Through the clumsiness of his editors a previous translator appeared to have a case for accusing Mandelstam of plagiarism. His enemies and notably the journalist Zaslavsky, who thirty years later browbeat Pasternak in similar fashion over the Nobel Prize, seized on this chance to involve him in a scandal. The experience, tormenting for Mandelstam as it was, drove him to the inevitable conclusion, that not only could he never belong wholeheartedly to the Soviet world, but he was right in rejecting it. Not with him lay the inadequacy; he had miscalled himself a ‘sick son’ of the age in a poem of 1924; and it was no longer for him to make concessions: ‘I tear off my literary fur coat and trample it underfoot.’

Thus he reiterated a distinction he had often made between literature and poetry. Mandelstam insisted that these two modes of verbal expression are utterly unlike because the man of letters addresses his contemporaries, while the poet converses with the unknown ideal reader waiting for him, providentially, in the distance. The man of letters has his whole being in the contemporary world; the poet exists in the timeless.

So he declares that he will stand alone:

I insist that writerdom, as it has taken shape in Europe and especially in Russia, is incompatible with the honorable title of Jew, of which I am proud. My blood, burdened with its inheritance from shepherds, patriarchs and kings, rebels against the shifting gypsydom of the writers’ tribe.

To understand the burden of this inheritance we must follow him to Armenia.

III

Mandelstam calls Armenia ‘that younger sister of the land of Judea’ and speaks of getting out at the station in Erevan, its capital, with his ‘elder’s walking stick’ or ‘Jewish staff’ for the journey before him. In the campaign provoked by the Uylenspiegel affair, anti-Semitism had, of course, played its part. But mention of the ‘Jewish staff’ is not merely defiant. He was returning, as Nadezhda puts it, ‘to the place where it all began, to his fathers, his sources, his fountainhead’. She explains:

The tradition of culture for Mandelstam had never been interrupted: the European world and European thought were born in the Mediterranean – there had begun that history in which he lived, and that poetry by which he subsisted. The cultures of the Caucasus – the Black Sea – were the same book

By which were taught the first men.

(The quotation comes from his cycle of poems, ‘Armenia’, to be discussed later.)

Mandelstam’s idea of Western culture corresponds to what Eliot means by ‘the mind of Europe’. It is a culture formed by the merging of four streams – the Hebraic, the Christian, the Hellenic and the Latin. Within this tradition developed the distinct but intercommunicating literatures of the modern world, its art and its music. Mandelstam’s conception of the European mind is more hospitable than Eliot’s with his predominantly Latin (and Catholic) bias, for it includes Goethe (tardily accepted by Eliot) and the German poets, and also, of course, his own literature, which in his view had the task of realizing a ‘domestic Hellenism’. (The poet Annensky, much admired by the Acmeists, had shown how this should be done.)

Soon after Scriabin’s death in 1915, Mandelstam wrote a memorial essay, of which only fragments are left, seeking to define there his conception of Christian art.

No necessity of any kind, even the highest, clouds its bright inner freedom, for its prototype, that which it imitates, is the very redemption of the world by Christ … Our whole two-thousand-year-old culture, thanks to the miraculous mercy of Christianity, is the world’s release into freedom for the sake of play, for spiritual joy, for the free ‘imitation of Christ’.

Such thoughts are very near those expressed by Nikolai Vedenyapin at the outset of Doctor Zhivago. During his time of confusion in the 1920s Mandelstam was uneasy about these ideas, but they were not abandoned, and Christianity stood for him as the central achievement, the life-giving spirit, of the culture that he admired. Christianity seemed to belong essentially to the mountains of the Mediterranean world – ‘the all-human’ hills ‘shining in Tuscany’ of a late poem. It was symbolized for him by the cold air of the mountains, and clothed in Apostolic poverty. Mount Ararat, visible on the southwest horizon of Armenia, was ‘rich with a Biblical carpet’, and in the verse fragment from which that phrase comes, Armenia is called a ‘Sabbath land’.

Should you wish to drink – there is there such water

From the Kurdish spring of Arzni –

A fine, tingling, dry

And very truthful water.

It is an image from the Psalms and from Isaiah; and the stones and clay of Armenia, the whole primitive coloring of the thirsty land, place it in the Old Testament.

He had been sent there to recount and to applaud the successes of socialism in the area, a typical assignment at the time for Soviet writers. As he tells it in an earlier draft for the chapter subsequently entitled ‘Zamoskvorech’e’:

Wherever I penetrated I met the firm will and hand of the Bolshevist party. Socialist construction is becoming for Armenia as it were second nature.

But he recognizes in the same passage that he is an unreliable correspondent:

Am I really like the dreadful child who turns in his hand a pocket mirror and directs into all the places he shouldn’t the dazzle from the sun?

(That sentence did not reach the final version.) Mandelstam’s use of the pocket mirror was not simple mischief: he illuminated what he held to be essential in Armenian life – all those qualities that resisted the Bolshevist innovators and revealed the unbroken ties of this people with the Christian and classical culture of the Mediterranean.

He admired the Armenians for ‘their splendid intimacy with the world of real things’. There could be no surer evidence that they had retained a truly classical civilization. As he wrote earlier about Innokenty Annensky:

Hellenism means consciously surrounding man with utensils instead of indifferent objects; the metamorphosis of these objects into the utensil, the humanization of the surrounding world; the environment heated with the most delicate teleological warmth. Hellenism is any stove near which a man sits, prizing its warmth as something related to his own inner warmth.

Classicism in Mandelstam’s mind was associated with that ‘fullness of life’ natural to the Armenians, and also with ‘their noble inclination for hard work’. He had listed among the utensils by which man is consciously surrounded ‘a baking dish, a pair of tongs, an earthenware jug with milk’; and it is the pottery of Armenia that he calls in one poem

A beautiful land’s hollow book

By which were taught the first men.

Jennifer Baines, in her excellent commentary on Mandelstam’s verse from the Armenian cycle onward, notes that a very late poem in a series inspired by Greek pots in the Voronezh museum links Crete and Armenia through their pottery. ‘In this respect,’ she says, ‘Mandelstam’s identical vision of Crete and Armenia is one of substance.’ A line quoted by her from this poem speaks of ‘clay made happy by baking’. The potter’s art had brought the red clay of Armenia into the human circle.

In an essay on ‘The Word and Culture’ published in 1921, Mandelstam had welcomed what he thought to be the separation in Soviet Russia ‘of Church (i.e., culture) and State’. It seemed to him that the Christian ideal had again become feasible.

At last we have found our inner freedom, real inner joy. We drink water in clay jugs as if it were wine … Apples, bread, the potato – from now on they will appease not merely physical but spiritual hunger as well.