Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition 1994

  

Osip Mandelstam and the

Modernist Creation of Tradition

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Osip Mandelstam and the

Modernist Creation of Tradition

• C L A R E C AVA N A G H

• P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

  _{P R I N C E T O N , N E W J E R S E Y}

  

Copyright  1995 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

  

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cavanagh, Clare.

Osip Mandelstam and the modernist creation of tradition / Clare Cavanagh.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

  

ISBN 0-691-03682-9

1. Mandel’shtam, Osip, 1891–1938—Criticism and interpretation.

  

PG3476.M355Z59 1994 891.71 ′ 3—dc20 94-11248

This book has been composed in Galliard

Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and meet the guidelines

for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book

  

Longevity of the Council on Library Resources

Printed in the United States of America

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• T O M I K E

  This page intentionally left blank THE ARTICULATION OF SIBERIA When the deaf phonetician spread his hand Over the dome of a speaker’s skull

He could tell which diphthong and which vowel

By the bone vibrating to the sound. A globe stops spinning. I feel my palm On a forehead cold as permafrost And imagine axle-hum and the steadfast Russian of Osip Mandelstam.

  —Seamus Heaney

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  C O N T E N T S

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  xi

  NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS, TRANSLATIONS, AND TRANSLITERATION

  xiii

  CHAPTER ONE

  Introduction: The Modernist Creation of Tradition

  3 CHAPTER TWO Self-Creation and the Creation of Culture

  29 CHAPTER THREE Making History: Modernist Cathedrals

  66 CHAPTER FOUR Judaic Chaos

  103

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Currency of the Past 146

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jewish Creation 193

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Powerful Insignificance 215

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Chaplinesque, or Villon Again: In Place of an Ending 279

  APPENDIX

  305

  NOTES

  313

  INDEX

  359

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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

• • •

  THE CREATION of tradition is, Mandelstam insists, a collaborative en- deavor, the work of “colleagues” and “co-discoverers.” A book is no less a collaboration, and for whatever merits this study may possess I am in- debted to many—although its faults are entirely my own. A poet finds his true reader only in posterity, Mandelstam laments. As a graduate student, I was more fortunate. I had three readers: Donald Fanger, Stanislaw Ba- ranczak, and especially Jurij Striedter, whose reading of my work—scrupu- lous, generous, and inspiring—was my best graduate education; and my book and I have both benefited from their continued interest in my re- search on Mandelstam.

  Many other colleagues and co-discoverers have helped this book along its way. Svetlana Boym and Andrew Kahn helped to shape my thought early on through memorable conversations about Mandelstam, and Andrew Kahn’s encouragement and criticism have been invaluable at every stage of this project’s evolution. I was lucky to find in my senior colleague at the University of Wisconsin, David Bethea, an inspired interlocutor, astute critic, and generous friend, whose unflagging faith in “the manuscript that wouldn’t die” helped bring the book to life. Others—Jane Garry Harris, Judith Kornblatt, Charles Isenberg, Caryl Emerson—gave much-needed support and advice at critical stages in the book’s development. Jennifer Presto, Mandelstam fan and research assistant extraordinaire, went far be- yond the call of duty as I struggled with the manuscript’s beginnings in 1989–90. Andrew Swenson’s assistance at the project’s conclusion was equally invaluable. As materials on and by Mandelstam began to proliferate in a Russia anxious to revive a suppressed poetic past, I relied on the kind- ness of friends and colleagues—Margaret and Mark Beissinger, Eliot Borenstein, Yuri Shcheglov, Irina Bagrationi-Mukhraneli—to provide me with texts that had not yet reached the West. My parents, John and Adele Cavanagh, have been generosity itself—they have helped in more ways than I can name. Fellowships from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and the Social Science Research Council helped to fund my work on Mandelstam early on; subsequent support and leave time granted me by the Univer- sity of Wisconsin Graduate School and Department of Slavic Languages allowed me both to expand the scope of my study and to bring it to a conclusion. My editors at Princeton University Press, Robert Brown and Marta Steele, provided assistance and encouragement throughout the ar- duous process of turning the manuscript into a book.

  Part of Chapter 1 was published, in somewhat different form, as “Man- del’shtam i modernistskoe izobretenie Evropy” (Mandelstam and the Modernist Invention of Europe), in Diapazon: Vestnik inostrannoi litera-

  xii

• • •

  entitled “The Modernist Creation of Tradition: Mandelstam, Eliot and Pound,” appears in American Scholars on Twentieth-Century Russian Lit-

  

erature , ed. Boris Averin and Elizabeth Neatrour (St. Petersburg: Petro-Rif

  Publishers, 1993): 400–421. Chapters 6 and 8 appeared in abbreviated form as the following articles: “The Poetics of Jewishness: Mandel’shtam, Dante and the ‘Honorable Calling of Jew,’ ” Slavic and East European

  

Journal , Vol. 35, No. 3 (1991): 317–38; and “Rereading the Poet’s End-

  ing: Mandelstam, Chaplin and Stalin,” PMLA, Vol. 109, No. 1 (January 1994): 71–86. This last essay is reprinted by permission of the copyright holder, The Modern Language Association of America.

  The quotation from “Chaplinesque” in The Complete Poems and Selected

  

Letters and Prose of Hart Crane by Hart Crane, edited by Brom Weber,

  copyright 1966 by the Liverright Publishing Corp., is reprinted by permis- sion of W. W. Norton Publishers. The quotations from T. S. Eliot, The

  

Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 , copyright by T. S. Eliot 1962, re-

  newed by Esme Valerie Eliot in 1971, are reprinted by permission of Har- court Brace and Company. The quotations from Osip Mandelstam, Sobra-

  

nie sochinenii , 4 vols., edited by G. P. Struve, N. Struve, B. A. Filipoff,

  copyright 1967–69, 1981 by Inter-Language Literary Associates and the YMCA Press, are reprinted by permission of the YMCA Press. Ezra Pound’s poem “Histrion” in Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, edited by Michael John King, copyright 1976 by The Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust, is reprinted by permission of New Directions Pub- lishers. The quotation from Canto I in The Cantos of Ezra Pound, copy- righted 1971 by Ezra Pound, renewed 1972 by the estate of Ezra Pound, is reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishers. The quotation from Ezra Pound’s parody of “Under Ben Bulben” is taken from his collec- tion Pavannes and Divagations, copyrighted 1958 by Ezra Pound and quoted by permission of New Directions Press. The quotation from Wil- liam Butler Yeat’s “Byzantium” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, cop- yright 1940 by Georgie Yeats, renewed 1956 by the Macmillan Publishing Co., is reprinted by permission of the Macmillan Publishing Co. I also would like to thank Seamus Heaney for his generous permission to use his poem “The Articulation of Siberia” as this book’s epigraph.

  Finally my standards of both personal and scholarly integrity were set by my best critic and reader, my “faithful friend” and “favorite relation,” Mi- chael Lopez. This book is dedicated to him as an installment on debts greater than I can ever express or repay.

  N O T E O N A B B R E

  V I A T

  I O N S , T R A N S L A T

  I O N S , A N D T R A N S L

  I T E R A T

  I O N

  UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED, all prose translations are taken, with some modifications, from The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965; abbreviated in the text as POM); and Osip Mandelstam, The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris, tr. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor: Ardis Press, 1979; abbreviated in the text as CPL). The volume and page number of the original Russian text in the Struve/Filipoff edition of Man- delstam’s work will be given whenever the translation has been substan- tially altered or the original Russian is cited along with the English transla- tion (Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols. Vols. 1–3: ed. G. P. Struve, B. A. Filipoff. Washington: Inter-Language Literary Associations, 1967–69. Vol. 4: ed.

  G. P. Struve, N. Struve, B. A. Filipoff. Paris: YMCA Press, 1981). Poems will be referred to in the text by their number in the Struve/Filipoff edition of Mandelstam’s writing. All translations of the poetry are my own, unless otherwise noted. For the purposes of this study, I have placed accuracy and readability over artistic merit in my English renditions of Mandelstam’s Russian; unfortunately and inevitably, then, what makes his poems poems in the original has thus been lost even more thoroughly than is usual in the translation of verse.

  I have used the Library of Congress system in transliterating Russian texts, with some modifications. The final -skii in proper names has been changed to the more common -sky, and well-known proper names are given in their most commonly used forms; e.g., Mandelstam, not Man- del’shtam, Lydia Ginzburg, not Lidiia Ginzburg, Mayakovsky, not Maiakovskii. The spelling Mandel’shtam will be used, however, in book and article titles transliterated from the Russian in the endnotes.

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Osip Mandelstam and the

Modernist Creation of Tradition

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C H A P T E R O N E

• • •

Introduction: The Modernist Creation of Tradition

  Perhaps the strongest impulse towards a shift in the approach to language and linguistics . . . was—for me, at least—the turbulent artistic movement of the early twentieth century. The great men of art born in the 1880’s—Picasso (1881– ), Joyce (1882–1941),

  Braque (1882– ), Stravinsky (1882– ), Khlebnikov (1885–1922), Le Corbusier (1887– )—were able to complete a thorough and comprehensive schooling in one of the most placid spans of world history, before that “last hour of universal calm” (poslednii chas

  

vsemirnoi tishiny) was shattered by a train of cataclysms. The lead-

  ing artists of that generation keenly anticipated the upheavals that were to come and met them while still young and dynamic enough to test and steel their own creative power in this crucible. The ex- traordinary capacity of these discoverers to overcome again and again the faded habits of their own yesterdays, [joined] together with an unprecedented gift for seizing and shaping anew every older tradition or foreign model without sacrificing the stamp of their own permanent individuality in the amazing polyphony of ever new creations.

  

—Roman Jakobson, “Retrospect” (1962)

  I was born in the same year as Charlie Chaplin, Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata,” [Gumilev] the Eiffel Tower, and, apparently, [T. S.] Eliot.

  

—Anna Akhmatova, “Notes Towards a Memoir” (undated)

  

C H A P T E R O N E

• • •

  INVENTION AND REMEMBRANCE

One often hears: that is good but it belongs to yesterday.

  

But I say: yesterday has not yet been born. It has not yet really existed.

  

—Osip Mandelstam, “The Word and Culture” (1921)

  To speak of modernist culture as a culture born of crisis and catastrophe seems to have become in recent years a critical commonplace, a cliché no longer adequate to the phenomena it purports to describe. Indeed, much recent discussion of the modernist movement in European and American culture has focused precisely on exposing what one scholar has called “the myth of the modern,” the myth, that is, of a radical break with a past that modern artists continued to draw on even as they mourned—or cele- brated—its loss. Such skepticism can be bracing, and certainly it is neces- sary if we are to achieve anything like a critical distance on a movement ₁ whose parameters are as ill-defined and shifting as those of modernism. Revisionist approaches to the modernist sense of an ending should not, however, lead us to overlook the degree to which this particular truism is rooted in historical fact. The modernist artist may have exagerrated the uniqueness of his historical situation: other generations, other ages and cultures have experienced upheavals and disasters that seemed truly cata- clysmic at the time and that had a profound and lasting impact on the art and thought that sprang up in their wake. Moreover, the Judeo-Christian models that have shaped Western culture predispose us to perceive all his- ₂ tory in terms of “eternal transition, perpetual crisis.” Living as we do in the extended aftermath of the modernist movement, we may find it diffi- cult to give credence to the French poet Charles Péguy’s hyberbolic claim, made in 1913, that “the world has changed less since Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years”; history has not yet screeched to a dead halt, nor has the modern world or the human condition changed beyond all possible recognition as we draw to the end of this century and the millennium. The modernist artist had, however, historically grounded reasons for consider- ing that what he lived in was indeed a qualitatively different kind of society, a technologically transformed, radically innovative, international “culture of time and space.” And the Great War, the War to End All Wars—along with the massive social upheavals that followed in its aftermath—undoubt- ably left a generation of artists and thinkers with scars, both literal and fig- urative, of a kind that previous generations would have found difficult to ₃ imagine. The artists and thinkers of early-twentieth-century Russia could lay even greater claim to living in an age of unprecedented disaster. Their experi- ence of World War I was framed by bloody revolutions, first the failed re- volt of 1905 and then the February and October revolutions of 1917,

  

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• • •

  rehearse the many horrors that have shaped the course of modern Russian history. But even if we strip away the inflated, apocalyptic rhetoric that col- ors so many poetic accounts—Symbolist, Futurist, and Acmeist alike—of the Russian experience of war and revolution, we are left, nonetheless, with the genuine, profound sense of an ending and accompanying shock of the new that lent the Russian modernist movement such energy and finally such poignance.

  Péguy makes his claim for the birth of a new age in 1913. Other mod- ernists dated the death of the past somewhat differently. “It was in 1915,” D. H. Lawrence announces, that “the old world ended”; while Virginia Woolf proclaims, with even greater assurance, that “on or about Decem- ber, 1910, human nature changed.” Anna Akhmatova was one of the few poets to survive the disasters that befell what Roman Jakobson propheti- cally called, in a famous essay of 1931, “the generation that squandered its poets.” She thus bore firsthand witness to the many tragedies, national and personal, that followed in the revolution’s wake. Nonetheless, the date she picks for the beginning of the new era comes close to those moments of crisis chosen by Lawrence and Woolf. As she looks back on the past from her vantage point in 1944—in the midst of yet another cataclysm, World War II—she watches “not the calendar, but the real twentieth century ap- proach” along the Petersburg embankments of 1913. Osip Mandelstam joins in this modernist chorus as he mourns the modern loss not just of past times, but of time itself as earlier generations had understood it: “The frag- ile reckoning of the years of our era has been lost,” he laments in “Pushkin ₄ and Skriabin” (1916; CPL, 91). The approximate convergence of these dates, taken together with their divergent sources in French, English, and Russian writing, points to one of modernism’s most salient features, a feature we might call continuity in crisis, or, perhaps more precisely, continuity in the perception of crisis. The modern sense of an ending was not confined to one country or one conti- nent alone, and modernist art likewise defies national and linguistic bound- aries. The very pervasiveness of this sense of crisis in modernist writing has led to what has become yet another commonplace of the vast scholarship on the movement. It is now “almost a truism,” Matei Calinescu writes, “to describe the modern artist as torn between his urge to cut himself off from the past—to become completely ‘modern’—and his dream to found a new

  

tradition, recognizable as such by the future.” Charles Feidelson and Rich-

  ard Ellman present us with another variant on this modernist dilemma. The modernist artist who has been, in Mandelstam’s phrase, “excommunicated from history” (CPL, 84), can read his exile from the past in one of two ways: it may be either a “liberation from inherited patterns” or “depriva- tion and disinheritance.” The modernist must cast his lot either among the “Futurists” or the “Pastists.” He must either celebrate his release from the dead weight of tradition or forever mourn the loss of an infinitely precious, ₅

  

C H A P T E R O N E

• • •

  This kind of opposition—between Pastists and Futurists, Archaists and Innovators, Apollonian preservers and Dionysian destroyers—is far too schematic to encompass the range of responses to the pervasive modern sense of rupture with the past, as Ellmann and Feidelson readily admit. For a variety of reasons, though, it has proved remarkably resilient on Russian soil, and nowhere is this literary two-party system more in evidence than in the responses to Russian modernist poetry. Indeed, the poetry itself might seem to invite just such a polarized reaction. The Russian post-symbolists, in hindsight at least, appear to have divided themselves neatly into two camps, as if for the convenience of future researchers: the Futurists were dedicated, as their name suggests, to casting unwanted cultural ballast off the “Steamship of Modernity”; while their coevals and competitors the Ac- meists, whose name proclaimed their allegiance to the akme, the highest and best that Western and Russian culture could offer, were equally bent on demonstrating that this “Steamship of Modernity” was “the ship of eternity,” the ship entrusted with bearing past treasures of world culture into an unknown future. In postrevolutionary Russia, the very notions of “past” and “future,” of “tradition” and “innovation” became valorized to a degree that made it still more difficult to cross these particular party lines in quest of an accurate assessment of the presence of the poetic past in Futurist writing, and of avant-garde innovation at work among the “pas- ₆ tist” Acmeists.

  This thumbnail sketch cannot do justice, poetic or otherwise, to the complicated history of Russian post-symbolist art—but it is not my goal here to address the many problems and issues involved in the critical recep- tion of this poetry. I want to turn now instead to the real subject of my study, to Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) and his modernist invention of tradition. I have spoken of the Acmeist commitment to “world culture”; the phrase itself is Mandelstam’s. Shortly before his final arrest in 1938, he defined the Acmeist aesthetic as a “yearning for world culture (toska po

  

mirovoi kulture)”; and he thus provided us with the best possible short-

hand description of the impulse that charges his own poetry and prose.

  This definition might seem initially to place Mandelstam and his poetics squarely in the camp of the cultural “passéists” (CPL, 176; II, 346). Taken from its proper context in his work, it might appear to signal a hopeless, helpless longing for an all-encompassing culture that existed once but has long since disappeared, or that has known its only life in the pipe dreams and poems of traditionless modernists. The vast scope of Mandelstam’s po- etic ambitions, which will be satisfied with nothing less than all of Western culture, attests inversely to the intensity of his sense of cultural deprivation. If modernist artists considered themselves to be the casualties of “an apoc- alypse of cultural community,” then Mandelstam must be ranked among ₇ the movement’s most representative figures. In a suggestive essay on Mandelstam’s notion of history, Gregory

  

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  Freidin observes that “only a cultural orphan growing up in [Russia’s] rev- olutionary years could possess such an insatiable need for a continuous construction of a gigantic vision of culture meant to compensate for the impossibility of belonging to a single place.” When Mandelstam was born, and where, and to whom—all three conditions apparently conspired to keep him from the European and Russian cultural legacy he craved. He was born, he writes, “in the night between the second and the third/Of Janu- ary in the ninety-first/Uncertain year, and the centuries/Surround me with fire” (#362). In his autobiography The Noise of Time (1925), Mandel- stam laments a generation of Russian modernists born beneath “the sign of the hiatus” (POM, 122) and thus deprived by history of the cultural trea- sures that should have been theirs by rights. But Mandelstam would not have stood to inherit these treasures in any case. His parents, as he de- scribes them in The Noise of Time, were themselves orphans of sorts, Cen- tral European Jews who, uprooted from their own culture, were not at home in their adoptive nation either. Mandelstam himself, born in Warsaw, could not claim Russia and its culture as his birthright. Even as an adopted motherland, though, Russia presented him with as many problems as it solved. It was itself an orphan, “the orphan of nations,” in Belinsky’s phrase, uncomfortably straddling the border between East and West, a feu- ₈ dal past and the foreign present forcibly imported by Peter the Great. Mandelstam’s definition of Acmeism appears to place him in the para- doxical position of being a pastist who had no past he could legitimately call his own. This paradox brings us in turn to the apparent contradic- tion contained in the title of my book, the contradiction that lies at the heart of Mandelstam’s work. It is not finally the intensity of Mandelstam’s sense of loss that distinguishes him among his fellow modernists. It is the energy and the imagination with which he sets about converting his deficits into assets as he works to create a usable past for himself and for a genera- tion of artists that found itself abandoned by history. Gifted with the capac- ity to generalize from his own dilemma, to convert isolation to connection, to turn disruption to his advantage, and to use all these skills in the ser- vice of an encompassing cultural vision, Mandelstam was singularly well equipped to address his own and his epoch’s paradoxical legacy of disinher- itance; and he responded with one of modernism’s most complex, ambi- tious, and challenging visions of tradition.

  In his famous poem “Tristia” (1918), Mandelstam movingly describes the “profound joy of recurrence” that informs his poetry and vision of his- tory alike: “Everything once was, everything will be repeated/And the mo- ₉ ment of recognition alone is sweet to us” (CPL, 114; #104). As scholars and critics recognized early on, Mandelstam seeks to provide both himself and his readers with this joyful shock of recognition by reviving in his work the classical, European, and Russian traditions he craved. His aim, though, is not merely to repeat the past, to deliver it intact and unaltered into the

  

C H A P T E R O N E

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  present. The very act of remembering the past changes it irreparably, and this is as it should be, according to Mandelstam. “Invention and remem- brance go hand in hand in poetry,” he insists in his essay “Literary Mos- cow” (1922). “To remember also means to invent, and the one who re- members is also an inventor” (CPL, 146).

  Invention and remembrance: this complex and energizing dialectic shapes Mandelstam’s work and the vision of tradition it both embodies and describes from his earliest poems and essays to the last “Voronezh Note- book” (1937). It is ideally suited to the needs of the cultural orphan who must invent his way into the past that he desires—but it also demonstrates the ways in which Mandelstam was able to turn necessity to his artistic ad- vantage. The dialectic he develops to counter his sense of loss and isolation serves to place him at the very heart of a modernist art preoccupied with what Guillaume Apollinaire calls the modern “debate between tradition and invention.” Like Mandelstam’s inventive remembrance, the very no- tion of a modern tradition is an “apparent oxymoron,” as Charles Russell notes, and the ground of this paradoxical tradition “is always slipping out from under [modern] writers’ and artists’ feet.” It slips from beneath the feet of critics as well. Ellman and Feidelson issue the following disclaimer as they struggle to define their own version of The Modern Tradition (1965): “If we can postulate a modern tradition, we must add that it is a paradoxically untraditional tradition.” Renato Poggioli reaches much the same conclusion when he speaks, in his Theory of the Avant-Garde (1968), of modernism’s reliance on a self-consciously “anti-traditional tradition.” My goal in this chapter and the chapters that follow is chiefly to trace the workings of Mandelstam’s invented tradition as it takes shape in both his poetry and his prose. But I also call attention to the ways in which Mandel- stam’s seemingly sui generis version of tradition serves to tie him to other modernist writers and thinkers—Russian, European, and American—who struggled to make sense of the past in an age apparently bent upon turning ₁₀ all history on its head. Influence study has largely dominated Mandelstam scholarship during what one might call its formative years: I am thinking of the pioneering works of Kiril Taranovsky, Omry Ronen, Dmitrii Segal, Iurii Levin, and others whose development of a “subtextual” and “intertextual” structural- ist approach to Mandelstam has defined and refined our understanding of the intricate web of quotations and references that shape Mandelstam’s ₁₁ world culture as it is embodied in his texts. I have drawn extensively on this scholarship in my own work—no student of Mandelstam or of Russian modernism in general can afford to neglect it. There is a danger, though, that subtext will take the place of context in such criticism, and that the larger poetic community drawn from all times and ages, the community to which Mandelstam aspired and in which he did indeed participate, at times unconsciously, will be confined to those writers whose works we can safely

  

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  assume he knew and read. However, this very vision of an international, multilingual community of poets serves to mark him as a modernist; and he shares this vision with other modern poets, most notably T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, whose work he could not have known. (He could not read English, and their work was virtually unknown in Russia at the time he was writing.) If we are to understand what is specifically modernist in Mandel- stam’s work, and what is distinctively Mandelstamian about his particular brand of modernism, we must make the same kind of unexpected and, one hopes, illuminating, connections that Mandelstam and other “modern ₁₂ poet-synthesizers” placed at the heart of their endeavor (CPL, 116). Our understanding of his work would be impoverished indeed without the glimpses of a larger modernist context that a comparably “synthetic” criti- cism—a criticism that takes into account not only subtext, but context, ₁₃ that examines affinities as well as influence—can provide. Modernism generally makes for strange bedfellows, as this chapter’s first epigraph attests. Roman Jakobson begins his pocket-sized portrait of the linguist as a young man by creating a backdrop in which Russian poets and composers rub shoulders with French architects, Spanish painters, and Irish novelists—even as he emphasizes their shared need to reinvent the various foreign and native traditions that inform their creations. The com- pany Akhmatova keeps in the opening passage of her unfinished memoirs is no less unlikely; she was born, she claims, in the same year as were T. S. Eliot, her fellow Acmeist and first husband Nikolai Gumilev, Tol- stoy’s famous novella “The Kreutzer Sonata,” Charlie Chaplin, and, of all things, the Eiffel Tower. Such juxtapositions are entirely true to the spirit of the modernist movement, and necessary to its proper understanding. Indeed, Akhmatova and Jakobson suggest as much by prefacing their self- ₁₄ portraits with these modernist collages. In both quotes, we notice a characteristic modernist blurring of bound- aries not only between nations, but between different media, genres, and modes of creation. We also note in Akhmatova’s quote particularly a ten- dency to disregard strict boundaries not only between high and low art, as Charlie Chaplin rubs elbows with the likes of Tolstoy, T. S. Eliot, and Akhmatova herself. She also juxtaposes two “pastist” Acmeists (and Eliot, whom we might consider an honorary Acmeist of sorts) with the Eiffel Tower, which represented for Futurists all over the world the essence of high technology and unabashed modernity that they themselves aspired to ₁₅ in their art. Akhmatova’s dates are mistaken on several counts—but it is not my aim to take her to task for what were, I suspect, the intentional mistakes in her chronology. Rather, I wish to call attention to the way in which Akhmatova, a lifelong Acmeist dedicated, like Mandelstam, to the preservation of Western culture within her work, begins her unfinished memoirs with what is, if not precisely a slap in the face of public taste, then at least a calculated gesture intended to disrupt fixed perceptions of a life

  

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  and work that should not be rooted too firmly in any form of purely “pas- tist” aesthetics. The same warning holds true for Mandelstam and his in- vented tradition, and I will now turn to some of the affinities that Mandel- stam shares with several unlikely modernist comrades-at-arms.

  MODERNIST GENEALOGIES

  

On or about December 1910 human nature changed. . . . All human

relations shifted—those between masters and servants,

husbands and wives, parents and children.

  

—Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924)

You cannot carry around on your back the corpse of your father.

  

You leave him with the other dead.

  

—Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters (1913)

  Following the revolution, Nadezhda Mandelstam notes, the comtemporar- ies of Akhmatova and Mandelstam “seriously thought of them as old peo- ple,” although both notorious pastists were in reality not much over thirty. After the publication of Kornei Chukovsky’s influential essay on “Akhma- tova and Mayakovsky” (1920), the Acmeist movement came to be per- ceived as the essence of a dying culture that had quickly outlived what little usefulness it had for the new regime. Chukovsky is basically sympathetic when he describes Akhmatova as the “heiress of an old and high culture” who “values her inheritance [and] her many ancestors: Pushkin, Bara- tynsky, Annensky.” He contrasts her with Mayakovsky, who has “no ances- tors” and is mighty not in his precursors but his descendants. Chukovsky concludes, however, by proposing not a purge of the poetic past, but a fusion of the “Akhmatova” and “Mayakovsky factions” in a Soviet poetry that has learned to cherish its prerevolutionary legacy. Other critics, in- cluding Mayakovsky himself, were less temperate. In a 1922 talk, Maya- kovsky calls for a “clean-up of modern poetry” and begins by casting the Akhmatovas of the world on Trotsky’s dust heap of history: “Of course, as literary landmarks, as the last remnants of a crumbling order, they will find their place in the pages of histories of literature. But for us, for our age, they are pointless, pathetic and comic anachronisms.” And in an essay on “The Formalist School of Poetry” (1923), Trotsky himself remarks acidly that “it does not make new poets of you to translate the philosophy of life ₁₆ of the Seventeenth Century into the language of the Acmeists.”

  Mandelstam had never been as widely known or read as was his more celebrated colleague. He was thus spared the kind of direct public attack ₁₇ that Akhmatova endured in the Soviet press of the early twenties. Even sympathetic postrevolutionary critics, though, followed Viktor Zhirmun-

  

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  for art’s sake, the creator of a poetry almost too pure for this world in the best of times, and certainly not up to the monumental tasks set by the mod- ern age for would-be poets of the future. He composes only “chamber music” in an age that demands Mayakovskian marches, Jakobson notes in an essay of 1921. And Iurii Tynianov echoes Jakobson in “Interim” (“Pro- mezhutok,” 1924), as he gives us a Mandelstam who is a “pure lyricist,” an otherworldly poet who deals only in “small forms” refined almost out of ₁₈ existence. It is difficult to find traces of this quiet, well-mannered poet in the essays of the twenties, essays that celebrate a Russian history that is “active, force- ful, thoroughly dialectical, a living battle of different powers fertilizing one another” (CPL, 141), and a Russian language formed “through ceaseless hybridization, cross-breeding and foreign-born (chuzherodnykh) influ- ences” (CPL, 120). (And in this last phrase, we also see the foreign-born Mandelstam writing himself into the Russian tradition he describes.) Man- delstam’s versions of Russia’s past and language might do double duty as descriptions of his world culture and invented tradition. “Poetic culture,” he asserts in “Badger Hole” (1922), “arises from the attempt to avert ca- tastrophe” (CPL, 137). We may be tempted to hear Jakobson’s chamber musician at work here, struggling in vain to tune out the discordant noise of his times. There is, however, another, more convincing way to read this statement. Mandelstam’s poetic, or world, culture (they are one and the same) not only manages to stave off impending disaster time and again. It actually requires the continuous stimulus of crises barely contained, if it is to survive and flourish. Mandelstam himself implies as much when he speaks in the same essay of culture’s “catastrophic essence” (CPL, 137). Mandelstam longs for his world culture not because it is lost forever, trapped in an irrecoverable past. This culture is beyond his reach precisely because it is, as Freidin suggests, under continuous construction, and, one might add, under a continuous “threat of destruction” as well (POM, 79). Mandelstam weaves the upheavals that mark his and his age’s histories into the fabric of a resilient tradition that draws power from the very forces it is intended to combat.

  In an essay of 1933, Boris Eikhenbaum notes that Mandelstam’s best lyrics are fueled by an ongoing “battle with the craft” of other poets. Those who would wish to learn from this “great poet” must likewise be prepared ₁₉ to do battle: “You must conquer Mandelstam. Not study him.” This rhetoric of battle and mastery is entirely appropriate to Mandelstam’s vi- sion of poetry, which thrives on storm and stress, on insult, injury, and “literary spite” (POM, 127). In his autobiography, Mandelstam gives us his ideal literary history, which comes to him by way of his high school literature teacher, Vladimir Vasilievich Gippius: “Beginning as early as Ra- dishchev and Novikov, V. V. had established personal relations with Rus- sian writers, splenetic and loving liasons filled with noble enviousness, jeal-

  

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  the members of one family” (POM, 130). If we substitute “strong poet” for Eikhenbaum’s “great poet” and combine his remarks with Mandel- stam’s vision of literature as an endlessly squabbling family, we come up with a version of poetic tradition that looks very like Harold Bloom’s more recent notion of a poetry that derives its force from the ceaseless battling of ₂₀ poetic parents and their rebellious offspring. In such traditions, Apolli- naire’s debate between tradition and innovation turns into something con- siderably less civil. It becomes a heated argument that threatens to erupt into the literary equivalent of war. But we need not look as far afield as Bloom to uncover comparable visions of a disruptive modern tradition. Modern Russian artists and thinkers were by necessity adept at weaving catastrophe into the substance of their visions, and it is not surprising that we should find similar theories of tradition far closer to home.

  The authors of these theories might have been startled to find themselves in such company. For all his astute observations on Mandelstam’s poetics, Iurii Tynianov clearly views Mandelstam as one of the exemplary poet- archaists at war with their more experimental brethren in his monumental study of literary Archaists and Innovators (1929). The tradition Tynianov describes in this study bears, however, clear affinities with Mandelstam’s lively, combative world culture. To the scholars of other ages, Tynianov claims, literary history may have seemed to follow an even course and its changes appeared to occur in “peaceful succession (preemvstvennost’).” The principle of genuine literary transformation lies, however, not in sim- ple succession but in “battle and takeover”; and traditions grow through “upheavals,” in “leaps and bounds (smeshchenie, skachok),” not through the systematic evolution posited by earlier, happier generations. Indeed, Man- delstam anticipates Tynianov when he speaks in “The Wheat of Humanity” (1922) of all history and culture as driven by “catastrophe, unexpected ₂₁ shifts, destruction (katastrofa, neozhidannyi sdvig, razrushenie).”

  Only happy families are alike—or so Tolstoy claims in the famous open- ing lines of Anna Karenina. There are striking similarities, though, be- tween the unhappy literary families that emerge in the traditions described by Mandelstam, Tynianov, and his fellow Formalist Viktor Shklovsky. Such unstable, crisis-ridden traditions would seem to lead inevitably to broken homes, disrupted families, and skewed, peculiar genealogies, and indeed, in Tynianov’s version of the ongoing struggle between literary fathers and sons, children inherit from their parents only by displacing them, and bat- tle-hardened young artists often end up inadvertently “resembling their grandfathers more than the fathers who fought with them.” Writers avoid unwelcome parental interference in a still more roundabout way in the tan- gled family tree that Shklovsky proposes in an essay of 1923. “In the his- tory of art,” Shklovsky insists, “the legacy is transmitted not from father to ₂₂ son, but from uncle to nephew.”

  Mandelstam is still more insistent on the rights of literary offspring to

  

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  pick and choose the ancestry that suits them in his early poem “I have not heard the tales of Ossian” (1914; #65). “I’ve come into a blessed legacy,” he announces in the poem’s final stanzas:

  Hu'ix pevcov blu'da[]ie sny_ Svoe rodstvo i skuhnoe sosedstvo My prezirat; zavedomo vol;ny.

  I ne odno sokrovi]e, byt; mo'et, Minuq vnukov, k pravnukam ujdet, I snova skal;d hu'u[ pesn[ slo'it I kak svo[ ee proizneset.

  The wandering dreams of other bards; We’re free to despise consciously Our kin and our dull neighbors. And this may not be the only treasure, either, To skip the grandsons, descending to their sons,

And a skald will once again set down another’s song

And speak it as though it were his own.

  Brave words indeed—but such absolute freedom from the burden of the past is more easily proclaimed than practiced, as Mandelstam’s own poetry demonstrates. Suffice it to note for now, though, that the poem not only provides us with yet another skewed and twisted modernist genealogy. It also indicates the ways in which disinheritance may become a form of liber- ation for the poet unlucky enough to have been born with an unprepos- sessing family tree and raised in less than inspiring cultural company. Such a poet, if he is daring and desperate enough, may find himself in possession of a past and present community far grander than anything his actual ori- gins might have seemed to portend. Poetic justice can at last be served, and fairy tales may finally come true, as cultural paupers contrive to take posses- sion of princely treasures through ingenuity and pluck—or so “Ossian”’s optimistic young author would have us believe. Though Mandelstam’s later writings inevitably complicate this triumphant early vision, it remains nonetheless the ideal, ideally liberating version of tradition to which Man- delstam will return throughout his poetry and prose.

  THE SHIPWRECK OF MODERNITY

  

Elam, Ninevah, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total