"The burden of memories": towards a Bloomlan analysis of influence in Osip Mandelstam1 s Voronezh Notebooks Andrew W. M. Reynolds Merton College, Oxford Trinity Term, 1995 Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. B SH3HH cxoaa Hacrynnaa repotwecKasi apa. CJJOBO nxorb H xneG. OHO paajiexser yvacTi xxeoa H BAOTH: crpajiaHHe. JlnsH roaoMHu. Eme roxojiHee rocyaapCTBo. Ho ecrt wevro Goxee roJiOMHoe: spews?. Bpeua xover noxparb rocyjtapCTBO. . . . KTO noMHHuer CJIOBO H noKaxer ero BpeUBHH, K3K CBSiaeHHHK eBXapHCTHK, —— GyseT BTOpbOd MncycoM HasHHOu. Her HHvero 6oaee roaojworo, yew coBpeueHHoe rocyjiapcTBO, a roaoonoe rocyjjapcTBo CTpaonee roxoMHoro veJioBexa. CocrpajiaHHe K rocysapcrsy, CSIOBO, oGsecTBeHHtiti nyrb H ROABHT noara. OSIP MANDELSTAM, "Slovo i kul'tura" And how could I endure to be a man, If man were not also poet and reader of riddles and the redeemer of chance! To redeem the past and to transform every "It was" into an "I wanted It thus!" that alone do I call redemption! This, yes, this alone Is revenge Itself: the will's antipathy towards time and time's "It was". [. . . ] "And that the law of time, that time must devour her children, Is justice Itself": thus madness preached, "Things are ordered morally according to Justice and punishment. Oh, where Is redemption from the stream of things and from the punishment 'existence'?" Thus madness preached. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Thus Spake Zarathustra Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: It survives In the valley of Its saying where executives Would never want to tamper; It flows south From ranches of Isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die In; It survives, A way of happening, a mouth. W. H. AUDEN, "In memory of W. B. Yeats" BHMHO, sapon ne npoxojjHT Meaejienbe STHX ryO, H sepmwia KOJIOBDOMHT, Ha cpyS. OSIP MANDELSTAM, "Kholodok shchekochet temya" Acknowledgements I should like to thank my supervisor, Professor G. S. Smith, for his careful reading of my manuscript, helpful comments and, above all, his generous support and encouragement. Useful dialogues on Mandelstamian and other literary matters were had with Victor Erofeyev, Wolf Iro, Pavel Nerler, Rachel Polonsky, N. S. Thompson and, in particular, Sven Spieker. The Librarian of the Slavonic Department of the Taylor Institution Library in Oxford, David Howells has been most helpful, as have all his staff. Grants from Merton College, Oxford, the Taylor Institution, Oxford, and Queens' College, Cambridge enabled me to attend Mandelstam conferences in Russia. The award of a Senior Heath Harrison Travelling Scholarship by the University of Oxford and a British Council Scholarship enabled me to spend a year pursuing research at Moscow State University. I am most grateful to the Warden and Fellows of Merton College, Oxford, in particular the Revd. Mark Everitt, and the President and Fellows of Queens' College, Cambridge, for their support. I had the good fortune to begin my study of Russian language and literature with a most inspiring and conscientious teacher, Bob Howells, at Dynevor Comprehensive School, Swansea; I am most grateful to him for his support and dearly value our friendship. I am more grateful than I can say to my parents Michael and Heather Reynolds. Most of all, I wish to express my gratitude, apologies and love to my incomparable wife 01'ya and inimitable daughter Christina, who have had to bear the brunt of my excessive devotion to Mandelstam (and Bloom). NOTE ON THE TEXT I have used the transliteration conventions of Oxford Slavonic Papers (British Standard 2979: 1958), omitting diacritics and using -y for final B, Hft, uB in proper names. Exceptions to these conventions have been made for certain proper names which have conventional English spelling, most significantly in the case of Mandelstam1 s own name. However, when transliterating Russian-language references (books, articles, etc.) to Mandelstam I have rendered the name as Mandel' shtam. Contents Chapter One: On the Nature of the Word The death of the author? The subtextual approach to Mandelstam in the light of current theories of intertextuality and influence Chapter Two: Trlstla. 58 The burden of the past: defences of poetry in the work of Osip Mandelstam and Harold Bloom Chapter Three: Fathers and Sons 152 Mandelstam and Pushkin: Cultural and Personal Mythologies Chapter Four: Crime and Punishment 248 Mandelstam1 s "poetics of contradiction" and the problem of the "Ode to Stalin" Chapter Five: Resurrection 310 The death of the poet? Mandelstam1 s self-canonization in "Stikhi o neizvestnom soldate" and his challenge to "world culture". Notes 354 Bibliography 393 "The burden of memories": towards a Bloomian analysis of influence in Osip Mandelstam1 s Voronezh Notebooks Andrew W. M Reynolds Merton College, Oxford Trinity Term, 1995 Abstract The Voronezh poetry of Osip Mandelstam (1935-1937) is viewed by many critics as one of the most heroic of Russian literature's many confrontations between the poet and the tyrant. Recently, however, Mandelstam's image has seemed to be compromised by the existence of poems revealing a more loyalist Mandelstam, in particular an Ode written in January 1937 in praise of Stalin. Critics are divided as to whether this poem is an expression of genuine praise and loyalty, whether it was written out of pragmatic considerations, or whether it is in fact an attack, in Aesopian language, on Stalin. This thesis argues that the lack of critical concensus on this and other matters is caused in large part by certain dangers inherent in the main method (intertextual analysis) used to study Mandelstam. The thesis therefore has a dual focus: it investigates theories of intertextuality and influence as issues of central importance to current literary debates, and attempts to establish an eclectic theory which fuses elements of various approaches to intertextuality and influence; but it does so in order that the poetry of Mandelstam and other Russian poets may be better understood. The thesis provides a detailed examination of Harold Bloom's theory of influence and applies it to Mandelstam's poetry, and argues that it is possible that it may be applied fruitfully to other Russian poets. Yet Russian poetry also provides a corrective to Bloom1 s tendency to see poetic influence as almost exclusively a relationship between literary texts. The thesis argues that Mandelstam1 s poetic precursor is Pushkin, and that his sense of being Pushkin' & heir seems to place him under some sort of obligation to imitate Pushkin's life and death as well as his art an extreme case of zhlznetvorchestvo ("life-creation"). Mandelstam's most significant description of his own death as an imitation of Pushkin's is found in his "Stikhi o neizvestnom soldate" ("Verses on the Unknown Soldier"). Bloom's theory helps one realise that the "Ode to Stalin" is only a part of Mandelstam's rewriting of Pushkin's own uncertainties in his relationship with Nicholas I; one may view the "Ode to Stalin" and "Stikhi o neizvestom soldate" as a single text equivalent to Pushkin's examination in Mednyl vsadnik (The Bronze Horseman) of the conflicting claims of state and individual. Mandelstam's willingness to give the devil some of his best words is thus not incompatible with the anti-Stalin conclusions reached by his work taken as a whole. Abstract Two The poetry written by Osip Mandelstam between 1935 and 1937 while in exile in Voronezh (the exile being the punishment for the crime of writing an epigram denouncing Stalin), poetry apparently criticizing both Stalin and the Soviet regime and asserting the poet's right to practice his gift freely, has traditionally been seen as one of this century's most powerful defences of poetry. For Western and Russian readers alike, Mandelstam has become an exemplary figure, his poetry a confirmation of the belief that the pen is mightier than the sword. Recently, however, Mandelstam1 s image as perhaps the most heroic of the few writers to resist Stalin has been threatened by evidence to the contrary, most notably by the discovery of an Ode he wrote in praise of Stalin. The opening chapter of the thesis suggests that one of the main reasons for the lack of consensus concerning both the meaning of these "Stalin" poems and Mandelstam's politics as a whole is that the most common approach to Mandelstam, an intertextual approach known as the subtextual method, provides considerable freedom for critics to read meanings into the poems. As Mandelstam's poems do appear to be highly intertextual constructs, this thesis investigates whether other approaches based on theories of intertextuality and influence may help solve these and other problems where the subtexual approach appears to have failed somewhat. To this end, the opening chapter proceeds to survey contemporary work in the fields of intertextuality and influence, and it becomes apparent that students of Mandelstam's work have too readily assumed that intertextuality and influence are synonymous, and have failed to distinguish between the different versions of intertextuality currently on offer. Moreover, they have failed to investigate whether there may be an alternative intertextual approach to the subtextual method. The thesis examines the relationship between theories of influence and intertextuality, and the textual phenomena they investigate, by focusing on the work of the leading American theorist of influence Harold Bloom. It is argued that Bloom1 s theory, in which a significant degree of authorial control is retained, is well suited for the study of Russian literature, where post- structuralist notions of the "death of the author" seem trivial in the light of the dangers faced by Russian writers in a culture whose central literary myth is "the death of the poet". Bloom's ideas have received only a superficial treatment from those few Slavists who have tried to make use of his theories, and therefore a detailed Investigation of Bloom's work, using examples taken from Mandelstam1 s poetry to illustrate many of Bloom's arguments, Is undertaken, in the hope that this will establish that Bloom's techniques may be of use not just for the study of Mandelstam, but for the study of other Russian poets too. It Is argued that Bloom1 s theory of the anxiety of influence, in which a poet has to creatively misread his poetic father's work in order to become "original", and in particular his complex concept of transumption, can be of benefit in understanding the links between the various strong individual talents in the tradition of Russian literature, as well as in establishing criteria for the identification and verification of literary allusions. Chapter Two begins by investigating whether Bloom's theory is relevant and applicable to the study of Mandelstam. It is shown that at first it may indeed seem that, for a number of reasons, Bloom1 s approach is not well-suited to the study of Mandelstam in particular. Mandelstam does not seem to suffer from the burden of the past; Bloom seems to claim that allusion is unimportant, whereas Mandelstam's poems are highly allusive; Mandelstam has no obvious poetic father. On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that Mandelstam does have an ambivalent attitude towards the past, and that Bloom does think that certain types of allusion can help in analysing poetic influence. A detailed examination is undertaken of the key elements of what is for Bloom the most important revisionary ratio, "transumption". A comparison is drawn between Bloom's description of transumptive techniques and Mandelstam's analysis of Dante's poetic in Razgovor o Dante (Conversation about Dante). It Is suggested that a study of the various aspects of the trope of transumption can help explain some of the difficulties to be found in Mandelstam's poetry; and that a study of Russian literature's "transumptive chains" may be of use in the writing of the literary history of Russian poetry and the study of individual poets alike. Chapter Two concludes, and Chapter Three opens, by examining the remaining obstacle to a fully Bloomian reading of Mandelstam: the problem of identifying the poetic father. In Akhmatova's opinion, the fact that Mandelstam did not seem to have a "teacher" was a unique fact in world literature. The thesis argues that in fact Mandelstam did have such a teacher, Pushkin. It is stressed, moreover, that even if one examines the possibility that Mandelstam's precursor is Pushkin from a Bloomian viewpoint, there is no need to assume that Mandelstam1 s ambivalence towards Pushkin is personal or conscious: the overidealistic view of influence held by lovers of Russian poetry need not clash with a Bloomian view, as the anxiety Bloom has in mind is first and foremost a linguistic anxiety, the means by which a poem becomes a poem by reacting against its precursor text(s). Another common mistake made by critics of Bloom's method is analysed: the assumption that one will always be able to see obvious signs of the anxiety of influence. There are, however, some areas of Bloom's theory which seem inadequate when applied to Russian poetry. There does seem to be more of a personal element in a Russian poet's relation to his precursor than the Bloomian theory would suggest. A central feature of Russian Modernism was its cult of Pushkin, but it would appear that, for Mandelstam at least, Pushkin was far more than a source of allusions for his poetry; or, rather, that it appears to be that the allusions indicate that the task of following in Pushkin's poetic path takes Mandelstam outside his texts and into an imitation of his fate. In Chapter Three it is suggested that the Russian poet' s anxiety before his precursor may in part arise from his understanding that a Russian poet becomes canonical above all when he becomes a sacrificial victim, when he suffers or even dies for his art. Mandelstam appears to have seen his destiny as mirroring Pushkin's, one hundred years on; his construction in his poetry of various myths of the death of the poet is underwritten by a three-fold identification with kenotic models. Mandelstam identifies himself with the values, with the "heroic character" of Russian literature and the Russian intelligentsia as a whole; more importantly, he views his life and death as an latltatlo Chrlstl; most important of all, he has to rewrite and relive Pushkin's art, life and death in his own. A detailed examination of the famous "Wolf" poem, written in 1931 but only completed to Mandelstam1 s satisfaction in Voronezh, serves as an illustration both of the issues in literary theory which have been examined in the thesis, and of the more specifically Russian theme of the "death of the poet". It would seem that one of the reasons why critics tend to disagree as to Mandelstam's meanings is that he uses arguments taken from different poems to create a dialogic text, an investigation of the pro and contra of a given political, moral, or metaphysical question. In "Wolf, as in a number of Mandelstam' s poems, the main polemic is with Pasternak, and concerns the role the modern Russian poet ought to play; Pushkin, as ever, provides Mandelstam with his answer. Chapter Four provides a detailed examination of the central problem facing Mandelstam scholars at present: how best to deal with what appear to be Mandelstam' s expressions, in both his life and his art, of loyalty to the regime. The reason why this matter is of such importance is discussed: the "Mandelstam myth" is so important to both Western and Russian defences of poetry that any threat to it has far-reaching consequences. The different readings given by critics of the so-called "Ode to Stalin" are analysed, and it is shown that Mandelstam critics disagree as to whether the poem is a genuine act of praise or whether, in fact, it contains a coded attack on Stalin. It is argued that the conflicting readings of Mandelstam's loyalist poetry thus far given are equally unconvincing and unsatisfactory: critics either ignore the surface meaning completely in a search for Aesopian messages, or neglect the evidence that points towards a more heroic Mandelstam in claiming that the "Ode to Stalin" is Mandelstam's final word on the subject. It is suggested that there may be a way of resolving the main problems, one based on this thesis' s claim that Mandelstam1 s identification with Pushkin lies at the heart of his poetry. As one might expect, it was in 1937, during the centenary celebrations of Pushkin's death, that Mandelstam1 6 identification with Pushkin was most acute. Chapter Five argues that Mandelstam viewed his own personal and poetic situation through the prism of Pushkin1 s poems on his own ambiguous relationship to Nicholas I. Pushkin's most important attempt to define his attitude to the monarchy was his narrative poem Mednyl vsadnlk (The Bronze Horseman), in which the conflicting claims of the state and the individual are investigated. If one sees Mandelstam's "Ode to Stalin" as Mandelstam1 s attempt to argue the case for Stalin, his other main poem of 1937, "Stikhi o nezivestnom soldate" ("Verses on the Unknown Soldier"), can be seen as arguing the case against. Indeed, it is claimed that Mandelstam needed to write his own version of Mednyl vsadnik for various reasons, not least to sum up his life's work and create a poem containing a prophecy of his own death, as Pushkin had done, and that he wrote his response to Pushkin's poema in two works because it was safer both politically and poetically to do so. In this way, there would be less evidence that the "Ode to Stalin" only put one side of the story, and Mandelstam1 s poem would be not seem overdependent (and therefore unoriginal) on the earlier text for its images and themes. It is unlikely that Mandelstam was fully aware that his poems represented a modern-day Mednyl vsadnlk, but the Bloomian approach allows one to detect the echoes of Pushkin's text in Mandelstam1 s; a few examples of such echoes are provided. Such a reading enables one to assert that the poems praising Stalin do not undermine the Mandelstam myth, as it provides an additional argument as to why these poems, and in particular the "Ode to Stalin", have to be seen against the wider context of Mandelstam's Voronezh poetry as a whole, and indeed of his life and heroic death, a death prepared for in and by his poetry. At the end of "Stikhi o neizvestnom soldate" Mandelstam claims his Pushkinian heritage, earned by his readiness to die for his art. The thesis concludes by asking whether, with changing political and literary circumstances in Russia, the heroic model still has such resonance. It is claimed that Mandelstam's fusion of life and art, his belief that poetry can make something happen, that, in his words, "poetry is power" when one can be killed for writing it, is still relevant not only in Russia, but also, despite what appear to be the very different circumstances, for readers in the West too. Chapter One: On the Nature of the Word The death of the author? The subtextual approach to Handelstarn in the light of current theories of intertextuality and influence. JimepaTypnoro renesnca no3ra, ero JiHTeparypnux HCTOIHHKOB, ero poflCTBa H cpaay BUBOMHT nac na rsepMyio novsy. Ha Bonpoc, XOT6J1 CK33aTb H03T, KpHTHK MOXGT H He OTBGTHTb, HO Ha Bonpoc, oTKyjia OH npnmeji, orBeiarb oGaaan. . . OSIP MANDELSTAM, "A. Blok" He nojipaxaft: csoeoBpaaen M COGCTBeHHUM BeJlHVHeM BeJIHK, MoparoB JIH, SleKcnnpoB n» JJBOAHHK Jlocajjen Tbi: He JinGar C HspaHJieu neBuy OMHH Aa ne TsopHT ce6e Kyunpa OH! Korjia TGOSI, Mnm<eBHV BjioxHOBeHHtift, a aacraio y BafipoHOBux nor, ft Ayuaio: TIQKJIOHHHK ynnxeHHUti! Boccranb, Boccranb H BCHOMHH: cau TU 6or! EVGENY BARATYNSKY, "Ne podrazhai: svoeobrazen genii" He cpaBHHBati: jn-iBynwti necpaBHHM. OSIP MANDELSTAM, "Ne sravnivai: zhivushchii nesravnim" He noBTopnti Myma TBOX Gorara Toro, ITO QUJIO CKaaano Koraa-ro, Ho, Mower Surb, no33Hx caua unrara. ANNA AKHMATOVA, "Ne povtoryai dusha tvoya bogata" The poetry written by Osip Mandelstam between 1935 and 1937 in his Voronezh exile the exile being the punishment for the crime of writing an epigram denouncing Stalin has traditionally been