Osip Mandelstam

The Dan Danciger Publication Series

Osip Mandelstam: Selected Essays

Translated by Sidney Monas

University of Texas Press,
Austin

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Mandel’shtam, Osip Emil’evich, 1891–1938.

Osip Mandelstam, selected essays.

(The Dan Danciger publication series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Russian literature—History and criticism—Addresses, essays, lectures.   2. Literature—Addresses, essays, lectures.   I. Monas, Sidney.   II. Title.

PG2933.M2713   1977   809   76–22456

ISBN 0–292–76006X

Copyright © 1977 by University of Texas Press

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-0-292-76162-9 (library e-book)
ISBN 978-0-292-76163-6 (individual e-book)

doi 10.7560/760066

Contents

Preface

Introduction: Friends and Enemies of the Word

Conversation about Dante

Translated by Clarence Brown and Robert Hughes

About Poetry

From the Author

The Word and Culture

Attack

About an Interlocutor

About the Nature of the Word

Notes about Poetry

The End of the Novel

Badger’s Burrow

The Nineteenth Century

Peter Chaadaev

Notes about Chénier

François Villon

Uncollected Essays and Fragments

Pushkin and Scriabin (Fragments)

The Morning of Acmeism

Literary Moscow

Literary Moscow: Birth of the Fabula

Storm and Stress

Humanism and Modern Life

Fourth Prose

Journey to Armenia

Sevan

Ashot Ovanesian

Zamoskvorech’e

Sukhum

The French

Around the Naturalists

Ashtarak

Alagez

Notes

Index of Names

Preface

Osip Emilevich Mandelstam was a great poet, a great critic, and a profound humanist, perhaps even one of the last of the breed, though let us hope not. There is much interest in him now, if not exactly a “bandwagon.” In any case, I am not a bandwagon man; my aim is to serve.

I thought Mandelstam better served by a careful, if broad, selection than by a complete volume of his prose. Inevitably a certain subjective element has entered into my choices of what to include. I have included all the essays that Mandelstam himself collected in the volume of literary essays published in his lifetime, About Poetry. In addition, I have tried to limit myself to the literary essays. I have excluded the journalistic pieces, though some of them, like the interview with Ho Chi Minh or the account of the Mensheviks in Georgia, are quite interesting. I feel I would have Mandelstam’s approval here. The charming little radio play that he wrote in Voronezh about the early life of Goethe gave me more pain, as did the piece called “Sukharevka,” but I decided finally they did not fit well into the “mix.” Some of Mandelstam’s reviews are interesting, especially his review of Huysmans; yet they do not really display Mandelstam at his best, nor do the two articles dealing with problems of translation.

On the other hand, the fragment “Pushkin and Scriabin,” which Mandelstam himself seems to have rejected, seems to me so central to his thought, so full of the swelling of all his major themes, that in spite of its clearly fragmentary nature and its many obscurities it had to be included. “Fourth Prose,” which might as easily have been included among Mandelstam’s autobiographical writings, is nevertheless so important a commentary on his idea of his calling and his distinction between “poetry” and “Literature” that it similarly could not be left out. I must also confess that I could not resist the eloquence of its angry style; after a first, superficial impression of incoherence, the profundity and impersonality of its anger cannot but make a lasting impression on the reader. It should be more obvious that Journey to Armenia is not simply a travel piece. Even more than Andrei Biely’s book about Armenia, to which it bears a previously unacknowledged kinship, it is an essay on culture, on literature, on life; and it is quite central to Mandelstam’s thought.

A number, though by no means the greater number, of these essays have been previously translated by other hands. Of those I have seen, the only one that struck me as unimprovable upon was the “Conversation about Dante” in the version by Clarence Brown and Robert Hughes. With their permission, the essay is included in this volume in their translation. Other translations are my own; I have worked on them long and hard, and with English cadences as much on my mind as the Russian. I wish I could have done better; but I have done my best.

Although “Conversation about Dante” is the last of the essays included here in its date of composition, I have placed it first, because it seems to me the most comprehensive statement of Mandelstam’s ideas about poetry and poetics. The essays that were included by Mandelstam in his volume About Poetry follow in the order in which he arranged them.

I have tried to keep scholarly apparatus to a minimum. Names and events presumably well known to every educated reader have been neither footnoted nor endnoted. I have had my Interlocutor in mind throughout; but he (or she) is at times, I must admit, a conveniently nebulous figure. He is an educated, intelligent reader, interested not only in Russian literature, but in literature. He is not a specialist. He may or may not know Russian. The idea that even “specialists” (i.e., graduate students in Russian literature) actually read Mandelstam in the original Russian, if they don’t have to for a given seminar or assignment, is a kind of fond Cloudcuckooland that I have no wish to disrupt, though I don’t believe in it for a moment. I hope this book will help them, as I hope the previous Mandelstam volume that I edited helped them, in spite of its regrettable mistakes (Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, translated by Burton Raffel and Alla Burago, edited by Sidney Monas [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972]). But the book is not primarily, and certainly not exclusively, for them. Mandelstam is a world figure, and he should be known to anybody who cares at all about literature and has the sensitivity to respond to a major poet.