The Prose of Osip Mandelstam

THE NOISE OF TIME The Prose o f Osip Mandelstam nslated with Critical Essays by Clarence Brown Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 http://archive.org/details/noiseoftimepOOmand 851*78 Mandelstam? Osip MA The noise of time / © THE BAKER ft TAYLOR CO. The Noise of Time The Prose o f Osip Mandelstam Translated with Critical Essays by Clarence Brown North Point Press • San Francisco • ig 8 6 Copyright © 1965 by Princeton University Press ; reprinted by arrangement Fourth Prose, Journey to Armenia, “ Introduction to the North Point Press Edition,” and “A Note on Fourth Prose and Journey to Armenia” copyright © 1986 by Clarence Brown Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 85-72981 isbn : 0-86547-238-6 North Point Press 850 Talbot Avenue Berkeley, California 94706 Contents Acknowledgments 7 A Note on the Illustrations 9 A Note on the Transliteration 11 Introduction: The Prose of Mandelstam 13 Introduction to the North Point Press Edition 63 THE NOISE OF TIME Music in Pavlovsk 69 Childish Imperialism 71 Riots and French Governesses 74 The Bookcase 77 Finland 81 The Judaic Chaos 83 The Concerts of Hofmann and Kubelik 88 The Tenishev School 90 Sergey Ivanych 94 YulyMatveich 97 The Erfurt Program 99 The Sinani Family 1 o 1 Komissarzhevskaya 109 In a Fur Coat above One's Station 112 THEODOSIA The Harbor Master 121 The Old Woman ys Bird 124 The Royal Mantle of the Law 126 Mazesa da Vinci 128 THE EGYPTIAN STAMP 13 1 A Note on Fourth Prose and Journey to Armenia 165 FOURTH PROSE 175 JOURNEY TO ARMENIA Sevan 193 Ashot Ovanesian 198 Zamoskvorechie 199 Sukhum 208 The French 2 11 About the Naturalists 213 Ashtarak 219 Alagez 221 Notes 227 Bibliography 243 I ndex of N ames 245 Acknowledgments All students of Osip Mandelstam owe their first debt of gratitude to Profes sor Gleb Struve and Mr. Boris Filippov, the editors of the Collected Works, which appeared in Russian in New York in 1955. For their many unselfish kindnesses to me, and for their interest and encouragement, I owe a fur ther, entirely personal, debt. Professor Struve’s scrutiny of certain parts of the translation greatly improved it. For many delightful conversations on the subject of his friend Osip Emilievich I am indebted to Artur Lourie. My colleagues Nina Berberova and Herman Ermolaev have patiently an swered many questions, for which I am very grateful. The errors and infelicities that remain are to be blamed solely on my own stubbornness or ignorance. I thank Mrs. Mary Gutbrodt for her kindness in typing parts of the manuscript. For my wife’s help in typing the final draft and in read ing the proof, and for her other assistance, I am much obliged. I have been greatly aided by some who do not desire public acknowledgment. Christmas 1964, Princeton, N .J. C.B. NOTE ON SECOND PRINTING For many valuable suggestions incorporated in the second printing I am obliged to Simon Karlinsky, Sir Isaiah Berlin, and Donald Fanger. January 1967 C.B. A Note on the Illustrations The drawing of Mandelstam by P. V. Miturich on p. 22 is discussed there. The drawing on p. 25, “ Poets,” is also by Miturich and also appeared in Apollon No. 4-5 for 1916. The portrait of Valentin Yakovlevich Parnakh on p. 132, discussed on p. 49, is by Pablo Picasso. It appeared for the first time (and, if my search of the Picasso catalogues has been sufficiently thorough, for the only time) as the frontispiece to a book of Parnakh’s poems (Karabkaetsja akrobat, Paris: Franko-russkajapecat’, 1922). The rare photographs of Osip Mandelstam and the portrait of him by Lev Bruni have been kindly supplied by friends to whom I am very grate ful. All of these appear here for the first time. The map of St. Petersburg on pp. 18 -19 is taken from Baedeker’s La Russie, 1897. A Note on the Transliteration In the body of the text I have used the popular system of transliteration, the most explicit description of which is to be found in J. Thomas Shaw, The Transliteration of Modern Russian for English-Language Publica tions (University of Wisconsin Press, 1967). In the notes I have used the narrow transliteration now all but universally adopted for scholarly pub lication; occasionally, in the text, Russian words cited as words are ren dered in this narrow system. Exceptions are made for words and names (moujik, Tchaikovsky) that have become familiar in other forms, and non- Russian names (Rubenstein, Hofmann) appear in their usual orthogra phy. “Mandelstam” is the transliteration preferred by the writer himself. When place names contain an adjectival form of a name familiar in English I have used the English form (the Nicholas Station). A foolish consistency in this matter, however, would have produced the “Marie” Theater instead of the familiar Mariinsky. In quotations from other sources, except where noted, the original transliteration has been changed to conform to the style of this book. Introduction: The Prose of Mandelstam I The prose which is here offered to the English-speaking reader for the first time is that of a Russian poet.1 Like the prose of certain other Russian poets who were his contemporaries—Andrey Bely, Velimir Khlebnikov, Boris Pasternak— it is wholly untypical of ordinary Russian prose and it is re markably interesting. For reasons that have nothing to do with literature, it is also virtually unknown even, or especially, in Russia itself. Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, a Jew, was born in Warsaw on the 15th of January, 1891, and died a political prisoner in a camp near Vladivostok in 1938. For years the end of his life was so obscured by rumor, conjecture, and deliberate falsehood that one could be sure only of the fact that he had perished. The date now officially given is 27 December and it is accepted by those close to the event, but there is one rumor left to haunt his biogra pher and to make it seem the part of prudence to precede the date of 27 December with the bleakly official formula “on or about.” Except for de tails, however, we do seem now to have a large measure of truth about how Mandelstam spent his last days. His troubles began in 1934. At that time, probably in the apartment of Boris Pasternak, Mandelstam read an epigram which he had written on Stalin. Whether the following excerpt, given here in the English version of George Stuckow, is from the actual poem itself or from another like it is not known, but its authenticity is asserted on good authority, and under the circumstances it is clearly actionable. We live unconscious of the country beneath us, Our talk cannot be heard ten paces away, And whenever there is enough for half-a-conversation, The Kremlin highlander is mentioned. His thick fingers are fat like worms, H INTRODUCTION His words hit hard like heavy weights, His cockroach’s huge moustaches laugh, And the tops of his boots shine brightly.2 It is unlikely that there were more than five of Mandelstam’s close friends within earshot of these verses. One of them reported the incident to the appropriate authority, and that was the beginning of the end. Our natural tendency toward revulsion at this act must be tempered by certain circumstances. The man who did it was himself in trouble and was proba bly terrified that one of his associates would show greater and prompter zeal than he, which would certainly have added to his difficulties. Besides, in a recent work of reference his short biography concludes with an official cliche which has lately begun to serve as the laconic epitaph for numerous writers (“ Illegally suppressed. Rehabilitated posthumously”), and he perished even earlier than Mandelstam. Requiescat in pace. The quarter of a century since Mandelstam’s death has not seen him restored to the canon of the elect, though there have been various signs that his work would be published again. An announcement in Voprosy literatury (Problems of Literature) for November 1958 (p. 256) declared that his collected poetry would be published in one of the large volumes of the distinguished series “ Biblioteka poeta” (Poet’s Library), and there were other indications, some of them very encouraging, that his work would be reissued, but little has yet come of it. So far as I have been able to determine, the four poems printed in the almanac D en’ poezii (Day of Poetry) for 1962 constitute, with the exception of isolated quotations, the whole extent of his rehabilitation. The bulletin Novye knigi (New Books), No. 22 (1964), a prospectus of forthcoming books for the use of librarians and the book trade, carried the announcement of an anthology caMedPoety nachala X X veka (Poets of the Beginning of the Twentieth Century), scheduled for publication in an edition of 50,000 copies in the fourth quar ter of 1964. Mandelstam is listed along with Balmont, Sologub, Annen sky, Bely, Kuzmin, Voloshin, Khodasevich, and other poets for inclusion in this work, which is to be one of the small-format volumes of the Poet’s Library. The announcement names V. N. Orlov, the editor-in-chief of the entire series, as the editor of the anthology and since that same Orlov’s statement in Literaturnaja gazeta (Literary Gazette) for 27 June 1964 concerning proposed one-volume editions of Russian poets omits the name of Mandelstam, it is to be presumed that the long-promised separate THE PROSE OF MANDELSTAM collection of his work has been abandoned and that we are to receive only the few poems which the format and scope of the forthcoming anthology give one any grounds for expecting.

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