Voronezh Notebooks Read online

  OSIP MANDELSTAM (1891–1938) was born and raised in St. Petersburg, where he attended the prestigious Tenishev School, before studying at the universities of St. Petersburg and Heidelberg and at the Sorbonne. Mandelstam first published his poems in Apollyon, an avant-garde magazine, in 1910, then banded together with Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev to form the Acmeist movement, which advocated an aesthetic of exact description and chiseled form, as suggested by the title of Mandelstam’s first book, Stone (1913). During the Russian Revolution, he left Leningrad for the Crimea and Georgia, and settled in Moscow in 1922,where his second collection of poems, Tristia, appeared. Unpopular with the Soviet authorities, Mandelstam found it increasingly difficult to publish his poetry, though an edition of collected poems did come out in 1928. In 1934, after reading a poem denouncing Stalin to friends, Mandelstam was arrested and sent into exile. He produced many new poems during these years, and his wife, Nadezhda, memorized his work in case his notebooks were destroyed or lost. (Her extraordinary memoirs of life with her husband, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, published in the 1970s, later helped to bring Mandelstam a worldwide audience.) In 1937, Mandelstam’s exile ended and he returned to Moscow, but he was arrested again almost immediately. This time he was sentenced to hard labor in Siberia. He was last seen in a transit camp near Vladivostok.

  ANDREW DAVIS is a poet, cabinetmaker, and visual artist. His current project is the long poem IMPLUVIUM. He divides his time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the north coast of Spain.

  Osip Mandelstam

  Voronezh Notebooks

  TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ANDREW DAVIS

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  a Amparín y Censi, que me dieron de comer—A.D.

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

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  Translation and introduction copyright © 2016 by Andrew Davis

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mandel’shtam, Osip, 1891–1938, author.

  [Voronezhskie tetradi. English]

  The Voronezh notebooks / by Osip Mandelstam ; translated and with an introduction by Andrew Davis.

  1 online resource. — (New York Review Books poets

  ISBN 978-1-59017-911-6 (epub) — ISBN 978-1-59017-910-9 (alk. paper)

  I. Davis, Andrew, translator, writer of introduction. II. Title.

  PG3476.M355

  891.71'3—dc23

  2015024854

  Cover design by Emily Singer

  ISBN 978-1-59017-911-6

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB/Poets series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  Contents

  Biographical Notes

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  VORONEZH NOTEBOOKS

  First Notebook

  Second Notebook

  Third Notebook

  Index of First Lines

  Introduction

  W. H. AUDEN once complained to Joseph Brodsky: “I don’t see why Mandelstam is considered a great poet. The translations that I’ve seen don’t convince me at all”*—a comment that indicates the conflict between Osip Mandelstam’s reputation as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century and his equally notorious impermeability to translation, if not to comprehension itself.

  Why is Mandelstam so hard to get at? There is, of course, the density of his language and imagery and the prominent role of rhyme and rhythm in his work. He was one of the great “orchestrators” of language, one of the great masters of sound and cadence, which has posed enormous—some would say insuperable—obstacles to translation. Related is the tantalizing, and perennial, question of the differences between Russian and English poetic practice, a question whose scope and complexity is beyond my capacity to deal with here. But underlying everything, I think, is the unique, the radical demand that Mandelstam places on his readers.

  All of Mandelstam’s poetry is excavated from the midden of his experience. This is its fundamental, invariable, characteristic, and essential principle. There was little of the theoretician and nothing of the mystic in him; he was the most earthly of men. One can see this clearly in the highly unusual way he treats three common poetic images, both in the Voronezh Notebooks and in his earlier poetry, images through which he expressed his horror at being separated from life. Not just by death—though death was a real threat when he was composing the Notebooks—but by anything that prevented him from immersing himself in physical, palpable existence. For Mandelstam, the sky (nebo) most often suggested not some paradise or heaven but sexless, inhuman, asphyxiating emptiness. The appearance of stars in his poetry indicated, as his wife, Nadezhda, pointed out, not a movement toward the eternal but the shrinking away from the essentially human and, therefore, the coming to an end of the poetic impulse. And air (vozduhk)—or rather the lack of it, one of Mandelstam’s greatest preoccupations in the Notebooks—stood in not as an animating principle, not as some cipher for the soul, but as an earthly element. It represented the most insistent of the triad of life’s physical necessities—food, water, breath—and by extension the freedom to move in a physical world.

  But for Mandelstam each thing seen or heard or smelt or tasted or felt functioned immediately as a door, as a point of departure into an underworld of passages, chambers, and hidden connections. Each bit of experience was touched, and then moved through, absorbed, and then moved beyond. The movement of Mandelstam’s poetry was toward not the celestial but the chthonic—toward a deeper and deeper exploration of the specific. He did not generalize from experience, and the words attached to that experience, but moved deeper beneath them and within them.

  So the reader—and the translator—must follow along with Mandelstam, must resist the temptation of the early exit, the premature conclusion, and carry right on, in a sense beyond language, to the core of experience and the roots of words themselves.

  Mandelstam was, along with Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nikolai Gumilev, and a host of others, part of a remarkable florescence of Russian poetry at the beginning of the Soviet era. His extraordinary talents manifested themselves and were recognized early: his first book, Kamen (Stone), was published in 1913 when he was only twenty-two. He quickly took his place among the leading poets of the day. The intimate friendship he formed with Akhmatova during this period was unshakable, lifelong.

  Mandelstam’s great early success and initial sympathy with the revolutionary changes sweeping Russia were followed by a period of increasing isolation and disillusionment with the form those changes were assuming. By the mid-1920s he had been reduced to silence. Prevented from publishing his poetry and condemned to translation to make a living, he struggled both internally and externally to find his place in the new world that was coming into being around him.

  Whether by some sort of personal miracle or by exposure to the rockbound, original virtue of the landscape and language, or whether because his period of wandering in the desert had come to its natural, inevitable end, a trip to Armenia in the early 1930s (which he wrote about in prose in Journey to Armenia) restored his internal compass, his sense of purpose, and his poetic voice.

  From that point on a confrontation with the literary establishment, and the regime itself, was inevitable. When it came, it was, in the context of the time, spectacular. His “Poem on Stalin” of November 1933 was completely uncharacteristic in that it was overtly political. Its composition was an act of extraordinary foolhardin
ess—the inevitable consequences of which he seemed, somehow, to have willfully ignored. In it he directly calls Stalin a murderer, and he confirmed and compounded his crime by sharing the poem with some twenty of his acquaintances.

  His fingers are fat as grubs

  And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

  His cockroach whiskers leer

  And his boot tops gleam.†

  He was, of course, denounced and arrested—which should have meant his death.

  Fortunately, he still had friends in high places. He was miraculously, if temporarily, spared through the influence—it is assumed—of Nikolai Bukharin. (At that point still a powerful minister in the government, Bukharin would himself be sentenced to death in Stalin’s 1936 show trials.) Instead Mandelstam was sent into internal exile, and Nadezhda was allowed to go with him. The story of their reunion; their trip by rail and river, accompanied by three guards, to their first place of exile in Cherdyn; her gradual realization of the mental illness brought on by his imprisonment and interrogation; his panicked, deluded attempt at flight or suicide by jumping out of a hospital window; his consequent miraculous restoration to sanity; their move to a slightly less onerous exile in the city of Voronezh; their life there in increasing poverty and isolation—all of this is the backdrop for and is reflected in the poetry of the Voronezh Notebooks.

  It is also described in detail in the autobiographical account of that period written by Nadezhda and titled in English Hope Against Hope. Hope Against Hope and its sequel, Hope Abandoned, are remarkable books (in Russian Nadezhda means “hope”). They are the best source for a reader who wants to know more about Mandelstam’s character, his methods of composition, and the nature of the times in which he and Nadezhda lived.

  The Voronezh Notebooks was written in three bursts of activity during their stay in the city: the spring and summer of 1935, the winter of 1936, and late 1936 through the spring of 1937. Mandelstam invariably composed in his head, most often while walking, and only later dictated the poems from memory to his wife. The act of their transcription was the sign of their completion: all significant work on the poems was done before they were committed to paper. From the beginning, according to the testimony of Nadezhda, Mandelstam was aware that he was working on a single book, a book that would consist of several related groups of poems. By the time they left Voronezh the Notebooks as a book was for all intents and purposes complete. He did not, however, live to prepare a final text, much less to see the poems published. Osip and Nadezhda were allowed to return to Moscow in 1937, but he was lured back only to be arrested again and sent to Siberia. It is assumed that he died the following year in a transit camp in Vladivostok, either from exhaustion and starvation, or from typhus, or from his chronic heart condition, or from all four. But, in fact, when or where or how he died, no one knows for certain.

  By the time Mandelstam arrived in Voronezh, his poetry had been stripped of nonessential elements. Gone as well was his native, infectious cockiness, his confidence in his “place at the table.” He had been dragged by the nape of his neck to the farthest edge of the twentieth century and abandoned.

  Where had he landed? In a city on a tributary of the River Don, on the border with Ukraine, in the land of the chernozem, the black-earth cornucopia of plenty. The abundance of this region would provoke only madness in the masters of the times: on the one hand Stalin’s insane scheme of collectivization and the starvation of millions in the midst of plenty; on the other Hitler’s lunatic dream of colonization and a greater German empire, and the destruction as his troops cleared the land of human impediment on their way east. Mandelstam himself had already seen the starvation in the streets; had felt, and anticipated in his poetry, the coming wave that within a few years of his death would leave Voronezh entirely in ruins.

  Condemned, isolated, impoverished, terrified, reduced to themselves but entirely attentive to the world at large—somehow he, they, had landed directly in the middle of it all: Hitler, Stalin, and beyond Hitler and Stalin, in the distance but obvious to the poet’s eye, the terrible promise of a future of uncontrolled, inhuman, infinite destruction.

  The Voronezh Notebooks survived by a miracle, or rather through the extraordinary determination of Nadezhda Mandelstam. In exile and poverty, under persecution and in isolation, his manuscripts hidden in teapots, shared out with friends, nightly renewed in the fragile casket of her human, fallible recall, she made it her life’s work to preserve her husband’s poetry.

  Given the circumstances of its preservation, the completeness of the text and the general consensus as to its form and content are remarkable. But discrepancies between the various published versions of the Notebooks have existed, and over time discrepancies have continued to arise.

  The issues that are at stake fall into a few straightforward categories. First are the two poems addressed to Stalin. Nadezhda describes in painfully humorous detail her husband’s ludicrous attempt to write an ode in praise of the dictator, in a futile but completely comprehensible effort to save their necks. Second are the poems that Mandelstam self-censored by producing variant lines he thought would be more palatable. Then there are the poems that Mandelstam produced with variants either because he was uncertain how to proceed or as discrete, and complete, approaches to the same initial impulse. More complex is the question of poems that Mandelstam, by his wife’s own testimony, was uncertain belonged in the corpus of the book. These include the poems beginning “No, it’s not a migraine” and “It’s your fate that your narrow shoulders.” Finally, there is the issue of the correct sequence of the poems.

  The text I used, which came from Polnoe Sobranie Stijotvorenie, published by Biblioteka Poeta in St. Petersburg in 1995 and edited by A.G. Mets, has opted above all for clarity and simplicity. The poems addressed directly to Stalin have been removed. (Some have argued that they should be included as a matter of historical accuracy, but I have no problem with eliminating material produced under compulsion.) The poems whose membership in the fraternity is tenuous have been removed. Lines and stanzas where Mandelstam tried self-censorship have been removed. Where variants exist that betray the poet’s indecision, choices have been made. Where variants exist as separate, complete poems, of course they have been preserved.

  More complicated is the question of the sequence of the poems. Nadezhda has emphasized the importance to her husband of ordering the poems by date. She took as her point of reference the moment not of composition but of transcription. In the version I used there are some departures from his wife’s ordering. Most delicate is the decision to begin the Third Notebook with the “Verses on the Unknown Soldier” instead of putting it later as Nadezhda has it. As Jennifer Baines discusses in her book on the late poetry, the composition of the “Verses” was the impulse that set in motion the Third Notebook.‡ Even though it was only written down in its final form later, the other poems were written within the parenthesis it formed. Baines follows Nadezhda in placing the “Verses” sixth in the Third Notebook. To me, however, indicating its pivotal status by putting the “Verses” at the beginning makes sense; conversely, including a miscellany of verses before it dilutes its effect.

  In any case, while the circumstances of his life, which is to say the attempt to silence him absolutely, inspire a special sense of obligation to get it right, I think, most importantly, that the whole idea of a “final word” would be anathema to Mandelstam. It was as if the real and final form of his poetry existed in his head, in a nimbus of multiplicity, and a printed, published version was only one of many possible emanations. As he says in “Conversation About Dante”:

  Imagine something intelligible, grasped, wrested from obscurity, in a language voluntarily and willingly forgotten immediately after the act of intellection and realization is completed...

  And again:

  The signal waves of meaning vanish, having completed their work; the more potent they are, the more yielding, and the less inclined to linger.

 
And again:

  Any given word is a bundle, and meaning sticks out of it in various directions, not aspiring toward any single official point. In pronouncing the word “sun,” we are, as it were, undertaking an enormous journey to which we are so accustomed that we travel in our sleep. What distinguishes poetry from automatic [that is, mechanical, involuntary] speech is that it rouses us and shakes us into wakefulness in the middle of a word. Then it turns out that the word is much longer than we thought, and we remember that to speak means to be forever on the road.§

  —Andrew Davis

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks are due especially to Aquilino Duque for his providential translation into Spanish of the Notebooks (an essential aid to my halting Russian) and his generous encouragement; to Oksana Alyeksyeyeva and Vlada Yaremenko for their patience with a tone-deaf student; to Marina Magazinik, met by chance on a cross-country flight, for Schubert and for hunchbacks; to Professor Andrew Kahn for important information at propitious moments. And most importantly, to Riley Ossorgin, my past returned to me, for his enthusiasm, intelligence, and persistence in combing the text with me for errors. Standard disclaimer: all mistakes are my own, but without Riley things would have been much worse.

  —A. D.

  *Joseph Brodsky, “The Child of Civilization,” in Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 142.

  †Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, translated by Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1983), 13.

  ‡Jennifer Baines, Mandelstam: The Later Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

  §Osip Mandelstam, The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, edited by Jane Gary Harris, translated by Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1979), 398, 407.