January 01, 2006

Never Anyone's Contemporary

It is a technical impossibility to write about any great Russian poet without quoting poetry. It is another technical impossibility (overcome so rarely, it is the exception that proves the rule) to feel a poet’s greatness through the haze of translation. This should be kept in mind when reading snippets of Mandelstam in our restrained prose translations, or anyone else in almost any translation. To finish the preamble, let only this be said: Mandelstam’s poems rank among the best, the most improbable, the most magical texts written in a human language. Trust me.

Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam was born on the night of January 14/15, 1891, in Warsaw, Poland. Soon after his birth, the family moved to Pavlovsk, in the environs of St. Petersburg, and then later to Petersburg, which became “my city” of Mandelstam’s later poetry. His father, Emil Mandelstam, was a leather worker – affluent at some point in his career, later doing worse and, still later, by the turn of the century, totally broke. A memoirist recalled his “hands of a laborer, black from tanning.” Osip’s mother, Flora née Werblowska, was a piano teacher (Osip learned to play piano and was sensitive to music throughout his life). They had three children, all boys; Osip was the first-born.

His childhood was not particularly happy. He had little contact with his parents; sensitive to words and their elusive meanings, he perceived his family as verbally challenged and later called his household atmosphere “the Judaic chaos.” “What did my family want to say? I don’t know. They have been tongue-tied since birth – and yet they had something to say.” Later he would seek contact with his father, and Emil, having learned of his son’s arrest, would weep: “My little tender Osya.”

In spite of financial difficulties, Osip was sent to one of the best schools in the capital – the “commercial” Tenishev School. It was officially assigned to the Ministry of Finance and thus free from the stifling care of the conservative Ministry of Education. The school, run by the most progressive teachers of the day, boasted greenhouses, chemistry and physics labs, two theater halls and an observatory. Nonetheless, Mandelstam recalled his school years with little warmth; he did not get on with his classmates very well and earned the nickname “proud llama.”

It was the turbulent social life of the 1900’s that affected Mandelstam: he became involved in socialist propaganda and even planned to enlist in a violent socialist organization. His youthful sympathies were with the romantic “social revolutionaries” [see Calendar, page 17], who would later lose out to the Bolsheviks – at this time known as the “social democrats.” Thus did Mandelstam’s revolutionary background do him more harm than good in later years.

His first attempts at poetry were in the very traditional, late-19th-century style: people’s hardships, future bloodshed, the imminent downfall of the evil reign. Publishers of Mandelstam’s selected poetry bashfully skip them.

The family did not approve of Osip’s dallying with revolution, and, once his school days were over, sent him to Europe. He spent several terms in Germany and France, never paying too much attention to his studies. The money soon petered out. Back in Russia, Mandelstam tried to enroll at St. Petersburg University, but a new governmental decree set the allowable percentage of Jewish students at 3%, and Mandelstam, with his mediocre grades, did not stand a chance. In 1911, he got baptized in a Protestant church and later that year matriculated into the Romance department at the university.

Mandelstam’s conversion was not just a ploy to circumvent regulations. Religion played an important role in his life, and many of his early poems describe Christian rites with fantastically mixed-up features of Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions. Protestantism, it seems, was a conscious choice allowing him to keep equal distance from the other two Christian confessions, which simultaneously attracted and repulsed him.

These years mark Mandelstam’s first visits to literary circles. At first, he was not taken seriously: a scrawny Jewish boy in shabby clothes, with his head proudly thrown back (there is virtually no memoirist who does not mention this gesture), singing, rather than reciting, his poems. According to one account, Zinaida Gippius, the grande dame of the literary world, told him: “If you write decent poems, I’ll be duly informed; as it is, there’s no point in listening to you.” A couple of years later, though, she wrote a more sympathetic letter to Valery Bryusov, cautiously recommending Mandelstam’s poems to him. Alexander Blok, always very severe with fellow poets, wrote: “The ‘kike’ disappears, one can see the artist.” It was among poets of his own generation that Mandelstam first found success and acknowledgement.

Several young poets from Petersburg organized a small circle called “The Guild of Poets,” which was supposed to concentrate on earthly things and speak less of “the unspeakable” and mystical, something so popular with the Symbolists, the leading poetic movement of the day. Symbolists ironically called the new group “the acmeists” (from the Greek “acme,” the pinnacle), and The Guild defiantly accepted the moniker. The self-proclaimed head of the movement was Nikolai Gumilyov; other members included Gumilyov’s wife, Anna Akhmatova, and Mandelstam. It is hard to imagine poets with more dissimilar tastes and temperaments, but the strong friendship Mandelstam formed with Gumilyov and Akhmatova was genuine. In 1913, his first book of poems, Stone, was printed, financed by his father. His brother recalled: “When I came back from the bookshop and reported that 42 copies had been sold, it was hailed as a triumph at home.”

Stone was remarkably free of love poetry, yet Mandelstam’s love life at that moment was far from serene. Unlike his friend Gumilyov, he was not a “traveler and sharpshooter” (Gumilyov’s self-description) or a ladies’ man. Instead, he suffered several deep infatuations and even complained to one friend of “erotic madness.” During his first visit to Moscow, he met Marina Tsvetaeva, another rising star on the poetic horizon, who walked him around the city, “giving Moscow to him as a gift.” Tsvetaeva’s loves were short-lived, and, indeed, their next meeting in Alexandrov, near Moscow, was brief and disappointing.

Mandelstam met the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution with mixed feelings, and fled to the South. He spent some time in Crimea, at the hospitable home of Max Voloshin. He fell out with the host because of an allegedly stolen book, and was arrested several times by changing administrations during the Civil War. Voloshin, still bitter after their quarrel, nevertheless stood up for his recent guest and wrote to the chief of police: “I am told that Mandelstam is accused of being a Bolshevik servant. I can reassure you completely: Mandelstam is incapable of any service, as well as of any political convictions: he never bothered himself with such stuff.” In 1919, in Kiev, Mandelstam met Nadezhda Khazina, had a brief but stormy affair. More than a year later, he searched her out and, after that, they never parted. “Osip loved Nadya unbelievably, impossibly,” wrote Akhmatova.

After a year of wandering, the young couple settled in Moscow. In the fall of 1922, Mandelstam’s second book, Tristia, was printed in Berlin, then reprinted in Moscow the following year. Meanwhile, times were changing for the worse: in 1921, Gumilyov was executed for alleged participation in an anti-Bolshevik conspiracy. Mandelstam was deeply affected by his friend’s death. A virulent opponent of violence in his mature years, he risked his life several times to appeal death sentences of various people he did not even know. At the same time, his new poems were getting mixed reviews: while everyone acknowledged his formal skill, most critics complained that his poetry was too “un-modern.” “Modern” in the newspeak of the 1920s meant writing about the struggle of the working class and great revolutionary changes. Definitely not about Ovid, Persephone and Heracles.

A poet’s life in Russia has always been financially difficult. Especially for poets who did not rush to celebrate the current ruler. Mandelstam only published three poetry books in his entire life, which of course could not support a family. (In the more relaxed year of 1964, Joseph Brodsky, the future Nobel laureate, was convicted by a Soviet court as a “parasite.” His proud statements – “I did work. I wrote poetry” – did not impress the judges.) Mandelstam was not very good at regular service, day in, day out – Voloshin had a point – and soon found that the only way to survive was to translate. He did not like the work, feeling that it drained his creative energy, and warned Boris Pasternak, a prolific translator, that Pasternak’s life work might end up being “one volume of your own poetry and twelve volumes of translations.”

The 1920’s were marked by Mandelstam’s first conflicts with fellow literati, who were now slowly consolidating into a community woefully dependent upon the government. He published his first book of prose, The Noise of Time. It was met with little enthusiasm. “I think in missing links,” he said later – something increasingly alien to the Soviet readership. He published a couple of collections of children’s verses, which came easily for him; the Mandelstams were childless, but both wanted and loved children. During these years, he traveled between Moscow, Leningrad and Yalta, where Nadya was recovering from tuberculosis. In the harsh winter of 1924, he spent hours in the line to Lenin’s coffin: many people genuinely mourned, and it was always important for Mandelstam, with his humble background, to feel at one with the people.

His health had always been fragile; a life of poverty did not help. He developed asthma and a heart condition, and, already at 40, looked like an old man. Bald, with his head thrown back, he nurtured the confidence in his poetic genius, something which surprised his less far-sighted contemporaries. He had a sweet tooth. Once, when asked why he was attending an unimportant poetic meeting, he earnestly replied: “There, I drink tea with candies.” Another memoirist wrote about the poet’s helplessness in everyday things: “Mandelstam used to jump out in the corridor, knocking on every door: ‘Help, help! I cannot light a stove! I’m not a stoker, I’m not a coal-heaver! Help!’” Mandelstam’s own later account offers a possible counterpoint: “The most difficult part was to prepare for Nadya’s return home: heat the stoves, warm the rooms, find money for the stuff, for household help.” He loved attention and eagerly read his poems to anyone interested, but often declined such requests for no reason. When, at a sanatorium, a pilot suggested that Mandelstam read some of his poems, he replied: “What would you say if I’d ask you to fly right now?”

In 1928, the publishing house ZIF issued Charles de Coster’s Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel, compiled by Mandelstam from two existing translations. Through an editorial error, Mandelstam was mentioned as the work’s translator. In spite of Mandelstam’s explanations, the writers and journalists launched a massive campaign against him using the trumped-up charge of plagiarism, leading to a decisive break with the writing community. “I don’t have manuscripts, or notebooks, or an archive. I don’t have handwriting, because I never write. I’m the only one in Russia who writes from his voice, while all around the thick scoundrels scribble. What, me, a writer? Get lost, you fools!” He tried to work at a newspaper, but it turned out badly. Through the protection of Nikolai Bukharin, a high-ranking Soviet official with a weak spot for literature, the Mandelstams went south again, spending almost a year in Armenia. Mandelstam fell in love with the ascetic poverty of the mountainous land, “the younger sister of Judea.” There, he met a new friend – the biologist Boris Kuzin; they spoke at length about poetry, the natural sciences and life in general. “I was woken up by friendship like by a cannon shot,” Mandelstam later wrote. After a long period of silence, poetry returned to him.

Having returned to Moscow, the Mandelstams feverishly looked for any job, but nothing came. Curiously, this time of hardship is marked by some of his most optimistic poems. “Enough sulking! Let’s stuff papers into the table! Today I’m possessed by a nice devil, as if Francois the hairdresser washed my hair to the roots. …
I keep in mind that the year is thirty-one, a beautiful year for bird cherry blossoms.” Old friends organized several poetic readings, where he was greeted with respect and admiration. Pasternak was somewhat frightened: “I envy your freedom. I myself need non-freedom.”

During a brief journey to the Crimea, the Mandelstams witnessed the horrible consequences of collectivization. People were starving. “Nature doesn’t recognize its own face,” he wrote in an angry poem. After this trip, Mandelstam felt complete detached from Soviet life and had no wish to get back in synch with it. He told Akhmatova: “I’m ready to die.”

Courting death was easy back them: all it took was a couple of incautious words in the wrong company. Mandelstam took a more creative approach. He wrote a fierce epigram about Stalin and, under strict secrecy, read it to at least fourteen people. “We live and do not feel the country under our feet, our talk is not heard ten steps away, and where there’s half a conversation, they think of the Kremlin mountain-dweller. His thick fingers fat as worms, and his words certain as stone weights; he laughs through his cockroach mustache, and his bootlegs shine.” Pasternak, whom he met on the street, was horrified: “This is not poetry, this is suicide. I don’t want to be part of it. You’ve never read it, I didn’t hear anything.” Privately, Pasternak was offended by the poem’s light tone, more typical of Mandelstam’s jocular verse: “How could he, a Jew, write something like this,” he asked, wondering at the mockery of Stalin’s Georgian provenance.

Five months later, in mid-May 1934, Mandelstam was arrested. “The search continued all night long,” recollected Akhmatova, who was visiting the Mandelstams at the time. “They looked for poems, walked over manuscripts thrown out of the chest. We were all sitting in one room. He kissed me as he said goodbye. They took him away at 7 am, in broad daylight.”

At the Lubyanka, the dreaded prison in downtown Moscow, Mandelstam was tormented with sleep deprivation and other tortures. He cooperated with the investigation, admitted his authorship of several “inappropriate” poems, including the epigram, and even named some of those whom he read it to. The sentence was astonishingly mild: three years of exile in Cherdyn, in the Northern Urals. The poet’s wife was told of Stalin’s decision: “isolate but keep alive.” Mandelstam arrived in Cherdyn delirious, overcome with paranoia. During his first night, he jumped out of the window and broke his arm. In two weeks’ time, thanks to Bukharin’s intervention, the sentence was eased: the couple was allowed to live anywhere except in Russia’s ten largest cities. Almost at random, they picked Voronezh.

The reasons for Stalin’s leniency have been much discussed. Possibly the dictator did not want to attract too much attention to the poet and the reason for his arrest. (Interestingly, some say Stalin was actually flattered by the epigram, which portrayed him as a strongman, albeit a nasty one.) It is also possible that he postponed his revenge until it would be covered by widescale repressions.

One of the most curious events connected with Mandelstam’s arrest was Stalin’s phone call to Pasternak, which is known in general details from several reliable sources. Pasternak at first thought it was a prank, and Stalin’s secretary had to call him twice.

“Why did you not react more strongly?” Stalin asked. “I’d hit the ceiling, should my friend be arrested.”

“If not for my letter, you wouldn’t have known about it,” Pasternak replied.

“It’s not the way to treat a friend,” Stalin insisted. “He’s your friend, right?”

“It’s more complicated,” Pasternak said. “Poets treat each other jealously, like women.”

“But he’s a master, right? Is he?”

“That’s beside the point,” Pasternak replied. “Why do we keep talking about Mandelstam? I’ve been wanting to meet you, to talk to you about important things.”

“Like what?”

“Life and death.”

Stalin slammed down the receiver.

The Mandelstams, having learned of the conversation, were satisfied with Pasternak’s behavior, and Akhmatova said Boris earned a confident “4” [out of 5]. Later, Mandelstam wrote to Pasternak from Voronezh, praising his poetry and inviting him to visit. Pasternak did not come. By then it was far too dangerous. Only the brave Akhmatova stealthily visited Voronezh for a short while.

Mandelstam tried to work, but most employers turned him away. He wrote for local newspapers, read lectures, prepared literary compositions for the radio and did some consulting work for the local theater (“mostly just chatting with actors,” Nadya recalled). In March 1935, a young literary scholar, Sergei Rudakov, came to Voronezh, having been exiled from Leningrad, and immediately found the Mandelstams. As Kuzin before him, Rudakov “woke up” Mandelstam from his creative slumber; a new flood of poetry erupted.

Rudakov had a keen ear for poetry and was able to appreciate Mandelstam’s caliber (“it’s like living next to Ovid or Pushkin”), but was fiercely competitive and hugely overestimated his own poetic gift. (“[Osip] said this: ‘There are four people writing in Russia: me, Pasternak, Akhmatova and P. Vasilyev.’ I must have been eaten by cats, I suppose.”) Still, if he played any role in inspiring Mandelstam’s final poems, it makes everything else irrelevant. Many feel that the Voronezh “notebooks” are Mandelstam’s best work. In these poems, he found a completely new poetic language, difficult and intense. Two poems stand out: “The Poem of the Unknown Soldier” and the so-called “Ode to Stalin.”

“The Soldier” is one of Mandelstam’s most obscure poems – it has spawned hundreds of articles discussing its mysterious metaphors. It is an apocalyptic anti-war fantasy, but there are strong indications that the author accepted the USSR’s preparations for war and was ready, at least metaphorically, to fight the good fight.

The “Ode,” with its unadulterated praise of Stalin, baffles modern readers, and many of them, following Nadezhda Mandelstam’s lead, declare it strained, insincere and artificial. Such examples are not unknown: many good poets forced themselves to write simplified “official” poetry,” and great poets were no exception – some of Pasternak’s stanzas come to mind, along with Akhmatova’s awful cycle, “Glory of Peace.” The problem is, Mandelstam’s ode is remarkably good (Joseph Brodsky called it “a work of genius”). It was rejected by magazines at the time not because it was insufficiently loyal, but because it was too complex. There is a well-known definition of Socialist Realism,” the “creative method” implanted by the communists in the 1930’s: “Glorification of superiors in a form accessible to them.” Mandelstam’s ode glorified Stalin all right, but in a form utterly inaccessible to the “rabble of thin-necked bosses,” to quote the fatal epigram.

The poet’s own attitude towards his poem was ambiguous: he oscillated between “it’s the best I’ve ever written” and “it was a disease.” One of the best commentators on Mandelstam’s poetry, Mikhail Gasparov [see Postscript, page 64] wrote: “The people accepted the regime and accepted Stalin: some because of memory of the revolution, some under the influence of hypnotizing propaganda, some out of stupefied forbearance. The democratic tradition did not allow Mandelstam to think that everyone else is out of step, and he alone marches in time.” It is noteworthy that Nadezhda, who hated the “Ode,” resisted the temptation to destroy it and preserved it for posterity.

One of the last poems Mandelstam wrote in Voronezh was dedicated to a friend of the family, the young Natalia Shtempel. Its innocently loving intonation marked the poet’s farewell to life: “There are women, native to moist soil, and their every step is a resonant sob; their vocation is to accompany the resurrected and to first greet the dead.” Notably, the point of view was from underground.

Poverty and persecution was unrelenting; a local newspaper published an article openly listing Mandelstam among the State’s “class enemies.” And yet, in May 1937 the exile term expired. The incredulous Mandelstams received permission to leave Voronezh. They spent a year in the environs of Moscow and in Kalinin, coming to Moscow and Leningrad several times. “The Mandelstams had no money,” recollected Akhmatova. “They had nowhere to live. Osip breathed with difficulty, seizing air with his lips. Everything was like in a nightmare.”

In March 1938, a high-ranking literary official, Vladimir Stavsky, wrote a squeal of a letter to the omnipotent Minister of the Interior: “It is known that O. Mandelstam was exiled to Voronezh a couple of years ago for foul, slanderous poems and anti-Soviet propaganda. The term of his exile has expired, and he lives near Moscow with his wife, outside the [prohibited] ‘zone.’ But actually he often visits Moscow, especially his literary friends. They help him, collect money for him and dress him up as a ‘sufferer,’ an unrecognized poet of genius. The issue is not just him, the author of foul and slanderous poems about the leaders of the party and Soviet people. The issue is the attitude of certain renowned Soviet writers to Mandelstam. He has written some poems lately, but they are of little value. Once again, please help settle this Mandelstam issue.”

It is hard to say whether this information played any critical role or whether Mandelstam’s fate was already sealed. One thing is certain: he was right in his rejection of the writers’ profession; all notions of guild honor were long since forsaken. In May 1938, Mandelstam was arrested again. There was no search, no investigation; repressions were so common by then that there was no time for such trifles. Record of just one interrogation was preserved: “Question: The investigation is informed that, while in Moscow, you were conducting anti-Soviet activity, which you are now concealing. Give truthful testimony. Answer: I did not conduct any anti-Soviet activity.” In August, the poet was informed of his sentence: five years in a labor camp. In the beginning of September, he set out on his final journey: a month in a horrible prison railroad car – from Moscow to Vladivostok. His last photograph is from the case documents: an old man of 47 with his head thrown back. He wrote his last letter to his brother Alexander, not knowing where Nadya might be:

Dear Shura,

I am in Vladivostok, labor camp, barrack 11. Got five years for antirevolutionary activity. Left the Butyrka prison in Moscow on September 9, arrived October 12. My health is very poor, I’m extremely emaciated, scrawny, almost unrecognizable, and I don’t know whether it makes sense to send any things, products or money. Try anyway. I’m freezing without clothes.

Dear Nadinka, I don’t know if you’re alive, my dove. Shura, write me about Nadya at once. It’s a transit point here. They didn’t take me to Kolyma. Wintering’s possible.

My dears, I kiss you all.

Osya

Accounts of Mandelstam’s death vary. He was slowly going mad, overcome by paranoia. One day, during a trip to the non-working sauna, he fell down. Guards attached a tag to his leg and left the body for criminals to defile: they sought rings and gold teeth. “I knew Mandelstam had gold crowns,” recalled a fellow prisoner. After that, the dead were wrapped in sheets and buried in a ditch, without coffins. Mandelstam’s grave was never found.

Nadezhda survived her husband by 42 years. She heroically kept the poet’s papers, and, once it became possible, disseminated his poems in samizdat copies and fought for their proper publication. Though the first posthumous edition of Mandelstam’s poems was prepared in the 1950’s, it did not appear in print until 1973, and even then with shameful omissions and an awful foreword. The widow managed to ship the bulk of the poet’s archive to the West; it is now kept at the Princeton University library. She wrote three volumes of memoirs, still the most important source of information on Mandelstam’s life and poetry. They are very biased and fiercely anti-Soviet. She earned the right to be unafraid. RL

January 01, 2006

Never Anyone's Contemporary

See Also

The Voronezh Notebooks: Poems 1935-1937

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