In poetry, as anywhere else, spiritual superiority is always disputed at the physical level. One cannot help thinking it was precisely the rift with the Symbolists (not entirely without anti-Semitic overtones) which contained the germs of Mandelstam's future. I am not referring so much to Georgi Ivanov's sneering at Mandelstam's poem in 1917, which was then echoed by the official ostracism of the thirties, as to Mandelstam's growing separation from any form of mass production, especially linguistic and psychological. The result was an effect in which the clearer a voice gets, the more dissonant it sounds. No choir likes it, and the aesthetic isolation acquires physical dimensions. When a man creates a world of his own, he becomes a foreign body against which all laws are aimed: gravity, compression, rejection, annihilation.
Mandelstam's world was big enough to invite all of these. I don't think that, had Russia chosen a different historical path, his fate would have been that much different. His world was too autonomous to merge. Besides, Russia went the way she did, and for Mandelstam, whose poetic development was rapid by itself, that direction could bring only one thing—a terrifying acceleration. This acceleration affected, first of all, the character of his verse. Its sublime, meditative, caesuraed flow changed into a swift, abrupt, pattering movement. His became a poetry of high velocity and exposed nerves, sometimes cryptic, with numerous leaps over the self-evident with somewhat abbreviated syntax. And yet in this way it became more a song than ever before, not a bardlike but a birdlike song, with its sharp, unpredictable turns and pitches, something like a goldfinch tremolo.
And like that bird, he became a target for all kinds of stones generously hurled at him by his motherland. It is not that Mandelstam opposed the political changes taking place in Russia. His sense of measure and his irony were enough to acknowledge the epic quality of the whole undertaking. Besides, he was a paganistically buoyant person, and, on the other hand, whining intonations were completely usurped by the Symbolist movement. Also, since the beginning of the century, the air was full of loose talk about a redivision of the world, so that when the Revolution came, almost everyone took what had occurred for what was desired. Mandelstam's was perhaps the only sober response to the events which shook the world and made so many thoughtful heads dizzy:
Well, let us try the cumbersome, the awkward,
The screeching turning of the wheel . . .
(from "The Twilight of Freedom")
But the stones were already flying, and so was the bird. Their mutual trajectories are fully recorded in the memoirs of the poet's widow, and they took two volumes. These books are not only a guide to his verse, though they are that too. But any poet, no matter how much he writes, expresses in his verse, physically or statistically speaking, at most one-tenth of his life's reality. The rest is normally shrouded in darkness; if any testimony by contemporaries survives, it contains gaping voids, not to mention the differing angles of vision that distort the object.
The memoirs of Osip Mandelstarn's widow take care precisely of that, of those nine-tenths. They illuminate the darkness, fill in the voids, eliminate the distortion. The net result is close to a resurrection, except that everything that killed the man, outlived him, and continues to exist and gain popularity is also reincarnated, reenacted in these pages. Because of the material's lethal power, the poet's widow re-creates these elements with the care used in defusing a bomb. Because of this precision and because of the fact that through his verse, by the acts of his life, and by the quality of his death somebody called forth great prose, one would instantly understand—even without knowing a single line by Mandelstam—that it is indeed a great poet being recalled in these pages: because of the quantity and energy of the evil directed against him.
Still, it is important to note that Mandelstam's attitude toward a new historical situation wasn't at all that of outright hostility. On the whole he regarded it as just a harsher form of existential reality, as a qualitatively new challenge. Ever since the Romantics we have had this notion of a poet throwing down the glove to his tyrant. Now if there ever was such a time at all, this sort of action is utter nonsense today: tyrants do not make themselves available for such a tete-a-tete any longer. The distance between us and our masters can be reduced only by the latter, which seldom happens. A poet gets into trouble because of his linguistic, and, by implication, his psychological superiority, rather than because of his politics. A song is a form of linguistic disobedience, and its sound casts a doubt on a lot more than a concrete political system: it questions the entire existential order. And the number of its adversaries grows proportionally.
It would be a simplification to think that it was the poem against Stalin which brought about Mandelstam's doom. This poem, for all its destructive power, was just a byproduct of Mandelstam's treatment of the theme of this not-so-new era. For that matter, there's a much more devastating line in the poem called "Ariosto" written earlier the same year ( 1933): "Power is repulsive as are the barber's fingers . . ." There were plenty of others, too. And yet I think that by themselves these mug-slapping comments wouldn't invite the law of annihilation. The iron broom that was walking across Russia could have missed him if he were merely a political poet or a lyrical poet spilling here and there into politics. After all, he got his warning and he could have learned from that as many others did. Yet he didn't because his instinct for self-preservation had long since yielded to his aesthetics. It was the immense intensity of lyricism in Mandelstam's poetry which set him apart from lis contemporaries and made him an orphan of his epoch, "homeless on an all-union scale." For lyricism is the ethics of language and the superiority of this lyricism to anything that could be achieved within human interplay, of whatever denomination, is what makes for a work of art and lets it survive. That is why the iron broom, whose purpose was the spiritual castration of the entire populace, couldn't have missed him.
It was a case of pure polarization. Song is, after all, restructured time, toward which mute space is inherently hostile. The first has been represented by Mandelstarn; the second chose the state as its weapon. There is a certain terrifying logic in the location of that concentration camp where Osip Mandelstam died in 1938: near Vladivostok, in the very bowels of the state-o^ed space. This is about as far as one can get from Petersburg inside Russia. And here is how high one can get in poetry in terms of lyricism (the poem is in memory of a woman, Olga Vaksel, who reportedly died in Sweden, and was written while Mandelstam was living in Voronezh, where he was transferred from his previous place of exile near the Ural Mountains after having a nervous breakdo^). Just four lines: