The individual resembled the stone in medieval architecture ‘asking to be let into the “groined arch” to participate in the joyous cooperative action of its fellows’.

These ideas Mandelstam had already committed to paper in the years before the ‘Great Revolution’ of his own country, although the essay that develops them (‘The Morning of Acmeism’) was not actually published until 1919. Their doctrine, from which Mandelstam never departed, would have had an even less favorable hearing then than at the time of its first formulation. As late as 1931 he in fact protested in a poem that he would not give up his loyalty to the raznochintsy or radical commoners of the nineteenth century. But it took him very little time to realize that the October Revolution had brought in an era of crushing conformity, and he could sense everywhere ‘the unclean goat smell issuing from the enemies of the word’. In 1921 Gumilyov, leader ten years before of the Acmeist movement, was shot for his alleged participation in a White conspiracy. The two other most notable adherents to Acmeism, Akhmatova and Mandelstam himself, were effectively isolated. Although he maintained that ‘classical poetry is the poetry of revolution’, he found himself treated as an unprofitable survivor from an effete culture. It is true that books of his poetry were published in 1922 and 1923, and an augmented edition was issued in 1928. He was also able to bring out his autobiographical sketches, The Noise of Time, in 1923, which were republished in 1928 with his story The Egyptian Stamp. And in that same year there appeared a selection of critical essays, About Poetry. Yet the publications of 1928 did not signalize the belated arrival of Mandelstam in Soviet literature. The good fortune of that time was not to be repeated, and with the gradual weakening of Bukharin’s protection Mandelstam would become virtually an outcast. During the 1920s his principles compelled him to accept most features of the Soviet regime, but the Soviet regime could not accept Mandelstam. His widow makes it clear that to a large extent he had believed in the revolution, and was not content (as many people supposed) to turn his back on reality. For that very reason, during the five years of silence preceding his journey to Armenia, Mandelstam set himself painfully to undertake a revaluation of his beliefs.

Matthew Arnold praises Burke for an exceptional courage and honesty which allowed him to admit he could have been wrong about the French Revolution. This he called ‘living by ideas’:

when one side of a question has long had your earnest support, when all your feelings are engaged, when you hear all round you no language but one, when your party talks this language like a steam engine and can imagine no other, – still to be able to think, still to be irresistibly carried, if so it be, by the current of thought to the opposite side of the question, and, like Balaam, to be unable to speak anything but what the Lord has put in your mouth.

Mandelstam’s support of the revolution had never been a party man’s. However, he was earnest, as a disciple of Herzen, who had upheld Russian democracy in the struggle against serfdom. And he did hear all round him ‘no language but one’. Being a dedicated poet he could speak only what the Lord put in his mouth, and for five desperate years he had to wait till the words should declare themselves.

As Nadezhda Mandelstam has said, in the chapter of Hope against Hope that describes the difficulties of this period, ‘It is not so simple to go against everybody and against the times.’ The temptation to join the majority was peculiarly strong in a country where any form of resistance to the prevailing ideas seemed like a betrayal. The intellectuals who had decided against emigration wanted very badly to make excuses for the new order, since they felt guilty about such benefits as they had received from the old. Mandelstam was for a while confused and uncertain in his allegiances. The one ally of whom he could be sure was Anna Akhmatova; but briefly he tried to dissociate himself even from her. Although his poetry made no appeal to the new Soviet reader, it still had a devoted following, of which he became critical – feeling, one suspects, that those who admired his work were encouraging him in ‘unreliability’. Parnok, the hero of his story The Egyptian Stamp, ineffectual and absurd, was uncomfortably close to Mandelstam’s gloomier notions of himself.

Whenever the conviction of rightness deserted him, Mandelstam sought deliverance through prose. Unlike poetry it did not depend on the inner voice, yet the effort of the mind to establish its bearings by responsible utterance in prose could at least put an end to distraction. It silenced the voice of fallacious reasoning. Joseph Brodsky, who understands Mandelstam well, has said that when a poet turns to prose, this should be seen as ‘the tribute of dynamism to the stasis which preceded it’. He refers to a ‘dry spell’ or to ‘polemical necessity’ as a condition that can dictate this change of medium. And he remarks that ‘prose and logic’ will ‘suddenly experience a very strong temptation to move’, so that stasis is swept up once more into dynamism.

Mandelstam’s ‘dry spell’ had become a seemingly continuous drought. But it was ‘polemical necessity’ that drove him at the end of 1929 to begin writing the work he entitled Fourth Prose (which was not published until 1966, in America). He had been involved in a literary squabble about a translation of La légende d’Uylenspiegel which he revised for the State Publishing House.