The Christian – and every cultivated man is a Christian now – knows not a merely physical hunger or a merely spiritual nourishment. For him, the word is also flesh, and simple bread is happiness and mystery.

Mandelstam never lost that sense of ‘happiness and mystery’, and it was fortified by his visit to Armenia.

IV

On their way back the Mandelstams stayed in Tiflis, the Georgian capital. Here he was once more able to write poetry, and during late October and early November 1930 he assembled the Armenian cycle. Once before in Tiflis he had found a new voice. That was in 1921, when news had reached him of Gumilyov’s execution; probably under the shock of this he had written a poem, ‘I bathed at night in the yard’, that his widow regards as pivotal. Mandelstam was facing the realities of a time when ‘the earth [had become] more truthful and more terrible’. His symbol for truth in that poem had been a rough homespun towel brought by them from the Ukraine. Over the years since 1921 the terror had not abated: in Armenia, they learned about the suicide of Mayakovsky. It seems probable that Mandelstam may have recalled the circumstances of that earlier poem. The homespun towel which supported his ‘new attitude of a matured man’, as Nadezhda describes it, was in keeping with the ‘rough tenderness’ of the Armenians.

How dear to me in its strenuous life,

Reckoning as a century a year,

This breeding, sleeping, bawling,

Earth-rooted people.

Armenia itself in another poem is ‘a State of bawling stones’; it is ‘summoning the hoarse hills to arms’ – in defense of Christianity.

Muffling your mouth, like a moist rose,

Holding in your hands the eight-sided honeycombs,

All the morning of the days on the borders of the world

You stayed, swallowing tears.

And turned away in shame and grief

From the bearded cities of the East …

Armenia evokes the poetry of Hafiz in neighboring Persia during the fourteenth century; and the ‘eight-sided honeycombs’ reflect the pattern of its church architecture.

You make the rose of Hafiz sway

And nurse little animals, your children,

With the eight-sided shoulders you breathe

Of peasant, bull-like churches.

Stained a hoarse ocher

You are all far over the mountain …

The colors of this land which ‘had endured tawny-bearded sirdars among the rocks and clays’ were daubed on it by a lion with half a dozen pencils that it ‘had seized with its paw’. As Dr Baines has noted, ‘the over-riding image’ to describe Armenia is that of a wild beast. The language (which fascinated Mandelstam as an ancient Indo-European tongue) is represented in the same terms:

Prickly speech of the Ararat valley,

Wild cat – Armenian speech,

Rapacious tongue of cities clay-walled,

Speech of hungering bricks …

(‘Prickly’ here is the same word in Russian as ‘tingling’ used for the spring water of Arzni in his poem.)

Mandelstam has to resign himself to parting with this land of ‘a feral and fabulous Christianity’, where the beauty of the women is leonine, and where the peasant’s little horse stumbles among purple granites. The last of the twelve poems making up the cycle is very characteristic of his art in the way it relates the visible scene to history, and once more strikes resonances that have been heard in the earlier poems. Already he has referred to the ‘short-sighted Armenian sky’, and to ‘looking with eyes screwed up / At the travelling tent of Ararat’; he has described Armenia as ‘lavishly giving away Persian money of the sun’; and he has spoken of pottery as the land’s ‘hollow book’. Now these images meet in six lines concluding the sequence:

Azure and clay, clay and azure,

What more would you have? Rather screw up your eyes,

Like a short-sighted shah over a ring of turquoise,

Over the book of echoing clays, over the bookish earth,

Over the purulent book, over the clay that is dear

By which we are tormented as by music and the word.

The clay book of the land is purulent, one supposes, because the experience of it throbs like an inflammation: there is in beauty of scene, music or word a peculiar pain that is also dear to us.

V

Mandelstam’s notebooks for 1931 and 1932 contain fragmentary drafts of the prose Journey to Armenia, the final version of which the Soviet journal Zvezda published in 1933. He mentions in the notebooks several other accounts of travel: the Physical Journey through Various Provinces of the Russian Empire in 1769–1770 by Pallas, a German follower of Linnaeus; A Naturalist’s Voyage round the World in H.M.S. ‘Beagle’ by Charles Darwin; Delacroix’s Journey to Morocco. The last of these was described as ‘a codex of visual training’, in a ‘tattered book by Signac defending Impressionism’. Darwin and even the leisurely Pallas – always fondling a deaf cat on his knee, as the draft noted – were also observers of a special kind, with keen professional interests. Mandelstam’s book has something in common with the writings of these naturalists and of the painter from whom ‘a codex of visual training’ could be derived. (The Journey to Armenia does not, however, give any exact equivalent of the Delacroix ‘codex’ in respect of Mandelstam’s own art. This would come with his ‘Conversation about Dante’ of 1933–4 which has evident ties with the Journey.)

In some notes for the final chapter of the Journey, Mandelstam speaks of another work that seems richly relevant to his own methods. ‘I had with me a single book, the Italienische Reise of Goethe in a leather binding for travel, bent like a Baedeker.’ A few years later, Mandelstam was to write a broadcast script in Voronezh called ‘The Youth of Goethe’ which describes his life up to the Italian journey of 1786 to 1788. Nadezhda, referring to it in Hope Abandoned, remarks on certain affinities between Mandelstam and Goethe – she found that he had picked out those aspects of Goethe’s life that corresponded more or less with his own: depression and neurasthenia when young; a similar blending of reverence and irony toward elders; even the use of friendships with women to provide ‘firm bridges’ from one phase of the poet’s life to another. But there are more profound intellectual resemblances, and in much of the Journey to Armenia a mind is at work the range and luminosity of which recall the mind of Goethe.

Barker Fairley has said that Goethe in Italy ‘discovered the common ground between classical antiquity and his natural philosophy’. He had an eye not only for the monuments and for the customs of the people, but also for ‘the revelations of science as he had come to understand and practise it in recent years’. Similarly, Mandelstam was drawn to the art of Armenia, its churches and pottery; he studied too the characteristics of the Armenians in their life of ‘teeming activity’, with their strange indifference to clock-time. Also, like Goethe, he found himself trying in his account to connect the scientific ideas that had newly interested him with the experience of his travels. And as the Italian Journey records an exceptionally fruitful stage in the progress of its author’s thinking, so too with the Journey to Armenia: its supreme interest lies in what it tells us about the growth of a poet’s awareness, at a time hardly less crucial for Mandelstam than the year 1786 was for Goethe.

Barker Fairley compares Goethe, once on the road to Italy, with ‘a spring, long detained and now leaping at the moment of release into its true position’. Goethe himself stated, soon after coming to Rome, ‘meine Existenz hat einen Ballast bekommen’ –‘my life has acquired a ballast’.