A work of art is always meant to outlast its maker. Paraphrasing the philosopher, one could say that writing poetry, too, is an exercise in dying. But apart from pure linguistic necessity, what makes one write is not so much a concern for one's perishable flesh as the urge to spare certain things of one's world—of one's personal civilization—one's own non-semantic continuum. Art is not a better, but an alternative existence; it is not an attempt to escape reality but the opposite, an attempt to animate it. It is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words. In the case of Mandelstam, the words happened to be those of the Russian language.
For a spirit, perhaps, there is no better accommodation: Russian is a very inflected language. What this means is that the noun could easily be found sitting at the very end of the sentence, and that the ending of this noun (or adjective, or verb) varies according to gender, number, and case. All this provides any given verbalization with the stereoscopic quality of the perception itself, and (sometimes) sharpens and develops the latter. The best illustration of this is Mandelstam's handling of one of the main themes of his poetry, the theme of time.
There is nothing odder than to apply an analytic device to a synthetic phenomenon; for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet. Yet in dealing with Mandelstam it wouldn't be much easier to apply such a device in Russian either. Poetry is the supreme result of the entire language, and to analyze it is but to diffuse the focus. It is all the more true of Mandelstam, who is an extremely lonely figure in the context of Russian poetry, and it is precisely the density of his focus that accounts for his isolation. Literary criticism is sensible only when the critic operates on the same plane of both psychological and linguistic regard. The way it looks now, Mandelstam is bound for a criticism coming strictly "from below" in either language.
The inferiority of analysis starts with the very notion of theme, be it a theme of time, love, or death. Poetry is, first of all, an art of references, allusions, linguistic and figurative parallels. There is an immense gulf between Homo sapiens and Homo scribens, because for the writer the notion of theme appears as a result of combining the above techniques and devices, if it appears at all. Writing is literally an existential process; it uses thinking for its own ends, it consumes notions, themes, and the like, not vice versa. What dictates a poem is the language, and this is the voice of the language, which we know under the nicknames of Muse or Inspiration. It is better, then, to speak not about the theme of time in Mandelstam's poetry, but about the presence of time itself, both as an entity and as a theme, if only because time has its seat within a poem anyway, and it is a caesura.
It is because we know this full well that Mandelstarn, unlike Goethe, never exclaims "0 moment, stay! Thou art so very fair!" but merely tries to extend his caesura. "'hat is more, he does it not so much because of this moment's particular faimess or lack of fairness; his concern (and subsequently his technique) is quite different. It was the sense of an oversaturated existence that the young Mandel- stam was trying to convey in his first two collections, and he chose the portrayal of overloaded time as his medium. Using all the phonetic and allusory power of words themselves, Mandelstam's verse in that period expresses the slowing-down, viscous sensation of time's passage. Since he succeeds (as he always does), the effect is that the reader realizes that the words, even their letters—vowels especially—are almost palpable vessels of time.
On the other hand, his is not at all that search for bygone days with its obsessive gropings to recapture and to reconsider the past. Mandelstam seldom looks bacW'ard in a poem; he is all in the present—in this moment, which he makes continue, linger beyond its own natural limit. The past, whether personal or historical, has been taken care of by the words' own etymology. But however un-Proust:ian his treatment of time is, the density of his verse is somewhat akin to the great Frenchman's prose. In a way, it is the same total warfare, the same frontal attack—but in this case, an attack on the present, and with resources of a different nature. It is extremely important to note, for instance, that in almost ever case when Mandelstam happens to deal v\ith this theme of time, he resorts to a rather heavily caesuraed verse which echoes the hexameter either in its beat or in its content. It is usually an iambic pentameter lapsing into alexandrine verse, and there is always a paraphrase or a direct reference to either of Homer's epics. As a rule, this kind of poem is set somewhere by the sea, in late summer, which directly or indirectly evokes the ancient Greek background. This is partly because of Russian poetry's traditional regard for the Crimea and the Black Sea as the only available approximation of the Greek world, of which these places—Taurida and Pontus Euxinus—used to be the outskirts. Take, for instance, poems like "The stream of the golden honey was pouring so slow . . . ," "Insomnia. Homer. Tautly swelling sails . . . ," and "There are orioles in woods and lasting length of vowels," where there are these lines:
. . . Yet nature once a year
Is bathed in lengthiness as in Homeric meters.
Like a caesura that day ya^M . . .
The importance of this Greek echo is manifold. It might seem to be a purely technical issue, but the point is that the alexandrine verse is the nearest kin to hexameter, if only in tenns of using a caesura. Speaking of relatives, the mother of all Muses was Mnemosyne, the Muse of Memory, and a poem (be it a short one or an epic) must be memorized in order to survive. Hexameter was a remarkable mnemonic device, if only because of being so cumbersome and different from the colloquial speech of any audience, Homer's included. So by referring to this vehicle of memory within another one—i.e., within his alexandrine verse— Mandelstam, along with producing an almost physical sensation of time's tunnel, creates the effect of a play within a play, of a caesura within a caesura, of a pause within a pause. Which is, after all, a form of time, if not its meaning: if time does not get stopped by that, it at least gets focused.
Not that Mandelstam does this consciously, deliberately. Or that this is his main purpose while writing a poem. He does it offhandedly, in subordinate clauses, while writing (often about something else), never by writing to make this point. His is not topical poetry. Russian poetry on the whole is not very topical. Its basic technique is one of beating around the bush, approaching the theme from various angles. The clear-cut treatment of the subject matter, which is so characteristic of poetry in English, usually gets exercised within this or that line, and then a poet moves on to something else; it seldom makes for an entire poem. Topics and concepts, regardless of their importance, are but material, like words, and they are always there. Language has names for all of them, and the poet is the one who masters language.
Greece was always there, so was Rome, and so were the biblical Judea and Christianity. The cornerstones of our civilization, they are treated by Mandelstam's poetry in approximately the same way time itself would treat them: as a unity—and in their unity. To pronounce Mandelstam an adept at either ideology (and especially at the latter) is not only to miniaturize him but to distort his historical perspective, or rather his historical landscape. Thematically, Mandelstam's poetry repeats the development of our civilization: it flows north, but the parallel streams in this current mingle with each other from the very beginning. Toward the twenties, the Roman themes gradually overtake the Greek and biblical references, largely because of the poet's growing identification with the archetypal predicament of "a poet versus an empire." Still, what created this kind of attitude, apart from the purely political aspects of the situation in Russia at the time, was Mandelstam's own estimate of his work's relation to the rest of contemporary literature, as well as to the moral climate and the intellectual concerns of the rest of the nation. It was the moral and the mental degradation of the latter which were suggesting this imperial scope. And yet it was only a thematic overtaking, never a takeover. Even in "Tristia," the most Roman poem, where the author clearly quotes from the exiled Ovid, one can trace a certain Hesi- odic patriarchal note, implying that the whole enterprise was being viewed through a somewhat Greek prism.