Osip Mandelstam
from The Voronezh Notebooks
Translated by John High and Matvei Yankelevich
The provenance of Osip Mandelstam’s patriotic verses has long been a matter of controversy, in part due to the difficult textual history of all of his later works, but also because of prevailing ideological interpretations of the poet’s oeuvre. One poem, published in quite varied forms since its first print appearance in Russian and in English translation in the 1960s, has been the source of much debate as to Mandelstam’s intentions. The following is a translation of this poem in its complete and uncensored form, made according to a post-Soviet collection edited by Pavel Nerler of the Mandelstam Society in Moscow.
If I’m taken captive by our enemies
And if I’m not spoken to by the people,
If I’m stripped of every last thing:
The right to breathe and to open doors,
And to insist that there will be being,
And that the people, like judges, judge;
If they have the guts to cage me like a beast
And throw my rations on the floor before me,
I won’t take it silently, won’t stifle the pain,
But instead I’ll draw what I’m free to draw,
And, having struck the naked bell of the cell wall
And woken the enemy darkness’ corner,
I’ll harness ten oxen to pull my voice,
And plow my hand through the darkness;
And in the depths of the vigilant night
Eyes will flash for earth, the low-wage worker,
And I’ll fall with the weight of an entire harvest,
With the terseness of a far-racing oath,
Into the eyes of the clenched legion of brothers;
And a flock of fiery years will descend,
Lenin will shimmer past as a heavy rainstorm,
And on this earth that will evade decaying,
Stalin will wake up both life and reason.—February to March, 1937
Without going into the complexities of the poem in its entirety, the final lines might seem shocking when we think of Stalin’s fatal effect on the poet’s life. In her memoirs, Nadezhda Mandelstam insisted that in the last line her husband had intended gubit’ (to destroy) in place of budit’ (to awaken), but fearing censorship created, at her suggestion, the more placating variant. Here is how the last stanza would read in what she claimed to be the authorial version:
And a flock of fiery years will descend,
Lenin will shimmer past as a heavy rainstorm,
And on this earth that will evade decaying,
Stalin will destroy both life and reason.
In this version, Stalin is pictured as what he really was—a killer and a psychopath. However, this revised or variant ending doesn’t make sense in the context of the whole poem, nor when we recall that it was written very close in time to his “Ode” to Stalin. Most scholars and editors of Mandelstam’s poetry (including I. Semenko, P. Nerler, M. Gasparov) seem to agree that these are not really the lines that Mandelstam wrote, but that Mandelstam actually wrote a poem of praise: “Stalin will wake up both life and reason.” *
The truth is that in many ways, like other writers of his generation, Mandelstam was caught in a complex political crossfire, and he was certainly not the only one to attempt to save himself by writing patriotic paeans to the Soviet regime, or to Stalin himself. What’s worse, or perhaps what is most shocking, is that Mandelstam did so brilliantly — one can understand why he was proud of the poem and showed it off to his friends. Given the similar sounds of gubit’ (to destroy) and budit’ (to awaken) it is also possible that Mandelstam believed that those who knew him well would understand the inherent play of meaning.
After his death, perhaps embarrassed by what can be seen as Mandelstam’s approval of Stalin in the poem, Nadezhda Mandelstam tried to hide the existence of the poem and then sought to alter it in an effort to preserve what she perceived to be her husband’s honor. As a result, she also preserved the misguided notion of Mandelstam’s unwavering non-conformist and anti-Soviet stance, an ideology of resistance that was imposed on the poet by a different historical context (after Stalin’s death and the destruction of the cult of personality). And, as naturally follows, this ideology is still commonly believed to be essential to our understanding of Mandelstam as a poet and serves as an underlying basis for most translations of his works. In this case and in many others, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs, commentary, and revisions of her husband’s poems affected the way that Clarence Brown and other translators, as well as many Russian scholars, interpreted Mandelstam’s political position. In a way, she was telling the West what it wanted to hear: that Mandelstam was a poet who stood up to Stalin. To this day, most still insist on hearing Mandelstam and his poetry in this heroic fashion.
Mandelstam’s first book, Stone, was published in 1913. It was around that time that he became recognized as one of the outstanding poets of his generation. He was a member of the Guild of Poets (Tsekh poetov) — with Anna Akhmatova, Sergei Gorodetsky, Nikolai Gumilev, Vladimir Narbut, and Mikhail Zenkevich, among others — and one of the leading exponents of their poetic school, Acmeism, a movement in opposition to both Russian Symbolism and Russian Futurism. (The doctrines of Acmeism could in many ways be compared to those of the American and British Imagist poets.) After the October Revolution and the Civil War a new state emerged and the cultural landscape changed drastically. Those of his colleagues who remained in Russia joined up with official Soviet culture (with varying degrees of hesitation), or were persecuted for remaining true to the bohemian lifestyle, aesthetics and ethics of Modernism (a period typically referred to as the Silver Age). Mandelstam was either unwilling or unable to change his writing for the sake of the Socialist cause and was therefore marginalized to a great extent as a cultural figure. He was published in a few Leningrad journals, but these, too, were marginalized after Moscow had become the cultural and political capital. It seems that Mandelstam survived in the Soviet system as long as he did because of the influence and help of such important political and literary figures as Nikolai Bukharin and Boris Pasternak. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Mandelstam often found himself in troubled waters as he was an irritant to many lesser writers who belonged to the literary establishment. But there were those who did everything to help him, from buying him clothes to petitioning the Bolshevik bosses on his behalf.
Breaking under the strain of constant threats to his career, Mandelstam began challenging the regime outwardly: In one poem, from the winter of 1933, he insinuated that Stalin was the “wolf” of Russian culture. In 1934 he wrote a poem depicting the dictator’s body in the language of “worms” and “cockroaches.” “One gets it in the balls,” Mandelstam wrote of victims of the political struggle, “the other in the forehead, one split between the eyes.” Though he did not intend to make this poem public, someone in the small group of close friends to whom he had read it, turned out to be an informant. He was then arrested and tortured in the infamous Lyubianka prison in the center of Moscow. Having given the names of everyone in his circle of poets, Mandelstam was guilt-ridden and attempted suicide on two occasions. If it were not for the interventions of Pasternak, who was telephoned and questioned by Stalin directly, Mandelstam would have surely been sent to the camps. Instead, after a series of prison transfers, Mandelstam was sent into exile in the city of Voronezh in central Russia.
The body of work that he wrote during his Voronezh exile consists of three “notebooks.” The first was written from April to August 1935, the second from December 6, 1936 to the end of February 1937, and the third from the beginning of March to May 4, 1937. Mandelstam wrote the Voronezh poems primarily on his walks, memorizing the poems and putting them down on paper later, often with Nadezhda’s help. Their transmission was usually clandestine, as his poetry was by then strictly forbidden. The first eleven poems selected for this publication are taken from the first Notebook, the last two are believed to have belonged to the second and third notebook, respectively.
Mandelstam referred to the poems written after 1930 as “the new poetry” — a complex fusion of classicism, high modernism and Soviet popular culture. The poetry of The Voronezh Notebooks is layered with references to nineteenth-century literature, the crisis of the emerging Soviet regime, and the metaphorically disguised codes of the poet’s “resurrection” in verse. The poetry of these last few years is also heavily laden with a foreboding sense of the poet’s inevitable demise, as if death were very close. Indeed, Mandelstam died in a transit camp near Vladivostok on December 27, 1938.
In the period of 1935-1937, Mandelstam wrote letters to the Soviet Writers Union and to Stalin himself, in an effort to reinstate himself in their good graces and to save himself and his wife. To the same end, he also wrote poems like his infamous “Ode” to Stalin and the poem given above in its entirety (now thought to belong to the second notebook), perhaps trying to give evidence of his political redemption. Mandelstam wanted his poetry published and accepted by the regime that eventually destroyed him. He did not relinquish hope of returning to publication in these darkening conditions, but unlike Pasternak, he failed to navigate his poetry into “acceptable” Soviet culture.
In translating The Voronezh Notebooks based on the most recent editions and new commentaries, we are attempting to alter at least slightly the prevailing reception of Mandelstam among English-language readers. Western translations have, for the most part, insisted on a received perception of Mandelstam as a hero, an arch rival to Stalin, a quiet flag-carrier of a kind of freedom our own political regimes and academic departments could accept. With the recent opening of KGB files and the discovery of formerly lost letters and renditions of the poems, it becomes clear that Mandelstam was as conflicted and ambivalent about his country’s leadership and ideological underpinnings as many of us are about our own.**
—John High and Matvei Yankelevich
* Mikhail L. Gasparov, in his book O. Mandel’shtam: Grazhdanskaia lirika 1937 goda (Moscow: RGGU, 1996) comments on the budit’ / gubit’ controvesy in detail (pp. 115-16). According to Gasparov, doubt about the authenticity of the version gubit’ first arose in print in the 1980 edition of the Voronezh notebooks edited by Viktoria Schweitzer for Ardis, the most important US publisher of Russian books, and dissident authors in particular, in the 1970s and ‘80s. The opinion that the variant version (gubit’) was Nadezhda Mandelstam’s fabrication was expressed most strongly by Irina Semenko (1921-1987) in her posthumously published commentary to Mandelstam’s later poetry included in the volume Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo O.E. Mandel’shtama (Voronezh: Izd-vo Voronezhskogo universiteta, 1990), and by Emma Gershtein in an essay published in the same volume.
** The poems that follow were translated by John High and Matvei Yankelevich with the exception of “[A five-headed day],” “Kama,” and “Stanzas,” which were translated by John High.