Osip mandelstam and the modernist creation of tradition 1994

entitled “The Modernist Creation of Tradition: Mandelstam, Eliot andPound,” appears in American Scholars on Twentieth-Century Russian Lit-erature, ed.. Moreover, the Judeo-Christianmode

Modernist Creation of Tradition

Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition

• C L A R E C AVA N AG H •

P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

P R I N C E T O N , N E W J E R S E Y

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1 Mandel’shtam, Osip, 1891–1938—Criticism and interpretation.

2 Modernism (Literature) I Title.

PG3476.M355Z59 1994 891.71 ′ 3—dc20 94-11248

This book has been composed in Galliard Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book

Longevity of the Council on Library Resources Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

When the deaf phonetician spread his handOver the dome of a speaker’s skull

He could tell which diphthong and which vowel

By the bone vibrating to the sound

A globe stops spinning I feel my palm

On a forehead cold as permafrost

And imagine axle-hum and the steadfast

Russian of Osip Mandelstam

—Seamus Heaney

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi

NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS, TRANSLATIONS,

THE CREATION of tradition is, Mandelstam insists, a collaborative deavor, the work of “colleagues” and “co-discoverers.” A book is no less acollaboration, and for whatever merits this study may possess I am in-debted to many—although its faults are entirely my own A poet finds histrue reader only in posterity, Mandelstam laments As a graduate student,

en-I was more fortunate en-I had three readers: Donald Fanger, Stanislaw ranczak, and especially Jurij Striedter, whose reading of my work—scrupu-lous, generous, and inspiring—was my best graduate education; and mybook and I have both benefited from their continued interest in my re-search on Mandelstam

Ba-Many other colleagues and co-discoverers have helped this book alongits way Svetlana Boym and Andrew Kahn helped to shape my thought early

on through memorable conversations about Mandelstam, and AndrewKahn’s encouragement and criticism have been invaluable at every stage ofthis project’s evolution I was lucky to find in my senior colleague at theUniversity of Wisconsin, David Bethea, an inspired interlocutor, astutecritic, and generous friend, whose unflagging faith in “the manuscript thatwouldn’t die” helped bring the book to life Others—Jane Garry Harris,Judith Kornblatt, Charles Isenberg, Caryl Emerson—gave much-neededsupport and advice at critical stages in the book’s development JenniferPresto, Mandelstam fan and research assistant extraordinaire, went far be-yond the call of duty as I struggled with the manuscript’s beginnings in1989–90 Andrew Swenson’s assistance at the project’s conclusion wasequally invaluable As materials on and by Mandelstam began to proliferate

in a Russia anxious to revive a suppressed poetic past, I relied on the ness of friends and colleagues—Margaret and Mark Beissinger, EliotBorenstein, Yuri Shcheglov, Irina Bagrationi-Mukhraneli—to provide mewith texts that had not yet reached the West My parents, John and AdeleCavanagh, have been generosity itself—they have helped in more ways than

kind-I can name Fellowships from the Mrs Giles Whiting Foundation and theSocial Science Research Council helped to fund my work on Mandelstamearly on; subsequent support and leave time granted me by the Univer-sity of Wisconsin Graduate School and Department of Slavic Languagesallowed me both to expand the scope of my study and to bring it to aconclusion My editors at Princeton University Press, Robert Brown andMarta Steele, provided assistance and encouragement throughout the ar-duous process of turning the manuscript into a book

Part of Chapter 1 was published, in somewhat different form, as del’shtam i modernistskoe izobretenie Evropy” (Mandelstam and the

“Man-Modernist Invention of Europe), in Diapazon: Vestnik inostrannoi

litera-tury, Vol 213, No 1 (1993), 40–47 A longer version of the same essay,

entitled “The Modernist Creation of Tradition: Mandelstam, Eliot and

Pound,” appears in American Scholars on Twentieth-Century Russian

Lit-erature, ed Boris Averin and Elizabeth Neatrour (St Petersburg: Petro-Rif

Publishers, 1993): 400–421 Chapters 6 and 8 appeared in abbreviatedform as the following articles: “The Poetics of Jewishness: Mandel’shtam,

Dante and the ‘Honorable Calling of Jew,’ ” Slavic and East European

Journal, Vol 35, No 3 (1991): 317–38; and “Rereading the Poet’s

End-ing: Mandelstam, Chaplin and Stalin,” PMLA, Vol 109, No 1 (January

1994): 71–86 This last essay is reprinted by permission of the copyrightholder, The Modern Language Association of America

The quotation from “Chaplinesque” in The Complete Poems and Selected

Letters and Prose of Hart Crane by Hart Crane, edited by Brom Weber,

copyright 1966 by the Liverright Publishing Corp., is reprinted by

permis-sion of W W Norton Publishers The quotations from T S Eliot, The

Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950, copyright by T S Eliot 1962,

re-newed by Esme Valerie Eliot in 1971, are reprinted by permission of

Har-court Brace and Company The quotations from Osip Mandelstam,

Sobra-nie sochinenii, 4 vols., edited by G P Struve, N Struve, B A Filipoff,

copyright 1967–69, 1981 by Inter-Language Literary Associates and theYMCA Press, are reprinted by permission of the YMCA Press Ezra

Pound’s poem “Histrion” in Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, edited

by Michael John King, copyright 1976 by The Trustees of the Ezra PoundLiterary Property Trust, is reprinted by permission of New Directions Pub-

lishers The quotation from Canto I in The Cantos of Ezra Pound,

copy-righted 1971 by Ezra Pound, renewed 1972 by the estate of Ezra Pound,

is reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishers The quotationfrom Ezra Pound’s parody of “Under Ben Bulben” is taken from his collec-

tion Pavannes and Divagations, copyrighted 1958 by Ezra Pound and

quoted by permission of New Directions Press The quotation from

Wil-liam Butler Yeat’s “Byzantium” in The Collected Poems of W B Yeats,

cop-yright 1940 by Georgie Yeats, renewed 1956 by the Macmillan PublishingCo., is reprinted by permission of the Macmillan Publishing Co I alsowould like to thank Seamus Heaney for his generous permission to use hispoem “The Articulation of Siberia” as this book’s epigraph

Finally my standards of both personal and scholarly integrity were set by

my best critic and reader, my “faithful friend” and “favorite relation,” chael Lopez This book is dedicated to him as an installment on debtsgreater than I can ever express or repay

Mi-T R A N S L A T I O N S ,

A N D T R A N S L I T E R A T I O N

UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED, all prose translations are taken, with some

modifications, from The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, trans Clarence Brown

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965; abbreviated in the text as

POM); and Osip Mandelstam, The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, ed.

Jane Gary Harris, tr Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor:Ardis Press, 1979; abbreviated in the text as CPL) The volume and pagenumber of the original Russian text in the Struve/Filipoff edition of Man-delstam’s work will be given whenever the translation has been substan-tially altered or the original Russian is cited along with the English transla-

tion (Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols Vols 1–3: ed G P Struve, B A Filipoff.

Washington: Inter-Language Literary Associations, 1967–69 Vol 4: ed

G P Struve, N Struve, B A Filipoff Paris: YMCA Press, 1981) Poemswill be referred to in the text by their number in the Struve/Filipoff edition

of Mandelstam’s writing All translations of the poetry are my own, unlessotherwise noted For the purposes of this study, I have placed accuracy andreadability over artistic merit in my English renditions of Mandelstam’sRussian; unfortunately and inevitably, then, what makes his poems poems

in the original has thus been lost even more thoroughly than is usual in thetranslation of verse

I have used the Library of Congress system in transliterating Russian

texts, with some modifications The final -skii in proper names has been changed to the more common -sky, and well-known proper names are

given in their most commonly used forms; e.g., Mandelstam, not del’shtam, Lydia Ginzburg, not Lidiia Ginzburg, Mayakovsky, notMaiakovskii The spelling Mandel’shtam will be used, however, in bookand article titles transliterated from the Russian in the endnotes

Man-Modernist Creation of Tradition

The Modernist Creation of Tradition

Perhaps the strongest impulse towards a shift in the approach tolanguage and linguistics was—for me, at least—the turbulentartistic movement of the early twentieth century The great men

of art born in the 1880’s—Picasso (1881– ), Joyce (1882–1941),Braque (1882– ), Stravinsky (1882– ), Khlebnikov (1885–1922),

Le Corbusier (1887– )—were able to complete a thorough andcomprehensive schooling in one of the most placid spans of world

history, before that “last hour of universal calm” (poslednii chas

vsemirnoi tishiny) was shattered by a train of cataclysms The

lead-ing artists of that generation keenly anticipated the upheavals thatwere to come and met them while still young and dynamic enough

to test and steel their own creative power in this crucible The traordinary capacity of these discoverers to overcome again andagain the faded habits of their own yesterdays, [joined] togetherwith an unprecedented gift for seizing and shaping anew everyolder tradition or foreign model without sacrificing thestamp of their own permanent individuality in the

ex-amazing polyphony of ever new creations

—Roman Jakobson, “Retrospect” (1962)

I was born in the same year as Charlie Chaplin,

Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata,” [Gumilev] the Eiffel Tower,

and, apparently, [T S.] Eliot

—Anna Akhmatova, “Notes Towards a Memoir” (undated)

INVENTION AND REMEMBRANCE

One often hears: that is good but it belongs to yesterday.

But I say: yesterday has not yet been born It has not yet really existed.

—Osip Mandelstam, “The Word and Culture” (1921)

To speak of modernist culture as a culture born of crisis and catastropheseems to have become in recent years a critical commonplace, a cliché nolonger adequate to the phenomena it purports to describe Indeed, muchrecent discussion of the modernist movement in European and Americanculture has focused precisely on exposing what one scholar has called “themyth of the modern,” the myth, that is, of a radical break with a past thatmodern artists continued to draw on even as they mourned—or cele-brated—its loss Such skepticism can be bracing, and certainly it is neces-sary if we are to achieve anything like a critical distance on a movementwhose parameters are as ill-defined and shifting as those of modernism.1Revisionist approaches to the modernist sense of an ending should not,however, lead us to overlook the degree to which this particular truism isrooted in historical fact The modernist artist may have exagerrated theuniqueness of his historical situation: other generations, other ages andcultures have experienced upheavals and disasters that seemed truly cata-clysmic at the time and that had a profound and lasting impact on the artand thought that sprang up in their wake Moreover, the Judeo-Christianmodels that have shaped Western culture predispose us to perceive all his-tory in terms of “eternal transition, perpetual crisis.”2 Living as we do inthe extended aftermath of the modernist movement, we may find it diffi-cult to give credence to the French poet Charles Péguy’s hyberbolic claim,made in 1913, that “the world has changed less since Jesus Christ than ithas in the last thirty years”; history has not yet screeched to a dead halt, norhas the modern world or the human condition changed beyond all possiblerecognition as we draw to the end of this century and the millennium Themodernist artist had, however, historically grounded reasons for consider-ing that what he lived in was indeed a qualitatively different kind of society,

a technologically transformed, radically innovative, international “culture

of time and space.” And the Great War, the War to End All Wars—alongwith the massive social upheavals that followed in its aftermath—undoubt-ably left a generation of artists and thinkers with scars, both literal and fig-urative, of a kind that previous generations would have found difficult toimagine.3

The artists and thinkers of early-twentieth-century Russia could lay evengreater claim to living in an age of unprecedented disaster Their experi-ence of World War I was framed by bloody revolutions, first the failed re-volt of 1905 and then the February and October revolutions of 1917,which were followed by three years of civil war This is not the place to

rehearse the many horrors that have shaped the course of modern Russianhistory But even if we strip away the inflated, apocalyptic rhetoric that col-ors so many poetic accounts—Symbolist, Futurist, and Acmeist alike—ofthe Russian experience of war and revolution, we are left, nonetheless, withthe genuine, profound sense of an ending and accompanying shock of thenew that lent the Russian modernist movement such energy and finallysuch poignance.

Péguy makes his claim for the birth of a new age in 1913 Other ernists dated the death of the past somewhat differently “It was in 1915,”

mod-D H Lawrence announces, that “the old world ended”; while VirginiaWoolf proclaims, with even greater assurance, that “on or about Decem-ber, 1910, human nature changed.” Anna Akhmatova was one of the fewpoets to survive the disasters that befell what Roman Jakobson propheti-cally called, in a famous essay of 1931, “the generation that squandered itspoets.” She thus bore firsthand witness to the many tragedies, national andpersonal, that followed in the revolution’s wake Nonetheless, the date shepicks for the beginning of the new era comes close to those moments ofcrisis chosen by Lawrence and Woolf As she looks back on the past fromher vantage point in 1944—in the midst of yet another cataclysm, WorldWar II—she watches “not the calendar, but the real twentieth century ap-proach” along the Petersburg embankments of 1913 Osip Mandelstamjoins in this modernist chorus as he mourns the modern loss not just of pasttimes, but of time itself as earlier generations had understood it: “The frag-ile reckoning of the years of our era has been lost,” he laments in “Pushkinand Skriabin” (1916; CPL, 91).4

The approximate convergence of these dates, taken together with theirdivergent sources in French, English, and Russian writing, points to one ofmodernism’s most salient features, a feature we might call continuity incrisis, or, perhaps more precisely, continuity in the perception of crisis Themodern sense of an ending was not confined to one country or one conti-nent alone, and modernist art likewise defies national and linguistic bound-aries The very pervasiveness of this sense of crisis in modernist writing hasled to what has become yet another commonplace of the vast scholarship

on the movement It is now “almost a truism,” Matei Calinescu writes, “todescribe the modern artist as torn between his urge to cut himself off fromthe past—to become completely ‘modern’—and his dream to found a new

tradition, recognizable as such by the future.” Charles Feidelson and

Rich-ard Ellman present us with another variant on this modernist dilemma Themodernist artist who has been, in Mandelstam’s phrase, “excommunicatedfrom history” (CPL, 84), can read his exile from the past in one of twoways: it may be either a “liberation from inherited patterns” or “depriva-tion and disinheritance.” The modernist must cast his lot either among the

“Futurists” or the “Pastists.” He must either celebrate his release from thedead weight of tradition or forever mourn the loss of an infinitely precious,infinitely distant history.5

This kind of opposition—between Pastists and Futurists, Archaists andInnovators, Apollonian preservers and Dionysian destroyers—is far tooschematic to encompass the range of responses to the pervasive modernsense of rupture with the past, as Ellmann and Feidelson readily admit For

a variety of reasons, though, it has proved remarkably resilient on Russiansoil, and nowhere is this literary two-party system more in evidence than inthe responses to Russian modernist poetry Indeed, the poetry itself mightseem to invite just such a polarized reaction The Russian post-symbolists,

in hindsight at least, appear to have divided themselves neatly into twocamps, as if for the convenience of future researchers: the Futurists werededicated, as their name suggests, to casting unwanted cultural ballast offthe “Steamship of Modernity”; while their coevals and competitors the Ac-

meists, whose name proclaimed their allegiance to the akme, the highest

and best that Western and Russian culture could offer, were equally bent

on demonstrating that this “Steamship of Modernity” was “the ship ofeternity,” the ship entrusted with bearing past treasures of world cultureinto an unknown future In postrevolutionary Russia, the very notions of

“past” and “future,” of “tradition” and “innovation” became valorized to

a degree that made it still more difficult to cross these particular party lines

in quest of an accurate assessment of the presence of the poetic past inFuturist writing, and of avant-garde innovation at work among the “pas-tist” Acmeists.6

This thumbnail sketch cannot do justice, poetic or otherwise, to thecomplicated history of Russian post-symbolist art—but it is not my goalhere to address the many problems and issues involved in the critical recep-tion of this poetry I want to turn now instead to the real subject of mystudy, to Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) and his modernist invention oftradition I have spoken of the Acmeist commitment to “world culture”;the phrase itself is Mandelstam’s Shortly before his final arrest in 1938, he

defined the Acmeist aesthetic as a “yearning for world culture (toska po

mirovoi kulture)”; and he thus provided us with the best possible

short-hand description of the impulse that charges his own poetry and prose.This definition might seem initially to place Mandelstam and his poeticssquarely in the camp of the cultural “passéists” (CPL, 176; II, 346) Takenfrom its proper context in his work, it might appear to signal a hopeless,helpless longing for an all-encompassing culture that existed once but haslong since disappeared, or that has known its only life in the pipe dreamsand poems of traditionless modernists The vast scope of Mandelstam’s po-etic ambitions, which will be satisfied with nothing less than all of Westernculture, attests inversely to the intensity of his sense of cultural deprivation

If modernist artists considered themselves to be the casualties of “an alypse of cultural community,” then Mandelstam must be ranked amongthe movement’s most representative figures.7

apoc-In a suggestive essay on Mandelstam’s notion of history, Gregory

Freidin observes that “only a cultural orphan growing up in [Russia’s] olutionary years could possess such an insatiable need for a continuousconstruction of a gigantic vision of culture meant to compensate for theimpossibility of belonging to a single place.” When Mandelstam was born,and where, and to whom—all three conditions apparently conspired tokeep him from the European and Russian cultural legacy he craved He wasborn, he writes, “in the night between the second and the third/Of Janu-ary in the ninety-first/Uncertain year, and the centuries/Surround me

rev-with fire” (#362) In his autobiography The Noise of Time (1925),

Mandel-stam laments a generation of Russian modernists born beneath “the sign ofthe hiatus” (POM, 122) and thus deprived by history of the cultural trea-sures that should have been theirs by rights But Mandelstam would nothave stood to inherit these treasures in any case His parents, as he de-

scribes them in The Noise of Time, were themselves orphans of sorts,

Cen-tral European Jews who, uprooted from their own culture, were not athome in their adoptive nation either Mandelstam himself, born in Warsaw,could not claim Russia and its culture as his birthright Even as an adoptedmotherland, though, Russia presented him with as many problems as itsolved It was itself an orphan, “the orphan of nations,” in Belinsky’sphrase, uncomfortably straddling the border between East and West, a feu-dal past and the foreign present forcibly imported by Peter the Great.8Mandelstam’s definition of Acmeism appears to place him in the para-doxical position of being a pastist who had no past he could legitimatelycall his own This paradox brings us in turn to the apparent contradic-tion contained in the title of my book, the contradiction that lies at theheart of Mandelstam’s work It is not finally the intensity of Mandelstam’ssense of loss that distinguishes him among his fellow modernists It is theenergy and the imagination with which he sets about converting his deficitsinto assets as he works to create a usable past for himself and for a genera-tion of artists that found itself abandoned by history Gifted with the capac-ity to generalize from his own dilemma, to convert isolation to connection,

to turn disruption to his advantage, and to use all these skills in the vice of an encompassing cultural vision, Mandelstam was singularly wellequipped to address his own and his epoch’s paradoxical legacy of disinher-itance; and he responded with one of modernism’s most complex, ambi-tious, and challenging visions of tradition

ser-In his famous poem “Tristia” (1918), Mandelstam movingly describesthe “profound joy of recurrence” that informs his poetry and vision of his-tory alike: “Everything once was, everything will be repeated/And the mo-ment of recognition alone is sweet to us” (CPL, 114; #104).9As scholarsand critics recognized early on, Mandelstam seeks to provide both himselfand his readers with this joyful shock of recognition by reviving in his workthe classical, European, and Russian traditions he craved His aim, though,

is not merely to repeat the past, to deliver it intact and unaltered into the

present The very act of remembering the past changes it irreparably, andthis is as it should be, according to Mandelstam “Invention and remem-brance go hand in hand in poetry,” he insists in his essay “Literary Mos-cow” (1922) “To remember also means to invent, and the one who re-members is also an inventor” (CPL, 146).

Invention and remembrance: this complex and energizing dialecticshapes Mandelstam’s work and the vision of tradition it both embodies anddescribes from his earliest poems and essays to the last “Voronezh Note-book” (1937) It is ideally suited to the needs of the cultural orphan whomust invent his way into the past that he desires—but it also demonstratesthe ways in which Mandelstam was able to turn necessity to his artistic ad-vantage The dialectic he develops to counter his sense of loss and isolationserves to place him at the very heart of a modernist art preoccupied withwhat Guillaume Apollinaire calls the modern “debate between traditionand invention.” Like Mandelstam’s inventive remembrance, the very no-tion of a modern tradition is an “apparent oxymoron,” as Charles Russellnotes, and the ground of this paradoxical tradition “is always slipping outfrom under [modern] writers’ and artists’ feet.” It slips from beneath thefeet of critics as well Ellman and Feidelson issue the following disclaimer

as they struggle to define their own version of The Modern Tradition

(1965): “If we can postulate a modern tradition, we must add that it is aparadoxically untraditional tradition.” Renato Poggioli reaches much the

same conclusion when he speaks, in his Theory of the Avant-Garde (1968),

of modernism’s reliance on a self-consciously “anti-traditional tradition.”

My goal in this chapter and the chapters that follow is chiefly to trace theworkings of Mandelstam’s invented tradition as it takes shape in both hispoetry and his prose But I also call attention to the ways in which Mandel-

stam’s seemingly sui generis version of tradition serves to tie him to other

modernist writers and thinkers—Russian, European, and American—whostruggled to make sense of the past in an age apparently bent upon turningall history on its head.10

Influence study has largely dominated Mandelstam scholarship duringwhat one might call its formative years: I am thinking of the pioneeringworks of Kiril Taranovsky, Omry Ronen, Dmitrii Segal, Iurii Levin, andothers whose development of a “subtextual” and “intertextual” structural-ist approach to Mandelstam has defined and refined our understanding ofthe intricate web of quotations and references that shape Mandelstam’sworld culture as it is embodied in his texts.11I have drawn extensively onthis scholarship in my own work—no student of Mandelstam or of Russianmodernism in general can afford to neglect it There is a danger, though,that subtext will take the place of context in such criticism, and that thelarger poetic community drawn from all times and ages, the community towhich Mandelstam aspired and in which he did indeed participate, at timesunconsciously, will be confined to those writers whose works we can safely

assume he knew and read However, this very vision of an international,multilingual community of poets serves to mark him as a modernist; and heshares this vision with other modern poets, most notably T S Eliot andEzra Pound, whose work he could not have known (He could not readEnglish, and their work was virtually unknown in Russia at the time he waswriting.) If we are to understand what is specifically modernist in Mandel-stam’s work, and what is distinctively Mandelstamian about his particularbrand of modernism, we must make the same kind of unexpected and, onehopes, illuminating, connections that Mandelstam and other “modernpoet-synthesizers” placed at the heart of their endeavor (CPL, 116).12Ourunderstanding of his work would be impoverished indeed without theglimpses of a larger modernist context that a comparably “synthetic” criti-cism—a criticism that takes into account not only subtext, but context,that examines affinities as well as influence—can provide.13

Modernism generally makes for strange bedfellows, as this chapter’s firstepigraph attests Roman Jakobson begins his pocket-sized portrait of thelinguist as a young man by creating a backdrop in which Russian poets andcomposers rub shoulders with French architects, Spanish painters, andIrish novelists—even as he emphasizes their shared need to reinvent thevarious foreign and native traditions that inform their creations The com-pany Akhmatova keeps in the opening passage of her unfinished memoirs

is no less unlikely; she was born, she claims, in the same year as were

T S Eliot, her fellow Acmeist and first husband Nikolai Gumilev, stoy’s famous novella “The Kreutzer Sonata,” Charlie Chaplin, and, of allthings, the Eiffel Tower Such juxtapositions are entirely true to the spirit

Tol-of the modernist movement, and necessary to its proper understanding.Indeed, Akhmatova and Jakobson suggest as much by prefacing their self-portraits with these modernist collages.14

In both quotes, we notice a characteristic modernist blurring of aries not only between nations, but between different media, genres, andmodes of creation We also note in Akhmatova’s quote particularly a ten-dency to disregard strict boundaries not only between high and low art, asCharlie Chaplin rubs elbows with the likes of Tolstoy, T S Eliot, andAkhmatova herself She also juxtaposes two “pastist” Acmeists (and Eliot,whom we might consider an honorary Acmeist of sorts) with the EiffelTower, which represented for Futurists all over the world the essence ofhigh technology and unabashed modernity that they themselves aspired to

bound-in their art.15 Akhmatova’s dates are mistaken on several counts—but it isnot my aim to take her to task for what were, I suspect, the intentionalmistakes in her chronology Rather, I wish to call attention to the way inwhich Akhmatova, a lifelong Acmeist dedicated, like Mandelstam, to thepreservation of Western culture within her work, begins her unfinishedmemoirs with what is, if not precisely a slap in the face of public taste, then

at least a calculated gesture intended to disrupt fixed perceptions of a life

and work that should not be rooted too firmly in any form of purely tist” aesthetics The same warning holds true for Mandelstam and his in-vented tradition, and I will now turn to some of the affinities that Mandel-stam shares with several unlikely modernist comrades-at-arms.

“pas-MODERNIST GENEALOGIES

On or about December 1910 human nature changed All human relations shifted—those between masters and servants,

husbands and wives, parents and children.

—Virginia Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” (1924)

You cannot carry around on your back the corpse of your father.

You leave him with the other dead.

—Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters (1913)

Following the revolution, Nadezhda Mandelstam notes, the ies of Akhmatova and Mandelstam “seriously thought of them as old peo-ple,” although both notorious pastists were in reality not much over thirty.After the publication of Kornei Chukovsky’s influential essay on “Akhma-tova and Mayakovsky” (1920), the Acmeist movement came to be per-ceived as the essence of a dying culture that had quickly outlived what littleusefulness it had for the new regime Chukovsky is basically sympatheticwhen he describes Akhmatova as the “heiress of an old and high culture”who “values her inheritance [and] her many ancestors: Pushkin, Bara-tynsky, Annensky.” He contrasts her with Mayakovsky, who has “no ances-tors” and is mighty not in his precursors but his descendants Chukovskyconcludes, however, by proposing not a purge of the poetic past, but afusion of the “Akhmatova” and “Mayakovsky factions” in a Soviet poetrythat has learned to cherish its prerevolutionary legacy Other critics, in-cluding Mayakovsky himself, were less temperate In a 1922 talk, Maya-kovsky calls for a “clean-up of modern poetry” and begins by casting theAkhmatovas of the world on Trotsky’s dust heap of history: “Of course, asliterary landmarks, as the last remnants of a crumbling order, they will findtheir place in the pages of histories of literature But for us, for our age,they are pointless, pathetic and comic anachronisms.” And in an essay on

comtemporar-“The Formalist School of Poetry” (1923), Trotsky himself remarks acidlythat “it does not make new poets of you to translate the philosophy of life

of the Seventeenth Century into the language of the Acmeists.”16

Mandelstam had never been as widely known or read as was his morecelebrated colleague He was thus spared the kind of direct public attackthat Akhmatova endured in the Soviet press of the early twenties.17 Evensympathetic postrevolutionary critics, though, followed Viktor Zhirmun-sky’s lead in seeing Mandelstam chiefly as a subtle, elegant advocate of art

for art’s sake, the creator of a poetry almost too pure for this world in thebest of times, and certainly not up to the monumental tasks set by the mod-ern age for would-be poets of the future He composes only “chambermusic” in an age that demands Mayakovskian marches, Jakobson notes in

an essay of 1921 And Iurii Tynianov echoes Jakobson in “Interim” mezhutok,” 1924), as he gives us a Mandelstam who is a “pure lyricist,” anotherworldly poet who deals only in “small forms” refined almost out ofexistence.18

(“Pro-It is difficult to find traces of this quiet, well-mannered poet in the essays

of the twenties, essays that celebrate a Russian history that is “active, ful, thoroughly dialectical, a living battle of different powers fertilizing oneanother” (CPL, 141), and a Russian language formed “through ceaseless

force-hybridization, cross-breeding and foreign-born (chuzherodnykh)

influ-ences” (CPL, 120) (And in this last phrase, we also see the foreign-bornMandelstam writing himself into the Russian tradition he describes.) Man-delstam’s versions of Russia’s past and language might do double duty asdescriptions of his world culture and invented tradition “Poetic culture,”

he asserts in “Badger Hole” (1922), “arises from the attempt to avert tastrophe” (CPL, 137) We may be tempted to hear Jakobson’s chambermusician at work here, struggling in vain to tune out the discordant noise

ca-of his times There is, however, another, more convincing way to read thisstatement Mandelstam’s poetic, or world, culture (they are one and thesame) not only manages to stave off impending disaster time and again Itactually requires the continuous stimulus of crises barely contained, if it is

to survive and flourish Mandelstam himself implies as much when hespeaks in the same essay of culture’s “catastrophic essence” (CPL, 137).Mandelstam longs for his world culture not because it is lost forever,trapped in an irrecoverable past This culture is beyond his reach preciselybecause it is, as Freidin suggests, under continuous construction, and, onemight add, under a continuous “threat of destruction” as well (POM, 79).Mandelstam weaves the upheavals that mark his and his age’s histories intothe fabric of a resilient tradition that draws power from the very forces it isintended to combat

In an essay of 1933, Boris Eikhenbaum notes that Mandelstam’s bestlyrics are fueled by an ongoing “battle with the craft” of other poets Thosewho would wish to learn from this “great poet” must likewise be prepared

to do battle: “You must conquer Mandelstam Not study him.”19 Thisrhetoric of battle and mastery is entirely appropriate to Mandelstam’s vi-sion of poetry, which thrives on storm and stress, on insult, injury, and

“literary spite” (POM, 127) In his autobiography, Mandelstam gives ushis ideal literary history, which comes to him by way of his high schoolliterature teacher, Vladimir Vasilievich Gippius: “Beginning as early as Ra-dishchev and Novikov, V V had established personal relations with Rus-sian writers, splenetic and loving liasons filled with noble enviousness, jeal-ousy, with jocular disrespect, grievous unfairness—as is customary between

the members of one family” (POM, 130) If we substitute “strong poet”for Eikhenbaum’s “great poet” and combine his remarks with Mandel-stam’s vision of literature as an endlessly squabbling family, we come upwith a version of poetic tradition that looks very like Harold Bloom’s morerecent notion of a poetry that derives its force from the ceaseless battling ofpoetic parents and their rebellious offspring.20 In such traditions, Apolli-naire’s debate between tradition and innovation turns into something con-siderably less civil It becomes a heated argument that threatens to eruptinto the literary equivalent of war But we need not look as far afield asBloom to uncover comparable visions of a disruptive modern tradition.Modern Russian artists and thinkers were by necessity adept at weavingcatastrophe into the substance of their visions, and it is not surprising that

we should find similar theories of tradition far closer to home

The authors of these theories might have been startled to find themselves

in such company For all his astute observations on Mandelstam’s poetics,Iurii Tynianov clearly views Mandelstam as one of the exemplary poet-archaists at war with their more experimental brethren in his monumental

study of literary Archaists and Innovators (1929) The tradition Tynianov

describes in this study bears, however, clear affinities with Mandelstam’slively, combative world culture To the scholars of other ages, Tynianovclaims, literary history may have seemed to follow an even course and its

changes appeared to occur in “peaceful succession (preemvstvennost’).”

The principle of genuine literary transformation lies, however, not in ple succession but in “battle and takeover”; and traditions grow through

sim-“upheavals,” in “leaps and bounds (smeshchenie, skachok),” not through the

systematic evolution posited by earlier, happier generations Indeed, delstam anticipates Tynianov when he speaks in “The Wheat of Humanity”(1922) of all history and culture as driven by “catastrophe, unexpected

Man-shifts, destruction (katastrofa, neozhidannyi sdvig, razrushenie).”21

Only happy families are alike—or so Tolstoy claims in the famous

open-ing lines of Anna Karenina There are strikopen-ing similarities, though,

be-tween the unhappy literary families that emerge in the traditions described

by Mandelstam, Tynianov, and his fellow Formalist Viktor Shklovsky Suchunstable, crisis-ridden traditions would seem to lead inevitably to brokenhomes, disrupted families, and skewed, peculiar genealogies, and indeed,

in Tynianov’s version of the ongoing struggle between literary fathers andsons, children inherit from their parents only by displacing them, and bat-tle-hardened young artists often end up inadvertently “resembling theirgrandfathers more than the fathers who fought with them.” Writers avoidunwelcome parental interference in a still more roundabout way in the tan-gled family tree that Shklovsky proposes in an essay of 1923 “In the his-tory of art,” Shklovsky insists, “the legacy is transmitted not from father toson, but from uncle to nephew.”22

Mandelstam is still more insistent on the rights of literary offspring to

pick and choose the ancestry that suits them in his early poem “I have notheard the tales of Ossian” (1914; #65) “I’ve come into a blessed legacy,”

he announces in the poem’s final stanzas:

Hu'ix pevcov blu'da[]ie sny_

Svoe rodstvo i skuhnoe sosedstvo

My prezirat; zavedomo vol;ny

I ne odno sokrovi]e, byt; mo'et,

Minuq vnukov, k pravnukam ujdet,

I snova skal;d hu'u[ pesn[ slo'it

I kak svo[ ee proizneset

The wandering dreams of other bards;

We’re free to despise consciously

Our kin and our dull neighbors.

And this may not be the only treasure, either,

To skip the grandsons, descending to their sons,

And a skald will once again set down another’s song

And speak it as though it were his own.

Brave words indeed—but such absolute freedom from the burden of thepast is more easily proclaimed than practiced, as Mandelstam’s own poetrydemonstrates Suffice it to note for now, though, that the poem not onlyprovides us with yet another skewed and twisted modernist genealogy Italso indicates the ways in which disinheritance may become a form of liber-ation for the poet unlucky enough to have been born with an unprepos-sessing family tree and raised in less than inspiring cultural company Such

a poet, if he is daring and desperate enough, may find himself in possession

of a past and present community far grander than anything his actual gins might have seemed to portend Poetic justice can at last be served, andfairy tales may finally come true, as cultural paupers contrive to take posses-sion of princely treasures through ingenuity and pluck—or so “Ossian”’soptimistic young author would have us believe Though Mandelstam’slater writings inevitably complicate this triumphant early vision, it remainsnonetheless the ideal, ideally liberating version of tradition to which Man-delstam will return throughout his poetry and prose

ori-THE SHIPWRECK OF MODERNITY

Elam, Ninevah, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence But France, England, Russia these too would be beautiful names.

Lusitania, too, is a beautiful name.

—Paul Valéry, “The Crisis of the Mind” (1919)

“You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember

Nothing?”

I remember

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

—T S Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

Mandelstam was adept at deriving cultural capital from apparently diable losses, and in his prose of the early twenties particularly, he managestime and again to turn the modern sense of an ending to his own purposes

irreme-He appears to mourn the modern rupture with the past in “Humanism andthe Present” (1923): “The chaotic world has burst in—into the English

‘home’ as well as into the German Gemüt; chaos sings in our Russian

stoves, banging our dampers and oven doors No laws preserve thehouse from catastrophe, provide it with any assurance or security” (CPL,182) And it is not merely our homes that are at risk, he warns in “The End

of the Novel” (1922) Our very selves are at stake, as we bear collectivewitness to “the catastrophic collapse of biography”: “Today Europeans areplucked out of their own biographies, like balls out of the pockets of bil-liard tables, and the same principle that governs the collision of billiardballs governs the laws of their actions” (CPL, 200) We have all fallen prey

to a universe governed by contingency and chaos alone, as earlier ways ofordering experience fall far short of the needs of the modern age

The collapse of European culture may actually work to the advantage ofthe modernist orphan in search of cultural community, as Mandelstamdemonstrates in “The Nineteenth Century” (1922), where his own di-lemma and his generation’s merge “We appear as colonizers to this newage, so vast and so cruelly determined,” Mandelstam proclaims: “To Eu-ropeanize and humanize the twentieth century, to provide it with teleolog-ical warmth—this is the task of those emigrants who survived the shipwreck

of the nineteenth century and were cast by the will of fate upon a new torical continent” (CPL, 144) After the collapse of history and the ship-wreck of the nineteenth century, all modern survivors are equally orphansand emigrants in the unknown land that is the twentieth century The Jew-ish émigré turned Russian modernist finds his true community throughdisruption, and he takes his place at the center of his uprooted age as heworks to articulate its mission

his-In “The Nineteenth Century,” Mandelstam stresses the affinities thatmodern Russians share with their European brethren: the historical differ-ences that divided Russia from its Western neighbors in the past have beenwashed away by the shipwreck of the modern age The disasters and catas-trophes that punctuate the pages of Mandelstam’s postrevolutionary essaysserve as great levelers They erase the differences that separate nations

blessed with long, distinguished cultural traditions from countries whosepasts are more erratic, marked with the “incoherence and gaps” that Man-delstam sees as the trademark of both his family’s and his adopted nation’shistory (POM, 172) And this is where we find the ties that link Mandel-stam not so much to his fellow Europeans as to two Americans, T S Eliotand Ezra Pound, who turned to Europe’s past and present in search ofwhat Eliot would also come to call “world culture.” Mandelstam’s di-lemma and his compensatory vision were singular, but they were notunique; and it is no accident that two companions with whom he unwit-tingly shared his quest for an encompassing culture came, like him, from acountry that stood uneasily on the outskirts of the European tradition.23

In Pound’s oblique self-portrait of the artist “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”(1920), he mourns his hero’s birth “in a half-savage country, out ofdate.”24 Mandelstam himself could conceive of only one country whose

“impenetrable thickets” (CPL, 87) were less hospitable to culture’s ing energies than those of his adopted homeland The “elemental forests”and “mighty vegetation” of American civilization are, he claims in an earlyessay, “impenetrable to the life-giving rays of culture” (CPL, 99) ThisAmerica is clearly akin to the Russia—a “young country of half-animatedmatter and half-dead spirit” (CPL, 81)—that Mandelstam seeks to colo-nize with the aid of Petr Chaadaev in his 1915 essay on the romantic phi-losopher.25And although we need not take Mandelstam’s characteristic hy-perbole entirely at face value, America, like Russia, has always stood at anuncomfortable remove from the centers of European culture, and it shareswith Russia a profound ambivalence toward the continent and the tradition

shap-to which it both does and does not belong Mandelstam, Eliot, and Poundwere alike, too, in sensing not only the difficulties, but the possibilities thataccrued to the ambitious poet-synthesist who found his native land sorelylacking in the cultural legacy that could feed his outsized needs

“The Arts insist that a man shall dispose of all he has, even of his family

tree, and follow art alone,” Eliot announces in The Sacred Wood (1920).26The freedom that Mandelstam claims for the poet in “I have not heard thetales of Ossian” becomes an imperative for Eliot, but the impulse that liesbehind both statements is recognizably the same, and the art both poetsfollow leads them in similar directions Mandelstam’s Jewish emigrant ori-gins made his relations with his adopted homeland even more complexthan Eliot’s with his native land Eliot and Mandelstam were alike, though,

in their early sense that their inherited pasts barred them from the pean culture they required, and they were alike in their insistence on thepoet’s right to choose his own ancestry and sources The provincial mod-ernist is free to orphan himself in the hopes of achieving a more distin-guished lineage and a richer, more rewarding legacy

Euro-Mandelstam was preoccupied throughout his life, his wife observes, by

the question of “succession and continuity (preemstvennost”), which he

sought everywhere—in history, in culture, in art.” In a late essay Eliotclaims that the ideal tradition grows from “the hereditary transmission ofculture within a culture.”27 But the younger Eliot knew, as Mandelstamdid, that his only hope for the heritage he sought lay in creative appropria-tion and inventive disruption Mandelstam’s Chaadaev may have venerated

“the sacred bond and succession of events”; but dispossessed poets who,like lands they come from, lack “continuity and unity,” are forced to findmore roundabout ways to acquire traditions not rightfully theirs by birth(CPL 84, 88)

One method is theft Great poets “pile up all the excellences they canbeg, borrow, or steal from their predecessors and contemporaries,” EzraPound announces in an early essay on Dante And Eliot echoes Pound in

a famous dictum from “Philip Massinger” (1920): “Immature poets tate; mature poets steal.” Mature poets steal, and so do dispossessed ones,like Mandelstam’s François Villon, Pound’s Dante, or Pound, Eliot, andMandelstam themselves For the Mandelstam of the twenties and thirties,cultural theft becomes a way of life; true, unofficial culture thrives, like thepoets who shape it, on “stolen air” (CPL, 316) The young Eliot chooses

imi-a less dubious route to Europeimi-an culture, imi-a route thimi-at reveimi-als his own gins in a nation of self-made citizens who value industry over inherited for-tune and family name Tradition, Eliot proclaims in “Tradition and the In-dividual Talent” (1919), “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you mustobtain it by great labour.” Honest labor replaces thievery in this version ofevents, which is nonetheless still the cultural vision of the “Displaced Per-son” or “resident alien,” who must start from scratch and struggle cease-lessly to work his way into his chosen tradition.28Eliot’s tradition places aheavy burden on the shoulders of the assiduous outsider who must work toearn his culture It burdens him—but it also grants him special privileges.Tradition cannot be inherited It cannot be sustained by passive reception

ori-or unreflecting repetition, and those who might appear to be in the directline of succession are actually ill-served by their inherited histories They donot perceive, as an outsider might, the need to work for what appears to betheir birthright They lack the drive and desire that come “from the fact ofbeing everywhere a foreigner” and that are the special property of the pe-rennial outsider.29

“There are advantages in coming from a large flat country that no onewants to visit.”30 Eliot’s remarks refer to Turgenev and James, but theyspeak just as well to his own situation and to Mandelstam’s Though bothpoets sought to cut themselves off from inadequate pasts, they also learned

to use their lack of a European birthright as they worked to invent andremember their world culture The outsider who comes from the hinter-lands may be inspired to go visiting himself, and his very foreignness andfreedom from the European past may prove an unexpected asset in his trav-els Mandelstam’s Chaadaev, whose historyless homeland has granted him

“freedom of choice,” “steps on to the sacred soil” of the European

tradi-tion, a tradition “to which he is not bound by inheritance,” “precisely bythe right of being a Russian”; and he energizes the sleepy, tradition-boundWest by his foreign, unfettered presence (CPL, 88).

Eliot’s disinherited American goes one step further “It is the final fection, the consummation of an American,” Eliot declares, “to becomenot an Englishman, but a European—something which no born European,

per-no person of any European nationality can become.” The young stam observes the Europe he covets in the outlines of a map: “For the firsttime in a century, right before my eyes,/Your mysterious map is shifting!”

Mandel-he exclaims (#68) TMandel-he perspective could only come from one who standsoutside the picture’s frame Only the outsider, unconstrained by nationalboundaries, can hope to see Europe whole And only the outsider can layclaim to all of its treasures, past and present, by becoming a true Euro-

pean—or so Eliot implies In The Sacred Wood, Eliot laments the American

“remoteness in space from the European centre,” but this very remotenessmay also generate the “tendency to seek the centre” that permits the for-eigner to become not a born, but a self-made, European Mandelstam wasvery much aware that the new arrival who comes to Europe seeking unityends by inventing his own West Like Eliot and like his Chaadaev, he wasnonetheless possessed by the “wholeness hunger” of modern poetry, andthe whole that Mandelstam and Eliot longed for lay, like Chaadaev’s, in aEurope visible only to the eyes of the perennial outsider.31

Mandelstam, Eliot, and Pound began their careers with a quest for whatEliot calls “a living and central tradition,” and their search for the center ofworld culture took all three “exiled, wandering poets” to the samesource—to the Mediterranean, to the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome,and to the Romance cultures that sprang up where Rome had sown its col-onies Pound’s ambitions ultimately led him beyond the confines even ofthis capacious heritage His vaulting goal was “to unite the cultures of

America, Europe and the Orient” in his Cantos; and Noh Dramas, Saxon

sagas, and Chinese calligrams all find their way into the new civilizationmade up of other cultures that his work is intended to create.32For Eliotand Mandelstam, however, the Mediterranean remained the center of theworld and of its culture, and both sought the cultural home they lacked intheir imagined Europe “The main stream of culture is the culture of LatinEurope,” Eliot writes in 1948 The capital of Mandelstam’s world cultureshifts with the “place of man”—and of Mandelstam himself—“in the uni-verse” (#66); it migrates from Rome to Greece and even takes up residence

in Erevan for a time, as it follows the poet on his “Journey to Armenia”(1933) But even when Mandelstam and his culture take up wandering forgood, his final fellow traveler is Dante Aligheri, the “Great European” forMandelstam and Eliot alike, and Mandelstam’s “yearning for world cul-ture” translates in a late poem into a longing for the “universal hills” ofDante’s native Tuscany (CPL, 400; #352) The Mediterranean and its

great poet, whose Divine Comedy reaches back to antiquity and forward to

the modern world, accompanied Mandelstam throughout the exile, cution, and isolation he endured in Stalin’s Russia of the thirties.33

perse-“We are all, so far as we inherit the civilization of Europe, still citizens ofthe Roman Empire,” Eliot proclaims in a late essay It is one thing to see

a culture whole and another thing entirely to enter it, though How does

an outsider come to inherit a civilization that apparently moves in ken succession from ancient Rome to modern Europe? If Europe is already

unbro-a whole, does it unbro-allow for or require further unbro-additions? Does it wunbro-ant thecontributions of outsiders? How are uprooted modernists from the out-skirts of Western culture, upstart poets, “wanderers with no fixed abode,”

to find their way into this tradition, even with plenty of hard work or gent theft? Where are the apertures and gaps that will admit them?34Suchproblems are particularly tricky for the modernist from the provinces, fromthe large flat places along the edges of European history He must come toterms not only with the pervasive modern sense of an ending; he must alsocope with the no less troubling knowledge that he has not even had theopportunity to lose the culture he misses because it was never his to beginwith The provincial modernist in search of an encompassing tradition isbarred from his longed-for inheritance not only by time, but by space He

dili-is ddili-istant from the European center in every possible way He may havecome too late for European culture, but he was not in its direct line ofsuccession in any case Geography and history have already seen to that.The provincial modernist can turn the disruptions of the modern age tohis advantage, though The modern collapse of “the world of time and itsconnections,” though it may seem to mean the collapse of tradition itself,can actually lead to a new kind of tradition, one that permits the outsider

to defy space and time—and this is true for Pound and Eliot as well asMandelstam.35 With the “shipwreck of the nineteenth century,” all arefreed to stake their claim to those treasures of the past that still remain Inthis new and orphaned age, Europeans and provincials, cosmopolitans andcountry cousins are equally out of place and ill at ease The old order mayhave vanished, but, with the line of succession broken once and for all,endless possibilities open up for those who are willing to invent as well asremember as they shape new wholes from the fragments of vanished pasts

THE FAMILY OF PHILOLOGY

In poetry the boundaries of the national are destroyed and the

elements of one language exchange greetings with those of

another over the heads of space and time.

—Osip Mandelstam, “Remarks on Chénier” (1914–15)

Between the true artists of any time there is, I believe,

an unconscious community.

—T S Eliot, “The Function of Criticism” (1923)

Thus am I Dante for a space and am One François Villon, ballad-lord and thief.

—Ezra Pound, “Histrion” (1908)

Dante, Mandelstam insists, “is an antimodernist.” The reasons he gives forDante’s antimodernism, are, however, precisely what make his Dante mod-ern “His contemporaneity,” Mandelstam claims in his “Conversationabout Dante” (1933), “is continuous, incalculable and inexhaustible”(CPL, 420): “Having combined the uncombinable, Dante altered thestructure of time or perhaps, on the contrary, he was forced to a glossolalia

of facts, to a synchronism of events, names and traditions severed by ries, precisely because he had heard the overtones of time” (CPL, 439).Dante employs, in other words, the techniques of the modernist outcast tocreate his poetic culture The modern poet who is sensitive to the over-tones, or the noise, of his times realizes that the very crisis of the age haslaid an inexhaustible wealth of traditions and names before him He is free,with Dante, to shape a new synchronic order from the inexhaustible con-temporaneity that is history in the modern age

centu-“Today,” Mandelstam announces in “The Word and Culture” (1921),

“a kind of speaking in tongues is taking place”: “In sacred frenzy poetsspeak the language of all times, all cultures Nothing is impossible As theroom of a dying man is open to everyone, so the door of the old world isflung open before the crowd Suddenly everything becomes public prop-erty Come and take your pick” (CPL, 116) All are free to bid as the hold-ings of the old world are auctioned off The “modern poet-synthesizer”(CPL, 116) may pick and choose, or mix and match his pasts, for all agesare equally close at hand Phenomena have been liberated, along with theprovincial modernist, from the tyranny of sequence and succession; and thepoet, if he is able “to preserve the principle of unity amidst the vortex ofchanges and the unceasing flood of phenomena” (CPL, l17), can take thepasts he desires and create from them a new order, a new history, a newlineage and new community that exist in defiance of time and space.Mandelstam shared his sense of the age’s possibilities with his Anglo-American contemporaries “We are the heirs of all the ages,” Ford MadoxFord exults, and Pound and Eliot agree “All ages are contemporaneous,”

Pound proclaims in The Spirit of Romance (1910): “This is especially true

of literature, where the real time is independent of the apparent, and wheremany dead men are our grandchildren’s contemporaries.” Eliot, who in-sists in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” on the past’s continued pres-ence in true culture, creates his world literature on the basis of this “real”time For the truly traditional poet, he explains, “the whole of the literature

of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his owncountry has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”Such a literature vanquishes both time and space It occupies its own terri-tory and commands its own chronology It is as accessible to the disinher-ited modernist as it is to the provincial poet who dreams of conquering the

capitals of Europe It is ideal for the poet who is a child both of the inces and of the modern age.36

prov-In his prescription for a simultaneous tradition, Eliot insists on ness, history, and order In “On the Nature of the Word,” Mandelstamdemands a “principle of unity” that will give shape to the unstable land-scape of modern civilization (CPL, 117) The world that these poets envi-sion, freed from its moorings in time and space, would seem, however, tolend itself more readily to chaos than to culture The possibilities of themodern age are inextricably bound to its problems, and even the mostgifted, ambitious poet-synthesizer might falter before the task of trans-forming the age’s hodgepodge of places, people, dates, and artifacts into acohesive culture How is the poet-synthesist to proceed if what he seeks isnot fragments from a vanished past but a new kind of living whole, notcomplete liberation from history but creative dialogue with it? What cul-ture can accommodate both history and simultaneous order? What tradi-tion can withstand the shocks of the modern age and retain its wholeness,while holding room for newcomers and outsiders? How is one to preserve,

whole-or discover, a principle of unity that will provide both coherence and bility amid the vortex of changes that is the modern age?

flexi-Language, Mandelstam observes in “On the Nature of the Word,”

“changes from period to period, never congealing for a moment Yet atevery point, within the confines of all its changes, it remains a fixed quan-tity, a ‘constant’ that is blindingly clear to the philological consciousness

At every point it remains internally unified.” It may thrive, like stam’s Russian, on ceaseless hybridization Still “it will always remain true

Mandel-to itself”; it will retain at every moment its identity and inner unity (CPL,120) Mandelstam’s Russian changes and grows throughout history It de-rives its energy from difference, from variety and “inoculations of foreignblood” (POM, 81) It possesses, nonetheless, a wholeness that cannot beundone by its heterogeneity, and an integrity that persists in spite of itstransformations in history This integrity is apparent at every moment tothe philologically sensitive mind of the linguist or the poet

In his “Retrospect” Jakobson notes that the artistic ferment of the earlytwentieth century gave birth to a new way of looking at language Thismovement went both ways, and new notions of language as a “perpetualpresent” that retained the past even as it pointed to the future, influencednot only budding linguists but poets in quest of world culture as well.37Eliot, Pound, and Mandelstam shared, if not a common language, then acommon philological consciousness, and they find the basis and the modelfor their world culture in the type of language that Mandelstam celebrates

in “On the Nature of the Word.” “The generation of Pound and Eliot,”Hugh Kenner observes, “had access to a new way of thinking about lan-guage,” and Kenner’s remarks on modernist philology hold as much forMandelstam as they do for Eliot or Pound The modern poet-philologistperceives that language is “an organism that can maintain its identity as it

grows and develops in time” and that “keeps all times simultaneous” while

it grows It changes endlessly, yet it is continuous It outlasts the fall ofempires and ages while bearing at every moment its complex, hybrid his-tory within it “Behind every sound we utter extends a history of orderedchanges and remote cultural transactions,” Kenner notes, and “the poetic

of our time grows from this discovery.”38

The modernist poet need only speak, then, to lay claim to the complexnetwork of histories and cultures that inhabit his native tongue and tie hisspeech to other languages and traditions “It was possible,” Kenner com-ments, for the Anglo-American modernist “to ignore the national litera-tures, to conceive poetry as international and interlingual [hence] theliterature of Europe, like its speech, could be conceived as one rich organ-ism, and the study of poetry be seen as inextricable from the study of phi-lology.” “The very idea of an interlingual community of poets” stems forEliot and Pound from “the great idea that languages were siblings, that acreating urgency flowed across their (miscalled) boundaries.”39 The En-glish-speaking modernist may simply turn to his native English in order toreceive instant access to a poetic community that ignores the divisions be-tween languages, ages, and nations

“Philology is the family,” Mandelstam announces in “On the Nature ofthe Word” (CPL, 123) Once again, though, he finds himself possessed ofthe wrong family tree Russian, of course, derives from different sourcesthan does English; and Mandelstam’s great essay is preoccupied with theproblem of how to lay claim, on his own behalf and on Russia’s, to theclassical and European heritage he requires to complete his imaginativelyrefigured genealogy He is finally forced to claim kinship with Europeanculture on the basis of Russian’s inner, non-etymological affinity with theWestern tradition—but the resourceful poet-synthesist is no more daunted

by the gaps in his linguistic genealogy than he is by the lacunae in his ary inheritance His hybrid Russian contains, he claims, an “inner Hellen-ism” that guarantees its access to a larger Western tradition (CPL, 127).Mandelstam would have found his way into this expanded philologicalfamily in any case In his “Remarks on Chénier” (1914), he insists thatpoetic speech itself, whatever its national origins, participates by its nature

liter-in a multilliter-ingual community of world poetry: “In poetry the boundaries ofthe national are destroyed and the elements of one language exchangegreetings with those of another over the heads of space and time, for alllanguages are bound in a fraternal union which is strengthened in the free-dom and domesticity of each, and within this freedom they are fraternallyrelated, and they greet each other as members of a single family” (CPL,81) For Pound, Kenner notes, “all poets are contemporaneous, not merelythe poets a common idiom unites,” but “the poets of whatever date orlanguage.”40 Pound and Eliot would not have known the language inwhich Mandelstam describes his brotherhood of poets They would, how-ever, have recognized the poetic language he celebrates and the poetic

community this language creates, for it is the same language and nity to which they themselves aspired.

commu-This philological community offers multiple advantages to the outsider

in search of world culture It is uncommonly hospitable—at least to thewriter who is willing to work for his keep, who is prepared to take on therequisite linguistic labors A poet who desires membership in this commu-nity does not require a distinguished pedigree He has only to recognizeand master the possibilities of his native speech to be welcomed into anextended poetic family This community is, moreover, like its componentlanguages, a hybrid; each of its member languages is equally foreign andequally native within its heterogeneous whole Russian derives its vitality,Mandelstam claims, from its very impurity, from the continuous cross-breeding that shapes its hybrid nature The best poetry grows, Eliot notes,from “the struggle between native and foreign elements.” For Pound, the

“constant cross-fertilization between different languages” prevents the

“linguistic provincialism” that is the death of true culture.41 The mobile,polyglot unity of Eliot’s or Pound’s English, like Mandelstam’s Russian,allows for and even requires the continuous contributions of outsiders.Their world culture is no less dependent on the generosity of strangers.The notion of a heteregeneous poetry that draws on all cultures whileretaining its inner unity lends itself more readily to theory than to practice.Yet the dream of such a poetry informs the very texture of the poetryshaped by these would-be citizens of world culture In “Conversationabout Dante,” Mandelstam celebrates “the orgy of quotations” and the

abundance of “lexical thrusts” he finds at work in Dante’s Divine Comedy

(CPL, 401): “There is the barbarian thrust towards German hushing

sounds and Slavic cacophony; there is the Latin thrust, at times toward Dies

irae and Benedictus qui venit , at other times towards kitchen Latin There

is the great impulse toward the speech of his native province—the Tuscanthrust” (CPL, 446) The same multiplicity of voices and speeches informsthe poetry of Mandelstam, Eliot, and Pound

Eliot’s Waste Land (1922) is, of course, this century’s most famous

patchwork of poetic quotations “These fragments I have shored against

my ruins,” Eliot mourns as his poem draws to its close Its last stanza ics the kind of linguistic and cultural disruption that is for Eliot the land-scape of modern culture, even as its final lines, given in the Sanskrit that isamong the oldest of all Indo-European languages, hint at a linguistic andcultural unity that underlies “the immense panorama of futility and anarchywhich is contemporary history”:

mim-I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon —O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Datta Dayadhvam Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih 42

Almost any page of Pound’s Cantos, taken at random, will yield a similar

amalgam of linguistic fragments, often not just in multiple languages but inmore than one alphabet The conclusion of Pound’s first Canto (1915/1925) may be less conspicuously polyglot than the closing of “The WasteLand.” As Pound begins his lifelong struggle to “write the Paradise” of anew civilization, though, he is no less preoccupied than Eliot with the role

of language in shaping a new cultural community from the linguistic facts of the past

arti-And I stepped back, And he strong with the blood, said then: “Odysseus

“Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas,

“Lose all companions.” And then Anticlea came.

Lie quiet Divus I mean, that is Andreas Divus,

In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.

And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away

And unto Circe.

Venerandam,

In the Cretan’s phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite,

Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, with golden

Girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids

Bearing the golden bough of Argicida So that:

These lines conclude Pound’s free translation of a passage from Homer’s

Odyssey, and they demonstrate the degree to which language itself becomes

the hero of Pound’s modern saga “The language of Canto I,” as ChristineFroula notes, “is not simply a translator’s modern English version of theancient Greek, but folds together, ply over ply, Homer’s Greek, the Latin

of the [sixteenth century] translator, Andreas Divus, whose text mediatesbetween Pound and the Greek.” Past and present, foreign and native coex-ist in a linguistic fabric that is “heavy with history.”43

Froula’s imagery of fabric and weaving is equally apt for Mandelstam’spoetics of history “I love the custom of weaving,” he writes in “Tristia”(1918; #104), and Ovid’s ancient Rome converges with postrevolutionaryRussia in his version of the poet as weaver of histories and tongues:

Snuet helnok, vereteno 'u''it,

Smotri, navstrehu, slovno pux lebq'ij,

U'e bosaq Deliq letit!

The shuttle warps, the spindle hums, And look! like swan’s down, barefoot Delia Comes flying to meet us.

Mandelstam’s strategies for weaving his world culture into the fabric of hisverse are less flamboyant than Eliot’s or Pound’s; his borrowings seldomtake the shape of long quotations in foreign tongues complete with glosses.The barefoot Delia Mandelstam magically summons up with his weavinghints, though, at the ways in which he endows his Russian speech with

“inner Hellenism.” This Delia comes to him through Ovid’s ies Tibullus and Horace, in whose verse she appears; and her Greek andRoman name had, moreover, already been given a Russian inflection byKonstantin Batiushkov (1787–1855), who had translated Tibullus’ poem

contemporar-on Delia over a century earlier Mandelstam draws both the classical andthe Russian past into his web of remembered and invented culture by way

of a single name.44

An astute early critic of Mandelstam’s verse hints at the distinctiveness ofhis hybrid poetic speech when he dubs it “classical transsense.”45And Man-delstam uses still subtler ways of weaving foreign pasts into the fabric ofmodern Russian speech in other lyrics Let us turn here, by way of exam-ple, to an early version of the Homer who haunts Mandelstam’s verse aswell as Pound’s:

Bessonnica Gomer Tugie parusa

Q spisok korablej prohel do serediny%

Sej dlinnyj vyvodok, sej poezd 'uravlinyj,Hto nad Ellado[ kogda-to podnqlsq

Kak 'uravlinyj klin v hu'ie rube'ió

Na golovax carej bo'estvennaq penaóKuda plyvete vy? Kogda by ne Elena,Hto Troq vam odna, axejskie mu'i?

I more, i Gomeróvse dvi'etsq l[bov;[

Kogo 'e slywat; mne? I vot Gomer molhit,

I more hernoe, vitijstvuq, wumit

I s tq'kim groxotom podxodit k izgolov;[

1915 (#79)

Sleeplessness Homer Taut sails.

I’ve read halfway through the list of ships:

That long-drawn flock, that convoy of cranes That arose once over Hellas.

Like a wedge of cranes toward foreign borders—

Divine foam on the emperors’ heads—

Where are you sailing? If not for Helen, What is Troy alone to you, Achaean men?

Both the sea and Homer—all is moved by love.

To whom should I listen? Homer now falls still,

And the black sea rumbles, orating,

And with a heavy crash, draws up beside the bed.

Mandelstam’s brief lyric, like Pound’s first Canto, evokes both the presence

of the past and its pastness, as the events described in Homer’s writingsconverge with and diverge from the experience of the modernist poet-syn-thesizer who works to recuperate an ancient history for the modern age.Mandelstam’s poem moves from mediation—in the poem’s opening stanza

he contemplates the Iliad’s famous catalog of ships—to immediacy, when,

in its final lines, Homer’s wine-dark sea sweeps up along the poet’s bedside.Mandelstam achieves this transformation through linguistic sleight ofhand, as he endows a purely Russian word with a Hellenistic soul by way of

his creative etymology The sea itself, móre in Russian, is anagrammatically concealed within Homer, Gomér; and Homer, conversely, lies partially hid-

den in the Russian “sea,” as Mandelstam reminds us by rocking the two

words back and forth in the poem’s closing lines: “I mó-re, i Go-mér”; “I

vót Go-mér molchít/ I mó-re chérnoe ” Centuries, traditions, and

linguis-tic boundaries wash away in the verbal play that gives all Russian speakers

permanent access to a Homeric past through their own sea, their more.

Such inventive etymologies are one way into the expanded philologicalfamily that Mandelstam, Eliot, and Pound seek In an early essay, Eliot de-scribes another way to acquire the rich history craved by modern orphans;and his method is one that Mandelstam and Pound energetically employ aswell The poet works his way into a new past through what Eliot calls “afeeling of profound kinship, or rather of a peculiar personal intimacy, withanother, probably a dead author Our friendship gives us an introduc-tion to the society in which our friend moved; we learn its origins and itsendings; we are broadened we have been quickened, and we becomebearers of a tradition.”46He might be describing the Mandelstam who callsFrançois Villon his “friend and favorite,” his “favorite relation,” who “feelshimself the poet’s contemporary” (III, 23; #382; II, 307) and who discov-ers a fellow traveler in an endlessly contemporaneous Dante obscured bycenturies of misguided criticism (CPL 410, 440)

The young Pound goes even further in his search for “mine own kind,”

“my kin of the spirit” among the poets of the past He resurrects his absent

“soul kin” in his own flesh as he converges with distant poets recovered for

a moment from other times and places “No man hath dared to write thisthing as yet,” he proclaims with a very young poet’s brashness in “His-trion” ( 1908):

And yet I know, how that the souls of all men great

At times pass through us,

And we are melted into them, and are not

Save reflexions of their souls.