7. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), p.229.
8. See the essay “François Villon,” p. 118.
9. N. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, pp. 184–190.
10. Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, trans. Colette Grandin (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), p. xxiii. Bachelard’s account of Novalis as a “poet of earth” would have pleased Mandelstam (Bachelard, La Terre et les reveries de la volonté [Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1948], p. 285).
11. “Pushkin and Scriabin.” Neither Pushkin nor Scriabin was in any conventional sense of the word a Christian. Pushkin was an agnostic, Scriabin a kind of diabolist and practitioner of white magic. Yet Mandelstam refers to Scriabin in this tantalizing fragment—the full version of which seems to have been irretrievably lost—as both a Christian and “a raving Hellene.” The reference to the curious police activities around the funeral of Pushkin as “the sun’s burial by night” has many echoes in Mandelstam in the image of the “black sun.” See also Iurii Ivask, “Khristianskaia poeziia Mandel’shtama” [The Christian poetry of Mandelstam], Novyi Zhurnal 103 (1971): 109–123.
12. “Pushkin and Scriabin.”
13. “The Morning of Acmeism.”
14. Mandelstam, no. 117. Throughout this volume, where Mandelstam’s poems are cited, I use the numbering of the Struve-Filipoff edition (see note 2 above), which the Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, trans. Raffel and Burago, also follows.
15. “The Word and Culture.”
16. Boris Pasternak, “Pro eti stikhi” [About these lines], in Stikhi i poemy, 1912–1932 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), p. 4.
17. “The Word and Culture.”
18. “The Nineteenth Century.”
19. “Humanism and Modern Life.”
20. “The Word and Culture.” See the extremely interesting essay by Victor Terras, “Osip Mandel’shtam i ego filosofiia slova” [Osip Mandelstam and his philosophy of the word], in Slavic Poetics: Essays in Honor of Kirill Taranovsky, ed. R. Jakobson, C. van Schooneveld, and D. Worth (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), pp. 455–460; also of considerable interest, Kirill Taranovsky, “Pchely i osy v poezii Mandel’shtama” [Bees and wasps in Mandelstam’s poetry], in To Honor Roman Jakobson (The Hague: Mouton, 1967). Basing himself on Mandelstam’s remarks on the importance of knowing where a poet comes from (“Badger’s Burrow”), Taranovsky makes a strong case for his “emergence” from Viacheslav Ivanov. His notion of a subtext, interesting in itself, becomes, more and more as he illustrates its meaning, somewhat academic. Russian Literature, no. 2 (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), a special issue devoted to the poetry of Osip Mandelstam, contains articles by Iu, Levin, D. Segal, R. Pshibylcki, and K. Taranovsky. Russian Literature, no. 7/8 (1974), contains articles by K. Taranovsky, “The Jewish Theme in the Poetry of Osip Mandel’shtam,” idem, “Osip Mandel’shtam: ‘Na rozval’njach, ulozhennych solomoj’”; N. A. Nilsson, “Mandel’shtam’s Poem ‘Voz’mi na rodost’”; J. van der Eng-Liedmeier, “Mandel’shtam’s Poem ‘V Peterburge my sojdemsja snova’”
21. In a number of essays and poems, Mandelstam uses “Buddhist” rather curiously to denote a kind of detachment in which the observer has no participation in the scene which he observes but looks on it with the privileged eye of God. In this sense, Mandelstam viewed nineteenth-century science as Buddhist—but also the transparent realism of Flaubert (and, with more justice, the Goncourts) and anthroposophy in religion. He owes the conception to his early reading of Alexander Herzen, the father of Russian socialism and a brilliant stylist. In Herzen’s book Dilettantism in Science, the chapter dealing with the right-Hegelians is called “Buddhism in Science.” See Alexander Herzen, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow, 1956), pp. 71–96.
22. “Literary Moscow.”
23. Elena Tager, quoted by Brown, Mandelstam, p. 69.
24. William Arrowsmith, “Aristophanes’ Birds: The Fantasy Politics of Eros,” Arion, n.s. 1, no. 1 (1973): 119–167. See also the charming account of Mandelstam’s attempt to learn Greek in Brown, Mandelstam, p. 47.
25. “About the Nature of the Word.”
26. “Pushkin and Scriabin.”
27. Victor Terras, “Classical Motives in the Poetry of Osip Mandelstam,” Slavic and East European Journal 3 (1966): 251–267; Brown, Mandelstam, pp. 253–375.
28. Cohen, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, p. 60.
29. “The Word and Culture.”
30. “Storm and Stress.”
31. N. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, p. 264.
32. Mandel’shtam, 1: 239, no. 352.
33. Cohen, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, p. 69.
34. Journey to Armenia. The “termenvox” was an electrical musical instrument, invented by Mandelstam’s friend Lev Termen.
35. Journey to Armenia.
36. N. Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned, p. 549.
“Before that I nonetheless have seen
Rich Ararat draped in its Bible cloth
And I spent 200 days in the Sabbath Land
They call Armenia.”
(Mandelstam, no. 237)
37. Journey to Armenia.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. “The Morning of Acmeism.”
Conversation about Dante
Although this essay was probably the last written (1933–1934) of those included in this volume, it expresses more fully than any other the range and the focus of Mandelstam’s sensibility as a critic, and so there is a certain logic in placing it first. It is not so much an attempt to characterize Dante as a literary figure as it is the elaboration of a poetics inspired by the reading of Dante, an attempt to get at the mainsprings of poetry, what poetry is and what it does, rather than an enumeration of its devices or the elaboration of a theoretical system based on a study of these devices. For Mandelstam, Dante is the archpoet, as Italy (the Mediterranean) is the home, the childhood, of modern European culture. Mandelstam is interested in the source, the basic physical impulse of poetry, and its elaboration in form—though he is no more a “Formalist” in his approach, for all his elaboration on rhyme and the terzina, than he is “sociological,” for all the importance he attaches to Dante’s social origins and the Italian class structure of his time.
During his student years at Heidelberg and the Sorbonne, long before the Revolution, Mandelstam may have spent a few weeks in Italy as a tourist. He knew the Divine Comedy in the superb Russian translation of his friend Lozinsky, but began to study Italian seriously only in the 1930’s. In the summer of 1933, in Koktebel, in the Crimea, he read a draft of this essay aloud to Andrei Biely, whom he had previously regarded as a literary enemy, but about whom he then severely revised his opinion, and to whom he subsequently dedicated a cycle of poems. Biely may in a certain sense be taken as the gifted and highly cultivated poet, novelist, and man of letters with whom this “conversation” takes place.
1. Dante, Inferno, XVI, 22–24. Brown and Hughes have translated directly from Mandelstam’s Russian. Dante’s Italian reads: