Yesterday Never Existed

Osip Mandelstam once started a poem with the line, “No, I have never been anyone’s contemporary.” He was born in 1891 but inhabited a poetic world in which he had conversations with Dante and sat at the seaside with Ovid, in which he was as much Greek, Roman, and Florentine as he was Russian. Born in Warsaw to a Jewish leather merchant and his music teacher wife, Mandelstam grew up in St. Petersburg, where French governesses taught him about Napoleon and Joan of Arc; as a teenager, he studied in France, Germany, and Italy, where he experienced the first twinges of what he later called “nostalgia for world culture.” His tender, aching preoccupation with the past set him apart in an era obsessed with the future. 

Mandelstam’s poetic career was launched under the aegis of Symbolism, a movement that treated the poet as a medium offering access to the distant world of the real, which could be perceived only through the veil of paraphrase. For Symbolists, language was a mere approximation: a means rather than an end. Like other Russian Symbolists, Mandelstam was much influenced by the 19th-century poet Fyodor Tyutchev, who wrote highly ambiguous metaphysical poetry devoid of lyric heroes. (One of Tyutchev’s most famous poems begins, “The mind cannot grasp Russia.”)

Around 1912, Mandelstam renounced Symbolism and joined the short-lived but long-remembered Acmeists. Central members included Anna Akhmatova, who became his lifelong friend, and her husband, Nikolai Gumilev. Acmeism sought to use poetry to bring words to the pinnacle—the acme—of their being, encompassing all the cultural history that language carried with it. From that point on, Mandelstam’s aim was not so much to create something new as to achieve heightened perception of what already existed. In “Tristia,” a poem from 1918 named for the verse epistles Ovid wrote in exile on the Black Sea, Mandelstam proclaims, “All has been seen, all will be seen again, / only the moment of recognition is sweet.”

As Mandelstam pondered eternal return, many of his contemporaries sought to cast off what they saw as the shackles of old language. The artistic experiments of this period were largely iconoclastic—throwing the classics from the ship of modernity, as the Futurists’ 1917 manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” put it. Avant-garde writers sought to invent a new kind of language, sometimes quite literally, as in Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh’s transrational language, zaum (sometimes rendered in English as “beyonsense”), which they hoped would achieve a universality that could put an end to all human discord. Neologism thrived. But for Mandelstam, “old” versus “new” was a false dichotomy, and language’s endurance was the source of the power and pleasure of poetry. In his 1921 essay “The Word and Culture,” excerpted in Peter France’s excellent new translation Black Earth (New Directions, 2021), Mandelstam writes

Poetry is a plow, which turns over the earth so that the deep layers of time, the black earth, come to the surface. But there are periods when humanity, not satisfied with the present and nostalgic for the deep layers of time, longs like a plowman for the virgin soil of past ages. Revolution in art leads inevitably to classicism.… You often hear people say: That’s fine, but it belongs to yesterday. But I say: Yesterday has still to be born. It has not yet really existed…. What is true for one poet is true for all. There is no need to set up any schools, no need to invent one’s own poetics.

For Mandelstam, the avant-garde was “calculated suicide out of curiosity.” He likewise rejected the teleological orientation of the Soviet project. The fantasy of conquering time, of arriving in the glorious future ahead of schedule, was central to early Soviet culture—whether in the form of quasi-scientific schemes for human immortality or in “production novels,” such as Valentin Kataev’s Time, Forward! (1932), literary accompaniment to the five-year plans that Stakhanovite workers sought to fulfill in record time. As Mandelstam observed, things actually worked the other way round: “Time wants to consume the state.” He was right, too, about revolution leading to classicism. In the 1930s, just a decade after Mandelstam made his claim, Soviet culture beat its great retreat from the avant-garde and embraced socialist realism, a kind of aspirational Marxist-Leninist classicism.

One of Mandelstam’s most famous poems, which France translates beautifully, opens with this stanza:

The thread of golden honey flowed from the jar
so weighty and slow that our hostess had time to declare:
Here in melancholy Tauris, where fate has brought us,
We are not bored at all—and glanced back over her shoulder.

The readerly jaw may drop at the year of composition: 1917. Not a boring time, indeed. There is an element of escapism here, a desire to withdraw from the deafening noise of current events into a peaceful dreamworld that exists outside of time. “Tauris” is Crimea, a place Mandelstam loved for its associations with classical culture and quasi-Mediterranean climate—a place that was hardly Russian, where civilizations had collided for millennia. (Crimea was also the site of his 1916 romance with fellow poet Marina Tsvetaeva, an affair that produced his “In a deep sleigh, with straw spread for a litter” and “Doubting the wonder of the resurrection,” both included in Black Earth.) “In stony Tauris,” Mandelstam writes, “the science of Hellas lives on.” The poem darts among familiar Greek stories—Helen, the golden fleece, Odysseus—in a classical mash-up that reflects Crimea’s mythical aura and tangled history.  

A poem composed in May 1918 speaks more or less directly about current events, but with a philosophical, almost otherworldly, detachment: “Let’s honor freedom’s twilight, brothers, / honor the mighty twilight year.” Perhaps because he believed that the past would always recur, Mandelstam seems to predict the unhappy results of the Russian Revolution, with eerie prescience as well as preternatural resignation:

Let’s honor, too, the fateful burden
the people’s leader, all in tears, accepts.
Honor the darkening load of power
in its unbearable dead weight.
Who has a heart, must hear your vessel,
time, as it sinks to the seabed.

He does not denounce the revolution, as some of his peers did; neither does he flee from it, as so many of his fellow writers, artists, and intellectuals did. Recalling Mandelstam in 1919, the poet Rurik Ivnev observed, “I never met a person who, like [him], managed to at the same time accept and reject the revolution.” “Let’s honor freedom’s twilight” concludes

What of it, then, let us attempt it,
the great unwieldy turn of the wheel.
The earth sails on. Men, show your courage.
Plowing a furrow through the seas,
we shall remember in cold Lethe
we paid ten heavens for this earth.

In his curious impartiality, Mandelstam reminds me of Isaac Babel, another Jewish writer destroyed by Stalin. In her memoir Hope Against Hope (1970), Mandelstam’s formidable, legendarily loyal wife, Nadezhda, tells a story about spending an evening in the late 1930s with Babel, who spoke about how he drank with “militiamen”—i.e., the secret police. Mandelstam asked whether he was driven by a desire “to see what it was like in the exclusive store where the merchandise was death. Did he just want to touch it with his fingers?” “No,” Babel answered, “I just like to have a sniff.” Soon enough, he was arrested and shot. Like Mandelstam, he had no instinct for flight; he chose to stay and watch the story until the end.

In 1920, the year Babel worked as a journalist embedded with a Red Army unit, Mandelstam wrote another prescient poem that played on the antics of the Futurists, whose zaum opera Victory Over the Sun had premiered in St. Petersburg in 1913:

We shall all meet again in Petersburg,
as if there we had buried the sun,
and we shall speak the blessed senseless word,
pronounce it there for the first time….
 
I can approach the sentries without fright,
I need no passport or password:
I shall be praying in the Soviet night,
praying for the blessed, senseless word.

Why would anyone want to conquer the sun, giver of light and life? And didn’t anyone remember the story of Icarus? Mandelstam had no truck with beyonsense, but he never abandoned his faith in the word.

Despite his rejection of iconoclasm, Mandelstam shared with the Futurists a conviction that language lay at the heart of the new order, freighted with an epic importance. In “The Word and Culture,” he wrote

A heroic era has dawned in the life of the word. The word is flesh and bread. It shares the fate of flesh and bread: suffering. People are hungry. The state is hungrier still.

Word, flesh, bread are drawn from the Gospels, of course, but here it is not Christ but language—a transcendent language that also encompasses ancient Greek, Latin, and Italian as well as Russian—that redeems the sins of mankind through its holy martyrdom. The state wished to dominate and possess language; in a few years, it would put accused “linguistic wreckers” on trial and prosecute the writers of dictionaries. But poetry was also a secret sustenance for many Soviet people.

Following a tortuous logic worthy of the Christian theology that helped inspire his work, Mandelstam rejected the idea that poetry possessed “any special corporeality, concreteness, materiality.” Demanding these qualities was mere “revolutionary hunger, the impulse of a doubting Thomas.” This, again, was a more or less explicit rejection of the Futurists, whose experiments had also included the “ferroconcrete” poems of Vasily Kamensky, which were oriented around graphic design, treating letters and words as the physical components of artwork; some of Kamensky’s poems appeared in hand-drawn form alongside paintings. His collection Tango with Cows (1914) was printed on pentagonal sheets of flowered wallpaper, with original drawings by two Futurist artists, the brothers David and Vladimir Burliuk. (In December, Ugly Duckling Presse will release a facsimile of Tango with Cows with a “visual translation” by Daniel Mellis and Eugene Ostashevsky.)

In Vladimir Mayakovsky’s verse, ideas become tangible, and inanimate objects spring to life. His verse play Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy (1913) had the working title The Uprising of Things: in it, the soul is served up on a platter, and kisses come alive, turning fat and menacing. Mandelstam, by contrast, imagined the relationship between word and thing as metempsychosis: “The living word does not signify the thing,” he wrote, “but freely chooses as a dwelling place one thing or another, a signification, a corporeality, a beloved body. And the word wanders freely around the thing, as the soul wanders around the abandoned but unforgotten body.” In the 1920 poem “I have forgotten the word I wanted to say,” he imagines words as shades in Homer’s underworld, eternal beings that slip in and out of sight and memory.

Mandelstam almost stopped writing poetry between 1926 and 1930. Many writers, including Boris Pasternak and Babel, found that their “muses went silent” in the tumult of the early Soviet years. But Mandelstam’s violent satirical essay “Fourth Prose,” written after he was pilloried by party-minded writers, set him writing poetry again. He had been attacked not only for his supposedly harmful retrograde tendencies but also for irrelevance—in other words, for his refusal to worship at the altar of the future. According to his wife’s memoirs, claims that Mandelstam was a has-been may, however, have saved his poems from being hunted down and destroyed. A brief excerpt of “Fourth Prose” in France’s collection is an explicit mockery of anti-Semitic and anti-Roma stereotypes: “Writers are a race with a disgusting skin odor and the filthiest methods of cooking. They are a race who wander around and sleep on their own vomit, expelled from the towns, hounded through the villages, but always and everywhere close to the powers that be, who allot them a place in designated districts like prostitutes.” Although in his early career, Mandelstam often seemed eager to distance himself from what he called the “Judaic chaos” of his childhood and from the stigma that led other writers to call him a “jewboy” behind his back, he now set this vitriolic parody against a proud reclamation of his Jewish identity: “I must insist that the writer’s trade as it has evolved in Europe and especially in Russia has nothing in common with the honorable title of Jew, of which I am proud.”

The poems of the 1930s were suffused with the violence and fear of the epoch. Mandelstam knew he didn’t have the ferocity or raw strength required for survival and that time would soon consume him too. “The wolfhound century leaps on my back,” he wrote, “but I have no wolf in my blood … and shall only be killed by my peers.” But the brutality in these later poems was matched by the glory of nature:

Let me see no coward, no sticky slime,
no wheel with bones and blood,
but silver foxes that shine all night
with a grace from before the flood.

Almost none of the poetry Mandelstam wrote after 1930 was printed in his lifetime, though he did publish his prose work “Journey to Armenia” (also excerpted in France’s volume). He lived in poverty, moving from one temporary dwelling to the next, waiting for the fatal knock on the door. In 1933, during the famine that Stalin’s collectivization policies caused, he visited Crimea—his beloved Tauris—and witnessed some of the horrors of starvation, an experience reflected in “Cold spring. Fearful Crimea with no grain.” That November, he wrote an uncharacteristically straightforward political poem, known as “The Stalin Epigram”: “Executions are what he loves best, / That Ossetian so broad in the chest.” (There’s something displeasing about this limerickish stanza; the original Russian-language version is not Mandelstam’s best work either.) He recited the epigram to friends—attempted suicide by poetry—and someone informed on him. He was arrested and exiled, first to the Urals, where he leapt out a hospital window, and then to Voronezh, in the fertile “black-earth” area southeast of Moscow.

This period produced the “Voronezh Notebooks,” a high point of his poetic output. In France’s translation (so different from Andrew Davis’s raucous, colloquial 2016 translation for NYRB Poets), these poems have a remarkable simplicity: perhaps it is the clarity of reconciliation to the end of life. They linger on the “cold magnificence” of the plains, the “long-drawn hunger of their miracle.” There is a piercing solace in the certainty that the natural world will survive both him and Stalin: “You, Ural of the throat, the Volga lands’ broad shoulders, / or this flat territory—these are my only rights, / and I must breathe them in to fill my lungs.” The penultimate poem in France’s collection, dated April 30, 1937, begins

I lift this green to my lips,
lift the leaves, their sticky oath,
the oath-breaking earth that gives
birth to poplars, maples, oaks.

The poem vibrates with the knowledge that this spring will likely be his last.

Mandelstam had already outlived Mayakovsky, who shot himself in 1930, not long after writing a poem reflecting on how, for the purposes of agitprop, he had “stepped on the throat” of his own song. Mandelstam, by contrast, wrote in February 1937, “I sing when my throat is moist and my soul is dry, / and my eyes are damp, and conscience tells no lies.” His stubborn rejection of propaganda and enforced denunciations, his loyalty to poetry until death, is central to the saint-like status he attained in the canon of 20th-century Russian poets. In May 1938, not long after returning from exile, he was arrested again. This time he was sent to the labor camps in the Russian Far East. He died that winter, still in a transit camp. The survival of his poetry was a victory of conjugal devotion. With the help of a few friends, Nadezhda Mandelstam preserved his work, largely through her prodigious memory. 

In Black Earth, Peter France has made all the right choices. He wisely declined to attempt to precisely reproduce Mandelstam’s use of rhyme and meter—a near-certain road to disaster for those translating Russian poetry into English, even poetry much less complex and supersaturated with metaphor than Mandelstam’s. (Nadezhda Mandelstam said that her husband “could not stand verse translations.”)

The willingness to reject original meter and rhyme schemes is often an advantage of non-native translators, who understand that even aside from the semantic sacrifices involved, meter and rhyme that sound divinely elegant in Russian often resemble nursery rhymes in English. Joseph Brodsky, who attacked Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin’s 1973 translations of Mandelstam for their infidelity in rhyme and meter, was too close to the originals to see this. (I do wish that New Directions had made Black Earth a facing translation, for bilingual readers, for those who aspire to bilingualism, and for those who like to decipher patterns in Cyrillic verse.)

In his preface, France explains that he “used a variety of full rhymes, slant rhymes, internal rhymes, assonance, and alliteration in attempting to recreate in English a poetry that appeals equally to the inner eye and ear.” This approach has yielded outstanding results, conveying Mandelstam’s density with an elegance that brings pleasure from the whole, even before the reader fully digests the parts. Much of the future-oriented poetry of Mandelstam’s contemporaries now sounds hopelessly dated; Mandelstam’s poetry, meanwhile, flourished with the passage of time. Here it also thrives in its journey into English.