VI— Revolutions and the Poetics of a Dying Age
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.).