The Federation of Unions of Soviet Writers (the centralized Writers’ Union had not yet been formed) resolved the “controversy” by declaring that, though Mandelstam had been unfairly attacked, he was morally to blame for having failed to draw up a contract with the original translators. The affair was not really forgotten until Bukharin intervened and arranged for Mandelstam’s trip to Armenia.
“Fourth Prose” is an outburst, an anathema directed against those who defame “Mother Philology,” a therapeutic release of all that Mandelstam had been holding back since the early 1920’s. As therapy, it ended the writing block which had left almost a five-year gap in his poetry. It also helped him clarify to himself his own position as an outsider, for whom there could no longer be any thought of compromise or concession. It was a full-voiced assertion of his own identity as well as a denunciation of “the enemies of the word.” (See N. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, pp. 177–178; also, Hope Abandoned, pp. 526–530.)
1. Benjamin Fedorovich Kagan (1869–1953). Well-known mathematician. Professor at Moscow University since 1923. Won a Stalin Prize in 1923. Not clear why he was brought into the Mandelstam “case”; perhaps because he had himself translated numerous mathematical texts.
2. Isaiah Benediktovich Mandelstam, a namesake, but not a relative. Also a translator.
3. In Mecca, one of the highlights of the Moslem pilgrimage to Mecca, formerly a pagan shrine, then site of Mohammed’s early preachments.
4. Groups of Komsomols or young Communists, organized to help the Party ostensibly in its struggle against bureaucracy and mismanagement. Their activity was greatly expanded with the conclusion of the New Economic Policy in 1928. Often, “the light cavalry” was used, as Struve and Filipoff point out, to pry into the personal life of members of the intelligentsia, people accused of retaining some sort of inner allegiance to the prerevolutionary way of life. Struve and Filipoff suggest that the assignment of cripples to such a task was not uncommon; there may have been some deliberate selection of people who could in some way be counted on to carry a grudge.
5. Commission for the Improvement of the Living Conditions of Scholars, created in 1921.
6. Pseudonym for Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky (1880–1932), a writer with an unusual and exceptionally adventurous biography; he had been a sailor, a fisherman, a prospector for gold, a soldier, a Socialist Revolutionary, a convict in exile and in prisons. Had a considerable reputation even in the pre-Soviet period for his stories of fantasy and adventure; no less successful in the Soviet period with novels along those lines.
7. One of the charges that kept coming up against Mandelstam, associating him with the “old regime,” was the one that he wore a “fur coat.”
Nadezhda Iakovlevna has eloquently described the poor tattered coat that was the pale spring from which this great rumor gushed forth. But she also refers to it symbolically: “In [‘Fourth Prose’] he spoke of our bloodstained land, cursed the official literature, tore off the literary ‘fur coat’ he had momentarily donned and again stretched out his hand to the upstart intellectual, ‘the first Komsomol, Akaky Akakievich’” (N. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, p. 178).
8. Organized in 1920 as the Writers’ Club; later the house of the Writers’ Union. There is a splendid satirical description of the goings-on there in Michael Bulgakov’s novel, Master and Margarita, trans. Mirra Ginsburg (New York: Grove Press, 1967). It is called Griboedov House there. Griboedov was also a Russian “classic,” but his name means, literally, “mushroom eater,” and the outstanding “cultural” feature of the house is its excellent, cheap restaurant.
9. Arkady Georgievich Gornfeld (1867–1941). A well-known scholar and critic. Before the Revolution he was a prominent contributor to the populist-oriented journal Russian Wealth (Russkoe bogatstvo) and the author of a number of books on Russian and foreign literature.
10. This is an admittedly poor attempt to render khaldy-baldy, a nonsense phrase to be sure, but one that suggests a number of things. Balda is a blockhead, or a hammer. Khalda isn’t anything, but suggests khaltura, or hack work. Since the phrase is repeated several times, my incapacity to translate it has some seriousness. Clarence Brown suggests “idiot-shmidiot.” That has advantages, and disadvantages.
11. Askanaz Artemevich Mravian (1886–1929). People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs for the Republic of Armenia in 1920–1921. From 1923 until his death he was Commissar of Public Education and vice-chairman of the Armenian Sovnarkom. Muravei means “ant,” on which Mandelstam puns the commissar’s name; hence “antic,” an attempt to convey Mandelstam’s pun.
12. Antisemitism was part of the campaign against Mandelstam.
13. The line is from Sergei Esenin’s poem, “I will not begin to deceive myself . . .” (“Ia obmanyvat’ sebia ne stanu . . .”) from his poem-cycle called Taverns of Moscow (Moskva kabatskaia, 1922).
14. Dmitry Dmitrievich Blagoi (b. 1893). Soviet literary scholar.
15. D’Anthès was the man who killed Pushkin in a duel. He was also, much later, a senator under Napoleon III.
16. Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko (1853–1921). Novelist, populist, humanitarian social reformer. Wrote many stories and novels of peasant life, somewhat sentimentalized. Interesting book of memoirs, A History of My Contemporary.
17. The Stock Exchange News (Birzhevye Vedemosti or Birzhevka) was a well-known newspaper before the Revolution and printed much more than stock-exchange news. After the Revolution, it changed its title several times, but expired in 1918; that is, it was closed. It had been owned by Stanislav Maksimovich Propper. The Evening Red Gazette was a popular Petrograd-Leningrad newspaper.
18. Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1888–1938). An Old Bolshevik, member of the Party since 1906; Lenin, in his Testament, called him the Party’s ablest theoretician. Later, one of Stalin’s victims. He was at the time the editor of Pravda, the official organ of the Party. Pravda, of course, means “truth” (or “justice”). He was later editor of Izvestiie. In 1929, Stalin’s noose was already beginning to tighten around Bukharin. He was finally made to participate in the Great Purge Trials and was executed in 1938. He was Mandelstam’s only important official Party “protector” and benefactor. Nadezhda Iakovlevna has pointed out in her memoirs that Mandelstam and Bukharin had in common the traits of impulsiveness and honesty, of doing things without careful calculation of the cost.
19. Angelina Bosio was an Italian soprano who sang four seasons in St. Petersburg before she died there in 1859. Her death is the subject of a poem by Nikolai Nekrasov, “About the Weather” (“O pogode”). In Mandelstam’s story “The Egyptian Stamp,” she plays a notable role, and Mandelstam seems to associate her with overtures and finales, beginnings and ends. See Brown, ed., The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, pp. 149–189; also, Brown’s notes to same. Mandelstam planned to write more, perhaps a novel, about Bosio.