Journey to Armenia
Osip Mandelstam visited Armenia in 1930, and during the eight months of his stay he rediscovered his poetic voice and was inspired to write an experimental meditation on the country and its ancient culture. ‘Armenia brought him back to his true self, a self depending on the “inner ear” which could never play a poet false. There was everything congenial to him in this country of red and ochre landscape, ancient churches, and resonant pottery’ (Henry Gifford). Conversation about Dante, Mandelstam’s incomparable apologia for poetic freedom and challenge to the Bolshevik establishment, was dictated by the poet to his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, in 1934–5, during the last phase of his itinerant life. It has close ties to the Journey.
Osip Mandelstam was born in Warsaw in 1891 and raised in St Petersburg. He published his first collection of poems, Stone, in 1913, and joined with Akhmatova in the Acmeist movement. Arrested in 1934 for an epigram he had written about Stalin, Mandelstam died in a gulag near Vladivostok in 1938.
Sidney Monas is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Texas, Austin. Henry Gifford was Winterstoke Professor of English Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Bristol University. Clarence Brown is the author of several works on Osip Mandelstam, is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and editor of The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader.
Osip Mandelstam
—
JOURNEY TO ARMENIA
&
CONVERSATION
ABOUT DANTE
—
‘Mandelstam and the Journey’ by Henry Gifford
‘Journey to Armenia’
translated by Sidney Monas
‘Conversation about Dante’
translated by Clarence Brown and Robert Hughes
Contents
- – Title Page –
- – Mandelstam and the Journey –
- – JOURNEY TO ARMENIA –
- – CONVERSATION ABOUT DANTE –
- – Notes –
- –About the Publisher –
- – Other titles from Notting Hill Editions –
- – Copyright –
Henry Gifford
I
In 1930, at the end of the decade that brought Mandelstam more unhappiness than any other, Bukharin was able to arrange for the poet and his wife to visit Armenia. Ten years before he had seen its neighboring country, Georgia, and written about the enduring appeal for Russian poets of ‘the Georgian myth, first proclaimed by Pushkin’. At that time it had struck him as curious that their ‘promised land’ should not have been Armenia. This he explained by the attraction of the Georgian temper, variously manifested in its art – ‘a kind of melancholy and festive headiness in which is plunged the soul of this people’. Pasternak in 1931 was to be carried away by that headiness and the congeniality of the Georgian poets who became his friends. It was the experience of going to Georgia with Zinaida Neuhaus, afterward his second wife, that he celebrated in a book of poems called Second Birth, and Georgia would remain for him ‘a second homeland’.
In this, as in so much else, Mandelstam and Pasternak were near to one another and very different. The group of Georgian Symbolist poets known as ‘The Blue Horns’, two of whose leaders were to form close personal ties with Pasternak, seemed to Mandelstam naive in the neglect of their own culture. He had been much impressed by the paintings of Niko Pirosmanishvili, the folk artist about whom a sensitive and endearing film, Pirosmani, was made in Soviet Georgia a few years ago. Pirosmanishvili’s ‘powerful art’ with its simple effects is related to ‘the real victory of Georgian art over the orient’ through the work of anonymous painters to be seen in the national museum. Pasternak was inspired by the high culture of Georgian poets fully at home in Russian and Western literature. Mandelstam sought out the abiding traditions of Georgia, an emblem for which he found in the local custom of preserving wine in long narrow amphorae which were then buried.
He turned to Armenia because it had preceded Georgia as an outpost of the Classical and Christian world. Both these countries are in the region of Colchis, where the Argonauts sailed with Jason to get back the Golden Fleece. They had been early converted to Christianity: the Armenians about the year 300 were the first people to adopt it as a state religion. In making his journey to this ancient civilization which had rejected ‘the bearded cities of the east’, Mandelstam, as his widow says, went back to his own origins. The journey ended five years of poetic silence, and the sensation he called in one poem ‘the quivering of Colchis’ – that is, an awareness of his own part in a culture derived from the Mediterranean world – was to be always the necessary and unfailing prelude to ‘selfless song’.
II
In 1926 Mandelstam published some poems for children, but the major stream of his poetry had run dry in the previous year. There ensued a time of dejection and uncertainty, during which he lacked the assurance of being right in his values without which the imagination could not build. In the Journey to Armenia he tells how as a child he first ‘sensed the rudiments of architecture’ from pine cones, and the ‘demon’ of architecture had thereafter accompanied him all his life. It was for Mandelstam the instrument of order in art and society, and also in the natural world. It answered the demands of an intellect seeking unity in all things. He had found its ideal expression in a Gothic cathedral such as Notre Dame, which he called ‘a celebration of physiology’. What he admired in the Middle Ages was an ‘aristocratic intimacy that links all people, so alien in spirit to the “equality and fraternity” of the Great Revolution’. Every craftsman, every clerk had the sense of his worth; his ‘specific gravity’ was defined for him.
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