The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review

The Whisper of History and the Noise of Time in the Writings of Osip Mandel'shtam Author(s): Gregory Freidin Source: Russian Review, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Oct., 1978), pp. 421-437 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/128508 Accessed: 10/12/2010 07:02
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The Whisper andthe Noise of of History Timein the Writings of OsipMandel'shtam*

FREIDIN By GREGORY

We must listen to the whisper of history. Vasilii Rozanov,

Priroda i istoriia

Having hastily prepared a cocktail of Rembrandt,of goatish Spanish paintings and the chirping of cicadas, and without even having touched this drink with his lips, Parnokdashed off. Osip Mandel'shtam,
The Egyptian Stamp

The "historicity"of Mandel'shtam's poetic expression has been often presented as a distinguishing trait of his art, but neither its role in his writings, nor its relation to the contemporary literary and cultural scene has been properly established. The present essay attempts to outline the poet's cultural genealogy and cultural affinities using as a guide his own attitudes toward time (as a factor of change) and toward history (as a succession of "historical"events which possess some latent meaning).' This outline will demonstrate that the way Mandel'shtam perceived time and, more specifically, history constituted a major formative
* This essay was first presented at Stanford University in January, 1978. In revising it for publication, I greatly benefited from suggestions and comments by Joseph Brodsky, Edward G. Brown, Leopold Haimson, Robert P. Hughes, Hugh McLean, John Malmsted, Czeslaw Milosz, I. Z. Serman, William Mills Todd III, Tomas Venclova and Reginald Zelnik. Needless to say, the responsibility for the essay's final version is mine alone. Unless otherwise indicated, all the references are to the three volumes of Osip Mandel'shtam, Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh (ed. G. P. Struve and B. A. Filippov [Washington: Inter-Language Literary Associates, 1967]). Translationsare mine. 1 For the discussion of philosophical aspects of Mandel'shtam'sperception of time, see an illuminating article by Victor Terras, "Time Philosophy of Osip Slavonic and East European Review 47, no. 109 (1969). Mandelshtam,"

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principle of his poetics. Thus, the goal of the essay is two-fold: to show how the age shaped Mandel'shtam and how Mandel'shtam, in his turn, shaped the image of that age. Just as the reforms of Peter the Great made the West a model for Russia's future, so Western European education and literature, once they sank roots in Russian soil, made Western history a model for Russia's past. However welcome or unwelcome this model was-some violently rejected it while others accepted it wholeheartedly over the course of the last two hundred years-the West could not be ignored. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, its cultural presence among the educated elite was felt so strongly that the question of Russia's national identity vis-a-vis the West has become a central theme in Russian literature. And always inseparable from this question have been the problems of the nation's origins and destiny, in short her fate. Indeed, there has hardly been a Russian writer or a poet in the last two hundred years who ignored the problem of Russia's historical identity. With such a long tradition behind it, Mandel'shtam's own preoccupation with cultural continuity and change can tell us little about the unique character of his art: he was one of many. But this anonymity disappears when we examine closely the values and concepts behind Mandel'shtam's attitude toward time and history. Even taken by themselves, these values and concepts reveal a great deal about Mandel'shtam's poetic perception, and they become particularly revealing when we relate them to Mandel'shtam'slife and times. The very idea of having to conceptualize the past in accordance with some Western model-a model less universal and more complex than the scriptural and pseudo-scriptural models of pre-Petrine Russia-and the necessity to account for the present in temporal and valuative terms, created enormous difficulties for the nineteenth-century Russians attempting to define their country as either part of or separate from the rest of Europe. These difficulties were much less evident when dealing with practical challenges of the moment, since it had, after all, proved possible to do such Western things as organize a modern and; on occasion, victorious army, build railroads, introduce a functioning legal system, and even have universities. However, as soon as attempts were made to discern a pattern of development, confusion would set in. To put it simply, one could not just appropriate a history, nor could one "begin it." As Mandel'shtam wrote in his early essay, "the resolve, good will alone are not sufficient in order to 'begin' history. To begin is altogether inconceivable. Continuity, unity are wanting." ("Petr Chaadaev," II, 286). Precisely this problem lies at the origins of the division of Russian

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intellectuals into Westemizers and Slavophiles and, even more important, into those who considered change capable of giving a nation a new, universal identity and those who saw this identity determined once and for all in the past. EHadthis division been stopped at this point, we would have had a problem for an intellectual historian rather than for an historian of literature. But what began as an historiosophical and cultural conflict almost at the outset turned into an existential issue -the denial or acceptance of time. It is in all these three forms-historical, cultural, and existential-that we find the conflict pervading the entire body of Russian poetry and fiction. For Pushkin, for example, historical considerations were of primary importance, and so was time in individual characterization. The interdependence and contrast existing between human fate and natural seasons in Eugene Onegin and between individual fate and major historical events in The Captain's Daughter amply illustrate this point. For Lermontov, however, as for Tiutchev and Fet, the drama of human existence was played out in close proximity to the metaphysical or daemonic spheres, and they confronted the category of time more often as either timelessness or an illusion. It is tempting to think that the reshuffling of the chronological planes in The Hero of Our Time, which contributes significantly to the novel's stereoscopic depth, would hardly have been possible if time and, indirectly, history were held in higher regard by Lermontov. "Our tormentor" was the name Mandel'shtam chose for Lermontov, so seductive and simultaneously repellent did he find Lermontov's yearning for timelessness (I, No. 259). Indeed, it is ironic that no matter by whom, when or how "our time's hero" Pecherin is described, the portrait in each episode of the novel comes out the same. The case of Leo Tolstoi is even more ironic. The author of the great historical novel used all his formidable powers to convince the reader that the search for meaning in history was utterly futile and the only pattern that could be discerned was the old cycle, tested by Russian nobles and peasants alike, of death, birth, and reproduction. In the Epilogue to War and Peace, Natasha proudly holds up the soiled diapers of the Bezukhov baby to what historically-minded Russians saw as the "sacred continuity and change of events" ("Petr Chaadaev," II, 286). Dostoevskii's heroes, too, want to shed the vestiges of history so that they may speak to each other "across eternity" or go on a pilgrimage selling the Gospels as did the reformed Westernizer and historically minded intellectual Stepan Verkhovenskii. Had it not been for the writings of Chaadaev, Herzen, Turgenev, and Chekhov, which challenged the antihistorical "simplicity" of Tolstoi and the equally antihistorical "complexity" of Dostoevskii, there would have

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been little relief from the intellectual and literary worship of the immutable Russian muzhik. Even Vladimir Solov'ev, the most levelheaded of the Russian metaphysicians and one who wished to see Russia join the rest of Christendom in building a Civitas Dei on earth, at the end of his life adopted an apocalyptic attitude to history which his followers among the literati-not without reason-interpreted as negation of history itself. Already in the early years of his career, Mandel'shtam declared himself on the side of those for whom change was a reality, and time a force capable of generating new more ideal forms of existence. This was the tradition of Chaadaev, Herzen and of the earlier Vladimir Solov'ev, a tradition unpopular in the mainstream of contemporary Russian poetry. When Mandel'shtam was growing up (he was born in 1891), the poetics and sensibility of Russian symbolism with its thoroughly ahistorical world view almost dominated the entire literary scene. For the symbolists, if change had any reality at all, it was in the form of an apocalypse, or-for those who wished to settle for less-a universal rebirth. Their poetics, as a rule, reflected a spatial perception, and their mythoi tended to substitute spacial dimensions for a temporal axis. In fact, had it not been for the special compartment created to accommodate things beyond good and evil, the symbolist space would have been identical with the universe of the mediaeval mystery plays. Of course, the symbolists' customary emphasis on the exalted state of the soul, their ideal of a poet as a theurgist, in short their "egocentricity," determines the very strength of their poetry, their superb understanding of the ego-that modern equivalent of the mediaeval soul which ignores the passage of time. This strength, however, turned out to be insufficient to deal with the fluid social, political, and cultural reality of Russia following the 1905 Revolution. Now a new language, a new mode of perception was needed before literature could absorb the effect of the historical change that apparently fitted neither the anticipated apocalypse nor a palingenesis. Predictably, the tone and the motifs of the civic and peasant-loving Nekrasov were the style to which Beli and, to a lesser extent, Blok resorted when they felt compelled to respond to the new sensibility engendered by the Revolution. Even Viacheslav Ivanov, who could walk the highest symbolist tight-rope with his eyes closed, decided to experiment in a "folksy" poetic tonality ("The Sun's Signet Ring," 1911) which he borrowed from Ershov's famous "The Humpbacked Horse." Needless to say, this folkloric, or, more appropriately, carnivalesque style of both Nekrasov and Ershov was ill-suited for introducing into literature the

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complex problems of history, although it could with fairy-tale magic transform history into burlesque, as in Blok's revolutionary poem "The Twelve." Even the historically-minded Blok in his poema "Retribution" found the nineteenth century wanting, not in the realization of that century's democratic and humanitarian ideals but in, of all things, mediaeval chivalry. There is considerably less "history"in this approach than in a burlesque representation of the Revolutionary "spectacle." One is indeed at a loss to explain the historical grasp of the young Mandel'shtam, his sensitivity to time, if one looks at the perception of time common to his symbolist mentors. Nor is it easy to account for Mandelshtam's "chronological" ease by referring to Mikhail Kuz'min and Innokentii Annenskii, the two "mensheviks"of the symbolist period of Russian literature, who exercised a substantial and, at times, decisive influence on Mandel'shtam and other poets of his generation. The answer, perhaps, lies not so much in the realm of art as in life, that is, in the facts of Mandel'shtam's biography, those early experiences which he selected for his autobiographical prose and which, we may assume, determined his basic attitudes and his relation to his age. The Revolution of 1905, particularly the way it unfolded in Mandershtam's home city of St. Petersburg, is one such experience. Shared by all of the poet's contemporaries, this experience had to leave a special mark on the young Mandel'shtam, as it coincided with the internal emotional turmoil natural in the fourteen-year-old adolescent. In this coincidence lies at least a partial explanation of Mandel'shtam's ability to internalize "history" in his writings. Mandel'shtam himself was aware of this: "Congenital tongue-tie weighs heavily over me and many of my contemporaries. We learned not to speak but to babble and only by listening intensely to the swelling noise of the age and bleached by the foam of its crest, did we acquire speech." (The Noise of Time, II, 99). Even translating the social and political pressures of the time into emotional terms was not unusual in the poetry of the period, but translating an emotional charge, a sine qua non of lyric poetry, into historical terms was a feat rarely accomplished. To illustrate this point, the earliest poem that Mandelshtam included in his first collection may be compared with a passage from The Noise of Time (1924) recounting the sensation of history experienced around the time of the First Russian Revolution: A sound cautionsand hollow Of a fruit that'sbrokenaway from a tree, Amid the incessantmelody Of deep forest silence ... (I, No. 1, 1908)

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Yes, I heard with the sharpnessof ears caught by the sound of a distant threshing machine in the field the burgeoning and increase, not of the barley in its ear, not of the northernapple, but of the world, the capitalist world, that was ripeningin orderto fall. (The Noise of Time, II, 88) Mandel'shtam's origins, that is, his family and home, also help explain the ease with which he could turn the past and the present into an "historical"artifact. In the last two decades of Imperial Russia, a son of a Jewish leather merchant aspiring to be a Russian poet could hardly look to his parents for an adequate identity, no matter how much they might have encouraged his literary pursuits. Russian poetry was bound to detach him from his family, just as his family had to stand between him and his Russian muse. Here is how Mandelshtam himself, by now a man in his thirties, formulated the consequences of the choice that he had to make: "Where for happy generations the epic speaks in hexameters and chronicles I have merely the sign of the hiatus, and between me and the age, there lies a pit, a moat, filled with clamorous time, the place where the family and the family archive ought to have been" (The Noise of Time, II, 99). Social snobbery and petty antisemitism were not beneath some of Mandel'shtam's mentors, and in such an atmosphere (we should not forget that only very few Jews were allowed to live in St. Petersburg), the family might very well appear as a stigma, a burden, and not a safe haven as it was, say, for the Muscovite Pasternak, whose parents, though Jewish, belonged to the artistic elite. Cultural rejection, as did "social change," forever impressed itself on Mandel'shtam's perception, and it gave him a poetic pattern which could equally well accomodate a delicate lyric conceit, written quite early, and a childhood "memory,"recorded in an epic manner much later, at the time of taking stock: Maybe, I am not necessaryto you, Night; out of the universalgulf, Like a shell without pearls I am cast up on your shore

And the walls of a fragile shell, Like the house of an empty heart, You will fill with the whispersof foam, With fog, with wind and the rain. (I, No. 26, 1911) The whole of the harmoniousmirage of St. Petersburgwas only a dream, a brilliant covering thrown over the abyss while all around (me) there

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sprawled Judaic chaos, not a native land, not a house, not a home, but precisely a chaos, the unfamiliar womb world out of which I came, which I feared, the existence of which I vaguely sensed and fled, always fled. (The Noise of Time, II, 55) The night that expelled Mandelshtam and the Judaic chaos from which he fled may only be exchanged for an aesthetic dream: either the "echo" of poetry or the Imperial "mirage" of St. Petersburg. But Russia, too, was trying to escape from her origins, she too found herself cast up on the shore of the twentieth century, searching more desperately than before for a new, European self-image. This identification of the poet with his country (Mandel'shtam, an "assimilated"Jew, and Russia, an "assimilated"European country) explains why Mandel'shtam, with such persistence, associated both his Jewish origins and Russia's statehood with the colors black and yellow:2 At Jerusalem's gates The black sun arose ... The yellow sun is moreterrifying... ... I woke up in my cradle In the radianceof the black sun (I, No. 91, 1916) ... Behold the black-yellowlight, behold the joy of Judea ... (I, No. 100, 1917) Suddenly grandpa pulled out of the commode's drawer a black-yellow shawl [a prayer shawl, G.F.], threw it over my shoulders and made me repeat after him the words composedof unfamiliarnoises, but, dissatisfied with my babble, grew angry and began to shake his head disapprovingly. I felt stifled and frightened. My mother, I do not rememberhow, rescued me. (The Noise of Time, II, 68) is bright Only there where the firmament The black-yellowcloth is raging As though the air were streaming With the gall of the two-headedEagle. I, No. 189, 1917 I returnedto my city familiarto the point of tears ...
2 In additionto the ImperialStandard (a black doubled-headed eagle against buildingsin a yellow background), yellow was often the color of governmental St. Petersburg.

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... So hurryto recognizethis December day With its ominoustar mixedwith yolk... (I, No. 221, 1930)

In a 1913 poem, Mandel'shtam threads onto one line the problematic identities of Russia, St. Petersburg, and a St. Petersburg man like himself-all three not quite belonging to their environment: ... Leviathan,like a battleshipin dock, Russiais restingheavily. And over the Neva there stand the embassies of half the world, The Admiralty,the sun, the quiet! And the stiff scarletof State, Like a coarsehairshirt,is plain. Burdensomeis the fate of a northernsnobOnegin'sancientspleen;... The thin-skinned, modest pedestrianThe eccentricEvgenii-conceals his poverty, Breathesgas fumes and curses fate! (I, No. 42, 1913) How did Mandel'shtam resolve this quandary of uncertain identities? If there were to be a place for Mandel'shtam in Russian culture, it had to be within that intellectual tradition which emphasized the universality of mankind's destiny and did not set Russia apart from the West. In the context of that time and place, the tradition quite naturally took the form of, first, Marxism, and, then, a strong admiration for Catholicism and Rome. This seemingly incongruous combination was common enough during Mandel'shtam's lifetime to be considered typical, so typical, in fact, that Thomas Mann used Georg Lucacs, the Marxist philosopher and literary scholar, as a prototype for the Jesuit Herr Nafta of The Magic Mountain, who, in his adolescence, exchanged a Hebrew school for a Jesuit seminary. The French philosophers, Henri Bergson and Simone Well, both Jews, ended their lives, if not as proper Catholics, then as believers who stopped only at the Church's doorstep; and Simone Well also had her Marxist period. The line between Marxism and Roman Catholicism has often been crossed by people uncertain in their twentieth century identities. Mandel'shtam made his first contact with Marxism through Karl Kautsky's The Erfurt Program (1892), a kind of "short course" in
... The file of autos flies into the mist;

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mankind's history and future which, in one sweep, disposed of Russia's uniqueness. It must have been equally gratifying to find out that in the Marxist universe there was neither Hellene nor Jew. But what proved most seductive in The Erfurt Program was the harmony of the "historical" spheres, the immutable laws governing mankind's mutability. 0 Erfurt Program,you Marxistpropylaea, early, too early did you train our spirits to harmony;but to me and to many others you gave a sense of life in those prehistoricyears when thought hungers after unity and harmony,when the backbone of the age straightensand when the heart needs most of all the red blood of the aorta!But is KautskyTiutchev? ... Tiutchev, that is, the source of cosmic joy, the bearer of a strong and harmonioussense of the world, the thinkingreed and the covering thrown over the abyss... ... What can be more powerful, more organic?I suddenly perceived the whole world as one economy, a human economy-and the spindles of the English cottage industry that had fallen silent a hundred years ago were still spinningin the ringingautumnair. (The Noise of Time, II, 87, 88) The pattern of mutability is isolated here as a "luminous detail," and is made to work as a metaphoric axis for several historical periods: the waning of English cottage industry, which was so critical for the development of modern Europe, becomes metaphorically identified with fate spun by the three Parcae. Fate and history are spun on the same spindle. Kautsky's popular Marxism gave Mandel'shtam the first whole vision of the world and a sense of belonging to the entire universe. It has to be emphasized that even in his early youth, Mandelshtam associated the sensation of cosmic unity, indispensable to a poet, with a historiosophic system, in short, with history. What Marxism did for Mandel'shtam in explaining material history, Catholicism did for him in explaining the spiritualization of history and the materialization of spirit. The tradition of seeing in Western Catholic history the "sacred change and continuity of events," that is to say, a purposeful development toward Civitas Dei, has existed quite prominently in Russia, from Chaadaev, in Pushkin's time, to the more recent Vladimir Solov'ev. Rome, as an historical, religious and aesthetic entity was the vortex of Western civilization, but it was now seen anew, in the light of Europe's rediscovery of antiquity after Schliemann. And in the second decade of the twentieth century, when Mandel'shtam's voice was reaching maturity, the classical and neo-classical traditions thoroughly satisfied the passion for universality and harmony that had earlier been nurtured by The Erfurt Program. "I was born in Rome and it returned to me," wrote Mandel'shtam in a 1915 poem (I, No. 80) as if to announce
Believe me, for a certain age and time Kautsky . . . is the same as

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by this allusion to Virgil and Schiller that he was exchanging a birthright in the Arcadia of the future for a birthright in the Arcadia of the past. But how was Mandelshtam's view of history realized in his aesthetic theory and practice? Mandel'shtam, after all, was a poet, and the unity of his outlook (we assume such unity in a poet a priori) requires that his aesthetic and philosophical affinities be in harmony with the historicity of his thinking. For the sake of consistency we may pose this question in generational terms as well. What did Mandershtam oppose to the symbolists' view of the world as a reality concealing a higher reality (Ivanov's a realibus ad realiora)? Mandel'shtam chose the old workhorse of Romanticism, Schelling. The German philosopher's famous law of identity between the subject and the object, nature and consciousness, the finite and the infinite, the absolute organism and the absolute artifact (whence the poet's exclusive role in the world) put Mandel'shtam on the solid ground of aesthetic and philosophical tradition. At the same time, Schelling prepared Mandel'shtam for exposure to the current philosophical fashions -the "intuitivist" philosophy of Henri Bergson, then at the summit of his popularity in Russia, and his Russian counterpart, N. O. Losskii, the poet's professor at St. Petersburg University. Finally, Schelling's law of identity provided Mande'shtam with a systematic confirmation of the poet's certainty in the tangibility of his perception. The symbolists were still peeking behind the veil of Maya while Mandel'shtam began to see poetry's role as a mediaeval mason saw the task of his craft: to give a tangible representation to the "other-worldly"reality, to make a stone, a slave of gravity, represent the heavens' ethereal lightness ("Morning of Acmeism," II, 324-325; I, No. 29). Given Mandel'shtam's commitment and ability to perceive change, and given his adherence to the law of identity, only one problem remained: how to reconcile the passage of time with the desired continuity of culture. Platonic theory of knowledge, as anamnesis, came to the rescue of the young poet and was quickly applied to poetry. A poet's function was to be midwife to cultural memory, and poetry was viewed as a kind of Jacob's ladder, along which time could move to and fro. Mandel'shtam, however, made one important departure from Plato. A poet not only conveyed, but shaped cultural memory and, therefore, the consciousness of his time. .. And more than one treasuremay, go to the future generations, Bypassingthe grandchildren, And once again a northernbard will composethe old song And will sing it as his own. I, No. 67, 1914)

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. .. We harnessedthe swallows Into battle legions and, behold, The sun disappearedfrom sight; all elements Are twittering,moving, alive; Throughthe nets-thick twilightOne cannotsee the sun, and the earth'safloat... (I, No. 103, 1917)

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"Swallows" often appear in Mandel'shtam's poetry and, almost invariably, are associated with the state of consciousness, when poetry is in the process of creation (cf. Nos. 24, 112, 113 and others). Mandel'shtam's attitude toward time and history takes another turn with the Revolution of 1917. It is then that he expands his understanding of existence to include the concept of catastrophe. And yet, Mande'shtam did not abandon his previous intellectual allegiances. With each new stage in his development, with each new stage in life, Mandershtam's outlook expanded and deepened, but at the core of it there still remained his previous intellectual affinities. Schelling's law of identity between the absolute organism (nature) and the absolute work of art (culture or consciousness made concrete) goes a long way towards demystifying the complex imagery of a poem central to Mandel'shtam's work, "Ode on Slate" (I, No. 137, 1923). In it culture and nature, their separate identities intact, are no longer divided against each other, for the poet has transcended the alienating conflict between the "raw and the cooked." The rhythm of shifts and releases of accumulated tensions in geological plates serves as a metaphor for human history punctuated by similar cataclysms. Likewise the swelling and eventual fall of a fruit link the pattern of tension and release to the creative process in poetry: ... Here writes fear, here writes shift With a lactescent lead stick, Here maturesthe rough draft Belongingto the studentsof streamingwaters ... ... The fruit was swelling, the vine maturing... (I, No. 137, 1923) The image of poetry as a plough that cuts through the soil of time and brings up to the surface time's deepest, most fertile layers belongs to the same period and reflects the same "catastrophic"view of art and history: ... I am drinkingthe opaque air, like water, Time is turnedup by a plough, and once a rose was earth ... (I, No. 108, 1920)

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An historical cataclysm clears the field of vision in order to reveal the origins of our culture in the classical age. The more powerful the break in continuity, the more obvious becomes the need for a classical approach to culture, for what appears as a discontinuity in fact represents a return to the primitive fertility of the soil which once gave birth to the culture of antiquity. "In art, a revolution leads inevitably to classicism. Not because David reaped the harvest of Robespierre but because so wishes the earth," wrote Mandel'shtam in 1924, offering to contemporaries his own version of the "eternal recurrence" ("Word and Culture," II, 224). It is this "earth" that Mandel'shtam wanted to be close to in those years, so close indeed that in many of the poems of the period we see him entombed in the earth like the famous kernel of wheat, dying, bursting with energy, giving birth (I, Nos. 110, 112, 113, 114, 116, 118, 123, and others). The whole of the universe appears to Mandel'shtam now as permeated with one central pattern which in poetry gives shape to innumerable metamorphoses. Each historical event represents an explosion of a slowly accumulated energy which leaves its imprint on the historical landscape ("The thunder storm serves as nature's prototype of an historical event.") ("Notes and Excerpts," II, 191). And again, just as in 1913 and 1916, the stone (the title of the first two collections) becomes a central image, but this time as a metaphor for the record of such explosions. In culture, a poet is such a stone; events which may not have any inherent meaning except for the fact that they indeed occurred, are ordered by a poet into a system with a single center of gravity. Thus, the past, a random set of events, acquires order, perhaps even a purpose, and man's place in the universe receives, in Mandel'shtam's idiom, a "teleological warmth" ("The Nineteenth Century," 283). In Russian, these words, teleologicheskoe teplo, paronomastically are associated with the word telo, a body, corpus; thus the whole expression implies a vision of culture as a universe metaphorically identical to the human body. (Cf. I, No. 8: "A body is given me / What shall I do with it?... Onto the window-panes of eternity / My breath, my warmth have settled. . ."). Mandel'shtam was deeply aware of cultural discontinuities, but they did not limit his poetic vision. Rather he accepted and assimilated them as one aspect of what, in modem times, has been called the human condition. Catastrophes in nature now held the key to understanding catastrophes in history; the mineral record of natural history became metaphorically identical with the poet's memory, anamnesis, but while the mineral record was merely shaped by time, a poet could give his human shape to the stream of history:

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... And how I am studyingthe record Of scratchesmade on slate by the summerThe language of flint and air, With a layer of darkness,with a layer of light, And I, too, want to thrustmy hand [as into His side] Into the flintyway out of the old song, Drawing into one joint Flint and water, a horseshoeand a signet ring. (I, No. 137, 1923) Without resorting to any one formula for time, Mandelshtam perceived change as a reality which had to be molded and shaped, and cultivated like a clearing in the woods intended for agriculture. In mid-1920 a new stage in the development of Mandel'shtam's concept of time begins. His frame of reference broadens now to include modern physics, biology, and, most significantly, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, which provided Mandel'shtam with a conceptual vocabulary for the major piece of his critical writing, Conversation About Dante. The poet who had been so sensitive to time in history, culture, and in human existence, finally decided to take a closer look at the function of time in the art he practiced best-the art of poetry. Mandel'shtam most likely came into contact with Bergson's work before the Revolution, when the French philosopher enjoyed wide popularity in Russia. Indeed, we find traces of Bergsonian influence, direct or indirect, in The Egyptian Stamp, Mandel'shtam's only fictional narrative in which the reader is plunged into the almost pure duree of the author's consciousness. It is doubtful, however, that Mandelshtam derived much inspiration from philosophy directly, though he had no compunction about using it freely for his own purposes even to the point of distortion.3 A theoretical treatise on poetry needed a background system and the choice naturally fell on Bergson who assigned as much importance to the category of time as did the poet. It was imperative for Mandel'shtam, just as it was for Dante, to show that poetry and the universe function in the same way. In Conversation about Dante (1933), Mandel'shtam defines poetry as a process and, further, as a "crossbred process" consisting of two
3 Bergson's L'evolution creatrice(1907) first appearedin Russianin 1910 and as part of a five-volumecollection (without date) around 1912. subsequently at least for awhile, considered Mandel'shtam, Bergsonto be the modernphilosopher,sang praisesto his "profoundly Judaicintellect,"and even attemptedan of his theorywith whichthe philosopher himselfwouldhave thoroughly exposition disagreed-allwithin the space of one page in a seminalessay "0 prirodeslova" to Bergsonare made to: HenriBergson,Creative Evolution, (II, 284). References in the authorized Mitchell(New York:The Modern translation by Arthur Library, 1944). The passagefrom Bergsonthat Mandel'shtam creativelymisreadcan be foundon page 12 of thatedition.

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movlements, the first being the poetic impulse, the second, the movement of language itself: Poetic speech is a crossbredprocess, and it consists of two sonorities.The first of these is the change that we hear and sense in the very instruments of poetic speech, which arise in the process of its impulse. The second is speech proper, that is, the intonationaland phonetic work performedby the same instruments.(II, 363) These opening lines of Conversation show that Mandelshtam's poetic universe bears a strong resemblance to the philosophical universe of Henri Bergson, where living forms represent a crossbred process of interpenetration between matter and the thrust of life-the famous elan vital: In reality, life is a movement, materialityis the inverse movement, and each of these two movements is simple, the matter which forms the world being an undivided flux, and undivided also the life that runs throughit, cutting out in it living beings all along the track. (Bergson,282) The similarity. between Mande'shtam's theory of poetry and Bergson's system goes still further. Once Mandelshtam perceived poetry as a process which exists, as he puts it, in a "supra-spatial field," the Bergsonian notion of duree, or duration, also had to be appropriated. And, indeed, where conventional poetics center around the concept of metaphor, Mandel'shtam introduces metamorphosis, that is, a continuous generation of poetic images which, themselves, only trace the poetic process but do not represent it. . . . Imagine to yourself an airplane (forgetting the technical impossibility) which in full flight constructsand launches another machine. In just the same way, this second flying machine, completely absorbed in its own flight, still managesto assemble and launch a third. In order to make this suggestive and helpful comparisonmore precise, I will add that the assembly and launching of these technically unthinkable machines that are sent flying off in the midst of flight do not constitute a secondary or peripheralfunction of the plane that is in flight; and they contribute no less to its feasibility and safety than the proper functioning of the workingof the engine. (II, 382) steeringgear or the uninterrupted Likewise, in Bergson, since creation never ceases, the constantly evolving life-forms at each instant represent only, as it were, the foot-prints of elan vital which continues its progress while our intellect tries to arrest its movement. Only in continuous duration, or duree, can Bergson's elan vital and Mandel'shtam's"creative impulse" be realized: Of all the arts, only painting, and, at that, only modern French painting,

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still has an ear for Dante. This is the painting which elongates the bodies of the horses approaching the finish line at the racetrack. We describe just what cannot be described, that is, nature's text brought to a standstill;and we have forgotten how to describe the only thing which by its structure yields to poetic representation, namely-impulses, intentions,and amplitudesof oscillation... (II, 404) In vain, therefore, does life evolve before our eyes as a continuous creation of unforeseeable form: the idea always persists that form, unforeseeabilityand continuity are mere appearance-the outward reflection of our own ignorance. What is presented to the senses as a continuous historywould breakup, we are told, into series of successive states. (Bergson,p. 35) For a poet to convey this movement, this creative impulse, and for a reader to perceive the continuous metamorphosis of poetic speech, a cognitive faculty other than intellect is needed. And again, we see Mandel'shtam employ a Bergsonian notion--"intuition," which makes the farthest reaches of the universe accessible at once to an individual's consciousness: Armedwith the sight of narrowwasps Suckingon the earth'saxis, earth'saxis, I sense all that I've been destined to see, And I rememberby heart and for no reason. I do not paint, nor do I sing, Nor do I draw the black-voicedbow, I only light into life and love To envy the mighty cunningwasps ... O, if only I, too, could, Bypassingdeath and sleep, be forced heat By the air'ssting and the summer's To hear the earth'saxis, earth'saxis (I, No. 367, 1937) This notion of intuition brings us back to the concept inseparable from Mandel'shtam's poetic world view since the initial stages of his career: anamnesis, poetry's capacity for total cultural recall. In this poem its opposite, amnesia, is polemically represented by a periphrasis of Lermontov's famous "death wish": "I want to forget myself, to fall asleep' (Lermontov's "Alone I walk onto the road"). Similarly, other concepts central to Mandel'shtam's earlier poetic theory and practice-the law of identity, the catastrophic theory of history engendered by the experience of the Revolution-found their way into Conversation about Dante, but in the shape given them by Bergson.

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The law of identity helped Mandel'shtam to transcend and at the same time maintain the dividing line between nature and poetry, that is, between the physical necessity of the one and the other's capacity for a free re-enactment of nature with the aid of poetic images. And Schuberton the water, and Mozartin birds'twitter, And Goethe whistling on a winding path, And Hamlet thinkingwith apprehensivestepsAll felt the crowd'spulse and trustedthe crowd. Perhaps,before the lips the whisperwas alreadyborn And the leaves whirled where there was no foliage, And those to whom we dedicate our work Beforeour work acquiredtheir traits.4 (I, No. 280, 1934) His view of history as a catastrophic process in which swelling tensions are discharged in an explosion generating new forms ("catastrophe [is]
a universal source of new forms . . ." [II, p. 374]) was continued in a

sort of "big bang" theory of poetry's origins and development. Homer was an explosion that nurtured with its energy the whole of the classical world. He was the Sun of antiquity. Virgil was the Sun of the Middle Ages, Dante the Sun of modern times, and Pushkin, needless to say, was the Sun of modern Russia. Each Sun at its inception contained the potential that literature would subsequently develop. Mandel'shtam even called for a commentary on Dante's allusions to post-Dante poetry. Not an absurd idea. Conversation about Dante, more than any other single work of Mandel'shtam, summarizes the poet's view of the world as poetry, existing only as movement, in a state of constant change. Conversation may and perhaps ought to be read not as a treatise, but as a poem on poetry, a nostalgic family epic of the kind Mandel'shtam never wrote, an epic poem that, in our scientific and scholarly age, assumed the shape of a theoretical essay. Only a cultural orphan growing up in the revolutionary years could possess such an insatiable need for a continuous construction of a gigantic vision of culture meant to compensate for the impossibility of belonging to a single place. Mandel'shtam's ability to accept and to internalize change, together with his virtually limitless cultural memory in which every event could find its home, makes his poetry and prose one of the most precious records of our age. His poetry also exemplifies
4Cf. with Bergson (p. 282): "Individuation is in part the work of matter, in part the result of life's own inclination. Thus a poetic sentiment which bursts into distinct verses, lines and words, may be said to have already contained this multiplicity of individuated elements, and yet, in fact, it is the materiality of language that creates it."

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and, in part,helps to explainthe dramaticshift in poetic sensibilitythat took place on the eve of and during the First World War and that served, as it were, to set the pace of literature in unison with the moder age.