Mandelstam himself had already seen the starvation in the streets; had felt, and anticipated in his poetry, the coming wave that within a few years of his death would leave Voronezh entirely in ruins.

Condemned, isolated, impoverished, terrified, reduced to themselves but entirely attentive to the world at large—somehow he, they, had landed directly in the middle of it all: Hitler, Stalin, and beyond Hitler and Stalin, in the distance but obvious to the poet’s eye, the terrible promise of a future of uncontrolled, inhuman, infinite destruction.

The Voronezh Notebooks survived by a miracle, or rather through the extraordinary determination of Nadezhda Mandelstam. In exile and poverty, under persecution and in isolation, his manuscripts hidden in teapots, shared out with friends, nightly renewed in the fragile casket of her human, fallible recall, she made it her life’s work to preserve her husband’s poetry.

Given the circumstances of its preservation, the completeness of the text and the general consensus as to its form and content are remarkable. But discrepancies between the various published versions of the Notebooks have existed, and over time discrepancies have continued to arise.

The issues that are at stake fall into a few straightforward categories. First are the two poems addressed to Stalin. Nadezhda describes in painfully humorous detail her husband’s ludicrous attempt to write an ode in praise of the dictator, in a futile but completely comprehensible effort to save their necks. Second are the poems that Mandelstam self-censored by producing variant lines he thought would be more palatable. Then there are the poems that Mandelstam produced with variants either because he was uncertain how to proceed or as discrete, and complete, approaches to the same initial impulse. More complex is the question of poems that Mandelstam, by his wife’s own testimony, was uncertain belonged in the corpus of the book. These include the poems beginning “No, it’s not a migraine” and “It’s your fate that your narrow shoulders.” Finally, there is the issue of the correct sequence of the poems.

The text I used, which came from Polnoe Sobranie Stijotvorenie, published by Biblioteka Poeta in St. Petersburg in 1995 and edited by A.G. Mets, has opted above all for clarity and simplicity. The poems addressed directly to Stalin have been removed. (Some have argued that they should be included as a matter of historical accuracy, but I have no problem with eliminating material produced under compulsion.) The poems whose membership in the fraternity is tenuous have been removed. Lines and stanzas where Mandelstam tried self-censorship have been removed. Where variants exist that betray the poet’s indecision, choices have been made. Where variants exist as separate, complete poems, of course they have been preserved.

More complicated is the question of the sequence of the poems. Nadezhda has emphasized the importance to her husband of ordering the poems by date. She took as her point of reference the moment not of composition but of transcription. In the version I used there are some departures from his wife’s ordering. Most delicate is the decision to begin the Third Notebook with the “Verses on the Unknown Soldier” instead of putting it later as Nadezhda has it. As Jennifer Baines discusses in her book on the late poetry, the composition of the “Verses” was the impulse that set in motion the Third Notebook.‡ Even though it was only written down in its final form later, the other poems were written within the parenthesis it formed. Baines follows Nadezhda in placing the “Verses” sixth in the Third Notebook. To me, however, indicating its pivotal status by putting the “Verses” at the beginning makes sense; conversely, including a miscellany of verses before it dilutes its effect.

In any case, while the circumstances of his life, which is to say the attempt to silence him absolutely, inspire a special sense of obligation to get it right, I think, most importantly, that the whole idea of a “final word” would be anathema to Mandelstam. It was as if the real and final form of his poetry existed in his head, in a nimbus of multiplicity, and a printed, published version was only one of many possible emanations. As he says in “Conversation About Dante”:

Imagine something intelligible, grasped, wrested from obscurity, in a language voluntarily and willingly forgotten immediately after the act of intellection and realization is completed...

And again:

The signal waves of meaning vanish, having completed their work; the more potent they are, the more yielding, and the less inclined to linger.

And again:

Any given word is a bundle, and meaning sticks out of it in various directions, not aspiring toward any single official point. In pronouncing the word “sun,” we are, as it were, undertaking an enormous journey to which we are so accustomed that we travel in our sleep. What distinguishes poetry from automatic [that is, mechanical, involuntary] speech is that it rouses us and shakes us into wakefulness in the middle of a word. Then it turns out that the word is much longer than we thought, and we remember that to speak means to be forever on the road.§

—Andrew Davis

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due especially to Aquilino Duque for his providential translation into Spanish of the Notebooks (an essential aid to my halting Russian) and his generous encouragement; to Oksana Alyeksyeyeva and Vlada Yaremenko for their patience with a tone-deaf student; to Marina Magazinik, met by chance on a cross-country flight, for Schubert and for hunchbacks; to Professor Andrew Kahn for important information at propitious moments. And most importantly, to Riley Ossorgin, my past returned to me, for his enthusiasm, intelligence, and persistence in combing the text with me for errors. Standard disclaimer: all mistakes are my own, but without Riley things would have been much worse.

—A.