Mandel'shtam's prose is scarcely translatable. The verse with all its fearful complexity and the tiers of meaning packed into the miraculously chosen words is, despite everything, more capable of being reproduced in an alien medium than his wildly eccentric, although rigorously disciplined, 'prose'. He intended to write in what he himself called 'wild parabolas'. He succeeded more often than not and to an astonishing extent. 'A manuscript is always a storm,' he wrote. But the writer keeps his head and dominates the storm. Sometimes he fails: then we have passages of brilliant virtuosity, the galloping wild horses of an exultant and disordered poetic imagination. But because Mandel'shtam is a marvellous rider the wild leaps, even when they seem to vanish in mid-air, are exhilarating and never degenerate into a mere exhibition of skill or vitality. More often these pages obey a rigorous pattern; Brown seems to me right about this as against the learned Soviet scholar Berkovsky, whom he quotes in his book with justified approval. For the cascades of Mandel'shtam's glittering or tranquil images leaping out of one another, the historical, psychological, syntactical, verbal allusions, contrasts, collisions, whirling at lightning speed, dazzle the imagination and the intellect, not as an impressionist or surrealist cavalcade of haphazard violently contrasted elements, a brilliant chaos, but as a composition, as a harmonious and noble whole. Brown speaks of Mandel'shtam's 'patterned selection of incongruous images'.
But it seems to me that they are seldom incongruous. They are bold, violent, but fused into a disturbing, often agonised, but demonstrably coherent unity - a complex, twisted, over-civilised world (needing a sophisticated and widely read observer) in which there are no loose ends. All the strands are interwoven, often in grotesque patterns, but everything echoes everything else, colours, sounds, tastes, shapes, tactile properties are related not by symbolic but literal - sensory and psychological - correspondences. It is all the product of a remorselessly ordering mind. The description of him by Russian critics as 'architectural' is perfectly just.
In the centre there is always a suffering hero - the martyr pursued by the mob, a descendant not only of Gogol's and Dostoevsky's humble victims but (whether consciously or not) also of Buchner's Woyzeck (and very like Berg's Wozzeck). The suffering hero of 'The Egyptian Stamp' is a Russian Jew. His prose is populated with figures and images of his Jewish environment, treated with neither condescension nor irony nor aggressive self- identification, indeed no self-consciousness of any kind. This evidently remained his natural world until the end.
Two motifs run persistently through these strange pieces: one, that of a wistful, timorous, Jewish victim of men and circumstances. Literary historians will surely one day devote chapters and perhaps volumes to this stock figure of our time and trace his evolution from his gentile ancestors, from Peter Schlemihl to Hoffmann's terrorised creatures, from Dostoevsky to Andrea, until we reach Mandel'shtam's Parnok, an obscure ancestor of Bellow's Herzog. Mandel'shtam identifies himself with poor Parnok and at the same time prays passionately to be delivered from his characteristics and his fate. Pasternak took a different and much solider path to salvation in Doctor Zhivago.
The other motif is that of music and composers, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and, at a different level, Tchaikovsky and Skryabin, the characteristics of whose art haunted Mandel'shtam much as they did Pasternak; and are constantly used by him to describe other things. They are similes for nature, ideas, human beings: the comparison between Alexander Herzen's stormy political rhetoric and a Beethoven sonata in 'The Noise of Time' is one of the most typical and brilliant of these. The two themes come together in the marvellous description of the contrast between two Baltic seaside resorts - the German resort where Richard Strauss is played before an audience from which Jews have been excluded, and the Jewish resort full of Tchaikovsky and violins; still more, in what is, if not the best, the most directly emotional of all his lyrics, the poem about the gloomy Jewish musician Herzevich (the play on Herz and serdtse - the Russian for 'heart' - and Scherzo can scarcely be conveyed in English). It is a poignant and profoundly upsetting piece, like the single Schubert sonata which the musician practises over and over again. (Vladimir Wendell has written well about it.)
In 'The Egyptian Stamp' the hero's enemy - his alter ego descended from Hoffmann and Chemise - is the stupid, brutal, handsome, insolent soldier, the miles gloriosus who steals the hero's shirts, persecutes him, is admired while the hero is despised, and robs the hero of what he most ardently longs for. He is the terrible Double - the Doppelganger - of the paranoiac imagination of the early German romantics, the Drum Major in Wozzeck, the symbol of detestable strength and success, the mocking dismissal of all forms of inner life.
'The Noise of Time' in its own euphemistic way looks back to the dying Jewish bourgeois world, the office-study of Man- del'shtam's father, the leather-merchant, a succession of tutors, Jewish and Gentile, the mingling of the Petersburg liberal intelligentsia with socialist conspirators - the world from which the Revolution sprang. It vividly recalls the not wholly dissimilar world of Pasternak's youth in Moscow, although there the Jewish element is much more remote.
As for 'The Egyptian Stamp', although the fantasy derives from nineteenth-century romanticism, it has points of similarity both with the phantasmagoria of Bely's Petersburg and the logic of Kafka's Castle. No wonder that this book, like much imaginative Russian writing of its time, was not held propitious to the social and political policies of the Soviet State in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
The first and second Five-Year Plans swept all this away. It swept away the writer too. The day will dawn, it may not be far off, when a new generation of Russians will be allowed to know what a rich and marvellous world existed in the midst of the hunger and desolation of the early years of the Soviet Republic; that it did not die a natural death, but is still crying for fulfilment, and is not therefore buried in some irrevocable past.
CONVERSATIONS WITH AKHMATOVA AND PASTERNAK
Berlin's diplomatic pass, issued in Moscow on 15 September 1945, and signed by the Soviet foreign minister, V. M. Molotov
because that savage ruler, with whom Stalin identified himself, faced with the need to repress the treachery of the boyars, had, so Stalin complained, been misrepresented as a man tormented to the point of neurosis. I asked Eisenstein what he thought were the best years of his life. He answered without hesitation, 'The early '20s. That was the time. We were young and did marvellous things in the theatre. I remember once, greased pigs were let loose among the members of the audience, who leapt on their seats and screamed. It was terrific. Goodness, how we enjoyed ourselves!'
This was obviously too good to last. An onslaught was delivered on it by leftist zealots who demanded collective proletarian art. Then Stalin decided to put an end to all these politico-literary squabbles as a sheer waste of energy - not at all what was needed for Five-Year Plans. The Writers' Union was created in the mid- 1950s to impose orthodoxy. There was to be no more argument, no disturbance of men's minds. A dead level of conformism followed. Then came the final horror - the Great Purge, the political show trials, the mounting terror of 1937-8, the wild and indiscriminate mowing down of individuals and groups, later of whole peoples. I need not dwell on the facts of that murderous period, not the first, nor probably the last, in the history of Russia. Authentic accounts of the life of the intelligentsia in that time are to be found in the memoirs of, for example, Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Lydia Chukovskaya, and, in a different sense, in Akhmatova's poem Requiem. In 1939 Stalin called a halt to the proscriptions. Russian literature, art and thought emerged like an area that had been subjected to bombardment, with some noble buildings still relatively intact, but standing bare and solitary in a landscape of ruined and deserted streets.