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An Emerging Reputation Comparable to Pushkin's1 An Emerging Reputation Comparable to Pushkin’s1 or almost a quarter century after his death in a remote Siberian F labor camp in 1938, Osip Mandelstam’s name was consigned to oblivion in his own country. In the West he was vaguely remembered by a few scholars as one of the Acmeist poets who had rebelled against the mysticism of the Symbolists around 1910, a poet secondary in interest to such leading Acmeists as Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilyov and not to be compared in any meaningful way to such giants of twentieth- century Russian poetry as Aleksandr Blok or Vladimir Mayakovsky. Yet today Mandelstam is a tremendous cult figure in Soviet underground publications (samizdat), and the State Publishing House has just released a collection of his poems that has been repeatedly announced since 1959.2 Articles about him are appearing in the West with increasing frequency, at least two major American universities are offering graduate seminars on his work, and the first full-scale biographical and critical study of him in English has just been published. Almost simultaneously, there has now appeared the second volume of the memoirs of Mandelstam’s widow— whose passionate Hope against Hope was enthusiastically received here four years ago—and two comprehensive collections of his poetry in Eng- lish translation. 1 Review of Hope Abandoned, by Nadezhda Mandelstam, trans. Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1974); Selected Poems, by Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin (New York: Atheneum, 1974); Complete Poetry of Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, trans. Burton Raffel and Alla Burago (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1973); and Mandelstam, by Clarence Brown (New York: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1973). Originally published in New York Times Book Review, 20 January 1974, 1, 10, 12. 2 O. Mandel’shtam, Stikhotvoreniia, ed. N. I. Khardzhiev, intro. by A. L. Dymshits (Len- ingrad: Sovetskii pistatel’, 1973 [Biblioteka poeta, bol’shaia seriia]). Needless to say, there was a flood of editions and publications of Mandelstam’s poetry and prose in late- and post-Soviet Russia. The editions prepared by Gleb Struve and Boris Filippov and published in the US (and mentioned by SK below) are widely acknowledged as pioneering efforts.—Ed. 145 II. Modernism, Its Past, Its Legacy It is all part of a momentous rediscovery and reevaluation, currently winning for this poet a reputation of towering proportions and generating among students and lovers of Russian poetry an excitement comparable to that of astronomers who are in the process of discovering that a minor outer planet is actually a solar system’s second sun. Russian poetry’s cen- tral sun—Aleksandr Pushkin—has been considered a figure without peer for a century and a half. Recently, a few brave voices have been raised here and there to suggest that in Mandelstam Russian poetry at last has a poet of a stature comparable to Pushkin’s—a claim that even the most fanatical admirers of Blok, Mayakovsky, or Pa ster nak would not dream of making. The phenomenon we now call Osip Mandelstam has been put together before our very eyes during the past eighteen years. The first post-Stalinist collection of Mandelstam’s poetry and prose was brought out in 1955 (in New York, and in Russian) by Gleb Struve and Boris Filippov. It contained only what the poet had been able to publish during his lifetime—less than half of his output, as we now know. The early 1960s saw first a trickle, then a minor flood of unpublished Mandelstam manuscripts brought back by visiting Western scholars from the Soviet Union, manuscripts that had been carefully hidden and preserved by the poet’s widow and a few loyal friends during the bleak years when the government was bent on obliter- ating all evidence that Osip Mandelstam had ever existed. By 1964, Struve and Filippov had enough material for an updated two-volume Man del- stam, which was in turn superseded by their three-volume edition, pub- lished between 1967 and 1971. It is these hitherto unknown later works of Mandelstam—poetry written between 1930 (when he returned to writing verse after a five-year silence) and 1937, including the poems he wrote in his Voronezh exile just before being shipped off to a labor camp, the poems in which he reaches the probable peak of his lyric and visionary powers—that make him the awesome figure he is. They also enable us to see his early poetry in a re- vealing new light. Osip Mandelstam grew up in St. Petersburg, in a cultivated Russian- Jewish family. The years that followed the unsuccessful Revolution of 1905 (when Mandelstam was fourteen) were an exciting time to be young. Poet- ry was scaling new heights; Russian literature, the visual arts, and political and philosophic thought were as free of governmental pressure and ideo- logical harassment as they would ever be. The young Mandelstam studied 146 An Emerging Reputation Comparable to Pushkin’s philosophy, art history, and classical literature, and all these interests were reflected in his early poetry. His poems began appearing in the best literary journals of the time from 1910 on; his first collection of verse, Stone (1913), brought him instant recognition as one of Russia’s finest young poets. Accomplished and elegant technically, full of fresh perceptions, Man- del stam’s early poetry was concerned with various aspects of human cul- ture from the architecture of the Hagia Sophia to the cathedral of Notre Dame, from the music of Bach and Beethoven to silent movies and the choreography of a tennis game. Such references to history, literature, and the arts remained a frequent trait of Mandelstam’s later poetry as well, and this preoccupation has led certain critics, both Russian and foreign, to see Mandelstam as a poet divorced from actual life. This was a charge brought against him by his Soviet detractors of the 1920s (who were wont to contrast him with the politically committed Mayakovsky), and we can discern an echo of those old denunciations in a recent American reference book, Atlantic Brief Lives (1971), where we read of Mandelstam’s poetry that it “reflect[s] life in art and literature, rather than direct experience. Chiefly concerned with form and technique, it is impersonal and erudite.” Such a view of Mandelstam as some kind of Russian Parnassian is misguided. Like W. B. Yeats and Rainer Maria Rilke—two poets whom he equals in pure power and whose counterpart in Russian poetry he may well be—Mandelstam uses references to cultures of the past not to escape but to grasp and express his own sense of present reality. This is true of such an early masterpiece as the haunting “Solominka” (1916), in which the ghosts of Poe’s and Balzac’s heroines (Lenore, Ligeia, and Séraphita) float through the huge bedroom of a beautiful woman while “the twelve months are singing of the hour of death” and the room itself is gradually invaded by the black river Neva, the whole conveying the poet’s sense of the doom and decay that pervaded the final years of the Russian empire. In one of the very last poems Mandelstam ever wrote (no. 382 in the Struve-Filippov edition), ancient Egypt, “adorning itself in choice bitchery” and concerned primarily with the welfare of its corpses, whose “trifling pyramids still jut out,” is strikingly contrasted with the sinful, imperfect, but infinitely more livable age in which that “insolent scholar and thieving angel,” François Villon, could despise illusory “spidery civil rights” and create great humanistic poetry. This ostensible excursus into ancient and medieval history was written in March of 1937, during the 147 II. Modernism, Its Past, Its Legacy building of the White Sea canal by Soviet slave labor and on the eve of the worst of Stalin’s purges. As early as 1916, Mandelstam had begun to expand his thematic and emotional range, and his poetry grew in depth and stature in the 1920s and 1930s. Though it has none of the outward trappings of novelty or innovation, Mandelstam’s mature poetry is nevertheless totally unprec- edented in both form and content. Its full originality and the acutely twentieth-century sensibility that underlies it reveal themselves fully only after repeated readings. Turns of phrase, epithets, images, or ideas that may at first appear familiar and clear turn out to be laden with fresh and rich meaning. One keeps returning to these poems month after month, year after year, always discovering new depths, new perspectives, new ambiguities that arise from some intangible substratum on which Man- del stam’s poetry is built. The postrevolutionary Mandelstam developed into a genuinely vatic poet, an observer and a barometer of his time, able to respond to the changes of his epoch with a kind of visceral totality and to predict future developments accurately in one unbearably beautiful poem after anoth- er—such as “Twilight of Freedom” (1918), “The Age” (1923), “Leningrad” (1930), “To the German Language” (1932), and the shattering “You’re Still Alive” (1937). The work of Mandelstam’s final years, when he was no lon- ger allowed to publish anything and lived under constant threat of arrest, combines a tragic vision with a warmly expressed love of his country and his people and mingles a defiant defense of Western cultural traditions (his poems on Ariosto and Villon and his great, book-length poetic essay on Dante) with bursts of grateful joy at being alive and experiencing to the very last this world’s beauty and radiance. These final poems of Mandelstam are as good as anything in twentieth- century poetry, Russian or foreign.
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