'O My Grand and Pitiful Age'

“In his free-and-easy way of dealing with historical figures, in the abrupt transitions and shifts of focus that show him to be quite unlike those awestruck devotees who turn the past into a sacred reliquary and life into the worship of things, there is the sense of measure we find in a son loving and respectful, yet natural and unconstrained in manner.”

A man in a Soviet prison camp writes of a poet who died thirty years earlier in a Soviet transit camp, a way station in the Gulag. Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) writes of Osip Mandelstam in A Voice from the Chorus (trans. Max Hayward, 1976). How could a Russian poet (or, arguably, any of us who remain conscious) not dwell in history? Not in the textbook sense but history as the medium in which he moved, like fish in water. “Mandelstam lived in history,” Sinyavsky writes, “as he breathed the air around him: it was a given quantity, a gift, part of the order of things, which can no more be left than it can be entered.” Sinyavsky’s words are a warning to all of us, most especially those who would treat the present as an autonomous region without veins and nerves linking it to the past. In the most reductive sense, the present does not exist, though we must be prepared to deal with it. Mandelstam writes:

“I’ll say this in a whisper, in draft,

because it’s early yet:

we have to pay

with experience and sweat

to learn the sky’s free play.

“And under purgatory’s temporal sky

we easily forget:

the dome of heaven

is a home

to praise forever, wherever.”

In fact, it was not early. In less than two years, sick, maddened and starving, Mandelstam would die in a camp near Vladivostok.  The poem is dated March 9, 1937. The translator is Robert Chandler, and you’ll find it in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, edited by Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski. Some fifteen years earlier, Mandelstam already felt history closing in. This poem, also translated by Chandler, is “The Age”:

“Buds will swell just as in the past,

sprouts of green will spurt and rage,

but your backbone has been smashed,

O my grand and pitiful age.

And so, with a meaningless smile,

you glance back, cruel and weak,

like a beast once quick and agile,

at the prints of your own feet.”

Sinyavsky writes: “We usually think of history not as a living entity like ourselves, but as something fossilized and left behind, a matter for chronological tables and text-books. For Mandelstam history was real, and at once simple and complex like our own life – which was hence also historic in his eyes.”