Prayer in the Soviet Night

...There were strange currents loosed about me-from the longing for suicide to the expectation of the end of the world...

...In Mandelstam young Russian poets see not only a great poet to emulate, but also an example of their right to be wrong (Babel's phrase) and even willfully poor if they choose, and many do...

...The Noise of Time suffers, quite simply, because Mandelstam's early life was very limited...

...When he was sent to the concentration camp, he broke completely...

...This trait is stressed as a virtue by Mandelstam numerous times, especially in his prose...

...Reviewed by ANDREW FIELD Osip mandelstam, born in 1891 into a petit bourgeois Jewish family, was one of the prominent poets of the pre-Revolutionary Acmeist movement in Russian poetry...

...It seems to me most unwise to attempt to suggest that there is any strict order in this disjointed tale...

...Even now his popularity among the most serious young Soviet poets is truly astonishing, Mandelstam's poetic voice and his eccentric, impoverished life have become a model more appealing to young poets than Vladimir Mayakovsky's civic flamboyance, A good illustration of this influence is the young poet losif Brodsky, whose manner and style are unmistakably "Mandelstamian...

...One, however, seems to me the most likely of all I have heard or read, and I was told about it by an old poet who was a close friend of Pasternak's...

...Mandelstam's personality emerges strongly from his poetry, and this is something of a paradox, achieved by means of a peculiar indirection...

...Mandelstam has now been officially rehabilitated, but a Soviet edition of his poetry, announced several years ago, has yet to appear...

...Mandelstam never really had the opportunity to try his hand at artistic prose, and what he did write may be regarded as first trials in a new genre...

...For he was keenly aware of the vacuum of culture in his immediate family, and he was not only reticent about himself, but also, in a sense, incapable of direct character delineation in his art...

...But the fact remains that such emotional crises and points of honor became almost a daily occurrence in Mandelstam's life...

...It is not that Mandelstam is considered dangerous (although, in a deeper sense, he is), it was explained to me, it is merely a petty expression of hostility against those who love Mandelstam and his poetry...

...The notion of Mandelstam's prose as "s urrealistic" is another borrowed concept, but one th at would better have been left alone . Russian literature did not know Surrealism as such, although it is true, as Philip Toynbee ha s noted, that there is a clear note of Surrealism as it was known in Western Europe in Mayakovsky, and the re is at least one writer, the neglected Boris Poplavsky, who ca ll be justly termed a Surrealist...

...He is attempting, by indirection, to "capture his age," but his statements frequently remind us of how much outside the real pulse of Russian culture the young Mandelstam was...

...What answer...

...Soviet Russia in the '30s...

...I am true to my friends...

...Clearly the background of the story demands greater exploration, but it seems likely that the emergence of additional fact s will not solve but merely further complicate The Egyptian Stamp...

...As ballet slippers belong to ballerinas, so galoshes belong to you...

...Russia could boast at least 5,000 members of one of the most extraordinary intellectual communities Europe has ever known...

...But when applied to Mandelstam's prose, the term has no meaning in the sense that it is used by Nadeau, and it is simply a handy sticker for those who fee l that every jar must have its label or there is nothing in it...

...He was on several occasions "brought to arbitration" by other writers over petty but fierce disputes, and once, in 1928, he was accused of plagiarism-falsely, it would seem, for there is a stirring protest against this charge in the Central Moscow Archives which was made by the writers Vsevolod Ivanov and Yury Olesha...

...Yet they are also wry, individualistic, and sometimes ethereal, and Mandelstam draws freely on colloquial speech...

...D. S. Mirsky wrote that Mandelstarn's prose essays "contain perhaps the most remark able, unprejudiced, and independent things that have ever been said on modern Russian civilization and on the art of poetry...

...And, in fact, Mandelstam's prose-the autobiographical Noise of Time and Theodosia and the semi-autobiographical short story The Egyptian Stamp which make up this book-is hopelessly entangled in and debilitated by the poet's unusual basic premise...

...To give but one small sample, Mandelstam once wrote about French decadence : "Paris is Hell...

...He also thought that every day at 6 o'clock he was going to be shot and, as the hour approached, he would lapse into psychic spasms...

...Taut sails./ I've read through half the list of ships / The sea and Homer-all moves by love./ Whom shall I hear...

...For both poets, to live in Hell is a great honor- such great misfortune is the lot of a king It 's a strange thin g : you have only to take away des Esseintes' money and his stores of erudition, and he would turn into a unique decadent version of Gogol' s Aka...

...and the germination of time...

...Unfortunately, the SCholarly artifacts with which this book has been furnished constitute a most unnecessary annoyance...

...and this would also have been the case if his prose had been presented along with even prosaic translations of his major poems...

...Twenty years of such a dance make an epoch...

...He believed that his food was being poisoned and so stole other prisoners' food, for which he was mercilessly beaten...

...But this is only the common caricature of those years, and every intellectual household in Russia was not, as Mandelstam supposed, picking out the dull polka from Andreev's Life of Man with one finger on the piano...

...As reported by Clarence Brown, what happened was the following: One evening, shortly after Mandelstam had been arrested, Pasternak unexpectedly received a telephone call from Stalin who asked Pasternak if he thought Mandelstam was a good poet...

...We are introducing the Gothic into word relations," he wrote about Acmeism, "in the way Bach brought it into music...

...Frequently one spelling is used in the text while another is followed in the footnotes, and in this way, Tsvetaeva becomes Cvetaeva on the same page, and Parnakh is turned into Parnax.This will doubtless be quite confusing for the reader who does not know Russian...

...Try them on, exchange themthis is your choice, It is performed in dark antechambers, but on one strict condition: disrespect for the master of the house...

...There was, I was told, nothing reprehensible in Pasternak's action - Mandelstam was a person with an extremely mercurial personality for whom it would have been madness to be "responsible" in those years...

...In the end, I was told, Mandelstam's tragic life will provide firm insurance against future repressions of his poetry...

...There was a certain similarity be tween Mandelstam and Parnakh , and Brown correctly supposes that there is something of both men in Mandelstam's protagonist...

...Even Balzac agrees with this axiom...

...Moreover, from the conversation Pasternak had some reason to suppose that Mandelstam's fate had already been decided and that it was his own which depended upon the answer he gave Stalin...

...Mo re important than these relatively minor irritations, though, is the fact Clarence Brown seems to have come across everything that has eve r been said about Mandelstam in print , and there are some important and fascinating findings of real scholarly value in his introduction . For example, it brings to light for the first time the information, given to Brown by a Soviet writer who wished to remain anonymous, that Mandelstam' s Parnok is based upon a real poet, the emigre Valentin Parnakh (his sister, also a writer, had ch anged he r name to Parnok ) , whose other primary claim to fame is a portrait done of him in 1922 by Picasso...

...More interesting than The Noise of Time and Theodosia is The Egyptian Stamp...

...If these basic attributes of his verse seem somewhat at odds, there are still greater contradictions in the figure of Mandelstam himself...

...Such ostentatious fussiness, like the guest who noisily splashes in his finger bowl at dinner, produces the opposite effect from what is desired...

...A method of transliteration has been used for names and places which is suitable only for English transcriptions of Russian verse, although, even here, Nabokov, for example, wisely chooses to use yo instead of e,ya instead of ia, and so on, in his Onegin commentaries...

...In The Noise of Time he declares: "My desire is to speak not about myself but to track down the age, the noise...

...Inevitably, Mandelstam was trampled by the Revolution, and presentiment of his fate is sounded in many of his best poems...

...Soviet writers and poets, I think it can be fairly said, conducted themselves, on the whole, with amazing courage and dignity...

...As one Russian critic correctly observed: "Parnok [and the other characters] and Petersburg are completely chance objects, necessary to no one, which are present in The Egyptian Mark only because one cannot simply write about absolutely nothing at all...

...In the same way, not even the most famous short story in all of Russian literature can be mentioned without carefully intoning: "Gogol's Shinel' (The Overcoat...

...as a literary genre , has no forerunners in Russian literature...

...but his two small books, The Stone and Tristia, enjoyed from the beginning an esteem which has never really diminished...

...forty, history," Clarence Brown's translation, by the way, is very careful, and if the salt of Mandelstam's language is missing, this is a problem about which the translator is painfully aware and refreshingly frank...

...But the precise purpose of Mandelstam's having given, as it were, ha lf of himself to another poet is not really considered . When Mandelstam exclaims : "Lord...

...Mandelstam won the day on that occasion, but in many other instances his volatility was less purposeful and noble...

...One hopes that Clarence Brown will now go on to these two more important tasks...

...I am a contemporary of Akhmatova...

...All the agitation of the times communicated itself to me," he writes...

...Give me the strength to distinguish myself from him," is he confronting the possibility of emigration...

...Mandelstam died in a Stalinist concentration camp near Vladivostok in 1938...

...Mandelstam's own public posture was heroic, but it was also all but hysterical, and it grew more so...

...and it has been my experience that the unsounded j's which flourish under this system tend to be pronounced in the French manner by these readers, thereby hopelessly distorting the simplest Russian names...

...My memory is inimical to all that is personal...

...The prose skips, turns, and weaves in a way that suggests disorientation rather than conscious design...

...which makes a collage of a Gogolian motif ( new coat), some stolen shirts, a wellknown singer, the turmoil of the times, and, flitting through it all, .a Mandelstamian character named Parnok...

...Mandelstam did leave us some matchless prose in his essays and reviews which sparkle and sear with penetrating insight...

...He was a poetic Isaac Babel who, alas, had not the slightest idea of how to mount a horse and come to terms with his "beastlike" century...

...There are numerous other variants of this famous conversation, and when I was in Moscow I heard several of them...

...Mandelstam tells us that he read Aleksandr B10k as a boy, but he candidly adds: "and he got on splendidly with the civic themes and all that gibberish verse.' When we consider the evidence-direct and indirect-of Mandelstam's autobiography, and then consider how he very shortly thereafter became one of the most erudite and refined of modern Russian poets, we realize that he is the example par excellence of how poets are born, not made...

...If Mandelstarn 's prose pieces had been presented along with his essays and reviews, the resulting boo k would have been a publishing event of major importance...

...At a public poetry reading in 1933 he was handed a provocative note from the audience asking him to "assess the significance of the older poets who have come to us from pre-Revolutionary times...

...He was arrested as a result of an epigram mocking Stalin which he recited before some fellow writers, one of whom, fearing for his own safety, reported the incident to the head of Litcontrol...

...You know, Comrade Stalin," Pasternak supposedly replied, "you should no more ask one poet what he thinks of another than you should ask a pretty woman her opinion of another pretty woman's looks...

...One fears that the exces sive claims which have been made for the three prose pieces in this book (barely 50 ,000 words in all) will damp en reader inter est in Mandelstam's poetry...

...Do not make me like Parnok...

...Baudelaire and Huysmans drew the ultimate conclusions from it...

...Indeed, this is central to understanding Brodsky's long poem Elegy for John Donne (NL, May 10), in which the long incantation of objects derives directly from one of Mandelstam's most famous poems: "Insomnia, Homer...

...He screamed out in reply: "What do you want from me...

...Curiously, one of Parnakh 's own poems faces one of the central dilemmas in Mandelstam's story (and in 1926, two years before its publication...

...Akakievich...

...Cla rence Brown has also been rather less th an careful in regard to some other scholarly amenitie s. Hi s introduction dwells at some length on the analogy between The Noise of Time and Apollon Grigorev's memoirs, Mv Literary and Moral Wanderings, but he neglects to credit th is highly pertinent comparison to the emigre literary historian Vyacheslav Zavalishin who first made the point in reply to an assertion in a 19 55 Russian-language emigre edition of Mandelstam that "The Noise of Time...

...A small, ungainly man who stressed his own alienation from all traditions and social loyalties, he nonetheless chose to remain in Russia after 1917 and even accepted the Revolution, albeit in a most doleful and fatalistic manner: "Let us praise the dark burden of power,/ Its unbearable yoke," and in another poem: "For the blessed, meaningless word/ I shall pray in the Soviet night...

...Now Homer is silent...

...I see The Egyptian Stamp as a long chain of tenuouslyconnected set pieces, and, if one has the patience, there are gems among them: "Gentlemen, litterateurs...

...There is a celebrated incident concerning his arrest in which Boris Pasternak figures...

...in a far calmer manner than does Parnok: "A mall can inhabit any cloak/ And in any terror he still guzzles and sleeps...

...His poems, as this statement and the titles of his books show, are dense, imposing, and Latinate...

...MandeIstam was not a prolific poet...

...Ilya Ehrenburg's well-known account in his memoirs of Mandelstam's death as he "sat beside the fire reciting the sonnets of Petrarch" is beautiful fiction...

...According to this version, Stalin asked Pasternak if he would be willing personally to vouch for Mandelstam's behavior in the future, and, after painful hesitation, Pasternak said he could not...