This is of course no mean interest. He was a poet first, and no doubt his criticism must be approached from the perspective of his poetry and in relation to his poetic practice. At the same time, it becomes immediately apparent that the quality and gift of his criticism partake of the quality and gift of his poetry while remaining, properly, prose.
Just as T. S. Eliot’s interest in Dante and the English metaphysical poets, Pound’s in the troubadors and Confucius, Wallace Stevens’ Symbolist essays in esthetics cannot be seen apart from their own poetry, so Mandelstam’s “Conversation about Dante” has to be read, I think, as an incipient project for a new Divine Comedy, or at the very least as the ringing affirmation of a sense of poetic identity so closely and passionately held as to make mere mistakes of historical detail or social interpretation seem relatively insignificant.6
It is interesting to compare it with Eliot’s essays on Dante. The poets attempt to rescue Dante from the Dante scholars. Each, while respectful of the need for knowledge about Dante’s time and its cultural assumptions so very different from our own, makes a powerful effort to remain true to his own “amateur” reading of the poem. Each rejects the “antiquarian” Dante and seeks in his work what is potentially alive as poetry.
Yet Eliot’s Dante is more like that of the scholars—a formidable and remote figure. Eliot’s immediate involvement is with the visual, not far away from the conceptual. “Dante’s,” he writes, “is a visual imagination,” adding that “it is visual in the sense that he lived in an age in which men still saw visions.”7 There follows a typically Eliotic distinction between “then” and “now.” “Then,” having been a religious age, turns out to have been better. Its visions were superior to the mere dreaming of “now.” For vision, he writes, “was once a more significant, interesting and disciplined kind of dreaming.” It might even be presumed to come from above, whereas we “take it for granted that our dreams spring from below.” The essays on Dante by Eliot are permeated by a nostalgia for a remote, more integral, more spiritually grounded age.
Mandelstam’s involvement is immediate and personal. For him, the essential question is “How many sandals did Alighieri wear out in the course of his poetic work, wandering about on the goatpaths of Italy?” For him, poetry is movement, the embodying, the incarnation, of movement. Elsewhere, Mandelstam repeatedly refers to Verlaine’s “Art poétique,” and often he substitutes the word mouvement for Verlaine’s musique.8 His own synonym for poetry was “moving lips,” and composition was inseparable from physical movement, from pacing and gesturing. Mandelstam wrote his poems—that is, “fixed” them on paper; abstracted them—only after they had already been composed.9 The composition of a poem was a physical process and “another poet” a physical presence.
Mandelstam tries to erase the impression left by Dante’s face in the well-known portraits; the aquiline profile, the haughty and superior gaze. Dante, he says, was an exile and a raznochinets (like Mandelstam!), a man of uncertain social background, nervous about his deportment in the presence of the mighty, all too capable of swinging to extremes of self-abasement and self-assertion. It is clear that Mandelstam knew little of the social history of Florence. Dante’s pride of lineage is not quite so easily dismissed. Nevertheless, Mandelstam finds his grounding in the text: Dante needed his guide, to make his way properly among the mighty shades!
The visual is by no means absent from the “Conversation about Dante,” and even the musical “instruments” with which the essay begins soon turn out to be “images.” It is not the visual stasis of a tableau. One senses the physicaclass="underline" incipient movement. In his obsession with architecture, Mandelstam sees the Goethean erstarrte Musik, “frozen music”; and, inweaving, the flow of rivers. Music is motion; words are motion. When he writes about Italian vowels, he talks of their place in the mouth, the mode of their issuance, the movement of the muscles. In his discussion of the “mineralogical” nature of Dante’s work—an image of stone borrowed from Novalis—he sees the most solid thing in the world, a rock, as a product of the motion of time and the weather.
It is not that Mandelstam has less than Eliot the sense of a “different” age. What he has is a physical confidence in the rightness of his own presence there, and it is a confidence that survives anachronism and incongruity. To catch the motion—there he concentrated. Mandelstam was obsessed with birds and bird flight to the degree that many of his contemporaries referred to him as “bird-like,” though he was in fact a tall, rather well-built and solid man. He is not slow to pick up the images of flight in Dante. This gift of physical sympathy, of susceptibility to motion, is apparent also in his almost physical sense for the presence and movement of cultural epochs. Where does it come from? Where does it go? These are questions he is always asking. For Mandelstam, an epoch is also a presence in motion. And he has the sense that Dante’s epoch, like his own, is transitional.
He does not in any case attempt to use his acquaintance with Dante as an occasion for feeling superior to his own time. He was of the earth, earthy; and, rightly or wrongly, Mandelstam believed that Dante was a raznochinets like himself. If the great French critic Gaston Bachelard is right, and a poet’s work tends to be dominated metaphorically by one of the four medieval archetypal elements, Mandelstam’s “dominant” was earth.10 In his reading of Dante, he scarcely notices the fire; and, although air (ascent; flight) and water (rivers; the ocean) recur in powerful images, there is no doubt that the basic element for Mandelstam is earth. Other images acquire their significance fundamentally in their relation to the earth. There is no Nietzschean climbing into the stratosphere, no Zarathustran ascent, the aim of which is to leave earth behind, so that even the return to earth has as its purpose the telling of what is above the earth, what belongs to the heights. For Mandelstam, space is empty and takes on significance only insofar as it can be populated—“colonized,” he wrote—with earthy images by the human imagination. Of the two aspects of earth, building and burial, Mandelstam emphasized the earth as material crying out to be built: stone as potential sculpture.
If earth and the materials of earth are his “ground bass,” the poetic process of building out of the materials of earth is inextricably connected with the Christian music of redemption. Mandelstam’s Christianity was by no means a decorative, that is to say, a purely esthetic phenomenon. Nor was it merely the form taken by his deep resistance to barbaric Stalinism. It was more fundamental and more complex.