Even Literature, with a capital L, was hostile. Mandelstam was an Acmeist, but he did not like schools. Still less did he like the way these schools were organizing themselves in the 1920’s—preparation for their own slaughter, in which the Stalinist organization of Socialist Realism would later use the rivalries and the acrimonies as well as the phrases and slogans of contending schools in order definitively to decimate them all. As the 1920’s came to an end and Literature tightened the clamp on Mandelstam, invoking even antisemitism against him, Mandelstam increased the angle of the defiant tilt to his head. More and more he came to distinguish “poetry” from “Literature.” Reading his poems at occasional “evenings,” he intoned them, I suspect, rather in the manner we have heard from Joseph Brodsky, liturgically. One memoirist writes: “He sang them like a shaman.”23
For friends of the word there was the blessing of the Russian language itself; its Hellenic nature. By “Hellenic,” Mandelstam explains, he does not mean that Russian derives etymologically from the Greek. Still less does he refer to the Byzantine cultural heritage—which, in a certain slant of light, he tends to see as “monkish” and dead and hostile or confining to the word. He calls it “the gift of free imagination,” or “free embodiment.” Just as Aristophanes in The Birds creates a structure out of the rootword eros, the manifold play and stresses of the meaning of “desire” and “desiring,” so Mandelstam sees the genius of the Russian language in the great depth and multiple branchings of its root meanings.24 So, too, he sees the writer Rozanov looking for “church walls” and finding only Russian words; for Russia had produced no Acropolis, no lasting legal or political structure, and the Russian language was Russian history.25 For that reason among others, history is a subject close to Mandelstam. When he listens, he hears it breathe.
A Hellenic language is one in which the word-psyche finds rich opportunity for embodiment, without the hindrance of authoritative utilitarian standards.
Mandelstam’s Hellenism should not be confused with that program of classical studies that for so long dominated the higher education of Europe and Great Britain. It is not that aristocratic/priestly key to possession of a mystery that wielded power in a secularizing world still stunned by the sacred. For Mandelstam, “Hellenic” means “human.” Perhaps it would be better to call it a kind of creative, procreative projection of the human onto the emptiness of the world. Crucial here is the conception of the utvar’, which one may translate as “utensil,” except that it has at its root a sense that is not that of “use” but is rather closer to the notions of “creation” and “creature,” something “creaturized.” It is, he tells us, the insistence on a relatedness between the warmth in the stove and the warmth in the human body. “Christianity,” in Mandelstam’s definition, is “the Hellenization of death.”26
Both Victor Terras and Clarence Brown have written eloquently of Mandelstam’s “Classicism.”27 It should not be confused with a preference for “high style.” There is, as Brown points out, a strong Flemish element, a transformation of the lowliest details of the everyday. Like Villon, Mandelstam has a keen sense of “roast duck,” and the vow of which he speaks in his poetry “to the fourth estate,” to his fellow raznochintsy, he took as a binding oath.
Yet his interest in Ovid is surely more than identification with a fellow exile, as Brown implies. He cares as much for the poet of the Metamorphoses and the Amores as for the exile of Tristia and Ex Ponte. One is reminded of Ovid’s absorption into medieval Christian cosmology as “Saint Ovid the Martyr.” It is possible that Mandelstam saw in metamorphosis a kind of resurrection: the creative process itself as death and rebirth, an arresting of the flow of time, “and then, after dwelling in the protracted moment wrested from it,” a return, changed by contact with the external, to life.28
Nor is “the Classical” simply a matter of Greeks and Romans. “Classical poetry,” Mandelstam tells us, “is the poetry of revolution.”29 He is not referring to David’s historical tableaux or to eighteenth-century pseudo-Classical “tragedy.” The Classical is that which is remembered when the mere piety of remembrance fails. It is remembrance energized by a powerful sense of the new, by a sense of what the new requires from the past. The trouble arises, Mandelstam writes, “when, instead of the real past with its deep roots, we get ‘former times.’” This is a poetry that has not had to wrestle with its conventions: “easily assimilated poetry, a henhouse with a fence around it, a cosy little corner where the domestic fowl cluck and scratch about. This is not work done upon the word but rather a rest from the word.”30 The Classical is what is required to complete a mode of experience: its necessity. In that sense, Mandelstam refers to the “genuinely Classic” style of Racine and the Classical furies of André Chénier.
He does not see the Classical as mere translation. In spite of his real devotion to the craft of translating—though his efforts are uneven, they contain some examples of the highest skill—he tended to speak of translation in the pejorative, implying use of the readymade phrase, the formula, the pat device, something mechanical and ready to hand. He did not see the task of the “Classicist” as releasing from the resources of the Russian language those qualities which might make it phonetically or syntactically resemble Latin or Greek, but rather as building out of Russian phonetic materials and the history of the Russian language (Hellenic only in its latent powers of incarnation) its own equivalents of Catullus, Ovid, Racine. It is not Latin or Greek that slumbers in Russian, Mandelstam insists, but the power of Russian itself. “Latin Russian” is therefore a pejorative, and even the commentary on Balmont, that he is the brilliant translator of a nonexistent original, is not praise.
Nor does he care much for Balmont’s assumption of superiority to his audience, the fashionably lofty hauteur toward the reader. If the poet has a special relationship to the word-psyche, it is not one that gives him a place on any elevation above the rest of mankind. On the contrary, what distinguishes him from a “literary man” is that he speaks to other men on their own level. The professor, the critic, the litterateur require their elevation; the poet is the same as any other man, if perhaps “not so well made as most.”31 He has no need to be morally superior. Villon, for instance, was a criminal, a murderer, possibly morally inferior to even the average man of his time, and yet a great poet.
A man speaking to men, with no need to be morally or intellectually superior: yet the poet speaks, and that means he speaks to someone, an addressee, an interlocutor. With its quiet humor and exceptional charm, the essay called “About an Interlocutor” articulates the poet’s reaching out past his beleaguered feeling of impending doom, to a very personal reader of some other time, a time beyond that “wing of oncoming night” he felt already encroaching upon him. The essay conveys, among other things, a remarkable understanding of those commonly not too well understood poems of Pushkin’s about the poet, his publisher, his audience, the powers-that-be. The poet’s interlocutor must be someone not too close, not too immediate. He must elicit surprises and carry about him and also invite a certain mystery. But above all he must be someone. He must have particularity. And that particularity must be respected.