Brown, Mandelstam, pp. 49-52.

37. O. Mandelstam, The Egyptian Stamp (1928).

38. M. Tsvetaeva, Poema kontsa (1924, 1926), end of pt. 12. See S. Karlinsky, Marina Cvetaeva (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966), pp. 212-214.

39. NM 2, p. 34.

40. SS 1:141 ("Net, nikogda nichei ia ne byl sovremennik"). Line four is a periphrasis of Lermontov's: "No I am not Byron, I am another one, / A chosen who is yet unknown, / Like him, a wanderer being chased by the world / But one with a Russian soul" (cf. Byron's "I was born for opposition"). The second stanza is based on a complex allusion to Gogol's story "Vii" about an iron demon of retribution with giant eyelids whose gaze brought death to those in his view. The poem is discussed in chapter 7.

41. Few people note when citing these ghoulishly pleasing words that continue

      Gumilev's tragic execution—whether or not he participated in the so-called Tagantsev conspiracy—had nothing to do with his poetry. On the contrary, his best chance for surviving the summary justice of the Cheka rested on his fame as one of Russia's foremost poets.

42. This attitude, which goes back to Nikolai Gogol's short essay on Pushkin ("Neskol'ko slov o Pushkine," Arabeski ), was "codified" in Dostoevsky's "Pushkin Speech." In Mandelstam's time, its proponents included Viacheslav Ivanov ("Poet i chern"') and, the poet who both cultivated it and benefited from it most, Aleksandr Blok (see his "Sud'ba pisatelia," "O naznachenii poeta," "Katilina"). The Formalist critics began discussing the problem of a "poet's biography" as a "literary fact" following the death of Aleksandr Blok. See Iu. Tynianov, "Litso" (1921), in Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino (Moscow, 1977); B. Eikhenbaum, "Sud'ba Bloka" (1921), in Ob Alekasandre Bloke (Petrograd, 1921); and B. Tomashevskii, "Literatura i biografiia," Kniga i revoliutsiia 4 (1923): 6-9. Jakobson's essay on Maiakovskii, "O pokolenii, rastrativshem svoikh poetov," may be seen as a culmination of this discussion insofar as it combines both the "religious" and the "scholarly" aspects of the traditional cult of the poet. More recently, the problem was addressed by L. Ginzburg in her study O lirike (Leningrad, 1974), specifically in chapter 3, "Problema lichnosti."

43. My thinking on this issue has been influenced considerably by R. Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore and London, 1977); see especially chapter 10, "The Gods, the Dead, the Sacred, and Sacrificial Substitution."

44. Vl. Maiakovskii, "Sergeiu Eseninu" (1926).

45. L. Fleishman, "O gibeli Maiakovskogo kak 'literaturnom fakte." ' SH 4 (1979): 126-130.

46. "On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets" (1931), p. 9.

47. Iu. Tynianov, "O literaturnom fakte." Nadezhda Mandelstam recalled that Tynianov had once suggested to her that she "organize" Mandelstam's biography according to the principle he had outlined in "O literaturnom fakte" (NM 2, p. 368). If such a conversation did indeed take place, it must have been on that rare occasion when her sense of humor happened to abandon her.

48. "Vek" (1923), SS 1:145. The poem is discussed in detail in chapter 6.

49. Nadezhda Mandelstam was alluding to O. Mandelstam, "Chetvertaia proza."

50. Durkheim, Religious Life, pp. 236 ff., 465.

51. Geertz, "Ideology as a Symbolic System," in Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973).

52. Durkheim, Religious Life, p. 237.

53. Ibid., p. 238.

52. Durkheim, Religious Life, p. 237.

53. Ibid., p. 238.

54. SS 2, p. 320. See the epigraph at the beginning of this section.

55. "In the first place, it is easy to see that the elements by which the wish-fulfillment is expressed are represented with special intensity " (S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams [New York, 1965], p. 365). In terms of Freud's en- soft

      ergetics, the locus of the greatest repression is the locus of the greatest intensity ("damming up" in need of "discharging"). The ultimate, paradigmatic intensity is associated with the Odeipus complex: "the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex" ( Totem and Taboo [1913], Standard Edition, vol. 13, p. 156). I have added the emphasis to point to the Oedipus complex as a symbolic nexus, not a cause—a caveat in keeping with Freud's own stated intention (see his opening to chapter 4 of Totem and Taboo). Note that Freud used Durkheim's Elementary Forms of the Religious Life when composing the last chapter of Totem and Taboo ( Standard Edition, vol. 13, p. 147).

56. Cf. Khlebnikov's numerology cum astrology in Doski sud'by; and N. Gumilev's "Slovo" (1920; italics are mine): "A dlia nizkoi zhizni byli chisla, Kak domashnii pod"iaremnyi skot, Potomu chto vse ottenki smysla umnoe chislo peredaet."

57. Cf. Max Weber's fear of rationalization of social life in his "Politics as a Vocation," in Essays.

58. This metaphor comes from Thomas Carlyle's characterization of Voltaire, which was used as an epigraph to one of the first modernist declarations in Russia, N. M. Minskii's treatise In the Light of Conscience (Pri svete sovesti, 2d ed. [St. Petersburg, 1897], p. 130). Comparing a hero to a star, Carlyle maintained that if egoism were the only driving force of human action and interaction, people "would, by and by, diffuse themselves over space, and constitute a remarkable Chaos, but no habitable solar or stellar system."

59. C. Geertz, "Ideology as a Symbolic System," pp. 193-233, esp. pp. 207, 220, 231.

60. I do not mean to suggest that literature "reflects" or even "refracts" anything in society, or that it relates to society as the icing on the cake relates to its base, or that it is an autonomous, self-generated, and self-consuming endeavor. Rather, at least as far as the Mandelstam phenomenon is concerned, I approach literature as one of many significant forms of communal symbolic activity (institutional religion and political ideology are examples of others). Together and more or less mutually defined, they make up a society's symbolic culture—its view and sanction of itself. See Geertz, "Art as a Cultural System," in Local Knowledge (New York, 1983), pp. 94-120, esp. p. 99; and his "Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power," ibid., pp. 121-146. A stimulating discussion of this issue may also be found in Kenneth Burke's The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3d ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973), pp. 1-137. For a review of approaches to the problem of literature and society, particularly as it relates to Russia, see W. M. Todd's introduction to his Literature and Society in Imperial Russia: 1800-1914 (Stanford, 1978), pp. 1-5.

61. S. N. Bernshtein is reputed to have been the first to deliver a paper on Saussure's Cours. See A. A. Kholodovich, "O 'Kurse obshchei lingvistiki' F. de Sossiura," in F. de Saussure, Trudy po iazykoznaniiu, trans. and ed. A. A. Kholodovich (Moscow, 1977), p. 28n. break

62. S. N. Bernshtein, "Golos Bloka," prepared for publication by A. Ivich and G. Superfin, Blokovskii sbornik II. Trudy Vtoroi nauchnoi konferentsii, posviashchennoi izucheniiu zhizni i tvorchestva A. A. Bloka (Tartu, 1977), pp. 454-527 (quotation is from p. 458). The article was to be included in a posthumous collection of essays on Blok, Ob Aleksandre Bloke (Petrograd, 1921), but the collection appeared without it because the accompanying charts and diagrams required better printing facilities than were available at the time. Since then, fragments of the study, as Ivich and Superfin note, have been appearing in publications of the author and his students.

63. E. J. Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature: 1928-1932 (New York, 1953).

64. "Mandelstam's 'holy foolishness' [ iurodstvo ] is a sacrifice of the everyday appearance of a human being. This means that not a single granule of the effort of his will is spent outside his poetic work. . . . Everything has gone into it, and for the realm of everyday life, there has remained an eccentric man with unregulated desires, a 'madman"' (L. Ginzburg, "Iz starykh zapisei," in O starom i novom, p. 413).

65. Contemporaries were attuned to Mandelstam's reliance on attributes of verbal magic, describing his poetry as "shamanistic," "exorcist," "prayerlike," or "spellbinding" (in the etymological sense). "Osip Mandelstam used to come here [the Petersburg bohemian cabaret "The Wandering Dog"], with his narrow head of an aged youth thrown back; he used to pronounce the lines of his verse as though he were an apprentice who had learned a mighty spell" (V. Shklovskii, Zhili-byli, in SS, vol. 1: Rasskazy i povesti [Moscow, 1973], p. 84). "He sang like a shaman possessed by visions"—this about Mandelstam's reading at the "Prival komediantov" in 1917 (E. Tager, "O Mandel'shtame," Novyi zhurnal 85 [1965]: 184). "Mandelstam's nostalgic spells: 'Remain foam, Aphrodite"' (B. Livshits, Polutoroglazyi strelets [New York, 1978]). Similar statements may be found in Vl. Piast, Vstrechi (Moscow, 1929), p. 157; and G. Ivanov, Peterburgskie zimy (New York, 1952), p. 120. Blok's well-known impression of Mandelstam's performance in 1918 belongs to the same genre and resembles closely a description of a shamanistic performance. Cf. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951), pp. 140 ff. See also A. Welsh, Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics (Princeton, 1978), chapters 6 and 7; and R. C. Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton, 1960), esp. chapter 5. For a discussion of verbal magic as an element of Mandelstam's poetics, see O. Ronen, "Osip Mandel'stam * : An Ode and an Elegy" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1976), pp. 8 ff. and elsewhere. See also his "An Introduction to Mandel'stam * 's Slate Ode and 1 January 1924: Similarity and Complementarity," SH 4 (1979): 214-222. There was nothing idiosyncratic in this aspect of Mandelstam's poetry. Among his contemporaries, Sologub, Bal'mont, Belyi, and Blok, not to speak of Gumilev and Khlebnikov, took a special interest in the "magic of words." Scholarly interest in the problem, too, was quite intense. For a review of contemporary scholarship on the folk uses of verbal magic, see V. P. Petrov, continue

      "Zagovory," in Iz istorii russkoi sovetskoi fol'kloristiki, ed. A. A. Gorelov (Leningrad, 1981), pp. 77-142.

66. Discussed in W. A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven, 1983), pp. 172-174.

67. E. J. Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution (Princeton, 1973), pp. 12 ff.; and V. Katanian, Maiakovskii: Literaturnaia khronika (Moscow, 1961), pp. 417 ff. For a report of the meeting, see N. V. Reformatskaia, ed., Maiakovskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow, 1963).

68. See Elliott, The Power of Satire; Welsh, Roots of Lyric.

69. "I Shubert na vode, i Motsart v ptich'em game," SS 1: 281.

70. "10 January 1934" (1934), SS 1:289.

71. "Barsuch'ia nora" (The Badger's Hole), SS 2, p. 275.

72. D. Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol' (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 69 ff.

73. N. V. Gogol', "Neskol'ko slov o Pushkine" (A Few Words about Pushkin), SS 8, p. 50.

74. E. A. Shtakenshneider, Dnevnik i zapiski (Moscow and Leningrad, 1934), pp. 423 ff.; and A. I. Faresov, "Literator-muchenik," in his Protiv techenii: N. S. Leskov. Ego zhizn', sochineniia, polemika i vospominaniia o nem (St. Petersburg, 1904), p. 405. On "starchestvo," in particular, see N. Arseniev, Holy Moscow (London, 1940), esp. chapter 9; I. Smolitsch, Russisches Mönchtum: Entstehung, Entwicklung und Wesen, 988-1917 (Würzburg, 1953); and V. Lossky, "Les startsy d'Optino," Contacts 33 (1961): 163-176.

75. P. Brown, "Eastern and Western Christiandom in Late Antiquity: A Parting of the Ways," in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, pp. 166-195.

76. J. B. Dunlop, Starets Amvrosy: Model for Dostoevsky's Starets Zossima (Belmont, Mass., 1972).

77. H. McLean, Nikolay Leskov: Man and His Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), "The Prolog," pp. 596-610.

78. Cited in P. Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny: Opyt pravoslavnoi feoditsei v dvenadtsati pis'makh (Moscow, 1914), p. 684n. See also E. Vytorpskii, Istoricheskoe opisanie Kozel'skoi Optinoi pustyni, vnov' sostavlennoe (Troitse-Sergievskaia Lavra, 1902), p. 128; and P. Matveev, "L. N. Tolstoi i N. N. Strakhov v Optinoi pustyni," Istoricheskii vestnik 4 (1907): 151-157.

79. Iu. M. Steklov, N. G. Chernyshevskii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1928), vol. 2, p. 216 (kindly suggested by I. Paperno).

80. N. Valentinov [N. V. Vol'skii], Encounters with Lenin (London, 1968), pp. 66-68; and L. H. Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), pp. 97-103.

81. N. Riasanovsky, A Parting of Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia, 1801-1855 (Oxford, 1976); and M. Raeff, The Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia (New York, 1966) (traces alienation to the end of the eighteenth century). See also M. Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855 (Cambridge, Mass., 1961).

82. Cf. W. M. Todd III, "Institutions of Literature," in Fiction and Society continue

      in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).

83. Note that Pushkin referred to the authors of the eighteenth century Summa as "the skeptical priesthood of the Encyclopédie" (Entsiklopédii skepticheskii prichet). See also Todd, " Eugene Onegin: 'Life's Novel,"' in Literature and Society in Imperial Russia.

84. See V. R. Leikina-Svirskaia, Russkaia intelligentsiia v 1900-1917 gg. (Moscow, 1981), particularly her discussion of the Union of Unions in chapter 7 ("Intelligetsiia v revoliutsionnoi bor'be"), where she deals with the issue of exfoliation. See also J. C. McClelland, Autocrats and Academics: Education, Culture, and Society in Tsarist Russia (Chicago, 1979).

85. "While Tolstoy is alive, walking behind his plough, behind his white little horse along the furrow, the morning is dewy, fresh, unfrightening, the vampires are asleep—and thank God. Tolstoy is coming—this is the sun coming. And if the sun sets, Tolstoy dies, the last genius passes away —what then? May God grant Lev Nikolaevich a long life among us. May he know that all contemporary Russian citizens, without distinction . . . have absorbed with their mother's milk at least a small measure of his great vital force" (quoted in A. Blok, "The Sun over Russia: The Eightieth Birthday of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy" [Solntse nad Rossiei, 1908], SS 5, p. 302); italics are mine.

86. For a contemporary review of opinions concerning the effect of the "differentiation" on Russian literature, see N. Shapir, "Uchitel'stvo literatury," RM 34, no. 4 (1913), pp. 1-37 (4th pagination).

87. A. Blok, "O sovremennom sostoianii russkogo simvolizma" (On the Present State of Russian Symbolism, 1910), SS 5, p. 433.

88. Ibid.

87. A. Blok, "O sovremennom sostoianii russkogo simvolizma" (On the Present State of Russian Symbolism, 1910), SS 5, p. 433.

88. Ibid.

89. A. Blok, "Otvet Merezhkovskomu" (1910), SS 5, p. 444.

90. On the pathos of the Acmeist school as a justification of poetry, see R. Timenchik, "Tekst v tekste u akmeistov," in Tekst v tekste. Trudy po znakovym sistemam XIV (Tartu, 1981).

91. O. Mandelstam, "Gumanizm i sovremennost'" (1922), SS 2, p. 352.

92. The Prose of Osip Mandelstam (Princeton, 1967); and C. Brown, Mandelstam. On Mandelstam's early years, see also A. Morozov's publication of the diary of S. P. Kablukov, Mandelstam's older friend: A. Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika S. P. Kablukova," VRSKhD 129, no. 3 (1979): 131-155.

93. Note that the main protagonists in Pasternak's prose are never Jewish. Pasternak's attitude may be glimpsed in the name of one of Iurii Zhivago's satellites, Gordon, whose name conveniently breaks into two parts, gord and on, meaning "he is proud"—an attribute at the very bottom of the scale of values in Pasternak's famous novel. One is tempted to suspect that Mandelstam, not known for his humility, was a prototype of Gordon. Cf. Pasternak's attitude to Mandelstam's handling of the Gornfel'd affair in "Zamechaniia o peresechenii biografii." On Pasternak's attitude to Jews, see also the record of his conversations with Sir Isaiah Berlin after World War II in Berlin's Personal Impressions (New York, 1981). break

94. O. Mandelstam, The Noise of Time and "The Bloody Mysterium of January 9." See also "The Age" (1922) and "He Who Found a Horseshoe" (1923).

95. Exceptions included skilled craftsmen, professionals with higher education, and merchants whose businesses had a turnover exceeding one hundred thousand rubles. Mandelstam's father most likely belonged to either the first or the third category. See E. V. Vainshtein, Deistvuiushchee zakonodatelstvo o evreiakh: Po svodu zakonov s raziasneniiami (Kiev, 1911). See also G. N. Vetlugin, Polnaia spravochnaia kniga o pravakh evreev: S raziasneniiami, opredeleniiami i resheniiami Pravitelstvuiushchago Senata (St. Petersburg, 1913); L. Greenberg, The Jews in Russia: The Struggle for Emancipation (New York, 1976); and S. W. Baron, The Russian ews Under Tsars and Soviets (New York and London, 1975).

96. Ves' Peterburg na 1909 g. Adresnaia i spravochnaia kniga g. S.-Peterburga (St. Petersburg, 1909). See also Mandelstam's descriptions of the recitals in the Tenishev Hall in The Noise of Time.

97. The Noise of Time.

98. For an S-R, not an incompatible combination (consider the leader of the party, V. M. Chernov).

99. Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika Kablukova."

100. D. S. Mirskii, A History of Russian Literature (New York, 1973), p. 435. The Scales ( Vesy ) ceased publication in 1909, yielding its role to the new Apollon.

101. See S. N. Bulgakov, "Geroizm i podvizhnichestvo," in Vekhi: Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii, ed. M. O. Gershenzon, 3d ed. (Moscow, 1909), pp. 23-96. For a recent discussion of the notion, see P. Henry, "Imagery of Podvig and Podvizhnichestvo in the Works of Garshin and the Early Gor'kii," Slavonic and East European Review 61, no. 1 (1983): 139-159.

102. B. Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 2d ed. (Kharkov, 1926), pp. 34, 36, 97, 103. In a private letter of May 1905, E. K. Metner, who at the time served as a government censor for Nizhnii Novgorod, declared that "Kaliaev and his kind were right" and that Kaliaev struck him as a man of "very subtle character, Blok-like." See N. V. Kotrelev and R. D. Timenchik, "Blok v neizdannoi perepiske i dnevnikakh sovremennikov (1898-1921)," LN 92 (1983), bk. 3, p. 224.

103. See Viacheslav Ivanov's "O nepriiatii mira" (1906), an introduction to Georgii Chulkov's brochure O misticheskom anarkhizme (St. Petersburg, 1906).

104. The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, pp. 83-85.

105. O. Mandelstam, "Pushkin i Skriabin" (1915), SS 2. Cf. Viacheslav Ivanov's major two-volume collection of poetry, Cor ardens (1910-12).

106. The Noise of Time and NM 1. See also B. Kozmin, ed., Pisateli sovremennoi epokhi. Bio-bibliograficheskii slovar' russkikh pisatelei xx veka, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1928).

107. Mandelstam's letter to his mother (April 20, 1908), SS 4, pp. 115 ff. See also M. Karpovich, "Moe znakomstvo s Mandel'shtamom," Novyi zhurnal 49 (1957). In Paris, Mandelstam met Nikolai Gumilev, a fact, as R. Timenchik continue

      has noted, that happened to be recorded in Mandelstam's humorous lines "I v Peterburge akmeist mne blizhe, chem romanticheckii Pierro v Parizhe."

108. M. Karpovich, "Moe znakomstvo," pp. 258-261. Cited here from C. Brown, Mandelstam, p. 34.

109. Cf. the description of Mandelstam's recital in Khardzhiev's letter to B. Eikhenbaum, quoted earlier in this chapter.

110. Mandelstam was brought to Ivanov's salon, the Tower, on May 16, 1909, by a poet, Viktor Gofman. Here the two attended the eighth and last meeting of the "Academy of Poetry" (Poeticheskaia akademiia), a series of lectures on the history of poetry and versification that Ivanov had been delivering to the young poets who gathered at his salon. From that time on Mandelstam was a frequent visitor, especially during 1911, the last year before the younger poets broke away from Ivanov's tutelage. For a history of Mandelstam's relations with Viacheslav Ivanov, see A. A. Morozov, "Pis'ma O. E. Mandel'shtama V. I. Ivanovu," in Gosudarstvennaia publichnaia biblioteka SSSR imeni V. I. Lenina. Zapiski Otdela rukopisei, vol. 34 (Moscow, 1975), pp. 258-274. For a recent controversy surrounding Ivanov's influence over Mandelstam, see K. Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 83 ff.; and NM 2, pp. 30 ff.

111. Viach. Ivanov, "Avtobiograficheskoe pis'mo," SS 3, pp. 16 ff. Ivanov studied with Mommsen (beginning in 1886), it appears, at the same time as Max Weber.

112. Sociological implications of Ivanov's "mission" would make an interesting dissertation topic. The present study addresses this question only as it touches on Mandelstam. For a critical appraisal of Ivanov's work, see J. West, Russian Symbolism: A Study of Vyacheslav Ivanov and the Russian Symbolist Aesthetic (London, 1970). For a brief overview, see also S. Averintsev's introduction to Viach. Ivanov, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (Leningrad, 1976).

113. Viach. Ivanov, "Religiia Dionisa: Eia proiskhozhdenie i vliianie" (The Religion of Dionysus: Its Origins and Influence), Voprosy zhizni 6, 7 (July 1905): 185-220, 122-148. For the examples of the uses of Erwin Rohde's Psyche, see ibid., p. 196; and Frazer's New Golden Bough (New York, 1959), p. 216.

114. Viach. Ivanov, "Poet i chern"' (The Poet and the Rabble, 1904), SS 1, p. 713.

115. "O russkoi idee" (On the Russian Idea, 1909), SS 3, esp. pp. 331-333. Cf. also A. Belyi in Vesy, nos. 2 and 3 (1909). For contemporary debates concerning Vekhi and the role of religion and "obshchestvennost'," the god-builders and the god-seekers, see Vl. Kranikhfel'dt, "Literaturnye otkliki," Sovremennyi mir 8 (1909); V. A. Bazarov, "Bogoiskateli i bogostroiteli," Vershiny (1909); D. Filosofov, "Druz'ia ili vragi," RM 8 (1909); P. B. Struve, "Religiia i sotsializm," RM 8 (1909); and N. M. Minskii (Vilenkin), "Narod i intelligentsiia," RM 9 (1909). See also J. Scherrer, Die Petersburger Religiös-Philosophischen Vereinigungen: Die Entwicklung des religiösen Selbstverständnisses ihrer Intelligencija-Mitglieder (1901-1917), vol. 19 in Forschungen zur Osteuropäi - soft

      schen Geschichte (Berlin, 1973); and C. Read, Religion, Revolution, and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1900-1912 (London, 1979).

116. For a critique of the "philosophy of [ethical] norm" from a Nietzschean position, see Lev Shestov's introduction to Apofeoz bespochvennosti (Moscow, 1905), reprinted in 1911. For a contemporary reading of the book, see A. Remizov, "Po povodu knigi L. Shestova 'Apofeoz bezpochvennosti," ' RM 7 (July 1905), p. 204 (3d pagination). Mandelstam was referring to Knut Hamsun's Pan (1894). Anna Akhmatova recalled the enormous impact Hamsun had on her in 1907-8; together with Ibsen, he was the vlastitel' dum. See E. L. Mandrykina, "Iz rukopisnogo naslediia Akhmatovoi," Neva 6 (1979): 198. See also M. N. Raudar, "Obrazy severa i severnoi kul'tury v tvorchestve Anny Akhmatovoi," in Skandinavskii sbornik 24 (1981): 208-224. In his programmatic "O poezii i zaumnom iazyke" (1919), V. Shklovskii chose to draw on Hamsun's authority to legitimize the use of trans-sense language. On Minskii: Mandelstam was referring to N. M. Minskii (Vilenkin), Pri svete sovesti (1897), one of the tamer versions of Russian Nietzscheism. The central postulates of Minskii's philosophy, which he called Maeonism (from Plato's me on [nothing]), defined "maeons," or those thoughts that are supposed to liberate humanity from the burden of contradictions, as "concepts that are absolutely opposite to experience and therefore completely negative conceptions" (pp. 188 ff.). Minskii was a prominent figure in the intellectual life of St. Petersburg (in 1905 he even edited the Bolshevik paper Novaia zhizn' ). See also his Religiia budushchego: Filosofskie razgovory (St. Petersburg, 1905); and a review by Vasilii Rozanov, "Odna iz russkikh poetiko-filosofskikh kontseptsii," Zolotoe runo 7-9 (1906). For a response by Minskii, see his "Zabvennaia dusha (otvet V. Rozanovu)" in Na obshchestvennye temy (St. Petersburg, 1909).

117. Both letters are published in SS 2. See also A. Morozov, "Pis'ma Mandel'shtama Ivanovu."

118. See Mandelstam's letter to Ivanov of August 13, 1909 ( SS 3), in which the young poet attempted a mild critique of the mentor from a Nietzschean, existentialist position, at that time identified with Innokentii Annenskii and Lev Shestov, and opposed to the well-balanced books of Ivanov's metaphysics. See K. Erberg, "O vozdushnykh mostakh kritiki," Apollon 2 (1909): 54-59. See also Morozov, "Pis'ma Mandel'shtama Ivanovu," p. 259.

119. Morozov, "Pis'ma Mandel'shtama Ivanovu"; and idem, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnikah Kablukova."

120. "As to the ideas," wrote Mandelstam in 1922 about the origins of Acmeism, "they came from the very same Viacheslav Ivanov" (Mandelstam, "O prirode slova," SS 2.)

121. Viach. Ivanov, "Kop'e Afiny" (1904), SS 1, pp. 729 ff.

122. Ibid., p. 730.

121. Viach. Ivanov, "Kop'e Afiny" (1904), SS 1, pp. 729 ff.

122. Ibid., p. 730.

123. Viach. Ivanov, "Religiia Dionisa," pp. 142-148.

124. Viach. Ivanov, "Poet i chern'," SS 1, p. 713.

125. Ibid.

124. Viach. Ivanov, "Poet i chern'," SS 1, p. 713.

125. Ibid.

126. Ivanov's cycle Roza was based on Veselovskii's Poetika rozy, his programmatic poem "Ozero Nemi" on Frazer's The Golden Bough. break

127. On the legendary Tower, see O. Deshart, "Vvedenie," in Viach. Ivanov, SS 1. See also Ivanov's diaries in SS 2, pp. 771-807; and V. Piast, Vstrechi (Moscow, 1928). For a testimony to Ivanov's great influence on the younger generation, see G. Adamovich, "Viacheslav Ivanov i Lev Shestov," in his Odinochestvo i svoboda (New York, 1955), p. 254. For an opposing view, see the not entirely reliable but often verifiable memoirs of Georgii Ivanov, Peterburgskie zimy (New York, 1952), pp. 66-67.

128. For the record of the debates, see Apollon 8 and 9 (1910). Ivanov read his paper at the Obshchesvto Revnitelei Khudozhestvennogo Slova on March 26, 1910. Blok delivered his response on April 8. See Briusov's "O rechi rabskoi" in Apollon 9 (1910); and Belyi's "Venok ili venets" in the following issue.

129. See the annotations to the essay in SS 5. See also Bel'kind, "A. Blok i Viacheslav Ivanov," Blokovskii sbornik II. Trudy Vtoroi nauchnoi konferentsii, posviashchennoi izucheniiu zhizni i tvorchestva A. A. Bloka (Tartu, 1972), pp. 365-384.

130. G. G. Superfin and R. D. Timenchik, "Pis'ma A. A. Akhmatovoi k V. Ia. Briusovu," Gosudarstvennaia publichnaia biblioteka SSSR imeni V. I. Lenina. Zapiski Otdela rukopisei 32 (Moscow, 1972), pp. 272-280; Aleksandr Blok: Novye materialy i issledovaniia, LN 92 (1983), bk. 3; and G. P. Struve, Neizdannyi Gumilev (Paris, 1982).

131. LN 92 (1983), bk. 3, pp. 279-280 and 372.

132. See N. Gumilev on I. Annenskii's "Antichnyi mif v sovremennoi frantsuzskoi poezii," in N. Gumilev, SS, vol. 4: Rasskazy, ocherki, literaturnokriticheskie i drugie stat'i, "Zapiski kavalerista" (Washington, D.C., 1968), p. 330 (first published in Apollon 1-2 [1914] as "Pis'mo o russkoi poezii").

133. "We consider the word to be the creator of myth; the word, as it dies, gives birth to myth, and vice versa" (from Sadok sudei [1913], in Vl. Markov, ed., Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov, Slavische Propyläen, vol. 27 [Munich, 1967], p. 52).

134. O. Mandelstam, "O prirode slova" (discussed in chapter 6).

135. In her correspondence, Anastasiia Nikolaevna Chebotarevskaia (the wife of Fedor Sologub) reported that Osip Mandelstam, belonging as he did to a "disturbed" generation, publicly predicted the imminent demise of the Symbolists' supremacy at the editorial offices of Apollon. See LN 92 (1983), bk. 3, pp. 409-410.

136. Kablukov's diary, in Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika Kablukova."

137. Ibid.

138. Ibid.

139. Ibid.

136. Kablukov's diary, in Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika Kablukova."

137. Ibid.

138. Ibid.

139. Ibid.

136. Kablukov's diary, in Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika Kablukova."

137. Ibid.

138. Ibid.

139. Ibid.

136. Kablukov's diary, in Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika Kablukova."

137. Ibid.

138. Ibid.

139. Ibid.

140. Certificate of baptism in E. Vagin, "Mandel'shtam—khristianin XX veka," Novoe russkoe slovo (New York) 10 (December 1978).

141. R. A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion with a Special Reference to the XVII and XVIII Centuries (Oxford, 1950), pp. 513-549 and 578-592. break

142. Kablukov's diary, in Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika Kablukova."

143. "Chuvstvo sobstvennoi pravoty" (the sense of one's own rightness) functions as a crucial ingredient of the poet's biographical myth in Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoirs. Understandably, she was highly critical of The Egyptian Stamp (1928), in which the authorlike protagonist indulged in self-mockery, a sentiment quite common among the intellectuals on the eve of the Stalin revolution. By 1927 Mandelstam had earned himself a reputation as one who was "preoccupied with translations and prose" (V. Saianov, "K voprosu os sud'bakh akmeizma," Na literaturnom postu 17-18 [1927]), two genres that did not require a pose of haughty self-righteousness.

144. Cited in M. O. Chudakova, Poetika Mlikhaila Zoshchenko (Moscow, 1979), p. 25.

145. A. Lezhnev: "They [the poets] moved from the foreground of literature into the background and then disappeared in the wings entirely. In 1921 they were published on a large scale, in 1924 on a small scale, in 1926 they ceased being published at all" ("Uzel," Krasnaia nov' 8 [1926]: 230). I. Rozanov: "The center of gravity and the dominant interests have shifted from poetry to prose" ( Literaturnye otkliki [Moscow, 1923], p. 71). B. Eikhenbaum: "The problems of prose are now in the center of literature. The interest in intimate form, and in poetic speech in general, has completely disappeared" ("O Shatobriane, o chervontsakh i russkoi literature," Zhizn' iskusstva 1 [1924]: 3). Iu. Tynianov: "Three years ago, prose decisively ordered poetry to clear the premises" ("Promezhutok" [1924], in Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino, p. 168). Mikhail Kuzmin voiced a contrary opinion: "Poetry, as history, can have a wheel" ("Parnasskie zarosli," Zavtra: Literaturno-kriticheskii sbornik [Berlin, 1923], p. 122).

146. NM 1, pp. 177-188 ("Pereotsenska tsennostei"). See a typical warning in B. Ol'khovyi, "O poputnichestve i poputchikakh," PiR 6 (1929): 9: "Such a poet [Mandelstam] is no 'fellow traveler,' not even with the 'right deviation,' but a poet who represents an antipode of fellow-travelism."

147. Cf. Olesha's Zavist' (Moscow, 1927).

148. NM 1 and 2 on the "plagiarism" affair. See also "Zamechaniia o peresechenii biografii Osipa Mandel'shtama i Borisa Pasternaka," Pamiat'. Istoricheskii sbornik 4 (Moscow, 1979; Paris, 1981); and E. B. Pasternak and E. V. Pasternak, "Boris Pasternak: Iz perepiski s pisateliami," in Iz istorii sovetskoi literatury 1920-1930-kh godov, LN 93 (Moscow, 1983), pp. 678-680. For a brief chronology of the events surrounding the "affair," see Appendix I.

149. See NM 1 on Bukharin's decision to make Mandelstam a personal'nyi pensioner, i.e., a recipient of a special pension including certain nonmonetary but highly valuable privileges such as access to the special food store for high officials and free passage on city transport. See also NM 2, pp. 603 ff.; and A. Grigor'ev and I. Petrova, "Mandel'shtam na poroge tridtsatykh godov," RL V-2 (April 1977): 181-192. Thanks to Bukharin, in 1932 (or 1933) Mandelstam was able to sign a contract and receive an advance for a two-volume edition of his works (see NM 2, p. 466). break

150. The Mandelstams moved into the apartment after their return from the Crimea (NM 2, p. 466). For a supplementary record of the Mandelstams' peregrinations between the return from Armenia and the arrest and exile in 1934, see the extremely valuable recollections of B. S. Kuzin, "Ob O. E. Mandel'shtame," in VRSKhD 140, nos. 3-4 (1983): 116.

151. What makes it especially ironic is that Mandelstam's vituperations in The Fourth Prose against A. G. Gornfel'd, who accused Mandelstam of literary theft, had an anti-Semitic flavor. Consider: "This paralytic d'Anthés, this uncle Monia from the Basseinaia Street . . . Uncle Gornfel'd, why did you decide to complain in the Birzhevka, that is, The Red Evening Gazette, in the Soviet year of 1929? You would have done better to weep in the clean Jewish literary waistcoat of Mr. Propper. You would have done better to relate your misfortune to the banker with sciatic nerve, kugel, and the tallith . . ." ( SS 2, p. 185). Since it was Mandelstam, not Gornfel'd, who was in the wrong (though not to the extent claimed by Gornfel'd), the passage begins to appear doubly ironic.

152. S. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography 1888-1938 (New York, 1973), p. 276 (and broadly, chapter 9). See also R. C. Tucker, "Stalinism as Revolution from Above," and Moshe Lewin, "The Social Background of Stalinism," both in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, 1977).

153. "Zasnula chern' . . ." SS 1:163. According to the diary of S. P. Kablukov (Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika Kablukova"), this poem, which Mandelstam included in his Stone (1916), was removed by the censor. The "Harlequin" was the nickname given by the courtiers to Emperor Paul I (1796-1801), the eccentric son of Catherine II. Paul was murdered, if not on the orders then with direct knowledge of his son, the poem's other tsar, Emperor Alexander I (1801-1825). In presenting Alexander, Mandelstam was relying on the Pushkinian allegory of the Bronze Horseman seen through the prism of Innokentii Annenskii's "Petersburg" (1910): "He [the Horseman] was both terrible and daring, / But the steed let him down, / The tsar failed to crush the serpent, / And, stepped upon, it became our idol." The "beast," to rely on Mandelstam's usage (e.g., SS 3, p. 130, and "The Age"), refers most likely to the steed—Russia—who turned out to be too wild for Alexander's feeble hand. However, the word also echoes the apocalyptic euphemism for Napoleon, current during Alexander's reign. "You, Russia, who rest on stone and blood" is reminiscent of Alexander Herzen's "Petersburg was built on stone and blood" ( On the Development of the Revolutionary Ideas in Russia, in Herzen, Sochineniia, vol. 3 [1956], p. 255).

154. I am using the term in the sense it was used in R. Barthes, Mythologies (New York, 1972), esp. pp. 117-121.

1. "Dykhanie" (1909), SS 1:8. Reviewing Stone (1916), Vl. Piast wrote: "Let us see, then, what kind of poetry this eccentric poet finds appropriate to continue

      so weighty a title? [The text of "Dykhanie" follows.] Aha! We begin to guess already that the title of the book has been selected 'ad absurdum' [ ot protivnogo ]" ( Den' 20 [January 21, 1916]: 5). Piast [Pestovskii], a poet and a close friend of Blok's, knew Mandelstam very well, especially during the so-called dandyism period (1913), when the two frequented the Petersburg bohemian cabaret "Brodiachaia sobaka." See Piast's memoirs, Vstrechi (Moscow, 1929).

2. Vl. Piast (see n. 1) found in neuznavaemyi s nedavnikh por (line 10) a "certain infantile helplessness." See also C. Brown, Mandelstam (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 169-171.

3. Mandelstam's "K iubilieiu F. K. Sologuba" ( SS 2, pp. 355-357) shows his appreciation of the older poet whose Petersburg salon he frequented in the prewar and war years. One of Mandelstam's descriptions of Sologub, in fact, echoes the poem: "Sologub's poetry presupposes the existence and melting of eternal ice." Or further on: "He was born in nontime and slowly saturated himself with time, learned how to breathe, and taught how to live."

4. The rehearsed artlessness of the poem points, first of all, to Mikhail Kuzmin, an unsurpassed master of this style. The poem combines the simplistic "folk" rhyming pattern, "mismatched" with the iambic rather than the trochaic meter, and made still more unusual by slightly "off" colloquial syntax, with the most intricate internal rhyming and paronomastic play: TELO — DELAT ', S NIM —ed INYM (first stanza), R a DO st'—blago D a R it', ZHIT '—ska ZHIT e (second stanza). On Kuzmin's "handwriting." see Vl. Markov, "Poeziia Mikhaila Kuzmina," in Kuzmin, Sobranie stikhov, vol. 3 (Munich, 1977), pp. 336 ff., 343 ff., 354-358. On Kuzmin and the beginnings of Acmeism, see J. E. Malmstad, "Mikhail Kuzmin: A Chronicle of His Life and Times," in Kuzmin, Sobranie stikhov, vol. 3, pp. 132 ff. Kuzmin's elevation to stardom (Malmstad, ibid., p. 133), in fact, coincided with Mandelstam's earliest attempts at poetry while still a Tenishev student. The poem's date (1909) also may point to Kuzmin, who in the same year published his novel Nezhnyi Iosif in Zolotoe runo. A major influence on the Acmeists (see R. D. Timenchik, V. N. Toporov, and T. V. Tsiv'ian, "Akhmatova i Kuzmin," RL VI-3 [1978]), Kuzmin exemplified for Mandelstam the most precious principle of poetry—"recollection" ("K vykhodu Al'manakha muz ")—and, indeed, some of the more programmatic poems by Mandelstam echo Kuzmin distinctly. Compare Kuzmin's "Smiris', o serdtse, ne ropshchi" ( Apollon 5 [1911]) with Mandelstam's "Paden'e—neizmennyi sputnik strakha" (1912), "Zverinets" (1916), and "Grifel'naia oda" (1923). This 1911 poem by Kuzmin apparently served as a salon conversation piece in 1911—witness its repeated "appropriation" by Viacheslav Ivanov in his "Huitain" (1911?), where the first four lines serve as the epigraph as well as the first quatrain of Ivanov's poem.

5. The poem might easily have been read as a pastiche of K. Bal'mont's "Zhizn' prokhodit—vechen son": "Zhizn' prokhodit—vechen son. / Khorosho mne,—ia vliublen. / Zhizn' prokhodit—skazki net. / Khorosho mneia poet. / Dushen mir,—v dushe svezho. / Khorosho mne—khorosho." Mandelstam included this poem in the never-published Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry he was compiling in the 1920s (see the Princeton Archive). An attentive continue

      (and retentive) reader of Bal'mont, Mandelstam displayed his ambivalent attitude toward the older poet by praising his poetry as "translations which prompt one to suspect the existence of an interesting original." One comes across the traces of these "interesting originals" in Mandelstam's poetry of the Tristia period. Cf., e.g., "Ia naravne s drugimi / Khochu tebe sluzhit', / Ot revnosti sukhimi / Gubami vorozhit"' (Mandelstam) with Bal'mont's "Eshche neobkhodimo liubit' i ubivat', / Eshche neobkhodimo nakladyvat' pechat'." The similarity between the two poems goes well beyond metrics. Much of Mandelstam's "verbal magic," too, appears to be related to Bal'mont's "magic of words."

6. In a composite review, S. Gorodetskii faulted Mandelstam for his uncertain knowledge of the Russian language. See Gorodetskii, "Stikhi o voine v 'Apollone,'" Rech' 3 (November 1914).

7. Casting about for a surefire self-image of youthful poetic innocence, Mandelstam's friend Larisa Reisner (for a while an intimate friend of N. Gumilev) felt free to convert Mandelstam's "Dykhanie" into her autobiographical prose: "There is not in the entire Petersburg a single crystal window covered with virginal hoarfrost and a dense covering of snow that Hafiz [N. Gumilev] has not made opaque with his breath, forever leaving a gaping opening into emptiness in the clear frosty patterns." This autobiographical novel (1919-21), which remained unfinished, was published as Avtobiograficheskii roman in Iz istorii sovetskoi literatury 1920-1930-kh godov, LN 93 (Moscow, 1983), p. 205.

8. G. Ivanov, Peterburgskie zimy (New York, 1952), pp. 115 ff.

9. This last is all the more striking, since it appears not in the last poem (as a self-congratulation for work well done) but in the first poem of the book. By comparison, even the lapidary arrogance in the lines ending the first Stone ranks as a tentative understatement:

And the more carefully, o firmament Notre Dame,
I have been studying your monstrous ribs,
The more frequently I thought: out of the unkindly heaviness,
I, too, shall create the beautiful someday.

      ("Gde rimskii sudiia sudil chuzhoi narod" [Where the Roman judge judged an alien people, 1912], SS 1:39).

10. Reliance on the pattern of Andersen's tales was no more unusual than reliance on the patterns of Greek myths. Echoes of "The Snow Queen" can be heard in Aleksandr Blok's "Vtoroe kreshchenie" (1907), in Snezhnaia maska, and of course, in Andrei Belyi's Kubok metelei (Moscow, 1908). For the poets of Mandelstam's generation, too, "The Snow Queen" functions as an important motif. For example, in Marina Tsvetaeva's cycle "Podruga" (1914-15), ad- soft

      dressed to Sofiia Parnok: "Segodnia, chasu v vos'mom" and "Mogu li ne vspomnit' ia" (see S. Poliakova, Zakatnye ony dni: Tsvetaeva i Parnok [Ann Arbor, 1983], p. 119n. 7). Consider also Stravinsky's contemporary ballet, "Le baiser de la Fée," based on "The Snow Queen" (suggested by Robert P. Hughes).

11. NM 2, pp. 544 ff.

12. I. Annenskii, "O sovremennom lirizme," Knigi otrazhenii (Moscow, 1979), pp. 342 ff. Annenskii had in mind Briusov's poem "No pochemu temno? Goriat bessil'no svechi," from the collection Vse napevy.

13. J. Lacan, "La relation d'objet et les structures freudiennes," Bulletin de psychologie 10, no. 10 (April 1957): 602-605; and idem, "La signification du phallus: Die Bedeutung des Phallus," Ecrits (Paris, 1966), pp. 685-695. R. Barthes, S/Z. An Essay (New York, 1974), e.g., pp. 106ff. For Derrida, see his discussion of Rousseau's "Essay on the Origin of Languages" in J. Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, 1976), esp. pp. 263-268.

14. "Viacheslav Ivanov, as a poet and a theoretician, came forth during a transitional epoch for literature. One such epoch found its distinct embodiment in the ancient 'Alexandrianism.' . . . We are close to their epoch" (A. Blok, "Tvorchestvo Viacheslava Ivanova" [1905], SS 5, pp. 7 and 8). M. Kuzmin's famous cycle Aleksandriiskie pesni (The Songs of Alexandria) came out in 1906 and was "extremely well received by critics and public alike" (see Malmstad, "Mikhail Kuzmin"). See also P. P. Muratov, "Stil' epokhi," RM 31, no. 1 (1910), pp. 94-99 (14th pagination), for parallels between the 1900s and the Alexandrian epoch. This subject and the general kinship between antiquity and the present are discussed at length by V. Buzeskul, Antichnost' i sovremennost': Sovremennye temy v antichnoi Gretsii, 2d ed. (St. Petersburg, 1914); for a review of this book, see Zavety 2 (1913): 196-198.

15. Cf. A. V. Lunacharskii: "The root of art is eros even among animals" ("Taneev i Skriabin," Novyi mir 6 [1925]: 116).

16. Annenskii's 1909 article, seminal for the subsequent development of Russian poetry, served in retrospect as a critical declaration of the new Apollon, where it was published in the first three issues ( Apollon [1909] 1:12-42, 2:3-29, and 3:5-29). In particular, Annenskii's emphasis on the effectiveness of subtle poetic allusions to other poets had far-reaching implications for the poetry of Akhmatova and Mandelstam (see his treatment of Sologub). Not only was Annenskii's view substantially different from much of the Symbolist criticism, but his impressionistic manner of presentation, his emphasis on craft rather than message, and his broad scope set the tone for some of the more important essays on poetry, such as Iu. Tynianov's "Promezhutok" (1924), which would appear in years to come. See the annotations to Knigi otrazhenii, pp. 630-632. Mandelstam thought highly of Annenskii's criticism. His "Literaturnaia Moskva" and "Literaturnaia Moskva. Rozhdenie fabuly" (1922), as well as "O sovremennoi poezii. K vykhodu 'Al'manakha muz'" (1916), demonstrate his affinity with Annenskii's famous essay (the latter even in its title).

17. "Kak oblakom serdtse odeto," SS 2:457. The poem was composed no later than August 1910, when Mandelstam sent it, together with nine other continue

      poems, to Viacheslav Ivanov. See A. A. Morozov, "Pis'ma O. E. Mandel'shtama V. I. Ivanovu," in Gosudarstvennaia publichnaia biblioteka SSSR imeni V. I. Lenina. Zapiski Otdela rukopisei, vol. 34 (Moscow, 1975), pp. 270-273.

18. N. Gumilev, "Pis'mo o russkoi poezii," Apollon 1-2 (1914): 126.

19. N. Gumilev, "Pis'mo o russkoi poezii" ( Apollon 1-2 [1914]), in SS 4 (Washington, D.C., 1968), p. 327.

20. V. Khodasevich, "Literaturnyi subbotnik—o novykh stikhakh," Utro Rossii 30 (January 30, 1916): 5. My gratitude to the late G. P. Struve for providing me with this reference to Khodasevich.

21. V. Briusov, "Poetu" ("Ty dolzhen byt' gordym kak znamia"), in Vse napevy (1909); first published in Vesy 1 (1908). The lines in question read: "Byt' mozhet, vse v zhizni lish' sredstvo / Dlia iarko-pevuchikh stikhov, / I ty s bespechal'nogo detstva / Ishchi sochetaniia slov."

22. O. Mandelstam, "Kak oblakom serdtse odeto," SS 2:457. The editors' provisional date for the poem's composition, 1909-10, is indirectly substantiated by the present discussion.

23. Mandelstam and his circle were aware of the etymological reverberations of akme: akmon—Adam-kadmon—kamen'—petrus—Petersburg. As G. G. Superfin (noted in "Russkaia semanticheskaia poetika") and O. Ronen have both pointed out, the words Kamen' and Akme (the publisher of Stone ), placed one over the other on the title page of Mandelstam's first collection of poetry, were meant to emphasize Mandelstam and the movement's etymological ken. See O. Ronen, "Leksicheskii povtor, podtekst i smysl v poetike Osipa Mandel'stam * a," in Slavic Poetics: Essays in Honor of Kiril Taranovsky, ed. Roman Jakobson, C. H. van Schoneveld, and Dean S. Worth (The Hague, 1973).

24. S. Gorodetskii, "Muzyka i arkhitektura v poezii," Rech' 17 (30) (June 1913).

25. The tradition of viewing 1912 as the year of Mandelstam's transition from Symbolism to Acmeism goes back to Nikolai Gumilev's review of Kamen' I ( Apollon 1-2 [1914]: 126). See also Gumilev, SS 4, pp. 326ff.

26. Such words as "the joy of life" and the "acceptance of the world" were used by S. Gorodetskii in "Nekotorye techeniia v sovremennoi russkoi poezii," Apollon 1 (1913): 48, and, somewhat more judiciously, by N. Gumilev in his concurrent manifesto "Nasledie simvolizma i akmeizm" (ibid., p. 45). See also R. D. Timenchik, "Zametki ob akmeizme," RL 7/8 (1974).

27. Stone: The First Book of Poems ( Kamen' III) came out in 1923, that is, a year or so after Tristia (1921) and The Second Book ( Vtoraia kniga, 1922). Consisting primarily of poems composed between 1908 and 1915, it opened with "The sound, cautious and hollow" (1908, SS 1:1), and closed with the 1923 "He Who Found a Horseshoe," a penultimate poem of The Second Book. Furthermore, it contained "Not believing in the miracle of the Resurrection" (1916, SS 1 :90), "That evening, the lancet forest of the organ did not rumble" (1917, SS 1:96), and "In Petersburg, we shall gather again" (1920, SS 1:18)—all already published as part of Tristia.

28. See E. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York, 1975), pp. 6 and 174 ff.; and Nietzsche's concepts of "origin versus purpose," central to continue

      Said's critical enterprise, in Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (New York, 1969), pp. 77-78. In contrast to the Acmeist "epic" of Mandelstam and (later) of Akhmatova ( Poema bez geroiia), which conform to the pattern of "origins," the Futurist verse narratives of Khlebnikov and Maiakovskii (epics of "beginnings," in Said's terms) may be seen as an inversion of the Symbolist conception of the genre, which was largely based on the mythological poetics of Viacheslav Ivanov and which found its ultimate expression in the "trilogy" of Aleksandr Blok.

29. See, for example, A. Blok's "Dusha pisatelia" (A Writer's Soul), SS 5, pp. 369-370. This notion provides the conceptual framework for a 1972 study of Blok by D. Maksimov, "Ideia puti v poeticheskom mire Al. Bloka," in Poeziia i proza Al. Bloka (Leningrad, 1981), pp. 6-152.

30. "Barsuch'ia nora" (1923), SS 2:270 ff.

31. As it was advertised in Giperborei 2 (November 1912), the upcoming edition of Mandelstam's poetry was to be named after his 1911 poem "Rakovina" ( SS 1:26).

32. Cf. D. M. Segal's term for a specifically Mandelstamian trope, ambivalentnaia antiteza (an ambivalent antithesis), in Segal, "O nekotorykh aspektakh smyslovoi struktury 'Grifel'noi ody' O. E. Mandel'shtama," RL 2 (1972).

33. Cf. Mandelstam's criticism of Viacheslav Ivanov's weltanschauung in Across the Stars as excessively smooth: "Even ecstasy is not dangerous—because you foresee the outcome. Only the breathing of the cosmos wafts about your book, imparting to it a charm it shares with Zarathustra —compensating for the astronomical roundness of your system, which you yourself shake in the best passages of your book, indeed, shake continuously. One more feature your book shares with Zarathustra —is that each word in it fulfills its purpose with fiery hatred and hates sincerely its own place and its own neighbors" (letter to Viach. Ivanov of August 13, 1909, SS 2, pp. 486 ff.).

34. A note on translation. According to Dal"s Dictionary (St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1905), the word korabel'shchik means "owner of a merchant ship," which conforms to Pushkin's usage in Skazka o Tsare Saltane: "Korabel'shchiki v otvet." The word may, however, mean simply a seafarer, a mariner—an acceptable usage supplied by D. N. Ushakov's Dictionary (Moscow, 1935), where it is illustrated by the same line from Pushkin. Zastrel'shchik, which I translate as "vanguard soldier," constitutes, according to Dal', a term for a specially designated front-line soldier who fires the first shot at the enemy, thereby signaling to others that the battle has begun and that it is time to commence firing. In civilian usage after World War I, it designated a social, political, or industrial "activist" (Ushakov, 1935).

35. "Vysokii dom postroil plotnik diuzhii" in "Na kamennykh otrogakh Pierii" (1919), SS 1:105. Cf. Sappho's Fragment 148 in J. M. Edmonds, ed., Lyra Graeca, vol. 1 (London, 1928). For a discussion of Mandelstam's reworking of Sappho, see R. Przybylski, "Arcadia Osipa Mandelsztama," Slavia Orientalis 13, no. 3 (1964): 243-262; K. Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 83-114; and G. Levinton, "'Na kamennykh otrogakh Pierii' Osipa Mandel'shtama: Materialy k analizu," RL V-2 and V-3 (1977). break

36. Cf. Mandelstam's "Sestry—tiazhest' i nezhnost'—odinakovy vashi primety" (1920, SS 1:108), one version of which reads: "It is easier to lift a stone than to utter the word— to love." See Tristia (1922).

37. Myth-making by nominations goes back to the "mythological" school of Russian folklore, A. N. Afanas'ev and F. I. Buslaev, and further back to the theories of Max Müller. See, for example, F. I. Buslaev, "Dogadki i mechtaniia o pervobytnom cheloveke," Sochineniia, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1908), p. 111. Closer to Mandelstam, see Viach. Ivanov, "Zavety simvolizma" (1910), SS 2, pp. 593-594; and A. Belyi, Simvolizm (Moscow, 1910), p. 70 ("Emblematika smysla") and p. 448 ("Magiia slov"). Cf. also N. Gumilev: "Bozhestvennye naimenovan'ia tebe daruiutsia, poet" (Divine names are given thee, poet).

38. "Na pesn', kak na podvig, gotov." It is enlightening to juxtapose Mandelstam's podvig (ordeal) with the definition of podvizhnichestvo (an act of engaging in ordeals) offered in the Russian theological dictionary: "a type of spiritual and external exercise based on self-abnegation with the purpose of Christian self-improvement. It characterized the ascetic monks, who were not subject to specific external rules. . . . It grew particularly among the Christians of both sexes in the first and second centuries when these men and women . . . remained chaste for their entire life" ( Polnyi pravoslavnyi bogoslovskii slovar', vol. 2 [St. Petersburg, 1913], cols. 1820-1821). Unlike a heroic feat, podvig or podvizhnichestvo, especially in a stylistically or thematically sacred context, owes little to the tradition of pagan, godlike heroism with its promotion of the self. Rather, it represents essentially an act of humility before, and in the service of, a higher communal ideal. As such, it is intimately connected to the notion of sobornost' (symphony), one of the central tenets of the Russian Orthodox culture. See S. N. Bulgakov, "Geroizm i podvizhnichestvo," in Vekhi: Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii, ed. M. O. Gershenzon, 3d ed. (Moscow, 1909), pp. 23-96. For a recent discussion of the notion, see P. Henry, "Imagery of Podvig and Podvizhnichestvo in the Works of Garshin and the Early Gor'kii," Slavonic and East European Review 61, no. 1 (1983): 139-159.

39. Viach. Ivanov, "Poet i Chern"' (The Poet and the Rabble, 1904), SS 1; reprinted in Po zvezdam (1909), which Mandelstam read carefully a few months before he sent the poem under discussion to Viacheslav Ivanov. Mandelstam offered a critique of the collection in his letter to Ivanov written on August 13/26, 1909 ( SS 2, pp. 468-488). For a discussion of this letter, see chapter 1; and Morozov, "Pis'ma Mandel'shtama Ivanovu." The "wafting of the subtle cool" as a sign of approaching poetic afflatus eventually appeared in Mandelstam's poem "Na kamennykh otrogakh Pierii" (1919)—another example of his customary use of Ivanov. On the contemporary usage of "thoughtful action" [ umnoe delan'e ], see P. Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny: Opyt pravoslavnoi feoditsei v dvenadtsati pis'makh (Moscow, 1914), p. 108.

40. A. Blok, "Khudozhnik" (1912).

41. Cf. another passage from Viacheslav Ivanov: "Let us, finally, take a closer look at the process during which out of erotic ecstasy there emerges a mystical epiphany; out of this epiphany, a spiritual conception accompanied continue

      by a clear calm of an enriched, gladdened soul; out of this calm, a new musical stirring, drawing the spirit toward engendering a new form of transfiguration; out of this musical stirring, a poetic dream in which memories serve only as material for the contemplation of the Apollonian image that is to reflect itself in the word as a harmonious body of rhythmic creation; until finally, out of the desire, inflamed by the contemplation of this Apollonian image, there emerges the verbal flesh of a sonnet" (Viach. Ivanov, "O granitsakh iskusstva" [1912], SS 2, pp. 630 ff.).

42. I am using the word sacred in the Durkheimian sense (E. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life [New York, 1965], pp. 356 ff.).

43. Significantly, in discussing Viacheslav Ivanov's "Poet i Chern'" (The Poet and the Rabble, 1904), Blok emphasized the "ordeal" as central to the experience of a modern poet, who, being an "Alexandrian," represents, as it were, an anticipatory imitator of Christ: "During the period of the concealed rebellion, which made silence even deeper and in which the Word was destined to be born—could literature (itself the word) not burn itself to ashes with the inner flame?" ("Tvorchestvo Viacheslava Ivanova," SS 5, p. 7). See also Ivanov's programmatic poem "Sloki" in Prozrachnost'. Vtoraia kniga liriki (Moscow, 1904).

44. G. Levinton noted a possible connection between Blok's essay on spells and incantations and Mandelstam's poem. See Levinton's "Zametki o fol'klorizme Bloka," in Mif,fol'klor, literatura (Leningrad, 1978), p. 184n.

45. "Poeziia zagovorov i zaklinanii" and "Stikhiia i kul'tura" in A. Blok, SS 5.

46. "'Obolokus' ia obolokom, obtychus' chastymi zvezdami',—govorit zaklinatel'; i vot on uzhe mag, plyvushchii v oblake, opoiasannyi Mlechnym Putem" (A. Blok, "Poeziia zagovorov i zaklinanii," SS 5, p. 48). Cf. Levinton, "Zametki o fol'klorizme Bloka," pp. 175 and 183 ff. See also Blok: "[The poet] must possess that singular word of incantation [ zaklinanie ] which has not yet become a 'lie' " ("Tvorchestvo Viacheslava Ivanova," SS 5, pp. 9 ff.).

47. G. Ivanov ( Novyi zhurnal 43 [1955]: 276) noted Mandelstam's early interest in theosophy ( zaigryval s teosofiei ), which makes Mandelstam similar to Gumilev in this respect (see V. Nevedomskaia, "Vospominaniia o Gumileve," Novyi zhurnal 38 [1954]: 190); Gumilev's poetry often makes use of the metempsychosis formula and astral symbolism (e.g., "Zabludivshiisia tramvai" and "Zvezdnyi uzhas"). In the early 1920s Mandelstam became a harsh opponent of theosophy as a "vulgar materialism," echoing Vl. Solov'ev's critique, which in turn invoked Hegel's schlechte Unendlichkeit. See "O prirode slova," SS 2, p. 243. See also O. Ronen, "Osip Mandel'stam * : An Ode and an Elegy," (Ph.D. diss. Harvard University, 1976), p. 18n.

48. Noted by I. Annenskii, "O sovremennom lirizme" (1909), in Knigi otrazhenii (Moscow, 1979), p. 361.

49. Mandelstam, SS 2, pp. 302, 305. Written in 1910, perhaps as a term paper, the essay was published in the fourth issue of Apollon for 1913 and must be seen as a serious, declarative statement, since the preceding issue contained the Acmeist manifestos of the poet's two comrades-in-arms, Nikolai Gumilev continue

      and Sergei Gorodetskii. Very close to them in letter and spirit but composed much earlier, it may have served as the Acmeist answer to the Futurists' backdating of their "birthday." On this anxiety of priority among the younger generation, see V. Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), p. 135; and R. D. Timenchik, "Zametki ob akmeizme," RL 7/8 (1974): 25 n. 7. The essay concludes the 1928 collection of Mandelstam's critical prose ( O poezii ), which indicates that the poet assigned it a programmatic significance even at that late date.

50. Viach. Ivanov, "Kop'e Afiny" (1904, 1909), SS 1, p. 733.

51. A. Blok, "Na pole Kulikovom." Cf. the common "Mother-Russia."

52. S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: 1980).

53. V. Khodasevich, "Literaturnyi subbotnik," p. 6.

54. D. Vygodskii, "Poeziia i poetika: Iz itogov 1916 g.," Letopis' 1 (1917): 251-252. The one poet Vygodskii singled out for praise was V. Maiakovskii ("Prostoe kak mychanie"). See also a review of Stone II in Letopis' 5 (1916): 288-289, where Stone was described as "a lifeless jewel." Vestnik znaniia reviewed Stone together with Lyrika, by Grigorii Aronson, arriving at the conclusion that the two books "were equal before the Muse": "Those who like subtle poetry designed to impress with its style, abstract feelings, salon sophistication, humor du belle esprit will prefer the artistry of Mandelstam; those who are more captivated by the tender melancholy of autumnal landscapes and the elegiac voluptuousness of autumnal skies will prefer the sensitive Aronson" (anonymous reviewer, Vestnik znaniia 5-6 [1916]: 379).

55. V. Zhirmunskii, "Preodolevshie simvolizm" (1916), in Voprosy teorii literatury (Leningrad, 1928), p. 305.

56. "Ia vzdragivaiu ot kholoda" (1912), SS 1:28; "Ia nenavizhu svet" (1912), SS 1:29; and "Otravlen khleb i vozdukh vypit" (1913), SS 1:54.

57. V. Gal'skii (Vadim Shershenevich, the future leader of the Russian Imagists) wrote in 1916: "One supposes that O. Mandelstam has something to say; but for some reason he does not want to be convincing. In order to affect the reader, to force him to submit, one of two things is necessary: you have to be either sincere or powerful. Mr. Mandelstam lacks sincerity; as to power, he does not have it yet" ("O. Mandel'shtam. Kamen'. Stikhi" [review], Novaiia zhizn': Literaturno-obshchestvennyi al'manakh 4 [Moscow, 1916]: 188).

58. A. Blok, "Pis'ma o poezii" (1908), SS 5, pp. 277-302, esp. pp. 277 ff. Note that the poet whom Blok selected as a negative example of the value of "sincerity" in poetry was N. M. Minskii, a Symbolist of the older generation and, like Mandelstam, a Jew. One can only wonder how Blok, who was prone to anti-Semitism, would have reacted to Minskii's "confessions." Mandelstam's letter to V. V. Gippius (April 9/27, 1908) reveals that the young poet took special care not to be identified with Minskii for reasons that perhaps had less to do with Minskii's philosophy than he wished to suggest: "Oh, do not worry, this is not 'maeonism,' and, in general, I have nothing in common with Minskii" ( SS 2, p. 484).

59. W. M. Todd III, " Eugene Onegin: 'Life's Novel,"' in Literature and Society in Imperial Russia: 1800-1914, ed. W. M. Todd III (Stanford, 1978), continue

      pp. 203-236. See also his 'Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich," in The Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. Victor Terras (New Haven, 1985).

60. As viewed by the Symbolist theurgists, poetry was to bring a new religion into the world, a task hardly compatible either with deception or with a conventionalized attitude toward verbal art.

61. "Ia znaiu, chto obman v videnii ne myslim" (1911), SS 4:507.

62. Zinaida Gippius, after the initial cool reception, promoted Mandelstam in the early 1910s, to which the unfortunate nickname amply testifies (NM 2, p. 34). See also A. Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika S. P. Kablukova," VRSKhD 129, no. 3 (1979): 137-139.

63. Blok's letter to Belyi (June 6, 1911), SS 8, p. 344.

64. First pointed out by O. Ronen in "Mandel'shtam, Osip Emilyevich," Encyclopaedia Judaica: Year Book 1973 (Jerusalem, 1973).

65. "Iz omuta zlogo i viazkogo" and "V ogromnom omute prozrachno i temno" (1910), SS 1:17 and 18. The last stanza of the first poem appeared in the 1911 Apollon (no. 5) selections from Mandelstam but was omitted in subsequent publications.

66. The central image may be traced to Viacheslav Ivanov's translation of Baudelaire's "Les phares," "Maiaki" (1905), which reads in part: "O Vinchi—zerkalo v ch'em omute bezdonnom / Mertsaiut angely, ulybchivonezhny, / Luchem bezglasnykh tain, v zatvore, ograzhdennom / Zubtsami gornykh l'dov i sumrachnoi sosny. . . . (Viach. Ivanov, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy [Leningrad, 1976], p. 14). Mallarmé's "Hèrodiade" may have served as an additional source, judging by Mandelstam's use of the famous poem in his "Solominka" I and II.

67. Golos zhizni 25 (June 17, 1915). The text of the poem was recorded in the 1910 entry in Kablukov's diary (Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisniakh dnevnika Kablukova"), which was published after the appearance of the articles by Omry Ronen ("Mandel'shtam, Osip Emilyevich") and Kiril Taranovsky ("The Black-Yellow Light: The Jewish Theme in Mandel'stam * 's Poetry," in Essays on Mandel'stam * ). As a result, the two scholars used the journal publication as the date of the poem's composition. What seems to have prompted Mandelstam to "resurrect" the poem in 1915 was the death of Skriabin in April of that year. Mandelstam associated the event with a whole complex of ideas concerning "Christian culture." Some of the poem's images, such as the ring of the Roman Guard around the Cross, resurfaced in drafts of Mandelstam's essay "Pushkin i Skriabin" (1915). See SS 4, p. 100.

68. "Neumolimye slova . . . Okamenela Iudeia," Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1973). The American edition of Mandelstam has "Neutolimye," which carries a different meaning—"unquenchable," rather than "implacable." The version printed in Stikhotvoreniia coincides with the autograph copy of the poem in Kablukov's diary. See Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika Kablukova."

69. F. Tiutchev, "Pevuchest' est' v morskikh volnakh." K. Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * , p. 53.

70. F. Tiutchev, "O veshchaia dusha moia." On the uses of Tiutchev in continue

      Mandelstam, see E. Toddes, "Tiutchev i Mandel'shtam," International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 17 (1974).

71. In Russian Orthodox culture, the distinction between the Old and the New Testament as between "Law" and "Grace" (based on Paul's Epistle to the Galatians and later developed by Augustine) goes back to the famous twelfth-century sermon by the Metropolitan Hilarion, "Slovo o zakone i blagodati," and, further, to the so-called Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews. Mandelstam was no doubt familiar with Hilarion's "sermon" from his days at the Tenishev School.

72. V. Dal' lists yet another Russian saying under the omut entry: "In a pool—that's where the water demon [ vodianoi ] lives." In 1919 Mandelstam reversed the image, using it in a positive association with Christianity, this time as a religion not opposed to "the Law" but encompassing it (hence the sheep-dogs and the shepherd-kings of the Old Testament). This poem, "V khrustal'nom omute kakaia krutizna!" (How precipitous is this crystal pool! SS 1:106), is obviously related directly to the triptych and, even more specifically, to "V ogromnom omute prozrachno i temno" (The enormous pool is limpid and dark).

73. Cf. Mandelstam's "feminine" self-presentation as a "shell without pearls" in "Rakovina" (1911, SS 1:26), a poem under whose title Mandelstam's first book of poetry was originally advertised in Giperborei 2 (November 1912).

74. "In a white corolla of roses, ahead [of them] is Jesus Christ." Mandelstam uses venchik (corolla) in a similar context in a poem dedicated to S. P. Kablukov and written at the same time as the cycle under discussion. See "Ubity med'iu vechernei," SS 2:457kh. For an analysis of this image in Blok, see S. Hackel, The Poet and the Revolution: Alexander Blok's "The Twelve" (Oxford, 1975), pp. 118-143. As Hackel points out (p. 119n. 3), the "femininity" of Blok's Christ had been noted in earlier criticism by R. Poggioli, A. E. Gorelov, and R. Przybylski. See also L. Dolgopolov, Poema Aleksandra Bloka "Dvenadtsat "' (Leningrad, 1979), pp. 66-72. Pavel Florenskii's Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny contains a learned digression—including a bibliography of literature on the subject—on the nature of the nimbus (pp. 672-674).

75. Vl. Solov'ev, "Poeziia Ia. P. Polonskogo. Kriticheskii ocherk" (1896), SS 7, p. 330. The subject is discussed more fully in "Zhiznennaia drama Platona" and "O smysle liubvi," where Solov'ev, relying on Genesis 1:27 ("Male and female created he them"), attempts to demonstrate the androgynous nature of God ( SS 9). Solov'ev's theory of eros became a matter of public discussion precisely in 1910. See S. N. Syromiatnikov, "Liubov' u Vladimira Solov'eva," Novoe vremia (May 9, 1910).

76. "Kak oblakom serdtse odeto," SS 2:457 ts. Cf. also "Dykhanie" (1909, SS 1:8), the opening poem of the first Kamen' (1913).

77. Vl. Solov'ev, "Zhiznennaia drama Platona," SS 9, pp. 226-228. Much of Solov'ev's discussion is based on Diotima's speech in Plato's Symposium, and it is worth mentioning that Viach. Ivanov's wife, Zinovieva-Annibal, was known to the family's acquaintances by the name of Socrates' wise teacher. break

78. The Russian rodimyi carries both connotations and is frequently used as an adjective of endearment. Cf. Tiutchev's usage in "Vetr nochnoi," with which Mandelstam was thoroughly familiar and which he employed in "Khaos iudeiskii," a chapter in Shum vremeni.

79. Cf. Mandelstam's "Erfurtskaia programma," a chapter in Shum vremeni. One of many examples of Mandelstam's familiarity with Nietzsche is found in his letter to Viacheslav Ivanov, written on August 13/26, 1909 ( SS 2, pp. 486-488).

80. See "Le destin: Mandelstam poète et martyr de son temps," chapter 1 of N. Struve, Ossip Mandelstam (Paris, 1982). The two parts of this title do go very well together.

81. See, for example, G. Levinton and R. D. Timenchik, "Kniga K. F. Taranovskogo o poezii O. E. Mandel'shtama," RL VI-2 (1978). Very interesting in this regard are the recently published memoirs of Mandelstam's 1930s friend B. S. Kuzin. He wrote: "Had I continued my acquaintance with N. Ia. [Mandelstam], then I would have inevitably come in contact with those who are creating—I can't find a better word—the cult of Mandelstam. I like neither salons nor cults. I want to retain my memory of O. E. [Mandelstam] as my dearest friend. The object of a cult, ipso facto, is not a friend" (Kuzin, "Ob O. E. Mandel'shtame," VRSKhD 140, nos. 3-4 [1983]: 128).

82. Weber defined the sentiment experienced by followers of a charismatic personality as "devotion to the extraordinary and unheard-of, to what is strange to all rule and tradition and which therefore is viewed as divine" ( Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills [New York, 1958], p. 249).

1. The review may have been arranged by Vladimir Piast, a frequent contributor to the newspaper and at that time a close friend of Osip Mandelstam. See Vl. Piast, Vstrechi (Moscow, 1929). See also Blok's diaries for October 26, 1911: "In the evening we are having tea at 'Kvisiani'—myself, Piast, and Mandelstam (the eternal) [ sic ]" (A. Blok, SS 7, p. 78; see also p. 150).

2. For biographical information on Mandelstam circa 1913, see Kablukov's "Diary" (A. Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika S. P. Kablukova," VRSKhD 129, no. 3 [1979]); Piast's Vstrechi; Kuzmin's Plavaiushchieputeshestvuiushchie; Tager's "Vospominaniia":, and Timenchik's "Zametki ob akmeizme" ( RL 7/8 [1974]).

3. Cf. Viacheslav Ivanov's first book of poetry, Guiding Stars (1901), and his first book of essays. Across the Stars (1909). See also the polemics around the closure of The Divine Comedy in Trudy i dni (1912). On the stars as an ambivalent image in Mandelstam, see NM 1, p. 215; and L. Ginzburg, "Poetika Osipa Mandel'shtama" (1966), contained in both O lirike, 2d ed. (Leningrad, 1974), and O starom i novom (Leningrad, 1982). Cf. further Maiakovskii, "Na smert' Esenina"; Akhmatova, "Vse dushi milykh na vysokikh zvezdakh" (1921); or Mandelstam, "Mne v serdtse dlinnoi bulabkoiu opustitsia vdrug continue

      zvezda" ("Ia vzdragivaiu ot kholoda," 1912); "Zolotye zvezdy v koshel'ke" ("Zolotoi," 1912); "No razve tak zvezda mertsaet" ("Na strashnoi vysote bluzhdaiushchii ogon'," 1918); "Grifel'naia oda" (1923); "1 ianvaria 1924" (1924); "Stilhi o neizvestnom soldate" (1937). Omry Ronen deals extensively with the star symbolism in Mandelstam's poetry. See his ("K siuzhetu 'Stikhov o neizvestnom soldate' Mandel'shtama," SH 4 [1979], pp. 214 ff.), where he links Mandelstam's early usage of the image to H. G. Wells's story "The Crystal Egg." See also Wells's The Star. For a more extensive treatment of the theme, see O. Ronen, "Osip Mandel'stam * : An Ode and an Elegy" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1976), pp. 108-111; and idem, An Approach to Mandel'stam * (Jerusalem, 1983), pp. 61-74. I briefly return to this subject in chapter 6.

4. "Ia nenavizhu svet" (1912), SS 1:29.

5. Among the Greeks, Silenus, a satyr, was known as a tutor to the young Dionysus—an unequivocal invitation to read the tragedy in the Nietzschean key.

6. This image may have been retrospectively interpreted in terms of the famous painting by Leon Bakst, Terror antiquus (1909), and an analysis of it performed by Viacheslav Ivanov in his essay "Drevnii uzhas" (1909).

7. "Innokentii Annenskii, Famira-kifared. Vakkhicheskaia drama" (1913), SS 2, p. 416. Mandelstam's comments elsewhere about Annenskii have been used to define Mandelstam's own work. In the same review, insisting that Thamyris was for reading rather than seeing, Mandelstam declared incredulously: "Why, indeed, should the cymbals and the flute that had been transformed into words be returned to the primordial state of sound?" In his "Silentium" (1909), Mandelstam called for the opposite in nearly the same words. See also "O prirode slova," where he uses allusions to his own poetry to describe Annenskii ( SS 2, pp. 252-253), and "Pis'mo o russkoi poezii," where he presents Annenskii as an ideal "organic poet" in order to give historical legitimacy to his own views ( SS 3, pp. 34-35).

8. N. Gumilev, "Nasledie simvolizma i akmeizm," S. Gorodetskii, "Nekotorye techeniia v sovremennoi russkoi poezii" (both appeared in Apollon 1 [1913]); and Mandelstam's "Utro akmeizma" ( SS 2, pp. 320-325). Mandelstam's essay was written, most likely, around the same time as Gumilev's and Gorodetskii's but was not published until 1919 during the Acmeists' second major attempt to outbid the Futurists for the leading role in poetry.

9. Okhrannaia gramota, SS 3, p. 273 (quoted in the epigraph to this section). Maiakovskii's Vladimir Maiakovskii: A Tragedy in Two Acts with a Prologue and an Epilogue was staged in Petersburg in December 1913. See V. Katanian, Maiakovskii (Moscow, 1961), pp. 50 ff.

10. Cf. Ivanov's treatment of the Promethean myth: "Prometheus's hope that he would be redeemed by Dionysus is the hope for the triumph of the Dionysian essence in human nature. Calling forth into being the tribe of man, he (Prometheus) knows that he will be crucified, and nevertheless trusts that he will be saved by it [crucifixion]. Such is his sacrificial humility in rebellion and conflict; such is his self-exhaustion [ samoistoshchenie; literally, "kenosis"] in hate and in love" (Viach. Ivanov, "O deistvii i deaistve" [On Action and continue

      Agon], SS 2, p. 168). The essay was composed in 1919 to serve as a foreword to Ivanov's tragedy Prometheus. See also his "O sushchestve tragedii" (On the Nature of Tragedy, 1912), where Ivanov gives a "Pauline" gloss to tragedy; and a postscriptum, "O liricheskoi teme" (On the Lyric Theme), where Ivanov makes a distinction between "triadic" ("Apollonian") and "diadic" ("Dionysian") types of lyric poetry. The Acmeists tended to cultivate the latter type (viz. "vos'mistishiia" octets). See also T. Zielinski (F. F. Zelinskii), Iz zhizni idei. Cf. R. D. Timenchik, "Zametki ob akmeizme II," RL V-3 (1977).

11. According to Ivanov, a "diadic," Dionysian lyric poet "intentionally avoids the ultimate reconciling harmony in order to achieve a greater effectiveness for his sounds which must for a long time continue to create tension in and overwhelm the soul of the listener until by fully experiencing them [the sounds of a poem] he [the listener] perceives their cathartic strength" [italics are mine] ("O liricheskoi teme," SS 2, p. 204). See also the preceding note.

12. See Piast's essay "O chtenii Blokom stikhov" (in Ob Aleksandre Bloke [Petrograd, 1921]), in which he discusses Blok's stage training as well as the interest professional actors showed in Blok's recitals.

13. Writers for whom this issue was crucial include: Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Ivanov, Blok, Eikhenbaum, Tynianov.

14. Popularity of Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" among the Acmeists is noted in Levin et al., "Russkaia semanticheskaia poetika kak potentsial'naia kul'turnaia paradigma," RL 7/8 (1974). Mandelstam's interest in Vico's theory of history (see NM 1) should be seen in a similar light.

15. Viach. Ivanov, "O sushchestve tragedii."

16. A. N. Veselovskii, "Tri glavy iz istoricheskoi poetiki," in Istoricheskaia poetika (Moscow, 1940).

17. See, for example, Blok's speeches on the death of Komissarzhevskaia and Vrubel' (1910), as well as Mandelstam's "Komissarzhevskaia" (a chapter in his Shum vremeni [1925], in SS 2).

18. A similar fusion of theatrical convention with the motif of Christian redemption informs "Hamlet," the opening poem of the Zhivago cycle in Pasternak's eponymous novel. On the "theatrical" aspect of Pasternak's "poet," see Michel Aucouturier, "The Legend of the Poet and the Image of the Actor in the Short Stories of Pasternak," Studies in Short Fiction 3 (1966): 225-235; see also his "The Metonymous Hero, or the Beginnings of Pasternak the Novelist," Books Abroad 44 (Spring 1977): 222-227. See also N. A. Nilsson, "Life as Ecstasy and Sacrifice: Two Poems by Pasternak," Scando-Slavica 5 (1959).

19. Such a leader "knows only inner determination and only inner restraint. The holder of charisma seizes the task that is adequate for him and demands obedience and a following by virtue of his mission. . . . If they [the followers] recognize him, he is their master—so long as he knows how to maintain recognition by 'proving' himself. But he does not derive his 'right' from their will, in the manner of an election. Rather, the reverse holds: it is the duty of those to whom he addresses his mission to recognize him as their charismatically qualified leader" (Weber, Essays in Sociology [New York, 1958], pp. 246 ff.). break

20. "O sobesednike" (1914), SS 2, p. 234.

21. Weber, Essays, p. 249.

22. For example, Iu. Tynianov, "Literaturnyi fakt" (1924) and "O literaturnoi evoliutsii" (1927), in Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino (Moscow, 1977); or Boris Eikhenbaum's introduction to Anna Akhmatova: Opyt analiza (Petersburg, 1923) and his emphasis on the Acmeists' choice of Annenskii as a representative of the earlier, "pure" modernism that was overrun, as it were, by the later offsprings of the movement, the Symbolist theurgists (pp. 25 ff.).

23. Concerning the plans of the Acmeists to enroll Briusov's support for their literary assault, see G. Superfin and R. Timenchik, "Pis'ma A. Akhmatovoi k V. Ia. Briusovu," in Gosudarstvennaia publichnaia biblioteka SSSR imeni V. I. Lenina. Zapiski otdela rukopisei, vol. 32 (Moscow, 1972), pp. 272-280. See also N. Gumilev, Neizdannye stikhi i pis'ma (Paris, 1980), especially Gumilev's correspondence with Briusov (letters 44 ff.).

24. It is no accident that among the major poets of modern Russia, Briusov was the only one who held a regular, salaried position in publishing—moreover, publishing of fiction and poetry. Money, particularly in the form of a regular salary, together with professional loyalty to a "worldly" literary institution, ran contrary to any pretension to a poet's "prophetic" calling. See Max Weber, Charisma and Institution Building (New York, 1968), p. 55, on Stefan George and his circle.

25. On Annenskii and his increasing influence and visibility in the late 1900s, see R. Timenchik, "Zametki ob akmeizme III" RL IX-2 (1981); Superfin and Timenchik, "Pis'ma A. Akhmatovoi"; and S. Driver, "Acmeism," Slavic and East European Journal 2 (1968).

26. "Poet" ("Poka ne trebuet poeta").

27. I. Annenskii, "Tragediia Ippolita i Fedry" (1902), in Knigi otrazhenii (Moscow, 1979), pp. 383-384, reprinted from Annenskii's translations of Euripides ( Teatr Evripida. Polnyi stikhotvornyi perevod I. F. Annenskogo, vol. 1 [St. Petersburg, 1908], pp. 329-349).

28. "Marble fly" was Velemir Khlebnikov's nickname for the author of Stone. See L. Brik, "Maiakovskii i chuzhie stikhi. Iz vospominanii," Znamia 3 (1940): 182.

29. B. Livshits, Polutoroglazyi strelets (New York, 1978; reprint of the 1933 Moscow edition), pp. 2-34. See also Vl. Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968). Cf. Mandelstam's declaration that Acmeism traces its genealogy to the "Romance soil circa 1200" ("Utro Acmeisma," SS 2, p. 325).

30. For example, El. Kuzmina-Karavaeva's book of poetry Skifskie cherepki or Mandelstam's poem of the period "O vremenakh prostykh i grubykh" (1914, SS 1:60). See V. Galakhov (V. V. Gippius), "Tsekh poetov," Zhizn', vol. 5 (Odessa, 1918), p. 12. Cited in R. D. Timenchik, "Zametki ob akmeizme," p. 34.

31. Viach. Ivanov, "Orfei," Trudy i dni 1 (January-February 1912): 63.

32. In 1911, Mandelstam produced what appears to be a cycle of love continue

      poems, none of which he included in any of the three editions of Stone. See SS 1:156, 1:175, 1:241, 4:510, 4:509, and possibly 4:506.

33. Annenskii, Knigi otrazhenii, p. 395. In his introduction to Teatr Evripida (vol. 1, p. vi), Annenskii wrote that in his prefaces to each tragedy he "sometimes had to touch on social and political themes."

34. See Anastasiia Chebotarevskaia's letter to Viacheslav Ivanov (January 21, 1913) in LN 92 (1983), bk. 3, pp. 409 ff.

35. G. Ivanov, Peterburgskie zimy (New York, 1952), p. 125. See also Mandelstam's humorous poem "V deviatsot trinadtsatom, kak iabloko rumian" (November-December 1913), which attributes the following sins to the son born of "monstrous parents": pawning family silver and clothes and running up fantastic debts with the "money changers" ( SS 1:421).

36. Vl. Maiakovskii, Oblako v shtanakh (1914-15).

37. A quarter of a century later, these "twenty-two-year-olds" would be parading as gassed soldiers, cripples, convicts, and ghosts in Mandelstam's own final "accounting"—his "Verses on the Unknown Soldier: An Oratorio" (Stikhi o neizvestnom soldate, 1937).

38. N. Gumilev, "Nasledie simvolizma i akmeizm," Apollon 1 (1913): 43-44.

39. Mandelstam, "Utro akmeizma" (1912-13?), SS 2, p. 232.

40. "O sobesednike" (1914), SS 2, pp. 234, 235, 239. Mandelstam's attitude to S. Nadson (1862-87) was not a simple one. The ridicule to which he subjected the "martyr" of the 1880s in The Noise of Time contains more than a grain of self-parody, coming as it did from a poet who was accustomed to commanding audiences in a similar way. It is significant that Mandelstam's "Za gremuchuiu doblest' griadushchikh vekov" (1931) was composed in the "key" of Nadson's "Ver', nastanet pora i pogibnet Vaa . " In The Noise of Time he chose this very poem as an emblem of "Nadsonovism" ("nadsonovshchina s ee idealom i Vaalom"). According to recently published memoirs of S. Lipkin, Mandelstam was aware of the echo (see S. Lipkin, "Ugl', pylaiushchii ognem," in Vnutrennie protivorechiia 7 [1984]).

41. Mandelstam, "Petr Chaadaev" (1914), SS 2, pp. 290-292.

42. "Posokh" (1915), SS 1:69. Cf. Viach. Ivanov, "Lira i os"' (1914); S. Gorodetskii, "Posokh" (addressed to Mandelstam); A. Pushkin, "V evreiskoi khizhine lampada." Mandelstam's "Petr Chaadaev" helps to elucidate many images in this poem. Even though his name is never mentioned, the essay owes much to Alexander Herzen, who was able to transform what was a sad necessity for Chaadaev (Russia's "ferity") into a blessing and a virtue of freedom. See especially Herzen's From the Other Shore and On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia. For a Chaadaevian subtext, see G. P. Struve, "Ital'ianskie obrazy v poezii Osipa Mandel'shtama," Studi in onore di Ettore Lo Gatto e Giovanni Maver (Rome, 1962).

43. See also S. Freud, "The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words" (1910), Standard Edition, vol. 11.

44. Euripides, Hippolytos, griechisch und deutsch von U. von Wilamowitz- hard

      Moellendorff (Berlin, 1891); cited in Annenskii, Knigi otrazhenii, p. 396. A. W. Schlegel, Comparaison entre "Phèdre" de Racine et celle d'Euripide (Oxford, 1962; reprint of the 1807 Paris edition), p. 104.

45. Annenskii, "Tragediia Ippolita i Fedry," in Knigi otrazhenii, pp. 296 ff.

46. According to Nadezhda Mandelstam (NM 2, p. 121), this presentation did indeed take place (she is less sure in her first book, NM 1, p. 182). However, according to the list of the meetings of the Assembly compiled by J. Scherrer ( Die St. Petersburger Religiös-Philosophischen Vereinigungen [Berlin, 1973]), it did not. I find it quite plausible, however, that Mandelstam read the paper for a similar audience in a different gathering. For discussion of the paper, see C. Brown, Mandelstam (Cambridge, 1973); NM 1 and NM 2 (especially the chapter "The Young Levite"); N. Struve, Ossip Mandelstam (Paris, 1982); and J. G. Harris's introduction and annotations to "Pushkin and Skriabin" (Mandelstam, Complete Critical Prose and Letters [Ann Arbor, 1979]).

47. Out of nine sessions of the St. Petersburg Religious-Philosophical Assembly between November 1914 and April 1915, at least eight were devoted to Russian nationalism. The first wartime session (November 26, 1914) centered on two papers, A. A. Meier's "The Religious Meaning of Messianism" (Religioznyi smysl messianizma) and D. S. Merezhkovskii's "On the Religious Lie of Nationalism" (O religioznoi lzhi natsionalizma); the third focused on Zinaida Gippius's "History in Christianity," the fifth on a discussion of the first two sessions. At the sixth session, S. M. Solov'ev read his "On Contemporary Patriotism"; and at the seventh, S. I. Gessen's "The Idea of a Nation" was discussed. The last two sessions were devoted to a reading and discussion of D. M. Koigen's "Gosudarstvo i religiia." The season of 1915-16 dealt with church reform, the "struggle for religious consciousness," the Resurrection, and the issue of church and state. See Zapiski S. Peterburgskogo [ Petrogradskogo ] religiozno-filosofskogo obshchestva 6 (1915). For a history of the society, see J. Scherrer, Die St. Petersburger Religiös-Philosophischen Vereinigungen.

48. For a discussion of change in Mandelstam's prose, see N. Berkovskii, "O proze Mandel'shtama," in Tekushchaia literatura (Moscow, 1930); Mirskii's review of Shum vremeni in Blagonamerennyi (Brussels, 1926); C. Brown, Mandelstam; Nadezhda Mandelstam's discussion of The Egyptian Stamp in her memoirs; J. G. Harris, "Autobiographical Theory and the Problem of Aesthetic Coherence in Mandelstam's The Noise of Time," Essays in Poetics 9, no. 2 (1984); C. Izenberg, "Associative Chains in Egipetskaia marka," RL V-3 (1977); G. Freidin, "The Whisper of History and the Noise of Time in the Writings of Osip Mandelstam," The Russian Review 37, no. 4 (1978). See also D. M. West, Mandelstam: The Egyptian Stamp, Birmingham Slavonic Monographs, no. 10 (1980), pp. 5 ff., 27.

49. "Buria i natisk" (1922), SS 2, pp. 341, 343. What Mandelstam called the "dropsy of grand themes" found an echo in Boris Eikhenbaum's characterization of Russian Symbolism and its affliction as "thematic extensification" ( Anna Akhmatova, pp. 8 ff., 29 ff.).

50. Viach. Ivanov, "Vzgliad Skriabina na iskusstvo" ( SS 3, pp. 172-189), where it was published for the first time. The editors cite the author's continue

      note: "Read at concert-assemblies of the Skriabin Society in Petrograd in December 1915, and in Moscow in January 1916, and also in Kiev in April 1916" ( SS 3, p. 736). In December 1915, Mandelstam was in Petrograd; in January 1916, he was in Moscow, where he had a long visit with Viacheslav Ivanov (see A. Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika Kablukova"). There is therefore little likelihood that he missed Ivanov's lecture. Those who like coincidences will appreciate that the fifteen-year-old Nadezhda Khazina attended Viacheslav Ivanov's lecture in Kiev (NM 2, p. 451).

51. V. V. Gippius, Pushkin i khristianstvo (Petrograd, 1915). A sympathetic, though not uncritical, review of Gippius by B. Griftsov appears in RM 37, no. 1 (1916), pp. 1-2 (3d pagination). For Blok's response to the pamphlet, see Blok's letter to Gippius of October 20, 1915 (Blok, SS 8, p. 444). Mandelstam maintained close contact with Gippius, who was a regular participant in the sessions of The Poets' Guild all through the early 1910s, and he could not have remained unaware of this, his teacher's, profession de foi. Mandelstam emphasized Gippius's influence on his intellectual development by devoting to him "In a Fur Coat Above His Station," the last chapter of his autobiographical The Noise of Time. We can judge the extent to which Mandelstam identified with Gippius by his choice of the synecdoche "fur coat," which he often applied to himself (see chapter 7).

52. V. Rozanov's "O sladchaishem Iisuse i gor'kikh plodakh mira" (1907), a part of Temnyi lik (1911), is another important work in the background of Mandelstam's "Pushkin and Skriabin." See V. Rozanov, Temnyi lik: Metafizika khristianstva (Würzburg, 1975; reprint of the 1911 St. Petersburg edition).

53. Vl. Solov'ev, "Sud'ba Pushkina" (Pushkin's Fate, 1897). For example, Solov'ev ( SS 9, p. 36) attributed Pushkin's "untimely" death to the poet's " rejection of that moral force which was accessible to him and which he could have used to his advantage without much effort." Solov'ev's essay was, in part, directed against the growing cult of Pushkin among the early Russian Nietzscheans, including, no doubt, D. M. Merezhkovskii's essay on Pushkin in his collection Vechnye sputniki (Eternal Companions) (St. Petersburg, 1896).

54. Gippius, Pushkin i khristianstvo, pp. 6-7. The reference to Merezhkovskii is explicit: "I believe that Merezhkovskii will accept my understanding of Pushkin, although it differs from the one he had voiced before [in Vechnye sputniki ], because I shall be speaking about Pushkin as a phenomenon of religious life."

55. Vl. Solov'ev, "Sud'ba Pushkina," SS 9, p. 50.

56. V. V. Gippius's 1915 pamphlet Pushkin i khristianstvo was based on a lecture, "Pushkin," which he delivered before the St. Petersburg Religious-Philosophical Assembly on November 21, 1911. For Blok's response to the lecture, see Blok's diary for 1911 (Blok, SS 7, p. 95).

57. Gippius, Pushkin i khristianstvo, pp. 6-7.

58. Ibid., pp. 7-8, 10.

59. Ibid., p. 43.

57. Gippius, Pushkin i khristianstvo, pp. 6-7.

58. Ibid., pp. 7-8, 10.

59. Ibid., p. 43.

57. Gippius, Pushkin i khristianstvo, pp. 6-7.

58. Ibid., pp. 7-8, 10.

59. Ibid., p. 43.

60. See, for example, Igor' Glebov [B. V. Asaf'ev], Skriabin. Opyt kharakteristiki (Berlin, 1923). break

61. Viach. Ivanov, "Vzgliad Skriabina na iskusstvo" (1915), SS 3, pp. 175, 187.

62. At least at that time, Viacheslav Ivanov, however, considered himself a proper Russian Orthodox believer. See, for example, his "Staraia i novaia vera" (The Old and the New Faith, 1916), in which he criticizes Nicholas Berdiaev from expressly Russian Orthodox positions.

63. Mandelstam, SS 2, pp. 314 ff.

64. N. Struve, Ossip Mandelstam, pp. 115-130.

65. An early formulation of Viacheslav Ivanov's position may be found in his 1904 poem "Sloki" ("Kto skazhet: 'Zdes' ogon"—o peple khladnom"): ". . . And learn the power of secret action / A priest's sword is Love; Love is murder. / 'Whence offering?' Whence—THOU and I? / All is an offering and offerer. All is aflame. Be silent." A further elaboration can be found in his essays "Kop'e Afiny" (Athena's Spear, 1904; in Po zvezdam [St. Petersburg, 1909]) and "Religioznoe delo Vladimira Solov'eva" (The Religious Cause of Vladimir Solov'ev, 1910; in Rodnoe i vselenskoe [Moscow, 1917]), first published in 1911 in O Vladimire Solov'eve. Sbornik Pervyi. The formula represents an echo of the famous conclusion from Vladimir Solov'ev's sophiological poem "Blizko, daleko, ne zdes' i ne tam" (1876): "I am the altar, and the sacrifice, and the priest, / Standing before you tormented by bliss" (in Stikhotvoreniia i shutochnye p'esy [Leningrad, 1974]).

66. See, for example, Viacheslav Ivanov's poems "Orfei rasterzannyi" (Orpheus Rent, 1904); "Zhrets ozera Nemi: Lunnaia ballada" (The Priest of Lake Nemi: A Lunar Ballad, 1903); or "Serdtse Dionisa" (The Heart of Dionysus, 1910), part of Cor ardens, from which Mandelstam borrowed the image of a dying artist as a radiant "sun-heart." Lest I be misunderstood, I am speaking not about the form of religiosity preached by Ivanov at about the time Mandelstam composed the essay (some of his contemporary thoughts were distinctly marked by "sobriety") but about the "ecstatic" Dionysian trend that was firmly associated with his name and his earlier writings.

67. "About the sweetest Jesus and the bitter fruits of the world" (O sladchaishem Iisuse i gor'kikh plodakh mira), in Rozanov, Temnyi lik.

68. Death, or rather submission to death, constitutes the ultimate element of a kenotic imitatio Christi, insofar as it is analogous to Christ's final, voluntary, self-sacrificial "emptying out." There exist a number of studies discussing the particular emphasis on Christian kenosis in the Russian Orthodox tradition (beginning with sanctification of the eleventh-century Princes Boris and Gleb). One of the most relevant for Mandelstam is N. Gorodetzky, The Humiliated Christ in Modern Russian Thought (London and New York, 1938).

69. "Death is the crown of life. Now, at the end of my days, I have realized that there is triumph in death, as Mandelstam once told me" (NM 2, p. 124).

70. "Pushkin and Skriabin," SS 2, p. 318.

71. "I want to speak about Skriabin's death as the highest act of his creative career" (ibid., p. 313). break

72. Ibid., p. 315. This should also explain Mandelstam's assertion, directed at Rozanov, that "Christianity has not been afraid of music" (ibid., p. 318). For the Greeks, music was associated with tragedy and death (Nietzsche), but for Christianity, which "naturalized" dying, there was no need to fear music.

71. "I want to speak about Skriabin's death as the highest act of his creative career" (ibid., p. 313). break

72. Ibid., p. 315. This should also explain Mandelstam's assertion, directed at Rozanov, that "Christianity has not been afraid of music" (ibid., p. 318). For the Greeks, music was associated with tragedy and death (Nietzsche), but for Christianity, which "naturalized" dying, there was no need to fear music.

73. Viach. Ivanov, "Sporady" (c. 1908), SS 3, p. 117. This particular section ("Sporady III: O ellinstve") was first published in Po zvezdam (1909), a collection of Ivanov's critical prose that Mandelstam read with great care. See his letter to Ivanov (August 13, 1909) in SS 2, pp. 486 ff.

74. "If you please, it [Christianity] 'forgives' Gogol, too, and Pushkin, and jam, even a whore and whoredom, without which, incidentally, all the saints, beginning with St. Augustine, would not have wound up in its net. . . . Of course, Gogol could have been 'saved.' But there is salvation and salvation: there are 'heroes' of salvation, . . . there is a poetry of Christian salvation, a 'spiritual novel' of sorts. Only martyrs have passed through this; and Gogol became and had to become a martyr in order to enter the poetry of Christianity" (Rozanov, "O sladchaishem Iisuse i gor'kikh plodakh mira" [1911], in Temnyi lik. )

75. SS 2, pp. 313 ff.

76. In his introduction to SS 3, Iurii Ivask suggests that the image of the "black sun" may have been associated with Nerval's "soleil noir" from "El desdichado" ( SS 3, pp. xxii). Mandelstam was certainly aware of Nerval, whose work appeared in translations in Russia in early 1910, for instance in Severnye zapiski, in which Mandelstam was frequently published. Many possible sources of Mandelstam's image are offered by the editors of SS 3 (pp. 404-411), from antiquity through the Old and the New Testaments, the Talmud, and early Christian literature to The Lay of gor's Campaign and Avvakum's autobiography. Kiril Taranovsky pointed to Viacheslav lvanov's poetry as a possible source ( Essays on Mandel'stam * [Cambridge, Mass., 1976], p. 87). Nadezhda Mandelstam gives particular emphasis to Avvakum's Life ("a book he was always reading"), The Lay of gor's Campaign, Gogol's words about Pushkin's death, and, finally, the eclipse during the Crucifixion in Matthew and Luke (NM 2, pp. 127-128). As she has also pointed out, the association of Pushkin with the sun being buried may go back to Gogol's lamentation after Pushkin's death (NM 2, p. 127). Contrary to her assertion, however, a careful perusal of Annenskii's critical prose yields no instances of "black" or "night sun." The image, however, was common enough in contemporary poetry, and it appears in a Briusovian poem by Mikhail Lozinskii, "West"' (1908; in Gornyi kliuch, 2d ed. [Petrograd, 1922], p. 73). I have narrowed my discussion to the sources that help define the "trajectory" of Mandelstam's usage without attempting an exhaustive catalog of possible allusions.

77. Cf. Viach. Ivanov's "Serdtse Dionisa" (The Heart of Dionysus, 1910) from Cor ardens: "Oh Parnassus, . . . offering a sacrifice, thou concealed in the solar sepulcher the heart of the ancient Zagreus . . . the heart of Sun-Dionysus. " Or consider his "Orfei rasterzannyi" (Orpheus Rent) from Prozrachnost' (1904): continue

      "O night sun, sing to thy dark music the testament of day in the tears of darkness." A more recent relevant text: "The lyre-player [Orpheus], both as Phoebus and as the creator of rhythm [Eurhythmos], sang in the night the harmony of the spheres, setting them in motion and thereby calling out the sun. He himself was the night sun, like Dionysus, and, like him, he was a martyr. The mystical Musagetes is Orpheus, the sun of the dark depths, the logos of the profound, internally empirical knowledge" (Viach. Ivanov, "Orfei," Trudy i dni 1 [January-February 1912]: 63). Taranovsky suggests Racine's flamme funeste and limits Mandelstam's usage in "Fedra" to the "black sun of wild and sleepless passion " ( Essays on Mandel'stam * , p. 150n. 6). Note that a good key to Mandelstam's usage of the image may be found in Vladislav Khodasevich's "Ballada," which thematizes the same usage in reverse: a sixteen-watt bulb of prosaic and meager existence is replaced by the lyre-playing astral Orpheus.

78. Mandelstam, SS 2, p. 314.

79. Ivanov, "Orfei," p. 63.

80. Among the prominent figures who paid homage to it were Vladimir Solov'ev, Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Belyi, and Viacheslav Ivanov.

81. Annenskii, Knigi otrazhenii, p. 397.

82. "Bessonnitsa. Gomer. Tugie parusa" ( SS 1:78) and "Sestry—tiazhest' i nezhnost'—odinakovy vashi primety" ( SS 1:1920). A possible connection between Mandelstam's use of Homer's "catalog of ships" ( The Iliad ) and the lists of war dead published daily in newspapers throughout the war was first noted by N. A. Nilsson ("Mandel'shtam's Poem 'Voz'mi na radost',"' RL 7/8 [1974]).

83. SS 2, p. 314.

84. Ibid.

83. SS 2, p. 314.

84. Ibid.

85. Cf. Viach. Ivanov's "K ideologii evreiskogo voprosa" (1915; in Rodnoe i vselenskoe [Moscow, 1917]), a powerful condemnation of current anti-Semitism.

86. "The symbol of this struggle [between the 'ressentiment' and the 'aristocratic' sense of the world], inscribed in letters legible across all human history, is 'Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome—there has hitherto been no greater event than this struggle, this question, this contradiction" (F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals [New York, 1969], pp. 52ff. [section 16 of pt. I]).

87. The Archive of Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam at Firestone Library, Princeton University. It seems that the passage was either to precede or to follow the part of the essay where Mandelstam establishes an opposition between the "fertile soil" of Hellas and the "rocky soil" of Rome ("Rome is Hellas deprived of grace") ( SS 2, p. 318). Cf. also okamenela Iudeia (Judea has grown petrified) in the "Christ" poem ( SS 1:182). In SS 4, the same text is published with minor variations. "Hellas will be vanquished by Rome" and "history will reverse the flow of time—the black sun of Phaedra." Although the first of these variants appears closer to what Mandelstam had in mind, the mistake, or rather the slip of the pen, is also meaningful, suggesting that Mandelstam had ambivalent feelings about dismissing his beloved and "native" Rome out of continue

      hand. See especially his 1914 "Posokh" ( SS 1:69) and "S veselym rzhaniem pasutsia tabuny" ( SS 1:80), which, according to the commentary by N. Khardzhiev, was composed in August 1915 ( Stikhotvoreniia [1973], p. 268). Emphasis is added where Mandelstam seems to be quoting his own 1910 poem, "The Implacable Words."

88. "Pushkin and Skriabin," SS 2, p. 317.

89. Viach. Ivanov, "Poet i chern"' (The Poet and the Rabble, 1904), included in Po zvezdam, SS 1, pp. 709-714.

90. Cf. Mother Maria [E. Skobtsova], "Vstrechi s Blokom (K piatnadtsatiletiiu so dnia smerti)," Sovremennye zapiski (Paris) 63 (1937): 211-228. The author, herself a poet, knew Mandelstam and during the early 1910s belonged to the same circle of Petersburg literati.

91. NM 2, pp. 121ff.

92. S. Monas, in his introduction to Mandelstam's Selected Essays (Austin, 1977).

93. A. V. Kartashev (1875-1960) served as a minister of religious faiths in the provisional government. He was arrested following the October coup and released in March 1918. Mandelstam published the poem with a dedication to him in April 1918, but the date in the Tristia publication is 1917. According to Nadezhda Mandelstam, the poem was composed in November 1917, perhaps as a response to Kartashev's arrest (NM 2, p. 121).

94. See the editors' discussion of Mandelstam's "black-yellow" symbolism in Mandelstam, SS 3, pp. 409 ff.

95. See Mandelstam's 1917 poem "Imperatorskii visson" ( SS 1:189), which celebrates the fall of the autocracy. In this poem Mandelstam refers to the imperial standard as a "sulking black-yellow rag."

96. SS 1:100. Cf. Taranovsky's reading of the poem: "Since the 'Sabbath swathed in precious linen' is . . . the image of the dead Christ, the 'sullen rebuilding of the destroyed Temple' should be explained as a metaphor for the time between Friday night and Sunday morning, the three days in which Christ has promised to rebuild the temple destroyed by him (Matt. 26:61)" (Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * , p. 55).

97. SS 2, p. 317.

98. "Avtoportret" ("V podniat'i golovy krylatyi"), SS 1:164. The poem is dated 1913. According to numerous memoirists, the head thrown back and the eyes closed were the most striking features of Mandelstam's appearance during public readings.

99. Cf. a characterization of Mandelstam by his friend, composer Artur Lur'e: "Most of all, Mandelstam required a capacity for recurrence [ povtornost' ]; he thought that a 'beautiful moment,' having fleeted, must repeat again and again. As memory constructs form in music, so history constructed form in Mandelstam's poetry" ("Detskii rai," Vozdushnye puti [New York, 1963], p. 170).

100. The same formula of phylogenetic-ontogenetic recapitulation can be found in P. Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny (Moscow, 1914), pp. 62 ff.

101. SS 2, pp. 317-318. break

102. V. S. Solov'ev, "Sud'ba Pushkina," SS 9, p. 59. Zhukovskii's letter to S. L. Pushkin (February 15, 1837) (V. A. Zhukovskii, SS 4, pp. 607, 615).

103. For Khlebnikov's difficulties and his break with Apollon, see Vl. Markov, Russian Futurism; and idem, The Longer Poems (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962). Gumilev, not Makovskii, was the focus of Khlebnikov's dissatisfaction with the journal. See also Timenchik, "Zametki ob akmeizme," pp. 30 ff.

104. I am using this word as Edward Said does in Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York, 1975).

105. See Timenchik, "Zametki ob akmeizme." The article is doubly valuable, as it both pieces together a history of the Acmeist fraternity and contains valuable and little-known testimony of contemporaries who at one time or another considered themselves Acmeists.

106. Lozinskii's note of April 15 in Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika Kablukova," p. 150. The date on Kablukov's copy of Stone II is December 15, 1915.

107. "This encounter with the soldiers and officers and this hour spent in a forward trench filled the soul with quiet faith and firm strength for a long time and allowed us, who are weak, to taste of the nourishment of the brave and strong in spirit" (V. M. Zhirmunskii, "Po Vostochnoi Galitsii s sanitarnym otriadom" [July 1915], RM 37, no. 2 [1916], p. 62 [2d pagination]). A member of the Poet's Guild and a friend of Mandelstam's, E. Iu. Kuzmina-Karavaeva (subsequently Mother Maria) recalled two decades later: "The soul accepted the war. It was not a question of victory over the Germans; the Germans were, just about, beside the point. It was a question of the people [ narod ], which had suddenly become a unified, live personality; in a sense, with the outbreak of this war, it [the people] began its history. We had been preparing for this sea voyage too long, impatiently expecting change too long, not to rejoice at the arrival of the appointed hour. . . . Especially firm was the awareness that the end was near. The war was the preliminary to the end. Just strain your eye, strain your ear, and you sense the presence of the messengers of transfiguration among us" (Mother Maria [E. I. Kuzmina-Karavaeva], "Vstrechi s Blokom," p. 223).

108. Noted in V. Kniazhin [Ivoilov], ed., Pis'ma A. Bloka (Moscow, 1925), p. 213. Reviews of war poetry by another Acmeist, Sergei Gorodetskii, offer some idea of what Mandelstam's paper may have been about (see his "Stikhi o voine v 'Apollone,"' Rech' [November 3, 1914]). Gorodetskii was critical of Mandelstam's more interesting war poems ("Evropa" and "Ni triumpha, ni voiny"), detecting in them a pernicious "Futurist influence." Nevertheless, he approved Akhmatova's extended comparisons between the warriors and saints, qualifying her poems as "a religious act, however small." Was Mandelstam's "V belom raiu lezhit bogatyr"' a response to Gorodetskii's praise of Akhmatova? We may assume as much, since at the time, "all conversations [were] about the War and around the War." See Vl. Berenshtam, "Voina i poety: Pis'mo iz Petrograda," Russkie vedomosti (January 1, 1915), which describes an evening at the Sologubs at which Mandelstam read his "Reims i continue

      Kel'n" ( SS 1:181). See also G. Ivanov, "Voennye stikhi," Apollon 4-5 (1915): 85. Cf. S. Broyde, Osip Mandel'stam * and His Age: A Commentary on the Themes of War and Revolution in the Poetry, 1913-1923 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).

109. Although the term itself is not mentioned in the extant fragments, other code names of the concept are the "chorus" ( khor ) and the "round dance" ( khorovod ). Thus Mandelstam contrasted Skriabin's mute chorus in Prometheus: The Poem of Fire with the "Catholic joy" of the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth as a "temptation of a siren" with the "triumph of white glory," as he called the famous movement in his "Ode to Beethoven." Schiller's "Seid umschlungen, Millionen" had been emblematic of the "symphonic" ideal in Russia, at least since Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov.

110. Mandelstam, "O prirode slova" (1921), SS 2, p. 245. "[In this essay, there] appears another feature of the times that has become ordinary—Russian messianism" (A. Bem, "O. Mandel'shtam, 'O prirode slova"' [review], Volia Rossii 6-7 [1923]: 159).

111. Cf. Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika Kablukova," pp. 146-147. Mandelstam's position prior to this switch might be defined in the same words that K. Mochulskii used to define Vl. Solov'ev's stand: "In [ Istoriia i budushchnost' teokratii (1888)] theocracy takes on a distinct Catholic form: the author declares that it was not the Orthodox but the Catholic church that had been the guardian of the idea of universality [ vselenskaia ideia ]; it was not the West but the East that had rejected the universal unity; its vehicle [universal unity, or catholicity] is the Bishop of Rome, the direct descendant of Apostle Peter" (Mochulskii, Vladimir Solov'ev: Zhizn' i uchenie [Paris, 1936], p. 67). There is no doubt that Mandelstam was familiar with this work by Solov'ev either directly or through Sergei Trubetskoi's work.

112. According to a report in Rech' (January 26, 1915), during a recital at the City Duma, Mandelstam read two poems: "Hagia Sophia" and "The Reims Cathedral," a poem based on the newspaper reports (exaggerated) of the cathedral's total destruction by German bombardments. See a report in Rech', September 9, 1914, and, in a subsequent issue (September 11), a companion piece by A. Benua (Benois), who characterized the bombardment of the cathedral, this "prayer crystallized in stone," as a "blasphemy against the Holy Ghost." In late December 1914, Mandelstam read "The Reims Cathedral" at a recital held at Fedor Sologub's apartment (Vl. Berenshtam, "Voina i poety").

113. N. Riasanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teachings of the Slavophiles (Cambridge, Mass., 1952); see also J. Scherrer, Die St. Petersburger Religiös-Philosophischen Vereinigungen.

114. "Belyi ekstaz," in part, goes back to Innokentii Annenskii's eponymous essay on Turgenev, "Belyi ekstaz. Strannaia istoriia, rasskazannaia Turgenevym" (in Knigi otrazhenii, pp. 141-146). For Annenskii, this state of ecstasy could be achieved by a chaste personality. Discussed in W. Schlott, Zur Funktion antiker Göttermythen in der Lyrik Osip Mandel'stam * s, in Europäische Hochschulschriften, series 16, vol. 18 in Slawische Sprachen und Literaturen (Frankfurt am Main and Bern, 1981). Schlott, however, ignored the signifi- soft

      cance of Viacheslav Ivanov's notion of Dionysian ecstasy for Mandelstam's use of the image. See also the discussion of Merezhkovskii's Khristos i Antikhrist in chapter 4.

115. SS 4:511.

116. Mandelstam left for Warsaw in December 1914, returning to Petrograd sometime in January 1915 (see Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika Kablukova"). See also Peterburgskie zimy by Georgii Ivanov, whose rather fantastic account of this trip has been largely discredited by Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam.

117. "Zverinets. Oda miru" (January 1916), SS 1:82. See a discussion of this poem in Broyde, Osip Mandel'stam * and His Age. On Mandelstam's 1916 reading of the poem, see E. Tager, "O Mandel'shtame," Novyi zhurnal 186 (1965).

118. NM 2, p. 522. See also M. Tsvetaeva, "Istoriia odnogo posviashcheniia," Oxford Slavonic Papers 9 (1964), and several discussions of the relationship between the two poets in S. Karlinsky, Marina Cvetaeva: Her Life and Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966); C. Brown, Mandelstam; K. Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * ; and Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika Kablukova." Although Mandelstam had met Tsvetaeva before (July 1915, in Koktebel'), the "romance" seems to have begun shortly after they met again, in January 1916, at a party given by the poet L. Kannegisser (a member of the Poets' Guild) during Tsvetaeva's first visit to Petrograd (see Tsvetaeva, "Nezdeshnii vecher," in Proza [New York, 1953], p. 280). At the time, Tsvetaeva was breaking up with Sofiia Parnok (see S. Poliakova's introduction to S. Parnok, Sobranie stikhotvorenii [Ann Arbor, 1979], pp. 15-18; and S. Poliakova, Zakatnye ony dni: Tsvetaeva i Parnok [Ann Arbor, 1983], pp. 61, 110-114 [Tsvetaeva's letter to Mikhail Kuzmin]). Collectors of literary curiosities will appreciate the fact that Sofiia Parnok was not indifferent to Salomeia Andronikova, the addressee of Mandelstam's "Solominka" cycle. Finally, Sofiia Parnok's brother, Valentin Parnakh—among other things a poet, a dance critic, and a musician who was the first to bring jazz to Russia (see F. Starr, Red and Hot [New York, 1983])—was a friend of Mandelstam's and a member of the Poets' Guild. He is the prototype for Parnok in Mandelstam's The Egyptian Stamp.

119. "Ia ne uvizhu znamenitoi Fedry" (1915, SS 1:81) and "Kak etikh pokryval i etogo ubora" (1915, SS 1:82). Despite the fact that it was Mikhail Kuzmin who, according to Nadezhda Mandelstam, compiled the third book and gave it its title, Mandelstam did not substantially change the composition of the collection and included it as Tristia in his Poems, published in 1928 ( Stikhotvoreniia ) (see NM 1; and N. Khardzhiev's annotations to Stikhotvoreniia [Leningrad, 1973], p. 251). Perhaps, if Mandelstam had been able to maintain better communication with Berlin, where Tristia was being published in late 1920, it would have come out as Novyi kamen' (The New Stone), the title, according to Khardzhiev, that Mandelstam originally intended. break

1. The "epic" element in the lyric has been discussed by Briusov and Blok (e.g., Blok's review of Briusov's Urbi et orbi). For more recent views, see L. Ginzburg, O lirike (Leningrad, 1974); D. Maksimov, "Ideia puti v poeticheskom mire Al. Bloka," in Poeziia i proza Aleksandra Bloka (Leningrad, 1981), pp. 6-151; N. Mandelstam (e.g., the chapters "Kniga i tetrad"' and "Tsikl" in NM 1); and L. Dolgopolov, Na rubezhe vekov: O russkoi literature kontsa XIX-nachala XX (Leningrad, 1977).

2. R. P. Hughes, "Nothung, the Cassia Flower, and a 'Spirit of Music' in the Poetry of Aleksandr Blok," California Slavic Studies 6 (1971): 49-60.

3. B. Pasternak, Doktor Zhivago: "Gefsimanskii sad": "No kniga zhizni podoshla k stranitse, / Kotoraia dorozhe vsekh sviatyn'. / Seichas dolzhno napisannoe sbyt'sia, / Puskai zhe sbudetsia ono. Amin'." As Omry Ronen ("Osip Mandel'stam * : An Ode and an Elegy" [Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1976]; An Approach to Mandel'stam * [Jerusalem, 1983]) has shown, Mandelstam paid particular attention to the poems that other poets composed at the end of their lives (e.g., Derzhavin's "Reka vremen") and that were therefore most intensely "illuminated by the sun" of their death ("Pushkin and Skriabin").

4. NM 1; C. Brown, Mandelstam (Cambridge, 1973); N. I. Khardzhiev in Stikhotvoreniia (1973).

5. According to NM 2 (pp. 501 ff.), some of Mandelstam's old friends, specifically Shileiko, believed as late as the spring of 1924 that the poet had been abjectly seeking favor with the regime. What prompted these "rumors" is not clear, but it was not hard to consider Mandelstam a sympathetic fellow traveler in view of his substantial contributions to Red Virgin Soil, the almanac Nashi dni, and Prozhektor (all edited by A. K. Voronskii) in 1922-24. Especially "Vek" and "Nashedshii podkovu," both published in the January 1923 issue of Krasnaia nov', may lend themselves to such an interpretation.

6. R. A. Maguire, Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920s (Princeton, 1968), p. 32. See also E. Dinershtein, "A. K. Voronskii: Iz perepiski s sovetskimi pisateliami (Vstupitel'naia stat'ia)," in Iz istorii sovetskoi literatury 1920-1930-kh godov: Novye materialy i issledovaniia, LN 93 (1983), pp. 535 ff. Cf. L. Fleishman, Pasternak v dvadtsatye gody (Munich, 1981), p. 24n.

7. "Ia budu metat'sia po taboru ulitsy temnoi" (1925, SS 1:144). The addressee of the poem is Ol'ga Vaksel'. About her affair with Mandelstam, see NM 1 and 2 and the recently published notes of Ol'ga Vaksel', "O Mandel'shtame. Iz dnevnika," Chast' rechi (New York) 1 (1980): 251-254, as well as S. Polianina, "Ol'ga Vaksel"' (ibid., pp. 254-263).

8. NM 1, p. 200. Contradicting Nadezhda Mandelstam's assertion, N. Khardzhiev describes the galleys of the 1928 edition as containing substantial editorial changes in Mandelstam's own hand and the hand of his friend, the poet Benedikt Livshits (see Stikhotvoreniia [1973], p. 312 [annotations to no. 276]). In fact, Nadezhda Mandelstam's statements are at times contradictory, and in the chapter devoted to the dating of the poetry of 1920-21 she continue

      maintains that the order of poems in Stikhotvoreniia (1928) restores the sequence garbled in Tristia (NM 2, p. 68).

9. In 1937, exiled Mandelstam inscribed a copy of the 1928 Poems for his Voronezh friend Natasha Shtempel': "For dear Natasha,—I do not know how to inscribe [this]: what joy that I could find [a copy of this] book to give as a gift, however bad it is. I promise not to write such books and obey [her] in everything—under one condition, that [she] obey me too." Signed: O.M., V[oronezh], March 3, [19]27 [ sic ] (Princeton Archive).

10. In the political spectrum of the period, Mandelstam's position came close to that of the "Change of Landmarks" ( Smena vekh, named after an eponymous collection of essays, 1921), an émigré movement whose goal was to reconcile the Russian intelligentsia with the Bolshevik Revolution (see, for example, M. Aucouturier, "Smena vekh i russkaia literatura 20-kh godov," in Odna ili dve russkikh literatury? [Lausanne, 1981]). In early 1922, Mandelstam was actually identified as a "smenovekhovets" ( SS 4, p. 181). As to his "Hellenistic" program (a kind of a sacralization of everyday life), he spelled it out in both the poetry and the prose of the period, beginning with a poem "Dekabrist" (1918): "But empty heavens do not want a sacrifice—everywhere there is work and constancy." Of particular interest are such essays as "Gumanizm i sovremennost'," "O vnutrennem ellinizme v russkoi literature" (virtually identical with "O prirode slova"), and, most transparent, the recently reprinted "Pshenitsa chelovecheskaia" (The Wheat of Humanity)—all published in the Change of Landmarks newspaper Nakanune in 1922-23. On the last of these essays, published in the June 22 issue of the paper, see L. Fleishman, "Neizvestnaia stat'ia Osipa Mandel'shtama," Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 10 (1982): 451-459. In "The Wheat of Humanity," Mandelstam recalled Herzen, pointing directly to the origins of his understanding of the future of Russia and Europe. Such uses of Herzen were commonplace in the contemporary press. See, for example, I. Lezhnev, "Velikii sintez," Novaia Rossiia 1 (1922): 14-28, where a leader of the Change of Landmarks likewise uses Herzen's "prophecies" to legitimize the Bolshevik Revolution from the "Slavophile" position. On Herzen as an "intense Slavophile nationalist," see K. Levin's A. I. Gertsen: Lichnost' i ideologiia, 2d ed. (Petrograd, 1922) (reviewed favorably in PiR 6 [1922]: 278-279). See also P. F. Preobrazhenskii, "Al. Gertsen i K. Leont'ev: Sravnitel'naia morfologiia tvorchestva," PiR 2/5 (1922): 79-87. Cf. S. Broyde, Osip Mandel'stam * and His Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), pp. 5-6, 9-28, 35-36, 200. On Herzen and Mandelstam, cf. Sydney Monas's introduction to Osip Mandelstam: Selected Essays (Austin, 1977), pp. i-xxvi. Herzen's "Buddhism in Science" (noted by Monas) was not the chief source of Mandelstam's appellation "Buddhist." See Vl. Solov'ev, "Buddiiskoe nastroenie v poezii" (1894), SS 7, pp. 81-99.

11. V. Briusov, "Sredi stikhov" (review of The Second Book ), PiR 6 (1923): 63-66. The bitterness and unfairness of Briusov's review becomes more comprehensible if we consider his own, compared to Mandelstam's, unsuccessful attempts at introducing high, classical diction into contemporary poetry. break

      See A. Men'shutin and A. Siniavskii, Poeziia pervykh let revoliutsii: 1917-1920 (Moscow, 1964), pp. 372-375. Further, Briusov's criticism should be viewed in the context of the savage attack mounted on Briusov himself by the Lef critic B. I. Arvatov, who described Briusov's use of classical vocabulary as "counterrevolutionary" ("Kontrrevoliutsiia formy," Lef 1 [1923]). "Why did Comrade Arvatov, for polemical reasons, use the argument that he himself does not believe? Is it decent?" (Briusov, "Sredi stikhov," p. 88). Mandelstam could have addressed these words to Briusov. Was Briusov offering Lefa substitute victim in the form of Mandelstam? D. S. Mirskii reflected on the incident in a Briusov obituary ( Sovremennye zapiski 25 [1924]: 414-426). In general, however, Briusov had a high opinion of Mandelstam, "whose poems are always beautiful and well thought out" ("Vchera, segodnia i zavtra russkoi poezii," PiR 7 [1922]: 52). Cf. C. Brown, Mandelstam, pp. 111ff.; and Ronen, "Osip Mandel'stam * ," p. 117.

12. "Liubliu pod svodami sedyia tishiny" (1921), SS 1:124. Cf. Mandelstam's quotation of M. Lomonosov's ode of 1747 in "Pshenitsa chelovecheskaia": "Tsarei i tsarstv zemnykh otrada / Vozliublennaia tishina." See note 10 (Fleishman, "Neizvestnaia stat'ia Mandel'shtama").

13. "Ia v khorovod tenei, toptavshikh nezhnyi lug" (1921), SS 1:123.

14. Nadezhda Mandelstam (NM 1, p. 257) testifies to Mandelstam's owning a volume of Vico's writings in the 1920s. Vico's ideas were frequently discussed in Russia both before the revolution (in connection with Nietzsche) and afterward (often in connection with Spengler). See, for example, V. Pertsev, "V. Buzeskul, 'Antichnost' i sovremnennost"" (review), Golos minuvshego 5 (1913); B. Vipper, Krugovorot istorii (Moscow, 1923); V. Fridliand, "Krugovorot professora istorii" (review of Vipper's Krugovorot istorii ), PiR 6 (1923); and A. Lunacharskii, "Taneev i Skriabin," Novyi mir 6 (1925). On "eternal recurrence" as a specifically Acmeist myth, see Iu. I. Levin et al., "Russkaia semanticheskaia poetika kak potentsial'naia kul'turnaia paradigma," RL 7/8 (1974).

15. See the discussion of N. Gumilev's and Vl. Khodasevich's responses to Mandelstam in chapter 3.

16. The first one, "Ia ne uvizhu znamenitoi Fedry" ( SS 1:81), had been composed by November 18, 1915, when Kablukov sent a copy of it to his friend D. V. Znamenskii. See A. Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika S. P. Kablukova," VRSKhD 129, no. 3 (1979): 149. Cf. Stikhotvoreniia (1973), p. 268. An extant copy of a version of the second poem ( SS 1:82), recorded in Mandelstam's own hand, bears the date "13 October 1915." This autograph is available at the Mandelstam Archive at Princeton University. According to Khardzhiev, the final draft of the published version (M. L. Lozinskii's archive) was dated 1916. See Stikhotvoreniia (1973), pp. 268-269.

17. C. Brown, Mandelstam, pp. 208-209, 212-213.

18. "Blessed is he who visited this world in its fateful moments" ("Tsitseron" ["Orator rimskii govoril"]). Cf. further such "apocalyptically" relevant expressions as: "the night of Rome," the 'setting of [Rome's] bloody star in all its grandeur," "he [Cicero] was drinking immortality." Cf. "drinking continue

      mortal air" in "V Petropole prozrachnom my umrem" (1916), SS 1:89. See also note 51.

19. "Maiakovskii read ["A Cloud in Trousers"] once again, but toward the end slid back into [the manner of] a shaman-conjurer [ shaman-zaklinatel' ]," a June 1915 entry from the diary of B. Lazarevskii (cited in V. Katanian, Maiakovskii: Literaturnaia khronika [Moscow, 1961], p. 72).

20. Mandelstam's usage of the "screen" or curtain [ zanaves ] echoes clearly N. Gumilev's words from his Acmeist manifesto "Nasledie simvolizma i akmeizm" ( Apollon 1 [1913]): "Death is a screen [ zanaves ] separating us, the actors, from the spectators."

21. On "igry" (games) in relation to the "Skriabin Weeks," a series of performances and lectures dedicated to the deceased composer, see A. Morozov's commentary to Kablukov's diary (Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika Kablukova"). See also Ronen, An Approach to Mandel'stam * .

22. Cf. Mandelstam's usage of the word game ( igra ) in a 1920 essay "The State and Rhythm": "A conscious creation of history [made possible by the revolution], its birth out of a celebration as a manifestation of the people's creative will, shall be from now on an inalienable right of mankind. In the future, the social game will take the place of social contradictions and will become that fermenting agent which assures an organic blossoming of culture" ( SS 3, p. 126).

23. For a detailed discussion of the uses of Racine and Euripides in these two poems see C. Brown, Mandelstam, pp. 213 ff. See also L. Martinez, "Le noir et le blanc. A propos de trois poèmes de Mandelstam," Cahiers de linguistique d'Orientalisme et de Slavistique 3-4 (1974): 118-137; and K. Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 150 ff.

24. One 1915 draft differs from the final version as follows. Lines 7-10: "Here she is: what words and how terrible she looks[!] Hippolytus, sensing truth, is avoiding her presence." Lines 13-21: "Like a black torch amid bright daylight, Phaedra ignited with her love for Hippolytus and herself has perished, blaming the son, learning from the old nurse. Forgetting her kin and the royal title, [she] cast a shadow of untruth on the youth, lured the hunter into a trap. You shall be bewailed by the woods, o stag!" Lines 26-29: "But we, following the dead home with a funeral song, are singing the sun of the wild and sleepless passion." The sheet also contains a quatrain that belongs to the "chorus" somewhere at the beginning of the poem: "Let us gather the fruit of the misfortune[,] and for the fatigued Phaedra, the black sun of the wild and sleepless passion shall set." Cf. another draft, one from M. Lozinskii's archive, in Stikhotvoreniia (1973), pp. 269 ff.

25. C. Brown, "The Classical in Tristia, " in Mandelstam; V. Terras, "Classical Motives in the Poetry of Osip Mandelstam," Slavic and East European Journal 3 (1966); G. Levinton, "'Na kamennykh otrogakh Pierii' Osipa Mandel'shtama: Materialy k analizu," RL V-2, V-3 (March 1977, July 1977); N. A. Nilsson, "Mandel'stam's Poem 'Voz'mi na radost',"' RL 7/8 (1974); and K. Taranovsky, "Bees and Wasps: Mandel'stam and Vjaceslav Ivanov," in Essays on Mandel'stam * . break

26. "Significantly, Mandelstam, when he attempts to legitimize the [notion] of the word independent of meaning, comes close to the Futurists" (I. Gruzdev, "Sovremennaia russkaia poeziia," Kniga i revoliutsiia 3 [1923]: 34). See also M. Karpovich, "Moe znakomstvo s Mandel'stamom"; Novyi zhurnal 49 (1957); NM 1, p. 377; O. Mandelstam, "Literaturnaia Moskva" ( SS 2, particular focus on Maiakovskii); R. Timenchik, "Zametki ob akmeizme III," RL IX-II (1981); Taranovsky, "A Concert at the Railroad Station," in Essays on Mandel'stam * ; Ronen, "Leksicheskii povtor," "Osip Mandel'stam * ," and An Approach to Mandel'stam * ; and Vl. Khodasevich, "O Mandel'shtame," Dni 65 (1922). See also Khardzhiev's commentary on 'Grifel'naia oda" and "Nashedshii podkovu" in Stikhotvoreniia (1973); and Vl. Markov, "Mysli o russkom futurizme," Novyi zhyrnal 38 (1954). According to Nadezhda Mandelstam (NM 2, p. 514), the original friendship between Maiakovskii and Mandelstam was spoiled by the zealots of the respective movements.

27. Viach. Ivanov, "O niskhozhdenii," Vesy 5 (1905), included in his essay collection Po zvezdam (St. Petersburg, 1909) under the title "Simvolika esteticheskikh nachal." Cf: Bakhtin's (1920) characterization of Ivanov's theory in Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (Moscow, 1979), pp. 375 ff. See also note 40.

28. Stikhotvoreniia (1973), p. 251n.3.

29. "Unichtozhaet plamen'," SS 1 :73. For a fuller version of this poem (1915), which includes the cross as one of the referents for the "tree," see Stikhotvoreniia (1973), pp. 266 ff. The poem was polemically pointed in the direction of Viacheslav Ivanov's 1904 poem "Krest zla" (The Cross of Evil): "Kak izrekut, o brat'ia, usta soblazna vest'? / I Grekh—altar' raspiat'ia, / I zla Golgofa est'!"

30. "The lesson of January 9—regicide—is a true lesson of tragedies: life is impossible unless the tsar is killed. January 9 is a tragedy with chorus alone, without the hero, without the shepherd. . . . January 9 is a Petersburg tragedy; it could unfold only in Petersburg: its plan, the network of its streets, left an indelible trace on the nature of the historical event" ( SS 3, pp. 130, 131). I hardly need point out that the word shepherd, as a Russian saying goes, comes from a different opera.

31. Cf. Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * , p. 150: "The origin of Mandelstam's image is clear enough: it is the 'black sun of wild and sleepless passion. ' "

32. See discussion of V. V. Gippius in chapter 3.

33. "Eta noch' nepopravima" (1916), SS 1:91. Cf. Aleksandr Blok's development of Tristan's "autobiography" in Wagner's music drama: "Zachatyi v noch', ia v noch' rozhden / . . . Tak tiazhek materi byl ston / Tak cheren nochi zev [Conceived in the night, I was born in the night . . . So heavy was mother's moan, So black the maw of the night]." Cf. Tristan und Isolde, act 2, scene 3: "es ist das dunkel / nächt'ge Land, / daraus die Mutter / mich entstand. . . . Ihr Liebesberger war / das Wunderreich der Nacht / aus ich erst erwacht."

34. T. S. Eliot, The Three Voices of Poetry (New York, 1954).

35. Viach. Ivanov, "Predchuvstviia i predvestiia" (1906), SS 2, pp. 93- hard

      94; "O suchshestve tragedii" (1912), ibid., pp. 192 ff.; and "Drevnii uzhas," in Po zvezdam.

36. A. N. Veselovskii, "Epicheskie povtoreniia kak khronologicheskii moment," in Istoricheskaia poetika (Moscow, 1940), pp. 93-124.

37. Cf. another 1916 poem, "The daughter of Andronicus Comnenus": "Oh daughter of Byzantium's glory! / Help me this night / To rescue the sun from captivity. / Help me to defeat with a harmonious song / The luxury of mortal flesh. . . ." ("Doch' Andronika Komnena," SS 4:512). The implied "Orphic" plot may be formulated as follows: held captive by the dark eros, the sun can be liberated only with a special song, which the poet can produce only if "the Emperor's daughter," in her own turn, helps the poet to defeat the spell of her "luxuriant mortal flesh." Cf. Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam, p. 150.

38. For a possible background for Mandelstam's imagery in mystical literature, see a discussion of St. John of the Cross in E. G. Gardner, Dante and the Mystics (New York, 1968), esp. p. 302. Dante's Pilgrim, too, is blinded as he contemplates Christ as the Sun in Paradiso, 8th Sphere. Consonant imagery may also be found in contemporary writings such as I. Annenskii's essay "Belyi ekstaz," where the image is associated with the ultimate aesthetization of suffering, a pure artistry of life. Mandelstam's "Pushkin and Skriabin" echoes Annenskii's essay, as does his "Ode to Beethoven" ( beloi slavy torzhestvo). Consider also Annenskii's emphasis on high noon as the time of the fateful action in his preface to the translation of Hippolytus. On this subject, cf. W. Schlott, Zur Funktion antiker Göttermythen in der Lyrik Osip Mandel'stam * s (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), pp. 103 ff. In the terminology of Viacheslav Ivanov, "white ecstasy" corresponded to the "ascent," "the individuated white break with the verdure." It is a "symbol of that tragic [action] that commences when one of the participants in the round dance of Dionysus comes out of the dithyrambic circle. Out of the impersonal elements of the orgiastic dithyrambic, there arises the lofty image of the tragic hero, prominent in his individual particularity, etc." (Viach. Ivanov, "Simvolika esteticheskikh nachal" [1905], SS 1, p. 825). Mandelstam was most impressed by this element of Ivanov's theory. See his letter to Viacheslav Ivanov (August 13/26, 1909, SS 2, p. 487), where he cites this passage; his poems "Dano mne telo" and "Silentium" ( SS 1:8 and 1:14); and the "pool" poems discussed in chapter 2. See also note 27.

39. A. N. Veselovskii, "Tri glavy iz istoricheskoi poetiki" (1899), in Istoricheskaia poetika, p. 211.

40. A. Bakhrakh, "Pis'ma Mariny Tsvetaevoi," Mosty (Munich) 5 (1960): 299-304.

41. M. Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (Essai sur le don, forme archaïque de l'échange, 1925) (New York, 1967), pp. 1, 52, 67.

42. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951), chapter 2: "From Shame-Culture to Guilt-Culture," esp. pp. 38 ff. See also D. Panofsky and E. Panofsky, Pandora's Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol (New York, 1965).

43. "If proof of his charismatic qualification fails him for long, the leader continue

      endowed with charisma tends to think his god or his magical or heroic powers have deserted him" [italics are minel. Or: "Whenever it [charisma] appears it constitutes a 'call' in the most emphatic sense of the word, a 'mission,' or a 'spiritual duty"' (M. Weber, Charisma and Institution Building [Chicago, 1968], pp. 49 and 52).

44. A pledge places one in a dangerous position, both the one who offers it and the one who receives it. "The fact is that the pledge as a thing given spells danger for the two parties concerned. . . . The danger expressed by the thing given or transmitted is nowhere better expressed than in very ancient Germanic languages. This explains the meaning of the word Gift as gift and poison" (Mauss, The Gift, pp. 61 ff.). Mauss's etymological excursion is most illuminating. Cf. Russian: iad-eda (poison-food) with the Latinate pair poisonpotion. "We compare the uncertainty of the meaning of gift with that of the Latin venenum and the Greek filtron and fármakon. . . . Cf. also venia, venus, venenum—vanati (Sanskrit, to give pleasure) and gewinnen and win" (ibid., p. 127n.). Cf. Mandelstam's poem "Venitseiskaia zhizn"' (1920), which thematizes this etymological ambiguity: Venetsianka, "a Venetian woman," is rhymed with sklianka, "a vial with poison." The name of the "pearl of the Adriatic" is itself derived from veneti (those beloved or venal ) and venenum. One encounters similar thematization in A. Blok's cycle "Pliaski smerti."

45. "Dmitrii! Marina! V mire" (March 29/30, 1916), in Tsvetaeva, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, vol. 1, pp. 213 ff.

46. "Truly, poetry is the consciousness of one's inner rightness" (from "O sobesednike" [1914], SS 2, p. 236). The statement is an important one for Mandelstam's reception, and not only in the memoirs of his widow but in those of others as well. See Emil' Mindlin, Neobyknovennye sobesedniki (Moscow, 1968), pp. 82-83. On this subject see also chapter 2.

47. "Takova u nas marinok spes', u poliachek -to" (That's how fickle we, Marinas, are, we the Polish girls) and "Novoprestavlennoi boliaryne Marine" (the just-deceased boayryna Marina).

48. In traditional Russian usage, the term nerukotvornyi (not wrought by hand) refers specifically to the miracle central to the Orthodox veneration of icons: the appearance of an imprint of Christ's face on a towel belonging to a painter who was trying unsuccessfully to catch God's likeness on an icon. The imprinted icon, Spas nerukotvornyi (Savior not wrought by hand), possessed miraculous healing powers. The Russian Orthodox church celebrates the translation of the icon from Edessa to Constantinople (994) on August 16 together with the celebration ( poprazdnik ) of the Dormition of the Virgin. The echo of this coincidence is evident in Tsvetaeva's poem. On the legend, see N. V. Pokrovskii, Siiskii ikonopisnyi podlinnik, vyp. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1895), pp. 49-52. On the liturgical significance, see K. T. Nikol'skii, Posobie k izucheniiu ustava bogosluzheniia Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi (St. Petersburg, 1900), pp. 22 ff. (n. 3), 507-508. At least on the lexical level, the legend might represent a thematization of the representation of Christ as the "tabernacle, not made with hands," contrasted to the Old Testament tabernacle ( skiniia nerukotvornaia, to est', ne takovogo ustroeniia, Heb. 9:11 and elsewhere). The same expression, it continue

      might be recalled, was used by Pushkin in his "Pamiatnik" ("Ia pamiatnik sebe vozdvig nerukotvornyi ".)

49. "Iz ruk moikh-nerukotvornyi grad" (March 31, 1916), in Tsvetaeva, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, vol. 1, pp. 215 ff. The "shroud" ( pokrov, also meaning "protection") that Tsvetaeva had in mind referred to the vision of St. Andrew the Fool and his disciple Epiphaneus (c. 936) to whom the Mother of God appeared hovering in the air in the company of prophets, apostles, and angels praying for peace and extending a blessing and protection over the Christians with her shroud. The Russian Orthodox church celebrates this holiday, Pokrov Presviatyia Bogoroditsy, on October 1. See Nikol'skii, Posobie k izucheniiu, pp. 537 ff. See also N. P. Kondakov, Ikonografiia Bogomateri, vol. 2 (Petrograd, 1915), pp. 56-62, 93-102.

50. "Mimo nochnykh bashen" (March 31, 1916), in Tsvetaeva, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, vol. 1, p. 216.

51. Cf. "Pushkin and Skriabin," SS 2.

52. "O etot vozdukh, smutoi p'ianyi" (April 1916). In Tristia, the word mir is spelled with the Russian letter "i" (not the "iota"), which is why it is translated as "peace." For another version, see Stikhotvoreniia (1973), p. 271. Cf. a later, disdainful view of "Muscovite" Russia in "Vsë chuzhdo nam v stolitse nepotrebnoi" (1917?), SS 2, p. 457ch, pp. 457 ff. An approximate prose translation is as follows: "All's alien for us in the ungainly capital: her dry, stale earth, the riotous trading at the bread Sukharevka, and the terrifying sight of the highwayman Kremlin. // Wild and homely, she rules the whole people [ mir ]. With her million oriental carts—a pull, and on she goes: a peasant woman's girth of her market places oppresses [one] like half a universe. // Her churches' honeycombs are fragrant, like wild honey in the thick of the woods, and flocks of birds in dense migrations alarm her gloomy heavens. // In commerce she's a clever fox, and before the prince a pathetic slave woman. The troubled water of the udel'naia river flows, as of old, into dry troughs." The modifier udel'nyi refers to the "appendage" Russia of internecine wars before the emergence of the centralized Muscovite state in the fifteenth century (hence the "troubled water" [ mutnyi-smutnyi ] of Old Russia's "river"). The poem undoubtedly influenced the prose of a great admirer of Mandelstam's poetry, Boris Pilniak. See Pilniak's letter to Voronskii (1922) in LN 93 (1983), p. 570. Cf. also SS 1:102 ("Kogda v temnoi nochi zamiraet," 1918): Moscow—Herculaneum.

53. Suggested by V. Borisov. See Levinton, "'Na kamennykh otragakh Pierii' Mandel'shtama," p. 223. On this poem, see also Schlott, Antike Göttermythen in der Lyrik Mandel'stam * s.

54. The theme will receive a somewhat different rendering in the "Solominka" cycle (1916).

55. "Na rozval'niakh, ulozhennykh solomoi," SS 1:85. According to Khardzhiev ( Stikhotvoreniia, 1973), a final draft of the poem is dated March 1916. On this poem and the exchange, see also S. Karlinsky, Marina Cvetaeva: Her Life and Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966), pp. 38-40, 126; C. Brown, Mandelstam, pp. 225-227; Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * , pp. 11-120; L. continue

      Ginzburg, "Poetika Osipa Mandel'shtama," in O lirike (Leningrad, 1974); Levinton (1977); and Schlott, Antike Göttermythen in der Lyrik Mandel'stam * s, pp. 118-133 (particularly on the poem "V raznogolositse devicheskogo khora," SS 1:84).

56. Viach. lvanov, "Zavety simvolizma." See Mandelstam's polemic in "Utro akmeizma" ( SS 2). To sum up the differences most succinctly, Viacheslav Ivanov was a true realist, whereas Mandelstam was a nominalist, in the medieval sense of the word—hence the other title of the Acmeist movement, Adamism, suggesting that poets, like Adam, must give things new names. See the Acmeist "manifestos" (Gumilev's "Nasledie simvolizma i akmeizm," Gorodetskii's "Nekotorye techeniia v sovremennoi poezii," and Mandelstam's "Utro akmeizma"). For more specific history, see S. Driver, "Acmeism," Slavic and East European Journal 2 (1968); and R. Timenchik, "Zametki ob akmeizme" I, RL 7/8 (1974), and III, RL IX-II (1981).

57. "Russian history moves along the edge, along the bank, over a precipice, and is ready at any moment to fall off into nihilism, that is, into the [state of being] excommunicated from the word" (Mandelstam, "O prirode slova," SS 2, p. 248).

58. Mandelstam's "Notre Dame" (1912) is a good example of this Acmeist formula of dramatic balance: "Next to a reed, an oak, and everywhere the plumb is king." See P. Steiner, "Poem as Manifesto: Mandel'stam * 's 'Notre Dame,"' RL V-3 (July 1977): 239-256.

59. Mandelstam, "O sovremennoi poezii (K vykhodu' Al' manakha muz')" (1916), SS 3, pp. 27-30, deals with the predictability of the Symbolist poetic vocabulary. See also V. Gofman, "Iazyk simvolistov," in LN 27-29 (1937), pp. 54-105. See especially his discussion of the Symbolists' tendency "to project a verbal utterance onto a ready-made, stable, religious-mystical background which colors the consciousness of people of certain epochs" (pp. 66 ff.). Note that in his essay Gofman generously quotes from Mandelstam's critique of the Symbolists.

60. Manifestos of Mandelstam and Gumilev, respectively.

61. Vl. Piast's speech at the Tenishev School on December 7, 1913 ("Poeziia vne grupp," Rech' [December 9, 1913]).

62. Mandelstam, "O prirode slova," SS 2, p. 255.

63. NM 2, p. 128. Cf. also the opening paragraph of Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoirs (NM 1, p. 1), a prelude to the poet's arrest and representing a context in which the painting plays a similar, if not identical, role (this time with respect to both Akhmatova and Mandelstam).

64. The expression seems to have been determined by the possibility of paronomasia: RA gózhii, "sackcloth," as a synecdoche of kenotic humiliation, and RA kavoi, "fateful," alluding to a martyr's tragic fate.

65. A. Herzen (Gertsen), Byloe i Dumy: chasti 1-3, in Sochineniia, vol. 4 (Moscow, 1956), p. 80.

66. "Zametki o poezii," SS 2, p. 265.

67. A. Herzen, O razvitii revoliutsionnykh idei v Rossii (On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia), in Sochineniia, vol. 3, p. 454. break

68. On the reception of Avvakum in the nineteenth century, see E. I. Mamimin in Trudy Otdela drevne-russkoi literatury Instituta russkoi literatury Akademii nauk SSSR (Pushkinskogo doma) 13 (1957). See also V. I. Malyshev, "Bibliografiia sochinenii protopopa Avvakuma i literatury o nem 1917-1953 gg.," in Trudy Otdela drevne-russkoi literatury 10 (1954): 435-446.

69. N. Struve ( Neizdannyi Gumilev [Paris, 1982]) believes that Mandelstam had in mind the Iverskaia Church. It would certainly be an important item on any traveler's list of famous sights. The pivotal mention of the Virgin in two poems of the Tsvetaeva cycle, one of them specifically of the Iverskaia Virgin, points to the Iverskaia Church, the shrine of the fabulous icon. Taranovsky ( Essays on Mandel'stam * ) identifies the "church" as one in which Maryna Mniszek and the Pretender were married. See also N. A. Skvortsov, Arkheologiia i topografiia Moskvy. Kurs lektsii (Moscow, 1913).

70. Discussed in M. Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855 (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), pp. 497 ff. For a history of the Russian intelligentsia based on this premise, see R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik, Istoriia russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli (St. Petersburg, 1907).

71. Cf. W. Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore and London, 1978), pp. 118-129.

72. D. S. Merezhkovskii, Petr i Aleksei, vol. 3 in Khristos i Antikhrist (St. Petersburg, 1907). Cf. Iu. M. Lotman and B. A. Uspenskii, "Rol' dual'nykh modelei v dinamike russkoi kul'tury (do kontsa XVIII veka)," Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii 28 (Tartu, 1977).

73. Godunov's investigators determined that Tsarevich Dmitrii fell on a knife during an epileptic seizure while playing the game of "svaika." Similar to darts, this game is played with a knife (or a large nail) which is thrown at the target on the ground (Dal"s Dictionary, s.v. "Svaika" and "Tychka"). See S. F. Platonov, Ocherki po istorii smuty v Moskovskom gosudarstve (St. Petersburg, 1910), and, a no less likely source, his Sokrashchennyi kurs russkoi istorii dlia srednei shkoly (St. Petersburg, 1914), pp. 156 ff. A student at the University of St. Petersburg, Mandelstam could have attended Platonov's lectures on the Muscovite state. He might have also been familiar with more specialized literature, such as N. Ustrialov, Skazaniia sovremennikov o Dmitrii Samozvantse (St. Petersburg, 1859).

74. According to Dal"s Dictionary (s.v. "Baba"), "babki" was played with vertebrae, or with objects of a similar design that had one protruding side called khrebetik (i.e., a little spine, or the "spinous process of the vertebra"). Therefore, the translation of babki as "knucklebones" (C. Brown, Mandelstam, p. 222; Broyde, Osip Mandel'stam * , pp. 177, 189; and Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * , p. 119) might be misleading. Iu. M. Lotman suggested that the substitution may be attributed to the two poems by Pushkin with almost identical titles: "Na statuiu igraiushchego v babki" and "Na statuiu igraiushchego v svaiku" (Lotman, "O sootnoshenii zvukovykh i smyslovykh zhestov v poeticheskom tekste," in Semiotika teksta. Trudy po znakovym sistemam 11 [Tartu, 1979], p. 119). For another view, see L. Ginzburg, O lirike, p. 281. Mandelstam resorted to the former in "Boris Sinani," where his S-R populist friend continue

      who died young is compared to the statue for which Pushkin composed his inscription (in fact one of the last poems composed by him). This constellation of referents is discussed in Ronen, An Approach to Mandel'stam * , pp. 154-156.

75. The aphorisms of Heracleitos, translated into Russian by Vladimir Nilender (a one-time fiancé of Tsvetaeva and a friend of Mandelstam), were published in Moscow by the Symbolist publishing house of Musaget: Geraklit efesskii, fragmenty (Moscow, 1910). This particular fragment reads as follows: "Vechnost' est' ditia, igraiushchee kostiami—tsarstvo ditiati." Mandelstam's "babki" is merely an archaic and uniquely Russian word for casting dice.

76. The "precursor" theme becomes more pronounced when this poem is juxtaposed with Mandelstam's description of his friend Boris Sinani, who died shortly after graduating from the Tenishev: "His movements, when necessary, were large and possessed a swagger, like those of the boy playing babki in the sculpture of Fedor Tolstoi; . . . his stride, astonishingly light, was the stride of a barefooted man. He would have looked right with a sheepdog at his feet and a tall staff: he had golden animal fuzz on his cheeks and chin. [He looked] either like a Russian boy playing svaika or like the Italian John the Baptist with a barely noticeable bump on his nose" ( The Noise of Time, SS 2, p. 89). In her "Poetika Osipa Mandel'shtama," Lidiia Ginzburg noted a connection between Pushkin's "Na statuiu mal'chika, igraiushchego v babki" and Mandelstam's "In the Sledge."

77. On this image ( igra v babki and/or kosti ), cf. D. Segal, "O nekotorykh aspektakh smyslovoi struktury 'Grifel'noi ody' O. E. Mandel'shtama," RL 2 (1972), p. 65; Broyde, Osip Mandel'stam * , pp. 189-190; Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * , p. 119; Levinton, "'Na kamennykh otragakh Pierii' Mandel'shtama," p. 234n. 210; and Ronen, An Approach to Mandel'stam * , pp. 154-156.

78. Cf. Pushkin, Istoriia Pugacheva, SS 4, p. 497: "Suddenly everything began to stir and grew noisy; there were shouts: they are carting him, they are carting him! Following a detachment of the Cuirassiers, there passed a sledge with an elevated platform. On it sat Pugachev, bare-headed."

79. One of the poems Tsvetaeva recited at the "otherworldly evening" at the Kannegissers, where she made friends with Mandelstam (they had met before in Koktebel'), was the stridently pro-German "Ty miru otdana na travliu" (1914). The poem had such lines as "O Germany, my madness! O Germany, my love!" ("Nezdeshnii vecher," in Tsvetaeva, Proza [New York, 1953], pp. 277 ff.). The poem must have impressed Mandelstam deeply, for its echoes are heard not only in his 1916 "Bestiary" but also in the 1932 "K nemetskoi rechi. "

80. A. N. Veselovskii, "Psikhologicheskii parallelizm i ego formy v otrazhenii poeticheskogo stilia" in Istoricheskaia poetika, pp. 164 ff., 173-175, and 185-194. On the use of Veselovskii in the poetry of Russian modernism (particularly Mandelstam), see also Levinton, "'Na kamennykh otragakh Pierii' Mandel'shtama," p. 207. Not only was Mandelstam familiar with this term, but he used it in his own criticism, identifying one of the characteristic features of Anna Akhmatova's poetry as "asimmetrichnyi parallelizm narodnoi pesni" ( SS 3, p. 34). break

81. Cited in V. O. Kliuchevskii, Kurs russkoi istorii, vol. 3 (Moscow, 1937), p. 315.

82. Cf. Pushkin (the last stanza of Eugene Onegin ): "Some are gone already, and those [i.e., the Decembrists in exile] are far away, as Saadi has once said" ( Inykh uzh net, a te daleche, kak Sadi nekogda skazal ). Note the quoting of another poet's quotation—the transparency of the Acmeist palimpsest. Cf. C. Brown, Mandelstam, p. 224, which identifies the allusion to Pushkin.

83. C. Brown, Mandelstam, p. 223; and Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * , p. 119.

84. The pronoun was capitalized neither in the Berlin Tristia, printed in the old orthography, nor in the poem's first publication in Al'manakh muz (St. Petersburg, 1916), p. 113. By contrast, it was capitalized in "Neumolimye slova" ( SS 1:182).

85. SS 2, p. 286.

86. "S veselym rzhaniem pasutsia tabuny," SS 1: 80.

87. "Tsarevich alone was brought from Moscow under guard" ( Tsarevicha odnogo privezli iz Moskvy pod karaulom ) (Merezhkovskii, Petr i Aleksei, p. 515). For the "carting of the tsarevich through Moscow," see ibid., p. 413. One can find a more conventional interpretation of the story in "O tsareviche Aleksee," a ballad by K. K. Sluchevskii, who followed the interpretation of S. M. Solov'ev ( Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, vol. 17, chap. 2).

88. D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature (New York, 1973), p. 417.

89. G. Florovskii, Puti russkogo bogosloviia (Paris, 1981), p. 457.

90. These two patterns were well within the Schellengian tradition and, in Russia, well within the millenarian scenario of Vladimir Solov'ev. See his "Smysl liubvi" ( SS, vol. 9) and the philosophical magnum opus Opravdanie dobra.

91. Merezhkovskii, Petr i Aleksei, p. 316. The reference is to the eighteenth-century Russian tale, "A Story About a Russian Sailor, Vasilii Kariotskii, and About the Beautiful Princess [ korolevna] Irakliia of the Florentine Land" (see Russkaia proza XVIII veka, ed. G. P. Makogonenko and A. V. Zapadov, vol. 1 [Moscow and Leningrad, 1950], pp. 22-41).

92. Ibid., pp. 306, 315.

91. Merezhkovskii, Petr i Aleksei, p. 316. The reference is to the eighteenth-century Russian tale, "A Story About a Russian Sailor, Vasilii Kariotskii, and About the Beautiful Princess [ korolevna] Irakliia of the Florentine Land" (see Russkaia proza XVIII veka, ed. G. P. Makogonenko and A. V. Zapadov, vol. 1 [Moscow and Leningrad, 1950], pp. 22-41).

92. Ibid., pp. 306, 315.

93. This probable genealogy of Merezhkovskii's John was kindly suggested to me by Simon Karlinsky.

94. Merezhkovskii, Petr i Aleksei, p. 545. Those interested in literary parody will appreciate juxtaposing this passage as well as other instances of contemporary fascination with the image of the black or night sun with Kornei Chukovskii's narrative poem for children, "Crocodile," in which the beast swallows the sun.

95. "The obligation of worthy return is imperative. Face is lost forever if it is not made or if equivalent value is not destroyed" (Mauss, The Gift, p. 41).

96. "Ne veria voskresen'ia chudu," SS 1:90. See also Stikhotvoreniia (1973). Interesting observations concerning this poem may be found in Levinton, "'Na kamennykh otragakh Pierii' Mandel'shtama," p. 237n. 236. break

97. Cf. Derzhavin's Horatian "Pamiatnik": "I have erected a monument to myself, miraculous [ chudesnyi ], eternal."

98. Mauss, The Gift, pp. 6 ff.

99. Cf. H. Bloom, "Kenosis or Repetition and Discontinuity," in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York, 1973).

100. Cf. Viach. Ivanov, recalling the mysteries of ancient speech: "na iazyke feurgov 'umeret" znachilo 'rodit'sia,' 'rodit'sia' znachilo 'umeret' " ("to die" meant "to be born," "to be born" meant "to die"), in "Zavety simvolizma" (1910).

101. Cf. O. Ronen, "The Dry River and the Black Ice: Anamnesis and Amnesia in Mandel'stam * 's poem 'Ia slovo pozabyl, cto * ia xotel skazat',' " SH 1 (1977): 184.

102. N. Zernov, Eastern Christiandom: A Study of Origins and Development of the Eastern Orthodox Church (New York, 1961), p. 444. Another part of the liturgy of the Eucharist bears the name "anaphora" (a familiar rhetorical term), which literally signifies "a return gift" and is used here to mean an offering (ibid.). The Russian word for "Host" is Sviatye dary (Holy Gifts). See also D. G. Dix, "The Meaning of the Eucharist" (particularly "The Eucharist as Anamnesis," pp. 243-247), in The Shape of the Liturgy (London, 1945).

103. "Vechnye sny, kak obrazchiki krovi, perelivai iz stakana v stakan" ("Batiushkov" [1932], SS 1:261). It was published in Novyi mir 6 (1932).

104. Cf. Levinton, "'Na kamennykh otragakh Pierii' Mandel'shtama," p. 223.

105. "Vot daronositsa kak solntse zolotoe" (1915), SS 1:117.

106. O. Ronen, "An Introduction to Mandel'stam * 's Slate Ode and 1 January 1924: Similarity and Complementarity," SH 4 (1979), p. 148n. In visual terms, Mandelstam's fascination with the "daronositsa" may be related, and not without reason, to the tomb, the sepulcher, and to him who rose from it. The image bears a further comparison with Merezhkovskii's novel, in which the actual daronositsa is juxtaposed with the black crate that carried a statue of Aphrodite into Russia from Rome on the order of Peter the Great. Mandelstam's "black sun" and the related images, although highly condensed, echo this juxtaposition. I shall examine them at greater length later on. The "apple" metaphor may be traced both to the "orb," the Byzantine symbol of autocratic power, and to the monstrance, since both objects are crowned with the cross.

107. "Petr Chaadaev," SS 2, p. 286.

108. Mauss, The Gift, p. 6.

109. Cf. one of Mandelstam's earliest poems: "In the informality of a creating exchange, tell me, who would be able to combine artfully the severity of Tiutchev with Verlaine's infantile jest?" (1908, SS 4:498). A central principle of Acmeist poetics of allusion, "creating exchange" was first discussed by Taranovsky and Ronen. See also C. Brown, "On Reading Mandelstam," in O. Mandelstam, SS 1, p. xiv ff.

110. Mauss, The Gift, p. 66.

111. See N. Berkovskii, "O proze Mandel'shtama," in Tekushchaia literatura (Moscow, 1930). Cf. M. Aucouturier, "The Legend of the Poet and the continue

      Image of the Actor in the Short Stories of Pasternak," Studies in Short Fiction 3 (1966): 225-235; and idem, "The Metonymous Hero, or the Beginnings of Pasternak the Novelist," Books Abroad 44 (Spring 1977): 222-227. Cf. also Roman Jakobson's pioneering "Randbemerkungen zur Prosa des Dichters Pasternak," Slavische Rundschau 7 (1935); N. A. Nilsson, "Life as Ecstasy and Sacrifice: Two Poems by Pasternak," Scando-Slavica 5 (1959).

112. The topic has been explored in N. Gorodetzky, The Humiliated Christ in Modern Russian Thought (London and New York, 1938). See also G. P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1946). On the use of the notion in Blok, see S. Hackel, The Poet and the Revolution (Oxford, 1975), pp. 98-103. For a discussion of its relevance in Pasternak's Doktor Zhivago, see M. F. Rowland and P. Rowland, Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (Carbondale, Ill., 1967), pp. 173-194.

113. The last words are a citation from Mandelstam's auto-descriptive Fourth Prose.

1. J. Lacan, The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis (New York, 1968), pp. 40 ff.

2. "Vernis' v smesitel'noe lono" (1920) has most frequently, and in my opinion incorrectly, been translated as "Return to the incestuous bosom " (see, for example, O. Ronen, "Mandelstam, Osip Emilyevich," in Encyclopaedia Judaica: Year Book 1973 Jerusalem, 1973]). Although the most frequent poetic usage of the Russian lono ("bosom" or "womb," according to the dictionaries of Dal' [Moscow, 1903-9] and Ushakov [Moscow, 19351) warrants its translation as "bosom" or "lap" (e.g., na lone prirody, "in the lap of nature"), this is so because the word is preceded by the preposition na, which signifies exteriority. By contrast, Mandelstam uses the preposition v, which signifies interiority or, in the case of motion, a movement terminating in a confined space—hence the womb as the terminus of Leah's return. Indeed, the womb is a far more appropriate place for the "pollution of blood" (the literal meaning of the Russian krovosmeshenie, "incest") than the bosom.

3. For a survey, see K. Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), esp. chapter 3.

4. "Guests from the North" (NM 2, p. 20). See also I. Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn': Kniga pervaia i vtoraia (Moscow, 1961), pp. 455, 469-470.

5. NM 2, p. 20.

6. P. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919-1920: The Defeat of the Whites (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977), p. 159.

7. Ibid., p. 154. See also N. I. Shtif, Pogromy na Ukraine: Period Dobrovol'cheskoi armii (Berlin, 1922); and Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn', pp. 476-477.

6. P. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919-1920: The Defeat of the Whites (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977), p. 159.

7. Ibid., p. 154. See also N. I. Shtif, Pogromy na Ukraine: Period Dobrovol'cheskoi armii (Berlin, 1922); and Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn', pp. 476-477.

8. NM 2, p. 27.

9. See Mandelstam's recollections of the civil war in the Crimea in his continue

      Feodosiia (Thedosia) and "Men'sheviki v Gruzii" (Mensheviks in Georgia), SS 2, pp. 111-128 and 195-200.

10. The following Tristia poems were addressed to Arbenina: "V Peterburge my soidemsia snova," "Chut' mertsaet prizrachnaia stsena," "Voz'mi na radost' iz moikh ladonei," "Za to, chto ia ruki tvoi ne sumel uderzhat'," "Mne zhalko, chto teper' zima," "Ia naravne s drugimi." See G. Dal'nii (G. G. Superfin), "Po povodu trekhtomnogo sobraniia O. Mandel'shtama," VRSKhD 97 (1970): 140-144, and N. Khardziev's annotations to these poems in Mandelstam, Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1973).

11. On Mandelstam's service in the People's Commissariat, see C. Brown, Mandelstam (Cambridge, 1973), p. 79, and NM 2, p. 451. It appears that even in Kiev, Mandelstam held a government post that enabled him to live at the Hotel Continental and hire Nadezhda Khazina as his secretary (C. Brown, Mandelstam, p. 76). We shall never know why this information was not included in Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoirs. Why did Mandelstam, whose sympathies, at least since the middle of 1918, lay with the Bolshevik Revolution, choose to travel to the Crimea, the stronghold of the Whites? Even assuming that politics influenced Mandelstam's travel plans, it was safer for him to go to the Crimea, specifically to M. Voloshin's pension, than to either Moscow or Petrograd, which would have involved a far more dangerous adventure of crossing the front lines. Voloshin enjoyed a reputation as a man who could save his friends from both the Reds and the Whites, to which Nadezhda Mandelstam testifies in her memoirs (NM 2, p. 21). One can find a plausible explanation—by analogy—in Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn', p. 477. See also M. Voloshin, "Vospominaniia (April 1932)," SH 5-6 (1981): 501-522. As to Mandelstam's political views during his stay in the White south, they do not seem to have changed at all. Two poems, "Gde noch' brosaet iakoria" and "Akter i rabochii," composed while he was still in the Crimea, provide ample testimony of his leftist leanings. On the former poem, see O. Ronen, "Osip Mandel'stam * : An Ode and an Elegy" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1976), p. 76 ff. (n. 57); see also chapter 8, this volume.

12. "The results of the trials [under Wrangel] were determined in advance. All the accused were condemned to death. . . . In the city center, there were usually ten to fifteen half-naked corpses hanging from the tram poles with the shameful sign 'A Communist.' This made a shocking impression even on the petty bourgeois public [ meshchanskaia publika ] and created a chilling paralyzed atmosphere in the city. It was then . . . that Tavricheskiigolos . . . began enumerating the evils that the executed had committed against the Russian Army, crudely emphasizing their Jewish extraction. 'A Jew by nationality, also a Jew, of course, a Jew"' (P. Novitskii, "Iz istorii krymskoi pechati v 1919-1920 gg.," PiR 1 [1921]: 59). See also Kenez, Civil War in Russia, p. 175 and elsewhere; D. Maslov, "Pechat' pri Vrangele," in Antanta i Vrangel': Sbornik statei (Moscow and Petrograd, 1923); and V. Obolenskii, "Krym pri Vrangele," Na chuzhoi storone (Berlin and Prague) 9 (1925).

13. Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn', p. 495. break

14. On Tsygal'skii, see E. Mindlin, Neobyknovennye sobesedniki (Moscow, 1968), p. 7. Whether Mandelstam was picked up because of his passing contact with the Bolshevik underground (as Nadezhda Mandelstam maintains) or for his dervishlike appearance, or simply for no reason at all, remains a mystery. See testimonials in C. Brown, Mandelstam, p. 80, as well as Mindlin's memoirs. Passages relating to Mandelstam's stay in the Crimea, including the story of the arrest, are reprinted in Mandelstam, SS 2, pp. 511-529. Mandelstam broke with Voloshin after the latter had accused him of stealing a volume of Dante ( SS 2, pp. 522 ff.). Voloshin's role in this affair and the subsequent arrest is unclear: his own account of the events, still unpublished, is reported to be different from what we know now. See A. Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika S. P. Kablukova," VRSKhD 129, no. 3 (1979), p. 139.

15. Cf. Mandelstam's description of the relation between events and a poetic text in "Conversation about Dante" (crossing a Chinese river by jumping from one junk to another; the river has been crossed but it is impossible to trace exactly the route one took crossing it). These are very much Bergsonian images and arguments, concerning the unpredictability of the élan vital as it moves through matter, of the intuition as it grasps the universe, and of the memory as it immediately presents the past to our consciousness. See especially H. Bergson, L'energie spirituelle (Paris, 1976), pp. 31ff. On Bergson as an aesthetician, see V. Asmus, "Estetika Bergsona," Na literaturnom postu 2 (1929): 4-18. See also N. Losskii, Intuitivnaia filosofiia Bergsona (St. Petersburg, 1922); R. Arbour, Henri Bergson et les lettres françaises (Paris, 1955); and T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (London, 1936).

16. "Vernis' v smesitel'noe lono" (1920), SS 1:109. The meaning of the last words of the poem has been controversial, since the Russian i Bog s toboi may, depending on the situation, signify either "leave me alone" or "so be it," or, literally, "may God be with you." Since it is a patriarchal, God-like figure who is issuing the command in the poem, I have settled on the literal option, but "so be it" might have done as well.

17. NM 2, p. 30.

18. NM 2, p. 264.

19. NM 2, pp. 18 ff.

20. See the discussion in chapter 1.

21. NM 2, p. 265.

22. "Bessonnitsa. Gomer. Tugie parusa" (1915), SS 1:78.

23. Mandelstam's swallow here is gray, an epithet quite "against nature" in the case of a swallow. One might say that a gray swallow is to a black (ordinary) swallow as an ox is to a bull. On the swallow as a bad omen, see A. N. Afanas'ev, Poeticheskie vozzreniia slavian na prirodu: Opyt sravnitel'nogo izucheniia slavianskikh predanii i verovanii v sviazi s mificheskimi skazaniiami drugikh narodov (Moscow, 1865-69), p. 348; and E. Kagarov, Kul't fetishei, zhivotnykh i rastenii v drevnei Gretsii (St. Petersburg, 1913), p. 272 n.12. According to the Russian sayings in Dal', "lastochka" can function allegorically as a harbinger of spring, a messenger, a harbinger of death knocking on the window of a dying man, and a bird signifying speech impairment, or tongue-tie. continue

      See also "Swallow" in d'Arsy W. Thompson., A Glossary of Greek Birds (Hildesheim and Olms, 1966); J. Hastings, ed., Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (New York, n.d.), vol. 1, s.v. "Amulets" (a swallow in or trying to get into a room is a death omen). Cf. Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * , p. 158 n.18; and A. D. Hope, "The Blind Swallow: Some Parleyings with Mandelstam," in The Pack of Autolycus (Canberra and Norwalk, Conn., 1978).

24. "Za to, chto Ia ruki tvoi ne sumel uderzhat"' (December 1920), SS 1:119. For an analysis of this poem, see L. Ginzburg, "Poetika Osipa Mandel'shtama," in O lirike (Leningrad, 1974); Ginzburg was the first (in 1966) to discuss the poem's Homeric subtext ( The Odyssey, bk. 4). Note that the "wild Acropolis" is the horse that is pitted against the pliant, "civilized" Troy. Hence the "city's" sensing of its wooden ribs, which paraphrases Helen's "running her hands over the wood" as she walked around three times. "The high roost of Priam" is an echo of the high tower at the Skaian Gates ( The Iliad, bk. 3, lines 149 ff.) from which the Trojan elders observed the battles. Further, one can discern the echo of another proverbial myth of lust, that of Pasiphaë, Phaedra's mother, who hid in the wooden cow to attract the attention of Poseidon's bull. Apart from the Homeric and Hellenic mythology Mandelstam uses here for his bricolage, the poem is associated with Pushkin's "Vospominanie" and with a number of poems from A. Fet's cycle "Vechera i nochi," especially "Na stoge sena noch'iu iuzhnoi." Mandelstam's last two lines contain a pun on the archaic Russian word for "city streets," stogna, and the unspoken word for "hayloft," senoval, represented metonymically by the "straw," soloma. The effect of this pun is to bring together the poems by Pushkir and Fet (not to speak of Mandelstam's own "straw" verses) and make them serve as background for this particular piece. See also G. Levinton and R. D. Timenchik, "Kniga K. F. Taranovskogo o poezii O. E. Mandel'shtama," RL VI-2 (1978): 210n.

25. NM 2, p. 262.

26. NM 2, p. 263.

27. R. C. Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton, 1960), p. 68. Cf. Mandelstam's own words as he tried to explain, in 1934 or 1935 following his arrest for the epigram on Stalin, why it was that Stalin had not punished him with the customary severity of those days: "Why is Stalin afraid of 'mastery'?—it's sort of a superstition for him, he is afraid we [poets] can cast a spell [ nashamanit' ]" (NM 1, p. 156).

28. Princeton Archive.

29. E.g., Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * , p. 60.

30. SS 2, pp. 199 ff.

31. O. Ronen, "Mandelshtam," Encyclopaedia Judaica.

32. Ronen, ibid., enumerates the following: "Chetvertaia proza" (1930?) and "Kantsona" ("Neuzheli ia uvizhu zavtra" [1931], SS 1:236).

31. O. Ronen, "Mandelshtam," Encyclopaedia Judaica.

32. Ronen, ibid., enumerates the following: "Chetvertaia proza" (1930?) and "Kantsona" ("Neuzheli ia uvizhu zavtra" [1931], SS 1:236).

33. "Emu kavkazskie krichali gory" (1934), SS 1:292. Kiril Taranovsky was the first to point to this allusion to Dante. See his "Tri zametki o poezii Mandel'shtama," International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 12 (1969): 169-170. It is unlikely, however, that Mandelstam, as Taranovsky suggests, had Belyi in mind in the case of Leah as well as Rachel. After all, it was he, the continue

      speaker of Mandelstam's poem, who was "singing" and "weaving" the funeral "wreath" for Belyi, who was both a poet and a theoretician. Hence the adversative conjunction "but" ( a ). Compare also with A. Fet's poem "K Ofelii": "Ofeliia gibla i pela, I pela, spletaia venki; S tsvetami, venkami i pesn'iu Na dno opustilas' reki."

34. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. and comment. John D. Sinclair, vol. 2: Purgatorio (New York, 1939), pp. 354 (the original text) and 355 (the translation).

35. "Mary who sits at the Master's feet and 'hath chosen the better part,' is recognized as the type of the contemplative life; and her sister Martha, who is 'careful and troubled about many things,' is the accepted type of the active life. Dante does not make use of these, but of the corresponding Old Testament symbols, Rachel and Leah, as they were interpreted in mediaeval theology from the time of Gregory the Great" (K. Vossler, Mediaeval Culture: An Introduction to Dante and His Times, vol. 1 [New York, 1929], p. 183). "St. Gregory the Great, when the office of the Papacy was forced upon him, bewailed the loss of his Rachel, the quiet life of contemplation in his monastery: 'The beauty of contemplative life I have loved as Rachel, barren indeed but clear-eyed and fair, which, although by its quiet it bears less, yet sees the light more clearly. Leah is wedded to me in the night, the active life namely, fruitful but blear-eyed, seeing less though bringing forth abundantly"' [italics are mine] (cited in the Sinclair edition of Purgatorio, p. 361). "Martha" and "Mary" were common proverbial referents in the Russian of Mandelstam's time. In the words of an American student of Russian spirituality, the allegory of Martha and Mary was "as common in Russia as 'faith without works is dead' is common here. Speaking roughly, Eastern Christianity is associated with Mary's good part and Western Christianity with the way of Martha and service" (S. Graham, The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary [New York, 1916], p. v).

36. S. Mallarmé, Les noces d'Hèrodiade. Mystère (Paris, 1959), pp. 65, 69 ("Scène"). Mandelstam attended a performance of the Wilde-Strauss Salome while still in Paris and, according to Mikhail Karpovich, composed a poem about the danseuse after the performance. See M. Karpovich, "Moe znakomstvo s Mandel'shtamom," Novyi zhurnal 49 (1957): 258-261. Cf. Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * , pp. 148 ff. Although both Wilde-Strauss and Mallarmé must be in the poem's background, Mallarmé's icy heroine—who, incidentally, stares into a mirror to see in its "cadre gelé" "eau froide par l'ennui"—seems to be more relevant to Mandelstam's Solominka-Salome than the "overheated" maiden casting off her seven veils on a sultry Palestinian night in the eponymous music drama.

37. The lines " Slomalas' milaia solomka nezhivaia, / Ne Salomeia, net, solominka skorei" represent an obvious (however rare in Mandelstam) play on a vulgar expression for sexual intercourse with a virgin, slomat' tselku (literally "to break the wholeness of virginity"). The drafts of the poem (Princeton Archive) are far more suggestive than the final version, indicating that Mandelstam made a special effort to maintain decorum.

38. "What happens with us in the use of certain names, as expressing continue

      summarily, this name for you and that for me—Helen, Gretchen, Mary—a hundred associations . . . which, through a very wide and deep experience, they have power of bringing with them; in which respect such names are but revealing instances of the whole significance, power and use of language in general " [italics are mine] (W. Pater, "A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew," in Greek Studies. A Series of Essays [New York, 1899], p. 35). On Gautier, see Khardzhiev in Stikhotvoreniia (1973), p. 272. The poem seems also to be related to one of the more emblematic poems of the young Akhmatova, "Kak solominkoi, p'esh' moiu dushu" (in Vecher [St. Petersburg, 1912]), and, as Khradzhiev noted ( Stikhotvoreniia 1973), Velemir Khlebnikov's burlesque drama Oshibka smerti. On Akhmatova, cf. B. Eikhenbaum on this poem and "Kak belich'ia rasplastannaia shkurka" (to which Mandelstam responded later on in Tristia ) as eminently representative of the post-Symbolist innovative technique (B. Eikhenbaum, Anna Akhmatova: Opyt analiza [Petersburg, 1923], p. 56). See also V. A. Piast, Vstrechi (Moscow, 1929), p. 156.

39. Mandelstam's friend S. P. Kablukov, a devout Christian, considered the poem blasphemous, reading it, no doubt, as a parody of the Gospel legend. Confronted with the evidence, Mandelstam was contrite, declaring to Kablukov that "sex was especially dangerous for him as one who had left the Jewish milieu, that he was aware of the dangerous road he was on, that his situation was terrible but that he was incapable of changing the course and even of not composing during this erotic madness, and that he saw no way out except a speedy conversion to Russian Orthodoxy" (A. Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika Kablukova," p. 153).

40. "Iz omuta zlogo i viazkogo" and "V ogromnom omute prozrachno i temno" (1911), SS 1:17 and 1:18; discussed in chapter 2. On this theme of "reconciliation," cf. Ronen, "Osip Mandel'stam * ," p. 161.

41. "An obelisk, which does not even cast enough shade to give you refuge from the heat of . . . the sun, does not render any useful service but forces you to lift your eyes to heaven; so the great temple of the Christian world, when in the hour of dusk you stroll under its enormous vaulted ceiling and when the deep shadows have already filled the entire ship but the glass panes of the cupola are still burning with the last rays of the setting sun, arouses in you a greater wonderment rather than [merely] charming you with its superhuman scale" (M. Gershenzon, Petr Chaadaev: Zhizn' i myshlen'e [St. Petersburg, 1908], p. 276). Cf. Mandelstam's letter to Viacheslav Ivanov: "Does a man, when he enters under the vaulted ceiling of Notre Dame, think about the truth [or falsehood] of Catholicism, rather than becoming a Catholic for the sole reason of being under these vaulted arches?" (August 13/26, 1909, SS 2, p. 486). For an opposite view, see Mandelstam's "Paden'e—neizmennyi sputnik strakha" (1912), SS 1:34. Cf. O. Ronen, "Leksicheskii povtor, podtekst i smysl v poetike Osipa Mandel'stam * a," in Slavic Poetics: Essays in Honor of Kiril Taranovsky, ed. R. Jakobson, C. H. van Schoneveld, and D. S. Worth (The Hague, 1973), p. 368n.

42. K. Taranovsky., "The Black-Yellow Light: The Jewish Theme in Mandel'stam's poetry," in Essays on Mandel'stam * , pp. 48-67 (pp. 59-64 deal specifi- soft

      cally with "Return"); the following quoted passage is from p. 63. The question of whether Mandelstam relied on the translation by Annenskii or on the original by Mallarmé, two poets whom he valued most highly (Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika Kablukova"), is important, since the choice of one or the other for the subtext will yield a different interpretation. On "Don du poème," see R. G. Cohn, Towards the Poems of Mallarmé (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965), pp. 47-51.

43. W. Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York, 1947). See also N. N. Holland, 5 readers reading (New Haven, 1975); and W. Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore and London, 1978), particularly on the relationship among the "theme," the "horizon," and the "repertoire."

44. The vulgar anti-Semitic vituperations against Gornfel'd in "Chetvertaia proza" (1930, 1931?), where Mandelstam accuses this "diadia Monia s Basseinoi" (uncle Monia from the Basseinaia Street) of murdering Russian poets in the manner of the French d'Anthes, represents a good example of this strange attitude. For in the same work, Mandelstam proudly declares himself an heir of the biblical "shepherds, patriarchs, and kings."

45. Cf. Mandelstam's "Otravlen khleb, i vozdukh vypit" (1913), SS 1: 54:

The bread has been poisoned, the air drunk up:
How hard it is to tend the wounds!
Joseph, when sold into Egypt,
Could not be more aggrieved.

      This is the only instance in which Mandelstam compared an Old Testament character with his "poet." In "Kantsona" (1931, SS 1:236), he vaguely projected the self onto the "Prodigal Son" (see NM 2, pp. 614-624), a projection that does not exclude the possibility of conflation with Jacob's (Israel's) son Joseph, who, though not by his own will, left his father. In fact, the self in this poem also includes Dante, from whom Mandelstam, using a circuitous metonymic route, derived the "Zeiss binoculars," "the psalmist's gift to the clairvoyant" Zeus. I discuss this poem in chapter 8.

46. Cf. R. Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore and London, 1977), pp. 270, 271.

47. See, for example, N. Poznanskii, Zagovory: Opyt issledovaniia proiskhozhdeniia i razvitiia zagovornykh formul (Petrograd, 1917), published as Zapiski istoriko-filologicheskogo fakul'teta Petrogradskogo Universiteta, vol. 136, esp. pp. 26 ff. See also A. Belyi, "Magiia slov," in Simvolizm (Moscow, 1910), which approaches verbal magic as a sort of fiat; and A. Blok's "Poeziia zagovorov i zaklinanii" ( SS 5), which was based, in the first place, on the writings of Veselovskii and Potebnia, among others.

48. See SS 3, pp. 409 ff.

49. One may also interpret Mandelstam's formula as something far more innocent, namely, a paraphrase of the biblical metaphor for Israel, lono avraamovo (kindly suggested by B. Gasparov). However, the attribute "in- soft

      cestuous" continues to describe this otherwise commendable decision to return to the ancestral fold.

50. See Freud on reversal in dreams, e.g., The Interpretation of Dreams (New York, 1965), pp. 361-363.

51. The element of apogamy (as in Zeus giving birth to Athena) is another feature that links "Return" to Mallarmé's "Don du poème." However, Mallarmé's "enfant d'une nuit d'Idumee" decidedly represents a poem (as it does in Annenskii), and not, like Mandelstam's Leah, the poet's muse or the poet himself. See Mandelstam's essay "François Villon" (written in 1910, when he was nineteen), which he emphatically placed at the conclusion of the 1928 edition of his collected essays, O poezii. In that essay, Mandelstam explicitly stated that the "other" of a lyric poet represented an aspect of his "I," an aspect alienated from the whole ego in such a way that a poet may engage in a dialogue with himself. Cf. T. S. Eliot, The Three Voices of Poetry (New York, 1954).

52. In an incest myth, the "inability to connect two kinds of relationships is overcome (or rather replaced) by the assertion that contradictory relationships are identical inasmuch as they are both self-contradictory in a similar way" (C. Lévi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth," in Structural Anthropology [New York, 1963], p. 216).

53. See his Tristia poem "V Petropole prozrachnom my umrem" (We shall die in the translucent Petropolis).

54. If Mandelstam's 1921 "usage" of the image of "heavy blood" is an indicator, the extraordinary density of blood denoted one's predisposition to historical activism. Thus, the "blood" lines in the poem add emphasis to Leah as the allegorical vita activa, despite her "return." Cf. "In the veins of each century there courses alien, not its own, blood, and the stronger, the more historically intensive the age, the heavier the weight of this alien blood" ( SS 2, p. 282). Cf. contemporary usage in Librovich, Nerusskaia krov' v russkikh pisateliakh: "In Russia, those who reflect the people's life [ otrazhateli narodnoi zhizni ] are in large numbers, if not primarily, persons of non-Russian or half Russian origin—persons in whose veins there courses [ v zhilakh kotorykh struitsia ] non-Russian blood, and even where it is Russian it is mixed with the alien" (cited in A. G. Gornfel'd, Knigi i liudi: Literaturnye besedy I [St. Petersburg, 1908], pp. 299 ff.).

55. Cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss's understanding of myth as the sum of its variants in "The Structural Study of Myth."

56. "Myth is the part of language where the formula traduttore, tradittore reaches its lowest truth value. From that point of view it should be placed in the gamut of linguistic expressions at the end opposite to that of poetry, in spite of all the claims that have been made to prove the contrary. Poetry is a kind of speech which cannot be translated except at the cost of serious distortions; whereas the mythical value of the myth is preserved even through the worst translations" (Lévi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth," p. 210). One may wish to add to this rather formidable statement that "serious distortions" occur every time a reader attempts to interpret, indeed merely to read, a continue

      poem, unless, of course, he deals with some other kind of poetry (I can think only of a poem composed and read by God in his privacy) that speaks outside the reader's mind.

57. R. Jakobson, "Poetry of grammar and grammar of poetry, " Lingua 21 (1968): 597-609.

58. Cf. "Zverinets" (The Bestiary, 1916), SS 1: 83: "But I am singing the wine of time—the source of the Italic speech—and, in the proto-Arian cradle, the Slavic and Germanic flax."

59. R. Jakobson, "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles," in R. Jakobson and M. Halle, The Fundamentals of Language (The Hague and Paris, 1956), pp. 90-96.

60. R. Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Style in Language, ed. T. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), pp. 350-377.

61. "Zolotistogo meda struia . . . ," SS 1:92. L. Ginzburg discusses this poem in "Poetika Osipa Mandel'shtama," O starom i novom (Leningrad, 1982).

62. Even as late as 1916, Nikolai Gumilev spoke about Mandelstam as a "poet who has had difficulties mastering the Russian language" (N. Gumilev, "Zametki o russkoi poezii," SS 4, p. 363). Another Acmeist, Sergei Gorodetskii, writing for an ultranationalist journal, was more explicit about the sources of Mandelstam's allegedly clumsy Russian: "He [Mandelstam] has learned the language. And although no study can serve as a substitute for the language to which one is born, nevertheless, Mandelstam's poetry belongs to literature. True, anyone sensitive to language will notice in it certain shortcomings, which the author skillfully tries to pass for his own, personal style . . . However, it is a big mistake to consider Mandelstam's private [ uslovnyi ] language some sort of 'Russian Latin,' as do some of his admirers" ("Poeziia kak iskusstvo," Lukomor'e 18 [April 30, 1916]). Or consider an opinion of a member of the younger generation associated with the Acmeists: "Undoubtedly, Mandelstam's poetry is beautiful, but this beauty is not his own, it is alien [ chuzaia ]. As to Mandelstam qua poet, he is not of the present (I am afraid, no longer of the present). There is only the solemn grandeur of Ancient Rome and Catholic Rome, the dead beauty of the Admiralty and Tsarskoe Selo" (I. Oksenov, "O. Mandel'shtam. Kamen'. Stikhi. 'Giperborei,' P. 1916" [review], Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh 2-3 [1916]: 74 ff.). A few years later Oksenov would count himself among the admirers of Mandelstam's poetry.

63. See my discussion of "Solominka" earlier in this chapter.

64. Cf. L. Ginzburg's interpretation in "Poetika Osipa Mandel'shtama," O lirike.

65. See NM 2, p. 278. Cf. Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * , pp. 62 ff.

66. NM 1, p. 200.

67. I am aware of three analyses of the poem: D. M. Segal, "Mikrosemantika odnogo stikhotvoreniia," in Jakobson, van Schoneveld, and Worth, Slavic Poetics, pp. 345-405; H. Henry, "Étude de fonctionnement d'un poème de Mandel'stam," Action poétique 63 (1975): 21-31; and N. Struve, Ossip Mandelstam (Paris, 1982), pp. 181-183. break

68. There are two more versions of the second stanza. The variants are telling and speak for themselves. One of them reads: "Lifting a stone is easier than saying: to love" (Princeton Archive). The other: "I have but one care left in this world: A golden care, to kill the burden of time" ( Tristia [Berlin, 1922], p. 55).

69. A. Akhmatova, Sochineniia, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1968), p. 177. See also H. Henry, "Étude de fonctionnement d'un poème," pp. 24-25; and N. Struve, Ossip Mandelstam, pp. 182-183.

70. B. Seward, The Symbolic Rose (New York, 1960), pp. 55-56, 136-137.

71. "The town council [of Novorossiisk] sent a delegation to Wrangel in April [1920] complaining that the parents would not send their children to school because the children were terrified by seeing so many people hanged in the streets" (Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, p. 275). For eyewitness accounts, see D. Maslov, "Pechat' pri Vrangele"; and V. Obolenskii, "Krym pri Vrangele."

72. In 1920, Vladislav Khodasevich came out with his Putem zerna (The Way of the Grain). Or cf. V. Khlebnikov's "Nasha osnova" (1920): "Slovotvorchestvo uchit, chto vse raznoobrazie slova iskhodit ot osnovnykh zvykov azbuki, zameniaiushchikh semena slova. Iz etikh iskhodnykh tochek stroitsia slovo, i novyi seiatel' iazykov mozhet prosto napolnit' ladon' 28 zvukami azbuki, zernami iazyka" [italics are mine] (Khlebnikov, SP 5, p. 228). Once again, this was a common allegory in search of a mythic narrative.

73. Cf. N. Struve's matter-of-fact treatment of this poem as a "formule incantatoire" ( Ossip Mandelstam, pp. 182-184).

74. For a more-or-less contemporary view of sympathetic magic, different from that of Sir James Frazer, see M. Mauss, A General Theory of Magic (London, 1972), pp. 11-12, 98-102.

75. For Mandelstam's contemporaries, such a view of iteration in poetry was commonplace. Cf. B. Larin, "O 'Kiparisovom lartse,"' Literaturnaia mysl': Al'manakh, vol. 2 (Petrograd, 1923). For Larin, Annenskii was a poet who "courageously put to a test motives repeated a hundred times." Citing Annenskii's densely iterative poem "Nevozmozhno," Larin echoed the early Futurist declarations and maintained that repetition of a word in a poem empties the word of conventional meaning and endows it with new meaning, creating the axiological "autonomy of the word" ( samotsennost' slova ). "Poetry," he wrote, "is more of a bait, a riddle, than a message, because it must always be a new name [ novoe nazvanie]. In poetry . . . there is present a power of unmediated suggestion. . . . A poem is the only lyric name [ imia ] which cannot be represented but which is comprehensible like a spell [ vniatno kak navazhdenie ]" (ibid., pp. 152 ff.). Larin's essay was written in 1922. On it and on the Formalists' response to Larin's ideas, see the commentary by E. A. Toddes, A. P. Chudakov, and M. O. Chudakova in Iu. Tynianov, Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino (Moscow, 1977), p. 455.

76. Some of the most astute contemporary readers of Mandelstam found his use of the "collage" technique—that is, the conjoining of self-enclosed continue

      stanzas and even lines—excessive. See S. Bobrov, "O. Mandelstam. 'Tristia"' (review), PiR 4 (1923): 259; and L. Lunts, "Tsekh poetov," Knizhnyi ugol 8 (1922): 54. As Ronen ("Osip Mandel'stam * ") has noted, Mandelstam, who often numbered stanzas (see Tristia), responded to this criticism by abandoning this essentially graphic emphasis on division numbers and sometimes by removing stanzaic divisions altogether (as in "Iazyk bulyzhnika . . . ," which in a draft was divided into seven numbered quatrains).

77. "And the intricate pattern he [Tintoretto] has thought up to replace the banal drapery serves to bring out that jewelry still-life within which is a broken necklace—symbol as it were of the coming fate of Venice" (A. Malraux, The Voices of Silence [Princeton, 1978], p. 439). Cf. also a description of the funeral seen through the child's eye in Mandelstam's The Noise of Time (1923-25): "Once, accompanied by my nanny and mother, I was walking along the Moika past the chocolate Italian Embassy. Suddenly—the doors are opened and they allow everybody in, and the place smells of resin, incense, and something sweet and pleasant. Black velvet was muffling the entry way and the walls decorated with silver and tropical plants: the embalmed Italian Ambassador was lying very high up. What was this all to me? I do not know, but these were strong and sharp impressions, and I cherish them to this day" ( SS 2, p. 54).

78. The motif is used again, in a personal context, in The Fourth Prose: "And everything was terrifying, as in a child's dream. Nel mezzo del'cammin di nostra vita —in the middle of life's way, I was stopped in a wild Soviet forest by robbers who called themselves my judges. They were elders with sinewy necks and small gooselike heads who were unworthy of carrying the burden of age. For the first time in my life, I was needed by literature, and it was squeezing me, pawing and feeling me, and everything was terrifying, as in a child's dream" ( SS 2, pp. 188 ff.).

79. "Venok ili venets?" was the title of A. Belyi's famous reply ( Apollon 11 [1910]) to Briusov's "O 'rechi rabskoi' v zashchitu poezii" ( Apollon 9 [1910], the issue containing Mandelstam's first publication).

80. Together with the motif of the mirror (stanzas 1 and 5), the "wreath" in "Venetian Life" once again returns to the theme of Rachel, contemplating herself in the mirror, and Leah, singing and weaving a wreath.

81. Cf. "Prozrachnaia zvezda, bluzhdaiushchii ogon', Tvoi brat, Petropol', umiraet" ("Na strashnoi vysote . ." [1918], SS 1:101, and Stikhotvoreniia, no. 87).

82. A. Blok, "Pliaski smerti" ("Pustaia ulitsa. Odin ogon' v okne," October 1912).

83. M. Voloshin gave the following explication of the Saturn and Vesper symbolism: "Venus is beauty; Saturn is fate. . . . Venus testifies to magnanimity, kindness, expansiveness; Saturn binds lovers with the ring of pride, signifies closure that can be broken only with a passionate, always tragic gesture" ("Liki tvorchestva," Apollon 2 [1909]: 1-4 [2d pagination]). Viacheslav Ivanov uses the image "Saturn's ring" in his cycle "Zolotye zavesy" ("Son razvernul ogneiazychnyi svitok," 1907) in Cor ardens. Cf. Ronen, "Osip Mandel'stam * ." Further echoes are found in E. T. A. Hoffmann's "The Doge and the Dogaressa" continue

      (known from Pushkin's unfinished translation). R. Timenchik ("Zametki ob akmeizme," RL 7/8 [1974]) suggests a connection with Mikhail Kuzmin's "Venetian" narrative poem, Novyi rolla. In contemporary usage, "Saturn's ring" represented instances of an "astrological" reintegration of astronomical knowledge. Cf. C. Flammarion, Popular Astronomy (n.p., 1907), p. 432: "The ancient opinion of Saturn has been preserved to our day, even among cultured minds. The marvellous ring which surrounds this strange world, far from effacing this legendary impression, has even further confirmed it." Flammarion's Dream of an Astronomer (the English edition of 1923) begins with a description of Venice similar to that presented in the poem.

84. V. Briusov, "'Al'manakh Tsekha poetov,' kn. 2 (Pg., 1921) and 'SOPO. Pervyi sbornik stikhov' (M. 4-yi god 1-go veka [1921])" (review), PiR 3 (1921): 270-271.

85. N. Pavlovich. See note 20, chap. 1.

86. A. Blok, SS 7, p. 371. In her memoirs, Nadezhda Mandelstam refused to see praise in Blok's qualification of Mandelstam as an artist. Although she singled out Blok as the most favorably disposed to Mandelstam of all the Symbolists (certainly an overstatement—Briusov and Ivanov are on record as praising Mandelstam), she wrote that even he "did make an entry in his diary about the Yid and the artist" (NM 2, p. 378). It would seem that she was speaking about this particular entry (the only one in which Mandelstam is called "artist"), suggesting that it was not printed in its entirety. Or was it the entry of 1911 in which Blok referred to Mandelstam parenthetically as "the eternal"? (see Blok, SS 7, p. 78). P. Gromov, an authority on Blok and a critic very sympathetic to Mandelstam, treated the same entry as "a high degree of praise in the overall system of Blok's views" (Gromov, Blok. Ego predshestvenniki i sovremenniki [Moscow and Leningrad, 1966], p. 380).

1. "In the literature of transitional eras, for instance, we find an especial profusion of rebirth rituals, where the poet is making symbolic passes that will endow him with new identity. Now, imagine him trying to do a very thorough job of this reidentification. To be completely reborn, he would have to change his very lineage itself. He would have to revise, not only his present but also his past" (K. Burke, "Freud—and the Analysis of Poetry," in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973], p. 273).

2. See, for example, a composite review by Valerii Briusov in which he discusses the proliferation of such imagery in contemporary poetry ("Sredi stikhov," PiR 2 [1922]: 149). A thorough discussion of the subject may be found in B. Jangfeldt, Majakovskij and Futurism: 1917-1921, Stockholm Studies in Russian Literature, no. 5 (Stockholm, 1976), esp. chapter 3: "The Revolution of the Spirit."

3. Letter to Viacheslav Ivanov, SS 2, p. 485. For the correct date (June 20, 1909, not 1910), see A. Morozov, "Pis'ma O). E. Mandel'shtama V. I. Iva- soft

      novu," in Gosudarstvennaia publichnaia biblioteka SSSR imeni V I. Lenina. Zapiski Otdela rukopisei, vol. 34 (Moscow, 1975), p. 262.

4. Mandelstam, "V Petropole prozrachnom my umrem," SS 1:89. This is another instance of Mandelstam's reworking of the Trojan cycle. Here Petersburg is Troy, about which it had been prophesied that its walls could not be breached as long as they contained Athene's Palladium (Apollodorus, Epitome 5:10). According to a later, Roman, tradition, Palladium was linked to palta, or "things hurled from heaven"—a link Mandelstam must have been aware of. He conflated the palta -Palladium with Tiutchev's stone ("Having rolled from a mountain, a stone came to rest in the valley") in his 1912 programmatic poem "Falling is an inevitable companion of fear": "Who hurls stones to us from on high, and does the stone deny the yoke of dust?" The architectural, Petersburg pathos of the early Mandelstam also points in this direction. Further, the poem echoes some of the habitual formulations concerning the nature and "destiny" of St. Petersburg that were current in the 1910s. Nikolai Shapir, who frequently wrote on such matters for Severnye zapiski, said the following: "Not Phoebus-Apollo, but Athene, 'the patroness of cities,' and Mars, swelling with power and subordinated to her—these are our gods ("Filosofskokul'turnye ocherki," Severnye zapiski 9 [September 1913]: 69).

5. V. Rozanov, Apokalipsis nashego vremeni (Sergiev Posad, 1917-18).

6. V. Khlebnikov, Noch' v okope (1922); VI. Maiakovskii, Voina i mir (1916).

7. Cf. Iu. Levin, D. Segal, R. Timenchik, V. Toporov, and T. Tsiv'ian, "Russkaia semanticheskaia poetika kak potentsial'naia kul'turnaia paradigma," RL 7/8 (1974): 47-82.

8. "The life of a historical system leads inevitably to aging . . ., for it carries on its back its entire past, and this heavy burden of past experience grows so big as to become unbearable" (N. O. Losskii, Intuitivnaia filosofiia Bergsona [Petersburg, 1922], p. 13). Bergson spoke of the possible eventual victory over death in L'évolution créatrice (ibid., p. 92). The similarity between Bergson and Spengler can be traced to their common source in Nietzsche. On this, see H. S. Hughes, Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate (New York and London, 1952), p. 52. Viacheslav Ivanov's revision of Nietzsche, which involved a Christianization of the self-proclaimed "Antichrist," needs no commentary, but see, for example, his "Nietsshe i Dionis" (1904, SS 2) as well as the contemporaneous "Ellinskaia religiia stradaiushchego boga" ( Novyi put', 1-3, 5, 8-9 [1904]).

9. "The Nineteenth Century." For Mandelstam's poetic elaboration of this formula, forever associated with Alfred de Musset, see O. Ronen, An Approach to Mandel'stam * (Jerusalem, 1983), pp. 226, 249-248.

10. On the early twentieth century as an "Alexandrian epoch," see A. Blok, "Tvorchestvo Viacheslava Ivanova" (1905), SS 5; M. Kuzmin's collection of poetry "Aleksandriiskie pesni" (1908); and Mandelstam's "Pushkin and Skriabin" (1915). A particularly poignant formulation may be found in P. P. Muratov, "Stil' epokhi" ( RM 31, no. 1 [1910], pp. 94-99). "The antique world continue

      had turned out to be so intimately related to ours and so close and dear, that the 'dead' culture has at once become revived for us" (V. Pertsev, "V. Buzeskul, 'Antichnost' i sovremennost"" [review], Golos minuvshego 5 [1913]: 250). This pathos is, of course, also behind the contemporary classic in the genre, Tadeusz Zielinski's three-volume Iz zhizni idei.

11. Cf. "Many of our authors have already found in the Buddhist legends motifs and plots for their own work; but a true representative of the Buddhist mood must be a poet who does not apparently take any interest in Buddhism and, in general, strictly guards his Russian verse against the encroachment of all sorts of heterogeneous names and terms" (Vl. Solov'ev, "Buddiiskoe nastroenie v poezii" [1894], in SS 7, p. 82). Mandelstam owed to this article his characterization of the psychologically intricate and pessimistic Flaubert as the "Buddhist prayer wheel" (see his essay "Konets romana," SS 2).

12. M. Kuzmin, Uslovnosti: Stat'i ob iskusstve (Petrograd, 1923), p. 87.

13. M. Kuzmin, "Parnasskie zarosli," in Zavtra: Literaturno-kriticheskii sbornik, vol. 1, ed. E. Zamiatin, M. Kuzmin, and M. Lozinskii (Berlin, 1923), p. 122.

14. Cf. B. Pasternak's letter to Mandelstam (January 31, 1925) concerning the planned Spektoskii: "The illusion of the extraordinary nature of the epoch is abandoned. The terminal style (the end of the century, the end of the revolution, the end of youth, the death of Europe [Spengler]) recedes, grows more and more shallow and ceases to function. The destinies of cultures, as before, become a matter of choice and good will" ("Chudo poeticheskogo voploshcheniia [Pis'ma Borisa Pasternaka]," Voprosy literatury 9 [1972]: 161).

15. A. Belyi, Simvolizm, (Moscow, 1910), p. 436. For a discussion of Belyi's impact on the Futurists, see, Dmitrij Tschizewskij's preface to his anthology on Russian Futurism, Anfänge des russischen Futurismus (Wiesbaden, 1963), and his preface to a reprint of Belyi's Glassolaliia, "Andrej Belyjs 'Glassolalija'—Ein 'Poem über die Lautwelt"' (Munich, 1976). See also Vl. Markov, The Longer Poems of Velemir Khlebnikov (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962), p. 13. The early Formalist theories were perceived as a direct outgrowth of Belyi's religious Wissenschaft. See, for example, D. Filosofov's review of Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo iazyka. Vypusk I (Petrograd, 1916) in Rech' (September 26, 1916), which was pointedly entitled "Magiia slov," echoing Belyi's seminal essay (1910).

16. For example, I. V. Ignat'ev, "Ego-Futurizm" (1913): "The word has reached its limit." Or the Futurists' "Poshchechina obshchestvennomy vkusu" (The Slap in the Face of Public Taste, 1912): "And if even in our words there have still remained dirty imprints of your 'common sense' and 'good taste,' they are, nevertheless, already illuminated by the first Fluttering Dawns of the New Coming Beauty of the Self-Valued (Self-Generated) Word" (in V1. Markov, ed., Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov, vol. 27 of Slavische Propyläen [Munich, 1967], pp. 45 and 51).

17. Mandelstam, "Utro akmeizma" (The Morning of Acmeism, 1913?), SS 2, p. 321. break

18. From "Sadok sudei" (Trap for Judges). This was item ten in the program of the Hylaea group (in Markov, Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov, p. 52).

19. A. Welsh, Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics (Princeton, 1978), pp. 25-47.

20. See Innokentii Annenskii's remark on Fedor Sologub's "howling dog" ( Vysoka luna gospodnia) as a modern version of the Hecate myth in Annenskii, Knigi otrazhenii (Moscow, 1979), "O sovremennom lirizme," p. 350. Or see V. Briusov on Maiakovskii's "Ia sosh'iu sebe chernye shtany iz barkhata golosa moego" ("Kofta-fata," 1913): an elaboration of the colloquial metaphor barkhatnyi golos ("velvety voice"), in V. Briusov, "God russkoi poezii," RM 5 (1914), p. 30 (4th pagination). In the late 1920s, this obsession with "secularized-sacralized" objects became a matter of parody in the fiction of Konstantin Vaginov. Not unrelated to Mandelstam's milieu and the poet himself (cf. the Unknown Poet in Vaginov's 1928 novel Kozlinaia pesn' ) were often-pathological collectors: a collector of kitsch and pornography, Kostia Rotikov ( Kozlinaia pesn' ), or the protagonist of the unfinished Garpagoniada, who collected clipped fingernails.

21. N. Stepanov, "O. Mandel'shtam, 'Stikhotvoreniia' (1928)" (review), Zvezda 6 (1928): 123-124. According to Stepanov, "Word-themes grow enormous labyrinths of meanings that lead one astray and through which the reader must make his way in order to arrive at the story [fabula] of the poem. The result is a poem-charade with a concealed key word." This approach to Mandelstam was quite common at the time. Cf. Stepanov's very similar approach to B. Pasternak in his review "Dve knigi" ( Zvezda 11 [1927]: 166-68): "One needs a poetic key . . . one solves them as a rebus." A. Lezhnev wrote that Mandelstam's poems "were composed like a rebus" ("Literaturnye zametki," PiR 4 [1925]: 151). Cf. Tynianov's formulation in "Promezhutok" (1924): "The semantic series [ smyslovoi riad ] in Mandelstam is such that a single image, a single lexical series, colors all the rest—this is the key to the entire hierarchy of images" (Iu. Tynianov, Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino, ed. E. A. Toddes, A. P. Chudakov, and M. O. Chudakova [Moscow, 1977], p. 188). Stepanov's work was obviously inspired by his teacher, Tynianov. Sergei Bobrov was perhaps the first critic to note and to emphasize this principle when he spoke about Mandelstam's "word-poems." See his review "O. Mandelstam. 'Tristia,' " PiR 4 (1923): 261. V. Vinogradov offered a similar analysis of Akhmatova's poetics: "Above all [her poetry] represents a typical example how the development of a verbal series dominating consciousness defines the general plot pattern [kanvafabuliarnogo uzora ] and the character of favored narrative structures [ siuzhetnye skhemy ]. . . . In this manner, in the course of artistic framing of the theme of war and civil strife, what actually takes place is an extension of the sphere of symbols that revolve between love and death [Akhmatova's thematic core, according to Vinogradov]" ("O simvolakh Anny Akhmatovoi," in Literaturnaia mysl': Al'manakh, vol. 1 [Petrograd, 1922], pp. 91-138, esp. p. 134). break

22. R. Barthes, Mythologies (New York, 1972), p. 142.

23. Viach. Ivanov, "Poet i chern"' (The Poet and the Rabble, 1904), SS 1, p. 713.

24. A. Veselovskii, "Psikhologicheskii parallelizm i ego formy v otrazhenii poeticheskogo stilia," in Istoricheskaia poetika (Moscow, 1940), p. 129. This was the stuff of a lecture course at the University of St. Petersburg. Consider a passage from a collection of articles by A. K. Borozdin, one of Mandelstam's instructors: "The elementary mythological ideas emerged together with poetry, and both verbal creativity and poetry were intimately intertwined with the creation of myths." ( Ocherki po istorii russkoi literatury: Russkaia narodnaia slovesnost' i drevniaia pis'mennost' [n.p., 1913], p. 2).

25. "Establishing a poet's literary genesis, his literary sources, his kinship and origin, takes us at once to firm ground" (Mandelstam, SS 2, pp. 270ff.). Cf. Veselovskii, Istoricheskaia poetika, p. 47.

26. Mandelstam, "Barsuch'ia nora" (The Badger's Hole, 1921), SS 2, p. 273. Cf. G. Levinton, "Zametki o fol'klorizme Bloka," in Mif, fol'klor, literatura, ed. V. G. Bazanov et al. (Leningrad, 1978), pp. 171ff. and 175ff.

27. "O prirode slova" obmirshchenie iazyka. In "Zavety simvolizma" (The Legacy of Symbolism, 1910), Viacheslav Ivanov wrote about Symbolism's appropriation of the "mysterial" poetry of the ancients: "the renewed symbolic energy of the word which had not been subjugated for long centuries by serving external experience, thanks to the religious tradition and the conservatism of the people's soul" ( Apollon 8 [1910]: 12). Mandelstam could have subscribed to this statement with only one proviso: his word could be revived even after the "long centuries" of servitude in the cause of external experience. This was the meaning, for him, of the "secularization" of poetic speech.

28. SS 2, p. 222. Cf. A. Belyi, Glassolaliia: Poema o zvuke (Moscow, 1917).

29. Mandelstam, "K vykhodu Al'manakha muz" (1916), SS 2, p. 29. Cf. "Literaturnaia Moskva" (1922), SS 2: "The double truth of invention and recollection is required—like bread"; 1922 was, of course, the year of the great famine in the Volga region.

30. Quoted (in connection with a discussion concerning a possible synthesis of Acmeism and Futurism) in I. Gruzdev, "Sovremennaia russkaia poeziia," Kniga i revoliutsiia 3 (1923): 35. The idea of the new poetry as a synthesis of the familiar and unfamiliar, however, goes back to Mandelstam's "Utro Akmeizma" (1913), where it found expression in an elaborate pun on the word kamen'. The Acmeists, wrote the author of Stone, take the "stone" from Tiutchev and make it the cornerstone of their new edifice.

31. "[Poetic] images are a given, and in poetry there is much more recollection of images than thinking in images" (V. Shklovskii, "Iskusstvo kak priem," in Poetika: Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo iazyka [Petrograd, 1919], p. 102 [hereafter referred to as Poetika (1919); on the "disautomatization," see pp. 104ff.). See also V. Erlich, Russian Formalism: History—Doctrine (New Haven and London, 1981), pp. 76ff., 176-178. break

32. V. Shklovskii, "O poezii i zaumnom iazyke" (1916), in Poetika (1919), p. 26. Shklovskii cited Mandelstam's "Silentium" (1909) as an example of a poet's express wish for the "trans-sense" language: "Remain foam, Aphrodite, and, word, return to music" (p. 22).

33. D. G. Konovalov, Religioznyi ekstaz v russkom misticheskom sektantstve: Issledovanie, pt. 1, vyp. 1: Fizicheskie iavleniia v kartine sektantskogo ekstaza (Sergiev Posad, 1908). This study provided a wealth of material for the early declarations of the Formalist critics. See V. Shklovskii, "O poezii i zaumnom iazyke"; and L. P. Iakubinskii, "Skoplenie odinakovykh plavnykh v prakticheskom i poeticheskom iazykakh," in Poetika (1919), pp. 22n and 57n, respectively.

34. "Deviatnadtsatyi vek" was published in the first issue of the Imagists' magazine Gostinitsa dlia puteshestvuiushchikh v prekrasnom, 1922. Mandelstam may have wished to temper the emphasis on the "image" characteristic of the Russian Imagists, in whom he took considerable interest. By late 1923 what could pass for mild criticism became an oblique declaration of rejection when Mandelstam alluded, in "Grifel'naia oda" ( SS 1: 137), to the founder of Russian Imagism, Vadim Shershenevich: "Kak mertvyi shershen' (hornet) vozle sot, den' pestryi vymeten s pozorom." In "O prirode slova" he was less oblique: "Representatives of the Moscow metaphoric school who call themselves Imagists, chafing in their attempts to adapt language to modernity, have been left far behind language, and their fate is to be swept out like paper rubbish" ( SS 2, p. 247). Cf. Vadim Shershenevich's own words (from "Esteticheskie stansy"): "I remind myself of a piece of paper that someone has thrown into a toilet [ Sam sebe napominaiiu bumazhku, kem-to broshennuiu v klozet ]." However, Mandelstam was not averse to borrowing from Shershenevich, whose poem "Printsip meshchanskoi kontseptsii" is echoed distinctly in the description of the telegraph office in Egipetskaia marka. My references to Shershenevich are made according to Russian Imagism: 1919-1924, ed. Vl. Markov (Giessen, 1980).

35. SS 2, pp. 221-222.

36. A. Bem's review of "O prirode slova," Volia Rossii (Prague) 6-7 (1923): 159-160.

37. See V. Shklovskii, "Potebnia" (1916), in Poetika (1919), p. 4. For a "revisionist" view of Shklovskii's relation to Potebnia, see Daniel Rancour-Laferrière, "Potebnja, Sklovkij * and the Familiarity/Strangeness Paradox," RL IV-1 (1976): 174-198. Shklovskii's "suppressed" indebtedness to Potebnia did not escape some of his contemporaries. "The novelty of the Formal method consists solely of the fact that its modern founders have very well internalized [ usvoili ] certain long-forgotten ideas of Potebnia" (E. Gollerbakh, [no title], Novaia russkaia kniga 7 [1922], p. 5).

38. Erlich, Russian Formalism, pp. 23-26.

39. A. A. Potebnia, Mysl' i iazyk (Odessa, 1922), p. 145 ("Poeziia, proza, sgushchenie mysli").

40. A. A. Potebnia, "Iz zapisok po teorii slovsnosti," in Estetika i poetika (Moscow, 1976), p. 309: "The elements of the word with a live representation correspond to elements of a poetic work, for such a word, even taken by itself, continue

      is a poetic work. . . . What is representation in the word corresponds to the image (or a certain unity of images) in a poetic work. The terms denoting a poetic image can be the same as those denoting image in the word, that is, sign, symbol, which contains representation, the inner form."

41. Potebnia, Estetika i poetika, p. 143.

42. I. Rozanov, "Obzor khudozhestvennoi literatury za dva goda," in Literaturnye otkliki. Stat'i (Moscow, 1923), p. 71.

43. Following Sir James Frazer, E. Kagarov ( Kul't fetishei, zhivotnykh i rastenii v drevnei Gretsii [Petersburg, 1913], p. 88) distinguishes three types of magic: homeopathic, contagious, and enantheopathic, the latter based on reversal. It stands to reason that the rhetoric of sarcasm may, in fact, have originated in forms of enantheopathic verbal magic, just as the rhetoric of satire can be traced to forms of magical incantations and spells (see R. C. Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art [Princeton, 1960]). Cf. Viacheslav Ivanov: "Word-symbol is produced by magical suggestion which assimilates the auditor to the mysteries of poetry. . . . The task of poetry [in ancient times] was the spellbinding magic of rhythmic speech mediating between the world of divine essences and man" ("Zavety simvolizma," 1910). Cf. also Andrei Belyi: "The sounds of the word are a spell. . . . the roots of the word are the result of creative experiments in the art of cognition; they are—magic" ("Zhezl Aarona," Skify 1 [1917]).

44. There was hardly a poet, including Maiakovskii, who was spared an accusation of "untopicality," but Mandelstam's Acmeist reputation made him a more frequent target of this unimaginative (and in those days purely verbal) form of criticism. A key to the contemporary reading of the poem may be found in B. Pasternak's letter to Mandelstam regarding the appearance of the 1928 collection of poetry. 'Trying to humor Mandelstam and, in part, to deflate his pose of a persecuted figure, Pasternak wrote: "I obtained your book yesterday. What a happy man you are, what pride you must derive from being the namesake of the author." Yet in the same letter, Pasternak, who was then reworking his earlier poetry, described Mandelstam's verse as extratemporal, "undisturbed in its loftiness and thematic density by the changes in the street"—echoing precisely the accusation he tried to dismiss in the congratulatory portion of the letter. For the full text of the letter, see "Zametki o peresechenii biografii Osipa Mandel'shtama i Borisa Pasternaka," Pamiat' 4 (Moscow, 1979; Paris, 1981).

45. "Net, nikogda nichei ia ne byl sovremennik," SS 1: 141. My translation of the word oblatka as the Latin oblatum puts a somewhat greater emphasis on the "communion" referent of the trope in English than it does in Russian. The difference, however, is only one of degree. In Russian, the communion bread (which is leavened in the Orthodox Church) is called prosfora (a word derived from the Greek), whereas oblatka, although etymologically an identical term, refers largely to a thin unleavened wafer or a waferlike piece of paper used to seal letters in place of sealing wax. In Russia, it was not uncommon to seal letters with moistened bread when regular stationery was unavailable or in short supply after World War II, and it was probably no different during the continue

      civil war or in the early 1920s. A good context for Mandelstam's usage of the image may be found in his "Zametki o Shen'e," where he follows the lines from Eugene Onegin with a conclusion: "It is thus that national divisions collapse, and the elemental force of one language calls out to another over the heads of space and time, for all languages are united in a fraternal union which rests on the freedom and Gemütlichkeit [ domashnost' ] of each; and in this freedom, they are fraternally related and call out to each other like family members" ( SS 2, p. 300). This passage "dates" "Zametki" as concluded about 1922-23.

46.O. Ronen, An Approach to Mandel'stam * (Jerusalem, 1983), pp. 331-363.

47. Cf. Mandelstam's "On the Interlocutor" (1914, SS 2), which develops extensively a key simile for Mandelstam: a poem is compared to a letter sealed in a bottle that a reader in posterity shall "providentially" discover as something addressed to himself. Note that chapter 3 of Eugene Onegin, where the word oblatka appears, was composed in 1824, exactly a hundred years before Mandelstam's poem.

48. Gogol's "Vii" (see Ronen, Approach to Mandel'stam * , pp. 240-241) does, of course, resonate strongly with Mandelstam's "archetypal" narrative of Phaedra and Hippolytus. In both cases, the male protagonists enter against their will into a sexual compact with a woman who ought not be available to them (the taboo of age—the witch first appears as an old woman—and then of social status in "Vii" and incest in Hippolytus ). The protagonists' demise, too, is effected by an older man—in both cases a father. Cf. also the killing of Andrii by his father in Taras Bul'ba. For pertinent and stimulating readings of "Vii," see S. Karlinsky, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 86-96; and L. Stilman, "The All-Seeing Eye in Gogol," in Gogol from the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays, ed. R. A. Maguire (Princeton, 1974).

49. "Slushaite! Iz menia slepym Viem vremia oret: 'Podymite, podymite mne vekov veki" (Listen! Time is screaming out of me like the blind Vii: 'Lift for me my eyelids of ages."') (V. Maiakovskii, Voina i mir [1916]). "Vygoraia ot liubopytstva, zvezd glaza povylezli iz orbit" (Losing color from curiosity, the eyes of the stars have stuck out of their orbits) (ibid.). See "Gogol' v stikhakh Maiakovskogo" by N. Khardzhiev, part of "Zametki o Maiakovskom," in N. Khardzhiev and Vl. Trenin, Poeticheskaia kul'tura Maiakovskogo (Moscow, 1969), p. 188. See also "Gogol' i Maiakovskii," in A. Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia (Moscow, 1934). Cf. also Belyi: "Revolution is an operation of removing the cataracts from the eye of the artist" ("Dnevnik pisatelia," Rossiia 2/11 [1924]: 146).

50. "Vek" (1923), SS 1: 135. Cf. S. Broyde, Osip Mandelstam * and His Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), pp. 107ff.

51. B. Pilniak, Golyi god (Petrograd, Moscow, and Berlin, 1921).

52. "Sergeiu Eseninu" (1926). Maiakovskii dated the poem in a more precise fashion, "January-March," alluding perhaps to Easter. For one who com- soft

      mitted suicide on a Thursday during the Holy Week, this was not an unusual allusion.

53. B. Pasternak, "Hamlet." One encounters the metaphor "stars are the axes of the universe" among the writers of Mandelstam's generation. See, for example, N. Punin, "O. Mandelstam. 'Tristia'" (review) Zhizn' iskusstva 41 (October 17, 1922): 3. The early Pasternak, the author of Bliznets v tuchakh (1914), was particularly involved with astral imagery.

54. V. Shershenevich, "Neboskreb obrazov minus spriazhenie," in Markov, Russian Imagism, p. 42. Cf. V. Shklovskii's characterization of I. Babel"s "principal device": "to speak in the same voice about the stars and the clap" (Shklovskii, "Babel': Kriticheskii romans" [1924], in Gamburgskii schet [Leningrad, 1928], p. 80).

55. See A. Fet, "Mezh temi zvezdami i mnoiu / Kakaia-to sviaz' rodilas"' ("Ia dolgo stoial nepodvizhno"), "Odna zvezda nad vsemi dyshit i tak drozhit / Ona luchom almaznym pyshet / I govorit" ("Odna zvezda nad vsemi dyshit"), "Ot liudei utait'sia vozmozhno / No ot zvezd nichego ne sokryt"' ("Ot ognei, ot tolpy besposhchadnoi"). Cf. also Viacheslav Ivanov on Dante's Pilgrim emerging out of the Inferno and his own collection of poetry Guiding Stars (1901) and the collection of essays Po zvezdam (From Star to Star) (St. Petersburg, 1909). Goethe's lines from Faust read: "Erkennest dann der Sterne lauf, / Und wenn Natur dich unterweist, / Dann geht die Seelenkraft dir auf, / Wie spricht ein Geist zum andern Geist." Lermontov's poem "Vykhozhu odin ia na dorogu." V. Khlebnikov: "Let man, who has rested from work, go and read the cuneiforms of constellations. To understand the will of the stars means to unfold before everyone's eyes the scroll of true freedom. They hang over us in this too black a night, these tablets of coming laws, and is it not the meaning of division—to get rid of the wire of governments between the hearing of humanity and the stars. Let the power of stars be wireless" ("Nasha osnova," SP 3, p. 242). Most items in this list of possible allusions can be found in Ronen, "Osip Mandel'stam * " and Approach to Mandel'stam * , which contain a most thorough and stimulating analysis of "Grifel'naia oda" and "l ianvaria 1924." The colloquialism of this astral imagery is further evident in N. Minskii's essay on Blok and Dante ("Blok i Dante," Sovremennye zapiski [Paris] 7 [October 5, 1921]: 188-208), in which he presents the two poets as "two stars illuminating each other"(p. 198).

56. Cf. Blok's usage in a commemorative essay on Vl. Soloviev, "Rytsar'-monakh": "Soloviev, alone of this world, struck the enemy with its own weapon: he learned to forget time; he only tamed it, throwing over the shaggy fur of the monster [ kosmataia sherst' chudovishcha ] a light, silvery bridal veil of laughter" (Blok, SS 5, p. 450).

57. Cf. A. Belyi's "The ideal of beauty is the ideal of a human being, and aesthetic creation, as it expands, inevitably leads to the transfiguration of human personality; Zarathustra, Buddha, Christ are as much the artists of life as they are life's lawgivers; their ethics merge with aesthetics, and vice versa. Kant's imperative in [the artist's] heart and starry heaven over his head are here insep - soft

      arable " ("Problemy kul'tury," in Simvolizm, p. 10). Cf. also Khlebnikov's rephrasing: "Let the power of stars be wireless. One of the ways [of achieving it] are the Scales of the Futurist which with one end stir the sky and with the other disappear in the heartbeat" ("Nasha osnova," SP 3, p. 243). One can, perhaps, discern in the latter an echo of Tiutchev's "Rainbow."

58. A. Voronskii, Na styke (Moscow, 1923). Polemicizing with his opponents from the journal Na postu, whose goal was to establish a "class hegemony" in Russian letters, Voronskii, who advocated a more conciliatory, mediating position, wrote: "Where shall we place our guards [i.e., the party activists]. . . . at the junction [ styk ] between the Communists and the fellow travelers?" Hence the metaphor's association with the problem of historical continuity in contemporary usage. In part, the expression may be traced to the emblematic revolutionary song of the period: "Our steam engine, fly forward. The next stop is the Commune. We have no other road [railroad]; in our hands we hold a rifle." See also an almanac published by the Moscow "salon," "Moskovskii tsekh poetov," which had existed since the early 1920s (see S. Gorodetskii, ed., Styk: Pervyi sbornik stikhov Moskovskogo Tsekha poetov [Moscow, 1925]). Together with representatives of the "fellow-traveling" older groups (the Acmeists Gorodetskii and Zenkevich; the Symbolists Belyi, Briusov, and Piast; the Futurist Pasternak), the contributors included a number of the "proletarian" and "peasant" poets. By the time "Slate Ode" was composed, the word styk had also become a term in Formalist poetics. "Coined" by Osip Brik, it denoted an epanoleptic alliteration conjoining two contiguous lines (not dissimilar to Mandelstam's epanoleptic figure formed by the last poem of Stone II and the first poem of Tristia ). See O. Brik, "Zvukovye povtory," in Poetika (1919), pp. 83, 87ff.

59. See, for example, E. Zamiatin, "O sintetizme" (1921), in A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Chicago, 1970): "We know that, of the twelve Apostles, only Thomas was not an artist. He alone could see nothing but what he could touch. And we who have been titrated through Schopenhauer, Kant, Einstein, and Symbolism, we know that the world, the thing in itself, reality, are not what is visible to the Thomases" (p. 85). In "Grifel'naia oda," Mandelstam polemicized with this one-sided Futurist apology by declaring himself a Thomas who wishes to synthesize the two opposing trends ("And I, too, wish to thrust my fingers into the flinty way . . . as into the wound, locking into a styk flint and water . . ."). Mandelstam's image of the advance scout ( zastrel'shchik ), too, may be traced to Zamiatin's essay: "There is a tactical axiom: every battle requires a group of self-sacrificing scouts doomed to cross a certain dread line, and to pave the earth beyond with their bodies under the cruel laughter of machine guns. . . . The role of these self-sacrificing scouts was taken by the numerous clan of Futurists" (ibid., p. 82).

60. Mandelstam, "Barsuch'ia nora" (The Badger's Hole): "slova-odnodnevki" ( SS 2, p. 274).

61. A. A. Potebnia, Iz zapisok po teorii slovesnosti ("Ob uchastii iazyka v obrazovanii mifov"), in Estetika i poetika, p. 444.

62. LN 92 (1983), bk. 3, p. 357. break

63. For a discussion of the subject, see F. Starr, Red and Hot (New York, 1983); and P. Fussell, Great War in Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975).

64. On one of the last such cooperatives, "Uzel," see S. Poliakova, "Poeziia Sofii Parnok," in S. Parnok, Sobranie stikhotvorenii (Ann Arbor, 1979), pp. 29-31.

65. See the annotations by E. Toddes, A. Chudakov, and M. Chudakova in Tynianov, Poetika, e.g., pp. 473nn.7,13, 475n.31.

66. S. Kartsevskii read a paper on Saussure for an audience of Moscow linguists as early as 1919. S. I. Bernshtein read a paper on him in Moscow in 1923. See A. A. Kholodovich, "O 'Kurse obshchei lingvistiki' F. de Sossiura," Foreword to Ferdinand de Saussure, Trudy po iazykoznaniiu (Moscow, 1977), p. 28n.4. See also Erlich, Russian Formalism, p. 65.

67. Noted in A. Bem's review of Mandelstam's "O prirode slova" (first published as a separate pamphlet), Volia Rossii (Prague) 6-7 (1923): 159ff.

68. Mandelstam, "O prirode slova." The formulation appears to have resurfaced in, or even prefigured, the polemics between Trotskii and the Formalists. See note 94. K. Taranovsky ( Essays on Mandel'stam * [Cambridge, Mass., 1976]) traces Mandelstam's formulation to Tiutchev—"Kak dushi smotriat"—and to Orphics in Viacheslav Ivanov, the latter connection resurfacing in Mandelstam's 1917 Crimean poem "Eshche daleko asfodelei" as "shleif vospominanii za kormoi."

69. SS 2, p. 251. Cf. Mandelstam's "winged Nike" with Shklovskii's essay "Potebnia" in Poetika (1919): "Nike is Nike even without the head as long as she retains her wings."

70. A. Herzen, O razvitii revoliutsionnykh idei v Rossii, vol. 3 of Sochineniia (Moscow, 1956).

71. On the uses in the 1920s of Herzen as the prophet of the 1917 revolution, see an article by Ivanov-Razumnik, "Gersten o nashikh dniakh," which consisted almost entirely of "pertinent" quotations from Herzen's writings on 1848 (R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik, A. I. Gertsen: 1870-1920 [Petrograd, 1920]). Cf.: "One of Herzen's prophecies has already come true: 'Russia will never be juste-milieu ' . . . What is this: the Third Rome or the Third International? Neither. This is the Third Russia" (the anonymous [I. Lezhnev?] leading article in Novaia Rossiia 1 [March 1922]: 13). For many Russian intellectuals, particularly those associated with the Socialist Revolutionary party, Herzen's writings virtually possessed the status of a sacred text. Cf. the following "confession" by a former S-R who was planning to repatriate to Russia: "Other people had the Gospels for the holy writ, and for me, this was that little blue issue of Herzen's The Bell with a medallion of the Decembrists [on the cover]. . . . You will say that this was religion, too. Yes, yes, exactly so. This, too, was religion . . . We were anticipating our own type of Resurrection of Christ, anticipating the second coming of Christ" (an anonymous letter to the Editor, Dni 5 [November 3, 1922]).

72. This Pushkinian image reappears later on—in part as commentary on the posthumous reception of Maiakovskii—in Mandelstam's "Stikhi o russkoi poezii" (July 1932): "I zrachek krovavoi belki krutiat v strashnom kolese" ( SS continue

      1: 264). Cf. Vl. Maiakovskii, Pro eto: "V etoi teme, / i lichnoi / i melkoi, / perepetoi ne raz / i ne piat', / ia kruzhil poeticheskoi belkoi / i khochu kruzhit'sia opiat'."

73. "Winged Nike" is, of course, a tautology, because the wings constitute the "distinctive feature" of the goddess. After all, a statuette without a head but with wings intact can still be identified as Nike, but one without wings, even if everything else is intact, cannot. See note 69. Mandelstam used the image in his essay on Pasternak, "Zametki o poezii," SS 2, p. 265.

74. On Saussure, see note 66.

75. Erlich, Russian Formalism, p. 65.

76. Cf. R. Jakobson: "The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical with its referent" ("Co je poesie," in Volné smery * 30 [1933-34]: 229).

77. The Freiburg School was perhaps the foremost representative of the Nominalist tradition in philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century.

78. Many Russians were familiar with Bergson on the basis of N. O. Losskii's Intuitivnaia filosofiia Bergsona, which had gone through three editions by 1922. Bergson's philosophy (specifically, Matter and Memory ) represented, in fact, one of the inspirational sources for the early Formalist theory of poetic speech as "disautomatized." See L. P. lakubinskii, "Skoplenie odinakovykh plavnykh," p. 52n. The question of Bergson's influence on contemporary Soviet criticism is discussed in R. A. Maguire, Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920s (Princeton, 1968). See also A. Asmus, "Estetika Bergsona," Na literaturnom postu 2 (1929): 2-18.

79. SS 2, p. 249.

80. Mandelstam may have been familiar with Ockham on the basis of Windelbandt's Istoriia novoi filosofii (St. Petersburg, 1904-5).

81. Tiutchev's "A thought verbalized is a lie" ("Silentium"). Cf. Mandelstam's "Silentium" and Blok's programmatic "Khudoznik" (The Artist).

82. "The goal of poetry was the spellbinding magic of rhythmic speech mediating between the world of divine essences and man" (Viach. Ivanov, "Zavety simvolizma," Apollon 8 [1910]: 12). For Blok, see "Poeziia zagovor i zaklinanii" (1906, SS 5), where the value of modern poetry is predicated on its retention of verbal magic (the "gold dust" in the otherwise valueless ore). Hence S. Gorodetskii's characterization of Blok's central technique as "liromagicheskii priem" (S. Gorodetskii, "Nekotorye techeniia v sovremennoi russkoi poezii," Apollon 1 [1913]: 47). For A. Belyi, see "Problemy kul'tury," in Simvolizm.

83. SS 2, p. 251.

84. SS 2, p. 242.

85. The question of this misreading is discussed in my article "The Whisper of History and the Noise of Time in the Poetry and Prose of Osip Mandel'shtam," The Russian Review 37, no. 4 (1978): 433 and 433n. For a different view, see N. Struve, Ossip Mandelstam (Paris, 1982).

86. A. Belyi, "Problemy kul'tury," in Simvolizm.

87. See note 78. break

88. For a discussion of Ockham's intuitivism, see M. H. Carré, Realists and Nominalists (Oxford, 1946), pp. 107-110.

89. See Abelard: "Could the generic term 'rose' continue to have significance if no particular roses were to exist?" (in B. Geyer, ed., Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelaters, vol. 21 [1919], p. 8).

90. SS 2, p. 255.

91. R. Jakobson, Noveishaia russkaia poeziia (Nabrosok pervyi). Viktor Khlebnikov (Prague, 1921), p. 10; and B. Tomashevskii, Teoriia literatury: Poetika (Moscow, 1931), p. 9.

92. See Erlich, Russian Formalism, p. 210.

93. L. Trotskii, Literature and Revolution (Moscow, 1924) p. 183. Reference is to Shklovskii's treatment of the ecstatics in "O poezii i zaumnom iazyke" (1919), published in Poetika (1919). Indirectly, the passage is linking Shklovskii with Gumilev's "Slovo," a poem that cites the first verse of the Gospel according to John.

94. V. Shklovskii, O teorii prozy (Moscow and Leningrad, 1925), p. 5. Ronen ("Osip Mandel'stam * ") was the first to point to Trotskii as the object of Shklovskii's polemics.

95. Psyche-soul-shadow in the underworld. Although Trotskii never mentioned Mandelstam by name, it is unlikely that he was ignorant of Mandelstam's critical writings. Far lesser names made their way into his Literature and Revolution. What makes this hypothesis even more plausible is that in "Promezhutok," Iurii Tynianov substituted Trotskii's "shadows" for Mandelstam's "word-Psyche" in defining principal features of Mandelstam's poetics: "He has, not words, but shadows of words [ u nego ne slova, a teni slov ]." Coming from a Formalist critic and appearing in 1924, these words could not help referring to Trotskii's self-assured pronouncement.

96. "On the Nature of the Word," finished about February-March 1922, was published in Khar'kov by Rakovskaia's press "Istoki." The epigraph from Gumilev's "Slovo" was inserted by the press (NM 2, p. 86). Then the capital of the Soviet Ukraine, Kharkov was, of course, well supplied with the publications from Moscow and Petrograd. Trotskii's Literature and Revolution came out in 1923 (1st ed.). Trotskii was working on a series of articles, "Vne-Oktabr'skaia literatura," for Pravda sometime around August 15, 1922 (L. Fleishman, Pasternak v dvadtsatye gody [Munich, (1981)], p. 14). According to I. Howe, Trotskii wrote the bulk of Literature and Revolution in the summers of 1922 and 1923 ( Leon Trotsky [New York, 1978], p. 96).

97. SS 2, p. 259. Mandelstam was not the only one to use the Pushkinian allegories of Mozart and Salieri to describe the difference between Symbolism and Acmeism, respectively. This terminology was implied by Valerii Briusov in his earliest characterization of the Acmeists as poets who "check their inspiration with reason [ proverka vdokhnoveniia rassudkom ]" ("Segoniashnii den' russkoi poezii," RM 33, no. 7 July 1912], p. 22 [3d pagination]). See also V. Stanevich, "O Sal'erizme," Trudy i dni 7 (1914). More recently, comparing Gumilev and Blok, E. Gollerbakh resorted to the same terms. This approach prompts one to treat Mandelstam's essay—which begins with an epigraph continue

      from Gumilev and concludes with the affirmation of "manliness," a virtual synecdoche of Gumilev—as a form of obituary and a funeral vow of loyalty to the tradition initiated by a fellow Acmeist and friend. In the same review, Gollerbakh singled out Mandelstam from among the Petersburg "passé-ists" as a poet of profound thought who produced a number of "'aphoristic verses' which would survive their author" (E. Gollerbakh, "Peterburgskaia Kamena," Novaia Rossiia. Obshchestvenno-literaturnyi i nauchnyi ezhemesiachnyi zhurnal [Petrograd] 1 [1922]: 87-88). See also Nadezhda Mandelstam's essay "Motsart i Sal'eri" ( VRSKhD 103 [1972]), which carries on the ethico-literary debates begun during the "crisis of Symbolism."

98. See Gumilev's and Gorodetskii's manifestos of Acmeism. For the history of the naming of the school, see R. Timenchik, "Zametki ob akmeizme," RL 7/8 (1974): 24-30.

99. As an author, Mandelstam was closely associated with the Change of Landmarks publications such as Rossiia and Nakanune, and it was indicative of Mandelstam's attitude that the editor of Sovetskii iug subtitled Mandelstam's essay "Shuba" as "Zapiski smenovekhovtsa" (Notes of a Change-of-Landmarks-ist). Regarding Ivanov and Blok, among the more recent works that touch on the subject of their ideological allegiances, see Z. G. Mints, "A. Blok i V. Ivanov," in Edinstvo i izmenchivost' istoriko-literaturnogo protsessa. Uchene zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, no. 604. Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii. Literaturovedenie (Tartu, 1983), pp. 97-111. The article contains a bibliography.

100. B. Jangfeldt, Majakovskij and Futurism, pp. 51-71.

101. "Deviatnadtsatyi vek" was published in the first issue of the Imagists' magazine Gostinnitsa dlia puteshestvuiushchikh v prekrasnom (1922).

102. Compare Mandelstam's "On the Nature of the Word" ( SS 2) with the more conventional (i.e., not overly involved with numerology) portions of Khlebnikov's "Nasha osnova" (1921).

103. See note 34, and Vl. Markov, Introduction to Russian Imagism: 1919-1924.

104. "Literaturnaia Moskva (rozhdenie fabuly)" (1922), SS 2, p. 336. "I imagine a synthetic poet of modernity, not as a Verhaern, but as a Verlaine of culture. For him the entire complexity of the world is the same Pushkinian reed-pipe" ("Slovo i kul'tura" [1921], SS 2, p. 227). Cf. Mandelstam's earliest poetic declaration: "Who could successfully combine the severity of Tiutchev with Verlaine's childishness, imparting his own stamp to the combination" ( SS 4, p. 498). In "Slovo i kul'tura," Mandelstam was polemicizing with V. Briusov, the champion of Verhaern in Russia, who had been advocating "scientific poetry," at least since 1909 (see Briusov, "Literaturnaia zhizn' Frantsii: Nauchnaia poeziia," RM 6 [1909]). Scientific poetry, as Briusov advocated it in the early 1920s, was ostensibly directed against the use of folkloric "superstition" as practiced by Mandelstam, V. Khlebnikov, Vl. Khodasevich (e.g., "Ballada"), and many others. See Briusov's "Pou sto" (1922), in Dali, SS 3, p. 137. See also D. Maksimov, Valerii Briusov (Leningrad, 1969), pp. 233-338. Mandelstam followed Briusov's work of those years with serious interest. Rising continue

      above the fray, he praised Briusov's latest Futurist-oriented poetry in the 1923 essay "Buria i natisk." See also E. Zamiatin, "O sintetizme" (1921), in Litsa (New York, 1967).

105. Mandelstam, "Utro Akmeizma" (1913), SS 2.

106. "Slovo i kul'tura" (1921), SS 2, p. 223.

107. L. Ginzburg, "Poetika Osipa Mandel'shtama," in O starom i novom (Leningrad, 1982), pp. 257ff.

108. See Mandelstam's "Pshenitsa chelovecheskaia" ( Nakanune [Berlin], June 7, 1922) and "Gumanizm i sovremennost"' ( SS 2, pp. 352-54). For Mandelstam's negative attitude to England, as a haughty bourgeois country isolated from the great European tradition, see Kablukov's diary (A. Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika S. P. Kablukova," VRSKhD 129, no. 3 [1979]). Cf.: "I see nothing organic in a constitutional system—rather, an organic clamp, reflecting the decay of the organism of a people who have lost the religious center. In my convictions, I am no democrat. . . . One should always remember the irrationality of being that gives birth to the ordeal of history [ rozhdaiushchego muku istorii ]" (N. Berdiaev, "K psikhologii revoliutsii," RM 29, no. 3 [1908]: 51-71).

109. See M. Lewin, "The Social Background of Stalinism," in Stalinism: Essays on Historical Interpretation, ed. R. C. Tucker (New York, 1977); and S. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography 1888-1938 (New York, 1973), on the "statism" of the first years after the revolution.

110. See S. V. Utechin, Russian Political Thought: A Concise History (New York and London, 1963), pp. 78-90.

111. O. Forsh, Sumashedshii korabl' (Moscow, 1931); Vl. Khodasevich, Nekropol' (Brussels, 1939); V. Shklovskii, Sentimental'noe puteshestvie (Berlin, 1923); N. Berberova, Kursiv moi: Avtobiografiia (Munich, 1972); I. Odoevtseva, Na beregakh Nevy (Washington, D.C., 1967). The list can go on.

112. H. Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris, 1924). As a testimony of Mandelstam's early admiration for Bergson, see Georgii Ivanov's "Bergsona on znal naizust'," in Peterburgskie zimy [New York, 1952], p. 113). On this subject, see also N. Struve, Ossip Mandelstam, and J. G. Harris's annotations to Osip Mandelstam, The Complete Critical Prose and Letters (Ann Arbor, 1979), pp. 615-616.

113. Cf. Mandelstam's poem "Sokhrani moiu rech"' ( SS 1: 235), addressed to Akhmatova: "Preserve my speech for the sake of its aftertaste of misfortune and smoke." See also G. Levinton and R. Timenchik, "Kniga K. F. Taranovskogo o poezii O. E. Mandel'shtama," RL VI-2 (1978): 198.

114. Mandelstam, "V Peterburge my soidemsia snova" ( SS 1: 118). On this poem, see Broyde, Osip Mandel'stam * and His Age, pp. 82-102; J. van der Eng-Liedmeier, "Mandel'stam * 's poem 'V Peterburge my sojdemsja snova,"' RL 7/8 (1974): 181-201; and J. E. Malmstad, "A Note on Mandel'stam * 's 'V Peterburge my sojdemsja snova,"' RL V-II (1977): 193-199.

115. The question whether the "we" referred to the poet and his beloved (O. Arbenina, to whom the poem is dedicated) or to the poet's cohort has been a matter of controversy. See, for example, NM 2, pp. 67ff.; Taranovsky, Essays continue

      on Mandel'stam * , p. 164n.26, who is in agreement with Nadezhda Mandelstam's identification of "we" as the poet's friends; and L. Ginzburg, "Poetika Osipa Mandel'shtama," in O starom i novom, p. 271, who makes the perplexing assertion that Mandelstam had in mind a future erotic union (the meaning of the Russian skhodit'sia ) with Arbenina. On the identification of the addressee of this poem and the so-called Arbenina cycle, see G. Dal'nii [G. G. Superfin], "Po povodu trekhtomnogo sobraniia O. Mandel'shtama," VRSKhD 97 (1970), p. 143.

116. "V Peterburge my soidemsia snova" ( SS 1: 118). It is significant that Mandelstam included the Tristia poem in the farewell-to-youth Kamen': The First Book of Poetry (1923) but not in the forward-looking Second Book (1923).

117. The examples of paronymy: blazh ENN oe zh EN y ([ë] pronounced as [e], as in the classical tradition); BE ss M ertnye tsvety—BEssMyslennoe slovo.

118. Mandelstam devoted to them a poem, "Imiabozhtsy" (1915). See note 124.

119. M. Weber, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft 1, p. 230 (cited in R. Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait [New York, 1960], p. 89).

120. Pointed out by Ronen, An Approach to Mandel'stam * .

121. A. Blok, "Shagi komandora" (1910-12). Cf. "Chto tebe tvoia postylaia svoboda, strakh poznavshii Don Zhuan," "Proletaet, bryznuv v noch' ogniami, chernyi, tikhii, kak sova, motor. " The chastushka-like lines about the night pass and the fear of a sentry also recall Blok, specifically, The Twelve.

122. A. Blok's introduction to Vozmezdie. See also Blok's "Intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia" (1918): "We must listen and love the same sounds now that they issue from the orchestra of the world and, as we listen, understand that this [music] is about the same thing, the same thing. Music is no toy; and that beast who used to think that music was a toy must now act like a beast: shake, grovel, and guard his things" ( SS 6, p. 11).

123. This is what N. Stepanov called a "charade." See note 21.

124. A 1912 poem by Mandelstam is a good example of conflation of prayer and incantation: "Thine image, tormenting and vacillating / I could not palpably perceive in the fog. / 'Oh Lord!' I said by mistake, / Without intending to say it. / God's name, like an enormous bird, / Flew out of my breast. / Ahead of me, thick fog is swirling, / An empty cage is behind me" ("Obraz Tvoi, muchitel'nyi i zybkii," SS 1: 30). The poem was in Mandelstam's repertoire of public recitals during the civil war. According to Nadezhda Mandelstam (NM 2), he recited it, for example, in Kiev in 1919. The poem, no doubt, is associated with the "Name-of-the-Lord" heresy, which also conflated the notions of incantation and prayer (which are by no means as clearly delineated in the dogmatic literature as one might wish). "The name Jesus predates the god-man Jesus. And this name is a divinity in itself, it is God—'true Jesus"' (from Ilarion [Zelenukhin], V gorakh Kavkaza, cited by the Old Believer Bishop Mikhail in "Afonskaia smuta (ob Imiabozhtsakh)," Rech', June 4 (May 22), 1913.

125. Cf. Mandelstam's image of the time of history as a "Bergsonian fan" continue

      unfolding both the present and the future around a center of human consciousness ("Slovo i kul'tura" [1921], SS 2, p. 242).

126. See also Viach. Ivanov, "Kop'e Afiny" (1904, 1909): "the psychology of prayer activity, native to the observations of the Brahmins, who knew that out of the energy of the prayer there mysteriously and truly emerges a deity" ( SS 1, p. 730).

127. One of the central arguments in Ronen, "Osip Mandel'stam * ."

128. The poem, apart from being part of the Arbenina cycle, also belongs to the theater cycle, associated with the 1920 revival of the famous 1913 production by Mikhail Fokine of Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice. This and the other relevant poem ("Vnov' mertsaet prizrachnaia stsena") are splendidly contextualized in John Malmstad's "Note on Mandel'stam * 's 'V Peterburge my soidemsia snova."' Cf. readings of the poem by S. Broyde, Osip Mandel'stam * and His Age, pp. 82-102; and J. van der Eng-Liedmeier, "Mandel'stam * 's poem 'V Peterburge my sojdemsja snova.'"

129. Note the use of Mandelstam's poems dealing with the Pushkinian epoch in the historical novels of Iurii Tynianov: "1 ianvaria 1924" and "Net, nikogrda" in Smert' Vazir'-Mukhtara (Ronen, "Osip Mandel'stam * "); and "Dekabrist" in Kiukhlia (A. Men'shutin and A. Siniavskii, Poeziia pervykh let revoliutsii: 1917-1920 [Moscow, 1964], p. 398).

130. Cf. Mandelstam's 1912 "Peterburgskie strofy": "Heavy is the burden of a northern snob, Onegin's ancient ennui; At the Senate square: a wave of a snow drift, smoke from a bonfire, and the chill of a bayonet." The last three items in the poem's enumeration are synecdoches or, better, emblems of the ordeals that a Russian martyr had to undergo (Konstantin Leont'ev's freeze of the Imperial Byzantine state, the literal and metaphoric burning at the stake, and the bayonet of the government troops dispersing a demonstration or suppressing a rebellion). The Senate Square was the place where the Decembrists took their final stand.

131. The allusion to Pushkin's "For Krivtsov" ("Ne pugai nas, milyi drug," 1817) was first pointed out by Ronen, "Leksicheskii povtor, podtekst i smysl v poetike Osipa Mandel'stam * a," in Slavic Poetics: Essays in Honor of Kiril Taranovsky, ed. R. Jakobson, C. H. van Schonefeld, and D. S. Worth (The Hague, 1973). In an approximate English rendering, the poem reads: "Do not frighten us, dear friend, with the tomb's close house-warming: We have not, believe me, time for this sort of trifling business. Let another slowly draw on the chilling cup of life; as to us, we'll give up our youth only together with our dear life; each of us shall take a seat on the threshold of his own tomb, plead for and receive: a fresh wreath from the Queen of Paphos [Aphrodite], another moment—from our trusty leisure; fill the common cup, and the crowds of our shadows will flee to the calm Lethe; the instant of our death shall be bright: And the beloveds of the playboys shall gather their light ash into the idle urns of feasts."

132. See note 23 and my discussion of Veselovskii in this chapter.

133. Vl. Khodasevich's famous "Ballada" (1921) provides an excellent continue

      gloss to Mandelstam's usage of the "night sun" in this poem, for it is, of course, the astral Orpheus who in Khodasevich replaces the "sixteen-candle-power sun." The poem is equally significant in what it has to say about the "blessed and senseless word": "Bessviaznye, strastnye rechi, Nel'zia v nikh poniat' nichego, No zvuki pravdivee smysla, I slovo sil'nee vsego. "

134. Mandelstam's letter to Ivanov of August 13, 1909 ( SS 2, pp. 486-488).

135. K. Erberg "O vozdushnykh mostakh kritiki," Apollon 2 (1909): 61.

136. In Russian the last phrase reads: obshchestvennyi put' i podvig sovremennogo poeta ("Slovo i kul'tura" [1921], SS 2, pp. 226ff.).

137. E.g., Hebrews 9.

138. Vl. Solov'ev, "Blizko, daleko l'," Stikhotvoreniia (1974), p. 63.

139. Viach. Ivanov, "Nietzsche and Dionysus" (1904, 1909), SS 1, p. 719. This "identity" should not be confused with Mandelstam's polemics with Ivanov in "Morning of Acmeism" (1913, SS 2, p. 324) where he advocated, instead of Ivanov's "a realibus ad realiora," the concept of identity between the work of art and the work of nature, fundamental to the aesthetics of Schiller and, especially, Schelling. Since Mandelstam's essay is full of puns, his "'A = A'—what a beautiful theme for poetry" may also be interpreted as an inversion of Ivanov's Dionysian formula by one who at the time identified with the journal Apollon. In any case, tracing Mandelstam's declaration to Henri Bergson unnecessarily attributes to the poet a basic misunderstanding of the French philosopher, who used the basic logical formula in Creative Evolution in order to show its incompatibility with the true, intuitive, creative consciousness. Cf. N. Struve, Ossip Mandelstam.

140. Mandelstam, "Slovo i kul'tura" (1921), SS 2, p. 227.

141. Mandelstam, letter to Ivanov of August 13, 1909 ( SS 2, pp. 486ff.).

1. P. D. Zhukov, "Levyi front isskusstv," Kniga i revoliutsiia 3/27 (1923): 41.

2. V. Zhirmunskii, "Preodolevshie simvolizm" (1916, 1921), in Voprosy teorii literatury (Leningrad, 1928), pp. 278-333, esp. p. 330, where Mandelstam is compared with Gogol and Maiakovskii.

3. B. Eikhenbaum, Anna Akhmatova: Opyt analiza (Petersburg, 1923), p. 26.

4. "There is an unforgivable callousness in our attitude toward the dead—we cross them out, associate them with the past. . . . Infinitely rich is the consciousness that says: 'all is in the present.' . . . The vitality of symbolism, its incessant charm. . . . The reflected light of symbolism [can be seen in the recent work of] Mikhail Kuzmin, O. Mandelstam, Nikolai Gumilev" (E. Gollerbakh, [no title], Novaia russkaia kniga [Berlin] 7 [1922], p. 2).

5. Eikhenbaum, Anna Akhmatova: "The poetry of symbolism is already behind us. It is no longer possible to speak about Bal'mont, and about Blok—it is already difficult. Before us, there are Akhmatova and Mandelstam on one side and the Futurists and the Imagists on the other" (pp. 7ff.). On the Ac- soft

      meists as elaborators of the Symbolist tradition: "Acmeists expand this area of the [Symbolist] tradition. Mandelstam strengthens the classical line and declares: 'Classical poetry is the poetry of revolution"' (p. 19). Against Zhirmunskii: "Acmeists are not a militant group: they consider their chief mission to be the achievement of equilibrium, smoothing out contradictions, introduction of corrections" (p. 24). Eikhenbaum's position was consonant with Iurii Tynianov's view of Akhmatova in "Promezhutok" (1924) as a poet virtually limited to the theme of Lot's wife.

6. Eikhenbaum, Anna Akhmatova, p. 7.

7. N. Punin, Zhizn' iskusstva 41 (October 17, 1922): 3.

8. "Kontsert na vokzale" ( SS 1: 125). For an interpretation of the poem as one developing the "Lermontovian" theme of the poet's way, see K. Taranovsky, "Concert at the Railroad Station: The Problem of Context and Subtext," in Essays on Mandel'stam * (Cambridge, Mass., 1976). Apart from situating Mandelstam in a particular tradition and showing how Mandelstam managed to encode the tradition in the four stanzas, the essay focuses on the approach to reading Mandelstam that was pioneered by the author and received a further elaboration in the work of his students, Omry Ronen and Steven Broyde. For a discussion of this poem that takes as its point of departure Iurii Tynianov's views, see L. Ginzburg, "Poetika Osipa Mandel'shtama," in O starom i novom (Leningrad, 1982). If I am not mistaken, Lidiia Ginzburg was the first to hint at the presence of a Blokian subtext in the poem. For the rich Tiutchevian subtext, see E. Toddes, "Mandel'shtam i Tiutchev," International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 17 (1974). For a more precise dating as well as a wealth of additional "subtexts," see O. Ronen, An Approach to Mandel'stam * (Jerusalem, 1983), pp. xvii-xx.

9. G. Lelevich, "Gippokratovo litso" (Hippocrates' mask), Krasnaia nov' 1 (1925): 296. The article's title refers to a medical term for the "death mask"—a pall that comes over a dying man's face. Among other poets wearing this "mask," according to Lelevich, were Pasternak and Khodasevich. The mention of Hamlet's famous line refers to Mandelstam's "Vek" (1922, SS 1: 135): "In order to tear the age out of captivity, in order to erect the new world, the joints of gnarled days need to be bound together with the flute. . . . But your spine is broken, my cruel, dear age/century." The Russian Contemporary was a short-lived journal (only four issues appeared, all in 1924).

10. SS 2, p. 258.

11. Shum vremeni, "Muzyka v Pavlovske," SS 2. According to NM 2, Mandelstam had most of The Noise of Time finished in 1923. See the correspondence between Mandelstam and Pasternak in "Zamechaniia o peresechenii biografii Osipa Mandel'shtama i Borisa Pasternaka," in Pamiat': Istoricheskii sbornik 4 (Moscow, 1979; Paris, 1981), p. 293. See also letters of Mandelstam and Pilniak to Voronskii in Iz istorii sovetskoi literatury 1920-1930-kh godov, LN 93 (Moscow, 1983), pp. 570 and 601.

12. Apart from this Blokian subtext, see also David Burliuk's 1913 poem "Luna kak vsha polzet nebes podkladkoi" (noted by Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * ): "The sky is a corpse!!! Not more! / Stars are worms drunk with fog continue

 . . . Stars—worms—(pussy, live) rash!" etc. This rather artless imitation of Baudelaire's "Charogne" (or, in general, of the poètes maudits ) was cited by V. Khlebnikov and A. Kruchenykh in Dokhlaia luna (Moscow, 1913). See Vl. Markov, Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov, vol. 27 of Slavische Propyläen (Munich, 1967), p. 54. It is also possible that the "works" had something to do with a now-lost mediating text the echo of which can be heard in the following passage: "Let heaven portend trouble. Let old women pronounce oracles [ prorekaiut ] about the worm in heaven crawling in refuse, let them predict wholesale death from hunger" (N. Nikitin, "Kamni," Zavtra: Literaturno-kriticheskii sbornik, vol. 1, ed. E. Zamiatin, M. Kuzmin, and M. Lozinskii (Berlin, 1923), p. 36.

13. Blok's imagery here owes much to the "echo" of the railroad at the end of Madame Bovary, when Emma's daydreaming in a hotel room is disturbed by the deafening noise of a cart hauling strips of iron. Mandelstam noted this "railroad link" between Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Flaubert's novel about, as he called her, "Anna's younger cousin." See Mandelstam's digression on prose at the conclusion of The Egyptian Stamp.

14. The last sentence provides a valuable subtext to Mandelstam's "Vek" (1922): "Only a parasite living off the backs of beasts [ zakhrebetnik ] trembles at the threshold of the new days." Clearly, the poet who wished to be identified with the dead century and offer himself as a sacrificial victim to establish continuity between the new and the old age did not wish to be confused with the "parasitic" remnants of that age. That same caution, exemplified also by the "oath of allegiance to the fourth estate" ("1 January 1924"), resurfaces in the 1930s, particularly in "The age-wolfhound leaps on my shoulders" and "Eshche daleko mne do patriarkha."

15. For a different, more precise, dating of the poem as well as a detailed discussion, see Ronen, An Approach to Mandel'stam * , pp. xvii-xx.

16. The story of Mandelstam's "setting things straight" with one of his friends, Shileiko, who accused the poet of toadying before the new regime, suggests that his position around 1924 (before the publication of "1 January 1924") lent itself to ambiguous interpretations on both sides of the political aisle (NM 2, pp. 500-501).

17. In a polemic with Lidiia Ginzburg, who saw in the image a simile of "a horse in a lather," Taranovsky pointed to the froth ( pena ) as an allusion to Mandelstam's earlier programmatic "Silentium," a poem about the birth of Aphrodite out of the foam of the sea ("Remain foam, Aphrodite, and word, return to music"). I do not consider the two points mutually exclusive, especially in view of Mandelstam's identification of the "age," the nineteenth century, with the "beast" (see his "My beast, my age") and with the steed (see Broyde, Osip Mandel'stam * and His Age [Cambridge, Mass., 1975], on "He Who Found a Horseshoe").

18. Mandelstam, "On the Nature of the Word," SS 2, p. 242. Cf. N. Struve, Ossip Mandelstam (Paris, 1982); and G. Freidin, "The Whisper of History and the Noise of Time in the Writings of Osip Mandelstam," The Russian Review 37, no. 4 (1978): 436. break

19. N. Gumilev, "Zabludivshiisia tramvai" (1920).

20. Fedor Tiutchev, "Ia liuteran liubliu bogosluzhen'e."

21. Mandelstam, "Stikhi o russkoi poezii" (1933), SS 1: 262-264. Echoes of Lermontov's "1 January" ("Kak chasto pestroiu tolpoiu okruzhen") are discernible in Mandelstam's "1 January 1924." The last stanza of "A Concert" alludes to Lermontov's "Dream" ("With lead in my chest, in the valley of Dagestan," 1841): "And I dreamed of a luminescent night feast in my native land" ( I snilsia mne siiaiushchii ogniami Vechernii pir v rodimoi storone ). Note the dedication to Lermontov in Pasternak's My Sister-Life (1921). A poignant characterization of Lermontov may be found in Pasternak's article on the Georgian poet Nikolai Baratashvili: "Artists-outcasts [ khudozhniki-otshchepentsy ] like to cross every t and dot every i. They are unusually specific because they do not believe others to be capable [of discernment]. Lermontov's specificity is insistent and haughty. His details captivate us supernaturally. In their small features we recognize what we ourselves ought to have [imaginatively] completed. This is a magical reading of our thoughts across great distance" (cited in E. B. Pasternak and E. V. Pasternak, "Boris Pasternak: Iz perepiski s pisateliami," LN 93, p. 728n.4). Lermontov played a similar role in Maiakovskii's self-image of a kenotic poet-outcast. The "ethical" aspect of Mandelstam's allusive poetics, too, may be traced to a Lermontov poem: "It will encounter no response among the worldly din—the word born out of flame and light. But whether in a temple or amid battle, wherever I am, as soon as I hear it, I shall recognize it. With my prayer unfinished, I shall respond to that sound, and I will dash out of a battle in order to greet it" ("Est' rechi—znachen'e" [1840]).

22. M. Lermontov, "Vykhozhu odin ia na dorogu."

23. Mandelstam, "Sestry—tiazhest' i nezhnost' . . ." (1920), SS 1: 108.

24. Cf. the discussion of Mandelstam's poetics of "anamnesis" in Iu. Levin et al., "Russkaia semanticheskaia poetika kak potentsial'naia kul'turnaia paradigma" RL 7/8 (1974): 47-82.

25. V. Shklovskii, Razvertyvanie siuzheta (Petrograd, 1921), p. 10. Cf. Iu. Tynianov's conception of the "density of poetic/rhythmic series" ( tesnota stikhovogo/ritmicheskogo riada ) developed in Problema stikhotvornogo iazyka (Moscow, 1965), p. 76. A periphrasis of this terminology is in Mandelstam's "Ia po lesenke pristavnoi": "I shall tear myself out of the burning series and shall return to my native phonoseries" ( Iz goriashchikh vyrvus' riadov i vernus' v rodnoi zvukoriad ). This wordplay was possible since the Russian riad, "series," denotes also "harmony," "rank," "row," and, etymologically, "order" ( poriadok. )

26. See note 1. Zhukov called Mandelstam the second Andreevskii (a nineteenth-century Russian poet who opposed the civic-minded tendentiousness of contemporary art) and quoted with approval the lines of Akhmatova ("Now nobody will listen to songs") and Maiakovskii ("Perhaps I am the last poet") announcing the end of the poetry.

27. Cf. O. Ronen, "The Dry River and the Black Ice: Anamnesis and Amnesia in Mandel'stam * 's poem 'Ja slovo pozabyl, cto * ja xotel skazat,'" SH 1 (1977): 177-184. break

28. A. N. Veselovskii, "Psikhologicheskii parallelizm i ego formy v otrazhenii poeticheskogo stilia," in Istoricheskaia poetika (Moscow, 1940), p. 190.

29. "Oh, Europe, a new Hellas, guard the Acropolis and Piraeus! We do not need gifts from the island " (Mandelstam, "Sobiralis' elliny voinoiu" [1914], SS 1: 70). In early 1917, Mandelstam's friend Kablukov recorded with strong disapproval Mandelstam's vituperations against the "parliamentary, haughty England" (A. Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika S. P. Kablukova," VRSKhD 129, no. 3 [1979], p. 154). See also Broyde, Osip Mandel'stam * and His Age, pp. 23ff.

30. Mandelstam, "Gumanism i sovremennost"' (Humanism and the Present, 1922). See also L. Fleishman's publication of another contemporary essay by Mandelstam, "Pshenitsa chelovecheskaia" (The Wheat of Humanity), which further clarifies Mandelstam's political thinking during the first years of the NEP ("Neizvestnaia stat'ia Osipa Mandel'shtama," Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 10 [1982]). As Fleishman noted, there exists a certain symmetry between the pro-Soviet politics of Mandelstam's publicistic writings of the period and Nadezhda Mandelstam's tendency to dismiss them as insignificant trifles produced in one sitting for the sake of meager royalties. The "mountain" casting its shadow in this essay bears fruitful comparison with its counterpart in the "Sermon on the Mount" part of "Slate Ode": "I am night's friend, I am the front soldier of the day. Blessed is he who has called flint a pupil of running water. Blessed is he who tied the sandal on the foot of the mountains on firm ground" ( SS 1: 137). Tying the sandal to the mountain of the approaching social architecture can hardly be construed as an expression of disloyalty to the Soviet regime.

31. Mandelstam, "Na kamennykh otrogakh Pierii" (1919).

32. P. Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny: Opyt pravoslavnoi feoditsei v dvenadtsati pis'makh (Moscow, 1914), p. 161. The quotation from Belyi comes from Simvolizm (Moscow, 1910), p. 30.

33. Mandelstam, "O prirode slova" (On the Nature of the Word, 1921). For the association of zemlia with the Slavophile and populist concept of conciliarity ( sobornost '), consider: zemskii sobor, zemstvo. This is yet another reason not to confuse Mandelstam's "classicism" with the related program by A. Efros announced in 'Vestnik y poroga: Dukh klassiki" (in Liricheskii krug: Stranitsy poezii i kritiki, vol. 1 [Moscow, 1922]). Significantly, Mandelstam's contribution to this issue consisted of two poems printed in reverse chronological order. The first, "Umyvalsia noch'iu na dvore" (1921), a poem signifying resolve in the face of a possible death, was permeated with Russian folklore in terms of both its strongly flavored rural lexicon ("na dvore," "na zamok," "vorota," "topor," "kholst") and its composition, which strongly echoed the two-part structure of incantations: the "epic" (first two stanzas) and the spell proper (N. Poznanskii, Zagovory [Petrograd, 1917]). The other, "Kogda Psikheia-zhizn' spuskaetsia k teniam" (1920), ending on a hesitant note, represented the epitome of Mandelstam's "Hellenism" of the Tristia period. Cf. O. Ronen, "Anamnesis and Amnesia," and "A Beam upon the Axe: Some Antecedents to Osip Mandel'stam * 's 'Umyvalsja nociu * na dvore,'" SH 1 (1977). break

34. The texts in which these images appear are: SS 1, nos. 116, 127, 112-114, 108, 126. Cf. O. Ronen's "Osip Mandel'stam * : An Ode and an Elegy" [Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1976]) productive characterization of such iterative usage as "talismanic" (and/or "magic helpers").

35. G. Dal'nii [G. G. Superfin], "Po povodu trekhtomnogo sobraniia O. Mandel'shtama," VRSKhD ) 97 (1970).

36. "Voz'mi na radost' iz moikh ladonei," SS 1: 116. I translate the word medunitsa (lungwort) as "honeysuckle" for the sake of retaining Mandelstam's etymological wordplay. Cf. Konstantin Bal'mont's Sonety solntsa, meda i luny (Moscow, 1917), which may have served as a source of elementary vocabulary and grammar for this poem, particularly in view of the cycle's Nietzschean and Lermontovian referents. Mandelstam described his poetry as "translations that suggest the existence of a brilliant original," possibly Mandelstam's own verse. On a deeper level, Mandelstam may have been relying on Viacheslav Ivanov, especially Cor ardens (e.g., "Kogda vzmyvaet dukh v nadmirnye vysoty" or the cycle "Zolotye zavesy"), and, of course, Nietzsche's "The Honey Sacrifice" in Thus Spake Zarathustra. See also Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * , pp. 99-110; and N. A. Nilsson, "Mandel'shtam's Poem 'Voz'mi na radost,"' RL 7/8 (1974).

37. Skriabin understood this paronymic play (including trans-sense) a*s a form of orchestration: "In language, there exist laws of [thematic?] development similar to those in music. . . . The word grows more complex, as do the harmonies, by means of inclusion of certain overtones" (L. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine [Moscow, 1925], p. 252, cited in N. Khardzhiev, "Maiakovskii i Khlebnikov," in N. Kkardzhiev and Vl. Trenin, Poeticheskaia kul'tura Maiakovskogo [Moscow, 1969], p. 98).

38. In his "Notes on Chénier" (1915?), Mandelstam described the poetry of the Romantics as inimical to the sense of continuity of tradition and likened it to a "necklace of dead nightingales," which "will not convey, will not reveal its enigmas," and which "does not know [the concept of] heritage" ( SS 2, p. 296). The "cyclical" bees of Persephone were, of course, another matter. The dating of this essay is unclear. It may have been begun in 1914-15 but seems to have been finished much later.

39. Cf. Pasternak's Doktor Zhivago, where an icon worn as an amulet by a young cadet deflects Zhivago's bullet. Praising the 1940 edition of Akhmatova's poetry, Pasternak mentioned in his letter to Akhmatova "the magical effect of your representational power" (cited in E. B. Pasternak and E. V. Pasternak, "Boris Pasternak: Iz perepiski s pisateliami," p. 661).

40. Viach. Ivanov, "Religiia Dionisa: Ee proiskhozhdenie i vliianie," Voprosy zhizni 6 (1905): 193. Cf. further "Here—'at grave's door young life is effervescent,' as Pushkin put it, and 'plenitude overcomes death' ( so überwältiget Fülle den Tod ), as Goethe says in his Venetian Epigrams, as he is describing these Orphic sarcophagi" (ibid., p. 196).

41. See discussion of Jakobson's "Metaphoric and Metonymic Pole" in chapter 4.

42. Cf. R. Timenchik: "Acmeist poetics itself created the object of its continue

      striving which only later underwent explication" ("Tekst v tekste u akmeistov," in Tekst v tekste: Trudy po znakovym sistemam, vol. 14 [Tartu, 1981]). Similar observations, if related more to Futurism, may be found in V. Erlich's Russian Formalism: History—Doctrine (New Haven and London, 1981), and in the essays on the legacy of Roman Jakobson by E. J. Brown ("Roman Osipovich Jakobson 1896-1982: The Unity of His Thought on Verbal Art," The Russian Review 42, no. 1 [1983]) and Hugh McLean ("A Linguist Among Poets," International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 3 [1983]).

43. M. Detienne, The Garden of Adonis (Sussex, Eng., 1977), esp. chapter 4, "The Misfortunes of Mint." Among Mandelstam's probable sources are the story of the Nymph Mintha in Ovid ( Metamorphoses 10: 728n and A. N. Veselovskii's discussion of the myth of Adonis in "Tri glavy iz istoricheskoi poetiki," Istoricheskaia poetika, pp. 221ff.

44. Noted by G. Levinton and R. D. Timenchik ("Kniga K. F. Taranovskogo o poezii O. E. Mandel'shtama," RL VI-2 [1978]). That Verlaine's "bonne aventure" (a good luck charm, an amulet) was interpreted as verbal magic may be seen from Boris Pasternak's 1938 translation of the poem. The last stanza reads: "Puskai on vyboltaet sduru / Vse, chto, v pot'makh chudotvoria, / Navorozhit emu zaria . . . / Vse prochee—literatura" (E. Etkind, ed. Frantsuzskie stikhi v perevode russkikh poetov XIX-XX vv. [Moscow, 1969], p. 481).

45. Dremuchii les is, needless to say, a topos from Russian fairy tales—another instance of Mandelstam's "naiveté" as a modern poet. Dante's vita and selva oscura underwent a catachresis to become Mandelstam's "dremuchaia zhizn'," just as his Taygetos asks to be "folk-etymologized" as a derivative of the Russian taiga. For the unusual elliptical syntax, cf. Vadim Shershenevich's ideas (via Marinetti) on the use of elliptical infinitive construction in "Lomat' grammatiku" ( 2 × 2 = 5 [Moscow, 1920]) and his own practice of the rule, for example, in "Agrammaticheskaia statika" ( Loshad' kak loshad' ), which is echoed in Mandelstam's 1922 "Komu—arak. . . ." The opening sonnet of Bal'mont's Sonety also is built around infinitive constructions ("Tvorit', . . . uznat', . . . proiti, . . . sledit"').

46. " . . . My, kak pchely u chresl Afrodity, / V'emsia, solnechnoi pyl'iu povity, / Nad ognem zolotogo tsvetka." (M. Voloshin, "Deti solnecho-ryzhego meda" [1910], in Stikhotvoreniia, ed. L. A. Evstigneeva [Leningrad, 1977], p. 184).

47. W. Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore and London, 1978), pp. 68-85.

48. Mandelstam, "Komissarzhevskaia," in The Noise of Time, SS 2, p. 99.

49. Mandelstam: "Muchit sil'nee, chem liubaia futuristicheskaia zagadka" (on Annenskii). Writing about the power of the word in Slavic mythology, Afanas'ev maintained that the less people understood the incantation, the greater was the incantation's effectiveness (see A. N. Afanas'ev, Poeticheskie vozzreniia slavian na prirodu, pt. 1 [Moscow, 1865], p. 355). This was a common point made by the Futurists ("Deklaratsiia slova kak takovogo") and later continue

      on by the Formalists (e.g., V. Shklovskii, "O poezii i zaumnom iazyke" [1916], in Poetika: Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo iazyka [Petrograd, 1919]).

50. Mandelstam, "Ia slovo pozabyl, chto ia khotel skazat"' (1920), SS 1: 113. As first published in 1921, it bore the date November 1920. For draft versions, see N. Khardzhiev's annotations in Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1973), p. 278.

51. See Potebnia on the witch who has forgotten the right word.

52. Cf. Taranovsky's assertion concerning the poem's plot ( Essays on Mandel'stam * , p. 77). Cf. also Ronen, "Anamnesis and Amnesia."

53. Viach. Ivanov, "Religiia Dionisa," pp. 199ff. Cf. Mandelstam's "I ponyne na Afone" (1915): "Slovo—chistoe vesel'e, Istselen'e ot toski" ( SS 1: 75). Or the 1923 "Kak tel'tse malen'koe krylyshkom": "Ne zabyvai menia, kazni menia, No dai mne imia! Dai mne imia! Mne budet legche s nim, poimi menia, V beremennoi glubokoi sini" ( SS 1: 139). Both poems, thematically as well as stylistically (they imitate incantations), belong to the genre of verbal magic focused on memory or, more specifically, on the antiamnesiac power of the word.

54. V. Terras, "Classical Motives in the Poetry of Osip Mandelstam," Slavic and East European Journal 3 (1966): 251-267; Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * , pp. 77ff.; and Ronen, "Anamnesis and Amnesia." The poem may be further elucidated if juxtaposed with Pavel Florenskii's "genealogical" (Nietzsche) meditations on the nature of truth: "Truth, as a Hellene understood it, was alethea, that is, something capable of abiding in the stream of forgetfulness [ potok zabveniia ], in the Lethean streams of the sensual world—something that overcomes time . . . , something eternally remembering [cf. Mandelstam's "Eucharist" ]. Truth is an eternal memory of a consciousness" (Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny, p. 18). Likewise, Florenskii's etymology of styd (shame) from sty-<d>nu, sty-t' (to grow cold) might have been related to Mandelstam wordplay here ("ice," "burning," "shame"), which conflated the erotic, "mnemonic," and chthonic thematics. "Shame," Florenskii concluded, "is the feeling of spiritual cold that arises from baring that which must be covered" (ibid., pp. 703-704). Cf. the conclusion of Ronen, "Anamnesis and Amnesia."

55. "Aid—bez-vid, govorit Platon (Gorgii, 495b)" (Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny, p. 178).

56. Cf. A. Men'shutin and A. Siniavskii, Poeziia pervykh let revoliutsii: 1917-1920 (Moscow, 1964), p. 400.

57. Among the more recent works dealing with this issue see R. Timenchik, "Tekst v tekste u akmeistov." The article contains an extensive bibliography.

58. The history of this cult and its association with the ideological climate of the 1920s and, particularly, the 1930s still remains to be written, but see M. Friedberg, Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets (New York and London, 1962), esp. chapter 5: "Official Attitudes Toward the Russian Classics," pp. 81-147; and chapter 6: "The Russian Classics and the Soviet Readers," pp. 148-166.

59. Vl. Maiakovskii, "Radovat'sia rano" (December 1918).

60. On the formation of attitudes toward the classical heritage in the years continue

      following the revolution, see B. Jangfeldt, Majakovskii and Futurism: 1917-1921 , in Stockholm Studies in Russian Literature, no. 5 (Stockholm, 1976), esp. pp. 51-71.

61. Mandelstam, "Vek" (The Age, 1922), SS 1: 132. In a general sense, the lines are self-explanatory; still, they require some glosses. The "age of the infant earth" is a metonymic pun based on the metaphors associated with the contemporary discourse on Russian history, the nineteenth century, or post-Petrine Russia (Herzen) as a period of infancy for the country. Cf.: "This qualitatively overripe nineteenth century, the century of steel and neurasthenia was, in the life of Russia, the first century, the century of brilliant infancy " (N. Shapir, "Filosofsko-kul'turnye ocherki," Severnye zapiski 9 [September 1913]: 58-80). As this innocuous passage indicates, the discourse on Russian history was drenched in associations of redemptive sacrifice with the commencement of a new age. At the risk of being literalist, the "crown of life" (literally, the fontanel, soft cartilage at the top of an infant's skull) has to be interpreted as pointing to the high and recent artistic achievement ("Acme") that the revolution had rendered outdated before it could enjoy a period of natural growth. In effect, Mandelstam is talking about himself, attempting to interpret his perceived "premature retirement" in terms of the redemptive sacrifice. Contemporaries could see through the poem easily, and N. Stepanov even found it crude (see his review of Mandelstam's Stikhotvoreniia [1928] in Zvezda 6 [1928]: 123). Cf. Broyde, Osip Mandel'stam * and His Age.

62. SS 1:132. On this and its companion poem ("Ia ne znaiu s kakikh por"), see Taranovsky, "The Hayloft," in Essays on Mandel'stam * ; and G. Levinton and R. Timenchik, "Kniga Taranovskogo o poezii Mandel'shtama."

63. Viach. Ivanov, "Dostoevskii i roman-tragediia" (pt. 2) RM 32, no. 6 (1911), p. 10 (2d pagination).

64. See, for example, Blok's essay "Katilina" (1918) or his preface to Vozmezdie. This theme of "retribution," of the artist's responsibility for everything that is happening in the world (echoes of Dostoevsky), runs through Boris Eikhenbaum's "Sud'ba Bloka" (1921). Cf.: "Blok felt the impending tragedy of his generation and his own tragedy as a master of that generation. . . . Blok knew that this life will demand a retribution and will force one to listen to it" ( Ob Aleksandre Bloke [Petersburg, 1921], pp. 49 and 51).

65. "Guard sleeping at the doorway" is a quotation from Aleksandr Pushkin's "Nedvizhnyi strazh dremal u tsarskogo poroga" (A. Belyi, "Dnevnik pisatelia. Pochemu ia ne mogu kul'turno rabotat'," Zapiski mechtatelei 2-3 [1921]: 115).

66. Mandelstam, "Ode to Beethoven" (1914), SS 1: 72: "Oh the flame of the grandiose sacrifice! Half the sky is covered in fire—and it is rent over us, the tent of the royal tabernacle." The imagery is based on the Ivanovian identification of Dionysus and Prometheus as prefigurations of Christ, which in its turn leads to the identification of Christ with the High Priest, the Tabernacle, and the Sacrifice in St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews (9:11ff.). The same symbolism is used profanely in "Football II" (1913), SS 1: 167: "And with the lev- soft

      ity of a heavyweight, the boxer parried the blows . . . Oh, the defenseless veil, the unguarded tent! . . ." The 1914 poem, "There is an unshakable scale of values" ( SS 1: 64) belongs to the same thematic development: "Like the royal staff in the prophets' tabernacle, solemn pain blossomed among us." Cf. the consequently transparent pun based on the expression "the fear of God" in The Egyptian Stamp, where the narrator suggests that "mathematicians should build a tent" in which to house "fear": "I like fear. I've almost said: 'With fear I am not afraid.'"

67. On Mandelstam's uses of lastochka, see Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * , pp. 158ff.; and G. Freidin, "Time, Identity, and Myth in Osip Mandelstam" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, 1979), chapters 4 and 6. For a few additional and valuable observations, see Levinton and Timenchik, "Kniga Taranovskogo o poezii Mandel'shtama."

68. Cf. Ronen, "Anamnesis and Amnesia."

69. S. Poliakova, Zakatnye ony dni: Tsvetaeva i Parnok (Ann Arbor, 1983), p. 24. See also the memoirs of Ol'ga Vaksel', who in the mid 1920s was being courted simultaneously by Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam (O. Vaksel', "O Mandel'shtame. Iz dnevnika," Chast' rechi [New York] 1 [1980]: 251-254). See also S. Polianina, "Ol'ga Vaksel'," Chast' rechi 1 (1980): 254-262.

70. "Posokh" (The Staff), SS 1: 69.

71. The usage of domashnost' (domesticity, familiarity) in this context is oxymoronic. Blok is "domashnii," Pasternak is "domashnii," "universitetskii seminarii," too, is "domashnii."

72. A later, "authorized" version of the first five lines (see Stikhotvoreniia, 1973):

Liubliu pod svodami sedyia tishiny,
Molebnov, panikhid bluzhdan'e
I trogatel'nyi chin, emu zhe vse dolzhny,—
U Isaaka otpevan'e.
Liubliu sviashchennika netoroplivyi shag, . . .

Cf. Viacheslav Ivanov's poem "Molchaniia" ( Cor ardens ): "Soidem pod svody tishiny . . . gde reiut liki proritsanii." The juxtaposition illustrates well what Mandelstam meant by the "secularization" of poetic speech (Ivanov's "proritsaniia" vs. Mandelstam's "vozglas siryi"). Compare this poem with Mandelstam's "Pshenitsa chelovechestva" (1922), published in Fleishman, "Neizvestnaia stat'ia Mandel'shtama."

73. Iu. Tynianov, "Promezhutok," in Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino (Moscow, 1977), pp. 189ff.

74. Heine was, of course, the most important of the non-Russian authors for Tynianov, who extensively translated him and devoted to him some of his major historical and comparative work (i.e., "Tiutchev i Geine" in Arkhaisty i novatory [Leningrad, 1927]; and "Blok i Geine" in Ob Aleksandre Bloke. See, for example, L. Ginzburg, "Tynianov-uchenyi," in Vospominaniia o Iurii Tynianove, ed. V. A. Kaverin (Moscow, 1983), p. 171. The passage from "Pro- soft

      mezhutok" must also be interpreted in generational terms—another instance of a younger critic making the poet aware that he was, like a classic, "dead." On the uses of Mandelstam in Tynianov's fiction, see Men'shutin and Siniavskii, Poeziia pervykh let revoliutsii, pp. 398ff.; and Ronen, An Approach to Mandel'stam * , pp. 343-345.

75. Cf. Boris Pasternak's letter to Mandelstam (January 31, 1925) concerning the planned Spektorskii (cited in note 14, chap. 6). Mandelstam's treatment of these themes in Shum vremeni was, indeed, perceived as disdainful. See N. Lerner, "Osip Mandel'shtam. 'Shum vremeni"' (review), Byloe 6 (1925): 244.

76. According to the poet's widow, The Noise of Time (written for the most part in Gaspra in 1923) developed the problematic of the poem "The Age" (1922), the problematic that found its resolution in "1 January 1924" (a "curative" poem, in the words of Ronen, "Osip Mandel'stam * "). See NM 2, p. 482.

77. M. Weber, Essays in Sociology (New York, 1958), p. 248.

78. See note 75.

79. "Ia v khorovod tenei, toptavshikh nezhnyi lug," SS 1: 123. The poem belongs to the Arbenina cycle. Cf. Pushkin, "The Prophet": "And the six-winged Seraph appeared to me at the crossroads. . . . And he cleaved my chest with a sword and removed the trembling heart and placed a flaming coal into the rent chest." Pushkin's poem is an elaboration on the call of Isaiah to prophecy. Compare the last two lines with the second stanza of Pushkin's Gavriliada (Gabriliad): "Shestnadtsat' let, nevinnoe smiren'e / Brov' chernaia, dvukh devstvennykh kholmov / Pod polotnom uprugoe dvizhen'e."

80. On the pledge pattern, see Ronen, "A Beam Upon the Axe"; see also idem, "Osip Mandel'stam * ."

81. "We are inviting you to a country where trees speak, where scientific unions resembling waves are, where armies of love are, where time blossoms like bird-cherry and goes like a piston, where the trans-man [ zachelovek ] wearing a carpenter's apron is sawing times into boards and, like a turner, treats his tomorrow" [italics are mine] (V. Khlebnikov, "Pust' Mlechnyi put' . . . ," in Truba marsian [1916], Sobranie Proizvedenii, vol. 5, p. 152).

82. "Chto poiut chasy-kuznechik" (1917), SS 1: 98. This poem, part of the "Akhmatova" cycle, echoes meaningfully Blok's "Karmen" verses, together with his essay "Poeziia zagovorov i zaklinanii" (passages on the Herodiade) and the Bizet opera itself. For other subtexts and for a detailed analysis of the poem, see Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * , pp. 68-82; and Freidin, "Time, Identity, and Myth."

83. Mandelstam, "Ia budu metat'sia po taboru ulitsy temnoi" (1925), SS 1: 144. The meter of the poem, coinciding with Pushkin's pastiche of Dante's Inferno, may be echoing some of the more unpleasant episodes in Mandelstam's (or rather, the Mandelstams' ) courtship of Ol'ga Vaksel'. See Vaksel', "O Mandel'shtame"; and Polianina, "Ol'ga Vaksel'."

84. Weber, Essays, p. 248.

85. SS 2, p. 20. break

86. SS 2, pp. 24ff.

87. SS 2, p. 38.

88. On Parnakh, see C. Brown, introduction to The Prose of Osip Mandelstam (Princeton, 1965); N. Berberova, Kursiv moi: Avtobiografiia (Munich, 1972), pp. 251, 656, 674; and R. Timenchik, "Zametki ob akmeizme," RL 7/8 (1974): 37ff. One of Parnakh's poems, "Restorany," bears a dedication to Mandelstam (V. Parnakh, Samum [Paris, 1919], pp. 4ff.).

89. C. Izenberg, "Associative Chains in Egipetskaia marka," RL V-3 (1977): 257-276. Most personages in The Egyptian Stamp bear the names of Mandelstam's actual friends. See also D. M. West, Mandelstam: The Egyptian Stamp, Birmingham Slavonic Monographs, no. 10 (1980), pp. 29-58 ("Characters and Setting").

90. O. Ronen, "Leksicheskii povtor, podtekst i smysl v poetike Osipa Mandel'stam * a," in Slavic Poetics: Essays in Honor of Kiril Taranovsky, ed. R. Jakobson, C. H. van Schoneveld, and D. S. Worth (The Hague, 1973).

91. SS 2, p. 13.

92. For a characterization of Mandelstam as a "right fellow traveler," see, for example, B. Ol'khovyi, "O poputnichestve i poputchikakh," pt. 1, PiR 5 (1929): 11. See also Nadezhda Mandelstam's petition to V. Molotov for an academic appointment for her husband (December 1930), in A. Grigor'ev and I. Petrova, "Mandel'shtam na poroge tridtsatykh godov," RL V-2 (1977): 182-184. The petition was first published in Pamiat' 1 (1976).

93. SS 2, p. 30.

94. NM 2, p. 212.

95. A possible link between Egipetskaia marka and Vaginov's Kozlinaia pesn' is worth investigating. Mandelstam followed Vaginov's career after at least 1926 ( SS 3, 232), the time when, according to N. Mandelstam's letter to Molotov, he began work on Egipetskaia marka. See Grigor'ev and Petrova, "Mandel'shtam na poroge tridtsatykh godov.'

96. "Nashedshii podkovu," SS 1: 136. This passage follows—virtually word for word—Pavel Florenskii's meditation on skepticism: "I enter the last circle of the skeptical inferno—into that part where the very meaning of words becomes lost. Words cease to be fixed and abandon their nests [ sryvaiutsia so svoikh gnezd ]. Everything metamorphoses into everything else, every expression [ slovosochetanie ] is equivalent to any other, and every word can exchange places with another. Here intellect loses itself . . . the cold . . . madness." (Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny, p. 38).

97. Cf. Broyde, Osip Mandel'stam * and His Age, pp. 169-199, which offers a far more detailed treatment of the poem.

98. A. G. Gornfel'd, Letter to the Editor, Krasnaia gazeta (Leningrad), November 28, 1928. Mandelstam used these words as an epigraph to his public reply in the Moscow Vecherniaia gazeta (December 10, 1928).

99. C. Brown, Mandelstam (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), pp. 124-125; "Zamechaniia o peresechenii biografii Mandel'shtama i Pasternaka," pp. 307-309; E. B. Pasternak and E. V. Pasternak, "Boris Pasternak: Iz perepiski s pisateliami," in LN 93, pp. 679-680. For a description of Gornfel'd's situation in continue

      the late 1920s, see Abram Palei, "Vospominaniia ob A. G. Gornfel'de," in Al'manakh bibliofila, vol. 5 (Moscow, 1978), pp. 242-248. See Appendix 1 for the chronology of events associated with the affair.

100. According to Nadezhda Mandelstam (NM 2, p. 149), Mandelstam was writing it in the winter of 1929-30 and must have completed it some time before May 1930, when the Mandelstams left for Armenia. See Grigor'ev and Petrova, "Mandel'shtam na poroge tridtsatykh godov," pp. 181-182.

101. The motif of incest is developed in the same section, in the stanzas preceding the "sartorial" one, and is interpreted as an all-embracing communality of a society in which every member bears responsibility for another's sin: "Suddenly some girl cries out in the pantry. . . . And the yard is in the smoke of suppressed desires, in the bare feet of dashing flags. . . . Along the way, it turns out that in the world there is not a speck of dust without a small stain of kinship [ piatnyshko rodstva ]" (B. Pasternak, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy [Moscow and Leningrad, 1965], p. 335). One of Parnok's nicknames in The Egyptian Stamp is "stain remover" ( piatnovyvodchik ). Cf. L. Fleishman, Pasternak v dvadtsatye gody (Munich, [1981]), p. 153.

102. Pasternak, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, p. 336.

103. "Polnoch' v Moskve" (May-June 1931), SS 1: 260. For the correct date, see J. Baines, Mandelstam: The Later Poetry (Cambridge, 1976). Many of Mandelstam's poems following his return to Moscow in the spring of 1931 were polemically directed at Pasternak. See Appendix II and chapter 8. The polemical intent of "Polnoch' v Moskve" was noted by Fleishman, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, p. 150n.46.

104. Together with Gor'kii, N. A. Tolstoi, Valentin Kataev, Vera Inber, and Kornelii Zelinskii, Zoshchenko participated in a volume celebrating the Stalin Canal (linking the White and the Baltic seas), contributing to it his story "Rasskaz pro odnogo spekulianta" (later included in his Golubaia kniga ). See M. Zoshchenko, Izbrannoe, vol. 2 (Leningrad, 1978), pp. 43-46.

105. Cf. I. Erenburg's story about Mandelstam in Theodosia: "He once gathered together rich 'liberals' and said to them strictly: 'On the Judgment Day you will be asked whether you understood the poet Mandelstam; you will answer no. You will be asked whether you have fed him, and if you answer yes, much shall be forgiven you" (Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn': Kniga pervaia i vtoraia [Moscow, 1961], p. 497.

106. M. Zoshchenko, Mishel' Siniagin (1930), in Izbrannoe, vol. 1, p. 498. Note the "monkey-fur collar" as a possible further hint at the "literary" nature of the coat (literature as imitation, "aping," of life). Siniagin must have come out after The Fourth Prose had been finished (April 1930). Otherwise, Mandelstam, who had the warmest words for Zoshchenko in The Fourth Prose, calling his writings "the Bible of labor," would no doubt have withdrawn them.

107. Chetvertaia proza, SS 2, p. 189.

108. See Mandelstam's "Kharkov" essay "Shuba" (1922), SS 4.

109. NM 2, pp. 592-597, and Grigor'ev and Petrova, "Mandel'shtam na poroge tridtsatykh godov," p. 181.

110. Mandelstam, Chetvertaia proza, SS 2, pp. 177, 184. According to continue

      Nadezhda Mandelstam, the Prose was composed in the spring of 1930, shortly before the Mandelstams left for Armenia (in April 1930).

111. Ibid., p. 182.

112. Ibid., pp. 188ff. Some of the pathos of The Fourth Prose may be traced to another masterpiece by Gogol, Notes of a Madman (kindly suggested by Boris Gasparov). Even though rumors about Mandelstam's "madness" were circulating in literary circles (see B. S. Kuzin's memoirs), I refrain from introducing this other text, as it might overshadow the purposiveness and the Dostoevskian self-affirmation of The Fourth Prose.

113. Ibid., p. 191. In Maiakovskii, the lines are "Chego kipiatites'? / Obeshchali i delim porovnu: / odnomu—bublik, drugomu—dyrka ot bublika. / Eto i est' demokraticheskaia respublika." See the annotations in SS 2, p. 617. Before leaving for Armenia, the Mandelstams may have attended the first performance of Maiakovskii's Bath. See L. Fleishman, "Epizod s Bezymenskim v Puteshestvii v Armeniiu, " SH 3 (1978), p. 195.

110. Mandelstam, Chetvertaia proza, SS 2, pp. 177, 184. According to continue

      Nadezhda Mandelstam, the Prose was composed in the spring of 1930, shortly before the Mandelstams left for Armenia (in April 1930).

111. Ibid., p. 182.

112. Ibid., pp. 188ff. Some of the pathos of The Fourth Prose may be traced to another masterpiece by Gogol, Notes of a Madman (kindly suggested by Boris Gasparov). Even though rumors about Mandelstam's "madness" were circulating in literary circles (see B. S. Kuzin's memoirs), I refrain from introducing this other text, as it might overshadow the purposiveness and the Dostoevskian self-affirmation of The Fourth Prose.

113. Ibid., p. 191. In Maiakovskii, the lines are "Chego kipiatites'? / Obeshchali i delim porovnu: / odnomu—bublik, drugomu—dyrka ot bublika. / Eto i est' demokraticheskaia respublika." See the annotations in SS 2, p. 617. Before leaving for Armenia, the Mandelstams may have attended the first performance of Maiakovskii's Bath. See L. Fleishman, "Epizod s Bezymenskim v Puteshestvii v Armeniiu, " SH 3 (1978), p. 195.

110. Mandelstam, Chetvertaia proza, SS 2, pp. 177, 184. According to continue

      Nadezhda Mandelstam, the Prose was composed in the spring of 1930, shortly before the Mandelstams left for Armenia (in April 1930).

111. Ibid., p. 182.

112. Ibid., pp. 188ff. Some of the pathos of The Fourth Prose may be traced to another masterpiece by Gogol, Notes of a Madman (kindly suggested by Boris Gasparov). Even though rumors about Mandelstam's "madness" were circulating in literary circles (see B. S. Kuzin's memoirs), I refrain from introducing this other text, as it might overshadow the purposiveness and the Dostoevskian self-affirmation of The Fourth Prose.

113. Ibid., p. 191. In Maiakovskii, the lines are "Chego kipiatites'? / Obeshchali i delim porovnu: / odnomu—bublik, drugomu—dyrka ot bublika. / Eto i est' demokraticheskaia respublika." See the annotations in SS 2, p. 617. Before leaving for Armenia, the Mandelstams may have attended the first performance of Maiakovskii's Bath. See L. Fleishman, "Epizod s Bezymenskim v Puteshestvii v Armeniiu, " SH 3 (1978), p. 195.

110. Mandelstam, Chetvertaia proza, SS 2, pp. 177, 184. According to continue

      Nadezhda Mandelstam, the Prose was composed in the spring of 1930, shortly before the Mandelstams left for Armenia (in April 1930).

111. Ibid., p. 182.

112. Ibid., pp. 188ff. Some of the pathos of The Fourth Prose may be traced to another masterpiece by Gogol, Notes of a Madman (kindly suggested by Boris Gasparov). Even though rumors about Mandelstam's "madness" were circulating in literary circles (see B. S. Kuzin's memoirs), I refrain from introducing this other text, as it might overshadow the purposiveness and the Dostoevskian self-affirmation of The Fourth Prose.

113. Ibid., p. 191. In Maiakovskii, the lines are "Chego kipiatites'? / Obeshchali i delim porovnu: / odnomu—bublik, drugomu—dyrka ot bublika. / Eto i est' demokraticheskaia respublika." See the annotations in SS 2, p. 617. Before leaving for Armenia, the Mandelstams may have attended the first performance of Maiakovskii's Bath. See L. Fleishman, "Epizod s Bezymenskim v Puteshestvii v Armeniiu, " SH 3 (1978), p. 195.

114. Mandelstam, "Iazyk bulyzhnika mne golubia poniatnei" (1923), SS 1: 138. Apart from Barbier (see Khardzhiev's commentary in Stikhotvoreniia [1973]), the poem is based, in part, on the following literary reminiscences: André Chéneir, "Jeu de pomme"; Aleksandr Pushkin, "Andrei Shen'e" (lines 160ff.); Innokentii Annenskii "Buddiiskaia messa v Parizhe"; and Nikolai Gumilev, "U tsygan." It further plays out Mallarmé's definition of poetry as the jeu suprême, punning it against "jeu de pomme" and, no doubt, pomme de discorde. Cf.: "Again, the frost smells of the apple"("1 ianvaria 1924"); "Oh, to take the world into one's hand like an apple" ("Vot daronositsa"); and "So a child answers: I shall give you an apple, or I shall not give you an apple" ("Nashedshii podkovu"). The allusion to Annenskii is most interesting. Compare Annenskii's "A v vozdukhe zhila neponiataia fraza" with Mandelstam's "I v vozdukhe plyvet zabytaia karinka, I v pamiati zhivet pletenaia korzinka." In The Noise of Time, most of which was done in 1923, Mandelstam recalls the delirium of his dying friend Boris Sinani: "Dying, Boris was deliriously speaking about Finland, moving to Raivola, and some ropes for packing the belongings" ( SS 2, p. 97). This was a memory associated with their attempt to join the Military Organization of the Socialist Revolutionary party. Cf. also the line from a lost poem by Mandelstam composed in Paris (in M. Karpovich, "Moe znakomstvo s Mandel'shtamom," Novyi zhurnal 49 [1957]): "podniat' skripuchii verkh solomennykh korzin." On "Iazyk bulyzhnika," see also D. Segal, "Pamiat' zreniia: pamiat' smysla," RL 7/8 (1974).

115. SS 2, p. 192. Cf. in Mandelstam's "Armenia" cycle: "k oruzhiu zovushchaia, Armeniia, Armeniia." The pun begins even earlier, but it cannot be easily conveyed in English: "Khodit nemets-sh ARM anshchik s shubertovskim leerkastenom, takoi neudachnik, takoi sh AROM yzhnik. Ich bin arm. Ia beden."

116. See N. Chuzhak, ed., Literatura fakta. Pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEF'a (Moscow, 1929). Mandelstam in fact translated one of the French authors, Pierre Hamp, whom one of the contributors to the volume, S. M. Tretiakov, considered exemplary of the trend (see G. P. Struve, Russian Literature Under Lenin and Stalin: 1917-1953 [Norman, Okla., 1971], pp. 215-217). continue

      Some of the elements of the program had already been spelled out by Mandelstam in 1923 (see especially his essay on Auguste Barbier, published in Prozhektor ), when he pointed out that Dante's Commedia had the topicality of a newspaper in its day and age. Further, the fact that Mandelstam avoided using invented names for the characters in his prose, including the fictional Egyptian Stamp, indicates that he was taking the trend seriously—whatever use he wished to put it to. See also N. Berkovskii, "O proze Mandel'shtama," in Tekushchaia literatura (Moscow, 1930), pp. 155-181.

1. See a draft of Mandelstam's letter to I. I. Ionov, SS 4, pp. 121-126. The letter was written sometime in January 1929.

2. "Potoki khaltury" (Streams of Slap-Dash), Izvestiia 80 (April 7, 1929), in SS 2, p. 428. The same issue contained a lengthy unsigned article with the following impressive title: "To Purge the State Apparatus by Means of the Masses and Together with the Masses." Appearing three months later in Na literaturnom postu, no. 13 (July 1929), Mandelstam's "O perevodakh" (On Translations) was a much calmer and more reasoned article.

3. D. I. Zaslavskii, "Skromnyi plagiat ili razviaznaia khaltura," Literaturnaia gazeta 3 (1929).

4. NM 1, p. 120.

5. NM 1, p. 186.

6. In a surviving draft of The Egyptian Stamp, with the action set in the 1920s rather than during the "Kerenskii summer," the Oedipal theme was much more explicit, as was Parnok's identification with authorship: "Parnok wrote not for himself, not for the critics, but for his dear mustachioed mother who deified him" (Princeton Archive). In the final version, professional authorship is attributed only to the narrator, and the "mustachio" to the "young Greek woman lying in a coffin." Cf. also the "mustachioed silence of the [narrator's childhood] apartment."

7. SS 1:254. Bearing the date May 7-9, 1932, the poem was first published in Novyi mir 6 (1932). Lamarck is presented here in terms of Mandelstam's "patriarchal" image. Cf. Khardzhiev's letter to Eikhenbaum (discussed in chapter 1) and the 1931 poem "Eshche daleko mne do patriarkha " ( SS 1: 251).

8. One might say that this metamorphosis had been "programmed" in the genetic code of the "mosquito," since it originated in the disguise used by Pushkin's Tsar Saltan (a character whose fate was similar to Joseph's) when he wished to visit the country of his birth incognito. On the "mosquito prince" from Mandelstam's poem "Ia ne znaiu s kakikh por," see K. Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * (Cambridge, Mass, 1976), pp. 30ff.; and G. Levinton and R. Timenchik, "Kniga K. F. Taranovskogo o poezii O. E. Mandel'shtama," RL VI-2 (1978): 200ff.

9. The poem was composed during Mandelstam's friendship with a biologist, Boris Kuzin (like Mandelstam, an admirer of Bergson and a neo- hard

      Lamarckian), who was involved in the contemporary debates concerning the viability of Lamarckism for Soviet science. See B. S. Kuzin's memoirs of his friendship with Mandelstam ("Ob O. E. Mandel'shtame," VRSKhD 140, nos. 3-4 [1983]: 99-129). On the debates, see P. Bondarenko, Protiv mekhanicheskogo materializma i men'shevistvuiushchego idealizma v biologii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1931); D. Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science (New York, 1961); idem, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), pp. 207ff.; and Zh. Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko (New York, 1969), pp. 9-17.

10. "Gde noch' brosaet iakoria," SS 2: 458. Although he did it without invoking the Dantean subtext ( Inferno 3: 111ff.), O. Ronen ("Osip Mandel'stam * : An Ode and an Elegy" [Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1976]) convincingly demonstrates that the subject of the poem, the "dry leaves of October falling off the Tree of Life," was not the Bolsheviks but the Whites fleeing the Crimea in the fall of 1920. Ronen thus disputed the assertion contained in the commentary accompanying the poem in Novoe russkoe slovo (New York, April 16, 1971). See also S. Broyde, Osip Mandel'stam * and His Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), pp. 70-73 and 214n.37.

11. "Proslavim, brat'ia, sumerki svobody," SS 1: 103. This is another Dantesque poem by Mandelstam—at least insofar as the last stanza recapitulates the story told by Dante's Ulysses about his last journey "beyond the pillars of Hercules" (hence "Take courage, men"). Cf. an analysis of this poem by Broyde, Osip Mandel'stam * and His Age, pp. 47ff. See also A. Morozov, "Mandel'shtam v zapisiakh dnevnika S. P. Kablukova," VRSKhD 129, no. 3 (1979): 134; and N. A. Nilsson, "Ship Metaphors in Mandel'stam * 's Poetry," in To Honor Roman Jakobson, vol. 2 (The Hague, 1967), pp. 1436-1444.

12. Nadezhda Mandelstam described the years 1924-27 as a period when her husband tried to reconcile himself to the regime, The Egyptian Stamp being one product of this attempt at reconciliation (NM 2, p. 255). See also her description of their visit to Shileiko in 1924, which suggests that contemporaries were not unaware of these attempts (NM 2, pp. 500ff.). "Mandelstam was one of those who began to see early, but he was not among the first of them, by far" (NM 1, p. 186).

13. "Light Cavalry" was the name of the special Komsomol groups charged with assisting the party in its struggle against bureaucratization and poor economic performance in Soviet enterprises. These groups became especially active following the adoption of the Five-Year Plan in 1928. According to Nadezhda Mandelstam (NM 1, p. 186), "after severing his connections with the writers' organizations, Mandelstam served on the staff of Moskovskii komsomolets for almost a year," that is, from the summer of 1929 to the spring of 1930. Cf. the interpretation of the passage below in J. Baines, Mandelstam: The Later Poetry (1976).

14. SS 2, p. 179. "Chinese games" ( kitaishchina ) most likely is an allusion to Dostoevsky's famous comparison of Russian bureaucracy with the Chinese Imperial state: "I would say that we are just like China only without her orderliness. We are only beginning what the Chinese have already accomplished. Doubtless we will achieve the same accomplishment, but when? In order to continue

      accept a thousand volumes of ceremonies, in order to win the right never to think about anything once and for all, we will have to live for at least another thousand years of pensiveness" (F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 21 [Leningrad, 1980], p. 7). Given this subtext, Mandelstam's invective can hardly represent a wish for the return of the good old days before 1917. Rather, it has much in common with the mentality of War Communism, when one did not have to "encode" into the formulas of "Chinese" servility the "great and powerful concept of class." Compare this with a 1922 essay, "The Fur Coat": "This was a severe and beautiful winter of 1920-21, the last harvest-time winter of Soviet Russia; and I miss it, remember it with tenderness . . . I feel oppressed by my heavy fur coat, just as the whole of Russia feels oppressed by the fortuitous satiety, fortuitous warmth, the ill-gotten second-hand wealth" ( SS 4, p. 95). This is about the first glimmer of economic recovery under NEP.

15. Mandelstam, Chetvertaia proza, SS 2, p. 178.

16. Sometime in the early spring of 1930, when he was finishing The Fourth Prose and about to depart for Armenia, Mandelstam visited a psychiatrist (NM 2, p. 298). See also Nadezhda Mandelstam's petition to V. Molotov (December 1930) requesting a university teaching position for Mandelstam. The request was motivated, in the words of the petition, by the "grievous state of poet Mandelstam," his "serious nervous disorder caused by a trauma (which resulted from the persecution of Mandelstam)" ("Dva pis'ma N. Ia. Mandel'shtam," in Pamiat': Istoricheskii sbornik 1 [Moscow, 1976; New York, 1978], pp. 302-307). For additional biographical materials pertaining to the late 1920s and the early 1930s, see A. Grigor'ev and I. Petrova, "Mandel'shtam na poroge tridtsatykh godov," RL V-2 (1977): 181-192.

17. NM 2, p. 405. All that Nadezhda Mandelstam remembered from the destroyed section of The Fourth Prose were two sentences. One was followed by expletives (" Komy on teper' nuzhen etot sotsializm zalapannyi . . . "). The other read: "If citizens suddenly decided to construct a Renaissance, what would have come out of it? A cafe 'Renaissance,' at best."

18. S. F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (New York, 1973), pp. 313-315.

19. Mandelstam, "Polnoch' v Moskve," SS 1: 260. According to Baines, The Later Poetry, the poem was written in May 1931. "1 ianvaria 1924" ( SS 1: 140) is perhaps the most elaborate of the early representations of this dilemma. On this poem and specifically on the use of the "fourth estate" in Mandelstam, see O. Ronen, "An Introduction to Mandel'stam * 's Slate Ode and 1 January 1924: Similarity and Complementarity," SH 4 (1979): 146-158. See also Ronen, "Osip Mandel'stam * ," and his "Cetvertoe * soslovie: Vierte Stand or Fourth Estate? (A Rejoinder)," SH 5-6 (1981): 319-324. Ronen's insistence on interpreting the term chetvertoe soslovie as "the proletariat" is supported, if indeed it needs additional support, by the following instance of contemporary usage: "Kuskova writes: 'the growing "fourth estate" cannot give up its hope for a distant paradise for labor, for the great promised land where there will be continue

      neither the rifles that shoot nor any inequality"' (A. S. Izgoev, "Na perevale. Zhizni' i publitsistika," RM 33, no. 27 [1912], p. 142 [2d pagination]).

20. Responding to Pasternak (see chapter 7 on Spektorskii ), Mandelstam defended in this poem his right to pass judgment on the epoch. History is not a fragile, cheap ( pen'kovaia dusha ), or fastidious affair that constantly requires a ritual bath like a sacred monkey in a Tibetan temple. L. Fleishman ( Pasternak v dvadtsatye gody [Munich, (1981)], p. 150n.46) offers a valuable subtext for these lines—Pasternak's 1928 poem "Bal'zak." The "Buddhist" motif, however, points strongly to Mandelstam's intellectual hero, Alexander Herzen, specifically to his characterization of Peter I: "Petr I ne mog udovol'stvovat'sia zhalkoi rol'iu khristianskogo Dalai-Lamy. . . . Petr I predstaet pered svoim narodom slovno prostoi smertnyi. Vse vidiat kak etot neutomimyi truzhennik, odetyi v skromnyi siurtuk voennogo pokroia, s utra do vechera otdaet prikazaniia i uchit, kak nado ikh vypolniat'; on kuz-nets, stoliar, inzhener, arkhitektor i shturman" (Gertzen, O razvitii revoliutsionnaykh idei v Rossii, in Sochineniia, vol. 3 [Moscow, 1956], p. 413). The Petrine metaphor for Stalin (recall his "Mao jacket") and the First Five-Year Plan were, of course, commonplace at the time. On one level, therefore, the poem's message concerns the awakening of Moscow-Russia from its ahistorical "Buddhist"' (Herzen's epithet) torpor under the guidance of the "indefatigable laborer in a modest coat of a military cut" who "from morning till night issues orders and teaches how they ought to be carried out." This was not the first time that Mandelstam invoked Herzen's Peter the Great (echoing Pushkin's view) as a measure of modern Russian history. See especially "Nashedshii podkovy." Cf. Broyde, Osip Mandel'stam * and His Age, pp. 180-182. See also H. Gifford, "Mandelstam and Pasternak: The Antipodes," in Russian and Slavic Literature, ed. R. Freeborn, R. R. Milner-Gulland, and C. A. Ward (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 376-386.

21. B. Pasternak, Stikhotvoreniia: poemy (Moscow and Leningrad, 1965), p. 377.

22. "Vek," SS 1: 135.

23. "S mirom derzhavnym ia byl lish' rebiacheski sviazan," SS 1: 222. First published in Zvezda 4 (1931): 113.

24. "Ia s dymiashchei luchinoi vkhozhu (April 4, 1931), SS 1: 231. Cf. Baines, The Later Poetry, pp. 27-28, 66.

25. Kuzin, "Ob O. E. Mandel'shtame," p. 114.

26. "Za gremuchuiu doblest' griadushchikh vekov," SS 1: 227. A number of drafts of this poem may be found in the Mandelstam Archive at Princeton University. They indicate that during the initial stages of composition, Mandelstam was working on a text that would later yield three separate poems: "Za gremuchuiu doblest'"; "Ia s dymiashchei luchinoi vkhozhu," SS 1: 227; and "Net, ne spriatat'sia mne ot velikoi mury," SS 1: 232. Other lines and whole stanzas belonging to these drafts have been published in SS 1: 242-246. The "wolf" poem is dated by Nikolai Khardzhiev as "March 17-28, 1932" (in O. Mandelstam, Stikhotvoreniia [Leningrad, 1973], p. 153). The dates for the other two in SS 1 are April 4, 1932, and April 1932, respectively. Khardzhiev continue

      also cites four different versions of the concluding stanza of the "wolf" poem (ibid., p. 288). For a discussion of the composition of the poem, see NM 1, pp. 158, 197, 201-202, 204; and Baines, The Later Poems, pp. 20-24.

27. M. Lermontov, "Vykhozhu odin ia na dorogu," "Zvezda"; "Na severe dikom stoit odinoko Na goloi vershine sosna."

28. Cf. "Zamechaniia o peresechenii biografii Osipa Mandel'shtama: Borisa Pasternaka," in Pamiat': Istoricheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1979; Paris, 1981); the anonymous author of this article was puzzled by Mandelstam's "overreaction" to Pasternak's "perfectly innocent words."

29. B. Pasternak, "Krasavitsa moia, vsia stat"' (1931), part of Vtoroe rozhdenie (1932). Cf. a discussion of Mandelstam's polemic in NM 1, pp. 158; and "Zamechaniia o peresechenii biografii Mandel'shtama," pp. 313ff.

30. The story begins: "I have always been in sympathy with the central institutions. Even when they were introducing NEP during the epoch of War Communism, I did not protest. If it's NEP, it's NEP. You know better. But, by the way, during the introduction of NEP, my heart would desperately sink. I somehow envisioned certain radical changes. And indeed, during the War Communism it was really free with respect to culture and civilization. Say, in the theater you were free to sit without taking your clothes off-just sit there in what you had on when you came. That was an achievement. This question of culture is a hard one. Take, for example, that [rule about] taking your clothes off in the theater. Of course, no argument, without their overcoats on the public is better distinguished" (M. Zoshchenko, Izbrannoe, vol. 1: Rasskasy i fel'etony. Povesti [Leningrad, 1978], p. 168).

31. Mandelstam, SS 1: 230. The motif of the coat appears in another poem composed in March 1931, "Zhil Aleksandr Gertsevich," an ironic selfportrait made up of Pushkin's first name, Herzen for a patronymic, and pieces of Schubert's Lieder for the family name. The poem recalls Gornfel'd's words perhaps, Zoshchenko's Mishel' Siniagin, and definitely Schubert's "Der Krähe" from Die Winterreise: "With music-dove, death isn't frightening, and afterward—a crow fur coat—to hang on a hook."

32. "As to the wolf cycle, it did not bode any special hardship—a labor camp at worst" (NM 1, p. 16). See also NM 2, pp. 603ff., which refers to the composition of the "wolf" cycle in the period when the Mandelstams "thought that the screws had been tightened to the limit and it was time to expect an improvement." This ambivalence is, of course, detectable in much of Mandelstam's poetry written after his return from Armenia in the fall of 1930.

33. The last stanza of the third version, cited by Nikolai Khardzhiev (see note 30), contains another allusion to Dante in the second line ( Inferno 32: 46-48). Mandelstam: "Take me away into the night where the Enisei flows and a tear on the eyelashes is like ice, because I am not a wolf by blood and a human being will not die in me." Cf. Dante: "Their eyes, which before were moist only within, gushed over at the lids, and the frost bound the tears between and locked them up again" ( The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno, trans. John D. Sinclair [New York, 1939], p. 397). Dante's description refers to the traitors frozen in the ice of the Caina. break

34. NM 2, pp. 460ff.

35. Mandelstam, Puteshestvie v Armeniiu, SS 2, pp. 175ff. On it, see Henry Gifford's introduction to O. Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia (San Francisco, 1979).

36. NM 2, pp. 466-473.

37. "Avtoportret," SS 1: 164.

38. "Kholodnaia vesna. Golodnyi Staryi Krym," SS 1: 271.

39. See M. Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York, 1967), pp. 41-43.

40. NM 1, p. 157; and "Zamechaniia," pp. 314ff.

41. For a discussion of the several other important subtexts of this poem (B. Pasternak, "V kvartire prokhlada usad'by"; A. Blok, "Druz'iam"; N. Nekrasov, "V. G. Belinskii," "Deshevaia pokupka"), see Ronen, "Leksicheskii povtor," pp. 385ff.; and idem, An Approach to Mandel'stam * (Jerusalem, 1983). See also V. V. Musatov, "Nekrasov v poeticheskom soznanii Mandel'shtama," in N. A. Nekrasov i russkaia literatura vtoroi poloviny XIX-nachala XX vekov, Mezhvuzovskii sbornik nauchnykh trudov, no. 64 (Yaroslavl, 1982), pp. 94-101.

42. "Kvartira tikha, kak bumaga," SS 1: 272. A future student of this poem may wish to juxtapose the "still telephone" with the suicide theme in Mandelstam ("samoubiitsa-telefon" in SS 1: 194; "k Perse F o N e tele FON eshche ne proveden" in Egipetskaia Marka ); line 10 with the similar line in "1 January 1924"; and line 18 with line 48 in "Polnoch' v Moskve" and with Pasternak's 1928 poem "Bal'zak": "On v'et, kak nitku iz pen'ki, istoriiu sego pritona." See Fleishman, Pasternak v dvadtsatye gody.

43. Sometime in the early 1930s, before Mandelstam's arrest, wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam, "The three of us [herself, her husband, and Akhmatova] were standing together when suddenly Mandelstam melted with joy: several little girls ran past us in a single file, imagining themselves to be horses. The first one stopped and impatiently asked: 'Where is the previous horsy?' The 'previous horsy' got bored with stomping its hooves and had fled. . . . I grabbed Mandelstam by his hand to prevent him from joining the kids as the lead horse. Akhmatova, too, was sensing danger. She said to Mandelstam: 'Do not run away from us—you are our previous horsy.' And we went to the Punins to have tea" (NM 2, p. 415).

44. For the events surrounding the composition of this poem, see NM 1, pp. 165-167ff. See also Baines, The Later Poems, pp. 84-86.

45. Mandelstam, "My zhivem, pod soboiu ne chuia strany," SS 1: 286. For another version in which Stalin, in reference to the brutality of the collectivization, is called a "murderer and a muzhikoclast" ( dushegubets i muzhikoborets ), see Baines, The Later Poems, p. 84.

46. Vl. Maiakovskii, "Levyi marsh" (Left March): "We shall ride the nag of history to death with our left, left, left." The relation between this poem and Mandelstam's "He Who Found a Horseshoe" is discussed in Broyde, Osip Mandel'stam * and His Age.

47. "Dovol'no kuksit'sia! Bumagi v stol zasunem," SS 1: 247.

48. "Vy pomnite, kak beguny," SS 1: 257. break

49. "Polnoch' v Moskve . . .," SS 1: 260.

50. "Segodnia mozhno sniat' dekal'komani," SS 1: 265.

51. NM 1, p. 101. The other exiles in Cherdyn' turned away from Mandelstam after the news of the commutation had arrived.

52. "Ty dolzhen mnoi povelevat'," SS 4: 515.

53. "Stansy," SS 1: 312.

54. "Ot syroi prostyni govoriashchaia," SS 1: 311.

55. "Den' stoial o pitai golovakh . ," SS 1: 313.

56. "Oboroniaet son moiu donskuiu son'," SS 1: 371.

57. "Sred' narodnogo shuma i spekha," SS 1: 361.

58. "Esli b menia nashi vragi vziali," SS 1: 372. The correct version of the poem's coda, cited here, appears in a draft copied by Nadezhda Mandelstam (deposited at the Mandelstam Archive at Princeton University). Baines ( The Later Poems, p. 202), however, follows the poet's widow in insisting that the poem ends instead in "Budet gubit' razum i zhizn' Stalin" (Stalin will keep destroying reason and life). But, as previously noted by C. Brown ("Into the Heart of Darkness," Slavic Review 26, no. 4 [1967]: 601-603) and B. Jangfeldt ("Osip Mandel'stam * 's 'Ode to Stalin,'" Scando-Slavica, 22 [1976]: 39-41), this reading, or version, contradicts the logic of the rest of the poem. The edition of Mandelstam's Voronezhskie tetradi prepared by V. Shveitser (Ann Arbor, 1980) follows Brown and Jangfeldt, attributing the other version to "the memory of Nadezhda Mandelstam" (p. 85).

59. SS 4: 147-148.

60. Baines, The Later Poems, pp. 175ff.

61. This and the two poems to follow are in SS 1, nos. 346, 347, and 348. Cf. Baines, The Later Poems, pp. 174-178. The word verstkii is a play on at least two terms: prodrazverstka (grain requisitioning during the War Communism and the collectivization) and verstka (galleys).

62. Cf. a passage from Egipetskaia Marka: "In the evening, at a dacha in Pavlovsk, these same gentlemen littérateurs taught a lesson to a poor youth—Hippolytus. He did not even get a chance to read to them out of his calico notebook. Some Rousseau!" ( SS 2, p. 27).

63. "Net, nikogda nichei ia ne byl sovremennik," SS 1: 141.

64. A. Akhmatova, Sochineniia, vol. 2 (Paris, 1968), p. 181. These reminiscences originally appeared in Vozdushnye puti 4 (1965).

65. Brown, "Into the Heart of Darkness."

66. Mandelstam, "Esli b menia nashi vragi vziali" ( SS 1: 372) represents a corrupt version of the poem. I am citing it here in the form it appears in V. Shveitser's edition of Mandelstam's Voronezhskie tetradi. See also a discussion of the text in Baines, The Later Poetry, pp. 201-203, 205. The most apparent allusions are to the Lay of Igor's Campaign (the ten hawks and the ten swans of Baian's fingers strumming the strings, as opposed to Mandelstam's far less aristocratic and far more biblical bullocks); to a Rembrandt "Pieta" (via the metonym of Rembrandt, his Night Watch; see also SS 1: 364 and discussion in the text below); and to Pushkin's "Ne dai mne Bog soiti s uma" (lines 2-3 and 7-8 are an obvious polemic with Pushkin's "anticivic" poem) and his "Pamiatnik" continue

      (line 22). The most important polemical and therefore meaningful allusion is to Pasternak's "On vstaet. Veka. Gelaty," from his "Georgian" cycle "Khudozhnik" (1936). The cycle appeared in Znamia 4 (1936) and elicited more than one response from Mandelstam. In this poem, Pasternak presented the poet as a folkloric warrior on a high horse riding into the "epoch," and pointedly not as a Baian ( gusliar ) or a narrator of magic tales ( balakir' ). The ostensible allusion is to the seventh stanza: "Like a thunderstorm, uniting on the road life and chance, death and passion, you shall pass through minds and lands, to fall into eternity as a legend." Mandelstam's poem is, obviously, a kenotic response to Pasternak's high-minded attempt to inscribe himself into Soviet modernity.

67. NM 1, pp. 216-220 ("Oda").

68. "Mandelstam's 'Ode to Stalin,"' Slavic Review 34, no. 4 (1975): 683-691.

69. Jangfeldt, "Mandel'stam * 's 'Ode to Stalin.'" K. Taranovsky discussed both the Slavic Review and Jangfeldt's texts in light of two authentic versions made available to him in "Dve publikatsii 'Stalinskoi ody' O. E. Mandel'shtama," Scando-Slavica 23 (1977): 87-88. The publication of the "Ode" in SS 4 follows the text established by Taranovsky.

70. NM 1, pp. 216-220. See also Baines, The Later Poetry, pp. 174-198, which closely follows the account of Nadezhda Mandelstam, although in more detail.

71. For the list of poems constituting The Second Voronezh Notebook, see Baines, The Later Poetry, pp. 242-243. The same list with only minor variations may be found in O. Mandelstam, Voronezhskie tetradi, pp. 35-80.

72. NM 1, pp. 212ff.

73. SS 4, pp. 143-145.

74. Most of Mandelstam's letters of this period end with an urgent plea for an answer by telegraph—a good indication of the sense of isolation Mandelstam was experiencing.

75. Mandelstam, SS 2, pp. 280ff.

76. Pasternak's growing visibility and importance during the congress, culminating in Nikolai Bukharin's high praise, prompted Lilia Brik's letter on behalf of the dead Maiakovskii, which in its turn culminated in Stalin's formulation (suggested by Lilia Brik): "Maiakovskii was and remains the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch" (E. J. Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution [Princeton, 1973], p. 370). See also G. de Mallac, Boris Pasternak, His Life and Art (Norman, Okla., 1981), pp. 142ff.

77. For the accounts of the incident, see NM 1, pp. 25-27, 145-149, 152-157, 214. See also Iu. Krotkov, "Pasternak," Grani 64 (1967): 62; and O. Ivinskaia, Vplenu vremeni (Paris, 1978), pp. 75-82. Two more recent summaries can be found in "Zamechaniia" and in L. Fleishman, Pasternak v tridtsatye gody (Jerusalem, 1983), pp. 163-178 ("Arest Mandel'shtama").

78. For Mandelstam, the term master had a negative connotation, as it designated older poets no longer needed by the new Soviet state except for their expertise as versifiers. This was what Mandelstam had in mind when in continue

      the "apartment" poem he refused to "master" (see Vl. Vasilenko's review of Mandelstam's Stikhotvoreniia [1928] in Izvestiia, July 6, 1928). See also the debates on Acmeism in Literaturnyi Leningrad in 1933-34. In this respect, Mikhail Bulgakov's designation of his novel's protagonist as "master" represents an attempt to restore the term's traditional honorable connotation.

79. NM 1, p. 220.

80. B. Bettelheim, "Remarks on the Psychological Appeal of Totalitarianism," in Surviving, and Other Essays (New York, 1979), pp. 319ff.

81. Cf. Mikhail Bakhtin's understanding of language, or words, as a locus of clashing attitudes of speakers (elaborated in Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo [Moscow, 1963], esp. "Slovo u Dostoevskogo"; "Slovo v romane," in Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva [Moscow, 1979]; and in the final chapter of Voloshinov's Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka [Leningrad, 1929], on "nesobstvenno-priamaia rech"'). In a sense, the poetics of Acmeism, particularly in Mandelstam, model this particular aspect of language insofar as they conjoin conflicting usages of poetic expressions. Even where the focus of the work falls on a "mythic" elaboration of a rhetorical item, the same operation of "clash" obtains. Cf. Akhmatova's recollection that Mandelstam's advice was "to clash words with diametrically opposing meanings" ("Mandel'shtam," in Akhmatova, Sochineniia, vol. 2). However, this orientation toward "the word of the other," foregrounded in Acmeist poetics (Ronen, "Leksicheskii povtor"), is common to any ideological text and, as such, represents a certain ideological position. It is itself a myth (as R. Barthes defines the term) linked to other myths comprising the contemporary ideological universe. Cf. R. Timenchik, "Tetkst v tekste u akmeistov," in Tekst v tekste, Trudy po znakovym sistemam, vol. 14 (Tartu, 1981), p. 73.

82. Akhmatova, Sochineniia, vol. 2, pp. 147-154.

83. "Nashedshii podkovu" ( SS 1: 140) bore the subtitle "Pindaricheskii otryvok" (Pindaric fragment), which places this most "irregular" of Mandelstam's poems in the Pindaric tradition, not via Russian classical poetry but by bypassing it. On this poem, see Broyde, Osip Mandel'stam * and His Age, pp. 169-199.

84. Letter of January 21, 1937 ( SS 2, pp. 280ff.).

85. Compare Mandelstam's words from Journey to Armenia, "the oceanic news of Maiakovskii's death," with the "oceanic" metaphor here and in the "Conversation about Dante," where he likens the composition of blood to that of the ocean, salt, and the sun: "krov' soliarna, solonna."

86. G. Kozintsev, "Tynianov i kino," and S. Eizenshtein, "Neposlannoe pis'mo Tynianovu," in Vospominaniia o Iurii Tynianove, ed. V. A. Kaverin (Moscow, 1983), pp. 262-271 and 272-277, respectively.

87. "Novoe chuvstvo prirody i istorii, chuvstvo tainstvennoi blizosti mira i prisutstviia beskonechnogo v konechnom sostavliaet sushchnost' vsiakoi podlinnoi romantiki" (A. Blok, "O romantizme" [1919]). In Blok, this state signified the "proximity to the World Soul." See A. Blok, SS 5, p. 363.

88. Frank J. Miller, "The Image of Stalin in Soviet Russian Folklore," The Russian Review 39, no. 1 (1980): 60ff. break

89. I. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 4 (Moscow, 1949), pp. 46-61. The speech containing these famous six vows was made the day before Lenin's entombment, on January 26, 1924: "We vow to thee, Comrade Lenin, that we will with honor fulfill this thy testament [ My klianemsia, tovarishch Lenin, chto my s chest'iu vypolnim etot tvoi zavet ]." And so forth, six times. The words klianemsia and zavet, needless to say, belong to the scriptural vocabulary, the first to the Old Testament, the second to both the New and the Old Testaments ( Novyi i Vetkhii Zavet ). They emphasize the sacred nature of the leadership transition, sanctify its legitimacy, and correspond to the self-image that Stalin would later so assiduously cultivate. As the "Ode" demonstrates, Mandelstam knew well how to "read" Stalin's speeches. Compare Stalin's vows to Genesis 26:3: "For unto thee and thy seed I will give all these countries, and I will perform the oath [ kliatvu ] which I swear [ klialsia ] unto Abraham thy father." See also Stalin's June 1931 speech on the six conditions for industrialization.

90. Viach. Ivanov, "Pindar, Pif. 1," Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, nos. 7-8 (1899), Otdel klassicheskoi filologii, pp. 50-51.

91. Izvestiia, October 2, 1936.

92. Apollodorus 1, 2: 2. There may be another, metonymic or contiguous, association of Stalin with the myth of Prometheus, which is focused on the Caucasus, the place of Stalin's birth and of Prometheus's punishment.

93. On the Stalin cycle, see C. Brown, "Into the Heart of Darkness"; and Baines, The Later Poetry, pp. 174-198. On the function of cycles in Mandelstam's poetics, see NM 1, pp. 198-212; and the work of Taranovsky and Ronen.

94. SS 1: 330-331.

95. Cf. O. Ronen, "Mandel'stam * 's Kascej", * in Studies Presented to Professor Roman Jakobson by His Students (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), pp. 252-264; and Baines, The Later Poetry, pp. 170-173. The poem is "Ottogo vse neudachi," SS 1: 337.

96. C. Brown, "Into the Heart of Darkness," pp. 598-600. "Vooruzhennyi zren'em uzkikh os," SS 1: 367.

97. NM 1, pp. 216-220; and Baines, The Later Poetry, pp. 174-198. Nadezhda Mandelstam, for example, insists that the words of the "wasps" poem "I neither draw, nor sing" are in direct opposition to the persona of the poet in the "Ode," where he indeed draws. This observation, although backed by the authority of, perhaps, the sharpest reader of Mandelstam's poetry, has the flaws of any literal interpretation. In the "wasps," Mandelstam neither "draws nor sings," but in the poem written the same day, February 8, 1937, he "sings while the soul is moist and the throat dry" ( SS 1: 365). The same may be said about another poem (one among many) where a similar reversal takes place: "Do not compare, a living man cannot be compared" ( SS 1: 352). But in February, seventeen days later, the poet breaks his own vow: "Like the martyr of chiaroscuro Rembrandt, / I have gone deep into the mute time, / But the sharpness of my burning rib / Is guarded neither by those guards / Nor by this warrior who is asleep under the thunderstorm" ( SS 1: 364). Here the poet compares himself not only to his brother artist but also to the subject of the artist's painting: either the Crucifixion or Christ's Resurrection from the tomb continue

      (viz., the "burning rib," the "sleeping warrior," the "guards"). Cf. C. Brown, "Into the Heart of Darkness," p. 385. On this subject, cf. also K. Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel'stam * , pp. 113ff.

98. For the text of Pasternak's "Stalin" poem and its versions, see his Stikhi 1936-1956, in Works, vol. 3: Stikhi dlia detei. Stikhi 1912-1957, ne sobrannye v knigi avtora. Stat'i i vystupleniia (Ann Arbor, 1961), pp. 138-139, 256. See also "Zamechaniia."

99. See especially Pasternak's 1913 poem "Bliznetsy" (Twins). It begins, appropriately for Mandelstam, with the motif of solitary confinement: "Hearts and companions, we freeze, we—[freeze] like twins in cells of solitary confinement" (B. Pasternak, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, p. 495). The collection is permeated with astral thematism—another aspect that Mandelstam, who would soon be composing his "stellar" cycle (including "Verse on the Unknown Soldier"), must have found appealing.

100. Mandelstam, SS 4, p. 140. If I am reading this letter correctly, the "Ode" represented another instance in the dialogue between the two poets in the 1930s. After all, the "wolf" cycle was prompted by, among other things, Pasternak's "Krasavitsa moia, vsia stat'," and certain lines in Pasternak's "Vse naklonen'ia i zalogi" read like an admonition to Mandelstam put together from bits and pieces of Mandelstam's own poetry (the "Ariosto" cycle, SS 1: 267-270). The admonition may actually have affected Mandelstam, since its echoes are audible in "Esli b menia nashi vragi vziali" ( SS 1: 372).

101. "Klialsia Gospod' i ne raskaetsia . . ."(Ps. 109: 4); "Ne narushu zaveta Moego . . . Odnazhdy Ia poklialsia sviatostiiu Moeiu: solgu li Davidu?" (Ps. 88: 35-36).

102. SS 1: 367.

103. H. Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York, 1944), pp. 153, 188-194.

104. NM 1, p. 218; Baines, The Later Poetry, p. 175.

105. SS 1: 86-87. For an analysis of this poem, see C. Brown, Mandelstam (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 237-245; and G. Freidin, "Time, Identity, and Myth in Osip Mandelstam" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1979), pp. 164-168.

106. Cf. Derzhavin's ode "Bog."

107. St. Augustin's Confessions and those of Rousseau.

108. K. Clark, "Utopian Anthropology as a Context for Stalinist Literature," in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, 1977). Cf. I. Nusinov, Vekovye Obrazy (Moscow, 1937).

109. The appropriation of Prometheus to Christianity is by no means an uncommon theme in modern European literature. "If the identification of Prometheus with Christ," wrote one scholar, "was the result of a mistake which was as much historical as ideological, then, it has to be recognized, rarely has a mistake been more productive" (R. Trousson, Le thème de Prométhée dans la littérature européenne, vol. 2 [Geneva, 1964], p. 479).

110. Apart from the "prayer of the cup" at Gethsemane, compare line 10 of stanza 5 with Matt. 27: 34: "Dali Emu pit' uksusa, smeshannogo s zhelch'iu i, otvedav, ne khotel pit'." break

111. Reported by N. Khardzhiev (see NM 1, p. 268).

112. "Gde sviazannyi i prigvozhdennyi ston," SS 1: 356.

113. See Sir James Frazer, The New Golden Bough (New York, 1959), p. 35 ("The Roots of Magic").

114. "Khrani menia, moi talisman." See Ronen, "Osip Mandel'stam * ."

115. Frazer, The New Golden Bough, p. 35.

116. To cite A. A. Potebnia ( Malorusskaia narodnaia pesnia (Voronezh, 1877], p. 21), the "fundamental formula of a spell [ zagovor ] . . . constitutes a verbal representation in which a given or contrived phenomenon is compared to one that is desired, with the purpose of fulfilling the latter."

117. R. Barthes, Mythologies (New York, 1972), esp. pp. 117-121. Significantly for the history of myth in contemporary culture, Mandelstam praises myth in "Pushkin i Skriabin" in virtually the same words Barthes uses (p. 118) to damn it: "It is this constant game of hide-and-seek between the meaning and the form which defines myth." Compare this with Mandelstam's idea of a poet "playing hide-and-seek with God." On the problem of this sort of concealment, see J. Derrida, "La pharmacie de Platon," in La dissémination (Paris, 1972), where we find the following definition of a text: "Un texte n'est un texte que s'il cache au premier regard, au premier venu, la loi de sa composition et la regle de sonjeu" (p. 71).

118. "Prodigal Son" is the title of a chapter in NM 2.

119. Contrary to the sense conveyed in NM 1, Mandelstam's friend B. S. Kuzin recalled that Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi was a magnanimous actor in the arbitration between Mandelstam and Sargidzhan, who allegedly used force against the poet's wife (Kuzin, "Ob. O. E. Mandel'shtame," p. 122): "A. Tolstoi, it was plain to see, did not try to add to the yapping of the dogs from the Writers' Union that had been loosed on Mandelstam. He did not even respond to the symbolic slap he received from O.E. in any way that might have worsened the clouds gathered over him."

120. "The Procurator's cheek twitched, and he said: 'Bring me the accused"' (M. Bulgakov, Belaia gvardiia. Teatral'nyi roman. Master i Margarita [Moscow, 1973], p. 438). Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 11, p. 28.

121. NM 1, p. 220.

122. NM 2, p. 103. break