From the book of fates . Osip Emilievich Mandelstam (1891 - 1938), Russian poet, prose writer, translator, essayist. Born on January 3 (15), 1891 in Warsaw in the family of Emilia Veniaminovich (Khatskel Benyaminovich) Mandelstam, a tanner and glove maker. Since the Jewish enlightenment of the 18th century, the ancient Jewish family of Mandelstams has given the world famous rabbis, physicists and doctors, Bible translators and literary historians.
The poet's mother, Flora Osipovna Verblovskaya, came from a Vilna family of Jews who assimilated and joined the ranks of the Russian intelligentsia. She was related to the famous literary critic S. A. Vengerov, was a musician and a connoisseur of Russian classical literature.
Soon after the birth of their son, the family moved to St. Petersburg. Here the consciousness of the future poet is gradually permeated by a deep and creatively fruitful cultural dissonance. The patriarchal life of the Jewish clan, which later took on the image of a rejected, exorcised, but also native “Jewish chaos,” will contrast in the poet’s work with the stunning, captivating grandeur of St. Petersburg with its imperial orderliness and commanding harmony. Later, in Mandelstam’s poetry, both of these backgrounds were captured in a combination of deep contrasting colors - black and yellow, the colors of the tales (Jewish prayer shawl) and the imperial standard: “As if flowing in the air / The bile of a double-headed eagle” (“Palace Square”, 1915); “Behold the black and yellow light, behold the joy of Judea!” (“Among the priests a young Levite..”, 1917).
The leitmotif of Mandelstam’s childhood memories is “tongue-tied”, “languageless” family, the “fantastic” language of his father, who self-taught himself in Russian and German. The poet’s legacy is not speech, but an insatiable impulse for speech, breaking through the barrier of languagelessness. Mandelstam's path to the laurels of one of greatest poets The 20th century will go through painful attempts to overcome this tongue-tiedness, to expand the boundaries of what is spoken, to curb the “inexpressible” with an innate rhythm, to find “ lost word" But along with the tongue-tiedness of the Jews, who enter Russian speech from the outside, with effort, Mandelstam will have to overcome the tongue-tiedness of the Nadsonov era of Russian poetry - 1880-1890, when the old possibilities of the language have been exhausted, and new ones are only dawning, and, finally, the lack of language of the future poet, to whom ordered to enjoy safely ready-made language and it is necessary to break through the “high” tongue-tiedness (“tongue-tied” is the speech defect of the prophet Moses in the Bible) to break through to one’s own unique word. And the transformative power of the influence of Mandelstam’s word on subsequent Russian poetry of the 20th century, perhaps, knows no equal.
From his early youth, Mandelstam’s consciousness was that of a commoner, not rooted in the age-old soil national culture and patriarchal life: “I could never understand the Tolstoys and Aksakovs, the Bagrov-grandsons, in love with family archives with epic home memories... A commoner does not need a memory, he just needs to talk about the books he has read, and the biography is ready.” But from this lack of rootedness in national life will grow participation in universal existence, an acmeistic “longing for world culture,” the ability to perceive Homer, Dante, Pushkin as contemporaries and “fellow brothers” at the free “feast” of the universal spirit.
In 1900-1907, Mandelstam studied at the Tenishevsky Commercial School, one of the best educational institutions in Russia at that time. A special intellectual-ascetic atmosphere reigned here, and lofty ideals of political freedom and civic duty were cultivated.
Revolutionary events and the catastrophe of the Russian-Japanese War inspired the poet's first poetic experiments. “The boys of 1905 went into the revolution with the same feeling with which Nikolenka Rostov went into the hussars,” he will say much later, looking back. Having received a diploma from the Tenishev School on May 15, 1907, Mandelstam tried to join the Socialist Revolutionary military organization in Finland, but was not accepted there due to his youth. Concerned for the future of their son, his parents are in a hurry to send him to study abroad. In 1907-1908, Mandelstam listened to lectures at the literature department of the University of Paris, in 1909-1910 he studied Romance philology at the University of Heidelberg (Germany), and traveled around Switzerland and Italy. The echo of these meetings with Western Europe will never leave Mandelstam's poetry. It was then that the sum of Mandelstam's architectural impressions included European Gothic - a through symbol of the figurative system of his future poetry.
An internal change occurs in Paris: the young man leaves politics for poetry and turns to intensive literary work. He is keen on the lyrics of Bryusov, the leader of Russian symbolism, and the French “damned” poets - for the courage of “pure denial”, for the “music of life”, as Mandelstam will say in one of his letters former teacher literature and literary mentor V.V. Gippius. In Paris, Mandelstam meets Gumilyov. It was Gumilyov who “ordained” Mandelstam to the “rank” of a poet. And in 1911, already in St. Petersburg, Mandelstam, at an evening in the “tower” of Vyacheslav Ivanov, meets Gumilyov’s wife Anna Akhmatova for the first time. All three will be united not only by deep friendship, but also by similarity of poetic aspirations.
Around 1910, in the most sensitive literary circles, the crisis of symbolism as a literary movement, claiming to be the total language of new art, became obvious. The desire for artistic liberation from under his power was dictated by the intention of Gumilyov, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, as well as S. Gorodetsky, V. Narbut, M. Zenkevich and some other authors to form a new poetic direction. Thus, at the beginning of 1913, Acmeism came to the forefront of literary struggle.
More than any other literary movement, Acmeism resisted a precise definition... But Acmeism entered the history of Russian literature of the 20th century, first of all, as an integral poetic system, uniting three poets - Mandelstam, Akhmatova and Gumilyov. And Mandelstam is perhaps the first in this row for most modern researchers.
Acmeism saw the highest miracle in the word, in the poetic action itself... The earthly and heavenly here did not oppose each other. They merged together thanks to the miracle of the word - the divine gift of naming simple earthly things... Having united the earthly and heavenly, the poetic word seemed to take on flesh and turn into the same fact of reality as the surrounding things - only more durable...
Mandelstam always sought to compare his poetic existence with the indelible mark left by his great predecessors, and to present the result of this comparison to the distant reader in posterity... Thus, the contradiction between the past, present and future was removed. Mandelstam's poetry could be clothed in clear classical forms, referring to art bygone eras. But at the same time, it always contained the explosive power of ultra-modern, avant-garde artistic techniques, which endowed stable traditional images with new and unexpected meanings. It was up to the “ideal reader” of the future to guess these meanings.
For all the impeccable, classical logic of its “architecture,” the meaning of Mandelstam’s text is as unpredictable as the key to the riddle. At the center of Mandelstam’s figurative language are analogies hidden in the subtext between phenomena that are sometimes distant from each other. And only a reader who lives in the same cultural space as Mandelstam himself can discern these analogies... And therefore, according to S.S. Averintsev, Mandelstam’s poems “are so tempting to understand - and so difficult to interpret.”
In Mandelstam’s poetry, the semantic potential accumulated by a word over the entire history of its existence in other poetic contexts acquires meaning thanks to hidden riddle quotes... The main features of this method were fully manifested already in the poet’s first collection - “Stone” (1913). This included 23 poems from 1908-1913 (later the collection was supplemented with texts from 1914-1915 and republished at the end of 1915). The early poems of 1908-1910 included in the collection represent a unique combination for all world poetry of the immature psychology of a young man, almost a teenager, with the perfect maturity of intellectual observation and poetic description of this particular psychology:
From the pool of evil and viscous
I grew up rustling like a reed -
And passionately, and languidly, and affectionately
Breathing the forbidden life...
I am happy with the cruel insult,
And in life like a dream,
I secretly envy everyone
And secretly in love with everyone.
In the first part of The Stone, critics most often noted symbolist influences. Here, indeed, as with the Symbolists, there is a certain “two worlds”, the opposition of the earthly transitory reality to the higher eternal peace. But Mandelstam feels this dual world in a special, purely individual way. He dramatically intensely experiences the uniqueness of his fragile self, his weak but unique “warm breath” against the backdrop of a cosmically indifferent eternity. As a result, surprise is born (perhaps the central emotion of all of Mandelstam’s lyrics), psychologically reliable and devoid of any literary or secondary nature:
Am I really real?
Will death really come?
The second half of “The Stone,” as Gumilev noted in his review of the book, is exemplary “Acmeistic.” In contrast to the symbolist “ecstasies of syllable”, deliberate sound writing and decorativeness, the “classical” form of verse, the often elevated intonation of the ode, and the balanced economy of style and image reign here. At the same time, Mandelstam transforms mystical symbols into complex but tangible analogies, and secrets into intellectual problems and riddles. The key to this method lies in the title of the book. The naming "stone" can be perceived as an anagram (a play on consonance through the rearrangement of letters) of the word AKME, which gave its name to a new literary movement (this is a Greek word denoting the highest point of development, flowering, but also the tip of a stone). But the title of the collection also refers to Tyutchev’s famous 1833 poem “Probleme,” which tells the story of a stone that “rolled down from the mountain and lay down in the valley,” falling “...by itself, / or was thrown down by the will of someone else.”
In the article “The Morning of Acmeism” Mandelstam will finally clarify the meaning of this association: “But Tyutchev’s stone... is a word. The voice of matter in this unexpected fall sounds like articulate speech. This challenge can only be answered by architecture. The Acmeists reverently lift the mysterious Tyutchev stone and place it at the base of their building.”
In “The Stone,” Mandelstam responded to the symbolist cult of music, “the most ephemeral of the arts,” with monumental images of architecture, testifying to the victory of organization over chaos, the pathos of establishing measure and curbing matter over immensity and impulse...
And yet there is no notorious cult of things here, which critics often saw behind Acmeist manifestos, and sensual plasticity and tangible concreteness of images are not the main thing. When a poet wants to convey a thing by touch, he achieves this with one detail. But there are few such things in Mandelstam’s lyrics. The poet looks at the things of his century from a great distance. In themselves they surprise him, but do not really interest him. Mandelstam's gaze seems to pass through things and strives to catch what is hidden behind them.
Back in 1911, Mandelstam committed an act of “transition to European culture” - he adopted Christianity. And although the poet was baptized in the Methodist Church (May 14, in Vyborg), the poems of “Stone” captured the preoccupation with the Catholic theme, the image of eternal Rome. In Catholicism, Mandelstam was captivated by the pathos of a single universal organizing idea. It reflected the symphony of Gothic architecture in the spiritual sphere. Just as the “stronghold” of the cathedral is created from the “evil weight” of stones, from the choir of such different and dissimilar peoples the unity of Western Christendom under the rule of Rome.
Another example is associated with Mandelstam’s perception of the image of the “first Russian Westernizer” - Chaadaev. The 1915 article “Peter Chaadaev” is dedicated to him, and the poem “Staff” created at the same time is inspired by his image. In Chaadaev’s Catholic sympathies, in his devotion to the idea of Rome as the focus of the spiritual unity of the Christian universe, Mandelstam discerns not betrayal, but a deep loyalty to the Russian national path: “Chaadaev’s thought, national in its origins, is national where it flows into Rome... Chaadaev precisely by the right of a Russian man, he entered the sacred land of tradition, with which he was not connected by continuity...” And the lyrical hero of Mandelstam himself, obviously, with a “staff” went to Europe - “the land of holy miracles” - in order to truly “grow into Russian." Now the “spring of undying Rome” takes over from the mature Mandelstam the role of a counterweight to the chaos of his birth, which St. Petersburg architecture played for the young poet. And in the concept of “native chaos” two faces are now indistinguishable - “Jewish” and “Russian”.
With the outbreak of the First World War, eschatological notes sounded more and more loudly in Mandelstam's poetry - a feeling of the inevitability of a catastrophe, some kind of temporary end. These notes are associated, first of all, with the theme of Russia and endow the image of the Motherland, squeezed in the grip of an inexorable history, with the gift of special freedom, available only to those who have tasted Death and shouldered the sacrificial Cross:
Are we, thrown into space,
Doomed to die
About beautiful constancy
And regret loyalty.
(“On unprecedented freedom...”, 1915).
The place of “stone”, the building material of poetry, is now replaced by “wood”, subject to fire - at the same time a symbol tragic fate and an expression of the Russian idea (“The flame destroys...”, 1915). The desire to join this kind of tragic national experience in practical life forces Mandelstam in December 1914 to go to front-line Warsaw, where he wants to join the troops as a medical orderly. Nothing came of it. The poet returns to the capital and creates a whole series of poems that can be called a requiem for the doomed imperial Petersburg. The departing world of power evokes in the poet a complex interweaving of feelings: almost physical horror, solemnity (“Let us glorify the twilight burden of power, / Its unbearable oppression”), and even pity.
Mandelstam was probably the first in world literature to talk about “compassion” for the state, for its “hunger.” In one of the chapters of “The Noise of Time,” an autobiographical prose from 1925, a surreal image of a “sick eagle” appears, pitiful, blind, with broken legs, a two-headed bird swarming in the corner “under the hiss of a primus stove.” The blackness of this heraldic bird - coat of arms Russian Empire- was seen as the color of the end back in 1915.
Poems from the time of war and revolution make up Mandelstam’s collection “Tristia” (“book of sorrows,” first published without the participation of the author in 1922 and republished under the title “Second Book” in 1923 in Moscow). The book is cemented by the theme of time, the grandiose flow of history heading towards destruction. This theme will become cross-cutting throughout the poet’s work right up to last days. The internal unity of “Tristia” is ensured by the new quality of the lyrical hero, for whom there is no longer anything personal that is not involved in the general time flow, whose voice can only be heard as an echo of the roar of the era. Taking place in great history is recognized as the collapse and creation of the “temple” of one’s own personality:
Whoever has a heart must hear, time,
How your ship goes down (“Twilight of Freedom”, 1918).
The motive of despair here sounds very clearly, but at the last depth it is illuminated by a cleansing sense of one’s own involvement in what is happening:
We are fighting legions
They tied up the swallows - and here they are
The sun is not visible; all the elements
Chirps, moves, lives;
Through the networks - thick twilight -
The sun is not visible and the earth is floating.
According to the laws of spiritual paradox, the difficult, bloody and hungry time of the early 1920s would not only be marked by a rise in Mandelstam’s poetic activity, but would also bring a strange, seemingly irrational feeling of enlightenment and purification (“In St. Petersburg we will meet again...”, 1920) . Mandelstam speaks of the fragile joy of national culture in the midst of the disastrous cold of Russian life and turns to the most piercing image:
And the living swallow fell
On hot snow.
The horror of what is happening is fraught with the last degree of freedom. "Nothing is impossible. Just as the room of a dying man is open to everyone, so the door of the old world is wide open to the crowd. Suddenly everything became common property. Go and get it. Everything is available...”, says the article “Word and Culture”.
In the poetry and biography of Mandelstam of the 1920s and 1930s, despair is redeemed by a courageous readiness for high sacrifice, and in distinctly Christian tones. The lines of 1922: “Again sacrificed, like a lamb / They brought the crown of life” will echo in the words spoken by the poet, who had already written disastrous poems about Stalin, in February 1934 to Akhmatova: “I am ready for death.” And in the early 1920s, Mandelstam wrote his renunciation of the temptation of emigration and contrasted the promises of political freedoms with freedom of a different - spiritual order, freedom of self-overcoming, which can only be purchased at the price of loyalty to the Russian Golgotha:
The slave who has overcome fear is free,
And it was preserved beyond measure
In cool granaries, in deep bins
The seed of deep, complete faith.
The book “Tristia” captures a significant change in the poet’s style: the texture of the image is increasingly moving towards a semantic shift, “dark”, encrypted meanings, irrational linguistic moves. And yet, a balance of new trends and former “architectural” rigor still reigns here. However, Mandelstam also departs from the previous acmeistic clarity in theory. He develops the concept of a “blessed meaningless word”, which loses its objective significance, “thingness”. But the law of balance also reigns in the theory of words: the word gains freedom from the objective meaning, but does not forget about it. “The Meaningless Blessed Word” approaches the boundary of “absurdity” that the futurists experimented with, but does not cross it. This technique of gradually moving away from identifiable details creates the opportunity for a sudden breakthrough of “recognition” and surprise - as soon as the interlocutor reader manages to get through the superficial semantic darkness. And then the reader is gifted with the glee of “a blind man who recognizes a sweet face, barely touching it,” and from whom “tears... of the joy of recognition will flow from his eyes after a long separation.”
Built like that best works poet of the beginning of the decade (“Sisters - heaviness and tenderness...”, “Swallow”, “The ghostly scene flickers slightly...”, “Take for joy from my palms...”, “Because I don’t have your hands. managed to hold on...", all - 1920). In the early 1920s, Mandelstam wandered around the southern regions of Russia: he visited Kyiv, where he met his future wife N. Ya. Khazina (the author of two memoir books about Mandelstam and the poet’s first commentator), a short time lives in Koktebel near Voloshin, moves to Feodosia, where he is arrested by Wrangel’s counterintelligence on suspicion of espionage, and after his release ends up in Batumi. Here Mandelstam is arrested again - this time by the Menshevik coast guard (Georgian poets N. Mitsishvili and T. Tabidze will rescue him from prison). Finally, exhausted to the extreme, Mandelstam returns to Petrograd, lives for some time in the famous House of Arts, again travels south, then settles in Moscow. But by the mid-1920s, not a trace remained of the former balance of anxieties and hopes in understanding what was happening. Mandelstam’s poetics is also changing: in it, darkness now increasingly outweighs clarity. I feel very personally about the execution of Gumilyov in 1921. Recent hopes for the “separation of church-culture from the state” and the establishment between them of new, organic relations similar to the connection between the ancient Russian “appanage princes” and “monasteries” are not justified.
Culture was increasingly put in its place. Mandelstam, like Akhmatova, found himself in an ambiguous position. For the Soviet authorities, he was clearly a stranger, a relic of the bourgeois past, but, unlike the generation of Symbolists, he was deprived of even condescension for the “solidity” of his past merits. Mandelstam is increasingly afraid of losing his “sense of inner rightness.” Increasingly, the image of “human lips that have nothing more to say” appears in Mandelstam’s poetry. At the same time, the ominous shadow of the merciless “age-Beast” creeps into the themes of Mandelstam’s poems. Behind him are the encrypted features of Gogol’s Viy with his deadly gaze (through a hidden paronym, that is, the consonance of the words “age” and “eyelid” - in the demon Viy’s address to evil spirits: “raise my eyelids”). This is how the language of the biblical Apocalypse is rethought, which refers to the coming Antichrist as a “beast.” The fate of the poetic word in a duel with the most bloodthirsty predator, hungry time, devouring all human creations, is reflected in the “Slate Ode” (1923, 1937). What is more than remarkable here is the dense darkness of the images, devoid of the slightest transparency.
In 1925, there was a short creative surge associated with Mandelstam’s passion for Olga Vaksel. Then the poet falls silent for five years. These years were busy with translations and work on prose - the autobiography “The Noise of Time”, the story “The Egyptian Brand” (1928), the essay “The Fourth Prose” (1930). The tone of the books is set by the tragic tension between the “big”, historical, epic time and personal, biographical time. In the “Egyptian Stamp” these motives are brought to the point of strain. As the main character, Mandelstam brings out his double, endows him with the condensed features of the “little man” of Russian literature in the spirit of Gogol and Dostoevsky and betrays him to the semblance of a ritual desecration...
At the turn of the 1920-1930s, Mandelstam’s patron in power circles, N. Bukharin, hired him as a proofreader for the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, which provided the poet and his wife with minimal means of subsistence. However, Mandelstam’s reluctance to accept the “rules of the game” of “well-bred” Soviet writers and extreme emotional impetuosity sharply complicate relations with his “colleagues.” The poet finds himself at the center of a public scandal related to accusations of translation plagiarism (he will deliver his rebuke to his literary enemies in the “Fourth Prose”, where he will reject “writing” as “prostitution” and will speak unequivocally about the “bloody Soviet land” and its “broken” socialism ).
In order to protect Mandelstam from the consequences of the scandal, N. Bukharin organized a trip for him in 1930 to Armenia, which left a deep mark on the poet’s artistic work: after a long silence, poetry came to him again. They are clearer and more transparent than the “Slate Ode,” but the final despair and hopeless fear are already clearly heard in them. If in prose Mandelstam frantically tried to escape the threat, now he finally accepts his fate and renews his internal consent to the sacrifice:
And life could whistle like a starling,
Eat nut pie
Yes, apparently, it’s impossible.
Since the beginning of the 1930s, Mandelstam’s poetry has been accumulating the energy of challenge and “high” civil indignation, dating back to the ancient Roman poet Juvenal: “The human pitiful charred mouth / is indignant and says “no.”
This is how a masterpiece of civil lyricism is born - “For the explosive valor of the coming centuries...” (1931, 1935).
Meanwhile, the poet increasingly feels like a hunted beast and, finally, in November 1933, writes poems against Stalin (“We live without feeling the country beneath us...”). The poems quickly gained fame, were circulated in lists, and were learned by heart. Mandelstam's fate was sealed: May 13, 1934, followed by arrest. However, the sentence turned out to be surprisingly lenient. Instead of execution or a camp - deportation to Cherdyn and quick permission to move to Voronezh. Here Mandelstam experiences the last, very bright flowering of his poetic genius (three “Voronezh notebooks”, 1935-1937). The crown of “Voronezh lyricism” is “Poems about unknown soldier"(1937).
The poet penetrates into the new “reality” - the ahistorical and despiritualized continent of time. Here it is fulfilled by the deep will to “be like everyone else”, “by choice of personal conscience” to live and die with the “crowd” and “herd” of millions “killed cheaply”, to dissolve in the endless outer space of the universe and the human mass filling it - and thereby win bad time. At the same time, Mandelstam’s late poetics becomes even more “closed,” “dark,” multi-layered, complicated by various subtextual levels. This is the poetics of “omitted links”, when in order to restore the plot of the poem it is necessary to restore the intermediary image. The intermediary image may be hidden in a hidden and processed quotation, an encrypted subtext that is very difficult for an unprepared reader to recover. But it can also be hidden in the purely individual irrational logic of the author’s thinking, which breaks open the ready-made word and extracts its hidden semantic depths, often archaic, dating back to ancient mythological models.
And yet the darkness can unexpectedly lighten up: the Voronezh land, the land of exile, is perceived as a chaste miracle of the Russian landscape. The harsh and pure landscape serves as a backdrop for the triumphant theme of human dignity, not subject to the blows of fate:
Unhappy is the one whom, like his shadow,
The barking scares and the wind mows down,
And the poor one is the one who is half-dead,
He asks for alms from the shadow.
Rejecting the fate of the “shadow”, but still feeling himself as a “shadow”, the poet goes through the last temptation - to ask for alms from the one on whom his “return to life” depends. So at the beginning of 1937, “Ode” to Stalin appeared - an ingeniously compiled catalog of cliched praises to the leader. However, “Ode” did not save Mandelstam. Its hero - cunning and vindictive - could start a crafty game with his offenders, give hope - as happened with Mandelstam, who in May 1937 served his appointed term in Voronezh exile and returned to Moscow. But Stalin could not forgive and forget the insult: in May 1938 a new arrest followed (formally - according to a letter to People's Commissar Yezhov Secretary General Union of Soviet Writers V.P. Stavsky).
The poet is sent along the stage to Far East. On December 27, 1938, in the Second River transit camp near Vladivostok, Mandelstam, driven to the brink of madness, dies. According to the testimony of some prisoners - on a trash heap.
Mandelstam's legacy, saved from destruction by his widow, began to actively enter the cultural life of the intelligentsia of the Thaw era from the early 1960s. Soon the poet's name becomes a password for those who stored or tried to restore the memory of Russian culture, and it was perceived as a sign of not only artistic, but also moral values. The words of the famous literary critic Yu. I. Levin, a representative of the generation that “discovered” Mandelstam, are indicative: “Mandelshtam is a call for the unity of life and culture, for such a deep and serious... attitude towards culture, which our century, apparently, is not yet able to rise... Mandelstam - ...an intermediate link, a harbinger, a formula for the transition from our modernity to what “does not exist yet,” but what “should be.” Mandelstam must “change something in the structure and composition” of not only Russian poetry, but also world culture.”
Vadim Polonsky
(Universal online encyclopedia "Around the World".
Printed with abbreviations)
...poetry is the consciousness of one's rightness. The air of verse is the unexpected.
When addressing the known, we can only say the known.
“About the interlocutor”, 1913
The poet's mental structure is conducive to disaster.
"A. Blok", 1921 - 1922
From an essay "Coal blazing with fire"
...We, poets, often act enchanted by the rhythms of a given literary era, even a given decade... How to break out of this magical captivity? No amount of advice will help... The ability to listen to rhythm is an innate skill, given from God. The point is that thought, word and rhythm arise simultaneously...
Mandelstam discovered for himself that the word does not live a separate life in verse, that it is connected by family, kinship, friendship, historical, social ties with other words; these ties, while existing, are often hidden from readers, and the poet is obliged to reveal them and even go to the risk that the word will be connected to the word not by a direct connection, but with the help of indirect, not immediately noticeable, but undoubtedly physically existing connections, sometimes stronger than visual direct ones. It is they who give birth to rhythm, themselves owing their appearance to rhythm...
Nadezhda Mandelstam
My will
...I ask the Future forever, that is, while books are being published and there are readers of these poems, to secure the rights to this inheritance for those people whom I name in a special document. Let there always be eleven of them in memory of Mandelstam’s eleven-line poems, and in place of those who drop out, let those who remain choose their own deputies.
I entrust this commission of heirs with the uncontrolled disposal of the remains of the archive, the publication of books, the reprinting of poems, the publication of unpublished materials... But I ask this commission to protect this inheritance from the state and not succumb to either its intimidation or cajoling. I lived my life in an era when each of us was required that everything we did would “benefit the state.” I ask the members of this commission to never forget that we, people, have a self-sufficient value, that it is not we who are called to serve the state, but the state to us, that poetry is addressed to people, to their living souls and has nothing to do with the state... Why does the state dare to declare itself the heir of a free person?.. Especially in those cases when the memory of this person lives in the hearts of people, and the state does everything to erase it...
That is why I ask the members of the commission, that is, those to whom I will leave Mandelstam’s legacy, to do everything to preserve the memory of the deceased - for his and my own joy. And if my inheritance brings in any money, then the commission itself decides what to do with it - whether to let it go to waste, whether to give it to people or spend it on its own pleasure. Just don’t create any literary funds or cash registers with it, try to spend this money in a simpler and more humane way in memory of a person who loved life so much and who was not allowed to live it out. As long as nothing goes to the state and its official literature. And I also ask you not to forget that the murdered person is always stronger than the killer, and a simple person is higher than the one who wants to subjugate him. This is my will, and I hope that the Future, to which I turn, will respect it at least for the fact that I gave my life to preserve the work and memory of the deceased.
Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899 - 1980). Obituary
Of the eighty-one years of her life, Nadezhda Mandelstam was the wife of the greatest Russian poet of our time, Osip Mandelstam, for nineteen years, and his widow for forty-two years. The rest was spent in childhood and adolescence... “Nadya is the happiest of widows,” - saying this, Anna Akhmatova meant the universal recognition that came to Mandelstam at that time. The remark itself, naturally, related primarily to the fate of the poet himself, a fellow writer, but with all its justice, it testifies to an outside view. By the time the above-mentioned recognition began to grow, N. Ya. Mandelstam was already in her seventies, in very precarious health and almost without funds. Moreover, this recognition, even if universal, still did not extend to “one sixth globe", to Russia itself. Behind Nadezhda Yakovlevna’s back were already two decades of widowhood, extreme hardships, a great war that wrote off all personal losses, and the daily fear of being captured by state security officers as the wife of an enemy of the people...
I first met her precisely then, in the winter of 1962, in Pskov, where I went with friends to look at the churches there (the most beautiful, I must say, in the entire empire). Having heard about our intention to go to Pskov, Anna Andreevna Akhmatova advised us to visit Nadezhda Mandelstam and asked us to give her several books. That's when I heard this name for the first time.
She lived in a two-room communal apartment... The room was the size of an average American bathroom - eight square meters. Most of the area was occupied by iron one-and-a-half bed; there were also two Viennese chairs, a chest of drawers with a small mirror and a bedside table that also served as a table...
During the years of her greatest prosperity, in the late sixties and early seventies, in her one-room apartment on the outskirts of Moscow, the most expensive item was the cuckoo clock on the kitchen wall. The thief would be disappointed here, as would be those who might come with a search warrant.
In those “prosperous” years that followed the publication in the West of two volumes of her memoirs, this kitchen truly became a place of pilgrimage. Almost every evening the best of what had survived or appeared in the post-Stalin period gathered around a long wooden table, ten times larger than the Pskov bedside table. It would appear that she was seeking to make up for decades of neglect. I, however, somehow remember her better in the Pskov little room or perched on the edge of the sofa in Akhmatova’s Leningrad apartment, to whom she sometimes sneaked in from Pskov, or emerging from the depths of the Shklovskys’ corridor in Moscow - there she huddled until she got her own housing. Probably, I remember this more clearly also because there she was more in her element - an outcast, a refugee, a “beggar friend,” as Mandelstam called her in one poem, and what she, in essence, remained for the rest of her life...
Poetry in general always precedes prose; in many respects this can be said about the life of Nadezhda Yakovlevna. Both as a person and as a writer, she was a consequence, a product of two poets with whom her life was inextricably linked: Mandelstam and Akhmatova. And not only because the first was her husband, and the second was her lifelong friend... The mechanism that cemented the bonds of this marriage, as well as the bonds of this friendship, was the need to remember and retain in memory what cannot be entrusted to paper, that is, the poems of both poets...
And all this little by little grew into her. Because if love can be replaced with something, it can only be with memory. To remember means to restore intimacy. Little by little, the lines of these poets became her consciousness, her personality. They gave her not only perspective, not only an angle of vision; what is more important is that they became a linguistic norm for her... Both in content and style, her books are only a postscript to highest form language, which, strictly speaking, is poetry.
It was them, the poems, and not the memory of her husband, that she saved. She was their widow, not his, for forty-two years. Of course, she loved him, but love itself is the most elitist of passions. Only in the context of culture does it acquire dimension and perspective... She was a widow of culture, and I think that at the end of her life she loved her husband more than at the beginning of the marriage...
The last time I saw her was on May 30, 1972, in the kitchen of a Moscow apartment. It was late in the evening; she sat and smoked in the deep shadow cast on the wall by the sideboard. The shadow was so deep that only a smoldering cigarette and two glowing eyes could be distinguished in it. The rest - a tiny shrunken body under a shawl, hands, the oval of an ashen face, gray ashen hair - everything was swallowed up in darkness. She looked like the remnant of a large fire, like a smoldering coal that would burn if you touched it.
Renegade
On January 21, 1937, in a letter to Tynyanov, “so convulsive and difficult,” “truly... from the depths, from the abyss” (S.S. Averintsev), Mandelstam writes:
“Dear Yuri Nikolaevich!
I want to see you. What to do? The desire is legitimate.
Please don't think of me as a shadow. I'm still casting a shadow. But Lately I am becoming clear to absolutely everyone. This is formidable. For a quarter of a century now, I have been drifting into Russian poetry, mixing important things with trifles, but soon my poems will merge with it, changing something in its structure and composition.
It's easy for me not to answer. It is impossible to justify abstaining from a letter or note. You will do as you please.
Your O.M.”
Why did the Voronezh exile choose a completely prosperous Soviet writer as the addressee for confession? There is no evidence of a close relationship between them. Everything is so and not so. A Jew who devoted his life to Russian literature - and remained in it forever, “changing something in its structure and composition,” writes to another Jew, whose name is dear to every cultured person who speaks Russian. Both the author and the addressee were seriously ill, the days of both were numbered. Therefore, Tynyanov for Mandelstam is “twice his own” - and, perhaps, the poet hoped that he would be understood and supported. Needless to say, how much he needed such support...
There was no answer. Whether the letter arrived, got lost or was intercepted is unknown. The text was preserved only thanks to the foresight of the “clear Natasha” - N. E. Shtempel, who made a copy.
And several years before the letter, when there were neither the “Voronezh notebooks” nor the “Kremlin highlander”, when Bukharin’s patronage seemed reliable and long-term, a poem was written in which the premonition of imminent death sounds clearly and ominously:
Save my speech forever for the taste of misfortune and smoke,
For the resin of circular patience, for the conscientious tar of labor...
Just as the water in Novgorod wells should be black and sweet,
So that for Christmas a star will be reflected in it with seven fins.
And for this, my father, my friend and my rude helper,
I am an unrecognized brother, a renegade in the people's family -
I promise to build such dense log houses,
So that the Tatarva lowers the princes into the tub in them.
If only these frozen blocks would love me,
How, aiming for death, the towns are killed in the garden, -
I'll spend my whole life wearing an iron shirt for this.
And for Peter’s execution I will find an ax in the forests.
In one stanza, “the scaffold,” “death,” and “execution” coexist. The ease and ordinariness of this very death game evokes horror and shock.
For the reader, but not for the poet. Looking into the eyes of his future, he does not even think of arguing with him. The only thing that bothers him is that he is “an unrecognized brother, a renegade in the people’s family.” And in order to rise above this “non-recognition”, to step over it, Osip Mandelstam is ready to accept everything. Even the fierce “Petrine” execution.
This is the price to pay for the immortality of “the greatest Russian poet of our time.”
April 2016
Illustrations:
portrait of the Poet - artist Lev Bruni, 1916;
photo of Osip Emilievich’s parents;
photo of O. E. Mandelstam and N. Ya. Mandelstam of different years;
photo by N. E. Shtempel;
covers of books by O. E. Mandelstam and N. Ya. Mandelstam;
Voronezh monument to O. E. Mandelstam;
illustrations - from Oleg Lekmanov’s book “Osip Mandelstam. Life of a Poet" (series "ZhZL")
and from free sources on the Internet.
Marina Tsvetaeva
Nobody took anything away!
It's sweet to me that we are apart.
I kiss you - through hundreds
Disconnecting miles.
I baptize you for a terrible flight:
Fly, young eagle!
You endured the sun without squinting, -
Is my youthful look heavy?
More tender and irrevocable
No one looked after you...
I kiss you - through hundreds
Years of separation.
Anna Akhmatova
Voronezh
O. M<андельштаму>
And the whole city is frozen.
Like trees, walls, snow under glass.
I walk timidly through the crystals.
The patterned sled runs so incorrectly.
And above Peter of Voronezh there are crows,
Yes, poplars, and the vault is light green,
Blurred, cloudy, covered in solar dust,
And the slopes blow with the Battle of Kulikovo
Mighty, victorious land.
And poplars, like shifted bowls,
They will immediately ring louder above us,
As if they were drinking to our rejoicing
There are thousands of guests at the wedding feast.
And in the room of the disgraced poet
Fear and the muse are on duty in their turn.
And the night goes on
Which does not know the dawn.
Arseny Tarkovsky
Poet
Once upon a time there lived a poor knight...
A. S. Pushkin
This book once upon a time
In the corridor of Gosizdat
One poet gave it;
The book is torn, crumpled,
And the poet is not alive.
They said that in the guise
The poet has something birdlike
And there is Egyptian;
There was impoverished greatness
And twitched honor.
How afraid he was of space
Corridors! Constancy
Creditors! He's like a gift
In a wild fit of affectation
Accepted his fee.
It crawls around the screen like that
With curtseys, like I'm drunk,
Old clown in a bowler hat
And, like a sober man, he hides the wound
Under a pique vest.
Feathered with steamy rhyme,
The calendar feat is over, -
Bon voyage to you, farewell!
Hello, fee holiday,
Black white loaf!
I amused myself with a bent word,
He smiled with a bird's beak,
He caught those he met on the fly,
I was afraid of loneliness
And I read poetry to strangers.
This is how a poet should live.
I myself wander around the world,
I'm afraid of loneliness
For the hundredth time in this book
I take it alone.
There are few landscapes in poetry,
Only the stupidity of the station
And the theater is a mess,
Only people haphazardly
Market, queue, prison.
Life must have been a mess
Fate itself wove it.
Monuments to Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam were erected in St. Petersburg and Amsterdam...
Bella Akhmadulina
In memory of Osip Mandelstam
In that time, where the villain is -
just an ordinary street dweller,
how terribly fragile the Jew is,
in whom Rus' and music have awakened.
Intro: fragile silhouette,
guilty of graceful force.
Beginning of the century. Youth years.
Wet summer in Helsingfors.
Is she a God or a young lady? Prayer -
through hundreds of miles of fuzzy love.
Love it! And the genius of the forehead
shyly hung with bangs.
But the century wants to feast!
Exhausted, he waits for an excuse -
and St. Petersburg Petrograd
will leave only Blok's dying breath.
Knew and said there would be a sign
and the century will fall on his shoulders.
What can he do? He is poor and naked
before the miracle of his speech.
Larynx starting to speak
unheard of - so open.
Enough to stop it
and less diligence in everyday life.
He is given special honor,
the double gloating of the sky:
gagged singer
and a gourmand deprived of bread.
From memoirs: “Mandelshtam
loved cakes." I'm glad
find out about it. But to breathe -
I don’t want to, and I don’t need to.
So it means to be a creator,
with his hands clasped behind his back,
and the nameless dead
Still not enough for flour?
And in death one must know trouble
the one that has never subsided,
careless, survivor of hell,
unquenchable childish thirst?
In my nightmare, in that paradise,
where is he alive, where am I hiding him,
he's full! And I feed him
great sweetness. And I cry.
Alexander Kushner
Photo
Photo from probably 1936.
Theater troupe. Something homemade, like soda,
The behind-the-scenes, loose things are dissolved in the air.
Twenty-two people were buried in one thing.
Twenty-two people were probably engrossed in the play
About a servant of two masters, or so: about a widow and a rake.
Only one person does not look at the printed text,
It froze like plaster, like lime, cement and asbestos.
His trousers and palms are covered in gray tobacco ash,
The old man and the slob, oh, how bored he is of Goldoni!
He looks, where? We'll never know - out the window,
Where the Voronezh rook tramples last year's cloth.
The plywood swells with bubbles on the lopsided tables.
How much life is left? Don't ask what kind of manner
Running around with a question? In the window on unsteady legs
Rooks perform. He himself is here on a bird's license.
He himself is somehow, barely holding on, I’m burning on the side.
Why does he love this warm hassle so much?
And in this vapid place, I feel sad, - this is a stupid role, -
Every time he adds his own poetic salt!
Yuri Levitansky
and I heard a voice in reality.
I'm a tram cherry, he told me,
seeing other worlds with my own eyes, -
I'm the tram cherry of the terrible time
and I don’t know why I live.
It was Osip Emilich who whispered to me in a dream,
but these words remained in me,
as if it were me, as if it were me and not him,
as if I myself said about myself and him -
we are the tram cherries of terrible times
and we don’t know why we live.
The Gumilyovsky tram walked over the dark river,
lost in the red smoke,
and Tsvetaeva with a white transparent hand
She waved goodbye to him.
And Akhmatova along the Tsarskoye Selo columns
floated by, repeating like an ancient canon,
in his high dialect:
We are the tram cherries of terrible times.
We don't know why we live.
O Russian muse, our proud Parnassus,
the shadow of prison bars has been upon you since ancient times
and on every untruthful line.
And the tram cherries of Russian poetry,
like bells in a field to the whistle of coachmen,
in the middle of endless Russian snows
everything rings and rings in the distance.
Inna Lisnyanskaya
We'll sit in the kitchen.
O. Mandelstam
That flash again
Sick mind:
watchtower,
There's a prison underneath
And a convict number
In that bathhouse where, naked,
Died of hunger
Everything was wrong.
They carried him straight
Through the sunny darkness
Two angels of God
To the border of Eden,
And a ghost passing by
I looked after them.
Boris Suslovich
Two dedications to O.M.
Respite
Happiness fell on my head:
Consider it four years ahead.
If an ordinary master happens
Instead of the poet, he could
Drum as needed
The right words for the day...
But you were never a master -
And you can barely sing mutely
Skilled. The Nutcracker Nutcracker
Having spent the entire century clicking for the soul,
On a lousy camp bed,
Dance until you wheeze!
Roll call
I can’t hide from the great storm
O. Mandelstam, 1931
There is no escape from the great storm into darkness,
Under the protection of the last dream,
There are no obstacles for her, no obstacles - because
That she is omniscient today;
What will be found at once, a well-wishing poet,
He who understands in your life,
What will unobtrusively shake her
Until the days marked by the order;
What will build a column of poems at the back of the head,
And he will drive you to serve the executioner...
I’m ready to climb the wall from the universal darkness.
Howl like a wolf. But it’s better to keep silent.
Boris Markovsky
In memory of Mandelstam
A duel took place between Pushkin and Dantes.
Osip Mandelstam died.
Church fragile candle
burns and burns without being consumed...
The sinister Black River
and the Second Black River.
Coin - heads or tails -
threw it up, playing with death...
The sinister Black River
and the Second Black River.
It must be a bad omen -
play with a patterned handle
pistol fallen in the snow
on the January and Black rivers.
Accidental shot, misfire,
and the echo of a raven's crow.
The sinister Black River
and the second black river...
Not feeling a huge country,
he raved about the key of Hippocrene
and saw bloody dreams -
future executions, betrayals.
He was no one's interlocutor.
And then a place was found -
swampy muddy stream,
The second, December, river.
Osip Mandelstam was born in Warsaw on January 15, 1891. Jewish family an unlucky businessman who was always moving from place to place due to his trading failures. Osip's father wrote and even spoke Russian poorly. And the mother, on the contrary, was an intelligent, educated woman from a literary background, despite her Jewish origin, and spoke beautiful and pure Russian speech. His grandparents preserved the “black and yellow ritual,” that is, the Jewish one, in their homes. The father wanted to see his son as a rabbi and therefore forbade him to read ordinary secular books. Only the Talmud. At the age of fourteen, Osip ran away from home to Berlin, where he briefly studied at a higher Talmudic school, and read mainly Schiller and the works of philosophers. Then he graduated from the Teneshevsky Commercial School in St. Petersburg, where his family lived at that time. There he began his first poetic attempts. Then - a trip to Paris, where he became interested in French symbolism. By the way, much later, already a mature poet, Mandelstam called symbolism “a wretched nothingness.” In 1910, Osip studied at the University of Heidelberg (only two semesters), where he studied Old French. Then - admission to St. Petersburg University at the Faculty of History and Philology. Whether he graduated from it is not known for certain.
It all started when philology student Osip Mandelstam joined a group of young, talented and cocky Acmeist poets. Their community was called the “Workshop of Poets.” They poeticized the world of primordial emotions, emphasized associations on objects and details, and preached the unambiguousness of images. Acmeism assumed perfection, sharpness of verse, its brilliance and sharpness, like a blade. And perfection can be achieved only by choosing untrodden paths and seeing the world exactly for the first and last time. These were Mandelstam’s guidelines for the rest of his life. The poet gave the same name to the first three collections - “Stone”; they were published between 1913 and 1916. He even wanted to give his fourth book the same title. once suggested that Mandelstam did not have a teacher, because his poems are some kind of new, unprecedented “divine harmony.” But Mandelstam himself called F.I. Tyutchev his teacher. In a poem in 1933, he wrote about a stone that fell from nowhere. And it seems that Mandelstam made these poems his “cornerstone.” He wrote in his article “The Morning of Acmeism” that he picked up the “Tyutchev stone” and made it the foundation of “his building.” In his later study, “Conversation about Dante,” he again talked a lot about the stone, and from his thoughts it follows that for him the stone is a symbol of the connection of times, phenomena and events; it is not only a particle of the universe, but an animated witness of history. And the world of the immortal human soul is also a tiny gem or meteorite, thrown into the universe by someone. Hence the comprehensive philosophical system of Mandelstam’s poetic creativity. In his poems live Hellenic heroes, Gothic temples of the Middle Ages, great emperors, musicians, poets, philosophers, painters, conquerors... In his poems there is a mighty force, and the power of a thinker, and encyclopedic erudition, but at the same time, they also sound gullible , the childish intonation of a simple-minded, even naive person, as he, in fact, was in ordinary life.
In the 30s, Mandelstam was no longer published. And at the end of May 1934 he was arrested - one of his “friends” reported to the authorities about the epigram on “Comrade Stalin”. He was exiled to Cherdyn, after which he was forced to live in Voronezh for several years, since the punishment included a ban on living in major cities. There he lived with his selfless wife and devoted friend Nadezhda Yakovlevna, who wrote two volumes of memoirs about her husband and accomplished an extremely dangerous task - she saved and organized the poet’s archive, which in those years could be equated to a feat. At the beginning of May 1938, Mandelstam was arrested again. And this time to certain death. When, how and where this amazing poet with the soul of a child died, no one knows, just as no one knows where his grave is. We only know that this is one of the common burials at some transit point near Vladivostok.
Osip Mandelstam's brief biography and creativity are described in this article.
Osip Emilievich Mandelstam- poet, prose writer, essayist, translator and literary critic, one of the largest Russian poets of the 20th century.
Was born January 3 (15), 1891 in Warsaw, in a Jewish merchant family. In 1897, the Mandelstams moved to St. Petersburg, where Osip received his education. First, he graduated from the Tenishev School, then was sent to study at the Sorbonne.
By 1911, Osip's family was broke and could no longer pay for his studies abroad.
Returning to St. Petersburg, he received a quota to enter the university, but studied poorly, never graduating from the Faculty of History and Philology. The poet's first publication took place in 1910 in the magazine Apollo. In 1912, he met A. A. Blok and joined the Acmeist circle. Mandelstam's debut book of poems, entitled “Stone,” was published three times. The first edition dates back to 1913. The poet's early poems are filled with anxiety for the fate of man. More complex attitudes towards the poetic word are reflected in the collection “Tristia” (1922).
Moving with the times, Mandelstam did not remain aloof from revolutionary events. The theme of the state appeared in his poetry, as well as the difficult relationship between the individual and the government. The poet's post-revolutionary work touched upon the theme of unsettled everyday life, the constant search for income, the lack of a readership, and was permeated with a feeling of loss and fear. His tragic forebodings were reflected in the collection “Poems” (1928), which became his last publication during his lifetime.
In 1930, at the request of N.I. Bukharin, Mandelstam was sent on a business trip to the Caucasus, returning from which he again began writing poetry, but it was not published anywhere. And in connection with the publication of his work “Journey to Armenia” (1933), devastating articles appeared in some newspapers. At the same time, he wrote an anti-Stalin epigram, after which in May 1934 the poet was arrested and exiled to Cherdyn.
After attempting suicide, his wife asked all Soviet authorities for help. After this, the Mandelstams were transported to Voronezh at their own request. There he writes a cycle of poems, which became the pinnacle of his work. In 1937, with the end of their exile, the couple returned to Moscow. A year later, Osip Emilievich was again arrested for “obscene and slanderous” epigrams. This time he was sent by convoy to the Far East.
Osip 1 Emilievich Mandelstam was born on January 3, 1891 in Warsaw; he spent his childhood and youth in St. Petersburg. Later, in 1937, Mandelstam wrote about the time of his birth:
I was born on the night from the second to the third of January in the ninety-one Unreliable Year... ("Poems about the Unknown Soldier")Here “into the night” contains an ominous omen of the tragic fate of the poet in the twentieth century and serves as a metaphor for the entire twentieth century, according to Mandelstam’s definition - “the century of the beast.”
Mandelstam's memories of childhood and youth reserved and strict, he avoided revealing himself, commenting on himself and his poems. He was an early ripened, or rather, a poet who saw the light, and his poetic manner is distinguished by seriousness and severity.
What little we find in the poet’s memoirs about his childhood, about the atmosphere that surrounded him, about the air that he had to breathe, is rather painted in gloomy tones:
From the pool of evil and viscous I grew up, rustling like a reed, and passionately, languidly, and affectionately breathing the forbidden life. ("From the whirlpool of evil and viscous...")"Forbidden Life" is about poetry.
Mandelstam’s family was, in his words, “difficult and confused,” and this was manifested with particular force (at least in the perception of Osip Emilievich himself) in words, in speech. The speech “element” of the family was unique. Father, Emilius Veniaminovich Mandelstam, a self-taught businessman, was completely devoid of a sense of language. In the book “The Noise of Time,” Mandelstam wrote: “My father had no language at all, it was tongue-tied and tongueless... A completely abstract, invented language, the florid and twisted speech of a self-taught person, the bizarre syntax of a Talmudist, an artificial, not always agreed upon phrase.” The speech of the mother, Flora Osipovna, a music teacher, was different: “Clear and sonorous, literary great Russian speech; its vocabulary is poor and condensed, its turns are monotonous - but this is a language, there is something radical and confident in it.” From his mother, Mandelstam inherited, along with a predisposition to heart disease and musicality, a heightened sense of the Russian language and accuracy of speech.
In 1900-1907, Mandelstam studied at the Tenishevsky Commercial School, one of the best private educational institutions in Russia (V. Nabokov and V. Zhirmunsky studied there at one time).
After graduating from college, Mandelstam traveled abroad three times: from October 1907 to the summer of 1908 he lived in Paris, from the autumn of 1909 to the spring of 1910 he studied Romance philology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, from July 21 to mid-October he lived in the Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf. The echo of these meetings with Western Europe can be heard in Mandelstam's poems right up to his last works.
The formation of Mandelstam's poetic personality was determined by his meeting with N. Gumilev and A. Akhmatova. In 1911, Gumilyov returned to St. Petersburg from the Abyssinian expedition, and all three then often met at various literary evenings. Subsequently, many years after the execution of Gumilyov, Mandelstam wrote to Akhmatova that Nikolai Stepanovich was the only one who understood his poems and with whom he talks and conducts dialogues to this day. Mandelstam’s attitude towards Akhmatova is most clearly evidenced by his words: “I am a contemporary of Akhmatova.” To publicly declare this during the years of the Stalinist regime, when the poetess was disgraced, one had to be Mandelstam.
All three, Gumilyov, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, became the creators and most prominent poets of a new literary movement - Acmeism. Biographers write that at first there was friction between them, because Gumilyov was despotic, Mandelstam was quick-tempered, and Akhmatova was capricious.
Mandelstam's first collection of poetry was published in 1913; it was published at his own expense 2 . It was assumed that it would be called "Sink", but the final name was chosen differently - "Stone". The name is quite in the spirit of Acmeism. The Acmeists sought to rediscover the world, as it were, to give everything a clear and courageous name, devoid of the elegiac hazy flair of the Symbolists. Stone - natural material, durable and solid, timeless material in the hands of a master. For Mandelstam, the stone represents the primary construction material spiritual culture, and not just material.
In 1911-1917, Mandelstam studied at the Romance-Germanic department of the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University.
Mandelstam's attitude towards the 1917 revolution was complex. However, any attempts by Mandelstam to find his place in new Russia ended in failure and scandal. The second half of the 1920s for Mandelstam were years of crisis. The poet was silent. There were no new poems. In five years - not a single one.
In 1929, the poet turned to prose and wrote a book called “The Fourth Prose.” It is small in volume, but it fully expresses the pain and contempt of the poet for opportunistic writers (“members of MASSOLIT”) that had been accumulating for many years in Mandelstam’s soul. "The Fourth Prose" gives an idea of the poet's character - impulsive, explosive, quarrelsome. Mandelstam very easily made enemies for himself; he did not hide his assessments and judgments. From “The Fourth Prose”: “I divide all works of world literature into those that were authorized and those written without permission. The former are scum, the latter are stolen air. I want to spit in the face of writers who write pre-authorized things, I want to hit them on the head with a stick and seat everyone at the table in the Herzen House, placing a glass of police tea in front of each and giving each one a Gornfeld urine test.
I would forbid these writers to marry and have children - after all, the children must continue for us, the most important thing to finish for us - while the fathers are sold to the pockmarked devil for three generations ahead."
One can imagine the intensity of mutual hatred: the hatred of those whom Mandelstam rejected and who rejected Mandelstam. The poet always, almost all post-revolutionary years, lived in extreme conditions, and in the 1930s - in anticipation of imminent death. There weren’t many friends and admirers of his talent, but they were there.
Mandelstam early realized himself as a poet, as creative person, which is destined to leave its mark in the history of literature and culture, and moreover, “to change something in its structure and composition” (from a letter to Yu.N. Tynyanov). Mandelstam knew his worth as a poet, and this was manifested, for example, in an insignificant episode that V. Kataev describes in his book “My Diamond Crown”:
“Having met the nutcracker (i.e. Mandelstam) on the street, one writer acquaintance very friendly asked the nutcracker a traditional secular question:
What new things have you written?
To which the nutcracker suddenly, completely unexpectedly, broke free from the chain:
If I wrote something new, then all of Russia would have known about it long ago! And you are ignorant and vulgar! - the nutcracker shouted, shaking with indignation, and pointedly turned his back on the tactless fiction writer." 3
Mandelstam was not adapted to everyday life, to a settled life. The concept of home, fortified home, is very important, for example, in art world M. Bulgakov, was not significant for Mandelstam. For him, home is the whole world, and at the same time in this world he is homeless.
K.I. Chukovsky recalled Mandelstam in the early 1920s, when he, like many other poets and writers, received a room in the Petrograd House of Arts: “In the room there was nothing belonging to him, except cigarettes, not a single personal thing. And then I I understood its most striking feature - its non-existence." In 1933, Mandelstam finally received a two-room apartment! B. Pasternak, who visited him, left and said: “Well, now we have an apartment - we can write poetry.” Mandelstam was furious. He cursed the apartment and offered to return it to those for whom it was intended: honest traitors, imagers. It was terrifying in front of the payment that was required for the apartment.
The consciousness of the choice made, the awareness of the tragedy of his fate, apparently strengthened the poet, gave him strength, and imparted a tragic, majestic pathos to his new poems 4. This pathos lies in the opposition of a free poetic personality to his age - the “beast age”. The poet does not feel insignificant in front of him, a pathetic victim, he realizes himself as an equal:
...The wolfhound age throws itself on my shoulders, But I am not a wolf your blood, Better stuff me, like a hat, into the sleeve of the hot fur coat of the Siberian steppes, take me into the night where the Yenisei flows, and the pine tree reaches the star, because I am not a wolf by my blood, and only an equal will kill me. March 17-28, 1931 (“For the explosive valor of the coming centuries...”)In the home circle this poem was called "Wolf". In it, Osip Emilievich predicted his future exile to Siberia, his physical death, and his poetic immortality. He understood a lot earlier than others.
Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam, whom E. Yevtushenko called “the greatest widow of the poet in the twentieth century,” left two books of memories about Mandelstam - about his sacrificial feat as a poet. From these memoirs one can understand, “even without knowing a single line of Mandelstam, that on these pages they remember a truly great poet: in view of the amount and power of evil directed against him.”
Mandelstam's sincerity bordered on suicide. In November 1933 he wrote a sharply satirical poem about Stalin:
We live without feeling the country beneath us, Our speeches cannot be heard ten steps away, And where there is enough for half a conversation, They will remember the Kremlin highlander. His thick fingers are fat like worms, And his words are true like weights. The cockroach's whiskers laugh, And his boots shine. And around him is a rabble of thin-necked leaders, He plays with the services of semi-humans. Who whistles, who meows, who whines, He alone babbles and pokes. Like a decree, a decree forges horseshoes - Some in the groin, some in the forehead, some in the eyebrow, some in the eye. No matter what he has, he has raspberries and a broad Ossetian chest.And Osip Emilievich read this poem to many acquaintances, including B. Pasternak. Anxiety for the fate of Mandelstam prompted Pasternak to declare in response: “What you read to me has nothing to do with literature, poetry. This is not a literary fact, but an act of suicide, which I do not approve of and in which I do not want to take part. I didn’t read anything, I didn’t hear anything, and I ask you not to read them to anyone.” Yes, Pasternak is right, the value of this poem does not lie in its literary merits. The first two lines here are at the level of the best poetic discoveries:
We live without feeling the country beneath us, Our speeches cannot be heard ten steps away...Surprisingly, the sentence given to Mandelstam was rather lenient. People at that time died for much lesser “offenses.” Stalin’s resolution simply read: “Isolate, but preserve,” and Osip Mandelstam was sent into exile in the distant northern village of Cherdyn. In Cherdyn, Mandelstam, suffering from mental illness, tried to commit suicide. Friends helped again. N. Bukharin, already losing his influence, wrote to Stalin for the last time: “Poets are always right; history is on their side”; Mandelstam was transferred to less harsh conditions - to Voronezh.
Of course, Mandelstam's fate was predetermined. But to punish him severely in 1933 would have meant publicizing that ill-fated poem and, as it were, settling personal scores between the tyrant and the poet, which would have been clearly unworthy of the “father of nations.” Everything has its time, Stalin knew how to wait, in this case- the great terror of 1937, when Mandelstam was destined to perish unknown along with hundreds of thousands of others.
Voronezh sheltered the poet, but sheltered him with hostility. From Voronezh notebooks (unpublished during his lifetime):
Let me go, give me back, Voronezh, - Will you drop me or miss me, Will you drop me or bring me back - Voronezh is a whim, Voronezh is a raven, a knife! 1935 Voronezh What street is this? 5 Mandelstam Street. What a damn name! - No matter how you twist it, it sounds crooked, not straight. There was little linear about him. He was not of a lily disposition, and therefore this street, or rather, this pit, is called by the name of this Mandelstam. April, 1935 VoronezhThe poet struggled with approaching despair: there was no means of subsistence, people avoided meeting him, his future fate was unclear, and with all his being as a poet, Mandelstam felt: the “beast of the century” was overtaking him. A. Akhmatova, who visited Mandelstam in exile, testifies:
And in the room of the disgraced poet, fear and the muse are on duty in their turn. And the night goes by, which knows no dawn. ("Voronezh")“Fear and the muse are on duty...” The poems came unstoppably, “irretrievably” (as M. Tsvetaeva said at the same time - in 1934), they demanded an outlet, they demanded to be heard. Memoirists testify that one day Mandelstam rushed to a pay phone and read new poems to the investigator to whom he was assigned: “No, listen, I have no one else to read to!” The poet's nerves were exposed, and he poured out his pain in poetry.
The poet was in a cage, but he was not broken, he was not deprived of the inner secret of freedom that raised him above everyone even in captivity:
Having deprived me of the seas, run-up and flight, and given my foot the support of the violent earth, what have you achieved? Brilliant calculation: You couldn’t take away the moving lips.The poems of the Voronezh cycle remained unpublished for a long time. They were not, as they say, political, but even “neutral” poems were perceived as a challenge, because they represented Poetry, uncontrollable and unstoppable. And no less dangerous for the authorities, because “a song is a form of linguistic disobedience, and its sound casts doubt on much more than a specific political system: it shakes the entire way of life” (I. Brodsky).
Mandelstam's poems stood out sharply against the background of the general flow of official literature of the 1920s and 30s. Time demanded the poems he needed, like famous poem E. Bagritsky "TVS" (1929):
And the century waits on the pavement, Concentrated like a sentry. Go - and don’t be afraid to stand next to him. Your loneliness matches the age. You look around and there are enemies all around; You stretch out your hands and there are no friends. But if he says, “Lie,” lie. But if he says: “Kill,” kill.Mandelstam understood: he could not stand “next to the century”; his choice was different - opposition to the cruel time.
Poems from the Voronezh notebooks, like many of Mandelstam’s poems of the 1930s, are imbued with a feeling of imminent death; sometimes they sound like spells, alas, unsuccessful:
I have not yet died, I am not yet alone, While with my beggar friend I enjoy the grandeur of the plains And the darkness, and hunger, and the blizzard. In beautiful poverty, in luxurious poverty I live alone - calm and comforted - Blessed are those days and nights, And the mellifluous labor is sinless. Unhappy is the one who, like his shadow, is frightened by barking and mowed down by the wind, And poor is the one who, half-dead himself, begs for alms from the shadow. January 1937 VoronezhIn May 1937, the Voronezh exile expired. The poet spent another year in the vicinity of Moscow, trying to obtain permission to live in the capital. Magazine editors were even afraid to talk to him. He was a beggar. Friends and acquaintances helped: V. Shklovsky, B. Pasternak, I. Erenburg, V. Kataev, although it was not easy for them themselves. Subsequently, A. Akhmatova wrote about 1938: “It was an apocalyptic time. Trouble followed on the heels of all of us. The Mandelstams had no money. They had absolutely nowhere to live. Osip was breathing poorly, catching air with his lips.”
On May 2, 1938, before sunrise, as was customary then, Mandelstam was arrested again, sentenced to 5 years of hard labor and sent to prison. Western Siberia, to the Far East, from where he will never return. A letter from the poet to his wife has been preserved, in which he wrote: “My health is very poor, I’m extremely exhausted, I’m emaciated, I’m almost unrecognizable, but I don’t know if it makes sense to send things, food and money. Try it anyway. I’m very cold without things.” .
The poet’s death occurred in the Vtoraya Rechka transit camp near Vladivostok on December 27, 1938... One of the poet’s last poems:
The mounds of people's heads recede into the distance, I shrink there - no one will notice me, But in gentle books and in children's games I will rise again to say that the sun is shining. 1936-1937?Jun 29 2011
Osip Emilievich Mandelstam is an outstanding Russian poet, translator, and literary critic. Mandelstam was born in Warsaw on January 15, 1891 into a merchant family. In 1897, Mandelstam moved to St. Petersburg, where in 1901 he entered the Tenishev School. After graduating from college, Mandelstam went to France, where from the autumn of 1907 to the summer of 1908 he lived in Paris and attended lectures at the Faculty of Literature of the Sorbonne.
In 1909, Mandelstam moved to Germany, where he settled in the suburbs of Berlin. He devoted the period from the autumn of 1909 to the spring of 1910 to the study of Romance philology at the University of Heidelberg. In the fall of 1910, Mandelstam went on a trip to Italy and Switzerland.
In 1911, Mandelstam returned to St. Petersburg and entered the Faculty of History and Philology at St. Petersburg University. In St. Petersburg, Mandelstam is adjacent to literary direction"symbolism" visits the salon of V. I. Ivanov, where he reads his works. Later, Mandelstam becomes close to Nikolai Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova and joins the new association of acmeists, the “Workshop of Poets.”
In 1913, Mandelstam released his first poetry collection, Stone. In 1914, the First World War begins, which at first Mandelstam welcomes, and then reacts sharply negatively.
At first, Mandelstam perceives the revolution that broke out in 1917 as a catastrophe, then Mandelstam has hopes that the new system will be able to change something in human nature.
In 1919, Mandelstam left St. Petersburg to the south. In 1922 the collection “Tristia” was published, and in 1923 the collection “The Second Book” was published. In 1924, Mandelstam moved to Leningrad. Since 1925 he stopped writing poetry. In 1928, Mandelstam settled in Moscow, where he worked on translations; in the same year, his final collection “Poems” and the story “The Egyptian Stamp” were published.
In 1930 he toured Armenia and Georgia. As a result of this trip, Mandelstam created the poetic cycle “Armenia”, which was only partially published in 1933. In the 30s, Mandelstam's relationship with Soviet power do not add up, he sharply does not accept the regime established in the country.
In 1930, Mandelstam wrote the book “The Fourth Prose,” denouncing the authorities, and in 1933 - the famous poem “We live without feeling the country beneath us...”. In 1934, Mandelstam was arrested and exiled to Cherdyn on the Kama, then, after petitions from B. Pasternak and A. Akhmatova, he was sent to Voronezh. In Voronezh exile, Mandelstam created the poetic cycle “Voronezh Notebooks,” which was published only in 1966.
After the end of his exile in 1937, Mandelstam settled in the vicinity of Moscow and tried to obtain permission to live in the capital. In May 1938, Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to 5 years of hard labor. He is sent first to Siberia and then to the Far East.
On December 27, 1938, in the Second River transit camp near Vladivostok, being in a state of severe mental disorder, Mandelstam died (according to official data from cardiac paralysis).
