Iuly Isaevich Aikhenvald (1872–1928). Impressionist critic, an emigré from 1921.
Wilhelm Alexandrovich Sorgenfrei (1882–1938). Critic, poet, and translator.
3. Boris Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum (1886–1959). One of the Formalist critics, author of brilliant essays on Gogol, on Tolstoy, and on poets and poetry. Later, turned more to long, scholarly-biographical works.
Victor Maksimovich Zhirmunsky (1889–1972). Distinguished scholar and critic. In his youth, he was very close to the Formalists. Still earlier, he was, with Mandelstam, a student at the Tenishev School in St. Petersburg.
4. Apollon Alexandrovich Grigoriev (1822–1864). One of the Russian poètes maudits, author of an interesting book of memoirs, My Literary Wanderings, much admired by Dostoevsky. An intense Slavophile, he praised the Russianness of the Moscow region called Zamoskvorech’e (the area beyond the Moscow River from the main city, populated by merchants and artisans) and placed a high poetic value on things distinctively Russian.
5. Sophie Perovsky (1853–1881). A Russian revolutionary, member of the People’s Will Party (Narodnaia Volia). Born into a noble family, she joined the “Going to the People” Movement of 1872–1873. She was arrested several times. She worked very closely with A. I. Zheliabov and became his common-law wife. With him, she led the conspiracy to assassinate Alexander II, in which she played a decisive part.
6. Nikolai Ivanovich Kostomarov (1817–1885). Russian and Ukrainian historian and ethnographer, who had an early reputation as a radical. His notion of the distinctive features of Ukrainian history opposed him to “official” historians.
Sergei Mikhailovich Soloviev (1820–1879). The founder of modern historical studies in Russia, the Russian Ranke. He was also the father of the philosopher and mystic Vladimir Soloviev.
Vasily Osipovich Kliuchevsky (1841–1911). Historian noted for the elegance of his style in lecturing and writing as well as for his scholarship; his interest focused on the nonstate aspects of historical development, especially the social and the sociocultural. He emphasized the importance of geographical factors in Russian history and the shaping influence of the process of colonization.
7. Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev (1853–1900). Theologian and philosopher, poet and mystic; tried to promote the reunion of Christendom under the leadership of the Pope. His intuition of Sacred Wisdom, or Sophia, produced three visions of the feminine embodiment of that Wisdom, the Eternal Womanly, or Ewige Weibliche. Both his poetry and his teachings had enormous impact on the development of Symbolism.
8. Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov (1821–1878). Leading Russian poet of the second half of the nineteenth century. Above all, the poet of Russian Populism. Many of his poems are sentimental and rhetorical; yet he probably was the most influential of all Russian poets and helped to shape the sensibilities of Dostoevsky, Blok, and the whole Russian radical intelligentsia. His specialty was the pathos of poverty, in a mode very close to folk traditions and resonant for Russian culture.
9. A special form of folk song, usually very short, associated with a factory or working-class milieu, usually witty, often ribald.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
First published, 1922.
1. Not quite. Mandelstam is using Baudelaire for his own purposes. Baudelaire’s albatross is laid out on the deck of a boat, not the earth, and is rather a different kind of bird:
“Souvent, pour s’amuser, les hommes d’équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.
A peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l’azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d’eux.”
(Les Fleurs du mal: “L’Albatros”)
(“Often, for fun, the men of the crew catch albatrosses, vast sea birds, which follow, indolent travel companions, the ship gliding over the bitter abysses. No sooner have they laid them on the planks than these kings of the blue, awkward and ashamed, woefully let their great white wings languish like oars at their sides.”)
The last line concludes a comparison of the albatross “out of his element” with the poet: “Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.” (“His giant’s wings prevent him from walking.”)
2. See “Buddhism in Science,” in Alexander Herzen’s Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1956).
3. An intricately prescribed Japanese verse form.
4. Mandelstam, no. 133.
PETER CHAADAEV
First published, 1915. For Chaadaev, see “About the Nature of the Word,” note 7.
1. These are the opening lines of Ershov’s well-known fairy-tale poem of the hump-backed horse (“Skazka o kon’ke-gorbunke”), which exists in many editions and many translations. The horse is a magic animal that can fly.
NOTES ABOUT CHÉNIER
First published, 1928.
1. André Chénier (1762–1794). French poet, son of a diplomat, poet of liberty. At first, he approved of the French Revolution; later, he wrote an ode to Charlotte Corday upon her assassination of Marat; he was arrested and guillotined on 8 Thermidor. Pushkin admired him.
2. Clément Marot (1496–1544). French Renaissance poet and humanist, translator of Ovid. In his poems there are traces of imitations of Villon. Marot did not father the line known as the Alexandrine, which takes its name from the twelfth-century Roman d’Alexandre, and which Marot rarely if ever used. Ronsard, a generation later, popularized it. Aleksan-driitsa, genitive form of aleksandriets, the word Mandelstam uses, is not the one normally used for the Alexandrine and causes some puzzlement.
3. “Fathers of a people, architects of the laws!
You who know how to establish with a firm, sure hand
A solemn code for man.”
4. “As Latona, pregnant, almost a mother,
Victim of a jealous power,
Without refuge wandered over the earth.”
5. “The oppressor is never free.”
6. Les Bucoliques is a collection of poems by Chénier; there is no comparable work called Idylles, although there is a series of poems within the Bucoliques called “Idylles marines.”
7. “And then in a charming way the letter inquires
What I want of you, what commands I have for you!
What do I want? you say! I want your return
To seem very slow to you; I want you to love me
Day and night (night and day, alas, I am in torment).
Present in their midst, be alone, be absent;
Sleep, thinking of me! Dream that I am near;
See only me, unceasingly, and be completely with me.”
FRANÇOIS VILLON
First published, 1913.
1. “Will you leave him here, poor Villon?”
2. Cassell’s New French Dictionary translates pet as “fart” and vesse as “silent evacuation of wind.”
3. “Movement above all!” As was mentioned in the introduction, Verlaine’s line (in “Art poétique”) actually reads: “De la musique avant toute chose” (“Music above all”).
Uncollected Essays and Fragments
PUSHKIN AND SCRIABIN (Fragments)
Published by Struve and Filipoff from an incomplete typed copy found by Nadezhda Mandelstam among Mandelstam’s papers. The essay probably dates back to the time of the composer’s death in 1915. According to the editors, the essay was completed in 1919 or 1920. It was submitted to a Miscellany of some sort, which never appeared. Later, Mandelstam, who apparently felt some misgivings about the essay, was unable to find it in its completed form. These fragments have appeared in the Russian emigré press, in 1963 and 1964, as well as in the Struve-Filipoff edition. The essay shows traces of a muted polemic with Mandelstam’s former mentor, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Ivanov’s notions of the “suffering god,” the cult of Dionysus and its resemblance to Christianity. Perhaps polemic is too strong a word. The choice of Scriabin and Pushkin as exemplars of Christian art is odd, to put it mildly. Scriabin was a kind of demonist and Pushkin an agnostic, certainly a religious man but hardly a Christian.