He did not see the task of the “Classicist” as releasing from the resources of the Russian language those qualities which might make it phonetically or syntactically resemble Latin or Greek, but rather as building out of Russian phonetic materials and the history of the Russian language (Hellenic only in its latent powers of incarnation) its own equivalents of Catullus, Ovid, Racine. It is not Latin or Greek that slumbers in Russian, Mandelstam insists, but the power of Russian itself. “Latin Russian” is therefore a pejorative, and even the commentary on Balmont, that he is the brilliant translator of a nonexistent original, is not praise.

Nor does he care much for Balmont’s assumption of superiority to his audience, the fashionably lofty hauteur toward the reader. If the poet has a special relationship to the word-psyche, it is not one that gives him a place on any elevation above the rest of mankind. On the contrary, what distinguishes him from a “literary man” is that he speaks to other men on their own level. The professor, the critic, the litterateur require their elevation; the poet is the same as any other man, if perhaps “not so well made as most.”31 He has no need to be morally superior. Villon, for instance, was a criminal, a murderer, possibly morally inferior to even the average man of his time, and yet a great poet.

A man speaking to men, with no need to be morally or intellectually superior: yet the poet speaks, and that means he speaks to someone, an addressee, an interlocutor. With its quiet humor and exceptional charm, the essay called “About an Interlocutor” articulates the poet’s reaching out past his beleaguered feeling of impending doom, to a very personal reader of some other time, a time beyond that “wing of oncoming night” he felt already encroaching upon him. The essay conveys, among other things, a remarkable understanding of those commonly not too well understood poems of Pushkin’s about the poet, his publisher, his audience, the powers-that-be. The poet’s interlocutor must be someone not too close, not too immediate. He must elicit surprises and carry about him and also invite a certain mystery. But above all he must be someone. He must have particularity. And that particularity must be respected.

The Classic has nothing to do with lofty attitudinizing, but rather with the idea of a human potential fulfilled. In this sense Mandelstam speaks in his poems of the Classic lands of the Mediterranean, of Italy and Greece, “those all-human hills” near Florence, and in the same sense, of the lands of the Caucasus and the Crimea which he associates with the Mediterranean, which for him are part of that “all-human” Mediterranean world.32

In a recent impassioned essay, the novelist Arthur A. Cohen has written well of Mandelstam. Like Nadezhda Iakovlevna, who has insisted on it, he has been able to see how the poems of Mandelstam’s last years, the “phases” and “cycles,” gain from being published complete, all their variants included. He has grasped the mutual implicativeness that joins poem to poem and makes each repetition of a word, a phrase, an image, or an association an addition to the meaning of the cycle. He has gone beyond this to suggest that the poems form a kind of eschatological epic, or that something like an eschatological epic is struggling to be born in them.33 I think one finds implications of this in the last great essays as well: in “Fourth Prose,” “Conversation about Dante,” and Journey to Armenia. Mandelstam’s obsessive themes draw together in them. They capture his sense of a civilization coming to an end, and, in the shipwreck of that civilization, they constitute his letter-in-the-bottle thrown overboard to find a distant interlocutor in future time.

While the Russian countryside was still being devastated by collectivization and the five-year plans for the forced, rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union were being launched, Mandelstam, who dearly loved travel, went off on what was to be his last extended voluntary journey. He had suffered a writing block for almost five years. The organization and regimentation of the country that preceded and accompanied collectivization and industrialization, including the ever-increasing pressure on writers, editors, and publishers, oppressed his sensibility. Rescuing him from on high at this crucial time, his “protector,” Nikolai Bukharin, arranged for him and his wife to go to Armenia. Whether in the long run his association with Bukharin may have precipitated his last arrest and his death is a moot point, but, just then, it saved his creative life as a poet. The journey itself, his meeting with Andrei Biely, the therapeutic outburst of “Fourth Prose” set the juices flowing again and the lips moving. The essays are certainly overshadowed by the poems, but they partake of the same qualities and, indeed, the same themes as the poems.

If there is anything that Journey to Armenia is not about, it is not about either the joys of collectivization or the successes of industrialization in Armenia. Whatever expectations may have been aroused by the title—it was a time when writers were going on all kinds of trips and turning them into euphoric odes to the new order—Mandelstam clearly does not aim the essay for entry into the fat privileges of the new writers’ elite. Collectivization and industrialization come up briefly in passing, and an occasional journalistic cliché is inserted for the irony with which it flavors the context. One has the impression that Armenia would probably survive the mechanical regulation imposed by the five-year plans.

He does not write only about Armenia, but about everything he carries with him to Armenia as well: his memories of Russia, his interest in Impressionist painting (now revived and revised), his obsession with biological theory, especially that of Lamarck, threaded through long dialogues with the chess-playing biologist, his friend, B.