Under the Sign of Contradiction

Acknowledgements

This book’s foremost obligations are to critics and writers whose ideas I used, as recorded throughout the text.

Eight years have passed since the first incarnation of this work was defended as a doctoral dissertation at Boston University’s Editorial Institute. The persons and institutions who had in different ways assisted the dissertation were noted at the time. I remain thankful to them, and especially to the Editorial Institute, whose programme in Editorial Studies has been the ground of many explorations of text and context in their fertile embrace. I cannot envision the present work outside of the environment that fostered it – without the exuberant discussions, the humour, the generosity of the faculty and the respectful interest and encouragement of senior colleagues within the ALSCW – the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers, whose ties to the Editorial Institute so much enriched student experience.

In the intervening years, the dissertation’s principal advisor, Christopher Ricks, continued to be a source of encouragement, advice, illuminating and often chastening commentary, and nurturing support. Archie Burnett and David Bromwich have been reliably willing to bolster me with letters of recommendation during my search for a place within academia, indirectly sustaining my scholarship. Alessandra Anzani commissioned the work in 2016; her successor at Peter Lang, Laurel Plapp, shepherded the manuscript through peer review and other ‘ages and stages’, a reliable and supportive presence that defied the geographical distance between Oxford and Boston. During peer review itself, the stringent yet fair-minded and constructively detailed comments of my reader, whose name is not known to me, assured me that a book written in the New-Critical tradition could yet be favourably received by colleagues in the field of philology. As the head of the Mandelstam Society (headquartered in Moscow), Pavel Nerler was very kind to supply the two sets of images used in Exhibit V, together with a permission to reproduce them.

Note on the Text

In an effort to lighten the page, no superscript or any other signalling means have been used to announce the existence of a note: as notes are limited to citations, this would have been superfluous. The reader can instead expect to find the source of any quotation in the References towards the end of the book, where every quotation in the text is abridged to a choice of words that together amount to a running index of the voices and viewpoints sounded in the chapters that follow. Under the same rationale of resisting unnecessary clutter, two kinds of ellipsis have been used to distinguish between two kinds of elision within quoted text throughout. A spaced editorial ellipsis ( . . . ) signals text omitted from the quotation by the present author for the sake of brevity. Where the ellipsis belongs to the author of the text being quoted, a closed ellipsis with no spaces ( … ) figures instead.

All translations from the Russian, where not otherwise attributed, are my own, and where the cited source of quoted text happens to be in Russian (as opposed to a published translation), the English translation should automatically be attributed to the author. In translating verse, the sense of the original wording was the first priority; the line as a unit of sense was preserved wherever possible, and only on those occasions when this would have compromised either the syntax and the rhythm was the correspondence of sense and line sequence altered. (‘Rhythm’, in turn, should not be equated with ‘metre’ but understood only as loosely indicative of the poem’s habit and intonations, conveyed to the best of the translator’s skill.)

The book does not presume a reading knowledge of Russian: with very few exceptions where Cyrillic script was felt to be integral to a quotation, Russian words are either translated or reproduced in italics, following the author’s best native sense of correct phonetics.

Preface

It has long been broadly understood that Osip Mandelstam’s posthumous reputation is replete with contradictions. As a poet, he wrote both against and in praise of Stalin (under duress in both instances, not solely the latter – to foreshadow one of the recognitions this work will seek to corroborate). As a man, he was a faithful ‘friend of his friends’, and yet testified against a number of them to the secret police. This undeniable complexity continues to stimulate those who wish to resolve its inconsistencies, among which Mandelstam’s composition of an ‘Ode’ to Stalin has occasioned the most critical dismay. Most judged it an aberrant, preposterous, even illegitimate phenomenon – a product of coercion according to some, or madness according to others. To survey the past half-century of Mandelstam scholarship is to be faced with a disparity between the contradictory manifold of Mandelstam’s life and letters and the compulsive wish (shared by writers with otherwise divergent opinions) to eliminate the antinomies, reversals and paradoxes pervading the evidence, all in pursuit of a politically acceptable and, above all, ‘tidy’ narrative. Some such efforts take the form of whitewashing what is felt to be a tainted image; inevitably, they are compensated by attempts to expose the ‘dark side’ of a figure perceived to have been sanctified – or sanitized – at the expense of the truth.

Both tendencies represent but two phases of a single dynamic, within which the quest after a balanced view follows a pendulum’s trajectory. The first phase was heralded by Anna Akhmatova, a close friend of Mandelstam’s, whose ‘Poem Without a Hero’ is indicative of what she felt to be the best posthumous policy: ‘he is guilty of nothing – not this, not that, nor the other’. Similar rhetoric was adopted by champions of Mandelstam in England, and all the more so in the United States, where a sentimentalized narrative of martyrdom at the hands of Stalin’s regime turned Mandelstam into a ‘political nonconformist’ and thereby America’s most unexpected ally in the Cold War. In Russian Mandelstam studies, whose development ←1 | 2→became possible with the fall of the Soviet system, nuanced conversation about Mandelstam’s politics is made difficult by the prevailing sense that, if not carefully minimized, ambiguities within the poet’s opposition to Stalin’s regime would damage Mandelstam’s reputation, felt to be dependent upon a strict interpretive hygiene.

With this in mind, this book attempts to negotiate the contradictions of Mandelstam’s biography without discounting any credible evidence whilst maintaining a grip on the critical language, its rhetorical ramifications, and the congruence of sensibility and manner of expression. This last requirement has long informed the English critical tradition, within which particularly the poet-critics – centrally, T. S. Eliot, William Empson and Geoffrey Hill – have tested the continuities and reciprocities of poetry and critical judgement. Their affinities with Mandelstam, who was himself not only a poet but also a critic, are rooted in philosophical dispositions that are not specific to any national literature. At the same time, the context of perennial literary ideas seems proper to Mandelstam in being consonant with his own professed longing for ‘world culture’. That no further theory is brought to bear on matters of criticism is not an omission but a deliberate decision to be cautious in adopting theoretical concepts, whose applicability to literature is tested by their viability as literary language (as stringent particularity must precede induction). At the same time, no argument about contradiction could be possible without some analytical apparatus. This is borrowed largely from William Empson, whose concepts ←2 | 3→of ambiguity, aspect, balance and deadlock assist the analysis of contradiction as an organizing crux in both art and biography. Gregory Bateson’s concept of the double bind proved to be another valuable tool in the analysis of Mandelstam’s biography.

This first thing required by the kind of investigation the author has in mind is a sufficiently rich array of witnesses – textual witness, behind which stand real persons, with their individual voices. In order to preserve the distinctness of each testimony, from others and from the author’s interpretations, they are presented, where possible, in direct quotation (as against paraphrase, which tends to absorb all voices into a single authorial voice). The coherence sought is that of a polyphony, a form whose political dimension is pluralistic, in contrast with the ideological univocalism of totalitarian and fascist states. This study does not claim to survey every piece of applicable evidence. What is attempted, however, is to marshal evidence sufficient for framing several significant loci of Mandelstam’s life and letters under the aspect of contradiction. The array of rhetorical examples assembled here is intended to supply the grounds for comparative analysis ←3 | 4→of further materials. Apart from the pragmatics of book production, established authorities on a given question may not be invoked, for the very reason that they are already generally known and constitute the ‘normal lighting’ upon the subject of this book. Nevertheless, an effort has been made to maintain a balance among existing witnesses and commentators so as not to distort the critical implications of what is known, following a principle suggested by Empson: