I am including the revised version of my essay on the 20th century Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam. Enjoy.
Russian poet Osip Mandelstam eventually became a reluctant witness of conflict after nearly a decade of Soviet persecution. Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1891, Mandelstam’s parents soon moved with him to St. Petersburg where he would be given an excellent early education. Showing an early affinity for, and interest in poetry, Mandelstam set out on a course that would have him as a key member of a new poetic movement in Russia, and eventually one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century. Because Mandelstam typically preferred not to openly respond to political problems, it is difficult to answer how his poetry was a witness for the conflict he experienced. The best way to understand how his poetry was a witness to conflict, is to look at the stylistic change from the first phase of his poetry from 1910-1925 to his second phase of poetry from 1930-1938. Initially attempting to abstain from politic discussions in his poetry, Osip Mandelstam’s poetic career can be divided into two main sections. In the first section of his career, Mandelstam wrote poetry that held witness to and expressed awe simply at the world it existed in. As he faced greater persecution from the Soviet Regime, Mandelstam’s poetic style changed to reflect his greater personal misfortune. The initial phase of Mandelstam’s poetic career was a time in which he developed his lucid style and explored his intentions with and purpose of his poetry.
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| Osip from Wikipedia |
Russia was undergoing the massive political change of the Bolshevik revolution while Mandelstam developed his poetry, but he wasn’t directly persecuted until the end of the 1920’s. Instead of directly seeing reading Mandelstam’s stance on the conflicts in Russia in his poetry, his witness must be interpreted through the stylistic change that occurred throughout his career. The poetry of the first half of his career is well-expressed by a poem from his first collection, Stone, whose first line is “I’m given a body – what to do with it?” The next stanza continues Mandelstam’s frequent fascination with his unlikely, but lucky presence on this earth, “For the quiet happiness to breathe and live. / Tell me, to whom shall I give my thanks?” In the same way that “Hagia Sophia” reflected on an artistic creation, “I’m given a body – what to do with it?” is an artistic creation designed to reflect on human life. Mandelstam’s poetry was initially a witness to life itself. As he was put under further pressure from the Soviets, Mandelstam’s poetry changed to witness more specifically his life as a member of the Soviet Union. Mandelstam generally tried to stay away from political commentary, but as his life was more influenced by the Soviets, it inevitably was reflected in his poetry . To provide for himself and his wife of two years, Mandelstam began translating literature into Russian. Made clear through letters he sent to his father, Mandelstam felt from the start his creativity was limited by the time he spent translating (Harris 8). Combining the stress of translating with a long period of his wife being in poor health in the mid twenties eventually proved too much for Mandelstam, and his poetic output ceased. For a period of five years, from 1925 to 1930, he began writing prose and essays in place of poetry.
Mandelstam spent his prose years living in Leningrad. Through a series of publications of essays and prose pieces, Mandelstam’s written voice slowly changed. In her recounting of her time with Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, Osip’s wife Nadezhda Mandelstam described the change taking place:
M. behaved like a man conscious of his power, and this only egged on those who wanted to destroy him. For them power was expressed in guns, agencies of repression, the distribution of everything – including fame- by coupons, the possibility of commissioning their portraits from any artist they chose. But M. stubbornly maintained that if they killed people for poetry, then they must fear and respect it—in other words, that it too was a power in the land. (Mandelstam N. 171).
The poems Mandelstam wrote after returning to poetry, such as “Stalin Epigram,” and “Verses On the Unknown Soldier,” express the aggression N. Mandelstam described.
“Stalin Epigram” (Forché, 122) is most extreme case of Mandelstam’s more open aggression against the Russian government. The poem is generally considered to be responsible for Mandelstam’s first arrest, and ultimately the events that led to his death (Coetzee 72). As Mandelstam intended the poem to be only for a private group of friends, the lines are quite bold “But whenever there’s a snatch of talk / it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer, / the ten thick worms his fingers, / his words like measures of weight, / the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip, / the glitter of his boot-rims.” Mandelstam was finally expressing the resentment felt by all citizens under Stalin’s ruthless regime. As his poetic style had become more inclusive of personal events in his life, his subject matters shifted from marveling at the general idea of being alive, to being alive in the presence of tyranny.
While his style of writing and views of the world changed with his prose, Mandelstam continued to translate for a living. His frustrations climaxed in what has become know as the Eulenspiegel Affair of 1928-29 . Mandelstam was asked to translate a second edition of a German folktale Till Eulenspiegel, but the publisher in the final copy gave no credit to the translators of the first edition. Mandelstam was accused of plagiarism by one of the first translators and the trouble caught the attention of the Soviet government. After this event Mandelstam was put under much closer surveillance by the Soviets. Luckily after the Eulenspiegel Affair, a friend of Mandelstam’s who had political connections was able to get Mandelstam and his wife permission to travel to Armenia (Harris 84).
Described by Mandelstam as his “200 days in the Sabbath land,” (Harris 9), his stay in Armenia worked to rejuvenate his interest in writing poetry. After being persecuted by the Soviets for so long, Mandelstam’s agitation and annoyance began to be reflected in his poetry. During an interview while reflecting on Mandelstam’s contribution to poetry, and the help his wife provided, Seamus Heaney describes the change that took place, “I assume that the grandiose passions of Ginsberg's Howl are just as much a cry on behalf of his urban tribe as the enigmatic intensities of Osip Mandelstam's late poems of exile were also a cry on behalf of his people.” (Kinahan and Heaney 650). One poem that expresses Mandelstam’s interest in the change of the Russian people is “Lamarck.”
In “Lamarck,” Mandelstam reflects on Russia’s evolution through time, and presents a much more pessimistic tone towards life than in his work of the first section of his career. Rather than marveling at the wonder of being alive, Mandelstam seems to feel insignificant in the procession of time, “if everything living is only a brief mark / for a day time takes back, / I'll sit on the last step / of Lamarck's mobile ladder” (Mandelstam, “Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam” 205). Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a French naturalist who was an early proponent of the theory of evolution. Mandelstam shares an interesting view, glumly sitting at the lowest point of evolution as the world advances without him. Rather than giving up hope on life though, Mandelstam is expressing his acceptance with his position in time, and reflecting on the need to live life at whatever point in time it falls.
After his first arrest in 1934, Mandelstam was exiled to the northern province, Voronezh. During the next three years Mandelstam continued to write poetry that reflected his new fixation on life amidst persecution and fear. After a second arrest in 1937, Mandelstam was sent to a prison camp in Siberia (Brinkley 1). After suffering from malnutrition and various sicknesses along the way, Mandelstam finally succumbed to the Soviet persecution and passed away on 27 December 1938 (Slonim 253).
Starting out as a poet enthralled by the wonder of being alive, Osip Mandelstam ended up a near-subliminal speaker against the Soviet party in Russia. His life was directly influenced by the Russian revolutions, and his poetry was thusly affected as well. His poetic career can be split into two periods, 1910-1925 and 1930-1938. Even though Mandelstam didn’t often directly respond to political conflicts in his poetry, his poetic style of speaking changed as Russia changed. Poems such as “Stalin Epigram” reflect Mandelstam’s more outgoing remarks that arose after his near decade of persecution by the Soviets. As he faced greater persecution from the Soviet Regime, Mandelstam’s poetic style continued to bear witness to his experience in a time of drastic change for all Russians.
Works Cited
Brinkley, Tony. "The Road to Stalin": Mandelstam's Ode to Stalin and "The Lines
on the Unknown Soldier." Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish
Studies 21.4 (2003): 32. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 15 Mar. 2011.
Coetzee, J. M. Osip Mandelstam and the Stalin Ode. Berkeley: University of
California Press. 1991. pp. 72-83
Harris Jane Gary. Osip Mandelstam. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Print.
Kinahan, Frank, and Seamus Heaney. “An Interview With Seamus Heaney.” Critical Inquiry. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1981.
pp. 645-651. Web.
Mandelstam, Nadezhda, and Max Hayward. Hope against Hope: a Memoir. New York:
Modern Library, 1999. Print.
Mandelstam, Osip. Ed. Forché, Carolyn. Against Forgetting: Twentieth-century
Poetry of Witness. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993. Print.
----, Burton Raffel, Alla Burago, and Sidney Monas. Complete
Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam. Albany: State University of New York,
1973. Google Books.Web.
Obolensky, Dimitri. The Penguin Book of Russian Verse. Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, Eng.: Penguin, 1965. Print.
Slonim, Marc. Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems, 1917-1977.
New York: Oxford UP, 1977. Print.
