Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition

By Clare Cavanagh

If modernism marked, as some critics claim, an "apocalypse of cultural community," then Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) must rank among its most representative figures. Born to Central European Jews in Warsaw on the cusp of the modern age, he could claim neither Russian nor European traditions as his birthright. Describing the poetic movement he helped to found, Acmeism, as a "yearning for world culture," he defined the impulse that charges his own poetry and prose. Clare Cavanagh has written a sustained study placing Mandelstam's "remembrance and invention" of a usable poetic past in the context of modernist writing in general, with particular attention to the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Cavanagh traces Mandelstam’s creation of tradition from his earliest lyrics to his last verses, written shortly before his arrest and subsequent death in a Stalinist camp. Her work shows how the poet, generalizing from his own dilemmas and disruptions, addressed his epoch’s paradoxical legacy of disinheritance--and how he responded to this unwelcome legacy with one of modernism’s most complex, ambitious, and challenging visions of tradition. Drawing on not only Russian and Western modernist writing and theory, but also modern European Jewish culture, Russian religious thought, postrevolutionary politics, and even silent film, Cavanagh traces Mandelstam’s recovery of a "world culture" vital, vast, and varied enough to satisfy the desires of the quintessential outcast modernist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Nov 14, 1994
• ISBN: 9781400821495

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Cover: Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition by Clare Cavanagh.

Osip Mandelstam and the

Modernist Creation of Tradition

Osip Mandelstam and the

Modernist Creation of Tradition

• Clare Cavanagh •

Princeton University Press

Princeton, New Jersey

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.

eISBN 1-4008-0114-1

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

2. Modernism (Literature) I. Title.

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

This book has been composed in Galliard

• To Mike •

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

• Contents •

Acknowledgments

Note on Abbreviations, Translations, and Transliteration

Chapter One

Introduction: The Modernist Creation of Tradition

Chapter Two

Self-Creation and the Creation of Culture

Chapter Three

Making History: Modernist Cathedrals

Chapter Four

Judaic Chaos

Chapter Five

The Currency of the Past

Chapter Six

Jewish Creation

Chapter Seven

Powerful Insignificance

Chapter Eight

Chaplinesque, or Villon Again: In Place of an Ending

Appendix

Notes

Index

• Acknowledgments •

The creation of tradition is, Mandelstam insists, a collaborative endeavor, the work of colleagues and co-discoverers. A book is no less a collaboration, and for whatever merits this study may possess I am indebted 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 Baranczak, and especially Jurij Striedter, whose reading of my work—scrupulous, generous, and inspiring—was my best graduate education; and my book and I have both benefited from their continued interest in my research 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 beyond 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 kindness 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 University 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 arduous process of turning the manuscript into a book.

Part of Chapter 1 was published, in somewhat different form, as Mandel’shtam i modernistskoe izobretenie Evropy (Mandelstam and the Modernist Invention of Europe), in Diapazon: Vestnik inostrannoi literatury, Vol. 213, No. 1 (1993), 40–47. A longer version of the same essay, entitled The Modernist Creation of Tradition: Mandelstam, Eliot and Pound, appears in American Scholars on Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, 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 Ending: 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 permission of W. W. Norton Publishers. The quotations from T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950, copyright by T. S. Eliot 1962, renewed by Esme Valerie Eliot in 1971, are reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace and Company. The quotations from Osip Mandelstam, Sobranie 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 Publishers. The quotation from Canto I in The Cantos of Ezra Pound, copyrighted 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 collection Pavannes and Divagations, copyrighted 1958 by Ezra Pound and quoted by permission of New Directions Press. The quotation from William Butler Yeat’s Byzantium in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, copyright 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, Michael Lopez. This book is dedicated to him as an installment on debts greater than I can ever express or repay.

Note on Abbreviations, Translations, and Transliteration

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 Mandelstam’s work will be given whenever the translation has been substantially altered or the original Russian is cited along with the English translation (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 Mandel’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.

Osip Mandelstam and the

Modernist Creation of Tradition

• Chapter One •

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 leading 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 extraordinary 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)

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 celebrated—its loss. Such skepticism can be bracing, and certainly it is necessary if we are to achieve anything like a critical distance on a movement whose parameters are as ill-defined and shifting as those of modernism.¹

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 cataclysmic 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 history in terms of eternal transition, perpetual crisis.² Living as we do in the extended aftermath of the modernist movement, we may find it difficult 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 considering 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—undoubtably left a generation of artists and thinkers with scars, both literal and figurative, of a kind that previous generations would have found difficult to imagine.³

The artists and thinkers of early-twentieth-century Russia could lay even greater claim to living in an age of unprecedented disaster. Their experience of World War I was framed by bloody revolutions, first the failed revolt of 1905 and then the February and October revolutions of 1917, which were followed by three years of civil war. This is not the place to rehearse the many horrors that have shaped the course of modern Russian history. But even if we strip away the inflated, apocalyptic rhetoric that colors 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 modernists 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 December, 1910, human nature changed. Anna Akhmatova was one of the few poets to survive the disasters that befell what Roman Jakobson prophetically 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 approach 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 fragile reckoning of the years of our era has been lost, he laments in Pushkin and Skriabin (1916; CPL, 91).⁴

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 continent alone, and modernist art likewise defies national and linguistic boundaries. 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 Richard 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 deprivation 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, infinitely distant history.⁵

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 Acmeists, 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 pastist Acmeists.⁶

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 reception 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 shorthand 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 poetic 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 apocalypse of cultural community," then Mandelstam must be ranked among the movement’s most representative figures.⁷

In a suggestive essay on Mandelstam’s notion of history, Gregory Freidin observes that only a cultural orphan growing up in [Russia’s] revolutionary 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 January in the ninety-first/Uncertain year, and the centuries/Surround me with fire (#362). In his autobiography The Noise of Time (1925), Mandelstam laments a generation of Russian modernists born beneath the sign of the hiatus (POM, 122) and thus deprived by history of the cultural treasures that should have been theirs by rights. But Mandelstam would not have stood to inherit these treasures in any case. His parents, as he describes them in The Noise of Time, were themselves orphans of sorts, Central 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 feudal past and the foreign present forcibly imported by Peter the Great.⁸

Mandelstam’s definition of Acmeism appears to place him in the paradoxical position of being a pastist who had no past he could legitimately call his own. This paradox brings us in turn to the apparent contradiction 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 generation of artists that found itself abandoned by history. Gifted with the capacity 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 service of an encompassing cultural vision, Mandelstam was singularly well equipped to address his own and his epoch’s paradoxical legacy of disinheritance; and he responded with one of modernism’s most complex, ambitious, 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 history alike: Everything once was, everything will be repeated/And the moment of recognition alone is sweet to us (CPL, 114; #104).⁹ 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 present. The very act of remembering the past changes it irreparably, and this is as it should be, according to Mandelstam. Invention and remembrance go hand in hand in poetry, he insists in his essay Literary Moscow (1922). To remember also means to invent, and the one who remembers 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 Notebook (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 advantage. 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 notion 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 Mandelstam’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 all history on its head.¹⁰

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 structuralist approach to Mandelstam has defined and refined our understanding of the intricate web of quotations and references that shape Mandelstam’s world culture as it is embodied in his texts.¹¹ 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 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 Mandelstam’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 poet-synthesizers placed at the heart of their endeavor (CPL, 116).¹² Our understanding of his work would be impoverished indeed without the glimpses of a larger modernist context that a comparably synthetic criticism—a criticism that takes into account not only subtext, but context, that examines affinities as well as influence—can provide.¹³

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 company 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, Tolstoy’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-portraits with these modernist collages.¹⁴

In both quotes, we notice a characteristic modernist blurring of boundaries not only between nations, but between different media, genres, and modes of creation. We also note in Akhmatova’s quote particularly a tendency 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 in their art.¹⁵ 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 and work that should not be rooted too firmly in any form of purely pastist aesthetics. The same warning holds true for Mandelstam and his invented tradition, and I will now turn to some of the affinities that Mandelstam 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 comtemporaries of Akhmatova and Mandelstam seriously thought of them as old people, although both notorious pastists were in reality not much over thirty. After the publication of Kornei Chukovsky’s influential essay on Akhmatova and Mayakovsky (1920), the Acmeist movement came to be perceived 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, Baratynsky, Annensky. He contrasts her with Mayakovsky, who has no ancestors 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, including Mayakovsky himself, were less temperate. In a 1922 talk, Mayakovsky 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 of the Seventeenth Century into the language of the Acmeists.¹⁶

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 that Akhmatova endured in the Soviet press of the early twenties.¹⁷ Even sympathetic postrevolutionary critics, though, followed Viktor Zhirmunsky’s lead in seeing Mandelstam chiefly as a subtle, elegant advocate of art 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 modern 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 (Promezhutok, 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 existence.¹⁸

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, forceful, 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) influences (CPL, 120). (And in this last phrase, we also see the foreign-born Mandelstam writing himself into the Russian tradition he describes.) Mandelstam’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 catastrophe (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 to do battle: You must conquer Mandelstam. Not study him.¹⁹ This rhetoric of battle and mastery is entirely appropriate to Mandelstam’s vision 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 Radishchev and Novikov, V. V. had established personal relations with Russian writers, splenetic and loving liasons filled with noble enviousness, jealousy, with jocular disrespect, grievous unfairness—as is customary between the members of one family (POM, 130). If we substitute strong poet for Eikhenbaum’s great poet and combine his remarks with Mandelstam’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 poetic parents and their rebellious offspring.²⁰ In such traditions, Apollinaire’s debate between tradition and innovation turns into something considerably 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 poetarchaists 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 simple 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, Mandelstam anticipates Tynianov when he speaks in The Wheat of Humanity (1922) of all history and culture as driven by catastrophe, unexpected shifts, destruction (katastrofa, neozhidannyi sdvig, razrushenie)."²¹

Only happy families are alike—or so Tolstoy claims in the famous opening lines of Anna Karenina. There are striking similarities, though, between 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 battle-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 tangled family tree that Shklovsky proposes in an essay of 1923. In the history of art, Shklovsky insists, the legacy is transmitted not from father to son, but from uncle to nephew.²²

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

Чужих певцов блуждающие сны;

Свое родство и скучное соседство

Мы презирать заведомо вольны.

И не одно сокровище, быть может,

Минуя внуков, к правнукам уйдет,

И снова скальд чужую песню сложит

И как свою ее произнесет.

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 liberation for the poet unlucky enough to have been born with an unprepossessing 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 origins 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 possession 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 Mandelstam will return throughout his poetry and prose.

The Shipwreck of Modernity

Elam, Ninevah, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia . . . these too would be beautiful names. Lusitania, too, is a beautiful name.

—Paul Valéry, The Crisis of the Mind (1919)

"Do

"You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember

Nothing?"

I remember

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

Mandelstam was adept at deriving cultural capital from apparently irremediable losses, and in his prose of the early twenties particularly, he manages time and again to turn the modern sense of an ending to his own purposes. He appears to mourn the modern rupture with the past in Humanism and the Present (1923): "The chaotic world has burst in—into the English ‘home’ as well as into the German Gemüt; chaos sings in our Russian stoves, banging our dampers and oven doors. . . . No laws preserve the house from catastrophe, provide it with any assurance or security (CPL, 182). And it is not merely our homes that are at risk, he warns in The End of the Novel (1922). Our very selves are at stake, as we bear collective witness to the catastrophic collapse of biography: Today Europeans are plucked out of their own biographies, like balls out of the pockets of billiard tables, and the same principle that governs the collision of billiard balls governs the laws of their actions" (CPL, 200). We have all fallen prey to a universe governed by contingency and chaos alone, as earlier ways of ordering experience fall far short of the needs of the modern age.

The collapse of European culture may actually work to the advantage of the modernist orphan in search of cultural community, as Mandelstam demonstrates in The Nineteenth Century (1922), where his own dilemma and his generation’s merge. We appear as colonizers to this new age, so vast and so cruelly determined, Mandelstam proclaims: To Europeanize and humanize the twentieth century, to provide it with teleological warmth—this is the task of those emigrants who survived the shipwreck of the nineteenth century and were cast by the will of fate upon a new historical continent (CPL, 144). After the collapse of history and the shipwreck of the nineteenth century, all modern survivors are equally orphans and emigrants in the unknown land that is the twentieth century. The Jewish émigré turned Russian modernist finds his true community through disruption, and he takes his place at the center of his uprooted age as he works to articulate its mission.

In The Nineteenth Century, Mandelstam stresses the affinities that modern Russians share with their European brethren: the historical differences that divided Russia from its Western neighbors in the past have been washed away by the shipwreck of the modern age. The disasters and catastrophes that punctuate the pages of Mandelstam’s postrevolutionary essays serve as great levelers. They erase the differences that separate nations blessed with long, distinguished cultural traditions from countries whose pasts are more erratic, marked with the incoherence and gaps that Mandelstam sees as the trademark of both his family’s and his adopted nation’s history (POM, 172). And this is where we find the ties that link Mandelstam not so much to his fellow Europeans as to two Americans, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who turned to Europe’s past and present in search of what Eliot would also come to call world culture. Mandelstam’s dilemma and his compensatory vision were singular, but they were not unique; and it is no accident that two companions with whom he unwittingly shared his quest for an encompassing culture came, like him, from a country that stood uneasily on the outskirts of the European tradition.²³

In Pound’s oblique self-portrait of the artist Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), he mourns his hero’s birth in a half-savage country, out of date.²⁴ Mandelstam himself could conceive of only one country whose impenetrable thickets (CPL, 87) were less hospitable to culture’s shaping energies than those of his adopted homeland. The elemental forests and mighty vegetation of American civilization are, he claims in an early essay, impenetrable to the life-giving rays of culture (CPL, 99). This America is clearly akin to the Russia—a young country of half-animated matter and half-dead spirit (CPL, 81)—that Mandelstam seeks to colonize with the aid of Petr Chaadaev in his 1915 essay on the romantic philosopher.²⁵ And although we need not take Mandelstam’s characteristic hyperbole entirely at face value, America, like Russia, has always stood at an uncomfortable remove from the centers of European culture, and it shares with Russia a profound ambivalence toward the continent and the tradition to which it both does and does not belong. Mandelstam, Eliot, and Pound were alike, too, in sensing not only the difficulties, but the possibilities that accrued to the ambitious poet-synthesist who found his native land sorely lacking in the cultural legacy that could feed his outsized needs.

The Arts insist that a man shall dispose of all he has, even of his family tree, and follow art alone, Eliot announces in The Sacred Wood (1920).²⁶ The freedom that Mandelstam claims for the poet in I have not heard the tales of Ossian becomes an imperative for Eliot, but the impulse that lies behind both statements is recognizably the same, and the art both poets follow leads them in similar directions. Mandelstam’s Jewish emigrant origins made his relations with his adopted homeland even more complex than Eliot’s with his native land. Eliot and Mandelstam were alike, though, in their early sense that their inherited pasts barred them from the European culture they required, and they were alike in their insistence on the poet’s right to choose his own ancestry and sources. The provincial modernist is free to orphan himself in the hopes of achieving a more distinguished lineage and a richer, more rewarding legacy.

Mandelstam was preoccupied throughout his life, his wife observes, by the question of "succession and continuity (preemstvennost"), which he sought everywhere—in history, in culture, in art. In a late essay Eliot claims that the ideal tradition grows from the hereditary transmission of culture within a culture."²⁷ But the younger Eliot knew, as Mandelstam did, that his only hope for the heritage he sought lay in creative appropriation and inventive disruption. Mandelstam’s Chaadaev may have venerated the sacred bond and succession of events; but dispossessed poets who, like lands they come from, lack continuity and unity, are forced to find more roundabout ways to acquire traditions not rightfully theirs by birth (CPL 84, 88).

One method is theft. Great poets pile up all the excellences they can beg, borrow, or steal from their predecessors and contemporaries, Ezra Pound announces in an early essay on Dante. And Eliot echoes Pound in a famous dictum from Philip Massinger (1920): Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. Mature poets steal, and so do dispossessed ones, like Mandelstam’s François Villon, Pound’s Dante, or Pound, Eliot, and Mandelstam themselves. For the Mandelstam of the twenties and thirties, cultural theft becomes a way of life; true, unofficial culture thrives, like the poets who shape it, on stolen air (CPL, 316). The young Eliot chooses a less dubious route to European culture, a route that reveals his own origins in a nation of self-made citizens who value industry over inherited fortune and family name. Tradition, Eliot proclaims in Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. Honest labor replaces thievery in this version of events, which is nonetheless still the cultural vision of the Displaced Person or resident alien, who must start from scratch and struggle ceaselessly to work his way into his chosen tradition.²⁸ Eliot’s tradition places a heavy burden on the shoulders of the assiduous outsider who must work to earn his culture. It burdens him—but it also grants him special privileges. Tradition cannot be inherited. It cannot be sustained by passive reception or unreflecting repetition, and those who might appear to be in the direct line of succession are actually ill-served by their inherited histories. They do not perceive, as an outsider might, the need to work for what appears to be their birthright. They lack the drive and desire that come from the fact of being everywhere a foreigner and that are the special property of the perennial outsider.²⁹

There are advantages in coming from a large flat country that no one wants to visit.³⁰ Eliot’s remarks refer to Turgenev and James, but they speak just as well to his own situation and to Mandelstam’s. Though both poets sought to cut themselves off from inadequate pasts, they also learned to use their lack of a European birthright as they worked to invent and remember their world culture. The outsider who comes from the hinterlands may be inspired to go visiting himself, and his very foreignness and freedom from the European past may prove an unexpected asset in his travels. Mandelstam’s Chaadaev, whose historyless homeland has granted him freedom of choice, steps on to the sacred soil of the European tradition, a tradition to which he is not bound by inheritance, precisely by the right of being a Russian; and he energizes the sleepy, tradition-bound West by his foreign, unfettered presence (CPL, 88).

Eliot’s disinherited American goes one step further. It is the final perfection, the consummation of an American, Eliot declares, to become not an Englishman, but a European—something which no born European, no person of any European nationality can become. The young Mandelstam observes the Europe he covets in the outlines of a map: For the first time in a century, right before my eyes,/Your mysterious map is shifting! he exclaims (#68). The perspective could only come from one who stands outside the picture’s frame. Only the outsider, unconstrained by national boundaries, can hope to see Europe whole. And only the outsider can lay claim to all of its treasures, past and present, by becoming a true European—or so Eliot implies. In The Sacred Wood, Eliot laments the American remoteness in space from the European centre, but this very remoteness may also generate the tendency to seek the centre that permits the foreigner to become not a born, but a self-made, European. Mandelstam was very much aware that the new arrival who comes to Europe seeking unity ends by inventing his own West. Like Eliot and like his Chaadaev, he was nonetheless possessed by the wholeness hunger of modern poetry, and the whole that Mandelstam and Eliot longed for lay, like Chaadaev’s, in a Europe visible only to the eyes of the perennial outsider.³¹

Mandelstam, Eliot, and Pound began their careers with a quest for what Eliot calls a living and central tradition, and their search for the center of world culture took all three exiled, wandering poets to the same source—to the Mediterranean, to the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome, and to the Romance cultures that sprang up where Rome had sown its colonies. Pound’s ambitions ultimately led him beyond the confines even of this capacious heritage. His vaulting goal was to unite the cultures of America, Europe and the Orient in his Cantos; and Noh Dramas, Saxon sagas, and Chinese calligrams all find their way into the new civilization made up of other cultures that his work is intended to create.³² For Eliot and Mandelstam, however, the Mediterranean remained the center of the world and of its culture, and both sought the cultural home they lacked in their imagined Europe. The main stream of culture is the culture of Latin Europe, Eliot writes in 1948. The capital of Mandelstam’s world culture shifts with the place of man—and of Mandelstam himself—in the universe (#66); it migrates from Rome to Greece and even takes up residence in Erevan for a time, as it follows the poet on his Journey to Armenia (1933). But even when Mandelstam and his culture take up wandering for good, his final fellow traveler is Dante Aligheri, the Great European for Mandelstam and Eliot alike, and Mandelstam’s yearning for world culture translates in a late poem into a longing for the universal hills of Dante’s native Tuscany (CPL, 400; #352). The Mediterranean and its great poet, whose Divine Comedy reaches back to antiquity and forward to the modern world, accompanied Mandelstam throughout the exile, persecution, and isolation he endured in Stalin’s Russia of the thirties.³³

"We are all, so far as we inherit the civilization of Europe,