'A Human Mind at Its Deepest and Highest'

Vladimir Nabokov is speaking in 1965 to Robert Hughes for the Television 13 Educational Program in New York: 

“One of the saddest cases is perhaps that of Osip Mandelshtam--a  wonderful  poet, the  greatest poet among those trying to survive in Russia under the Soviets--whom that brutal and imbecile administration persecuted and finally drove to death in a remote concentration camp. The poems he heroically kept composing until madness eclipsed his limpid gifts are admirable specimens of a human mind at its deepest and highest.”

 

Even in 1965, the details of Mandelstam’s final days and death were still sketchy. Now we know he had been arrested in May 1938, sentenced to five years in correction camps for “counter-revolutionary activities” three months later, and died in a transit camp near Vladivostok on this date, December 27, in 1938. You can read the complete account I know in Ralph Dutli’s Osip Mandelstam: A Biography (Verso, 2023), translated from the German by Ben Fowkes. In the opening section of a poem dated March 1-15, 1937, titled “Verses on the Unknown Soldier” (trans. Ilya Bernstein), Mandelstam seems to foresee his own death:

 

“And the people, cold and feeble,

Will kill and starve and freeze,

While inside his well-known monument

The unknown soldier lies

 

“Teach me, you feeble swallow

Who have forgotten how to fly,

How without wings and a rudder

To manage this grave in the sky.”

 

I remember the excitement I felt in the early 70s when the English-speaking world was introduced to the life and 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 Nadezhda Mandelstam’s 1,100 pages of memoir in two volumes. Later in the Hughes interview, Nabokov says of Mandelstam’s poems:

 

“Reading them enhances one’s healthy contempt for Soviet ferocity. Tyrants and torturers will never manage to hide their comic stumbles behind their cosmic acrobatics. Contemptuous  laughter is all right, but it is not enough in the way of moral relief. And when I read Mandelshtam’s poems composed under the accursed rule of those beasts, I feel a kind of helpless shame, being so free to live and think and write and speak in the free part of the world. That’s the only time when liberty is bitter. ‘