The Classic has nothing to do with lofty attitudinizing, but rather with the idea of a human potential fulfilled. In this sense Mandelstam speaks in his poems of the Classic lands of the Mediterranean, of Italy and Greece, “those all-human hills” near Florence, and in the same sense, of the lands of the Caucasus and the Crimea which he associates with the Mediterranean, which for him are part of that “all-human” Mediterranean world.32
In a recent impassioned essay, the novelist Arthur A. Cohen has written well of Mandelstam. Like Nadezhda Iakovlevna, who has insisted on it, he has been able to see how the poems of Mandelstam’s last years, the “phases” and “cycles,” gain from being published complete, all their variants included. He has grasped the mutual implicativeness that joins poem to poem and makes each repetition of a word, a phrase, an image, or an association an addition to the meaning of the cycle. He has gone beyond this to suggest that the poems form a kind of eschatological epic, or that something like an eschatological epic is struggling to be born in them.33 I think one finds implications of this in the last great essays as welclass="underline" in “Fourth Prose,” “Conversation about Dante,” and Journey to Armenia. Mandelstam’s obsessive themes draw together in them. They capture his sense of a civilization coming to an end, and, in the shipwreck of that civilization, they constitute his letter-in-the-bottle thrown overboard to find a distant interlocutor in future time.
While the Russian countryside was still being devastated by collectivization and the five-year plans for the forced, rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union were being launched, Mandelstam, who dearly loved travel, went off on what was to be his last extended voluntary journey. He had suffered a writing block for almost five years. The organization and regimentation of the country that preceded and accompanied collectivization and industrialization, including the ever-increasing pressure on writers, editors, and publishers, oppressed his sensibility. Rescuing him from on high at this crucial time, his “protector,” Nikolai Bukharin, arranged for him and his wife to go to Armenia. Whether in the long run his association with Bukharin may have precipitated his last arrest and his death is a moot point, but, just then, it saved his creative life as a poet. The journey itself, his meeting with Andrei Biely, the therapeutic outburst of “Fourth Prose” set the juices flowing again and the lips moving. The essays are certainly overshadowed by the poems, but they partake of the same qualities and, indeed, the same themes as the poems.
If there is anything that Journey to Armenia is not about, it is not about either the joys of collectivization or the successes of industrialization in Armenia. Whatever expectations may have been aroused by the title—it was a time when writers were going on all kinds of trips and turning them into euphoric odes to the new order—Mandelstam clearly does not aim the essay for entry into the fat privileges of the new writers’ elite. Collectivization and industrialization come up briefly in passing, and an occasional journalistic cliché is inserted for the irony with which it flavors the context. One has the impression that Armenia would probably survive the mechanical regulation imposed by the five-year plans.
He does not write only about Armenia, but about everything he carries with him to Armenia as welclass="underline" his memories of Russia, his interest in Impressionist painting (now revived and revised), his obsession with biological theory, especially that of Lamarck, threaded through long dialogues with the chess-playing biologist, his friend, B. S. Kuzin; and, above all, his passion for language, his philology. As elsewhere, he tells his story by means of significant association rather than linear narrative. A chapter on the island of Sevan and its architectural “digs” is followed by a chapter on Zamoskvorech’e, the old merchants’ section of Moscow, setting for so many of the plays of Ostrovsky, dramas of personal and cultural tyranny, and for the poems and essays of Apollon Grigoriev with their exaltation of the “seven-stringed guitar” and the home-soil aspects of Russian nationalism. The fullness of Armenia is contrasted in restrospect with the “watermelon-emptiness of Russia,” with Zamoskvorech’e, where Mandelstam himself had lived, and its “cheery little houses” and “nasty little souls and timidly oriented windows.” Armenia might survive the five-year plans with their hypostasization of nineteenth-century scientific rationalist “Buddhism”—but Zamoskvorech’e?
In connection with thoughts on evolutionary theory, Mandelstam uses the word “development” (razvitie), which, of course, also has many associations with the five-year plan. It is a word he dislikes: “A plant is a sound evoked by the wand of a termenvox, pulsating in a sphere oversaturated with wave processes. It is the envoy of a living storm that rages permanently in the universe—akin in equal measure to stone and lightning! A plant in the world—that is an event, a happening, an arrow; and not boring, bearded ‘development’!”34 The passage recalls Mandelstam’s poem, no. 254, on Lamarck, and carries as well the implicit comparison of “a plant” with “a poem,” an ineluctable resemblance to Mandelstam’s theory of composition as expressed in “Conversation about Dante” and elsewhere. Even the adjective “bearded” as applied to “development” recalls the Italian idiom Che barba! and the expressive gesture that normally accompanies it. Mandelstam’s biological is really poetic theory:
All of us, without suspecting it, are the carriers of an immense embryological experiment: for even the process of remembering, crowned with the victory of memory’s effort, is amazingly like the phenomenon of growth. In one as well as the other, there is a sprout, an embryo, the rudiment of a face, half a character, half a sound, the ending of a name, something labial or palatal, a sweet legume on the tongue, that doesn’t develop out of itself but only responds to an invitation, only stretches out toward, justifying one’s expectation.35
That a Jew should identify closely with Armenia and Armenians is of course not at all unusual or surprising, but an instance of the natural kinship of gifted diasporic peoples, often persecuted, often mistaken one for the other by “the heathen.” What country, as Nadezhda Mandelstam asked, could be more worthy of being called “the younger sister of Judea”?36 Since the mood is eschatological, there is Mount Ararat, where the ark came to rest; and there are the Gog and Magog of the long dark night of imperial oriental siege and conquest. But Armenia resembles Greece and Italy as much as Judea: it is a wine-growing region, with the culture habits that accompany the grape, and there are even traces of an ancient goat cult in the mountains. Above all, Mandelstam is fascinated by the jangling of the philological keys, with his discovery that the Japhetic verbs “to see,” “to hear,” and “to understand” once coalesced into a single semantic bundle.37
Armenia is the first Christian kingdom and the longest Christian survivor as a cultural entity. It is the homeland of Christian architecture—both the Romanesque and the Gothic. Mandelstam sees it as a place of renewal, whose language will be studied when the phonetic ores of Europe and America are all used up, a place lifted outside of time like the Eucharist. Armenians were a people
whom you respect, with whom you sympathize, of whom you are, though a stranger, proud. The Armenians’ fullness of life, their rough tenderness, their noble inclination for hard work, their inexplicable aversion to any kind of metaphysics, and their splendid intimacy with the world of real things—all this said to me: you’re awake, don’t be afraid of your own time, don’t be sly.