Introduction: Friends & Enemies of the Word
Osip Mandelstam was born in 1891 of middle-class Jewish parents, grew up in St. Petersburg, and received his formal education in part there, in part in France and Germany. He studied philology, and, though he never took an academic degree or acquired much erudition, his word-love was deep and very sure of itself and became in his imagination a kind of substitute for the warm and secure domesticity he was not otherwise to know. His first poems, published in 1909–1910, whatever traces they might show of his apprenticeship to Symbolism, were of a marked originality, and the sense of a stillness in them, the sense of a motion arrested and about to resume, the sense of transition now strike the attentive reader as the distinctive features of his early work. Crowded between two worlds, the nineteenth century dying, the twentieth in ominous labor, it is small wonder that Mandelstam’s talent, like that of so many of his contemporaries, lent itself to apocalyptic expectations—to a vision of the end of the world that at the same time saw a terrible beauty stirring to be born out of that death—grass growing in the streets of St. Petersburg, paradoxically making of it “the most advanced city in the world.”1
No doubt these apocalyptic expectations had been nourished by the mystical Marxism of his early years as well as by his later Christianity. Writing from Paris in 1908 to his former teacher, V. V. Gippius, Mandelstam affirmed: “My first religious experiences date from the period of my childish infatuation with Marxist dogma and can’t be separated from that infatuation.”2 He saw a culture marked for death, and a new barbarism, terrifying yet perhaps potentially creative, waiting at the gates. Looking back on his youth through the acquired irony of maturity, Mandelstam wrote: “I perceived the entire world as an economy, a human economy—and. . . . I heard . . . the burgeoning and increase, not of the barley in its ear . . . but of the world, the capitalist world, that was ripening in order to fall!”3
Mandelstam was early associated with the journal Apollon and with Acmeism, a literary movement that had strong Classicist, Neo-Parnassian overtones. Its leader was Nikolai Gumilev, whose stance, given the Russian context, had strong analogies with that of the early Ezra Pound.
The Acmeists were at least as opposed as the Symbolists to the powerful Russian-intelligentsia tradition of a socially useful and uplifting art. Like the Symbolists, they believed in the sacred nature of the word and the autonomy and integrity of the work of art—but not, like the Symbolists, in the priesthood of poets. And they rebelled against a certain excess, the decadence of Symbolism—its obscurity, its glorification of self-indulgent and self-pitying attitudes, its love of oblivion and the abyss, its compulsive obsession with “other worlds.” The Acmeists tried to emphasize clarity, lucidity, forthrightness, and, above all, this-worldliness, a sense of being of the earth, earthy. At the same time they attempted to restore a traditional, rational formality, and Gumilev, though certainly not Mandelstam, indulged a certain heroic, Hemingway-like, aristocratic athleticism, meant among other things to distinguish him from the mob. I think it fair to sum up the major thrust of the Acmeist revolt against Symbolism not in its aristocraticism but, on the contrary, in its emphasis on the poet as a man among men, its this-worldliness, its attempt to return to earth. Mandelstam’s association with Acmeism was an important chapter in his life; yet, although his essay “About the Nature of the Word” was the most complete and the most eloquent expression of Acmeism and its relation to Symbolism, he was never a “leader” or even much of a “member” of that or any other group. He did, however, participate in that will toward a new taste-formation in which he himself saw the historical significance of Acmeism.4
Like other poets of his generation, Mandelstam reacted to the Bolshevik Revolution at first in terms of his apocalyptic expectations, welcoming it with some hope, not unmixed with dread and apprehension. From the 1920’s on, he saw that apprehension more and more insistently confirmed. It became increasingly clear that the revolution he had thought might produce a new universalizing human domesticity, the new “Social Gothic” he had hoped for, was not taking place. The barbarism at the gates was a repressive, not a creative barbarism. He found it increasingly difficult to survive in the Soviet context, though his spirit remained in general cheerful and indomitable. In 1934, the Soviet press ceased to publish his work; he was exiled, under very harsh circumstances, to the provincial town of Voronezh. In 1937, he was arrested and sent to the Far East, where, in a transit camp in Vladivostok, in the winter of 1938, he died. For almost two decades, his name disappeared from print in the USSR.
In 1973, a slender volume of Mandelstam’s poems appeared in the Biblioteka poeta series, in a limited edition, more than half of which was exported abroad, and then by curious circumnavigations much of it reimported! From the introduction to this volume by the Socialist Realist critic Alexander Dymshits, in his own way trying, I suppose, to bring Mandelstam back, one might gather that Mandelstam “cut himself off” from literature in 1934 as an act of eccentric self-isolation and that he died in 1938 of some unnamed but probably self-inflicted and equally eccentric illness!5 Nevertheless, thanks very largely to the efforts of his widow and a number of devoted scholars and admirers both in the Soviet Union and abroad, Mandelstam is now commonly, even if still too often in the USSR only tacitly, acknowledged as one of the great Russian poets of the twentieth century.
Mandelstam’s criticism has to this day been seriously under-estimated. He does not provide us with a new methodology and in general tends to take a deflating view of the importance of methodologies. Nor is he quick to put on the judge’s robes and consign his fellow poets to this or that circle of critical hell. There are poets he speaks of frowningly and with displeasure in one context who often appear with vibrantly positive force elsewhere in his work. In his essays, there is some sarcasm directed at poets like Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, whom he was elsewhere to cherish. Andrei Biely appears as a kind of villain, yet became the inspiration later for a whole cycle of poems; and it is Biely who must be thought of as a kind of interlocutor for the essay on Dante. A number of figures who appear in these essays are particularly close to Mandelstam in an almost intimate, personal sense—Villon, Chaadaev, the historian Kliuchevsky—without his necessarily making universal claims for them. A number of poets whom he treats rather harshly—Mayakovsky, Kruchenykh, Balmont—at the same time clearly command his respect. He offers us neither the luxury of an imitable method nor that of an authoritative juridical decision, and so interest in him as critic in our age of luxurious criticism has been limited to the illumination his criticism provides his poetry.