“Christian art,” he wrote, “is always an action based on the great idea of redemption.” This is from the fragments of the unpublished essay “Pushkin and Scriabin.” It was written, or at least begun, as early as 1915, on the occasion of Scriabin’s death. The passage on Christian art seems to me central and deserves quotation at length:
It [Christian art] is an “imitation of Christ” infinitely various in its manifestations, an eternal return to the single creative act that began our historical era. Christian art is free. It is, in the full meaning of the phrase, “Art for art’s sake.” No necessity of any kind, even the highest, clouds its bright inner freedom, for its prototype, that which it imitates, is the very redemption of the world by Christ. And so, not sacrifice, not redemption in art, but the free and joyful imitation of Christ—that is the keystone of Christian esthetics.11
It is a strange kind of estheticism—the imitation of Christ! Like Jesus, the artist redeems the world—but in his art. We are close here to Jakob Böhme, to the old mystic himself, without the intermediacy of Schelling and the German Romantics:
Art cannot be a sacrifice, for a sacrifice has already been made; cannot be redemption, for the world along with the artist has already been redeemed. What then is left? A joyful commerce with the divine, like a game played by the Father with his children, a hide-and-seek of the spirit! The divine illusion of redemption, which is Christian art, is explained precisely by this game Divinity plays with us, permitting us to stray along the byways of mystery so that we would as it were of ourselves come upon salvation, having experienced catharsis, redemption in art. Christian artists are as it were the freedmen of the idea of redemption, rather than slaves; and they are not preachers.12
What an extraordinary explication of “art for art’s sake” and its consequent “freedom of the artist”! As a kind of Christianity, it places its emphasis not on the crucifixion, not on Golgotha, but on resurrection and transfiguration. It conceives of art as play—the play of a game in which the artist imitates Christ by redeeming the world.
The poet and the architect imitate Christ by endowing the world with meaning, by giving it a form and pattern in their works that is analogous to the form and pattern God made out of the world. The poet is a colonizer, a settler, a kind of Saint George, like the intrepid Russian monks of the period of the Mongol Yoke that Kliuchevsky wrote about; like Chaadaev with his need for form, his vision of unity, his “West.” Anticipating Heidegger, Mandelstam wrote: “To build means to fight against emptiness, to hypnotize space. The fine arrow of the Gothic belltower is angry, because the whole idea of it is to stab the sky, to reproach it for being empty.”13 Poets were the shepherds of being.
This freedom of the artist and the builder is therefore not the empty liberty of the unimportant. His mission is to hypnotize space and, like Joshua in the Old Testament or the priest in performance of the Eucharist, to make time stand still.
Behold the chalice like a golden sun
Suspended in the air—a splendid moment;
Here must only Greek resound:
To take the whole world in its hands, like a simple apple.
Festive height of the service,
Light in a rounded structure under the dome in July,
That, beyond time, we might, full-chested, sigh
For that meadow where time does not run.
And like eternal noon the Eucharist endures—
All take part, all play and sing,
And in the sight of all, the holy vessel
Flows with unending joy.*14
The poet may redeem the most recalcitrant materials: “There is nothing hungrier than the contemporary state, and a hungry state is more terrible than a hungry man. To show compassion for the state which denies the word is the contemporary poet’s civic ‘way,’ the heroic feat that awaits him.”15 That is a long way from the mere “defense” of poetry, or from the notion, wearily conceded by Eliot, that poetry is probably little more than a superior form of amusement. For Mandelstam, too, it is a game—but a game to be played as seriously as children play games, that is, as a sacred and heroic calling.
For all his juxtaposing of Chinese junks and racers at Verona, Jesus and Joshua, Beethoven and Dante, Verlaine and Villon, incarnation and Ovidian metamorphosis, Mandelstam knows very well what time it is. He never asks, as does the lyrical voice in a Pasternak poem, “What millennium is it out there?”16 His feeling for “the age” is one of the qualities of his gift. Not clock time (he disliked clocks and would never have one in his flat), time spatially conceived, but rather Bergsonian time, time as durée, a system of intuited inner connections. Like the lover in his essay, he “gets tangled up in tender names and suddenly remembers that all this has happened before.”17 Shaping form out of matter, life creates pattern; and pattern is repetition.
It is dangerous, the time he lives in. He feels the ominous shift of direction. The nineteenth century, weighed down by “the enormous wings” of its cognitive powers, cannot lift itself from the exhausted shore.18 One feels the shadow of an oncoming night. Those essays of the Civil War period, “The Word and Culture” and “Humanism and Modern Life,” still vibrate with a certain optimism, still hold the early conjunction of his religious sensibility and his unorthodox interpretation of Marxism. He hopes for a new “Social Gothic,” that universalized domesticity, an all-human family. But he sees the other alternative: a new Assyrian age in which “captives swarm like chickens under the feet of the immense king.”19
It is a time of crisis and there is magic in it; the tree is about to become a girl again. It is a time when
Social distinctions and class antagonisms pale before the division of people into friends and enemies of the word. Literally, sheep and goats. I sense, almost physically, the unclean goat smell issuing from the enemies of the word.20
Who are these goat-smelling enemies of the word?
Those for whom the word had merely a denotative, a utilitarian meaning. Those for whom its living nature is a secondary or subordinate quality. Propagandists of political parties, philosophers, anthroposophists like Andrei Biely, who, in Mandelstam’s view, yoked his great poetic gift to a “Buddhist” worldview.21 Those who used the word as slave labor to support some other external structure—a church, a state, a party, a program.
“Friends” were those who believed in the sacred and redemptive power and the psychic nature of the word.
Luther was a poor word-lover; he departed from verbal argument to fling his inkpot at the devil. The literary critics whose response to the anniversary of the death of the great poet Blok was mere lyrical effusion served the word badly, for a critic’s minimal task is to establish where the poet’s words came from—that is, his poetic genealogy—where he stood in relation to the larger pattern-forming, historical energies of the word. The Moscow “poetesses” pay only half-tribute to the word, for, of the constituent elements of poetry, remembrance and invention, they honor remembrance alone; they are all genealogy, mere traditionalists; while the Futurists blaringly honor invention alone.22
“Culture has become a church,” Mandelstam wrote in 1921, and he hailed the separation of this “church” from the state. It is in this time of transformation and transfiguration that culture assumes a sacred quality, a sacred mission. Within the state, those are friends of the word who acknowledge the statutory independence of culture, who “consult” it, as the princes of old Moscow used to consult the monasteries. But within these monasteries, there were monks and laymen; and Mandelstam identified himself as a layman. Monkish structure—whether Byzantine, or whether the new monasticism of the secularized Russian intelligentsia—was hostile to the word.