Poet of Unquenchable Joy

...His own brother, with whom his relations were often strained, earned the disdain he reserved for anyone who manipulated or sacrificed other people...

...The Conspirators, The Pardon lrjiiMTipIs i»t t.ipc- llkistr.iti'il with ru'.irh ^iphnft^Mphv ,t|| h<i<ksti'ri<N Norton 1KK1N S COMPANY May 7, 1979 17 would have read Zoshchenko's best book and exulted like a Tatar running off with a hundred stolen rubles . . . I would have taken courage with me in my yellow straw basket piled high with fresh, clean-smelling linen, and my fur coat would have danced on a golden hook...

...Reviewed by Josephine Woll Assistant Professor of Russian Literature, Howard University Osip Mandelstam is almost universally held to be the greatest Russian poet of this century, but that is only part of the reason for welcoming the appearance in English of his entire body of critical prose and letters...

...The literary quarrels of the day, however, are of less interest to us than Mandelstam's concern with the continuing questions of poetry: Whom does the poet address...

...In essays such as "Government and Rhythm" or "Humanism and the Present," the Revolution is described as an experiment in "social architecture," a construction that, if motivated by the vision of universal brotherhood, would soar like the Gothic cathedrals he loved...

...Clearly referring here to the hacks and bureaucrats who were persecuting him, his vitriol is, a few paragraphs later, followed by a typical example of his lyric, childlike enthusiasm at the possibilities life offers: "Had I traveled to Erevan [capital of Armenia], I would have spent three days and three nights eating black caviar sandwiches at the huge railway station buffets...

...Read him "with all your powers and with complete conviction," he urged,"transplant yourself completely to the field of action of the poetic material...

...For example, he accurately points out that the Symbolists, an influential group until the Revolution, gut images "like scarecrows . . . theroseisalikenessofthesun.the sun is a likeness of a rose, a dove of a girl, and a girl of a dove...

...Clarence Brown aptly observes that Mandelstam accepted a "traditional humanistic code, not less traditional for its being so seldom observed, of human decency...

...At last he tells the full story, as only he can...

...Nothing is left but a terrifying quadrille of 'correspondences,' all nodding to one another...

...What is poetry's role in society...

...It sought to promote the notion of words as verbal representations that are not simply reducible to their sounds (the device of another group, the Futurists), but are complex bundles of sounds, connotations, meanings...

...Arrested in 1933 and again in 1937, he died in one of Stalin's camps in December 1938...

...Most poems today are simply bad, as most poems have always been bad...

...From his earliest essays, marked by casual bull's-eye evaluations of writers and literary movements, Mandelstam addresses the issues that preoccupied him his whole life...

...Let's mutiny...

...Eternal winking...

...John J. Sirica To Set the Record Straight The Break in.TheTapes...

...A fter a reasonably serene childhood and adolescence, Mandelstam, who turned 26 the year of the Revolution, spent his maturity in incessant wandering and unavoidable dependence on the generosity of friends...

...people whose names come up in a letter often are not identified in the notes until they are mentioned in a subsequent letter...

...Going on in this vein, Mandelstam cites a "splendid" line of poetry that has for him the power to disperse evil spirits:" I did not shoot the wretched in the dungeons...

...Never a clear word, nothing but hints and reticent whispers...

...it goes hand-in-hand with a capacity for wonder, an acute eye for distinguishing between truth and sham, and a sensibility that responds to tenderness no less than irony...

...Apart from their intellectual sophistication, complexity and subtlety, given the poet's suffering, his letters and the essays are noteworthy for an unexpected quality—unquenchable joy...

...the "Citizen" declines in importance compared to "Man...

...Nonetheless the plusses far outweigh the minuses...

...and the context of various letters are obscure, leaving one to wonder why Mandelstam was in one place and his wife in another...

...but soon my poems will merge with it, thereby altering something of its structure and composition...

...In a letter he wrote to him in 1936, when the Mandelstams were literally living on handouts, he said:" Listen, Zhenya: it's not a question of whether you'll send the money or not...

...That is valid for prose as for poetry, for Mandelstam as for Dante, and it is what this collection enables us to do...

...As Man-delstam's poems and essays eloquently testify, he was ambivalent about the Revolution even while it was taking place, and then grew increasingly pessimistic...

...His professional existence was limited, officially, to translating and an occasional review or screenplay...

...The former are all trash...

...The rose nods to the girl, the girl to the rose...

...In his case, of course, there is also the question of the role of the State...

...Perception is demoralized...

...Unhappily, her Introduction is more confounding than clarifying for being inexplicably dense...

...Mandelstam makes a distinction between poetry, which preserves, and prose which instructs...

...The same spirit permeates Mandel-stam's letters, especially those to his wife...

...Undoctrinal, untouched by philistinism, he was guided in his every endeavor by compassion and integrity...

...Enough of their ordering us about...

...The man who cries out: "The race of professional writers emits a repugnant odor from its hide...

...As late as April 1937, from exile in Voronezh, he wrote to Nadezhda in Moscow that he will show her the "handsome rooster that crows 300 times between four and six a.m.," that they will begin their life "wherever fate may cast us...

...the latter—stolen air...

...Then the poems will dance to our pipe and what do we care if no one dares to praise them...

...The man who has the acuity to characterize Moliere at root as "rational yet sunny" is the same one who describes a baby as having "evil, professorial, yellow eyes...

...Fifteen years later, in a far more bitter variant, Mandelstam writes: "I divide all of world literature into authorized and unauthorized works...

...Mandelstam's contempt for the literary apparatchik, and for those who sacrifice human values to expediency or self-interest, knew no bounds...

...Regrettable, too, is the sloppy editing: The footnotes indicated in the Introduction simply do not exist (at least not in my copy...

...In response, Mandelstam and two other poets, Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev, formed their own movement, Acmeism...

...I From out of the morass of Watergate emerged only one true hero...

...Nothing is real, genuine...

...As he rather idiosyncratically defines it, philology is in essence that love of the word poetry is grounded in—it is "a seminar, a family, domestic...

...No one wants to be himself...

...Where he argues in these essays against the literary movements that stormed Russia between 1905-25, violation of the nature of the word is what exercises him most...

...He also draws a line between "philology" and literature...

...In a 1916 review of a poetry anthology he decries the false nostalgia for an earlier, richer age of poetry, saying: "There is no such thing as a'high level' of contemporary poetry in comparison to the poetry of the past...

...The bare biographical data, by the standards of Stalin's Russia, is unfortunately commonplace...

...Now I shall be stronger than the poems...

...Such a form of aid, such negligent indifference is taking on monstrous proportions...

...The poet's life is recounted in Clarence Brown's admirable book, entitled Mandelstam, and in Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, the extraordinary two-volume memoir of his widow and archivist, Nadezhda...

...The knowledge one can gain from this collection is considerable, and the sense of Mandelstam's consistency is striking...

...He is also the man with the courage to describe Stalin's fingers as fat worms—and the wisdom to regard his own life as "a miracle...

...His life cannot be separated from his art in this regard, and it is one of this book's assets that the essays and letters illuminate each other to form an integral whole...

...Both authors make the intimate connections with his work, and explore the attitudes toward art, literature, politics, and time that inform it...

...Editor Jane Gary Harris has brought together all of Mandelstam's non-fiction, from his earliest essay on Francois Villon, written in 1910, to his last letter to his brother, written from a transit camp two months before his death...

...Its other assets include the lucid translation of Mandelstam's thorny prose by Harris and Constance Links, and the formidable amount of scholarship Harris exhibits in her annotations of the essays...

...For understanding why that proved to be true not merely of his poetry but of his prose as well, this book is invaluable...

...In one of his last letters, to the critic Yuri Tynianov, Osip Mandelstam writes: "It's already been a quarter of a century that I . . . have been steadily encroaching on Russian poetry...

...Literature does not necessarily love words, it merely uses them, well or badly, while philology, hence poetry, "clings to its own intonations . . . and to its own special meaning of words defined in parenthesis...

...But Mandelstam can best be understood by following the advice in his essay, "Conversation About Dante...

...It is love of the word, Mandelstam suggests, that should make Russia a family, hold it together—for him, Russia's very history is to be found in its language...

...Literature on the other hand is public, a lecture hall, the streets...

...It is a joy that delights in the artifacts and occupations of everyday existence, as well as in the powers and potential of poetry...

...What is poetry's relationship to time...

...The combination, although incomplete without his poetry and creative prose, contributes to a true picture of Mandelstam as an artist and as a man...

...Later in the '20s that hopefulness fades...

...it helps the rulers keep their soldiers in line and it helps the judges arbitrarily dispose of the condemned," is the same one who poignantly writes to his wife, "Help me to stand firm, help me to avoid all lies and vile people...