From Mortal to Immortal Love

Mandelstam wrote another set of poems marked by the contrast between love as a form of deep social feeling and love as a renunciation of the earthly. Poems that represent love as a social bond celebrate intimacy as friendship, showing a sense of ethical responsibility and protective consolation in a hostile world. Love as depicted here is, in the famous phrase of the Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev in On the Meaning of Love, ‘the justification and salvation of individuality through the sacrifice of egoism’. Other poems elevate love to a metaphysical category, reviving the use of archetype that Mandelstam favoured before 1918. But instead of troubled figures like Phaedra and Helen of Troy, the feminine ideal projected here takes the form of otherworldly angels who transcend death. Those visions of the eternal beloved complement the poet’s flight to safety described in the final poems of exile.

‘Octaves’

The Soviet regime asked of its citizens transparency of motivation in the drive towards socialist consciousness. In the cycle ‘Octaves’, Mandelstam reprised the process of internal inspection previously broached in the ‘Slate Ode’. Whereas the ode configured subjectivity as in Freudian terms still acceptable to Soviet psychology, by the early 1930s, more scientific, rationalist models of the mind dominated. In exploring whether the mind of the poet is its own internal world, and what laws determine how thought develops, Mandelstam drew on Goethe’s description of plant morphology, supplemented by the theories of speech by his own contemporary, the pioneering neuropsychologist Lev Vygotsky. What is in nature, what is in us, what is accidental and what can be controlled? The chapter ends with poems that wonder whether it would solve the problem of uncontrollable thought (and subversiveness) if the poet’s mind were like the Aeolian harp and poems like music.

‘Verses on Russian Poetry’

The chapter considers Mandelstam’s 1932 ‘Verses on Russian Poetry’ as an act of engagement with Soviet critical debates on poetry and ideology, and on the nature of the poetic canon. The cycle has been deemed to illustrate Mandelstam at his most hermetic and even backward-looking, read as poems that put up a verbal screen. In fact, it is highly topical and draws heavily on contemporary newspaper material about literary groups and reviews of his own work. A new, productive method of reading such difficult texts is proposed here by showing how closely the cycle assimilates its horizon of expectation, using the language of parable, allegory, visual emblem, and political quotation. Flowing out of the events described in Chapter 1, the cycle asks whether there are limits to the evolutionary model of survival of the fittest that operates in an age of class warfare, and whether in a poetic world that formerly cultivated dialogue the poet still has a place.

Into the Fourth Dimension

From early 1937, attacks on Mandelstam appeared in the local Voronezh press. The story of adapting to exile and escape from his political plight connects the poems of the notebooks. The chapter examines how the works written in that year explore the various prospects for survival, haunted by the example of homelessness of Schubert’s Winterreise. These experiences drive Mandelstam to consider whether the extensive reach of Stalin can ever be evaded, plotting whether flight might lead to freedom. The remaining possibility might be to surrender politically and submit to Stalin, seeking pardon. The book circles back to Mandelstam’s relation to the revolution by examining his late poem, the ‘Stalin Ode’, one of the most controversial poems in the Russian language, read here as a work of ironic defiance that manipulates panegyric subversively and closes off any possibility of rapprochement. Mandelstam’s final lyrics imagine flight into invisible realms.

Moving Pictures

One area of experimentation in Mandelstam’s poetics was the visual. As a young modernist, he wrote poems about new technologies like the telephone and the cinema. During the 1920s he dabbled in writing film scripts. In the early 1930s, beset by the class warfare, Mandelstam dramatized his feelings of urban alienation in the Moscow poems. ‘I’m still far from being a patriarch’ is the focus of a reading that looks at the development of new representational strategies in his work. More Futurist than Acmeist, the poem’s creative vigour lies in its layering of visual material and its use of cinematic techniques of focalization rather than subtextual allusion. While its Chaplinesque hero provides a timely alter ego for a writer famously seen as steeped in high culture, the lyric is also full of ironic self-questioning about its own devices, the mechanization of art, and about the mimetic regime of Socialist Realism.

The Voronezh Poems (1934–7) and the Geometry of Exile

This chapter concentrates on the poems of the First Voronezh Notebook that chronicle exile, starting with the journey into the unknown and transitioning unevenly to the theme of habituation. Drawing on folkloric tropes as well as cinematic devices, the poems represent a hope that the exile might escape through shape-shifting or heroic antics, as well as the fear of oblivion that he faces. One key anxiety and source of inspiration concerns the endlessness of the flat steppe extending from Voronezh, and the poet turns his mind to plotting the geography of exile in relation to the Kremlin, to metropolitan culture, to Voronezh itself, and ultimately to the vast space that threatens to engulf him. Counterpointing poems about human contact and socialization are lyrics that with ‘an eye sharper than steel’ scrutinize space for forms that can be moulded by the imagination.

Love’s Body

Mandelstam’s love poetry is built out of a dialectical tension between sexual desire and repudiation of the body, expressed by sublimating eroticism into either intimate feeling or rapture that transports the lover into ‘a country beyond the eye-lashes’. Poems written in the mid-1920s stage scenes in which feeling escalates from attraction via flirtation to carnal desire, and then to a transcendent vision involving self-sacrifice and Liebestod. The male figure in a number of these poems moves from a sexually passive posture to sexual desire that is more overt, but also dressed up in theatrical role playing, and the ideal of the sexless male is posited, as is an ideal of devotion including Caritas. The stylistic range of the poems places them among Mandelstam’s most enchanting and challenging. He was always capable of poetic difficulty, and these poems present enigmas whose interpretation folds in earlier discoveries such as the use of the emblem and the figure of Chaplin, and expands our sense of the parallel developments of the worldly and unworldly writer.

Objects

In the early 1930s, Mandelstam wrote a set of short poems about objects. These lyrics, read here from the perspective of modern thing-theory as well as early Soviet writings on ‘the thing’, occasion meditations on questions of aesthetics: What is the difference between a thing and an object? How much work should the viewer be expected to do to recover the original intention of the craftsman? Does social utility spoil beauty? These questions impinge on the value of found things like stones used by Mandelstam as metaphors for the kind of beautiful object that might look found rather than made, that is, anonymous and formally perfect. Should texts be written this way? Would that solve the problem of uncontrollable thought? The chapter concludes with a discussion of lyrics that, as pure poems, seek to operate according to an independent musical language. Can they remain aloof from the world and poetic biography?

Painting

This chapter observes that references to the eye and parts of the eye (eyelashes, iris, pupil, sclera, retina, and socket) are pervasive in Mandelstam’s prose and poetry. These references intensify around 1931, at a time when his poems establish a visual dialectic between representations of art (cinema, painting, objects) and also make use of images from Soviet life, adding what W.J.T. Mitchell calls ‘iconotexts’ to the emblems or ideograms seen in the poems of the early 1920s. A close reading of a famous passage from the travel piece Journey to Armenia unravels from its references to French painters and theorists the background behind Mandelstam’s terminology and his preoccupation with the physiological sensitivity of the eye. The Russian art scene was strongly influenced by French neo-Impressionist painting, in both theory and practice, and Mandelstam’s references condense a cultural moment of great prominence and influence. The chapter moves on to poems that aim to transpose onto a verbal canvas some of the lessons of these schools of painting, opening up new worlds governed by rules of art rather than rules of ideology at a time when the Soviet state was imposing canons of representation.

Revolutionary Lyric

This chapter examines a set of four poems, written between 1921 and 1924, that combine a certain abstraction of language with visceral violence. Mandelstam develops a set of techniques for his lyric poetry that will permanently enrich his poetics in exploring new themes such as guilt and violence; in another poem he creates an emblem to represent generational warfare, combining the highly pictorial and the abstract, and reflecting on questions of whether the ends justify the means; in a third, Mandelstam uses allegory and emblems to represent, in his own way, the analogy between the French Revolution and the Terror widespread in early Bolshevik culture, interrogating the historiography to see whether the past is of any use in predicting the future. In a eulogy to Lenin, the question of Russia’s direction remains acutely open-ended.