Fedor Sologub, pseudonym of Fedor Kuzmich Teternikov (1863–1927). Symbolist poet and novelist.
Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, born Gorenko (1888–1966). Acmeist poet. First wife of Gumilev, whom she divorced in 1918. Her lover, Nikolai Punin, was, like Gumilev, arrested, and he died in prison. During the period of which Mandelstam writes she was a splendid and influential poet; but in the period between the Second World War and her death she wrote her very greatest poetry, in a strikingly different mode, and her role and influence were unique.
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890–1960). Probably better known to an American audience than any other Russian poet; the author of Doctor Zhivago.
Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev (1886–1921). Head of the Acmeist group. Executed in August, 1921, as a conspirator. See Selected Works of Nikolai S. Gumilev, trans. Raffel and Burago.
Vladislav Felitsianovich Khodasevich (1886–1939). Poet, critic, essayist. Parents partly Jewish, partly Polish. Went into emigration; partly rehabilitated in the USSR in 1963, though still not published there. See the moving account of him by his former wife, Nina Berberova, in The Italics Are Mine, trans. Philippe Radley (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969).
2. Vesy, a journal, published by Valery Iakovlevich Briusov (1873–1924), between 1904 and 1909, as an enterprise of the publishing house of which he was the head. Although Symbolist in orientation, the journal was the most urbane, cosmopolitan, and generally sensitive literary journal in Russia.
3. One of Krylov’s verse fables (I. A. Krylov, “Svin’ia pod dubom” [The pig under the oak tree], in Basni [Fables] [Moscow and Leningrad, 1956], p. 191). The fable is said to be based on an anecdote about Peter the Great and his courtiers.
4. Dmitry Nikolaevich Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky (1853–1920). Prominent critic and literary scholar of the period around the turn of the twentieth century. His work was characteristically sociological in its approach to literature, with a strong concern as well for the “psychology” of the author. His political views were “advanced” and “progressive.” His work also reflects the strong influence of Comte and Taine.
ABOUT AN INTERLOCUTOR
First published, 1913.
1. From his long poem The Gypsies.
2. Evgeny Abramovich Baratynsky, or Boratynsky (1800–1844). Russian poet, contemporary of Pushkin. One of the great Russian poets of the nineteenth century, though more appreciated in the twentieth than by his contemporaries.
3. Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont (1867–1942). Early Russian Symbolist poet, who emigrated in 1921 and died in Paris. Recently, critics like Professor Vladimir Markov have tried to revive a certain interest in his work.
4. Nekrasov, “Poet i grazhdanin” [Poet and citizen]. See “Badger’s Burrow,” note 8.
5. Semen Iakovlevich Nadson (1862–1887). Melancholy poet of partly Jewish descent, who died of tuberculosis at an early age. Sentimental, diffuse, his poetry of regret and frustration nevertheless had an enormous impact on the Russian generation that came of age in the 1880’s.
ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE WORD
First published, 1922.
1. Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743–1816). Greatest Russian poet of the eighteenth century. Cultivated an odd, interesting and passionate baroque style, sometimes eloquent and solemn, sometimes even grandiloquent, and sometimes “rough,” unpolished and very expressive.
Simeon Polotsky, or Simon of Polotsk (1629–1680). Monk, important church leader, writer and translator. Tutor of Tsar Aleksei’s children. Experimented with Russian syllabic verse and with dramaturgy.
2. An oblique reference to the well-known essay by Kuzmin.
3. Also called The Song of Igor’s Campaign. The title has other variants. It is often referred to briefly as the I gor Tale. An anonymous heroic epic dealing with the campaign of the Russian prince Igor against the Turkic Polovtsy. Believed by most scholars to have been composed in the late twelfth century. There has nevertheless been a prolonged scholarly controversy, by no means as yet resolved, as to its authenticity, with a number of scholars concluding the likelihood of an eighteenth-century forgery in the manner of Ossian. For an English version, see the translation by Sidney Monas and Burton Raffel, Delos, no. 6 (1971): 13.
4. In an earlier draft, cited by Struve and Filipoff in their notes, Mandelstam quotes two lines of the song:
“Bona puella fur Eulaluà
Bel anret corps bellerzonr, anima.”
(Mandel’shtam, 2: 632)
These are the first two lines of the ninth-century “‘Séquence’ de Sainte Eulalie,” quoted as follows by Albert Henry, ed., Chrestomathie de la littérature en ancien français, 3d ed. rev. (Bern: A. Francke, 1965), p. 3:
“Buona pulcella fut Eulalia:
Bel auret corps, bellezour anima.”
(“A virtuous maiden was Eulalia: she had a beautiful body and a more beautiful soul.”)
5. Pseudonym for Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev (1880–1934). Poet, novelist, critic, mystic, literary theoretician; Symbolist, disciple in anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner. His father was a brilliant mathematician and a well-known conservative figure in university politics. Brilliant in many fields, Biely is best known in English for his novel St. Petersburg, trans. John Cournos (New York: Grove Press, 1959). When Biely died in January, 1934, Mandelstam wrote a cycle of poems dedicated to him.
6. Fedor Ivanovich Tiutchev (1803–1873). One of Russia’s very greatest poets. A great philosophical poet, and the poet of chaos. Lived for many years abroad, serving as a diplomat in Munich and Turin. The herovictim of an intensive love affair late in life with his daughter’s governess that resulted in an intense group of love poems. In his political views, a right-wing Slavophile.
7. Peter Iakovlevich Chaadaev (1794–1856). See Mandelstam’s essay “Peter Chaadaev.” See also Peter Chaadaev, Philosophical Letters and Apology of a Madman, trans. Mary-Barbara Zeldin (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969). After a brilliant military career and early retirement as colonel of hussars, Chaadaev began those musings on Russian culture, history, and destiny that resulted in the Philosophical Letters. They were never intended for publication; whether the one letter that found its way into print had been so intended by Chaadaev is not altogether clear. But it was his first and last published work, for on publication he was declared “officially insane” by the political police—the first famous instance, but unfortunately not the last. It is quite impossible to separate the intrinsic quality of Chaadaev’s writings from their historical impact, which was so enormous that almost all of subsequent Russian intellectual history may be said to devolve from it.
8. Vasily Vasilevich Rozanov (1856–1919). A strange and controversial writer almost impossible to classify. A “ruminator” on all manner of subjects, whom the Formalist critic Victor Shklovsky called a “novelist” because his works are put together somewhat in the manner of fiction, though they are composed not only of narration and dialogue, but also of diary entries, aphorisms, private letters, and newspaper clippings. He exulted in the “privacy” and “intimacy” of his style.