Roald Mandelstam: The Ringing Vanity of Song

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Ian Probstein

The Ringing Vanity of Song

On September 16, 2012, Roald Mandelstam (1932-1961) would have been 80 if he hadn’t died at 28 from intestinal hemorrhage and bone tuberculosis. He called himself “the last poet on earth” in his last poem entitled “Epilogue”. In fact, he was perhaps the last romantic poet, a sparkling splinter of the Russian Silver Age.  He was one of the first postwar underground poets in Leningrad, a forerunner of the brilliant constellation of poets, including the so-called Leningrad Philological school, Leonid Aronson, Vladimir Uflyand, Joseph Brodsky and the poets of his circle, Victor Krivulin, Yelena Shvartz,  and many more. Starting with gifted imitations of the Russian Symbolist and Silver Age poets, primarily Alexander Block, Konstantin Balmont, Nikolay Gumilev, and his great namesake Osip Mandelstam, Roald had an enormous speed of spiritual and poetic development, and in a little bit more than a decade, he turned into a unique poet distinguished by syncretism of imagery, that is all five senses were involved simultaneously, metaphoric hyperbolization, what was known in the epoch of Baroque as catachresis, far-fetched metaphors, but Roald Mandelstam lived and worked in the 1950s, rather a dark period in the Soviet history. Without seeing a single line published, the poet died at the time of the so-called “thaw of the 1960-ies.”  He was a loner even in the underground literature since he avoided literary circles, enjoying the company of painters and sculptors who valued him due to his unusual daring imagery perhaps.

Since his poetry circulated only in the underground, there has been a great confusion when after the downfall of the USSR, amateurs and even professional scholars of literature began to publish his books; for instance, several separate poems were merged in one, and occasionally, even lines from other poets, including his great namesake Osip Mandelstam were included in it. Needless to say that Roald Mandelstam’s syntax, punctuation, occasionally even semantics and word choices were altered as well. That was how Vodolei Publishing compiled and printed his book in 1997.  His literary fate resembled that of Emily Dickinson, the authoritative edition of whose poems was first published in 1955 by Thomas Johnson. There were occasional mostly correct publications in anthologies and periodicals. Thus, the Russian sculptor and artist Michail Shemyakin published a selection of Roald Mandelstam’s poetry in his almanac Apollo-77, and Konstantin Kuzminsky included Roald Mandelstam’s poems accompanied by an essay in the famous many-volume edition of underground and non-conformist poetry The Blue Lagoon.

However, even in a distorted form, Roald Mandelstam’s poetry was greatly acclaimed and draw many admirers, and I was not an exception. It was not until 2003 when I occasionally met Helene Petrova-Mandelstam and her husband Yuri Petrov on Brooklyn Bridge during the blackout, that I started reading her authoritative editions of her brother’s poetry, unpublished at that time, and little by little got so involved, that I wrote a lengthy study of his poetry in Russian, and abridged edition of which was later published in The New Review and an unabridged version was later published in Poberezhye [The Coast], and gradually started translating his poetry into English.

            One of the legends about Roald Mandelstam  states that his father was born and raised in New York, sympathized with Bolsheviks and returned to Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.  Although the poet’s father, Charles Yakovlevich Gorovich, was really born in New York City, he “never sympathized with Bolsheviks and was brought back to Russia, not to the Soviet Union, when he was barely 1 year-old,” according to the poet’s step-sister Helene Petrova-Mandelstam who now resides in Brooklyn, New York.  The poet’s grandmother was from a wealthy Jewish family and came to the US, as Mrs. Petrova-Mandelstam states, “to give birth to her first child just because the doctors were better (and still are) there.” He was raised in St. Petersburg-Leningrad, became a civil engineer but knew so many poems by heart that he won the heart of Roald’s mother, Helene Mandelstam (Tomina-Mandelstam in her second marriage) who came from a very distinct family: her father Joseph Vladimirovich Mandelstam was a prominent St. Petersburg lawyer whose cases are described by the famous law historian Koni. It is notable that Joseph Vladimirovich Mandelstam got his first education and Ph.D. in biology. His brother Jacob Mandelstam was a prominent Moscow lawyer. The parents of the future poet, however, were soon separated and divorced, and later his father Charles Gorovich thoughtlessly said at a party that “Trotsky was not a stupid man,” for which he has gotten a 15 years’ term and exile to Kazakhstan to the rest of his life. When Roald with his maternal grandmother Vera Ionovna was evacuated during the siege of Leningrad (among the first since he was sick with TB) to Kazakhstan, the father and the son were re-united and even lived together for some time until the authorities decided that it was against the law for Roald to live with the enemy of the people under the same roof, and the future poet and his grandmother had to move further to Siberia.  His mother and stepfather had to stay in Leningrad since their newborn daughter had an infection and nearly died, and when she recovered, they were the last to leave the city. It was Roald who found the family after the war in 1947 in Stalinogorsk, Moscow oblast (province), where his mother, who graduated from the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute majoring in chemistry, worked at a factory as a chemical engineer. By that time, however, her second husband was arrested on a train to Tbilisi and, as she was informed later, died from a heart attack in the infamous Leningrad prison “Kresty” [literally “crosses”].

Roald was very gifted and studied first at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute and then at the Oriental Department of the Leningrad University but did not finish the course due to poor health. However, he has always loved Chinese and Japanese literature and art, and there numerous allusions to oriental art in his poetry:

A moonlit town turned porcelain,

It shines like snow-white clay,

But it’s not a Chinese who painted

In azure its gray kaolin.

It was not a Chinese, who likes wine,

That opened it for people to share

And cut the lemon of moon

On the dish of a night square.[1]

As tuberculosis progressed, it had developed into the bone tuberculosis, and the poet had to use crutches first, but in the end of his short life could not walk and was bedridden. That saved him from prison and exile since the KGB interrogator told his friends, artists Arefiev and Gudzenko (who both served terms in prison), “this dog will soon die by himself.”

Roald Mandelstam died from tuberculosis and intestinal hemorrhage at the age of 28 without seeing a single line published in his lifetime. It is amazing that his career lasted a little bit more than a decade (he wrote the first poem when he was about 14-15 years old), the most important poems being written between 1953 and 1960. As was stated above, Roald mandelstam’s poetry was rediscovered by the Russian artist and sculptor Mikhail Shemiakin, who published R. Mandelstam’s poetry in his almanac Apollon-77, and K. Kuz’minskii, who selected what he thought was the best in R. Mandelstam’s poetry in the anthology U Goluboi Laguny [At the Blue Lagoon].  In his essay Kuz’minskii came to a contradictory conclusion: on the one hand, he proved that R. Mandelstam is a unique poet, and, on the other hand, claimed that “R. Mandelstam is a typical representative of constructive eclecticism (Kuz’minskii 122).

There is an evident affinity between the poetry of R. Mandelstam with the poetry of the Silver Age — first and foremost, with the poetry of Blok, Gumilev and O. Mandelstam, but R. Mandelstam differs from all of them by his unique syncretic imagery, vision, and intonation. Moreover, he is an existential poet and as such, he is continuing the highest traditions of the Russian poetry from Derzhavin and Tiutchev to Gumilev and O. Mandelstam. At some point Roald Mandelstam even quotes his great namesake:

No, never hope for life’s mercy, but

Carelessly mock at it, laugh —

“The wolfhound-age flings itself at my back,

But I am not a wolf by my blood”,

No, I am no wolf, but can’t crouch low

At one’s feet like a fawning dog,

I am unable to wag my tail and my tongue 

And to beg for caress at times.

It is amazing that he quotes one of the most “anti-soviet poems” of Osip Mandelstam in the 1950s, when the great poet was still forbidden. An unpublished “loner” Roald Mandelstam (it is notable that his closest friends were underground Petersburg artists of the so-called Arefiev circle, not literati), perhaps the last Romantic in the Russian poetry of the 20^th century, managed to bridge in the gap between the Russian Silver Age and 1950s bringing back “nostalgia [or thirst] for world culture,” to quote Osip Mandelstam, his great namesake. Like Osip Mandelstam, who craved for the “blessed islands” and the time where “no one eats hard-earned bread / Where there is only honey, wine, and milk,/ Where a creaking labor does not darken the sky, / And the wheel turns lightly” (1919; translation is mine), his younger namesake exclaims:

There is nothing like the song of the winds!

Poets cannot dream of a higher prize

Than a pearl string of beautiful isles,

And Corinthian locks of Hellas.

There can’t be a deadlier poison

Than the words of those who saw in the dream,

Hellas, golden as flame, on the horizon,

Whose fate is eternal spring.

(“Alba”)

Prominent scholar Przybylski stated in his inspirational book on Osip Mandelstam that Hölderlin called the islands of the Greek Archipelago beloved, Byron “Blessed Isles” and “Leconte de Lisle did not hesitate to call the archipelago holy”[2]  Hence the young poet continues his quest to the birthplace of world culture and civilization to quench his “spiritual thirst,” to quote Pushkin.

However, Roald Mandelstam also feels anxiety observing spiritual void in front of him. His poem “Atlantis” is about the disappearance of the lost continent of Russian culture and the capital of imperial Russia, St. Petersburg, covered by the swell of the Bolshevik tide:

The leaves were ringing…

Strangely, strangely…

The chilling cold embraced the soul.

The tongue tried to utter vainly

Thousands of words that hurt like a sore.

I was thirsty to remember

Or perhaps to forget what I knew.

A moonlit garden was in a golden slumber—

The leaves were too tired to ring, to live. 

The fog, silent and grey, enfolded

Wet boughs in transparent cloths;

The chilling city sank into silence,

And the ocean closed quietly above.

 Hence the destruction of the temples in “The Minstrel” by the hordes of Huns, the coming of whom was anticipated by such poets of the Russian Silver Age as Viacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949), who wrote “Tread on their Eden, Atilla!”, Valerii Briusov (1873-1926), who took the above line from the former as the epigraph to his poem “The Coming Huns” (1905), and Alexander Blok (1880-1921), the author of “Scythians” and “The Twelve” (1918). In “The Coming Huns” Briusov anticipates and greets the coming of barbarians although they will destroy both the civilization and him:

Where are you Huns who are coming,

Who cloud the wide world with your spears?

I hear your pig iron tramping

On the still-undiscovered Pamirs.

Like a drunken horde from dark field-camps

Fall on us in a clamorous flood. . .

To revive our too-soon-grown-old bodies

With a fresh surge of burning blood.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Perhaps all that is our own will perish

And leave no trace that men’s eyes can see. . .

Still I welcome with a hymn of greeting

All of you who will destroy me.[1]

            (Fall 1904; 30 July—10 August 1905.)

The poem was finalized in the time of the first Russian revolution of 1905. Thus the fall of civilization, not only the decline of the West, was anticipated by the Russian poets much earlier than by Spengler. It is notable, that Briusov successfully collaborated with the Bolsheviks, unlike most Russian symbolist poets who either emigrated, like Viacheslav Ivanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovsky, Konstantin Balmont, or were killed like Nikolai Gumilev, or were exiled like Osip Mandelstam. However, Roald Mandelstam, like his great namesake, has never put up with barbarians. He was convinced that “those who lose freedom /Do not have anything else to lose” (“Don Quixote’) and was seeking a hidden temple:

But there is another, hidden shrine

In a runic temple in the grove,

There is God and His priests are alive.

            (“A Runic Ballad”; translated by Ian Probstein)

            Roald Mandelstam’s usage of myth and history, as in the above poem or most notably, in “Katilina,” “Atlantis,” or “Golden Fleece” is not an exercise in erudition or an illustration, but is living through history and myth here and now: “I greet Catilina’s rebellion. /I was going myself to revolt.” The poet defamiliarizes, in the Russian scholar Victor Shklovky’s dictum,[3] history and myth, or as another Russian scholar Vladimir N. Toporov put it, he “demythologizes myth” (5). [4]

Reading Roald Mandelstam’s poems, one cannot help noticing double, triple, and even quadruple versions of the same poem or image. As an underground unpublished poet, most likely he could not make the final choice or was reluctant to do so, developing the same images in a different way or applying the same images to another theme. It is notable that the same phenomenon can be observed in Osip Mandelstam’s poetry after 1928, when the Soviet authorities stopped publishing his original poetry.

Kirill Medvedev in his review of the third posthumously published book compares R. Mandelstam’s poetry to the French les poètes maudits.  True, such poems as “My Friends”, “A Grim Guest” or “Junkman” are akin to Rimbaud’s poems and Corbière’s “Night Paris”.   There is an evident trace of antagonism and protest against the totalitarian system, against those who accept their slavery, but the rebel-poet calls his fellow-citizens to revolt. Hence such highly romantic poems as “The Minstrel”, “Sirventes,” “A Runic Ballad,” can be interpreted as parables or allegories.  Even alluding to Roman history, Roald Mandelstam draws parallels with his contemporary life.  Therefore, Mandelstam’s lack of agonism, decadence, and narcissism distinguishes him from the French les poètes maudits.

            Among other distinctive features of R. Mandelstam’s poetry are his artistic vision in images, syncretic imagery revealing all five senses and, as V. Kreyd mentioned in his essay of 1984, “nature is spiritualized; there is no borderline between human nature, organic and inorganic nature (Kreyd 22).  He does not depict images, neither does he even paint: he lives in them:

Autumn.

A barefoot autumn

In the skin of a Thespian lioness,

In the feathers of brazen pines

(The arrows of Stymfalian birds).

The wind is sowing coins…

Autumn.

Danae.

Myth.

The manes of the gardens grow bald.

The midnight elevator neighs. 

It is not just anthropomorphism or animation; perhaps in the best poems it is even more than “a speaking picture,” to quote Sir Philip Sidney. Music does not only add to the quality of sound a meter, but it also adds to the syncretism of images, becoming a sixth sense of a sort:

With the hooves of black horses

The ringing night mints the stars,

Riding her majestic maestoso

Along the bowls of resonant squares.

Over the weeping orchestra,

Over the deceased day swing

The tails of the black maestro,

Blacker than a raven’s wing,

And blacker than Moors’ souls

(If they ever have one)

Is the march that falls rustling

On the sidewalk’s kettle drum.

            “The ringing night mints the stars, /Riding her majestic maestoso,” one would even add almost unintentionally — Allegro as in Mozart’s “Little Night Music,” “Night Serenade” or “Symphony Concertante.”  Sometimes, the images are hyperpobolized, grow wild.  Such poems, as “A moon crescent rolls down the sky”, “The night exploded like a cloudy cocoon”, and “To Arefiev” certainly show syncretism of daring images, color, sound, and even smell:

A sky — a belly — a drum —

Is swollen with a brass buzz,

A lunar bucket fell

Into the red holes of the wounds

(Translated by Ian Probstein)

During his last years, using morphine as a painkiller and getting used to it, bedridden and lonely, since many of his friend were arrested and served terms while his sister was torn apart between work, taking care of her mother who had suffered several strokes, and Roald, the poet dreams about the land that “Does not know sorrow and grief, /Does not know how to writhe from pain” (“I am a witness of night violation”). He knows who he is and yet predicts that his life, poetry, and even death will be unnoticed:  

A heavy echo

Swallowed the streams of a lucent laughter,

And then a long silence fell,

The night came,

And no one heard

In a joyless gloom

How sang and laughed

May be the last

Poet on earth.

(“Epilogue.” Translated by Ian Probstein)

There were 4 people at his funeral: his sister and three friends who were not in jail. From 1982 to 1997 four books of Roald Mandelstam’s Poems have been published, one in Israel and 4 in Russia, including Complete Poems compiled and edited by Mrs. Helene Petrov-Mandelstam, poet’s sister (St Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh Publishing, 2006), which had 2 editions  in one year. (Helene corrected about 600 errors in punctuation and even diction in the first edition.)

Roald Mandelstam has come back and is now widely anthologized in Russian.

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[1] All translations of poetry and prose are mine — I.P.

[2] Przybylski, Ryszard. An Essay on the Poetry of Osip Mandelstam: God’s Grateful Guest. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1987. 187.

[3] Shklovsky considered the device of defamiliarization or estrangement as one of the main tools in literature aimed at a ‘shift’ of meaning and perception in order to deautomatize it. According to Shklovsky, it works on all levels: sound, meter, form, syntax, convention, and genre. The final purpose of defamiliarization is to deautomatize aesthetic perception, as reinstated in one of his latest books, Tyetiva [A Bow-String], Moscow: 1970. Shklovsky’s ideas were further developed by Brecht (“alienation”) and by the structuralists of the Prague school (Mukařevsky’s “deautomatization”).

[4] Toporov, V. N. Myth. Ritual. Symbol. Studies in Mythopoetics. Moscow: Progress-culture, 1995.

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[1] From  Modern Russian Poetry. An Anthology with Verse Translations, ed. Markov Vladimir and Merill Sparks (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1966; reprint, Indianopolis-Kansas City-New York: Bobbs-Merill, 1971).

Artwork:

Roald Mandestam’s portrait by Shalom Shwarts: http://img607.imageshack.us/i/4e28013eb81a.jpg/

Roald Mandelstam’s portrait by G. Traugot http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:%D0%9C%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%88%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BC_%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%B4_%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%83%D0%B3%D0%BE%D1%82.jpg

Bibliography:

In English:

Ian E. Probstein’s translations of poems “White. White”, “The Glowing Rose” first appeared in the International Poetry Review Vol. 31, No. 2 (Fall 2005): 38-41.

Ian E. Probstein’s translations of “In the Hermitage Museum”, “Laputa”, “Don Quixote”, “Evening”, “Romance About Moon, Moon”, “Passacaglia”, “With the hooves of black horses”, “A City Fisherman”,“New Holland”, “Autumn. A Barefoot Autumn”, “The evening air is resonant and clear”, “A golden horde of clouds”, “A golden horde of clouds. Adorns the Fire-Bird's feathers at dawn”,“My many-towered town”, “A coat drenched in the night”, “A Tolling Night” “Alba”, “Moon Hares”,  “Dialogue”“I am sick, and my verse is sick too” have been published in Brooklyn Rail: In Translation. January 5-11, 2011

http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org/russian/poems-by-roald-mandelstam

Ian Probstein’s translations of poems “Lemon-seller” and “Dialogue” were published in Metamorphoses Vol.20, Issue 1 (Spring 2012): 48-51.

In Russian:

Apollon-77. “Poety severnoi stolitsy.” [Poets of the Northern Capital]. Comp. Petrov,V  and Mikhail Shemiakin. Ed. Shemiakin. Paris: M. Sheniakin, 1977. p.108.  

Antologia noveishei russkoi poezii u goluboi laguny. [Anthology of New Russian Poetry at the Blue Lagoon] in 5 (9) vols. Comp. Kuz’minskii, K. And G. Kovalev. Newtonvill, Mess: Oriental Research Partners, 1980. vol. 1, 119-137, vol. 2-A, 288-291.

Kreyd, V. Zametki o poezii Roal’da Mandel’stama. [Notes on Roald Mandelstam’s poetry]. Strelets 4 (1984): 22-24. 

Mandel’shtam, Roal’d, 1932-1961. Izbrannoie [Selected Poems]. A. Volokhonskii, comp. and edited. Jerusalem, 1982.

________. Alyi tramvai. [A Scarlet Tram]. Comp., ed., introduction, Iu. Novikov. St. Pteresburg: Borei-Art, 1994.

________.. Stikhotvoreniia. [Poems]. Comp, ed. Krestovokovskii, A. and O. Barash. Tomsk: Vodolei, 1997.

________.. Stikhotvoreniia. [Poems]. Comp.. and ed. Vasmi, R. and O. Kotel’nikov. Afterword by B. Roginskii.  St. Pteresburg: Izd-vo Chernysheva 1997.

________..Sobraniie Stikhotvorenii [Collected Poems]. St. Petersburg,: Ivan Limbakh Publishing, 2006 (1^st ed.), 2006 (2^nd ed.).