Sergeev-Tsensky. Pseudonym of Sergei Nikolaevich Sergeev (1875–1958). “Realistic” writer of the sad lot of the peasant and the provincial intelligentsia. Later he did Socialist Realism.
Evgeny Ivanovich Zamiatin (1884–1937). Author of the antiutopian novel We; also a brilliant essayist and critic. In 1971, he was allowed to leave the Soviet Union and go to Paris. Although one of the few gifted writers with some real understanding of Marxism as well as a commitment to the Revolution, he has never been rehabilitated.
2. Almanacs, in the publication of which Gorky played a large role. See note 1 above on the Znanie school. For the most part, the writers involved were Realists like Gorky.
3. Pseudonym for Boris Andreevich Vogau (1894–1937). Author of The Naked Year; a gifted and innovative writer. Got into trouble, arrested. Recently rehabilitated.
4. The Serapion Brothers, a group of ten young and talented writers and poets, founded in the 1920’s. Their manifesto tried to proclaim some sort of political and stylistic independence, and what they had in common was a commitment to craftsmanship. Their title derived from the novella by Hoffmann.
5. Nikolai Nikolaevich Nikitin (1895–1963). A member of the Serapion Brothers, but managed to adjust to the 1930’s. He won the Stalin Prize in 1951 for a novel about Anglo-American intervention in Russia at the time of the Civil War (1918–1919).
Konstantin Aleksandrovich Fedin (b. 1892). Author of Cities and Years.
Mikhail Iakovlevich Kozyrev (b. 1892). A novelist of great unimportance.
Vadim Germanovich Lidin (b. 1894). Minor writer, was a war correspondent in the Second World War; author of a moderately interesting book of memoirs published in 1957.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin (1873–1954). A remarkably gifted nature and travel writer.
6. Nikolai Leskov (1831–1895). Storyteller and novelist. At his best, one of the greatest of Russian prose writers, but very uneven. His story “The Enchanted Wanderer” is well known.
7. Vsevolod Ivanov (b. 1895). Novelist, whose early prose showed a certain poetic sense of exotic detail. Member of the Serapion Brothers’ literary circle, which tried to establish a certain independence from ideology for literature. In his youth he worked at some odd jobs, including that of fakir in Central Asia.
STORM AND STRESS
First published, 1923. The Russian title, “Buria i natisk,” is the standard translation of the German Sturm und Drang.
1. Aleksei Nikolaevich Apukhtin (1840–1893). Sentimental poet of melancholy Weltschmerz; in some of his works, a civic, reform-oriented poet.
Arseny Arkadievich Golenishchev-Kutuzov (1841–1913). Author of many long narrative poems, close to Apukhtin in spirit; mood of melancholy world-weariness.
2. Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (1875–1936). Poet, novelist, critic, composer, with a decadent yellow-ninetyish flavor. Both imaginative and prolific. Wrote a novel about Cagliostro. It was he who gave Mandelstam’s collection of poems, published in Berlin, the title Tristia. See also “Attack,” note 1.
3. Evdokia Petrovna Rostopchina (1811–1858). An amateur poet. She wrote an allegorical poem about oppression in Poland which got her into trouble with the political police of Nicholas I. Khodasevich has written a splendid essay about her.
Peter Andreevich Viazemsky (1792–1878). Pushkin’s friend, a minor poet and gifted critic.
4. Balagannyi raeshnik. At Russian fairs and carnivals, the side-show barker usually announced the attractions of his booth in rhymed lines.
5. Sergei Esenin (1895–1925). Poet of peasant origin, friend and protégé of Kliuev, though eventually more famous. Wrote elegiac poems about the Russian countryside; indulged in a desperate pose called “hooliganism”; married Isadora Duncan. Committed suicide.
Nikolai Kliuev (1885–1937). Poet of peasant origin. A mystical revolutionary, his enthusiasm began to wane as early as 1918. Arrested in1933 and died in Siberia.
6. François Coppée (1842–1908). French poet and novelist, known as poète des humbles; wrote about cares, loves, and sorrows of common people. Late in life reconverted to Catholicism, became violent nationalist and anti-Dreyfusard.
HUMANISM AND MODERN LIFE
First published, 1923.
FOURTH PROSE
First published, 1966, in the first New York edition of Mandelstam. A samizdat version, which had been circulating for some time, was published by Grani [Facets] in 1967. A revised version was published by Struve and Filipoff in their edition of 1971. A section of the manuscript, apparently dealing with Mandelstam’s views on socialism, was destroyed. The title “Fourth Prose,” according to Nadezhda Iakovlevna, was a kind of amiable code name by which she and Mandelstam referred to the piece. However, it also signified, literally, Mandelstam’s fourth piece of prose: i.e., after “The Hum of Time,” “The Egyptian Stamp,” and About Poetry. It is also a playful reference to the “fourth estate” and Mandelstam’s “vow” to it (See Mandelstam, no. 140). There is also a suggestion of the “Fourth Rome” that was never to be. It is Mandelstam’s “declaration of independence” and statement of solidarity with the fourth estate. It was written in 1929–1930, before the Mandelstams’ trip to Armenia, and tinkered with as late as 1931. This spirited outburst against the notion of an “authorized” literature, against all the still relatively genteel but extremely ominous beginnings of totalitarian thought control, was inspired by the “Eulenspiegel affair.”
The ZIF (Zemlia i Fabrika, “Land and Factory”) publishing house commissioned Mandelstam to revise an edition of a translation of Till Eulenspiegel (Ulenspiegel, in the Russian transliteration) in 1928. The translation had been once revised by V. N. Kariakin in 1916, from one made in 1915 by A. G. Gornfeld under the pseudonym of Korshan. When the new edition appeared in 1928, Mandelstam alone was credited with it on the title page. Neither Mandelstam nor the original translators knew of this or had given their consent. In that world of Literature with a capital L, in which Mandelstam was considered a maverick, and which was itself in the process of being organized for the slaughter yard, the affair was rapidly blown up into a scandal. Mandelstam was accused of plagiarism. The bitter tone of his references to “translation” and “translators” has something of its origins here; but of course the real enemies were Literature and Totalitarianism.
Mandelstam might have used the occasion to make his amends, to conform and join the literary sheep. He refused. He answered the charges with the pledge of the entire body of his literary work. In May, 1929, Mandelstam wrote an article (not included in this volume) about the wretched current state of translation. This was answered by a crude attack. A number of writers came to his defense—among them, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Valentin Kataev, and even such Bolshevik and proletarian stalwarts as Alexander Fadeev and Leopold Averbakh. (Zoshchenko [1895–1958] was a brilliant satirist and master of comic melancholy, much admired by Mandelstam for his sense of the “new” Soviet language and its relation to reality; see his Scenes from the Bath-House, trans. S. Monas [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961]. Kataev [b. 1897] was the author of The Embezzlers, trans. I. Zarine [New York: Dial Press, 1929], and the play Squaring the Circle; he was liberal and protective in his attitude to younger writers. Fadeev [1901–1956] was an old-fashioned “monumental” novelist, generally an orthodox Socialist Realist writer; his novel The Young Guard, first published in 1945, was rewritten drastically to conform to Stalin’s orders. He became secretary-general of the Writers’ Union. Averbakh [1903–?] was a literary critic, militant advocate of a proletarian literature, and leader of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers [RAPP]; he was later liquidated as a Trotskyite.)