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Mandel'shtam's Mandel'shteln (Initial Observations on the Cracking of a Slit-Eyed Nut, OR a Couple of Chinks in the Shchell)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Nancy Pollak
Nancy Pollak*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Extract

      But the impervious geode
      Was entered, and its inner crust
      Of crystals with a ray cathode
      At every point and facet glowed
      In answer to the mental thrust.
      Robert Frost, “All Revelation”

A crucial year for Osip Mandel'shtam was 1930: it was in October of that year, in Tiflis, on the way back from Armenia, that poetry returned to him, after five years during which he wrote almost no verse. The Armenia poems (numbers 203-218) are among the first of the “new verse,” and, with their theme of penance for unproductivity and attempt to transform the factors of disturbance—the sense of limitation, confinement, deprivation—into sources of new energy, they testify to Mandel'shtam's current concern with the operations of his work. Moreover, at this juncture Mandel'shtam gives programmatic attention to the principles of his writing.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 46 , Issue 3-4 , Fall/Winter 1987 , pp. 450 - 470
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1987

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References

I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Michigan, which gave me the opportunity to pursue the research that led to this article through a Mellon Fellowship in 1984-1985.

1. See Mandel'shtam, N. Ia., Vtoraia kniga (Paris: YMCA, 1972, p. 524 Google Scholar. Compare Grigor'ev, A. and Petrova, I., “Mandel'shtam na poroge tridtsatykh godov,” Russian Literature 5 (April 1977): 181.Google Scholar

2. I will identify Mandel'shtam's verse either by first line or title or according to the numeration in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, ed. Gleb P. Struve and B. A. Filippov, 4 vols., 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Inter-Language Literary Associates, 1967), vol. 1. Citations of the poet's proserefer to vol. 2 of the 2nd ed. (1971) and vol. 3 (1969). What I call the “published version” of Puteshestvie v Armeniiu is the edition in vol. 2 (it is a composite of the two Soviet publications; see the editorial notes, 2: 600); the “drafts” are the notebooks of 1931–1932 in vol. 3. These works will be cited in parentheses in the text.

3. For “expansion of borders” and “confinement” in Puteshestvie v Armeniiu see Avins, Carol (Border Crossings: The West and Russian Identity in Soviet Literature 1917–1934 (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1983), pp. 152–153 Google Scholar. Cf. Levin, Iu., “Zametki o poezii O. Mandel'shtama tridtsatykhgodov. I,” Slavica Hierosolymitana 3 (1978): 120–121.Google Scholar

4. Levin, Iu., “Zametki k Razgovoru o Dante O. Mandel'shtama,” International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 15 (1972): 184.Google Scholar

5. Mandel'shtam quotes Dante's opening lines in “Chetvertaia proza,” written within a year before the journey, in response to accusations of plagiarism (2: 188). He returns to the same figure aslate as 1936: “la v serdtse veka —put’ neiasen.” Compare the discussion of this period in Grigor'ev and Petrova, “Mandel'shtam na poroge tridtsatykh godov,” p. 182 and passim.

6. Ronen, Omry, An Approach to Mandel'štam (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1983), pp. 186–187.Google Scholar

7. Mandel'shtam, N. la., Vospominaniia (New York: Izd. im. Chekhova, 1970), pp. 245–246 Google Scholar.

8. Compare Jane Gary Harris on Mandel'shtam's interest in Gurvich, , “The‘Latin Gerundive’ asAutobiographical Imperative: A Reading of Mandel'shtam's Journey to Armenia ” Slavic Review 45 (Spring 1986): 6, n. 14.Google Scholar

9. Levin, “Zametki k Razgovoru o Dante” p. 186.

10. See von Bertalanffy, Ludwig, Modem Theories of Development, trans, and adapt. Woodger, J. H. (London: Oxford University Press, 1933, pp. 46–50 Google Scholar.

11. The “metaphors of organicism,” which include” fibers, spheres, helices, and the tissues wovenfrom them,” Haraway, Donna Jeanne, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univeristy Press, 1976), p. 48 Google Scholar, become an important part of Mandel'shtam's vocabulary in the early 1930s. See in particular “Vos'mistishiia “: all four figures are central to the biological investigation of theorigins of the word that is a theme of that group of poems (cf. even the Mandel'shtamian title of Haraway's book).

12. In “Admiralteistvo,” man's work (here, an architectural construction) is seen to exist in morethan three dimensions and to make up a fifth element. Compare the “sixth sense” of “Vos'mistishiia” (4) and Puleshestvie v Armeniiu (chap, seven), discussed below: this is the third in the sequence ofextraordinary characteristics defining the creative enterprise.

13. See in particular “Priroda — tot zhe Rim i otrazilas’ v nem” and “Pusf imena tsvetushchikhgorodov. “

14. Von Bertalanffy, Modern Theories, p. 50.

15. Compare Harris's similar descriptions of the function of the journey, introduction, The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, by Osip Emilievich Mandelstam (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), p. 35, and “The‘Latin Gerundive.'“

16. Compare the references to Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre in the third chapter of Puteshestvie v Armeniiu (2: 152–153); see also Iunost’ Gete (1935), the title of which reflects Mandel'shtam's association of Goethe with “the land where the lemon trees bloom “: IuG.

17. “The eye may be said to owe its existence to light, which calls forth, as it were, a sense that isakin to itself…. This immediate affinity between light and the eye will be denied by none; toconsider them as identical in substance is less easy to comprehend.” von Goethe, J. W., Schriften zur Farbenlehre, Einleilung, trans. Eastlake, Charles Lock, Goethe's Theory of Colours (London: JohnMurray, 1840; Cambridge, Mass., and London: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press): liii Google Scholar.

18. Goethe, Italienische Reise 2: Sizilien 1787, 17 April.

19. Italienische Reise 3: Rom 1787, 28 August.

20. The formulation dates to 1922 (“O prirode slova “), but the conception of an organic poeticsis evident in “Utro akmeizma” (1913) and might be traced, as Ronen has suggested, in the works of the minor acmeists (Mikhail Zenkevich's Dikaia porfira, Vladimir Narbut's Alliluiia).

21. Ronen, commenting on “Kremnia i vozdukha iazyk” (“Grifel'naia oda “), notes: “This is the beginning of a series of analogies between poetic and geological structures,” Approach to Mandel'štam, p. 76.

22. Levin, “Zametki k Razgovoru o Dante” p. 187; Peter Steiner, “On Semantic Poetics: O.Mandel'stam in the Discussions of the Soviet Structuralists,” dispositio, no. 3 (Autumn 1976), 342;compare D. M. Segal, “O nekotorykh aspektakh smyslovoi struktury‘Grifel'noi ody’ O. E.Mandel'shtama,” Russian Literature (1972): 61.

23. Ronen, Approach to Mandel'stam, p. 137; compare Harris, ed., Critical Prose and Letters, p. 37.

24. In Za kommunisticheskoe prosveshchenie (Moscow), 19 April 1932.

25. Compare the fragments on prose style in the same notebooks, which must be read in light ofJ. B. Lamarck's theories of organization and also of Leont'ev's conceptions of form (see the excerptsfrom “Vizantizm i slavianstvo” quoted in 2: 586).

26. Compare West, Daphne, “Mandelstam and the Evolutionists,” Journal of Russian Studies, no. 42 (1981), p. 30.Google Scholar

27. Pallas's counterpart is the Goethe, for example, of Baratynskii's elegy: “Pogas! no nichto neostavleno im / Pod solntsem zhivykh bez priveta” ( “Na smert’ Gete “).

28. Compare Mandel'shtam's characterization of poetic material as syr'e in the drafts toRazgovor o Dante (3: 181–182).

29. That same conjunction of spheres is one of Goethe's interests on his journey; from the opening pages of Italienische Reise, the Neptunist poet makes detailed observations about the topography, soil, climate of the regions he passes through and suggests that the mountains determine their own weather. Ronen notes Goethe's importance for Mandel'shtam in this regard (Approach to Mandel'štam, p. 77).

30. Mandel'shtam's conception seems to have been confirmed by the recent discovery of rocks insouthern Australia that bear the imprint of solar cycles. One scientist commented, concerning the efforts to decipher the rocks: “What they're really doing is reading the ancient diaries of the earth” (The New York Times, 18 November 1986, CI, 15).

31. The sixth, kartina, is given through a synonym, risunki; forms related to bliz’ and kriuchki occur as well.

32. Pallas's eye must be compared also with Gogol “s; see, for example, Stilman, Leon, “The‘All-Seeing Eye’ in Gogol,” in Gogol from the Twentieth Century, ed. Maguire, Robert A. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974: 376–389)Google Scholar and with Belyi's (his is the “hard sky-blue eye” of “Vos'mistishiia “; compare Nancy Pollak, “The Obscure Way to Mandel'Stam's Armenia” (Ph.D.diss., Yale University, 1983), pp. 237–243, for a more detailed discussion of the connection).

33. Ronen, Omry, “Mandel'štam's Kaščej ” Studies Presented to Professor Roman Jakobson by His Students, ed. Gribble, Charles E. (Cambridge, Mass.: Slavica, 1968), pp. 259, 260Google Scholar.

34. Pallas mentions one remarkable cat seen on the way from Petersburg to Tsaritsyn, Travels through the Southern Provinces of the Russian Empire, in the Years 1793 and 1794, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: J. Stockdale, 1812) 1: 48–49. Felis manul appears in an appendix, the fifth volume of Voyages de M, P. S. Pallas, en différentes provinces de l'empire de Russie, et dans l'Asie septentrionale, 5 vols. (Paris: Maradan, 1793). Compare The New Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed., micropaedia, 7: 698.

35. Pallas, Travels, 1: 182; see also Pallas's reference to “amygdalite” formations (2: 230–231).

36. Fersman, Dragotsennye i tsvetnye kamni Rossii (Petrograd: ?-aia gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1920), pp. 257–279. Ronen identifies Fersman as a source for Mandel'shtam (“Mandel'Stam's Kaščej” p. 264).

37. Brokgauz-Efron, , Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (St. Petersburg: Tipo-Litografiia I. A. Efrona, 1896), Pt. 37 [vol. 19]: 337 Google Scholar.

38. Ronen, “Mandel'štam's Kaščej” p. 262.

39. The representation of the miniature in terms of an almond-shaped eye recalls Gumilev's “Persidskaia miniatiura.” The protagonist of that lyric is to become, after death, a Persian miniature, depicting, among other things, a prince with precisely such eyes: “I prints, podniavshii ele-ele /Mindalevidnye glaza.” I am grateful to Viach. Vs. Ivanov for bringing this to my attention.

40. Technically, “mindalina” does not refer to the thyroid gland involved in the disease knownas goiter; but Mandel'shtam invokes “mindalina” by describing the goggle-eyes characteristic of goiteras “almond-shaped. “

41. This is the imperative discussed by Harris in “The‘Latin Gerundive'. “

42. See Pollak, “The Obscure Way,” pp. 128–129, for a more detailed grammatical analysis of the paragraph.

43. An examination of the drafts indicates that in a number of cases these correspondences are “organic,” the passages in question originating in common draft material. For a more comprehensive treatment see Pollak, “The Obscure Way,” pp. 86–104.

44. The passage is almost literally central, occurring on p. 158 in vol. 2, in which Puleshestvie v Armeniiu covers pp. 137–176.

45. Lazar Fleishman, “Epizod s Bezymenskim v Putesheslvii v Armeniiu,” Slavica Hierosolymitana 3 (1978): 195.

46. Fleishman suggests that the references to “bezymiannye mogili” and “fundament dlia maiaka” in “Sevan” (2: 138) anticipate the “Sukhum” passage (“Epizod s Bezymenskim,” p. 196). The appearanceof maiak in “Sukhum” confirms this.

47. Compare Mandel'shtam's fragmentary early essay “Pushkin i Skriabin,” where he calls theartist's death his “highest creative act,” the “final conclusive link in the chain” of his creation, the “source of his creation, its teleological cause “: “Esli sorvat’ pokrov smerti s etoi tvorcheskoi zhizni, ona budet svobodno vytekat’ iz svoei prichiny — smerti, raspolagaias’ vokrug nee, kak vokrug svoegosolntsa, i pogloshchaia ego svet” (2: 313). The conception of the artist's death as central sun recallsthe geometry of the geode and illuminates the conception, implicit in Mandel'shtam's treatment ofthat figure, of death as the element that orders and makes sense of the whole.

48. Ararat remains a reference point in contemporary Armenia, the concern with its appearances and disappearances corresponding to the “attempt to predict tomorrow's weather” Mandel'shtamfinds characteristic of the “rational salamander” (2: 146).

49. Viach. Vs. Ivanov gives a similar account of the relation between Mandel'shtam's two stonymedia in his discussion of the Armenia verse: “Simvoly zemli i knigi, gliny kak materiala‘v bibliotekeavtorov goncharnykh’ soedinialis’ vmeste — zdaniia zagovorili na‘zloveshchem’ drevnem iazyke” (“Temy i stili vostoka v poezii zapada,” afterword to Vostochnye motivy. Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, comp. L.E. Cherkasskii and V. S. Murav'ev [Moscow: Nauka, 1985], p. 455).

50. Mandel'shtam's church might be described by an entry in his “Baedeker.” Compare Goethe's Santa Rosalia, hewn out of the rocky face of a cliff (on Monte Pellegrino, another pilgrim's mountain), in Italienische Reise, Sizilien 1787, 6 April

51. The Lamarckian coordinates of the scene are confirmed and illuminated by a passage in René Berthelot's study of Goethe in relation to Lamarck and Hegel, Science et philosophic chez Goethe (Paris: Alcan, 1932). The author quotes an account, by the hero of Sainte-Beuve's Volupté, of the “impression Lamarck's lectures made on him.” (Compare Mandel'shtam's own descriptions, in “Vokrug naturalistov,” of Lamarck as a teacher and of a butterfly located, he implies, on Lamarck's “staircase,” as a “French academician” [2: 165, 164].) (pp. 52–53; Berthelot's emphasis):

dans l'ordre organique, une fois admis cepouvoir mystérieux de la vie, aussi petit et aussi élémentaireque possible, il le supposait se développant lui-mème, se composant, se confectionnant peu à peuavec le temps; le besoin sourd, la seule habitude dans les milieux divers fasait naître à la longue lesorganes, contrairement au pouvoir constant de la nature qui les détruisait; car M. de Lamarck séparait la vie d'avec la nature. La nature, à ses yeux, c'était la pierre et la cendre, le granit de la tombe, la mortl La vie n'y intervenait que comme un accident étrange et singulièrement industrieux, une lutte prolongée avec plus ou moins de succès ou d'équilibre çà et là, mais toujours finalementvaincue; l'immobilité froide était régnante après comme devant.

The description of life “intervening] as an accident,” with the adverbial “çà et là,” corresponds to Mandel'shtam's image of life “sparklfing]” — occasionally, fortuitously — from the bottom of thegrave. Lamarck's “nature,” represented by “la pierre et la cendre, le granit de la tombe, la mort,” isparalleled in Mandel'shtam's series “kost', … lava, … grobovoe dno. “

52. Surovost’ recalls the Lamarckian state Berthelot gives as immobilité froide (cf. rigor mortis

53. Again Goethe is the guide; in lunosf Gete Mandel'shtam quotes one of the self-appraisalstypical of Italienische Reise: “Etim puteshestviem ia khochu raz navsegda nasytit’ svoiu dushu, stremiashchuiusiak prekrasnym iskusstvam… . No potom, kogda ia vernus', ia vozvrashchus’ k remeslam… . Vremia prekrasnogo otzhivaet. Tol'ko poleznost’ i strogaia neobkhodimost’ upravliaiutnashei sovremennost'iu” (3: 78). Here I would take issue with Harris, whose interpretation of the “Ashtarak” draft passage depends on her translation of uperet'sia: “With all the fibers of my being Iwant to exert pressure against the impossibility of choice, against the total absence of freedom” (Critical Prose and Letters, p. 395). Harris implies that choice and volition are invoked as positivevalues and objects of the poet's pursuit (see “The‘Latin Gerundive, '” pp. 15, 16), but the situation isin fact more complicated. Compare Henry Gifford, who observes, concerning the attraction of themountain: “[Mandel'shtam] wants to come up against a necessity, and to obey it “; “Mandelstam andthe Journey,” in Journey to Armenia by Osip Mandelstam, trans. Sidney Monas (San Francisco: George F. Ritchie, 1979), p. 29.

54. Ronen, Approach to Mandel'štam, 219.

55. In the same way, poetry, deprived of the usual routes of the word, takes unexpected paths.Mandel'shtam makes “tsarstvo neozhidannosti” the province of poetry in “Utro akmeizma,” and “Voronezhskie tetradi” confirm the possibilities for poetry in extreme circumstances.

56. Compare Mandel'shtam's paean to German, written in the summer of 1932: “Zvuk suzilsia, slova shipiat, buntuiut, / No ty zhivesh', i ia s toboi spokoen” (“K nemetskoi rechi “).

57. Mandel'shtam's Armenia is a land of beasts and infants: “[Ty] nianchish’ zverushek detei” ( “Armeniia,” 2); Armenian is a bestial tongue: “Dikaia koshka — armianskaia rech’ — / Khishchnyiiazyk gorodov glinobitnykh” (216; see also 218). In its hardness and inevitability ( “Kak hub mneiazyk tvoi zloveshchii, / Tvoi molodye groba, / Gde bukvy — kuznechnye kleshschi, / I kazhdoeslovo — skoba” [ “Armeniia,” 3]), Mandel'shtam's Armenian recalls his own infantile speech, thespeech of his father, which had its origins in the “Judaic chaos” of the Hebrew volumes on the lowershelves of the family bookcase (2: 57). In “Sukharevka” Mandel'shtam associates similar titles with “hardware” ( “[skob\ano\\tovar “; see 2: 135), and he describes the main attraction of the bazaar as itsbestial speech: “bazarnaia rech', kak khishchnyi zverek, sverkaet malen'kimi zubkami” (2: 136). Mandel'shtamdescribes his father as virtually speechless: “U ottsa sovsem ne bylo iazyka, eto bylo kosnoiazychiei bez “iazychie “; “Chto khotela skazat’ sem'ia? Ia ne znaiu. Ona byla kosnoizychna otrozhdeniia, — a mezhdu tern u nee bylo chto skazat'. Nado mnoi i nad mnogimi sovremennikamitiagoteet kosnoiazychie rozhdeniia. My uchilis’ ne govorit', a lepetat'” (2: 66, 99). But “babble,” thepoet's original speech, is the origins of the poet's speech: “On opyt iz lepeta lepit, / I lepet iz opytap'et” ( “Vos'mistishiia,” 9). Mandel'shtein, the name that is the poet's “patriarchal paternal” heritage (cf. Shum vremeni, 2: 108), qualifies Mandel'shtam's much-cited assertion, just preceding the descriptionof his family's language, that the biography of the raznochinets is a list of books read (2: 99). Mandel'shtam does not, after all, deny the personal origins of his word: “mandel'shtein” revealsthe organic connection between the twin spheres of the poet's system, the natural and the cultural asingle source. The geode gives new substance to Segal's observation, on the evidence of the “autobiographicalconfession” of Razgovor o Dante, of Mandel'shtam's “astonishingly personal relation to thedramatic life of stone” (“O nekotorykh aspektakh,” p. 63).

58. Ronen, Approach to Mandel'štam, pp. 204–205; see also idem, “An Introduction to Mandel'shtam's Slate Ode and January 1924: Similarity and Complementarity,” Slavica Hierosolymitana 4 (1979): 220.

59. Ronen, Approach to Mandel'štam, p. 168.

60. J.-B. Lamarck, Philosophic zoologique, vol. 2, chap. 8.

61. See Inferno 26: 133–135; compare with Dante's “una montagna bruna / per la distanza” Mandel'shtam's “ogromnyi korichnevyi sad,” in the context of distant mountains, in his early (Homeric) version of the Odysseus story (92).

62. Compare also the last “Vos'mistishie,” “I ia vykhozhu iz prostranstva. “

63. The windows admit a “triumph of light “; on the pendentives beneath the cupola are “fourarchangels “: compare the vast space contained by the cupola of Karmravor, with its “four bakers. “

64. Those “finds” provide the first “substantial evidence of existence” for the traveler surrounded by signs of death.

65. Fersman, Dragotsennye kamni, p. 329.

66. See Ronen, “Mandel'štam's KaSiej” pp. 259–260.

67. See Haraway on Paul Weiss's organismic theories (Crystals, p. 198); note her references toGoethe (pp. 12, 40–41, 47).

68. Ronen discusses the name as talisman in “Introduction,” pp. 149–156, and Approach to Mandel'štam, pp. 5–13.

69. See the discussion of “pansemioticity,” redundancy, informational noise in Tomas Venclova, “Neustoichivoe ravnovesie: vosem’ russkikh poeticheskikh tekstov” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1985), p. 9.

70. See Levin, Iu. I. , Segal, D. M., Timenchik, R. D., Toporov, V. N., and Tsiv'ian, T. V., “Russkaiasemanticheskaia poetika kak potentsial'naia kul'turnaia paradigma,” Russian Literature 7/8 (1974): 80 Google Scholar. See this article for a discussion of Mandel'shtam's meonal prose.

71. Compare Steiner, “Semantic Poetics,” p. 340.

72. In a sequel to this paper I will show how Mandel'shtam determines his future reader indescribing his own brain, with particular reference to the prophetic Voronezh poem “Ne u menia, neu tebia — u nikh.” Mandel'shtam's comments on the autobiographical nature of the book immediatelyfollow the geode passage in “Vokrug naturalistov” (2: 163). See also the more explicit discussion inthe drafts (3: 165–166), and compare . N. la. Mandel'shtam's comments (Vospominaniia, pp. 244–245).The conception of reading as an organic process, a process of physiological recollection, is essential tothe model of the speech situation that permits the transmission of the poet's message.