5 - Nostalgia for World Culture

Summary

Remembering the murderous nineteen-thirties, Nadezhda Mandelstam reports her husband's answer to a question about Acmeism, the poetic alliance he had belonged to in his youth, a group that included Anna Akhmatova and her husband Nicolay Gumilyov:

To the question: ‘What is Acmeism?’ M. once replied: ‘Nostalgia for world culture.’ This was in the thirties, either in the Press House in Leningrad or at the lecture he gave to the Voronezh branch of the Union of Writers – on the same occasion when he also declared that he would disown neither the living nor the dead. Shortly after this he wrote: ‘And bright nostalgia does not let me leave the still young Voronezh hills for those of all mankind so bright in Italy.’

As his wife's collocated quotations imply, the terms for Osip Mandelstam's nostalgia were his inability to travel. The chapter in which this is reported is entitled ‘Italy’, and she notes that he had been there briefly in his youth but had almost forgotten it by the time he made these remarks. Mandelstam's response to the poetry of Dante and Ariosto is a part of his St Petersburg ambience: a Russia opened up to the world. The word ‘nostalgia’, a ‘disease of the soul’ (as a Soviet party member defined the word for me in 1980), implies a desired homecoming to world culture on the part of the poet whose exile in Stalin's Soviet Union was both real and soon-to-be fatal.