M. – Nadezhda Mandelshtam. Where references to authors are unspecific, see under Acknowledgements

(at the end of these Notes) for title and publisher.

STONE (1913, 1916, 1923 AND 1928)

Stone, the title of Mandelshtam’s first book of poems, ‘is obviously a prosaic symbol, yet timeless and in a way sacred – the material of which streets and cathedrals are made’ (N. A. Nilsson, Scando-Slavica IX).

(14) ‘The poem begins with a literally pregnant silence’ (R. F. Holmes, private communication).

Peter France (Poets of Modern Russia): ‘ “primordial speechlessness”, the undifferentiated world which precedes poetry and human culture and whose image is the sea’.

V. Terras: ‘O. M.’s nostalgia for primordial unity with the cosmos’ (Slavonic and East European Review XVII, No. 109, 1969).

‘He felt poetry to be immanent in nature, to be there in the silence, a presence with which he could be “fused” … Poetry was not an occasion for sentiment, for “heart” … ’ (Clarence Brown, Mandelshtam). Robert Tracy has pointed out (in his Osip Mandelshtam’s ‘Stone’) that later, in O.M.’s The one who walks, ‘he seems to reply to Silentium: “Though music cannot save one from the abyss” ’.

Fyodor Tyutchev (1803–73) also wrote a celebrated poem called Silentium. (See Charles Tomlinson’s Versions from Fyodor Tyutchev.)

(31) The poet Batyushkov (1787–1855) spent the last thirty or so years of his life in an asylum (from 1821). See also no. 261.

(32) R. F. Holmes has suggested to me that the ‘age-old traveller’ may be Pushkin.

(54) ‘Joseph’: Osip is a Russian version of Joseph.

(60) Ovid was banished to Scythia.

(80) Ovid is speaking.

TRISTIA (1922)

Tristia, the title of O.M.’s second book of poems, ‘is a lament and an encomium for a splendid past, for Renaissance Venice, for Racine’s France, for Hellas, above all for Petropolis … These cultures are seen as one, are fused into one … image of threatened civilisation … The theme of Tristia is summed up in a line of O.M.’s poem about Venice: “How can I escape this festive death?” ’ (Robert Chandler, from an unpublished article ‘Mandelstam and Ezra Pound’).

‘In [O.M.’s] poems epochs and cultures that have become deeply stratified in language rise up before our consciousness. An individual word can summon them up …’ (Boris Bukhshtab, Russian Literature Triquarterly, No. 1, 1971).

(82) Troezen was where Hippolytus died.

(89) Petropolis ‘was Derzhavin’s and Pushkin’s name for Petersburg … A whole cultural tradition is threatened, dying’. ‘It is not Athena, a goddess noted for her mercifulness and generosity, the goddess of wisdom, who reigns, but Proserpina, queen of the underworld’ (S. Broyde).

(90) Dedicated to Marina Tsvetayeva. I have translated the poem in its original form, as given in Tsvetayeva’s ‘The history of one dedication’ (Oxford Slavonic Papers XI, 1964).

(92) ‘Tauris’: the Crimea.

(93) ‘the image of the “amulet buried in the sand” should be deciphered as “poetry addressed to the reader in posterity” ’ (K. Taranovsky).

‘[O.M.’s] visions of classical antiquity are not “Homeric”, “Sapphic”, or “Horatian”, but Mandelshtamian … It is “world culture”, not ancient culture, that is the leitmotif of Mandelshtam’s poetry’ (Victor Terras, ‘Classical Motifs in the Poetry of Osip Mandelshtam’ (Slavic and East European Journal, 3, 1966).

Persephone (or Kore or Proserpina), Queen of the Underworld, spends two-thirds of the year with her mother Demeter (the Greek corn-goddess). ‘This is the “light” part of the annual circle …’ The black sail is ‘still another topos of Greek mythology, known best from the myth of Theseus and Ariadne’ (Victor Terras).

Line 20: ‘Black rose-flakes’ is an allusion to O.M.’s mother’s death (see N.M., Hope Abandoned).

(104) Stanza 1: ‘In the stillness of night a lover pronounces one tender name instead of another, and suddenly realises that this has happened once before: the words and the hair and the cock who has just crowed under the window crowed already in Ovid’s Tristia. And he is overcome by a deep joy of recognition …’ (O.M., ‘The Word and Culture’, in Sobraniye sochineniy).

Line 4: ‘M’s elegy … attains a genuine Latin ring, as Tynyanov observes, by introducing the entirely foreign word vigilia, which changes the chemistry of the whole stanza’ (Henry Gifford, Poetry in a Divided World).

Stanza 3: Clarence Brown refers to ‘the special kind of cognition that takes place when a poet composes a poem. Mandelshtam declares that this is in fact recognition’ (‘Mandelshtam’s Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction’, Delos, Austin, Texas, 1968, No. I).

Compare Fet’s poem which begins: ‘How threadbare our language!’

Line 25 onwards: see Pushkin, Yevgeny Onegin V: 4–10. ‘The method [of divination] was to melt a candle into a shallow dish of water, where the suddenly cooled wax would assume odd shapes, like Rorschach blots or … like a cloud or the stretched pelt of a squirrel … Ovid’s parting from his loved ones as he goes into exile is a paradigm of all partings’ (Clarence Brown, Mandelshtam).

‘Erebus’: name of ‘a place of darkness between Earth and Hades’. Erebus is the son of Chaos, brother of Night, and father of Day.

Joseph Brodsky’s version of this poem can be inspected in his Less than One, Viking, 1986, p. 128.

(108) Line 4, according to Akhmatova, refers to the death of Pushkin; according to N.M., to the death of any human being. O.M.: ‘Poetry is the plough which turns up time, so that the deepest layer of time – its black earth – appears on top.’

‘The unspoken “name”, the “golden care” of the second stanza is “love” ’(Leon Burnett, The Modern Language Review, April 1981).

(109) Written in the Crimea during the Civil War when O.M.