I do not really know whether the Interlocutor will coincide with the actual readers of this book. He may be somewhere among them.

Most of the notes are endnotes, so that the reader may consult them or not as he sees fit. In some cases, where a brief and simple explanation seemed more immediately called for, I have used a footnote.

The system of transliteration used here is based on that of the Library of Congress, but it may be overstatement to call it a system. I have deferred to common usage: Tolstoy, and not Tolstoi; Biely, not Belyi; Scriabin and not Skriabin. In some cases, where the person involved seems to prefer a given usage, I have retained it: Filipoff, for instance, rather than Filippov. I have preferred to keep Russian names ending in -skii in the more familiar -sky. It isn’t entirely satisfactory, but I tend to eschew fanatic spelling.

In the course of preparing this volume, I have had much help from a large number of individuals, and I hope, if I have not managed to acknowledge them all, none will be offended. Clearly, final responsibility is mine alone, and none of the good people mentioned here should be held to blame in any way for the book’s shortcomings.

All students and readers of Mandelstam must first and foremost acknowledge their debt to his indefatigable widow, Nadezhda Iakovlevna. I have profited not only from her two books of memoirs and her interesting critical essay, but also from personal interviews and brief correspondence. The Struve-Filipoff edition of the Collected Works (Sobranie Sochinenii, 3 vols. [New York: Language Library Associates, 1972]), especially volume 2, which contains all the Russian essays translated here, is an indispensable source. I have not only used the Struve-Filipoff texts but have also taken information from many of their notes and have taken much light from the essays by various hands that are included in the three volumes. I wish to thank Clarence Brown and Robert Hughes for permission to include their translation of “Conversation about Dante.” In addition, I have had much valuable help and advice from them both. Translations from the poems of Gumilev and Mandelstam are by Burton Raffel and Alla Burago, with some emendations by me. Translations from the French are by Carolyn Cates Wylie, who has also served as an exceptionally alert and conscientious copy editor. All other translations are mine. George Ivask has been unstinting of his time and deep knowledge of Russian literature, and I owe him a great deal. Two readers from a university press submitted criticisms of the translations that I at first could not help resenting but in the long run came very much to appreciate, along with the comments of two readers for the present press, one of them most helpfully detailed. I have had help and encouragement from many people: Rita and David Monas, Alla Burago, Elnora Carrino, and Louis Iribarne. William Arrowsmith gave me good cheer when I needed it. Carol Monas, my wife, was a stalwart support, a good critic. The person who seemed to identify with the work of getting Mandelstam into English almost as much as I did, who worked unstintingly and indefatigably, typing, correcting, criticizing, arranging was Gianna Kirtley, and I wish to thank her specially.

Introduction: Friends & Enemies of the Word

Osip Mandelstam was born in 1891 of middle-class Jewish parents, grew up in St. Petersburg, and received his formal education in part there, in part in France and Germany. He studied philology, and, though he never took an academic degree or acquired much erudition, his word-love was deep and very sure of itself and became in his imagination a kind of substitute for the warm and secure domesticity he was not otherwise to know. His first poems, published in 1909–1910, whatever traces they might show of his apprenticeship to Symbolism, were of a marked originality, and the sense of a stillness in them, the sense of a motion arrested and about to resume, the sense of transition now strike the attentive reader as the distinctive features of his early work. Crowded between two worlds, the nineteenth century dying, the twentieth in ominous labor, it is small wonder that Mandelstam’s talent, like that of so many of his contemporaries, lent itself to apocalyptic expectations—to a vision of the end of the world that at the same time saw a terrible beauty stirring to be born out of that death—grass growing in the streets of St. Petersburg, paradoxically making of it “the most advanced city in the world.”1

No doubt these apocalyptic expectations had been nourished by the mystical Marxism of his early years as well as by his later Christianity. Writing from Paris in 1908 to his former teacher, V. V. Gippius, Mandelstam affirmed: “My first religious experiences date from the period of my childish infatuation with Marxist dogma and can’t be separated from that infatuation.”2 He saw a culture marked for death, and a new barbarism, terrifying yet perhaps potentially creative, waiting at the gates.