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Into the Heart of Darkness: Mandelstam’s Ode to Stalin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Clarence Brown
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Extract

The obscurity of poems is differently motivated. The later poems of Wallace Stevens are obscure in part because what he wished to say, the one thing that he was trying more and more monomaniacally to say, namely, that there is an imagined life greater and more real than the ordinary life of the senses, became increasingly complex and intractable and hence more difficult to say. The later poems of Osip Mandelstam, whose poems were never easy, are in part obscure because what he wished or had to say involved, if said plainly, the danger of death.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , December 1967 , pp. 584 - 604
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1967

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References

An earlier version of this paper was delivered as a talk at the second national Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies on April 1, 1967, in Washington, D.C. I have discussed several points with Nina Berberova and Simon Karlinsky, who kindly read a draft of this article and made many valuable suggestions.

1 The plain translations of these poems have no other purpose than to provide the reader with a compact statement of how I understand them on the most elementary level of all.

2 Whether the picture was a genuine Rembrandt or one attributed to him or to his achool or some reproduction I have been unable to determine. The Rembrandt catalogues available to me do not help.

3 Mandel'shtam, Sobranie sochinenii (Washington : Inter-Language Literary Associates, ’ 1964), Vol. I, No. 265. The text here is very inexact.

4 Both Vols. I and II of the Washington edition are to be reprinted in greatly revised form, and there is now to be a third volume to contain material recently uncovered. The word ruda can also mean “blood.” Mandelstam earlier made use of this ambiguity in the poem beginning “Preodolev zatverzhennost’ prirody” (I, 186).

5 It should be noted that both 140 and 141 appear in Vol. I as “variants” of what is there numbered “314.” In a certain sense this is true, but it is also true that Mandelstam cancelled

6 314” and omitted it from the Second Voronezh Notebook, indicating that it was only an early sketch, the material of which was then distributed among two independent poems.

7 A translation of the Vos'mistishiia and a commentary to them by the present writer appear in Delos, the journal of the National Translation Center, Austin, Texas, Vol. I, No. 1 (Spring 1968).

8 The plural of mekh ‘wineskin’ is properly mekhl, but it seems to me that this context excludes the reading “furs” (mekhd).

9 Kolkhida ‘Colchis’ is the ancient name for the place that is now Georgia. The heaving of Colchis in the blood may be taken as one more trace of the Stalin ode.

10 See Vozdushnye puti, IV (New York, 1965), 38.

11 This poem ends with what is undoubtedly an echo, as Simon Karlinsky has suggested in a private letter, of Pushkin's poem “Iz Pindemonti,” which concludes “Vot schast'el vot prava…” In both cases the “rights” are the same : in spite of tyranny, to feel awe and joy before the works of nature and art.