Osip Mandelstam

Insomnia. Homer. The tight-rigged sails.
I’ve read the list of ships – half-way, at least:
That long parade, that crane –flotilla once
That rose and sailed beyond the land of Greece.

A cry of cranes to pierce an alien shore,
You kings all crowned with heavenly foam –
Where are you sailing? What would Troy mean,
Achaeans, if Helen had stayed home?

Homer, the sea…and love, that moves us all.
What’s left to hear? Homer is silent, fled –
And the wine-dark sea recites and roars,
Thunders hard and wild against my bed.

– Osip Mandelstam, adapted by Paul Schmidt

He was “a little Jewish boy with a heart full of Russian iambic pentameter,” a mouth full of ridiculous dreams and an eloquent tongue for phrasing them – back when he first arrived in St. Petersburg. His early childhood had been spent in Warsaw and remarkably, given the strictures of the Tsarist order, his parents managed to leave that Judaic chaos of the Pale of Settlement and make it to the Imperial capital. So it was as a son of ‘Peter,’ and not a member of the Yiddish Writers Club, he would live to die as. Imagine the young Mandelstam, walking through the forests of collandes, through the geometry of “that so very artificial city,” maybe singing along to himself or playing with words as if they were clay, and see him as a jumped-up little man stuck in a paradox. Those of ownership, pedigree and belonging. For one hand Mandelstam could lay claim to the Russian language, as his very instrument, to the songs and souls of the whole city whilst at the same time being denied the right to them. Like his far flung contemporaries James Joyce in English or Paul Celan for German, Mandelstam was naturally cut out of the language he felt was the ‘one pure voice of art,’ by his very nose, ears and name. It may be called the ‘modernist’ paradox, one where an sense of estrangement to the language produces in racially creative expression. This force that George Steiner identified as working on Franz Kafka and Theodore Adorno saw influencing Heinrich Heine can clearly be seen in the poetry of Mandelstam. This is how he crafted his place in the St. Petersburg Acemeist scene, who were orientated in a very similar direction to T.S Eliot or Ezra Pound’s version of modernism.

Mandelstam’s inventiveness was not merely limited to his craftsmen-like eyes, ones that could be “wrapped and wrapped around Schubert, like a pure diamond,” but surges from the images and ideas he weaves together. Some poems are oddly reminiscent of Robert Lowell, another poet obsessed by history who wove new and old stylistic techniques into one. Joseph Brodsky describes the emotional affects of reading these poems as a “nostalgia for a world culture,” and indeed this very Jewish and deeply Russian hope, blending together images of Ancient Greece, Christianity East and West to the beats of the steppe is what makes poetry cycles such as Stone or the Ovidically named Tristia so intoxicating. If read aloud, as it demands, the recitor can almost feel a Deplhic quality overtake him, like what could have been is choosing his words, so carefully.

Lines such as these from 1918, are not only pieces of a ‘world literature’ but shot through with History, and an anguish not only personal but All-Union in its dimensions.

Who knows when the times comes to say goodbye,

What separation we are to bear
And what for us cockcrow shall signify
When the acropolis burns like a flare,
And why, at the new daybreak of life,
When the ox is ruminating in his stall,
The herald cock prophetic of rebirth,
Should flap his wings on the town wall?

Within Tristia and other verse is the rebelliousness of the insider-outsider of the colonnades, or as Marshall Berman might suggest “evocative of a St. Petersburg radicalism that refused to die.” Mandelstam, like so many other scientists, workers and many small minds was a revolutionary in his own way, in the old way, that was devoured by a revolution that demanded that the ‘new man’ be an unthinking and obedient genetically-engineered Soviet super-worker. Where Mandelstam in his unique way represents all those Russians that truly made up the fizzing spirit of the cultural ‘Revolution’ from below, it was the image of the practically sado-masochistic Stakhanovite worker that the ‘Revolution from above’ was determined to mould its citizens into. This was to be a paradox he could not overcome.

As the Russian Twenties roared and it became clear that Alexander Blok had been painfully wrong to figuratively place Christ as leading the Revolutionary masses, Mandelstam began to see more and more his friends die and the dream life he and his wife Nadezhda had hoped to lead was reduced to a communal flat, ration cards and repression. Unlike so many others, he didn’t stop, but wrote the deeply condemnatory Leningrad. But he still didn’t listen, but wrote verses like this: “his cockroach moustache is laughing, about him the great, his think-necked, drained advisors. He plays with them. He is happy with half-men around him. They make touching and funny animal sounds. He alone talks Russian."

Those were recited in a cramped, probably brown and stuffy soviet ‘apartment,’ were never written down and memorised so as not to be forgot. But that was crime enough. It was here that Mandelstam began to personify another All-Union phenomena, that of exile, deportation and slavery, but this is the stop that Nadezhda picks up, scrabbling his poems together and mumbling them out over and over, in a struggle to keep that prism alive. But that is another story. First it was exile to the black earth region, but Stalin’s ‘murder-obvious’ thriller ended up outside Vladivostok, where the poet collapsed. He was on his way to Magadan, the Soviet Auschwitz of Kamchatka. Evgenia Ginsburg describes her memoirs Through the Whirlwind how on these death boats that departed Russian’s furthest city to the camp, throngs of starving ‘birdlike’ peasants who had never seen the ocean before throw into the other-worldly lights near the Pole would notice the curvature of the Earth – and scream. They believed they were being taken to another Planet. In some sense they were.

Mandelstam narrowly escaped those gold-mines of death. As he was dying in some termite hole of a quarry-camp he tasted the ironies of art, perhaps of fate and confessed to a fellow inmate of that great prison; ‘My first book was Stone, so it seems shall be my last.’ The prisoner found his Nadezhda a long time after, and told her. If we ask did Mandelstam die meaninglessly, then the answer can only be yes. However he may of shown us how to die, in one of those poems his love memorised in Voronezh about a certain Jewish musician, “where are you going, it’s all the same, Alexander with love of music, for you its not a shame to die, on a peg like you’re raven-feathered cloak, to hang.”

Leningrad

I’ve come back to the town I know by heart -

In my veins, like the swell of childhood sickness.

You’re back? Then take your medicine:

Fish-oil, slick, lights tracks in the canals.

Take a long look: In December dusk

The ill-reflecting asphalt stains the sky.

I do not want to die. Not yet, Petersburg.

My number’s in your phonebook, not up yet.

I still have some addresses, Petersburg,

To find the faces of the dead, the gone.

I live in a backstairs walk-up, the doorbell hurts,

It rings inside torn out by roots.

All night long I wait for friends to call;

I shake like handcuffs at the footsteps in the hall.

– Osip Mandelstam, adapted by Paul Schmidt