Mandelstam’s images of conversation partners engaged in their

eternal disputes are invariably constructed in such a way that

there is no telling which is which, the two melding into one

another, for it is impossible to understand another without

accepting the necessity of that other’s existence into one’s own

life, and consequently mirroring that other in one’s thoughts and

actions. Friends grow to share a vocabulary, spouses to resemble

one another even in their physical appearance, and it is a

commonly observable fact in our experience that Tolstoy scholars

differ in their ways from those who study Turgenev, Tiutchev, or,

for that matter, this same Osip Mandelstam: the conversation

leaves an indelible mark upon the one who enters in it.

In the "Bookcase" chapter of his mid-life autobiography The

Noise of Time, Mandelstam rehearses his literary heritage. The rise

up from the "Jewish chaos" of the lowermost shelf by two degrees

of ascent first to his father's German books and then to his

mother's Russian ones has been commented upon by Clare Cavanagh

in her biography Osip Mandelstam and the modernist creation of tradition.

Focused as she is on her thesis of Mandelstam the self-hating Jew

who later has a change of heart, the biographer misses about the

autobiographer this precisely that the degrees of ascent from the

Hebrew Pentateuchs with covers torn-off and the "Russian history

of the Jews, written in the clumsy and shy language of a

Talmudist speaking in Russian" through the father's German books

with their neat type faces and picture engravings "something in

the style of antiquity", to, finally, the mother's Russian books

which are characterized solely by the quality of the paper, the

neatness of the type faces and the lack of commentaries, are also

degrees of descent: a progression from that which is ordinarily

considered the deep content of a book, its style by which the

author can be characterized even to his roots, to that which is

ordinarily considered its shallowest external form. The Russian

books on his mother’s shelf of the bookcase are of unequal

quality with the German ones, but comparable in their low quality

of the materials and extensive wear from use to the Jewish books

on the bottom row. All three rows go into the making of the young

man's mind, the top row of the Russian books and the bottom row

of the Jewish ones fluttering their pages around the higher-

quality products of Western print culture like the two wings of

an ungainly butterfly around a steady middle part.

Mandelstam makes small what he would have his readers

struggle with in order to wrest from him and thus make strange in

their own minds. The red, lion-colored, Jewish Pentateuchs with

torn-off covers filling up the bottom shelf likewise have their

dignity, which consists in their neither having to be touched nor

read in order for what is most meaningful about them to be known

in detail and open to the poetic imagination. In Voronezh,

Mandelstam will compare a woman’s voice singing the American

Spirituals to the roaring of a lion and the power of the

Pentateuch:

Я в львиный ров и крепость погруженИ опускаюсь ниже, ниже, нижеПод этих звуков ливень дрожжевой -Сильнее льва, мощнее Пятикнижья.1

The books of the Torah in his parents’ bookcase lie there not one

Pentateuch, but a whole collection of lions who have no more need

even to roar, having already earned their place on Earth for all

time:

рыжие Пятикнижия с оборванными переплетами, русская история евреев, написанная неуклюжим и робким языком говорящего по-русски талмудиста. Это был повергнутый в пыль хаос иудейский.

1 Vol. 1, p.227

Why does a family need a whole plurality of Pentateuchs? One

Torah ought to have been enough, but here there is a whole pride

of these red lions. Their color – рыжие. This is the lion’s color

in Russian. The Lion of Judah, so to speak; and when the cantor

sings the Hebrew psalms, he is bringing down the “leonine

building”. The covers are torn off from these books of the Torah

because any cover would be insufficient to describe these books

in language. Mandelstam uses the same device to describe his

mother’s Pushkin, which is of a special color because it can be

of any color and all: никакого цвета. Likewise the book of

Nadson’s disembodied poetry which concludes the little Catalogue

of the Books, which also has no cover, only yellowed-out pages,

sickly as the Petersburg government buildings in Mandelstam’s

poems of the Stone period. A cover for the Pentateuchs would have

meant that these books can be contained, but also taken away from

their identity as lions, who are not bound in bulls’ hide, but

eat the creatures, man and bull, which are.

The collective existence of the pride of Pentateuchs

contrasts against the disunited Russians, all each on his own.

The very name of the Pentateuchs suggests a plural identity:

Пятикнижье, five books as one. This is a collective single being

like the collective single being of the stars, одинокое множество

звезд, which Mandelstam describes in another Voronezh poem.2 The

books of the German authors are all standing in good brotherhood.

Above the high dignity of the Jewish ruins begin the ranks of

literature:

Над иудейскими развалинами начинался книжный строй, то были немцы: Шиллер, Гете, Кернер и Шекспир по-немецки - старые лейпцигско-тюбингерские издания, кубышки и коротышки в бордовых тисненных переплетах, с мелкой печатью, рассчитанной на юношескую зоркость, с мягкими гравюрами, немного на античный лад.3

The Catalogue of the Books is all in motion and there is an

internal reason for this description to focus on the pictures, as

different from the ones in the Jewish primer as is a woman with

her hair loose and her hands raised in tragic gesture lifting up

the breasts is different from the same old sad-faced very mature-

looking Jewish boy in as many different attitudes as are the many

causes of his sadness living in the Ghetto and following the

Rabbinical trade of the fathers. Flapping the wings of his

butterfly description up (in one sense) from the Jewish books up

2 “Были очи острее точимой косы –”; Vol.1, p. 225.3 Vol.2, p.216.

through the German and onto the Russian ones, Mandelstam also

rehearses the flapping of the wings of his father’s wide journey

from a Jewish Ghetto in Poland west to Germany and east again to

Russia. When his father was a young man, the Hebrew primer was

still the same Hebrew primer in spirit, even if it is an

anachronism in form to say so. Mandelstam’s father was drawn away

to Schiller from the books in the Talmudic academy to which he

escaped from his Ghetto, and it was for his sharp young eyes that

the small print and the pictures were intended in the case of

these books on this particular bookcase. Это отец пробивался

самоучкой в германский мир из талмудических дебрей, writes the

son, making the books into whose world his father waged his war

of cultural assimilation to break through both the neat rows of

the enemy he fought against and also the neat rows of the army

which the teenage general from nowhere rallied, like a young

Napoleon commanding foreign troops in France. All these books are

of one color: кубышки и коротышки в бордовых тисненых переплетах.

These are so many toy soldiers in their red Prussian uniforms.

But the military order of the books breaks up on reaching

the mother’s top shelf in the bookcase, which does not represent

a step up if ordered being is higher than disordered, nor yet if

high quality binding is considered a higher quality of material

than low quality binding. The bookcase butterfly has lion-colored

Pentateuchs the other Pushkin and Lermontov never seemed to

Mandelstam the brothers that they are made out to be in critical

commonplaces, and were even more so in the critical commonplaces

of his day. Pushkin has one cover, Lermontov another entirely.

But the books of the Germans Goethe and Schiller have always

seemed to him brothers. This is to be understood about the German

language, that fraternity and military order is in its very

nature, much as the chaos of individual disunity is in the nature

of the Russian language, and the other chaos, of collective

existence of the ancient days, in the nature of the lions’ pride

of Hebrew books, and the leonine language of the ancient Jews,

better without the translation insofar that it precedes all

history, and thus all need for language. So far as Mandelstam is

concerned, those who speak Hebrew are still living in that Garden

of Eden. Hence his strange quirk of thought, made so much of by

Freidin in his book, that all Jews are already interrelated and

any marriage of two Jews is an incestuous one at its core; as was

the marriage of Adam and Eve.

Is there unity in Russian literature, asks Mandelstam at the

beginning of his essay “On the Nature of the Word”, and pulls out

Bergson’s fan in order to show that there is more than one kind

of unity available to the human intellect in this world.

To put the question thus boldly: what is the difference

between a “Russian history of the Jews written in the shy and

clumsy language of a Talmudist speaking in Russian” and a

translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, as, for example, the

American “Stone” Torah? Can the Jews have any history more

powerful in art than the one already written in the Old

Testament? And, finally, can it be possibly determined by the

syntax as he is the conversation partner of the books of the

Hebrew Torah and his Russian language has attained to a quality

of deep history which stands alongside only the Jewish bible.

Mandelstam describes his mother's (and hence his own)

Pushkin in Isakov's 1876 popular edition thus:

Я до сих пор думаю, что это прекрасное издание, оно мне нравится больше академического. в нем нет ничего лишнего, шрифты располагаются стройно, колонки стихов текут свободно,

как солдаты летучими батальонами, и ведут их, как полководцы, четкие годы включительно по тридцать седьмой.

Gogol's Akaky Akakievich and Gogol's Popryshchin, had they put

their minds together, might have written such a description of

Pushkin, in which the great poet is characterized solely by the

ease with which he can be read. Now of course we know that

Pushkin's poetry "flows freely, like flying battalions" while the

poet's thoughts are always in good battle order: мысли

располагаются стройно would be a thorough banality to say about

Pushkin. Applied to Pushkin's style these were mere commonplaces.

But a poet's dignity is in the imperative nature of his verse:

Pushkin's style commands the typefaces and the covers which his

book will have. Isakov printed the popular edition of Pushkin's

poems with an understanding what this book is good for: to take

everywhere, to learn from and to live with.

The German quality of brotherhood as opposed to the Russian

sublime disorder of the sensual as opposed to the dusty chaos of

the Jewish ages. Only this last one I am unable to trace in the

poetry, but on the other hand it is amply expressed in his Noise

of Time. Ronen ad locum on the Underwood rifle and its fibrous

tendon: people thought he was crazy in his day, but a simpler

understanding is that this is analytic poetry, breaking up the

necessary colloquial associations so that each word can enter

into sense-making union with any other, working up to the soil-

and-sky poetry of the Voronezh Notebooks.

In describing his special, more than intellectual,

relationship with this book, Mandelstam gets rid of everything

which would have been in his way. The German books have pictures

in them; what need of pictures in a book of poetry which you read

dozens of times over and over again? The Russian-speaking

Talmudist's history has a style; where is the awareness of a

style in the book of a poet whose existence you have accepted as

a categorical fact of nature? The Sun and the moon have no style,

they are simply there and we are left to make of them what we

will; Pushkin as familiar and inevitable a fact in Russian

literature as the Sun and moon on Earth. But to whom among the

Russian readership of the day (or, for that matter, the American

readership of this day) would the same description of a

"Talmudist's" style by means of his book jacket not seem lacking

of insight into the books themselves? There is no good

defamiliarizing that which is unfamiliar. What we do not know

about too much, that we can speak of from its considerations of

deep form and intellectual structure. But when we get near a

thing, it becomes difficult to describe its inner essence.

Accordingly, Mandelstam tells about the style in which these

books are written: he has read them, or tried to read them, and

can speak about them thus plainly because he has formed no

personal connection. The Russian books caught his heart.

Who knows but that the Russian books also had pictures in

them. The Hebrew primer has the one invariable sad-eyed and

adult-looking boy in as great a variety of postures with assorted

items of domestic use as the King on Old Persian coinage with his

assortment of military items and the things of rule, in whom the

young Osip Emilievich refuses to recognize himself: too sad-eyed

and too mature. But what is more: too close to home. The German

books have more interesting pictures in them, whereas the Russian

ones have no pictures at all, only covers. Mandelstam's favorite

device is to construct, as here, a two-way axis of comparison.

Take this passage from his essay "On the Conversation Partner":

Расстояние разлуки стирает черты милого человека. Только тогда у меня возникает желание сказать ему то важное, что я не мог сказать, когда владел его обликом во всей реальной полноте. Я позволю себе формулировать это наблюдение так: вкус

сообщительности обратно пропорционален нашему реальному знанию о собеседнике и прямо пропорционален стремлению заинтересовать его собой.

The more we know about a friend, the less that friend can

interest us as a stranger before whom to show ourselves sparkling

in the light of playful language. There is likewise an inversely

rising interest in the house of a German Jew's son to read the

Russian books insofar that this is what he knows the least about:

we go from knowledge of the style of the Talmudist's writing, to

familiarity with the pictures in the German books, to finally

only a way of looking with the hands and the tips of the eye, so

to speak, at these most foreign objects, the coveted Russian

authors. It is not that Mandelstam has no love for his Jewish

nose, which after all is his own business whether he does or no,

but that he wants to approach the Russian poets from his most

distant available angle of remove, in order to be as much a

stranger to the poetry himself as he will make it to his readers.

To pause briefly on this question of the Self-hating Jew

Osip Mandelstam, because the point of personal relation is

overstressed in the scholarship, where the tendency is to explain

all of Mandelstam's writings by whether he had "strongly

positive" feelings towards this or "strongly negative" feelings

towards something other. The essay "On the Conversation Partner"

holds the explanation for Mandelstam's small knowledge of the

Jewish books on the bottom shelf, gathering their dust as they do

in their Jewish chaos where no single letter can be discerned, so

that even the Hebrew alphabet soon falls into the dust and no

Hebrew teacher is able to get little Osip Emilievich to identify

with that same sad Jewish boy in his picture-book learning aides.

The "Bookshelf" chapter begins with a description of the unique

smell of Jewish homes, missing from the Aryan ones:

Как крошка мускуса наполнит весь дом, так малейшее влияние юдаизма переполняет целую жизнь. О, какой это сильный запах! Разве я мог не заметить, что в настоящих еврейских домах пахнет иначе, чем в арийских. И это пахнет не только кухня, но люди, вещи и одежда.

A drop of tar spoils a barrel of honey; but a bit of musk which

fills up the whole home with its aroma? Thus tongue in cheek

Mandelstam’s Jewish origins become even a source of exotic

insight for him, an oriental and a mystic charm which attaches

itself to all the people in his life, and all the books he has

read on his mother’s and his father’s shelves of the bookcase.

For if the kitchen and the people and the clothes were all

pierced through and through with the musk-scent of their Judaism

(which, moreover, is found in only in real Jewish homes, according

to Mandelstam’s explanation: в настоящих еврейских домах пахнет

иначе, чем в арийских), then it must also have penetrated all his

mother’s Russian and his father’s German books. But the Jewish

books on the bottom shelf smelled of their own scent: the dust of

ages, to be distinguished from the noise of time.

Cavanagh notwithstanding, Mandelstam’s is an irony in the

description, but an irony at the expense not of the Jewish home,

but of the foolish contemporary who reads the autobiography of a

Jewish author of Russian poetry and expects to find apologetic

passages, explaining how unhappy the life of a Jew, how excellent

the life of a Russian. Note here that the books, neither the

Jewish lowermost shelf, nor the German middle shelf, nor yet the

top shelf with the mother's books, have any smell whatever. These

are objects which already transcend the daily bounds of race and

bodily features. And in fact - why are there only three shelves?

Is this not a rather small bookshelf, if it has only three

shelves on it? The bookshelf is a rhetorical device with a two-

way axis of comparison: interest in form rising in direct

proportion as the eye goes up, interest in content bearing an

inverse proportion and, accordingly, dropping. Whether perhaps

Osip Emilievich spent long years trying to master the language of

the bottom shelf, we simply cannot know from the words which we

are told, nor is it our business to know, so far as this poet

teaches.

And indeed, why not write about these things which

Mandelstam knows so well, why always refer obliquely and with

some mixture of tongue in cheek humor and deep-seated horror to

the Jewish chaos of his origins, that timeless "swamp" from which

he describes himself now rising up, now falling into it again in

two early poems?4 Why always make things so difficult?

4 See Cavanagh's perplexed discussion of what she calls the "омут" poems (because this is how Mandelstam likes to refer to the Jewish roots in his poetry), but note that Cavanagh does not consider the shifting associations ofthis word already in the Stone collection, where in a poem dated at 1915 Mandelstam writes: Императорский виссон/И моторов колесницы -/В черном омуте столицы/Столпник-ангел вознесен. ("Императорский виссон...", p.86 in my edition). Are we then to understand that the capital St. Petersburg is a Jewish swamp as well? But what is more than that, and wherein Cavanagh's argument holds powerfully with a change of ground, is that a poet with precisecorrespondences of words to literalized metaphorical meanings is a Symbolist: when a rose is the symbol of love, the abstract concept of love becomes more literal even as the rose which represents it more abstract. Judaism conceived of as a physical characteristic, changing as it does in its precise associations around the mid-life axis of Mandelstam's career in the late 30's,

According to the premises which Mandelstam offers in his

essay "On the Conversation Partner", poetry is not that which

produces estrangement, but rather that which already at its very

outset in the author's mind begins with a making strange of his

relation to the reader. Почему же не живой конкретный собеседник,

не "представитель эпохи", не "друг в поколении", he asks in that

essay, quoting on the one hand from Gumilev's essay for the same

colloquium on "the moment of dialogue in poetry" for which

Mandelstam's essay was also written, and from the poem by

Baratynsky which originally suggests to him the idea of a "you"

addressed in the poem who is both real and also not any

physically present you in the sense that people can be physically

(or rather emotionally) present before one's eyes at the moment

of writing. Я отвечаю, he continues:

обращение к конкретному собеседнику обескрыливает стих, лишает его воздуха, полета. Воздух стиха есть неожиданное. Обращаясь к известному, мы можем сказать только известное. Это властный неколебимый психологический закон. Нельзя достаточно сильно подчеркнуть его значение для поэзии.

is nonetheless a Symbolist understanding of descent insofar that the Symbolists gave physical significance to abstract nouns.

Now the "providential conversation partner" whom Mandelstam

eventually deduces in this essay is none other than a personified

understanding of the second-person singular pronoun "ты". Of the

five examples of lines of poetry which Mandelstam cites to

illustrate his thesis, three display a right or a wrong balance

between the pronounce "I and thou": Balmont's poems leave no room

for the word "you" in the line, while Sologub's poems put such a

space of distance on the page between the I and the you that

Mandelstam imagines whole light years necessary for the I to

connect to the you. Baratynsky's lines, cited twice in the essay,

have a noble balance to them:

И, как нашел я друга в поколеньи,Читателя найду в потомстве я...

The "you" of the reader is understood in these lines, while the

proximity of the "I" and the "friend" in the generation balances

in a quadrangle of sorts, a kind of open cone or the neck and

body of a bottle, with the wide remove in the next line between

the "reader" and that same "I", as much divided by the reader's

posterity as brought together providentially in it. But of course

the main brunt of the "Conversation Partner" essay is not in its

discussion of immortal 19th century poets but in its analysis of

living 20th century ones. Balmont and Sologub are Mandelstam's

contemporaries, and yet he discusses the formal nature of their

poetry, from the point of view of what a providential

conversation partner would see. Giving the reasons why he does

not feel that they converse with him on equal grounds, Mandelstam

gives also a way of putting the Symbolist "I" and the Civic

Activists' (Nekrasov and company) "you" both down to size as

words existing on the level of the literal interpretation, words

on the level of the line. Sologub is distant from his reader for

the reason that it takes a whole half-stanza of his slow balanced

lines to get from the one who speaks and will die to the one who

is the mysterious friend and might be interested in that dying:

Друг мой тайный, друг мой дальный,Посмотри,Я - холодный и печальныйСвет зари.

But of course the mysterious addressee in a Symbolist's poem is

not the reader, but rather the world beyond. But Mandelstam

reduces this "you" of transcendent union as well, understanding

it as would someone who is divided from the cultural heritage of

the Symbolists, does not know what they were after and, with a

child's simplicity, assumes that "you" means "you": the lines are

for me.

The Jewish chaos of the bottom shelf does not interest

Mandelstam for the reason that he knows it all too well. These

books do not make good conversation partners because they are too

near the poet, too close to what he is himself and consequently

not as interesting as the eternal strangers of Russian literature

(although Omry Ronen does bring up interesting observations on

the similarities between Mandelstam's number symbolism and the

number symbolism of the Cabala). Knowing this part of the world

by smell, Mandelstam does not need to learn of it by eye. Whether

that means the knowledge is necessarily negative is up to the

given reader to establish.

Within the more productive category of the Russian strangers

there is another axis of comparison: kinship and color. Pushkin

is colorless because of all colors. Мой исаковский Пушкин был в

ряске никакого цвета, Mandelstam writes:

в гимназическом коленкоровом переплете, в черно-бурой вылинявшей ряске с землистым песочным оттенком; не боялся он ни пятен, ни чернил, ни огня, ни керосина.

This book begins with the "lycee" poetry, finds its way through

the sandy shade of its binding to the sea where Pushkin wrote his

famous "Прощание с морем", and then proceeds to all the days and

hours which both the author Pushkin and the reader Mandelstam

spent poring over it by gaslight and the light of midnight oil.

Why ought a book not be afraid of ink and fire, stains and

kerosine? The first two describe Pushkin's own method of work,

with hundreds of pages to a draft and long nighttime vigils by

the candle's flame. But the other two, the stains and kerosine,

pertain more to Mandelstam's way of reading, by the light of

street lamps and on muddy rides, taking his book with him

everywhere he went. The four items are interwoven into an

arabesque: не боялся он ни пятен, ни чернил, ни огня, ни

керосина. The principle of unity between the conversation partner

and the author who summons him into being is here expressed as

fully as anywhere in Mandelstam's works.

Following Pushkin is Lermontov in his gren-blue jacket,

which impresses Osip Emilievich irrationally as having something

"military" about it. Military uniforms in the Imperial Government

were not green: green was the color of the civil service,

famously so in literature, not least of all Gogol's works. There

is nothing about the jacket's color to suggest this impression,

only a feeling which Mandelstam attaches to the poet himself: У

Лермонтова переплет был зелено-голубой и какой-то военный,

недаром он был гусар. It is not the color, then, but something

else about the binding which gives Mandelstam the idea of a

military character about Lermontov; that something, of course, an

extrapolation from the inside of the book onto the outside.

Lermontov was a soldier to his very core, and, accordingly, it is

not possible to tell what it is about his binding exactly which

marks him for a soldier, just as there is no finding what it is

exactly that makes for such a man in making an acquaintance.

Character exists before language.

The brief note on Lermontov follows the expanded one on

Pushkin by a balance upon the axis of brotherhood:

Никогда он не казался мне братом или родственником Пушкина. А вот Гете и Шиллера я считал близнецами.

Following these two true German brothers are the two true Russian

brothers in prose, whom anyone from the 19th century to the 21st

would have taken to be Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, if Dostoevsky is

to be involved. But Mandelstam puts together Dostoevsky and

Turgenev as the two twin brothers on account of their jackets:

А что такое Тургенев и Достовеский? Это приложение к "Ниве".Внешность у них одинаковая, как у братьев. Переплеты картонные, обтянутые кожицей.These true brothers in Russia share their physical outsides, but

are opposed to one another in their contents. Dostoevsky is the

heavy one, with a ban upon him as if his covers were the two

sides of a gravestone; Turgenev the light and open one for all,

but impossible to believe, because where else do such peaceful

conversations and such bright days exist, except in the books of

that mild dreamer? What makes these books to be in their

appearance brothers is that both have the same cheap binding of a

weekly periodical press; while Tolstoy, not mentioned, had his

own printing press on his estate and produced excellent editions

of his works, nothing like those of the two periodical-bound

authors Mandelstam makes out for twins.

All the German books have perfect uniform bindings, which is

a product of their inner selves, much as the vision of the finch

in Voronezh a product of the same organic whole which makes for

his shape and colors, and hence discernible from a close look at

the finch itself. The inner brotherhood by content of the most

dissimilar German authors proceeds from the same quality in the

nature of their German language as does the outer brotherhood of

the equal bindings for them all.

The axis of comparison remains, but each time the nature of

the opposition changes. The final book in this series is that of

Nadson's, which has no cover because it has no contents. Instead,

Mandelstam describes the pages of this book:

А не хотите ли ключ эпохи, книгу, раскалившуюся от прикосновений, книгу, которая ни за что не хотела умирать и в узком гробу девяностых годов лежала как живая, книгу, листы которой преждевременно пожелтели, от чтения ли, от солнца ли дачных сскамеек, чья первая страница являет черты юноши с вдохновенным зачесом волос, ставшие иконой?

Although the "narrow grave of the nineties" could be understood

as the book's small body, with the pages contained inside, the

body which is now its cover is so little related to the pages of

the book that the book itself lives in a coffin,

indistinguishable from the coffin of its times just as the nature

of the yellowing of the pages is indistinguishable, whether it is

from reading or from being left open on the benches of summer

homes.

Gogol does not enter into the line of authors because the

fire image would have become too difficult to manage, not fitting

in on the axis of comparison where Pushkin's fire of creation

becomes the self-immolating flame of the 1890's moths circulating

around the altar of the reader's table in Mandelstam's myth about

Nadson. Gogol's portrait is written into that of this young man

with the wooden face and the features of a monk, who sang his

"ideal" and his "Baal" anywhere he went, varying almost not at

all in his writings. But Gogol comes too early in time and simply

does not fit in.