SOURCE: "The Poetics of Osip Mandelstam," in Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism, edited by Victor Erlich, Yale University Press, 1975, pp. 284-312.

[In the following essay, which was first published in a Russian periodical in 1972, Ginzburg distinguishes three stages in the development of Mandelstam's poetry and determines the influence of Hellenistic and Symbolist imagery on his work.]

Mandelstam began as an heir to the Russian symbolists. Yet he did so at the moment when the disintegration of the symbolist movement was obvious to everyone, when Blok, its erstwhile standard-bearer, was seeking different answers to the disquieting questions of the era. The poems in Mandelstam's first collection Stone (1913) are free from symbolism's "other-worldliness," from its positive ideology and philosophy.

In 1912 Mandelstam joined the acmeists. These widely differing disciples of the symbolists were united by a common aspiration—the desire to return to an earthly source of poetic values, to a portrayal of the tridimensional world. The principal acmeist poets differed in their interpretation of this tridimensionality. Gumilëv's neoromanticism and exoticism are a far cry from the concrete, everyday world of Akhmatova's early verse. As for Mandelstam, he was attracted to various facets of "tridimensionality," including the literal sense of the word—architectural proportions and building materials.

Be lace, stone
and a spiderweb.
Stab the sky's empty breast
With a fine needle.

"Gothic dynamics" are important to Mandelstam not because they symbolize a striving toward the infinite—this is the romantic interpretation of the Gothic—but because they mark the triumph of construction over material, the transformation of stone into needle and lace.

The architectural emphasis of Mandelstam's early poems should be broadly interpreted. In general, Mandelstam tended to conceive reality—from everyday occurrences to major cultural developments—in architectural terms, that is, as completed structures. [In his Voprosy teorii literatury, 1928] Viktor Zhirmunskij was the first to draw attention to this salient characteristic of Mandelstam's poetry in a 1916 article entitled "Those Who Have Overcome Symbolism." Observing that Mandelstam finds inspiration in "the images … of life in the cultural and artistic creations of the past ages," Zhirmunskij examines a series of such "synthetic images" in Mandelstam's poetry: aging Venice, the musical élan of German romanticism, the Kremlin cathedrals, Homer.

Making his debut in the 1910s when stylization reigned supreme—and stylization is always unhistorical—Mandelstam was struggling toward a historical grasp of cultures and styles.

The personality of the poet is not the focal point of the early Mandelstam's poetic world. Later, in The Noise of Time Mandelstam wrote: "My desire is to speak not about myself, but to track down the age, the noise, and the germination of time. My memory is inimical to all that is personal." Yet, while constructing in Stone a world of objectified cultural phenomena Mandelstam did not doubt that in fact he was creating lyric poetry.

An epic work not only unfolds in time, but also constructs an objective space, apprehended by the reader, within which objects are located and events occur. A lyric event is quite a different matter. Whether the poem deals with personal emotions or with the outside world, it is the poet's consciousness, his inner experience that provides here the encompassing framework. Within the lyric space concepts circulate freely, remote semantic categories crisscross as the abstract encounters the concrete, as subjectivity mingles with actuality, the literal meaning with the symbolic. This is clearly the case with the poems of Stone where inner experience is conveyed in mediated fashion and the personal is rarely mentioned.

To the young Mandelstam "overcoming of Symbolism" meant a repudiation not merely of "other-worldliness," but also of flimsy subjectivism. Hence the author hidden behind the world both historical and concrete, hence the structural firmness of his poetic universe. Art itself is conceived here as an architectural principle superimposed by the artist upon life's natural disorder.

The chief among the historical and artistic cultures reflected in the early Mandelstam is the synthetic, Greco-Roman culture. Mandelstam perceives it through the prism of the Russian tradition, of eighteenth-century classicism, of Batjushkov, Pushkin, and Russian architecture. "And the architect was no Italian, / but a Russian in Rome." This reference is to Voronikhin, architect of Kazan Cathedral.

It was not propensity for stylization that led Mandelstam to travel down the paths of world culture. It was rather the need to understand these cultures historically and to locate them in the context of Russia's cultural consciousness. This urge may well be traced back to Dostoevsky's notion of universality or all-embracing humanity as an inherent characteristic of Russian national consciousness. In Mandelstam, however, the problem is transposed to the linguistic plane, the most essential one, he feels, for a poet.

In his 1922 essay, "On the Nature of the Word" [which was published in Sobranie Sochinenij Mandelstam writes: "Russian is a Hellenistic language. Thanks to historical circumstances, the vital forces of Hellenic culture, having yielded to Latin influences and, having tarried for a while in childless Byzantium, rushed to the bosom of Russian speech, imparting to it the original secret of the Hellenistic world view, the secret of free incarnation. That is why Russian became a sounding and speaking flesh." The point here is not how well Mandelstam's linguistic notions correspond to scientific fact, but rather the role they play in his understanding of historical cultures and cultural styles.

In Tristia as in Stone Mandelstam steers clear of the poetic language of early nineteenth-century Russian classicism with its mythological bent and its conventional formulas. His aim is to create a Hellenic poetic "dialect" of his own. Mandelstam's poetic language is synthetic and broad; it ranges from the solemn archaisms to the most ordinary words, from learned allusions to plain colloquialisms. What is at issue here is merely the classical "coloring" of Mandelstam's vocabulary, the impact of some particularly dynamic words, capable of "infecting" the entire context. Mandelstam and his contemporaries learned the use of such words from the poets of the Pushkin era: "I have studied the science of saying goodbye / in bareheaded laments at night."

In a 1924 essay, "The Interlude" [which was published in Arkhaisty i novatory, 1929], Jurij Tynjanov commented: "In so receptive a poetic culture the grafting of a simple foreign word is enough to make 'saying goodbye,' 'bareheaded,' and 'waiting' as Latin-sounding as the 'vigils' [vigilij] and to assimilate 'sciences' and 'a pair of pants' to 'chebureki'" [the latter observation is a reference to the poem "Feodosija"].

For Mandelstam Hellenism is not only a source that fed Russian culture. In his poetic system of the 1910s and 1920s it is also the fountainhead of beauty. During those two decades Mandelstam, it seems, could not tear himself away from the beautiful.

Classicist aesthetics of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries frequently equated the beautiful with the artistic. At times, however, the former was interpreted more narrowly and distinguished from the merely characteristic or expressive in art. Since there is no room here for an extended discussion of the nature of the beautiful, this must remain a moot point. Suffice it to say that the experience of beauty is, indubitably, a distinctive psychological and aesthetic fact. The artistic systems of various ages invariably lay claim to this marvelous quality. Both classicism in all its variants and romanticism, in quite a different way, were such systems, even though the latter also provided a rationale for an aesthetic of the ugly.

Symbolist aesthetics was heavily indebted to the romantic tradition, and more specifically, to the romantic concept of the beautiful. The futurists tried to refute the very principle of beauty in art, though, in actual fact the beautiful is present in the works of both Khlebnikov and Majakovskij. Among the other poets who followed in the wake of the symbolists, there was no agreement on this issue. Each in his own way sought to discover the source of beauty and of the poetic. The Roman-Italian motifs of Stone, the Hellenism of Tristia are Mandelstam's appeal to the sphere of the beautiful, consecrated by tradition, to be exact, by the Russian poetic tradition. No wonder Mandelstam loved Batjushkov so much. In Batjushkov's poetry he found the continuity of beautiful formulas rooted in tradition but transformed by a great poet's genius.

To Mandelstam of the 1910s beauty bequeathed by classical antiquity leaves its imprint on every mode of experience, be it the lofty civic-mindedness ("Let us celebrate, brothers, the twilight of freedom"), or everyday life. Thus, the tennis player plays against the girl "like Attica's soldier in love with his enemy." Thus, the street urchin staring at the ice-cream peddler's "itinerate icebox" partakes of classical splendor.

But even the Gods do not know what he'll take—
A diamond cream? A wafer filled with jam?
But glittering under the sun's thin ray
The divine ice will quickly melt.

In his programmatic essay "On the Nature of the Word," Mandelstam contends that the Russian literary tradition knew heroic Hellenism and domestic Hellenism. He elaborates: "Hellenism—that is a cooking pot, an oven fork, a milk jug. It is household utensils, dishes, everything that surrounds the body. Hellenism is the conscious encirclement of man with the untensils instead of impersonal objects, the transformation of these objects into the utensils, the humanization of the surrounding world, heating it with the most delicate tedeological warmth."

These reflections are closely related to Mandelstam's own poetics as well as to that Russian literary tradition in which Mandelstam, as a zealous reader of The Iliad in Gnedich's translation, was well versed. In the period of 1810-30 Gnedich elaborated what has been called the Russian "Homeric style." This style departs from the French neoclassical concept of antiquity, combining solemn archaisms with vernacular expressions, workaday concreteness, and at times, elements of folklore. The Russian version of The Iliad is a good example of what Mandelstam meant by the domestic Hellenistic tradition. Among Mandelstam's more recent models were the translations of ancient authors done by Vjacheslav Ivanov.

In her reminiscences about Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva calls him a "Petersburgite and a Crimean." Mandelstam passionately loved the Crimea and the sea. The Crimea became for him a sui generis native variant of antiquity. Crimean motifs permeate the Hellenism of Tristia and lend the cycle a certain intimacy. "In rock-strewn Taurida Hellenic science lives," writes Mandelstam.

And in the white room silence stands like a spinning wheel,
It smells of vinegar, paint, and new wine from the cellar.
Do you remember, in the Greek house, the wife everyone loved?
Not Helen. The other one—how long she could work at embroidering?

Thus Mandelstam's "household-utensil" concept of Hellenism is brought forth and the boundaries between the Crimean and classical motifs obliterated.

In Mandelstam flocks of sheep are emblematic of the Crimea. A system of images that keeps recurring in his verse of the 1910s includes flocks, shepherds, dogs, wool, sheeps' warmth. This cluster, grounded in a domestic locale, can be propelled into a Roman theme of a broad historical scope:

The old ewes, the black Chaldeans,
The spawn of night, cowled in darkness,
Go off grumbling to the hills
Like plebs annoyed at Rome.

In Tristia Mandelstam uses Hellenism as a mode of the beautiful to talk of the lyric poet's enduring subjects—the creative process ("I have forgotten the word I wanted to say"), the passage of time, death, and love. There are many poems about love in Tristia. But for the most part the direct, traditionally lyrical expression of the love theme is absent here. It enters the collection in a covert, to be exact, semicovert fashion.

"Because I Was Not Able to Restrain Your Hands" is one of the finest love lyrics in twentieth-century Russian poetry. The poet finds himself a participant in an ancient agon; the besieged Troy, the Achaian warriors, and Helen, not named but alluded to, are all "objective correlatives" for a throbbing, pent-up lyricism. But Mandelstam's semantics are so sensitive to lexical coloring that at times one name suffices to bring this lyricism to the fore. Why for instance, "Not Helen. The other?" Why is Penelope not named, but introduced in a roundabout, periphrastic manner? Because the beautiful Helen's name brings to the surface the personal theme, reinforced by "do you remember?" Though never fully articulated, it sends a current of lyrical uneasiness across the poem.

In the collection Tristia (1922) the function of the Hellenist style has changed. No longer employed to project the image of a historical culture, it now becomes authorial style, the language that encompasses Mandelstam's poetic universe, an embodiment of the beauty he seeks.

The reviewers of the 1920s contrasted the precision and concreteness of Stone with Tristia's associative poetics. The shift from Stone to Tristia show how substantial was the evolution Mandelstam had undergone. It is, however, the evolution of a single creative personality whose continuity is evident at all stages. The two collections are held together by a certain structuring thrust that characterizes Mandelstam's perception of the world. Therefore, his associative semantics [assotsiativnost'], though dynamic, is not at all diffuse.

The artistic context that determines the meaning of a word may well extend far beyond the limits of a given work. Such a context can be provided by an entire literary movement or an individual poetic system. Block's poetry, for example, cannot be understood apart from his large cycles, which ultimately merge into a single context, a "trilogy of incarnation" [literally "humanization"], to use Blok's own phrase. In Pasternak's early poems, the verses rush along impetuously, breaking out of their boundaries to form a single lyrical torrent. Mandelstam, on the other hand, is a poet of delimited, though interrelated, contexts.

In a much quoted letter to Strakhov [23 April 1876], Tolstoy said that "art is a huge labyrinth of linkages" and that, as a writer, "[I am] guided by a need to gather thoughts that were linked together in order to express myself. Each thought, however, expressed separately loses its meaning and suffers terribly when it is taken out of the linkage to which it belongs." The decisive aesthetic role of the context and intensity of semantic interaction are inherent in all verbal art, not to mention lyric poetry, where interaction is especially dynamic. I keep referring to Mandelstam's associativeness, to poetics of linkages, since these characteristics acquire maximum intensity in his poetic system. There are historical reasons for this. The pupils of the symbolists repudiated their predecessors' "other-worldliness" but held firm to their discovery that in poetry the word has a heightened capacity for evoking unnamed notions, for filling the gaps with associations. This widened range of association is, perhaps, the most vital element of the symbolist legacy.

Mandelstam's taut contexts permit remote meanings to meet, crisscross, or come into conflict with one another. In his poems an epithet often refers to the context rather than to the object with which it is formally, or grammatically, linked. "I have studied the science of saying goodbye / In bare-headed laments at night."

Why are these laments "bare-headed?" The explanation is found in the last three lines of the same eight-line stanza:

When, lifting their load of sorrow for the journey,
Eyes red from weeping have peered into the distance
And the crying of women mingled with the Muses' singing.

These are tears and laments of bare-headed women (that is, women with uncovered heads), seeing their men off to battle.

The last collection of Mandelstam's poetry published in his lifetime (1928) includes Stone, Tristia, and a section labeled 1921-1925. The poems of these latter years, although akin in many ways to the Tristia collection, for the most part lack the stylistic coloring suggestive of classical antiquity. Hence, the principle that underlies the Mandelstam imagery emerges even more clearly. The section opens with the 1921 poem, "Concert at the Railway Station" (later in The Noise of Time Mandelstam transferred the salient images of this poem from a poetic plane to the plane of everyday life). The architectonics of the poem are complex. The present mingles with childhood recollections of famous symphonic concerts held at the Pavlovsk train station. Within this allembracing antithesis, three worlds collide: the world of music (like Blok, Mandelstam considers music not only an art form, but also a higher symbol both of the historical life of peoples and of the spiritual life of individual man), the glass world of the station's concert hall, and the iron world of the nearby railroad—a harsh, antimusical world. One should not, however, interpret such images allegorically and assign to them a single meaning; to do so would be to violate Mandelstam's poetic system.

The Aeonian maids, at whose song the station trembles,
And again the violin-laden air is sundered
And fused together by the whistles of trains.

Immense park. The station in a glass sphere.
A spell cast again on the iron world.
The train carriage is borne away in state
to the echoing feast in misty Elysium.

The three worlds are tightly interwoven into a single whole: the railway station with the "Aeonian maids" [muses], the whistles of trains with the violin-laden air. The iron world is drawn into the world of music. The very word torzhestvenno [in state] with its classical ambiance and stately sound does much to lend the train carriage a semblance of a musical "Elysium." The station trembles with music ("at the song of the Aeonian maids")—this traditional metaphor reappears in the last stanza in a new and complex guise: "And I think, how like a beggar the iron world / shivers, covered with music and lather."

The iron world shivers. It is now bewitched, overcome by music. Therefore, it is covered with music, but also with lather, because the shiver has drawn into the semantic circle the notion of a winded, lathery horse. The unusual combination of music and lather lends a material quality to music and symbolic significance to the lather.

On no account should Mandelstam's associative resonance be confused with the "trans-sense," undifferentiated semantics and kindred phenomena that Mandelstam opposed vigorously. He pitted against the symbolist verbal music the poetically transformed meaning of the word, against the signs of the "unknowable" the image as an expression of the sometimes elusive, but essentially knowable, intellectual connection between phenomena.

In the essay "The Morning of Acmeism," written about 1913, Mandelstam protests the "trans-sense" [zaumnyj] language of the futurists, arguing that logos, "the conscious sense of the word," is the very cornerstone of poetry: "For us a logical relationship is not some ditty about a siskin, but a choral symphony with organ, so difficult and inspired that the director must exert all his powers to keep the performers under his control." That is how Mandelstam viewed the semantic instrumentation in verse. A younger contemporary of Andrej Belyj and Khlebnikov, a peer of Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam is fully alive to phonic affinities between words, but he cherishes the auditory image chiefly as a generator of a new meaning.

Many years later Mandelstam returns to the problem of poetic logos in "Talking about Dante" [Doles, 1933]. In this essay he not only talks about the Italian poet, but also discusses at length both poetry in general and his own poetics in particular. "When, for example, we pronounce the word 'sun,' we do not expel a ready-made meaning—this would be a form of semantic abortion—but rather experience a sui generis cycle. Every word is a bundle from which meaning radiates in different directions, rather than converging on one official point. When we say 'sun,' we embark upon an enormous journey, one to which we have become so accustomed that we 'sleepwalk.' What distinguishes poetry from automatic speech is that it rouses us and shakes us awake in the middle of a word."

In his memoirs Vsevolod Rozhdestvenskij recalls Mandelstam's early pronouncement: "Ideas should blaze up now here, now there like little marsh lights. They only appear to be disconnected. Everything is subject to reason, to sound rules of logic, yet they are buried deep down and are not readily accessible" [Pages from Life, 1965].

Although the reader does not actually reconstruct the omitted semantic links, he nonetheless is aware of this "difficult and inspired" inner logic. With few exceptions, Mandelstam's poems can be explained; their author is not a poet who strings together "blissful and senseless" words. One should not misconstrue this formula as Mandelstam's poetic creed; it occurs in "We Shall Gather Again in Petersburg" (1920) and refers to the words of love. Many Mandelstam poems are effective because of their euphony or their lexical coloring. For him, however, this is always an auxiliary, secondary factor. It has been assumed that the poem "I Have Forgotten the Word I Wanted to Say" lacked a definable subject. Actually it has a theme—notably, creativity, the fear of muteness that haunts the poet. The young Mandelstam wrote about the delights of silence, beseeching the word to return to music. The mature Mandelstam knows that thought embodied in words is a necessity, that it is the poet's highest obligation. "More than anything else," Akhmatova recalls, "he feared his own muteness, calling it asphyxia. When it gripped him, he rushed about in terror":

I have forgotten the word I wanted to say.
A blind Swallow returns to the palace of shadows
on clipped wings to flicker among the Transparent Ones.
In oblivion they are singing the night song.

The blind swallow with clipped wings stands for the unspoken word. It returns to the kingdom of the dead, to the palace of shadows where everything is incorporeal and thus transparent, mute, and arid:

No sounds from the birds. No flowers on the immortelles.
The horses of night have transparent manes.
A little boat drifts on the dry river.
Among the crickets the word fades into oblivion.

Unembodied, the poetic word loses its bearings. Tormented, like the poet himself, it fights for life:

And it rises slowly, like a pavilion or a temple,
performs the madness of Antigone,
or falls at one's feet, a dead swallow,
with Stygian tenderness and a green branch.

The word grows, bearing a green branch like the dove released from Noah's ark. Further on there is a fear of the opening void, and the muses (Aeonian maids) weep over the poet who has lapsed into silence.

But I have forgotten what I wanted to say
and a bodiless thought returns to the palace of shadows.

Another poem also dated 1920 deals, on the other hand, with the realization of a poetic vision. The same Hellenic imagery is used simultaneously with the themes of poetry and love, death and creative immortality, and thus of time.

Take from my palms, to soothe your heart,
a little honey, a little sun,
in obedience to Persephone's bees.

You can't untie a boat that was never moored,
nor hear a shadow in its furs,
nor move through thick life without fear.

For us, all that's left is kisses
tattered as the little bees
that die when they leave the hive.

Deep in the transparent night they're still humming,
at home in the dark wood on the mountain,
in the mint and lungwort and the past.

But lay to your heart my rough gift,
this unlovely dry necklace of dead bees
that once made a sun out of honey.

The poem is constructed around two fundamental—and interrelated—symbols: bees and kisses. Kisses are the symbol of love; bees traditionally have been associated with poetry. The poets of classical antiquity (Horace, in particular) compared themselves to bees. Mandelstam had employed the images of the bee as poet and honey as poetry in one of his early poems, "On a Rocky Spur of Peoria." In "Take from My Palms" the image of the bee is more polysemous. Bees are an attribute of Persephone, queen of the underground kingdom of the dead, and goddess of fertility and germination. Persephone is a symbol of the eternal cycle of death and rebirth in nature, of sprouting grain that has been dropped into the earth's womb. In the second tercet Mandelstam speaks of the subterranean, shadowy kingdom of Persephone, the ruler of the bees, and of the fear this kingdom inspires in mortals. In the third tercet kisses appear and immediately are identified with bees through the medium of Mandelstam's favorite device—the transfer of an attribute from one object to another. The kisses are "tattered [furry] as the little bees." These are the bees of poetry and love, and at the same time of the eternal cycle of death and renewal in nature. It is thus that they feed on the past as well as on lungwort. The bees, the kisses, and the feelings of the poet die. But the honey of creation and love is immortal, like the sun.

To understand this poem one need not have an extensive knowledge of mythology, but simply a general idea of the Persephone myth (much less than a reading of Pushkin's early poems and of other Russian poets of the period frequently requires). But one also needs to grasp the basic principle of Mandelstam semantics.

Poetry is a special mode of artistic cognition, of knowing things in their uniqueness, in their aspect at once generalized and individual, thus inaccessible to scientific logical cognition. This uniqueness or individuality of the percept is more essential to the modern lyric poet than the sense of the author's or the hero's individuality. That is why poetic word is always a word transformed by the context, and qualitatively different from its prose equivalent.

In "Talking about Dante," Mandelstam speaks at length about the poetic transformation of the world "with the aid of instruments commonly labeled images." Mandelstam expresses himself metaphorically: this is an organic trait of his thinking. In 1933 Mandelstam came to Leningrad. Several people, among them myself, gathered at Anna Akhmatov's to listen to him read his just completed "Talking about Dante." Mandelstam read the essay, read his poems, and talked copiously about poetry and about painting. We were struck by the remarkable affinities between the essay, the poems, and the table talk. Here was a single semantic system, a single stream of similes and juxtapositions. The image-bearing matrix from which Mandelstam's poems emerged became strangely tangible.

The same semantic principles are operative in Mandelstam's prose, including his essays. Paradoxical though it may seem, Mandelstam's prose is often more metaphorical than his poetry. This is true, at any rate, of The Egyptian Stamp. A metaphor brings together notions so as to form a completely new and indivisible semantic whole. This is not always the case with Mandelstam's "linkages." What matters most here are changes in meaning occasioned by the words' presence in the total context of the work where they can interact at a distance, often without a syntactic contiguity.

Within this overall pattern pivotal or key words acquire special impact. Mandelstam's insight into the nature of these words owes a great deal to Annenskij's poetry with its psychological symbolism. Mandelstam accepts the notion of life refracted through poetic symbols, but he cannot accept the abstractness of "professional symbolism." In the essay "On the Nature of the Word," (1922) Mandelstam writes:

Images are disemboweled like stuffed animals and packed with foreign content…. That's what happens with professional symbolism. The result is a terrible quadrille of "correspondences" nodding to one another. Eternal winking…. Rose motions to girl, girl to rose. No one wants to be himself…. The Russian symbolists … sealed every word and every image, having earmarked them in advance for liturgical use alone. Something extremely awkward resulted; one could neither move, stand up, nor sit down…. All the utensils had risen in rebellion, the broom requested a day off, the pot no longer wanted to cook, but demanded instead absolute significance (as if cooking were not an absolute significance).

In an early essay on Villon, Mandelstam says approvingly that medieval allegories are "not disembodied." The same idea is also found in the essay "Remarks on Chénier": "Very broad allegories, including such concepts as 'Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,' are not at all incorporeal. For a poet and his epoch they are almost living persons, interlocutors. He discerns their features, feels their warm breath" [Sobranie sochinenij]. In an allegory or a simile Mandelstam wanted to preserve the sensual warmth of objects.

Mandelstam's key words are inherently symbolic: they were not drawn, however, from any symbolist stockpile. His symbols are original, the system his own. It is not surprising that his system took shape in the 1910s, when poets nurtured by symbolism were repudiating its philosophy. In the 1924 essay "Thrust" [which was published in Sobranie sochinenij] Mandelstam calls symbolism "generic [rodovoja] poetry," contending that after its collapse "the kingdom … of the poetic individual came into being," a kingdom in which "every individual stood separately, with his head bared."

In Tristia and in the poems written during the first half of the 1920s emphasis on the objective and the narrative tenor of Stone recedes; to a large degree, the poet's experience is now an inner one. It is the experience of a man who loves life in all its beauty and significance, but finds it an inordinate burden because its harsh laws bear down on him and because he carries within himself elements of weakness and inadequacy that sap his creative powers and that creativity alone might be able to overcome.

This is also true of the later period. In Mandelstam's poems written in the 1930s there is fear, confusion, and despair, and at the same time an amazing, indestructible love of life. Tragedy coexists here with an ever-increasing delight in the phenomena of existence. The poet is in love with history, art, and life. Such is the cycle "Armenia" (1930), which marks the beginning of Mandelstam's final creative period.

Oh, Erivan, Erivan! Did a bird draw you,
or, like a child, a lion paint you out of a colored pencilcase?

The bird and lion are heraldic animals protrayed as a rule colorfully and archetypally. The lion suggests beauty and strength, but here the lion also has a childlike quality—a marvelous schoolboy with a pencilcase in its paw.

"Batjushkov" (1932) is a poem about the triumph of poetry.

He brought us, tongue-tied,
Our anguish, and our wealth,
the noise of poetry-making, the bell of brotherhood
and the soft downpour of tears.

"Impressionism" is about our response to painting. Sensual concreteness of perception approaches here a visual illusion.

But the shadow, the shadow's getting ever more violet—
A bow or a whip, it goes out like a match
You may say: in the kitchen
The cooks are cooking fat pigeons.

Mandelstam's poetry always has its origin at the point where fear of life and love of life meet. And so it is until the very end. In one of the last Voronezh poems, Mandelstam with unprecedented directness writes about his desire to possess the earth's vital force, "to hear the axis of the earth."

I do not draw or sing
or ply the dark-varied bow.
I simply drink life in and love to envy
The strength and cunning of the wasps!

Oh if only once the sting of the air and the heat
of summer could make me hear
beyond sleep and death
the earth's axis, the earth's axis.

If in Stone problems of the world's cultures and of poetic styles are predominant, in Tristia and the poems 1921-1925 adjoining it "eternal themes" of life and death, creation and love are paramount. Here the love theme is partially concealed by imagery, now classical, now old-Russian. The poet has moved into a different dimension; in Tristia structural ties appear to lose their external objective and narrative outlines, becoming instead an inner logic of assocaitions.

The cluster of symbols that originally embodied Mandelstam's concept of man, of his strengths and weaknesses, gave rise to a number of secondary images. In 1915 he announced a change in his materials. He wrote:

Fire destroys
My dry life
and I sing now
not stones, but tree.

But at that time he was still speaking about "the wooden paradise where things are so light." Eventually the theme of dryness and the correlative one of wood becomes increasingly important to Mandelstam. Dryness acquires the connotation of sapped vitality, of inadequacy. In the poem "Because I Was not Able to Restrain Your Hands" man is imprisoned in a wooden world peopled by timbers, saws, wood, an ax, resin-oozing walls, the wooden ribs of a city, a wooden rain of arrows like a grove of nut trees, and all this is a retribution for man's powerlessness, for dryness.

Because I was not able to restrain your hands,
Because I betrayed your salty, tender lips,
I must wait for dawn in this dense acropolis.
How I despise these ancient reeking timbers.

Another key word here is blood. Blood is a vital force: "But blood has rushed to the stairs and started climbing …" Yet blood too is threatened by dryness: "Nothing quiets the blood's dry fever." The extraordinary coupling of dryness with blood is thus justified.

The meaning of Mandelstam's images is determined by the context. Sometimes, however, their meaning is quite stable and is transmitted from one poem to another. Dryness is failure—an "exchanged blood." This is fully explained by another poem of 1920 in which the love theme appears without any classical coloring:

I want to serve you
equally with others,
to mumble fortunes
with lips dry from jealousy.
The word does not slake
my parched mouth,
and without you the dense air
is empty again for me.
I do not call you
either joy or love,
my blood has been exchanged
for another, savage blood.

In two poems of 1922, "No Way of Knowing When This Song Began," and "I Climbed into the Tousled Hayloft," both variations on the same theme, we are no longer confronted by the dryness of wood, but rather by the stifling dryness of hay and the hayloft. Hence, a whole series of secondary images smothering hayrick, rustling, sack of caraway seeds, dry grass, hay-dust, matted scurf, and finally squabble. Significantly, the image of blood is present here also. The poet must free it from dryness: "So that the pink link of blood / and the one-armed ringing of the grass may pronounce / their last goodbyes." As one can see, these poems share a single semantic key. Each of them is a whole; at the same time they are linked by the symbolism that runs through Mandelstam's poetry.

Critics have noted the presence of recurrent images in Mandelstam's poetry such as salt and star. Such images, however, occur not by themselves but in specific contexts. In "Talking about Dante," salt and blood are tied in one semantic "bundle:" "This is a song about the composition of human blood, which contains oceanic salt. The origin of the journey lies in the system of blood vessels. Blood is planetary, solar, salty." If blood is always perceived as a vital force, the image of salt in Mandelstam's poetry acquires various meanings. Sometimes salt means hurt, sometimes it too is a vital force—the salt of the earth.

In the poems of the 1920s, as in Stone, stars inspire in the poet feelings of distrust, hostility, and fear. As in the earlier verse, they represent the inscrutable and overwhelmingly vast universe from which one must seek protection in domesticity, in utensils, in the warmth of the earth: "There are seven stars in the Great Bear's dipper, / five good senses on the earth."

In the 1925 poem "I'll Run Wild in the Dark Streets Gypsy Camp" the image of "prickly starry untruth" arises. Why are the stars "prickly?" Because they are cold, indifferent to man. Of course, the star's form, its slender rays, and sharp facets are also significant. Because of their sharp planes, stars resemble salt crystals. Thus salt, associated with stars through form, glitter, and milky dispersion, becomes a hostile force. And here something else comes into play—the corrosive power of salt.

I was washing outside in the darkness,
the sky burning with rough stars,
and the starlight, salt on an ax-blade.
The cold overflows the barrel.

The gate's locked,
The land's grim—as its conscience—
I don't think there is a finer warp
than the truth of a fresh canvas.

Star, like salt, is melting the barrel
Icy water is turning blacker,
Death's growing purer, misfortune saltier
The earth more truthful and dreadful.

Rough stars, salt, an ax, icy water, the stern earth, unbleached canvas are all merciless to man, demanding from him an ultimate sobriety and truth and requiring him to look death and salty misfortune in the face.

The following poem also dates from the first half of the 1920s:

To some winter is nut-stains and blue-eyed punch
to some, wine fragrant with cinnamon, and to some
it's a salt of commands from the cruel stars
to carry into a smoky hut.
The warm droppings of a few hens
and a tepid muddle of sheep.
For life, for life and care, I'll give up everything
A kitchen match could keep me warm.

Here Mandelstam's key symbols combine with a terribly direct, unvarnished conversation about the agonizing desire to live, to find warmth. And "A salt of command from cruel stars" is a new variant on the 1912 theme:

The cold abstractness, the "cruelty" of vast spaces is juxtaposed with the warmth of sheep, chicken manure, smoke, wool, utensils; all these help sustain life, however frail.

Look, all I have with me is a clay pot
To smoothe out fur and turn straw in silence.

In the final stanzas, cruel stars once again are coupled with the acidity of salt, with the bitter taste of smoke and wormwood.

Since persistently recurring images wander through Mandelstam's poems, they may be said to explain one another. But sometimes the key to the poem's interpretation is found outside the confines of Mandelstam's poetry. Thus, on occasions, the meaning of an entire poem or of individual images can be fully grasped only by consulting the memoirs of a contemporary.

In her reminiscences about Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva recalls that three of his 1916 poems were addressed to her, though there were no formal dedications. In 1916 Tsvetaeva in her own words, "made Mandelstam a present of Moscow," that is, showed him the city. It was her "tiger fur coat," we learn, that got intertwined with the Russo-Italian motif of Kremlin cathedrals:

And Moscow's five-domed cathedrals
With their Italian and Russian souls
Remind me of Aurora, Goddess of dawn
but with a Russian name, and in a fur coat.

The following poem in the cycle is "On a Sledge, Overlaid with Straw." In this multilevel poem Tsarevich Dmitrij, murdered in Uglich, blends with the False Dmitrij, who, in turn, merges with the author and assumes independent existence: "I am conveyed about the streets bare-headed," but later "They are bringing the Tsarevich, the body's numb with terror."

Let us imagine that this poem is preceded by a dedication to Marina Tsvetaeva: immediately it ceases to be enigmatic. The name Marina, bringing to mind Pushkin's Boris Godunov, is the key to the latent love theme in the poem. She is Marina, and he, therefore, is Dmitrij; at the same time he is the poet who is writing about Dmitrij and Marina.

At times the poem's plot overlaps with history. For example, the line "And in Uglich the children play at knucklebones" alludes to an actual historical fact. The boyars, sent to Uglich by Godunov, declared that the Tsarevich was not murdered, but had accidentally stabbed himself with a knife while playing svajka (a game similar to knucklebones) with other children. The Pretender's ties with Rome and the Pope's futile attempt to use him as a means of introducing Catholicism into Russia are also historical facts. At times the poet moves away from history. The Pretender was not bound and carried around the city. He was murdered near the palace, and later his body was burned. This, perhaps, accounts for the line "And now the amber straw was set on fire." The False Dmitrij was red-haired. The chain of associations thus grows longer. Missing, however, is the final link, the name Marina Tsvetaeva, which would elucidate the poem once and for all. To find the link we must have recourse to material outside the text.

Recounting the story of the third poem dedicated to her, "No Believers in the Resurrection," Tsvetaeva observes: "I do not know whether it is necessary to footnote the everyday material used in poems. Poems grind up life and then discard it." This is true, but not entirely true. One should not confuse the origin of lyric material with its artistic function. A "real-life" source sometimes is incorporated into a poem's artistic structure in the form of its principal theme or semantic key or serves as a basis for associations essential to a total response. At times, however, the realia that set the poet's thought in motion prove to be aesthetically neutral. They have indeed been milled by the verses and then discarded.

Mandelstam was clearly the kind of poet who reacted strongly to the most diverse stimuli, including the mundane, the everyday. It is this concreteness of impulse, whenever the letter is unknown to the reader, that sometimes renders a poem unintelligible.

The clock-cricket singing,
that's the fever rustling,
the dry stove hissing
that's the fire in red silk.

Speaking about this poem Akhmatova observed: "This is about how we heated the stove together. I have a fever and I take my temperature."

Most likely Mandelstam really "was washing outside in the darkness" (the opening line of a poem written in Tbilisi in 1921), or climbed the ladder ("I climbed into the tousled hayloft"). A locked gate, a barrel with icy water, the tousled hay, all these are real objects, transformed into elements of a poetic conversation about truth, death, and misfortune or about the universe and creativity. In instances such as these information about the actual sources of a poetic experience is pertinent only to the psychology of creation, remaining beyond the threshold of the work's aesthetic structure.

A similar fate befalls sometimes even the aesthetically effective realia that are essential to the interpretation of a given context. More exactly, their meaning is revealed elsewhere, notably in Mandelstam's prose or essays. One of his favorite images is the swallow. Its significance differs from one context to another. Swallows are bonded together into legions in one place and serve as a symbol of poetic language in another. The swallow is an image found in ancient Greek folksongs. But this is not all. The meaning of bird imagery is elucidated in "Talking about Dante:" "The quill is a tiny piece of bird flesh. Certainly Dante, who never forgets the origin of things, keeps this in mind. The technique of writing with all its twists and flourishes develops into a figured flight of birds in flock…. Old Italian grammar, not unlike our Russian grammar, is the same agitated flock of birds." Thus, for Mandelstam bird symbolism is associated with writing, with language (in The Egyptian Stamp there is an expression, "the swallow's flourish"). Later, while in Voronezh, Mandelstam wrote a radio essay on Goethe. In it the "technique of writing," to be exact, the handwriting of a great poet, is associated with the swallow. Goethe's "handwriting is characterized at once by the wildest swings and by harmony. His letters resemble fishermen's hooks that slant diagonally as though a whole flock of swallows were skimming smoothly and powerfully slantwise across the page." The swallow's flight is the poet's handwriting; it is letters and letters are a word. The chain of associations extend thus to blind swallow, symbol of the unembodied poetic word. But the links of these chains are buried in later essays.

For Mandelstam this was a natural process. So absorbed was he in the single thrust of his poetic thought which he realized in his verse, artistic prose, essays, and conversation, moving freely from genre to genre, that he himself did not fully appreciate its range.

The problem of the reader, the social existence of the work of art, was a matter of major concern to Mandelstam. He advocated intellectuality in poetry and inner logic in poetic thought. In "Talking about Dante" he labeled the expectation that the reader would grasp the cultural, historical, political, and technical notions introduced by the poet the poem's "reference keyboard." We have seen, nonetheless, that he himself more than once pressed a key that could not evoke the requisite response even in an experienced reader. This was so not because his verse defied sense or lacked a subject, but because in those instances the key to his poetic logic was misplaced.

Mandelstam had great faith in the power of poetic linkages, so characteristic of this system, in the dynamics of the context. (Whenever this faith was not justified, failure would ensue.) Mandelstam was confident that even where crucial poetic associations were not available to the reader, because he was not familiar with some aspect of the realia, the context would compensate by suggesting some other kindred associations. This held true for individual poetic images and occasionally also for poems constructed entirely around plots concealed from the reader.

An example of such a poem is "On the Stage of Ghosts a Pale Gleaming." In the last stanza we are confronted by Petrograd at night in the year 1920. "Smoke hangs in the ragged sheepskins. The street's black with drifted snow," while at the theater magnificent opera performances are taking place. We find the same theme in "We Shall Gather Again in Petersburg." The first two stanzas are a recollection of old Petersburg, with its grand theater exits, an illusory image of the nineteenth-century opera stage. The third stanza seems to stand at the juncture of these two planes. The name of Eurydice and the legend of Orpheus, who found Eurydice in the kingdom of shadows and lost her again thanks to a blunder, introduces a personal, lyric theme. The poem's two motifs—love and music—have been brought together.

But how is one to understand the last two lines: "The living swallow fell / On hot snow."?

What is this? A diffuse, irrational motif? No, once again the factual link is missing, and we find it in Mandelstam's prose. In The Egyptian Stamp Mandelstam twice talks about the circumstances surrounding the death of the Italian singer, Angiolina Bosio. Bosio sang in St. Petersburg during the years 1856-59; in 1859, at the age of thirty-five, she caught a cold and died of pneumonia. Her death made an extraordinary impression on St. Petersburg society. In the poem "On the Weather" (1865) Nekrasov recalls the event:

Let us recall Bosio. Arrogant Petropolis
Went all out for her.
But in vain did you wrap up in sable
Your nightingale throat,
Italy's daughter! Southern roses
Cannot cope with Russian frost.

"The stage of ghosts" of the first stanzas is the stage of the 1850s. Mandelstam's line "There's a rose under the furs," offers a variation on the above. In the next stanza he appears to take notice of Nekrasov: "Ours is a cold winter, dear Eurydice. / Never mind …"

The narrative core of the poem is thus encoded in the same way as the love theme. The reader's perception nevertheless moves along the track laid out, though not visible to him. What he perceives is the collision of two planes, one temporal, Petrograd of the 1920s and St. Petersburg of the nineteenth century, the other national, the Russo-Italian motif, crowned by the image of the singer-swallow lying in the St. Petersburg snows.

In Mandelstam's poetry of 1921-25 Hellenism has been cast aside along with other stylistic conventions. It is a major step toward his works of the 1930s where the poet was to confront reality in a different, new way. A group of poems of 1923 and early 1924 help define this transition. One of the themes in Tristia, that of time, of alternating death and rebirth, is transferred from a philosophical domain, from the sphere of "eternal" lyric themes, to a historical one, becoming the theme of the age. This shift occurs in the poems "The Age," "He Who Finds a Horseshoe," "The Slate Ode," and "1 January 1924."

To seek a clear political program in Mandelstam's works of the 1920s would be futile. Mandelstam did accept the October Revolution, though not without hesitation and contradictions that characterized the initial response of many intellectuals formed before the Revolution. The burden of history, however, is heavy:

Could I ever betray to gossip-mongers
the great vow to the Fourth Estate
and oaths solemn enough for tears?

Dry blood of Tristia gives way to blood mixed with lime. The persona now experiences directly the pressure of history. He still very much wants to live. Once again the imagery moves from impoverishment and extinction ("Breath growing weaker by the day"), to bursts of indestructible vitality.

And in the sick son's blood the deposit of lime
Will melt, and there'll be sudden blessed laughter.

But the age itself seems to be the speaker's double; it too is frightened and hungry for life. At times it becomes difficult to distinguish the age from the lyrical "I" of this cycle. The latter is about the atrophy of the past, in particular, of the nineteenth century and "its survivors, those emigrants shipwrecked and cast by the will of fate onto a new historical continent," to use the words of Mandelstam's essay "The nineteenth century." Mandelstam is speaking of the essence of the nineteenth century, an age of reflection and "relativism" ("my splendid derelict, my age") that continues to live in the consciousness of the old intelligentsia hesitatingly accepting the Revolution. All this emerges clearly from the poetic texts themselves. In addition, we can find theoretical corroboration of such a reading in Mandelstam's essays "The Word and Culture," "The Badger's Burrow," and, especially the 1922 one entitled "The Nineteenth Century."

On the threshold of the nineteenth century Derzhavin scratched on slate several lines of poetry that may serve as a leitmotif for the entire coming century.

The river of time in its onrush
Carries away the affairs of men
And drowns in the abyss of oblivion

Peoples, kingdoms, and kings.
And if anything survives
In the sounds of the lyre and the trumpet,
It shall be swallowed by the crater of eternity
And shall not escape the common fate.

The rusty tongue of an aged century serves here to express with power and penetration the latent thought of the century yet to come. A moral is drawn, a keynote is sounded. This moral is relativism or relativity, "and if anything survives"…

The above passage provides a clue to "The Slate Ode," seemingly one of Mandelstam's most difficult works. What Mandelstam cites is the first and only stanza of Derzhavin's ode "On Mortality," written down on slate several days before the poet's death (the slate is preserved in the Leningrad Public Library). "The Slate Ode" is also about the "river of time." It is, however, about a real river as well that cascades down, carrying an inverted reflection of its green banks.

Like rubble from icy heights,
from the backs of green icons,
the famished water flows, eddying,
playing like the young of an animal.

Mountain villages envelop the river, and Mandelstam's Caucasian and Crimean motifs again appear:

Steep goat cities
The massive layering of flint …
In the water their lesson, time wears them fine.

The theme of flint, "a student of running water," represents a new bundle of meanings. It is also, however, Mandelstam's initial theme of stone, the medium of architects and poets.

Derzhavin, one of Mandelstam's favorite poets, is the hidden motivating force of the poem, written in imitation of Derzhavin's eight-line stanza, and celebrating a singularly significant creative act. Slate, the "lead stick" becomes its symbol.

Terror and Split write with the same little stick of milk.
Here, taking form, is the first draft
of the students of running water
…. .
I hear the slate screech
On the startled crag.

In the complex semantic instrumentation of "The Slate Ode" water is an emblem of time. Water-time erodes flint, which resists time, while slate is the vehicle of creativity that interprets time.

Unless the reader has read "The Slate Ode" with "The Nineteenth Century" in mind, he will not recognize the Derzhavin theme—that of the dying poet's writing on slate a poem about the river of time. However, the semantic current that emanates from this hidden source runs through all the poem's links. The reader is aware that the poem is about the lofty and the magnificent, about a rough draft written by a genius. In Mandelstam's poem, however, the river of time is, also, a mountain river. Mandelstam does not want his metaphors to be "incorporeal." Most likely, "The Slate Ode" originated at the confluence of two sets of impressions: the sight of a slate in the Public Library with the half-effaced Derzhavin autograph and the roar of a mountain river, rushing down a siliceous bed.

The 1923-24 cycle of poems about the age and time signals the appearance in Mandelstam of new tendencies. The hayloft in the poem "I Climbed into the Tousled Hayloft," the ax and the icy water in the poem, "I Was Washing Outside in the Darkness" are actualities that set the poet's thought in motion. Within the system of these poems, however, such objects have symbolic meaning, not at all "other-worldly," but expressive of the poet's inner experience.

In 1931 Mandelstam wrote a cycle of poems associated with Moscow ("Midnight in Moscow," "I'm Still not Patriarch") in which the themes of the age and of time, sounded in the 1923-24 poems, are again taken up. Yet we find ourselves now in a different world. Objects remain objects here, even if they acquire a new, vastly expanded meaning. The 1931 cycle is an attempt to define the relationship between the author and his era; its language is contemporary and workaday.

This is how Mandelstam now writes about the "great vow" to the revolutionary tradition and about the passage of time. Instead of searching for domesticity in the cold expanses of the age, the poet wanders along the streets and the embankments of Moscow.

I love the starling streetcars starting off,
And the asphalt's Astrakhan caviar,
Covered with straw matting,
Reminding me of a basket of Asti
And steel ostrich-feathers
On the scaffolding of the Lenin Housing Project.

The young Mandelstam maintained that the poet ought to grasp the tridimensional. Stone abounds in objects, but these are objects of a special sort. First and foremost, they are indicators of cultural structures, of historical styles, be they the exedrae of a temple or the checkered trousers of a Dickens character, the lawyer's overcoat or the "sesquipedalian parts" of a musical composition by Bach. In Tristia and in those poems of the early 1920s that followed in its wake, Mandelstam's is still a tridimensional world, both accessible to the senses ("five good senses on the earth") and intelligible. But the predominance of the "Hellenic" stylistic pattern dematerializes this world. For the late Mandelstam history is the immediate present. The conventional styles had to recede; they were ill equipped to tackle contemporary life, to deal the the fluid, the incomplete, the as yet unnamed. By now the very themes of poems emerge from unexpected impressions, thoughts, recollections, from any inner experience. They bring in tow everyday, prosaic words, signifying the diversity of contemporary reality and essential to the poet because they provide direct contact with it.

Mandelstam's late works point toward a new relationship between poetic symbolism and reality.