20. Vechnaia Pamiat’. Penultimate part of the Requiem Mass of the Russian Orthodox service, repeated three times.
21. Marie-Joseph, the younger brother of André Chénier, was a successful playwright. He is said to have remained silent when his speaking out might have saved his brother André (who had begun by welcoming the French Revolution, but later wrote in praise of Charlotte Corday) from the guillotine. He survived the Terror and was lavishly successful under Napoleon. So much for “literature”!
22. Dante is very much on Mandelstam’s mind. It is not too fanciful to assume that something like a darkly modern Divine Comedy is beginning to stir.
23. Central figure of Gogol’s short story “The Overcoat.”
24. “Hey, Ivan”—from a poem by Nikolai Nekrasov of that title. Many of Nekrasov’s poems deal with and are dedicated to outcasts and the suffering poor. Moiseich means “son of Moses.” Nekrasov’s figure is also called Ivan Moiseich.
25. A bublika in the original, which is almost a cross between a doughnut and a pretzel.
26. The well-known statue of the great Russian fabulist, which depicts all around and below him the animals that were the characters of his verse fables. The linking of Zoshchenko and Krylov is, in my opinion, a flash of critical inspiration.
27. Moscow Union of Consumer Associations.
28. Viy—from Gogol’s story of that name. A gnomelike creature, whose eyelids reach to the ground, and who therefore cannot see. Once his eyelids have been raised with outside help, however, he can point to the source of evil.
29. See Mandelstam, no. 354.
Journey to Armenia
First published, 1933. I have relied basically on the text in the Struve-Filipoff edition (Mandel’shtam, 2: 137–176) but have collated this with the text published in Literaturnaia Armenia 167, no. 3: 83–99, to which is added an interesting postscript by Nadezhda Mandelstam.
Armenia appealed to both the Christian and the Hellene in Mandelstam. The journey was at once a reprieve, a symbolic journey, and an apocalypse. The essay on Dante is also closely linked with the journey. Mandelstam took it at a time when Soviet writers were in the habit of visiting far corners of the USSR to report back on the strides of progress made by the first five-year plan and the collectivization of agriculture—two revolutions within the Revolution, with more drastically far-reaching effects than the October Revolution itself, for it was these that actually “Sovietized” or, rather, Stalinized the Soviet Union. A number of talented writers at this time were singing the praises of the White Sea Canal, built with slave labor. This is one of the themes of Solzhenitsyn’s richly orchestrated Gulag Archipelago. Of course, Mandelstam’s “travel piece” turned out altogether differently.
While others celebrated the organization of time and place into a totalitarian knot through the minutely detailed and severely imposed five-year plans, Mandelstam sang timelessness, or rather a different kind of time; time linked to the “all-human” world of the Mediterranean, Classical and Christian. He sang Bergsonian time and the power of the word and of “building.”
The Journey is also a vision of the end; Mandelstam’s own end certainly. He identifies very closely with the captured Armenian king at the end of his account. Yet the survival of Armenia encourages him to ride on. It is not likely he hoped much for his own physical survival; but the journey taught him something of his place in time; and that was heartening.
A considerable role in Mandelstam’s life in Armenia belongs to B. S. Kuzin (the biologist B. S. K.), who, at a time when literary people were shunning Mandelstam, spoke to him long and earnestly about evolutionary theory, and who also prompted him, through his interest in German literature, to reread many of the German writers who were close to him.
1. From On Guard (Na Postu), the journal of RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers). A militantly proletarian tendency in pre-1934 Soviet literary life.
2. Reference is probably to Pushkin’s Mazepa (Poltava) rather than Byron’s. I use Byron’s spelling, assuming it more familiar to the English reader.
3. Khlysty: a religious sect. The meaning is literally “flagellants,” but they were not known for their dour ascetic self-scourging as much as for their ritualized joyous responses to the divine; they were “ecstatics.”
4. Another religious sect. Literally means “milk-drinker.”
5. “Official” language. The charge was often leveled against Mandelstam.
6. Nikolai Iakovlevich Marr (1864–1934). Gifted linguist; Marxist. Persuaded Stalin of the truth or at least the usefulness of his theory of the class origins of language. For a time, he occupied a place in linguistics almost equivalent to that of Lysenko in genetics. After his death, he and his work were denounced by Stalin himself, in Stalin’s last major theoretical pronouncement, in 1952, his essay on linguistics.
7. That part of Moscow beyond the Moscow River from the main city, associated with the playwright Ostrovsky and with Apollon Grigoriev, a place inhabited by merchants and artisans, and redolent of the spirit of old, traditional Russia.
8. Paul Signac, D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionisme (Paris, 1911).
9. The Russian word obyvateli, which means literally “the inhabitants, those who live there,” also carries the connotation of “philistines.”
10. Boris Godunov, regent during the reign of Tsar Fedor I (1584–1598), Fedor’s brother-in-law, and one of the last close companions of Fedor’s father, Ivan the Terrible. Later himself elected Tsar (1598–1605) by the Zemsky Sobor. His reign inaugurated the Time of Troubles. Godunov was the descendant of a minor boyar family that was Tatar in origin, and it was sometimes said that the Tatar shone through.
11. To my query, Clarence Brown responded: “The termenvox is the well-known musical instrument named after its inventor, the immortal Lev Termen (b. 1896),” to which he added, “of course.”
12. Alexander Ilyich Bezymensky (b. 1898). Poet, member of the Party since 1916. During the period 1923–1936, he had been an active member of RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) and one of the basic contributors to its journal On Guard (Na Postu).
13. The Russian says literally “shoe tree.” It did not strike me as correct to stretch a glove on a shoe tree. However, the play of words in Russian justifies the usage: na kolodku, “on a shoe tree”; okolodok, “neighborhood.”
14. In Russian, fruits ripen and eyes become bloodshot by means of the same verb: nalivaiushchikhsia plodov, “ripening fruits”; glaza nalivaiutsia krov’iu, “eyes become bloodshot.”
15. Lipovyi means “deceptive,” but also suggests lipa, a linden or lime tree; i.e., “linden-lined.”
16. Nedotroga may mean either the flower or an especially touchy person.
17. One of the oldest settlements in Armenia, at one time an important cultural center. It is about twenty miles from Erevan and contains a number of ancient ruins, some going back as far as the fifth century.
18. A suburb of Erevan, on the way to Ashtarak.
19. King of the Arshakide dynasty, which ruled Armenia from 63 to 428 A.D. In the fourth century the kingdom was divided into Roman and Iranian spheres of influence.
20. Shapur, or Sapores (Greek), or Pahlavi Shahpur II (310–379), defeated the Romans in 363 (death of Julian), and overran Armenia; made some attempt to impose Zoroastrianism on Christian Armenia. Shapur imprisoned the Parthian King Arshak (Arsaces III) in a fortress, where the latter committed suicide. In spite of the political unrest that characterized it, the fifth century that followed these events was the Golden Age of Armenian culture.