Meetings with Mandelstam

...He came willingly, although, apparently, he was not in the least moved by a visit to his childhood school...

...Mandelstam was lying on the bed, face turned toward the window looking on the Neva, smoking, and there was nothing which belonged to him in the room except the cigarettes-not one personal item...

...throwing back his small head like a young rooster...

...In several days his project had adopted the following form...

...Strolling with Niuma Levin along an endless university hallway, I, feeling the need to share my trepidation with someone, told him about my debt and how I had despaired of selling The River Pirates...

...He was always extremely poor, and every day at dinner time he would begin to think about where he could get several rubles in order to have dinner...

...simply because he was "Like an illegal comet/ Amidst the ordered luminaries...

...I w~nt up to them, and hope flashed in Mandelstam.'s eyes...

...I'm a streetcar straphanger in a terrible time" he wrote about himself shortly after the end of the civil war...

...We'd go sit in the restaurant, but In the harsh times which soon began they exiled him to Voronezh...

...This jacket was very large and full for Mandelstam, and only the ends of his fingers protruded from the long sleeves...

...When in 1913 Mandelstam wrote: "The proud, modest pedestrian-the eccentric Evgeny-ashamed of his poverty, he breathes gasoline and curses his fate...

...We're going an hour later," he said...

...But it turned out that I did not even have enough poems to make the tiniest little booklet...

...The next day I again went to Niuma Levin's...

...I obtained poems both from Vladislav Khodasevich and Anna Akhmatova-I kept their manuscripts for a long time...

...We would both have equal authority as publishers and editors...

...I gave out 10 copies to each author, gave a copy to all my acquaintances, but the pile remained almost undiminished...

...When I finished one poem he shook his head and said: "More...

...I opened my eyes...

...We covered them all in two hours...

...Niuma...

...I've come quailing back again To my infected boyhood, shames and pain...

...He transferred from the House of the Arts to the House of Scholars, where Gorky gave him a room, and for some reason or other I visited him there in the winter...

...I ran after him and caught him on the train platform...

...We would sell The River Pirates to Moscow book dealers...

...From time to time he would also come to Leningrad...

...And so I decided to publish a collection of poems of different poets, including my own among them...

...He recited his poems to us, all new, for about two hours, and in them were mentioned Persephone, Pyrrha, the Achean husbands, Troy, Helen...

...In the '30s he printed a cycle of poems about Armenia in the journal Zvezda...

...He was almost singing them, enjoying each sound, and his shaggy sleeves, like light fins, swam in the air...

...He arrived at these views under the influence of his Crimean impressions- in the Crimea everything to him resembled ancient Greece...

...There I found, in addition to Stenich and his wife, Mandelstam with Nadezhda Yakovlevna and Anna Akhmatova...

...All right, you're back-now swallow at a gulp The fish-oil of the Neva's flares: drink up...

...And I read more...

...When he took offense he would, like a rooster, throw back his little head with its thinning plumes of hair, his sharp adam's apple on his scraggy, poorly shaved neck would protrude, and he would begin to speak about his offended honor quite in the old officer's manner...

...We asked him to read his poems, and he recited many, carried away through the whole long, gloomy Leningrad night, growing ever and ever more animated...

...As Mandelstam explained to me, they had opened up most of the book and paper stalls at the railroad stations, but they had practically nothing to sell...

...He was then living on Griboedov Canal, 9, in a tiny two-room apartment...

...he would shake off his cigarette ashes over his left shoulder...

...In '35 or '36, on a rainy day in Autumn, I was returning from Moscow to Leningrad...

...When I had recited ali that I could, he said: "Don't recite those poems with such a rubbery voice, they're poor all the same...

...Two stores bought five copies apiece...

...In my grief I drank one of my jars of condensed milk and ate some bread and fell off to sleep...

...His window looked out on the frozen Neva, the furniture was elegant...

...Tomorrow we'll go together, and I'll pay you back on the train...

...and he appeared at it made up like Pushkin-in a gray top hat with glued-on sideburns...

...1 don't want to drag anything along," he replied to my surprised question...

...Petersburg...

...There are more bookstores there than in Petrograd, and there you'll sell them all...

...In a week Stenich was arrested...

...In the first place, Niuma had not returned my money, and I did not have a single kopeck...

...With this money we would begin to publish an artistic and literary journal...

...Young poets, dreaming of being printed in my collection, curried favor with me...

...I went along Myasnitskaya, Kuznetsky Bridge, and Tverskaya stopping in at the bookstores...

...I emptied my third jar of condensed milk and tossed it into the grass...

...The New Economic Policy was at its height, and almost all the bookstores were privately owned...

...o this is a day that yawns like a caesura: Serene from the start, almost painfully slowed...

...I had no other hope of paying the printers...

...he was portraying himself...

...Housed in a black stair-pit, I feel the crash Of bells that rip like scissors in my flesh, Waiting the long night through-dear friends, come: knock!I shuttle the slotted bolt in the door lock, Osip Mandelstam: translated by Maurice English quickly that it was already impossible to jump off, I went back into the car, sat down on a bench, and began to consider my situation, It seemed to me to be terrible...

...He would come with his wife to some town or other, would live there for several months in the apartments of his admirers, lovers of poetry, until it bored him, and then go on to some other place...

...He asked what train I was going on...

...It wasn't that I considered my poems excellent, not at all-I had a modest opinion of them...

...That was my first trip to Moscow and, in general, my first trip of any length at all-until then I had never gone farther from Petrograd than Pskov...

...Of course, he lived more than a little in Moscow, too...

...A debt of 381 million rubles was hanging over me and oppressing my soul...

...But that was compensated for by the fact that the whole first year class knew that I was an editor of the journal The Ship...

...In one they bought three, and that was only because Boba was a very sweet little boy and pleased the owner...

...The suitcase was small and, swallowed up in the huge hall, they were sitting closely pressed against one another like two sparrows...

...Here was a man who had constructed no daily life around himself and who was living without any external framework...

...Let's go...

...Thus he lived in Tbilisi, in Erevan, in Rostov, in Perm...

...And all my woes disappeared in an instant...

...I finished my bread...

...I awoke when the sun was already high above the roofs...

...To become the editor of a journal and print anything that you want in it-can one possibly imagine a greater happiness...

...For all his life he was a proud pedestrian...

...I yearn through every street For the friends I used to have: Cadavers, speak...

...It was going to be necessary to sell The River Pirates, and as quickly as possible I set out with my brother Boba, who was 11 then, to do the rounds of the Petrograd bookstores...

...The students were free to go on vacations, and Niuma Levin and I decided not to put the trip off any longer and to go "Lend me your money until tomorrow," said Niuma...

...Having had some wine, Mandelstam grew more lively...

...Our hostess led us to the table in the other room...

...And on the spot they bought my claim ticket for The River Pirates, and at once paid me a billion rubles for them...

...Very soon it became clear to me that all the book stores in Moscow would not take even 50 copies from me...

...And he led me along the scorching Moscow streets and brought me to some sort of private contractor's printing press, located in one little room in a semi-basement...

...I gave him all my money and went home...

...He was setting out for Moscow, and he did not even have a cap on...

...In the street I noticed that he didn't have any luggage...

...And on his left shoulder there was always a little pile of ashes...

...I at once agreed to everything...

...Then I put my empty sack under my head, stretched out on the bench, and fell into a very deep sleep...

...He lived very near the railroad station, and we left his apartment about 20 minutes before the train was to leave...

...The printing of this little book was 2,000 copies...

...I fell asleep in a sitting position...

...My St...

...He had no personal possessions, no home, nor even a permanent region-he led a wanderer's life...

...At the Leningrad station in Moscow I saw Mandelstam sitting with his wife on a shabby suitcase...

...I met Mandelstam only occasionally in the course of the next 15 years...

...His poems were eagerly copied and memorized by poetry lovers, but there was nothing said about them in print...

...In spite of the fact that Osip Emilevich barely knew me and his relations with my family were rather superficial, seeing me sleeping on a street bench, he acted with warmth and sympathy toward me...

...He, who had constantly rambled from city to city, could have lived in Voronezh, too, but the tragedy was that he had absolutely no source of subsistence...

...Not knowing what steps I should take, I asked where the center of town was and slowly ambled along Myasnitskaya...

...When they would refuse us, Boba, as he left the store, spat on the threshold...

...My uncle works in the Railroad Ministry and can arrange for the ticket...

...I did not even have a paltry 250 thousand kopecks for a streetcar ticket...

...We would return to Petrograd, and Niuma Levin would add to my several hundred million his own several hundred million, in the same amount...

...He would fall from sight for long periods, then he would come into view again...

...We had an excellent title for our journal: The Ship...

...It's early yet to die, (You have the old phone-numbers I've lived by...

...During this unfortunate spring I became friendly with a student named Naum Levin, whom we called simply Niuma...

...The long hot day was fading...

...Mandelstam read stressing the sound and not the sense of the poetry, and I listened with pleasure to the sound combinations he made In those years his appearance was remotely similar to that of Pushkin, and he knew it...

...The table was not elegant, but there were several bottles of wine...

...Osip Emilevich reacted with complete contempt to The River Pirates, but my debt of 381 million drew his interest and excited him...

...Oxen browse in the field, and a golden languor Keeps me from drawing a rich, whole note from my reed...

...I can get you a free ticket...

...His forehead was covered with sweat...

...Mandelstarn recited many of his poems...

...Taking advantage of the weakness of the surveillance there and driven by hunger and longing, he several times ran off to Moscow, and once he even got to Leningrad...

...In one of his articles Mandelstam wrote that for him, as a classless intellectual, compositions based upon family traditions such as Aksakov's The Childhood Years of Bagrov's Grandson were alien because a classless intellectual has no family traditions, has no past at all apart from the books he has read...

...It wasn't a bad book-a thousand copies...

...By that time summer had begun...

...I k the last decade of his life he did not at all resemble Pushkin...

...I'll go with you," he added...

...He turned around, but he didn't look me in the eyes...

...Before dawn it grew cold, and I had a sudden desire to eat...

...But he had a full sense of his own worth, and great selfrespect, and he was very quick to take offense...

...lot only my timid literary attempts, but also the whole range of my literary tastes were alien to him Of the Russian poets he most of all loved Pushkin, Batiushkov, and Baratynsky...

...Besides, I still had the publishing itch...

...As a result of the sale, after the deduction of my debt, I would have a sum amounting to several hundred million rubles...

...I was taking The SUMMER SOLSTICE Orioles live in the elms, and in classical verse The lcnzth of the vowels alone determines the measure...

...And so The River Pirates was ready, adorned in a white art-paper cover, and the entire printing was sent to our apartment on Kirochnaya Street and stacked in a corner of my room...

...Stenich made an attempt to read some poems from the just published Second Book of Poems by Zabolotsky...

...They sent him there although he was guilty of nothing...

...The meaning of these poems came to me much later, but at that time I was carried away by their sound...

...His character soured, his readiness to take offense grew, he more and more often found himself in a nervous, exasperated frame of mind...

...An inexplicable logical inconsistency...

...I passed only half of my exams, and that in a mediocre way, and I did not move forward to the second class...

...I had one copy of The River Pirates with me which I showed to the store managers, asking how many copies of such a book they could buy from me...

...In the afternoon my friend Stenich phoned me and asked me to come by in the evening...

...Our bleak December day of course you know, The ominous pitch, the house-fronts' yellow glow, St...

...My closer relations with him date from this time, because in Moscow he gave me great help and hoisted me from disaster...

...It was essential to pay my bill at the printing shop, but how could I get hold of the money...

...I'm not going," he said, and he jumped from the moving train...

...Mandelstam was wearing a rough, dark gray jacket, which Yury German had given to him an hour before...

...Gradually the boulevard emptied...

...He had once studied, as I did, at the Tenishev School in Petersburg, but he graduated about 15 years earlier than 1. At the request of my fellow students I somehow brought him to the Tenishev School to read his poetry, just as I had earlier brought Nikolai Gumilyov...

...In two stores they took 10 copies apiece, but that was on commission, with the money to be paid to us only when the copies had been sold out, In the others they did not take any...

...I panicked...

...I suddenly found myself an influential person, and I reveled in this...

...Four middle- aged NEP-men were sitting there...

...Once and once only a year nature knows quantity Stretched to the limit as in Homer's meter...

...He helped me carry the books...

...Both perished...

...It turned out that Petrograd did not even have 20 bookstores...

...Over me stood Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, anxiously and attentively looking me over...

...Mandelstam and I said goodbye, and I set off for the railroad station lugging my billion on my shoulders...

...And so [because I had an opportunity to obtain credit at a Pertrograd printshop] I decided to publish them myself...

...I lived through the entire spring of 1922 in gloom and trepidation...

...But all the same, I thought only about how I could get them printed...

...We can both stay at their house...

...feeling that someone was staring into my face...

...Still drowsy, I did not answer his questions very intelligibly...

...Soon after his arrival at the House of the Arts there was a masquerade, NIKOLAI CHUKOVSKY, the Russian...

...He rarely succeeded in getting his poems printed now...

...When he smoked, Osip Emilevich usually did not use an as~tray...

...In the second, I did not know one person in Moscow, and I had nowhere to stay...

...Well, we'll take care of that right now," he said...

...In Moscow it was sunny and very hot...

...Then he asked me to read...

...Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, knew him for a period of 17 years, and saw him rather frequently, but I was never close to himin part because of the difference in our ages, in part because he, with the sincerity that was peculiar to him, never concealed from me his extremely disdainful attitude toward everything I wrote...

...He explained to us that Russian poetry is Hellenic in spirit, and that the sole path of its purification was a return to Hellenism...

...He grew up in imperial Petersburg amid the military parades and carriages with coats of arms, but his father was a small leather merchant, and little Osip had nothing to do with either parades or coats of arms...

...I sat down on a bench on Tversky Boulevard and passed the whole night there...

...He was about four years older than I, and that alone was enough to earn my respect for him...

...He lived in Petrograd at that time until the spring of 1922, and I would meet him at the House of the Arts and at the Nappelbaums...

...To my surprise Niuma found nothing tragic in my situation...

...Only then did I suspect that something was not right...

...I have relatives in Moscow...

...I had already begun to occupy myself actively with the collection of material for the first issue...

...To my sorrow no one expressed a desire to print them...

...The chapter was translated for us by Andrew Field...

...Unwillingly and without any animation she recited a poem which we all knew well...

...It goes with out saying, of course, that I had by that time several score of poems, but I considered only two or three, the ones which I had most recently written, to be worthwhile...

...In the summer of 1922 I especially felt the full force of his unusual detachment from any sort of daily routine when I was with him in Moscow, in the room on Tversky Boulevard which the House of Herzen had given to him...

...But what can you do, that's how it was...

...I would meet him mainly in Leningrad...

...I was struck by his nervousness and depression...

...We would both go to Moscow and take with us the whole printing of The River Pirates...

...Petersburg...

...I was 18, I wrote poems, and I passionately dreamed of seeing them in print...

...While I was considering whether or not I should jump after him, the train began to move so LENINGRAD My city...

...It was then that I perceived his most striking characteristic- his air of "just-passing-throughness...

...Mandelstam listened to me attentively, and his face showed neither approval nor disapproval...

...In 1928 he published a collection, Poems...

...novelist, died suddenly on November 5. Here we present a shortened version of a chapter from his memoirs, which appeared last year in the Soviet literary journal Moskva...

...On the next day he left Leningrad...

...Osip Mandelstam: translated by Stanley Kunit: Arrow...

...My relatives in Moscow have everything The train shivered and slowly began to move...

...We started right off with poetry-to both of us everything else seemed less important...

...Bills of large denomination did not exist then, so all of this billion was shoved with difficulty into my empty knapsack...

...We Tenishevtsy sat on wooden benches in the hall, where they played tag during the breaks between classes, while he, standing, read before us-triumphantly, as though he were singing...

...I remember that I visited him once in the summer when he was living at Detskoe Selo...

...In the beginning Mandelstam was taciturn and gloomy, but then everyone else was silent too...

...He began to ask Akhmatova to recite something...

...And besides, where would I go...

...He talked a lot, now jumping up, now sitting down...

...I landed in Moscow in the following way...

...He escorted me into the garden of the House of Herzen, past the front garden, and sat down with me on a bench in the shade of a linden tree...

...The print shop, which had no back orders on hand, got the book ready in several days...

...I t turned out that, without being aware of it, I had passed the night directly opposite the House of Herzen (Tversky Boulevard, 25), the literary center of Moscow at that time and the place where Mandelstarn then occupied a room in the left wing...

...sometimes he would suddenly let his head drop to the table, and when he raised it there were tears in his eyes...

...It was there that I saw him for the last time...

...So everything was for nothing...

...I recited my latest poems, zealously and in exactly the same way that he himself and all the Acmeists read-that is, underscoring with my voice the sound and rhythmic aspect of the poetry rather than its sense...

...We collectively thought up a martial title for the collection-The River Pirates...

...You simply have to go to Moscow," he said...

...Later Mandelstam, too, was arrested...

...We would stay at his relatives...

...he recited them with great feeling, but Akhmatova listened coldly, while Mandelstam, with his peculiar bluntness, said that he liked neither the old nor the new poems of Zabolotsky...

...with gilt, there were circular mirrors in gilt frames, the ceiling was extraordinarily high and a semidarkness hung under it, and there was an old clock in the corner, as large as a cupboard, which recorded not only the second, minute, and hour, but also the month and day...

...Niuma suddenly nodded to me and quickly started for the door...