`The Man Without Contemporaries'

One of the strangest, most sadly ironic intersections in literary history occurred in Moscow in 1923. No one at the time could have recognized its momentousness, for the principles were obscure functionaries of a nascent totalitarian system. Lenin was still alive and Stalin, though already absorbing lethal energy like a newly spawned hurricane, was an undistinguished bureaucrat. A Russian journalist interviewed a party hack from Southeast Asia and the resulting profile was published in the Dec. 23 edition of the Soviet weekly, The Flame.

The 32-year-old journalist was Osip Mandelstam, already recognized as a significant poet and essayist, later to be known, in the words of Arthur A. Cohen (in Osip Emilievich Mandelstam: An Essay in Antiphon), as “the greatest and most difficult poet of modern Russia.” His subject was Nguyen Ai Quoc, 33, better known by one of the many Communist Party pseudonyms he adopted, Ho Chi Minh – “Uncle Ho,” future leader of North Vietnam. At the time of their meeting, Ho was a Comintern member representing the Annamese people.

As published in Mandelstam’s The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, his profile is less than three pages long. Its admiring tone alerts us to the Bolshevik shadow cast across its paragraphs. Also striking is the way Ho comes across like one of today’s trendy, Third World-worshipping Leftists:

“Nguyen Ai Quoc pronounces the word `civilization’ with disgust. He has travelled throughout most of the colonial world, he has been in northern and central Africa, and he has seen enough. He often uses the word `brothers’ in conversation. By `brothers’ he means Negroes, Hindus, Syrians, Chinese.”

Some of Mandelstam’s language sounds like Susan Sontag at her most criminally foolish:

“Nguyen Ai Quoc’s temperament radiated nothing but innate tact and delicacy. European civilization operates with bayonets and liquor, concealing them beneath the Catholic missionary’s soutane. Nguyen Ai Quoc breathes culture, not European culture, but perhaps the culture of the future.”

The editors of The Black Book of Communism, an indispensable reference work, estimate that between 85 million and 100 million people were murdered in the name of the Marxist-Leninist gospel – Mandelstam among them. By nature, Mandelstam ceded authority only to his muse. In 1933, during the Great Famine, he wrote and recited a poem lampooning Stalin, later called “a 16-line death sentence.” Six months later he was arrested for the first time, but for the final 15 years of his life he and his wife were plagued by poverty, homelessness and official harassment. By now, it’s a depressingly familiar story. Mandelstam was forbidden to publish. He and his wife, in one of the most moving of love stories, committed his work to memory. He was arrested again in 1938 and sentenced to a labor camp in Siberia. He died there a few months later, on Dec. 26. Mandelstam’s brother learned of his death only after three years.

Ho’s future was different. He eventually returned to Southeast Asia, tailored a popular hybrid of Communism and Vietnamese nationalism, fought against the Japanese, French and Americans, and contributed to the deaths of 1 million of his countrymen. He died in 1969, more than 30 years after Mandelstam His embalmed body is on display in a mausoleum in the city that now bears his name. No one knows the fate of Mandelstam’s body.

In the early 1970s, Guy Davenport, whose work stands as a reliable guide to civilization’s gifts to all thoughtful people, devoted a review/essay to the Russian poet’s prose and the two volumes of memoirs written by his widow, Nadezdah Mandelstam. The piece, collected in The Geography of the Imagination, is titled “The Man Without Contemporaries”:

“Mandelstam’s `contemporaries’ (he said he had none in the literal sense) were Ovid, Villon, Dante, Racine, Poe. He was also aware that he was an Orpheus trying to reclaim a lost spirit: in the poems of the late 1920s Persephone becomes an eloquent symbol. It is as if Mandelstam saw how prophetically he had named his first book – Stone. His St. Petersburg was etymologically `the city of stone.’ The art of living in cities (which is what `civilization’ means) begins with the shaping of stone, and civilization becomes for Mandelstam a metaphysical nostalgia. Civilization figures in his mind as the opposite of Socialism. Stone takes on an added ambiguity: Russia has become stone, Hades, an underworld, a prison of the spirit.”

Mandelstam invites such readings. More than with most poets, we lose much, perhaps the vital essence, when we rely upon translations. He is a poet of civilization, and his poems are correspondingly allusive. Davenport likens him somewhat to Rimbaud:

“By Rimbaud I mean the gnarled image which suggest a chord of meaning rather than a simple metaphor or simile, a respect for classical form with a bold originality, a harshness of poetic phrasing that defies translation into prose.”

I remember the excitement I felt in the early 70s when I and much of the rest of the English-speaking world first encountered the work of this great Russian-Jewish wonder – the poetry, Clarence Brown’s biographical study of the poet and his translations of Mandelstam’s sui generis prose, and Madame Mandelstam’s 1,100 pages of memoir. I felt the impulse Davenport describes:

“The remainder of the twentieth century (most miserable of ages since the Barbarians poured into Rome) might profitably be spent putting together the human achievements which tyranny has kept behind walls.”

The old century is gone and the new one shows no signs of being any more human than the last, but even in the post-samizdat era, the work Davenport identifies remains to be accomplished.