Those for whom its living nature is a secondary or subordinate quality. Propagandists of political parties, philosophers, anthroposophists like Andrei Biely, who, in Mandelstam’s view, yoked his great poetic gift to a “Buddhist” worldview.21 Those who used the word as slave labor to support some other external structure—a church, a state, a party, a program.

“Friends” were those who believed in the sacred and redemptive power and the psychic nature of the word.

Luther was a poor word-lover; he departed from verbal argument to fling his inkpot at the devil. The literary critics whose response to the anniversary of the death of the great poet Blok was mere lyrical effusion served the word badly, for a critic’s minimal task is to establish where the poet’s words came from—that is, his poetic genealogy—where he stood in relation to the larger pattern-forming, historical energies of the word. The Moscow “poetesses” pay only half-tribute to the word, for, of the constituent elements of poetry, remembrance and invention, they honor remembrance alone; they are all genealogy, mere traditionalists; while the Futurists blaringly honor invention alone.22

“Culture has become a church,” Mandelstam wrote in 1921, and he hailed the separation of this “church” from the state. It is in this time of transformation and transfiguration that culture assumes a sacred quality, a sacred mission. Within the state, those are friends of the word who acknowledge the statutory independence of culture, who “consult” it, as the princes of old Moscow used to consult the monasteries. But within these monasteries, there were monks and laymen; and Mandelstam identified himself as a layman. Monkish structure—whether Byzantine, or whether the new monasticism of the secularized Russian intelligentsia—was hostile to the word.

Even Literature, with a capital L, was hostile. Mandelstam was an Acmeist, but he did not like schools. Still less did he like the way these schools were organizing themselves in the 1920’s—preparation for their own slaughter, in which the Stalinist organization of Socialist Realism would later use the rivalries and the acrimonies as well as the phrases and slogans of contending schools in order definitively to decimate them all. As the 1920’s came to an end and Literature tightened the clamp on Mandelstam, invoking even antisemitism against him, Mandelstam increased the angle of the defiant tilt to his head. More and more he came to distinguish “poetry” from “Literature.” Reading his poems at occasional “evenings,” he intoned them, I suspect, rather in the manner we have heard from Joseph Brodsky, liturgically. One memoirist writes: “He sang them like a shaman.”23

For friends of the word there was the blessing of the Russian language itself; its Hellenic nature. By “Hellenic,” Mandelstam explains, he does not mean that Russian derives etymologically from the Greek. Still less does he refer to the Byzantine cultural heritage—which, in a certain slant of light, he tends to see as “monkish” and dead and hostile or confining to the word. He calls it “the gift of free imagination,” or “free embodiment.” Just as Aristophanes in The Birds creates a structure out of the rootword eros, the manifold play and stresses of the meaning of “desire” and “desiring,” so Mandelstam sees the genius of the Russian language in the great depth and multiple branchings of its root meanings.24 So, too, he sees the writer Rozanov looking for “church walls” and finding only Russian words; for Russia had produced no Acropolis, no lasting legal or political structure, and the Russian language was Russian history.25 For that reason among others, history is a subject close to Mandelstam. When he listens, he hears it breathe.

A Hellenic language is one in which the word-psyche finds rich opportunity for embodiment, without the hindrance of authoritative utilitarian standards.

Mandelstam’s Hellenism should not be confused with that program of classical studies that for so long dominated the higher education of Europe and Great Britain. It is not that aristocratic/priestly key to possession of a mystery that wielded power in a secularizing world still stunned by the sacred. For Mandelstam, “Hellenic” means “human.” Perhaps it would be better to call it a kind of creative, procreative projection of the human onto the emptiness of the world. Crucial here is the conception of the utvar’, which one may translate as “utensil,” except that it has at its root a sense that is not that of “use” but is rather closer to the notions of “creation” and “creature,” something “creaturized.” It is, he tells us, the insistence on a relatedness between the warmth in the stove and the warmth in the human body. “Christianity,” in Mandelstam’s definition, is “the Hellenization of death.”26

Both Victor Terras and Clarence Brown have written eloquently of Mandelstam’s “Classicism.”27 It should not be confused with a preference for “high style.” There is, as Brown points out, a strong Flemish element, a transformation of the lowliest details of the everyday. Like Villon, Mandelstam has a keen sense of “roast duck,” and the vow of which he speaks in his poetry “to the fourth estate,” to his fellow raznochintsy, he took as a binding oath.

Yet his interest in Ovid is surely more than identification with a fellow exile, as Brown implies. He cares as much for the poet of the Metamorphoses and the Amores as for the exile of Tristia and Ex Ponte. One is reminded of Ovid’s absorption into medieval Christian cosmology as “Saint Ovid the Martyr.” It is possible that Mandelstam saw in metamorphosis a kind of resurrection: the creative process itself as death and rebirth, an arresting of the flow of time, “and then, after dwelling in the protracted moment wrested from it,” a return, changed by contact with the external, to life.28

Nor is “the Classical” simply a matter of Greeks and Romans. “Classical poetry,” Mandelstam tells us, “is the poetry of revolution.”29 He is not referring to David’s historical tableaux or to eighteenth-century pseudo-Classical “tragedy.” The Classical is that which is remembered when the mere piety of remembrance fails. It is remembrance energized by a powerful sense of the new, by a sense of what the new requires from the past. The trouble arises, Mandelstam writes, “when, instead of the real past with its deep roots, we get ‘former times.’” This is a poetry that has not had to wrestle with its conventions: “easily assimilated poetry, a henhouse with a fence around it, a cosy little corner where the domestic fowl cluck and scratch about. This is not work done upon the word but rather a rest from the word.”30 The Classical is what is required to complete a mode of experience: its necessity. In that sense, Mandelstam refers to the “genuinely Classic” style of Racine and the Classical furies of André Chénier.

He does not see the Classical as mere translation. In spite of his real devotion to the craft of translating—though his efforts are uneven, they contain some examples of the highest skill—he tended to speak of translation in the pejorative, implying use of the readymade phrase, the formula, the pat device, something mechanical and ready to hand.