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).