Vertebrae of the Century (On Osip Mandelstam) — R.K. Hegelman
A questionable privilege: to die like your idols. The paradigm is Oedipus – relegated in his dotage to the backwater of Kolonos, ambling offstage, there not going the way of all flesh but effervescing it entirely, a disappearing act without remainder: “he was gone – nowhere… the lightless depths of the earth bursting open in kindness to receive him.” There is Ovid, withering in obscurity towards a dateless, graveless end at the margins of Empire, along the same Black Sea shores where two millennia later the poet Osip Mandelstam, displaced himself, will ventriloquize the fallen bard of Caesar: “Even on the rim of the world I can hear the time/of Augustus rolling away, an orb, an apple./When I’m old may even my sadness shine.” Later, there is François Villon (per Mandelstam an “Insolent schoolboy, thieving angel,/François Villon, the incomparable!”) who leaves the historical record much as he entered it, sidling through its backdoor to rejoin the great mass of history’s anonymous lumpen, a phantom last noted in a Paris prison in 1463 before he vaults our view to die, as gossip has it, either by a bar brawl, the gallows, or the bottle. And Mandelstam himself, last seen in public in the early hours of May 2nd 1938 as he is escorted to the Lubyanka by two agents of the NKVD, his mugshot evincing a temper at once ravaged and yet defiant, before he is stolen eastward to nether Siberia, never to be seen again.
A more spurious inheritance: to live like them. Poets hounded by Imperium and so consigned to go to and fro upon the earth, to walk up and down ceaselessly for so long as they inhabit it: Ovid banished by personal decree of Augustus; Villon whose own myriad ignominies are exceeded only by those heaped upon him by a recriminating State. Foremost, however, is Dante – the monomaniacal fixation of Mandelstam’s later years – cast out on pain of death from his beloved Florence by papist machination and turning to poetry only when proscribed his prime vocation, politics. The symmetric lilt of terza rima and the seamless architectonic of the Commedia are the intimations of a paradisical order denied him on earth. All are refracted in the image of Osip Mandelstam, serial arrestee: the first two by the Whites and then the Mensheviks in 1920 challenge his precarious sanity; the third in 1934 heralds psychosis and ensuing suicide attempts – razors smuggled into the Lubyanka, a leap from a window weeks later; and the fourth in 1938 finally deprives him of the dignity of dying by his own hand. So he writes: “It seems to me that an artist’s death ought not to be excluded from the chain of his creative achievements, but rather examined as the last conclusive link.” None of these poets are afforded any such link. Exeunt omnes pursued by the powers that be, the dissonant noise of their times.
They leave behind them these legacies of abjection, but also poems. Metamorphoses, Le Testament, the Commedia… the masterworks of Ovid, Villon, and Dante are all towering edifices forged upon, and in defiance of, the shifting sands of exile. They are consummate visions that seek less to redress a degraded reality than replace it entirely, finding solace in the eternal registers of myth, bawdy, and theology respectively, in lieu of the temporal powers that ravaged their makers. Osip Mandelstam, the greatest Russian poet of the last century, composed no such magnum opus. There are highlights – the chiseled post-Symbolism of his debut Stone, the great odes of the mid-twenties, the final Voronezh Notebooks that are a singularity in modern poetry before and since – but nothing that collectively makes a monument, that pretends to an affront to earthly time and its intrigues. His is a corpus committed not in spite of but conditioned by its times, less a monolith than an archipelago: sputtering fitfully according to the whims of war, illness, and inspiration, years of silence sometimes preceding days of fervent composition, as it tends to eventual, submerged oblivion. And like an archipelago, it does not loom over its environs so much as embody its converging temporalities: shaped by the quotidian waves that trammel its shores; the longer periodicity of political squall and calm that bring wreck and reparation; and then history in its imperceptible yet colossal geologic drift. The Revolution, the Civil War, War Communism, Collectivization and Stalinism… these are travails not transcended in his poems but are their brute interlocutors.
This dialogue may be coarse. Between his early allusiveness and later mysticism, his middle years see a flirtation with civic satire. At best this channels the fleet wit of Juvenal biting his thumb at the era:
The age is a despot with two sleepy apples
to see with, and a splendid mouth of earth.
When he dies he’ll sink onto the numb
arm of his son, who’s already senile.
Otherwise, it is more ham-fisted, as in the famous Stalin epigram:
But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,The ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weightThe huge laughing cockroach on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.
… a poem he never wrote down but that was passed amongst the Leningrad intelligentsia of his day, a game of Chinese Whispers become fatal when it reached the pricked ear of the NKVD (to this day, the informant is still unknown.) One more sad irony of Mandelstam’s life – the poem that literally killed him was ultimately a mediocre one. He will otherwise for the most part spurn direct engagement, less by the censor’s necessity than his own poetics. If ultimately ambivalent, for instance, towards his Futurist contemporaries, he was quite happy to mock their blithe political commitment, saying of Mayakovsky, that ‘drummer boy of the Revolution’, that his “merit is to be found in the poetic perfection of pedagogy for schools… a schoolmarm… a great reformer of the newspaper… the traditional itinerant showman.” One drunken night after a reading at the Stray Dog Café, cradle of Russian poetic modernism, he is rather more forthright: “Mayakovsky, stop reciting your poems. You’re not a Romanian orchestra.”
To read Mandelstam deeply is to understand that, beyond exemption or engagement, the poem may encode history in subtler figures. There is, for instance, as disclosed by Ralph Dutli’s recent biography Osip Mandelstam (translated from the German by Ben Fowkes), a hermetic aspect to so many of his poems. Take the lines “When after two or three, or/Maybe even four gasps of air/An expansive sigh comes…”: in the fifty years Mandelstam has been available in the West, we might have taken this to be a paragon of knotted rhythm and eroticism that so deeply characterizes Mandelstam’s poetry. Dutli informs us of its actual referent: the shortness of breath he owed to his chronic heart problems. His book is ripe with such minor revelations, not only disaffecting but also delightful: Mandelstam abruptly fleeing breakfast at the Kremlin when he hears Trotsky is coming; Mandelstam chaperoning a young Ho Chi Minh as he tours a young USSR. The oddity, however, specific to artistic biography is that it is a basically instrumental genre. The particular pleasures of anecdote or bon mot notwithstanding, our reading of them is always framed by one question: how does this knowledge behoove our primary object – how we read their poems? A poem, after all, is not a matter of mere reference and yet, while not therefore reducible to intention, intention somehow and irreducibly inheres in it. To discover, for instance, the banal origin of a that “expansive sigh” might disillusion of us an image’s local colour, but to learn these correspondences over the course of a corpus is to adumbrate and nuance our impression of the cohesive sensibility that wrote it. That is to say that it furnishes us the concept of a voice, which is the basic tenor of all lyric poetry, and whose substrate is nothing but such the sum of such banalities, what in turn we call a life. Dutli’s Mandelstam throws this obscure knot of poem and biography, that the former at once transcends and yet inextricably derives from the latter, into relief with unusual acuity not least because it is the first comprehensive biography of Mandelstam to appear in English. Political repression, secret archives, and the generalized chaos of the early Soviet Union mean that it has only become viable in recent years to excavate something like this from the swathes of redactions, anecdote and imperfect testimony that have shrouded it for almost a century. Moreover, the case is vexed by Mandelstam himself who vocally eschewed biography altogether as a poetic resource, saying of his era that it had incurred:
The catastrophic collapse of biography… Europeans are now cast out of their biographies, like balls from the pocket of the billiard table… Besides, the interest in psychological motivation… is radically undermined and discredited by the… impotence of psychological motives before those real forces whose punitive verdict on psychological motivation becomes crueler from hour to hour.
Years later, his conviction does not waver:
My desire is not to speak about myself but to track down the age, the noise and the germination of time. My memory is inimical to all that is personal… A raznochinets needs no memory – it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done.
And to his credit, Dutli, himself an accomplished poet and the preeminent German translator of Mandelstam, is deeply sensitive to this:
The essential task is to understand the literary work of a poet, not to accumulate facts about his life. The vicissitudes of the poet’s life experience pale into insignificance in the face of the eventfulness of his poetry, the miracles of his language. A lifetime is nothing in comparison with the protracted and occult process of poetry’s emergence.
And it is thus only when those same poems are as deeply imbricated with their times, they the sparks of the fraught collision of a life with its circumstance, that we confront this paradox of a biography written despite itself, one whose impetus becomes a forensic inquiry into the nature of that encounter: what precisely is the mechanism by which a poet can “track down [his] age”? Indeed, this is terrain of some of Mandelstam’s most famous lines, which indulge a cryptic metahistorical register, that by times gestures to a resignation (“I’ve gone, like the martyr of light and shade,/like Rembrandt, into a growing numbness of time.”), melodramatic victimhood (“The wolfhound age springs at my shoulders/though I’m no wolf by blood.”), spritely insouciance (“No, I was no one’s contemporary ever – ever./That would have been above my station.”), or even the glint of a more positive poetic programme:
My animal, my age, who will ever be able
to look into your eyes?
Who will ever glue back together the vertebrae
of two centuries of blood?
The poem as vertebra, a joint in time… an articulation properly speaking – what, as a node of encounter between speaker and reader, enables some kind of movement outside the strictures of time’s otherwise indomitable arrow. This stanza stops short of claiming the poet may repair that fracture – this is no crass messianism – but it does modestly raise the prospect of a zone of passage ulterior to linear history, its typecasting of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. Mandelstam’s voice speaks from this joint that insinuates a sovereign out-of-jointness, a non-contemporaneity that therefore bears upon the contemporary all the more incisively. Against history’s goosestep, his poetry is a syncopated Barynya around the hegemonies of the past and the supposed inevitabilities of the future, his token strategies – irony, montage, and this ranging metaphorology of time – are elements of an ingenious footwork that refuses the easy categorizations of any historicism. To write not about, but about, one’s era.
***
Indeed, as Dutli relates, there is nothing that defines the trajectory of Mandelstam’s life so much as ceaseless movement. No less than nineteen addresses registered across the St. Petersburg of his childhood sets the precedent for that life’s second half. Its path is a tightening gyre: a late teenage stint in Paris, where he imbibes Verlaine and is steeped in the process philosophy of Bergson, is its westernmost frontier; stints in Heidelberg and Berlin before he returns to what will soon become the Soviet Union, never to leave its borders again. The Civil War sees him ambling through Crimea, which will come to figure in his personal symbolism as an emblem of the Mediterranean idyll of his beloved Ancients (“Theodosia… the particular quirk of this city [was] to pretend that nothing had changed”,) and to which he will return throughout his life. Otherwise, he is progressively constricted to the doldrums of Moscow and what is now called Leningrad, coerced into indigence by his temperamental inability to keep a job, a State that forgets nothing, and those jealous, careerist dilettantes of the new Official Literature, who smell blood. For two decades he is itinerant, effectively homeless as he is barred from employ and eventually publication, inhabiting closets and hallways, hovels and overstayed welcomes, his precarious health ever on the slip. He is instantly recognizable by the same motheaten fur coat, “cheaper than a boiled turnip”. Two vital exceptions to his degradation. First is a trip to Armenia in 1930, granted by grace of Bukharin (his sole benefactor in the Politburo, and whose own demise quickly entails Mandelstam’s). The country becomes an archetype of primeval origin in the figure of Mt. Ararat, its people a symbol of perseverance in the aftermath of genocide – “This people nailed to the earth,/Who think each year is a century”. It breaks a five-year period of poetic silence. Then there is “the miracle” at Voronezh, the site of his longest exile from 1934-1937, where in three notebooks composed in lightning snatches, he commits one of the most alien acts of modern literature. Otherwise he is circling the drain, drawn towards the epicenter of the Lubyanka, the white sepulcher at the heart of Leningrad that has become the paradigmatic symbol of a botched utopia. When he arrives there in the springtime of 1938, the centripetal tide of his life reaches its critical point. The impossibly tightened coil is released as he is catapulted further than he has ever traveled before, to Vladivostok where he surpasses the horizons of both the Eurasian continent and this world entirely.
Mandelstam’s vagrancy is not only a matter of geography but the very principle of his identity, one that refuses stasis between its many polarities, restlessly shifting in their interim. He is deeply versed in the languages and literatures of Europe’s West yet is unmistakably a man of the continent’s East – a synthesis paradigmatized in his lionization of Piotr Chaadev, who at once espoused the cultural superiority of the West and yet a spiritual disposition to “moral freedom, a freedom of choice… inner freedom” that is all Russia’s own. And if a Slavophile of the north he is also a romanticist of southern idyll, embodied for him above all in the landscapes of an Italy he never visited – “O Venice, the weight of your garments/and of your mirrors in their cypress frames!” – and analogized in the shores of a Crimea he often did – “Here in stone-starred Tauris is an art of Hellas”. Politically protean, he is an outspoken radical in his youth and yet will lament the collapse of the Provisional Government in a series of odes to the deposed Kerensky; and while he is famously no friend to the Stalinist regime, he is by no means a liberal and will as late as 1937 proclaim the cause of revolution – “I must live, breathe, and grow Bolshevik”. To his alternating pride and chagrin, he is a Jew: born to an assimilated Jewish family, he almost converts to Christian Orthodoxy in his youth, venerating the Christianity of Pushkin and Scriabin – “And down the Christian hills through space that is astounded/Like Palestrina’s song, the grace of God descends”; and yet no theme will come to appear as periodically and strongly in all his writings as his Judaism, above all a seal of outsider dignity: “Writerdom … is incompatible with the honourable title of Jew, of which I am proud. My blood, burdened with its inheritance from sheep breeders, patriarchs and kings, rebels against the shifty gypsyishness of the writing tribe.” And finally he straddles epochs, at once the most modern of ancients – he is suffused with Classical culture, garnering from it the solace of an “inner, domestic Hellenism” that is a balm in his apocalyptic age… “Hellenism is the warmth of hearth felt as something sacred… the humanisation of the surrounding world; the environment heated with the most delicate teleological warmth.” And yet he is also the most ancient of moderns, not content with mere nostalgia – “yesterday hasn’t been born yet. It has not yet really come to pass. I want Ovid, Pushkin, Catullus afresh, and I will not be satisfied with the historical Ovid, Pushkin, Catullus” – envisioning this renovation only by means of an avant-garde, at first under the guise of Acmeism and later locating his verse in the future perfect, providing gifts “for which the revolution still has no need”.
Dutli’s portrait of Mandelstam is thus not the product of a neat diegesis, a sum of calcified attributes. He does not give us an image but a flickering montage, where any such attribute is beset by its antipode and every such polarity is traversed by every other. Its drama is no royal road to coherence when to linearize a life is to impoverish it – it is to forget the poet as one who takes time’s arrow in bad faith; it is to make death the telos, the shaping principle, of life. Instead, add to time’s line a dimension and remetaphorize this life as a field: its drama is now the compounding superposition of these oscillating binaries, its eloquence the flutter of cumulative harmonies and dissonances that, while restive and random, may nevertheless momentarily align to afford the lineaments of a structure, a meridian that encompasses this field and to which the poem is somehow testament.
Somehow: to inquire into the mechanism of this testimony is to excavate the relationship of poem and poet that is the subterranean premise of any poetic biography. The case of Mandelstam shows with unusual clarity that this must be understood as a correlation not a causation. His name evokes three parallel movements of preternatural dynamism – the nomadic chronology of his outward life, the restlessness of his inner identity, and the queer vigor of his poetic forms that is, however, blunted if reduced to an expression of the former two. The poem is demeaned so long as it is taken for a representation, the petrified dead letter of an experience extraneous to it rather than a self-moving movement we do not read off so much as enter into, are moved and divagate with, upon each reading. This is to say that Mandelstam’s pen is not a seismograph traversing that shifting field of productive tensions that is his psyche but, to use a metaphor of his contemporary Rilke, a phonograph’s stylus: it does not transcribe but translates the raw stuff of experience into a novel order called poetry. Dutli’s specific novelty is to abet the texts of the poems we know, for the first time, with the comprehensive text of the self that wrought them; his specific merit is to maintain them in an analogical suspension that preserves the dignity of each – the man no vehicle of his poetry, the poetry no derivation of the man – rather than collapsing these registers into a single explanatory scheme. Consistently and explicitly he abstains from the kind of speculative psychology that might pose as a cryptographic key to any poem. ‘Mandelstam’ denotes both a historical personage that wrote poems and the signature that addends each, but is moreover the name of their interstice, an active site of transposition that simultaneously dis- and conjoins poet and poem, a paradoxical figure of rift and asymptotic contact that is the poem’s condition.
The ceaseless commerce across this site is called analogy. The movement of analogy is the core of Mandelstam’s poetics. Analogy is an ethical figure: it affirms accord without assimilating difference – it is what Whitman calls ‘curiosity’ or Baudelaire ‘correspondances’ – what constellates with a mind to minute particularity. It envisions the Good not as the dispensation of any higher Being or the utilitarianism of any profane end, but immanently in the motion of associative passage itself. Thus Mandelstam’s veneration of Ovid who, against Homeric typology and Lucretius’s eternal atoms, was the first epicist to paradoxically make a myth of change. It binds him to Dante, Europe’s greatest similist. It underwrites his later obsession with Lamarck who, against Darwinian determinism, conceived a more elastic organism evolving in dynamic interaction with its environs. Hence the metamorphoses of his great ode “Lamarck”:
I’ll hiss my way down through the lizards and snakes
to the annelid worms and the sea-slugs,
across resilient gangways, through valleys,
I’ll shrink, and vanish, like Proteus.
Thus too the premium that Mandelstam placed on translation, not a mere act of reference secondary to the composition of ‘original’ verse but the very distillate of analogical and hence poetic thinking: “[It] is one of the most difficult and responsible aspects of literary work… requir[ing] tremendous effort, attention, will power, a wealth of inventiveness, intellectual freshness, philological sensibility, a huge lexical keyboard, and the ability to listen carefully to rhythm, to grasp the picture of a phrase and to convey it; and what is more, this must all be accompanied by the strictest self-control.” It was both a prosaic means by which he primarily eked out a living and a high vocation, the loam of the cosmopolitanism that makes Mandelstam one of our most universal poets.
Analogy is above all the core mechanism of Mandelstam’s metaphorology, the principium mobile of his process poetics. It is the dynamo by which an image is conjugated with another, and so the basic syntactic operator of what we vaguely call (yet unmistakably recognize) as poetic, as opposed to deductive or diegetic, logic. A Mandelstam poem renders preeminently visible a virtuoso analogical labor: in the quickening density of its internal associations, it devolves a cross-hatched and contrapuntal field of thematic momentums, these parlayed with its plural, fleet metric ones. Panta rhei: analogy is what enlivens poiesis from pictura to a kinema appropriate to both the animating flux of a life and to the intoxicating flux of an uprooted era. Verse, he claimed, is “a continuous transformation of the substratum of poetic material, which preserves its unity and strives to penetrate its interior… transformability or convertibility.” It is best analogized, as Mandelstam put it in his masterful Dante essay, as “an airplane… which in full flight constructs and launches another machine. In just the same way this second flying machine, completely absorbed in its own flight, still manages to assemble and launch a third.” This is a poetics not grounded in Substance but one buoyed aloft in ubiquitous Relation where, as Celan once remarked of Mandelstam, “Things come together, yet even in this togetherness the question of their wherefrom and whereto resounds – a questions that “remains open,” that does not come to any conclusion,” and points to the open and cathexable, into the empty and the free.” Thus is poetic form, an analogical epicenter, itself an analogy for the delicate triad of poem, poet, and history – a dynamic complex called ‘Mandelstam’, finally made legible by Dutli as we read the text of biography with and against those poems. To invoke it, as Mandelstam would, by an airborne series of metaphors: conceive him as a gyroscope, the spry orbits of poem, poet, and the age never touching but tracing a figure in their telekinetic commune; and conceive this figure as the impossible solution to an insoluble three-body problem, ‘Mandelstam’ the name given to the unlocalizable epicenter of these allied yet incompatible vectors; and so bereft of any place just as he subverts our easy frames of time, he is not reducible to any of these three bodies but the queer evidence of a quantum entanglement between them, an agency miraculously heedless of the worldly parameters of spacetime; and so just as entanglement is the eccentric mechanism of a causeless effect, ‘Mandelstam’ too is an invisibility retroactively hypothesized from the texts of history, biography, and poem – at once the pulsive dark energy that proscribes their collapse into an apocalyptic singularity and the gravitational attraction that maintains them in legible concert, an equilibrium we commonly call ‘form’.
***
Inconstancy is not the only constant that shadows Mandelstam. There is, of course, persecution, poverty and illness, but also Nadezhda, the single benevolent surety of his life. They meet on May 1st 1919 and after a night spent together they are, for the next eighteen years until Mandelstam is arrested for the final time, inseparable: in body, sparing a year-long period when the Civil War cordons them either side of the front, but even then inextricable in spirit – “Nadyusha, we shall be together at any cost, I shall find you and live for you because you give me life, without knowing it yourself.” – as they will be thereafter as they cohabit closets, mutually talk each other out of suicide, tectonically merge into one. It is simply impossible to tell the life of Osip without that of Nadya, just as it is as much to her that we owe his poems. This is true in the banal sense wont of most wives of troubled poets: only slightly more able to hold down a job than he, she provides the handouts that are their daily bread; she suffers his infidelities, largely puerile infatuations all the more pathetic for being unconsummated, and at least one serious affair (only ended by Osip when she finds solace in the arms of Vladimir Tatlin.) She was, however, not simply a crutch –at least his intellectual match and as obdurate a firebrand, theirs is a love of equals – and our debt extends to the poems themselves. There is what may without hyperbole be deemed the miracle of their transmission: a significant portion of his poetry, least of all the Voronezh notebooks, has survived only because she committed it to memory. She moreover permeates their very composition – not only the amanuensis to Osip, who typically composed aloud and pacing beside her, but his literary coconspirator, sparring with him over a comma or a line break, their screaming rallies reportedly reverberating throughout whatever hovel they happened to be occupying for the night.
Nadya is also responsible for what until now was our primary window on Osip. Her magisterial memoirs, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, are not only perhaps the best account of quotidian life under Stalinism, but simply two of the greatest works of Russian literature in the twentieth century. Her account is inadequate as biography only because to reduce its scope as such would be to do it a vast injustice. Its roving, selective focus and anecdotal impressionism are at once the source of its inimitable stylistic merit as they are its deficiencies as a straightforward chronicle of Osip’s life. Complicating this is a slew of posthumous counternarratives, enabled by the liberalizations of Perestroika, which spawned a cottage genre of Stalinist memoirs in the 90s, and in turn entailed a morass of retroactive finger-pointing and petty grudges, foremost among these being that of the Mandelstams’ friend Emma Gerstein, who painted Osip as a sadist and Nadya a “shameless female ape.” And yet while the ongoing unavailability of NKVD archives inhibit anything like an objective ‘truth’ beyond hearsay, and notwithstanding that there can be anything like a clean conscience in a period of generalized and hysteric paranoia, Dutli brings unprecedented sobriety to the matter. In corralling an unparalleled range of sources, some only available quite recently, and demurring from an ulterior program of vindication or easy moralizing, he synthesizes his materials into a prose at once declarative, at times even flat, that hews to something more like a chronology than any gussied-up narrative. His serial prose, its insistent he-did-this-then-that tempo, by times courts an even tiresome aspect mitigated only by the sheer eventfulness of the Mandelstams’ life.
Besides bypassing this ad hominem score-settling that mars his legacy, Dutli’s demystifying impetus also befits Mandelstam’s memory insofar as perhaps no other poet in modern times has been so perfunctorily mythologized. His harassment and murder at the hands of the State naturally has invited a gamut of political appropriations, be these in the name of cynical Anti-Communist revisionism or his ham-fisted recasting as a martyr of liberalism. Assuredly his life is inflected with liberal gestures, such as the aforementioned odes to Kerensky, but nothing that might flatten his overarching vacillation into something like a crystallized commitment; nothing from which to extrapolate a positive program out of his sole political continuity (his opposition to a regime that was indiscriminate in its extermination of radical, reactionary and moderate.) There is nothing to justifiably convert Mandelstam from a poet into a proselytizer. Indeed, we learn that his opposition was hardly unflagging: no principled flaunter of the State, he clearly at points would have welcomed its alms if it had deigned to proffer them; no valiant keeper of freedom’s faith, heroically staring down death from his moral pedestal, he even wrote a (and non-ironic!) ode to Stalin in a last-ditch attempt to curry clemency. It was too little too late. These are indictments only against a man become myth, not against a man who happened to write poems and was enfeebled by conditions unimaginable to us.
The error is to conflate Mandelstam’s humanism with a politik of facile freedom. His is a quieter humanism, not the vociferous individualism of his young friend Brodsky nor the practiced aestheticism of his boyhood schoolmate Nabokov, twin faces of liberal recoil before the Stalinist monstrosity, but a diffident petition for bare life to be accorded a basic decency, one embodied in the eloquence and esprit that are his poetry’s mandate. One might be tempted to call this something like a poetic Franciscanism. And yet we must be just as cautious of falsely theologizing Mandelstam as of politicizing him: beyond his political recuperations, it is foremost a pat metaphysical myth to which he has fallen victim. This frames the poet as a paragon of human spirit: Mandelstam as fortitude incarnate before impossible adversity; the laurels of heroism recompense for his tragic death; his poems the upshot of earthly suffering. Mandelstam of course is not the sole poet to be so idealized – this is after all the ideology of the poète maudit – but his case amplifies its pathos insofar as his antagonist is not his personal demons but apparently nothing less than the tides of history itself. Against this mythology, we must guard ourselves against such glib evocations of ‘human spirit’. Whether such a ‘spirit’ exists must invite skepticism and, even if it does, the European experience of the 1930s could only attest that this spirit is no happy inheritance but bodes only a shameful predilection for perverse submission and blithe atrocity.
Poetry and suffering are obscurely and analogically allied as limit experiences of language and world respectively, but to claim the former’s provenance in the latter is at best glib – two nights in the Lubyanka do not a couplet make. Meanwhile to vindicate the latter by the former is downright pernicious – it is only in this restricted sense that poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Pain is without apologia. A poem does not beautify it. That is pornography. To the contrary, the poem inveighs precisely against this exchange. It is an affront to a culture that more widely rests on a reciprocal economy of perdition and redemption – one that justifies revolution by terror, profit by proletariat, or Parousia by the nightmare of History. Poetry does not alchemize art from affliction but is a caesura impairing the prevailing fallacy of this sleight: its dignity does not come from a direct confrontation with its time but in adumbrating a language at once of this world and alien to it, and so auguring an exodus from it rather than any ‘victory’ won through masochistic combat with it. Dutli’s evasion of easy hagiography is thus an act of highest fealty to Mandelstam’s work. For instance, we learn his death was not the mystical Ascension of the touted Mandelstam-myth but something at once more banal and brutal: he collapsed of a heart attack during a routine delousing, relegated outside and naked for almost an hour in the Vladivostok winter. This is the frank picture of a man who was deranged by his circumstances rather than mythically superseding them, a man who also happened to write poems that are equally evacuated of their limpid humility when either removed from those circumstances and coopted to ulterior ends, or else ossified as a historical artifact when reduced to them entirely. By interweaving less a maudlin story than a chronology that is the loam and backdrop of Mandelstam’s poetry, Dutli staunchly heeds the categorical imperative of reading Mandelstam: this poetry bears on history neither by transcending or being contiguous with it, but by a canny and dynamic relationship of analogy, epitomized in some of his most famous lines:
No, never was I anyone’s contemporary –
Not for me such honour.
O how despicable that namesake of mine.
That wasn’t me, that was someone else.
Divested of tactless myths, how does Mandelstam still speak to us of the ethics of artmaking under duress? His contemporariness with us resides in an (a-)politics of time, illumined against the two major artistic trends of his own moment: on one hand the avant-garde, embroiled in the internecine wrangling of Futurists, Constructivists and Zaumists, yet allied in their vision of artistic praxis as the herald of ‘progress’, poetry the hand-crank on history’s flywheel accelerating its implacable march forward; and Stalinism, not simply a political program but, as argued by Boris Groys, an aesthetic one in its imperious vocation to make of society a Total Artwork, and so seeking not to stoke but stem time’s flow in a static image of utopia, an ‘end to history’. History of course would come to impugn either tack: the Stalinist State would purge its progressive avant-garde and that same State would fall prey sixty years later to the ruse of History it thought it had outwitted. Instead, what is belied is the binary of which the avant-garde and the Total Artwork-State are the twinned faces. As diametric attempts to dissolve art into a practical form-of-life or make of collective life a unified artwork, they conceive revolutionary society precisely in the actualization of this coincidence of life and art. This implies an insidious complicity of political aesthetics and aestheticized politics wherein the artwork is instrumentalized as the brunt lever of history, the poet an “engineer of the soul” as Bogdanov famously proclaimed. This poet becomes a burlesque politician, risibly taking his pen for a conductor’s baton laying the tempo of world history. Mandelstam bears on us insofar as he carved a path exempt from these hegemonic positions, when it is these positions that still broadly define the terms of debate over the fraught knot of art and politics today in its humdrum rally between the totems of ‘Progress’ and ‘Tradition’.
Naturally there is nothing in Mandelstam of a synoptic philosophy to this end. Instead, we are given fragments of a heterodox and speculative historiography, a lexicon of figures that graft our commonplace linear temporality and contort it into a surreal gymnastic, enabling sites of anomalous encounter, prospects of commune or contest where the supposedly irremediable flux of history is opened as a synchronic field of praxis. A few specimens:
+ The science of good-byes – a historical attitude superseding the twin traps of revolutionary melancholy and revolutionary anticipation, beyond “what bereavements await us,/what the rooster promises”. The same poem concludes “Everything’s happened before and will happen again,/but still the moment of each meeting is sweet”, a proclamation of eternal return against the forces of blind progressivism but also, in that cherished sweetness, not a haphazard surrender to its flux either.
+ Black Earth – in a crucial early essay, he claims “poetry is a plough that uproots time so that its deeper layers, its ‘black earth’, are on top… the virgin soil of time.” And yet its harvest belies no perverse yearning for a mythic purity; later exiled to actual black earth of Voronezh, the motif returns repeatedly – as an anachronism become present praxis (“Of the black earth acres – my last weapon”); as a proleptic reserve of quiet resolve (“Well: live long, black earth: be firm, clear-eyed –/Here there’s a black-voiced silence working.”)
+ A nostalgia for world culture – as he once famously proclaimed Acmeism, the vision of a world culture that is the cosmopolitan prerogative of poetry, polylingual and in its aspiration to universal music.
Dear Ariosto, maybe a century shall pass –
And we shall pour your azure and our black together
Into one fraternal, vast, blue-black sea.
We were there too. We too drank mead.
This is the philosophical idea of Europe, no less fractious and unachieved in the past two millennia than in our own day. And yet it is paradoxically a nostalgia, not a vision, for this unrealized ideal: this ‘world culture’ dwells liminal to the line between past and future, concretely inexistent and yet always-already legible in the future-perfect. A communism not only of space but of time.
+ A Verlaine of culture – the “synthetic poet of modern life” who is the Lenin of that alter-communism. Astride the ages, he analogically articulates them in his verse by a queer classicism of the future (“Classical poetry is the poetry of revolution.”) The hypothesis of a fulcrum to the divagations of human knowledge across eras and ever-divvying fields:
For him the whole complexity of the old world would be like that same old Pushkinian reed. In him, ideas, scientific systems, political theories would sing, just as nightingales and roses used to sing in his predecessors.
Song: the donation of this gathering; the affidavit of unanimous encounter.
***
R.K. Hegelman is a writer from London