Brown Clarence - Journey To Armenia & Conversation About Dante

Osip Mandelstam visited Armenia in 1930, and during the eight months of his stay he rediscovered his poetic voice and was inspired to write an experimental meditation on the country and its ancient culture. Armenia brought him back to his true self, a self depending on the inner ear which could never play a poet false. There was everything congenial to him in this country of red and ochre landscape, ancient churches, and resonant pottery (Henry Gifford). Conversation about Dante, Mandelstams incomparable apologia for poetic freedom and challenge to the Bolshevik establishment, was dictated by the poet to his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, in 19345, during the last phase of his itinerant life. It has close ties to the Journey.

Osip Mandelstam was born in Warsaw in 1891 and raised in St Petersburg. He published his first collection of poems, Stone, in 1913, and joined with Akhmatova in the Acmeist movement. Arrested in 1934 for an epigram he had written about Stalin, Mandelstam died in a gulag near Vladivostok in 1938.

Sidney Monas is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Texas, Austin. Henry Gifford was Winterstoke Professor of English Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Bristol University. Clarence Brown is the author of several works on Osip Mandelstam, is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and editor of The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader.

In 1930, at the end of the decade that brought Mandelstam more unhappiness than any other, Bukharin was able to arrange for the poet and his wife to visit Armenia. Ten years before he had seen its neighboring country, Georgia, and written about the enduring appeal for Russian poets of the Georgian myth, first proclaimed by Pushkin. At that time it had struck him as curious that their promised land should not have been Armenia. This he explained by the attraction of the Georgian temper, variously manifested in its art a kind of melancholy and festive headiness in which is plunged the soul of this people. Pasternak in 1931 was to be carried away by that headiness and the congeniality of the Georgian poets who became his friends. It was the experience of going to Georgia with Zinaida Neuhaus, afterward his second wife, that he celebrated in a book of poems called Second Birth, and Georgia would remain for him a second homeland.

In this, as in so much else, Mandelstam and Pasternak were near to one another and very different. The group of Georgian Symbolist poets known as The Blue Horns, two of whose leaders were to form close personal ties with Pasternak, seemed to Mandelstam naive in the neglect of their own culture. He had been much impressed by the paintings of Niko Pirosmanishvili, the folk artist about whom a sensitive and endearing film, Pirosmani, was made in Soviet Georgia a few years ago. Pirosmanishvilis powerful art with its simple effects is related to the real victory of Georgian art over the orient through the work of anonymous painters to be seen in the national museum. Pasternak was inspired by the high culture of Georgian poets fully at home in Russian and Western literature. Mandelstam sought out the abiding traditions of Georgia, an emblem for which he found in the local custom of preserving wine in long narrow amphorae which were then buried.

He turned to Armenia because it had preceded Georgia as an outpost of the Classical and Christian world. Both these countries are in the region of Colchis, where the Argonauts sailed with Jason to get back the Golden Fleece. They had been early converted to Christianity: the Armenians about the year 300 were the first people to adopt it as a state religion. In making his journey to this ancient civilization which had rejected the bearded cities of the east, Mandelstam, as his widow says, went back to his own origins. The journey ended five years of poetic silence, and the sensation he called in one poem the quivering of Colchis that is, an awareness of his own part in a culture derived from the Mediterranean world was to be always the necessary and unfailing prelude to selfless song.

In 1926 Mandelstam published some poems for children, but the major stream of his poetry had run dry in the previous year. There ensued a time of dejection and uncertainty, during which he lacked the assurance of being right in his values without which the imagination could not build. In the Journey to Armenia he tells how as a child he first sensed the rudiments of architecture from pine cones, and the demon of architecture had thereafter accompanied him all his life. It was for Mandelstam the instrument of order in art and society, and also in the natural world. It answered the demands of an intellect seeking unity in all things. He had found its ideal expression in a Gothic cathedral such as Notre Dame, which he called a celebration of physiology. What he admired in the Middle Ages was an aristocratic intimacy that links all people, so alien in spirit to the equality and fraternity of the Great Revolution. Every craftsman, every clerk had the sense of his worth; his specific gravity was defined for him. The individual resembled the stone in medieval architecture asking to be let into the groined arch to participate in the joyous cooperative action of its fellows.

These ideas Mandelstam had already committed to paper in the years before the Great Revolution of his own country, although the essay that develops them (The Morning of Acmeism) was not actually published until 1919. Their doctrine, from which Mandelstam never departed, would have had an even less favorable hearing then than at the time of its first formulation. As late as 1931 he in fact protested in a poem that he would not give up his loyalty to the raznochintsy or radical commoners of the nineteenth century. But it took him very little time to realize that the October Revolution had brought in an era of crushing conformity, and he could sense everywhere the unclean goat smell issuing from the enemies of the word. In 1921 Gumilyov, leader ten years before of the Acmeist movement, was shot for his alleged participation in a White conspiracy. The two other most notable adherents to Acmeism, Akhmatova and Mandelstam himself, were effectively isolated. Although he maintained that classical poetry is the poetry of revolution, he found himself treated as an unprofitable survivor from an effete culture. It is true that books of his poetry were published in 1922 and 1923, and an augmented edition was issued in 1928. He was also able to bring out his autobiographical sketches, The Noise of Time, in 1923, which were republished in 1928 with his story The Egyptian Stamp. And in that same year there appeared a selection of critical essays, About Poetry. Yet the publications of 1928 did not signalize the belated arrival of Mandelstam in Soviet literature. The good fortune of that time was not to be repeated, and with the gradual weakening of Bukharins protection Mandelstam would become virtually an outcast. During the 1920s his principles compelled him to accept most features of the Soviet regime, but the Soviet regime could not accept Mandelstam. His widow makes it clear that to a large extent he had believed in the revolution, and was not content (as many people supposed) to turn his back on reality. For that very reason, during the five years of silence preceding his journey to Armenia, Mandelstam set himself painfully to undertake a revaluation of his beliefs.

Matthew Arnold praises Burke for an exceptional courage and honesty which allowed him to admit he could have been wrong about the French Revolution. This he called living by ideas: