By Thomas Sanfilip

It is difficult to say, though bears repeating, that poetry holds no sway over modern culture, it has drifted into obscure corners so distant, it has become merely an artifact, an oddity, a peculiar expression that has turned largely inward rather than outward. Picture a flower whose petals never burst under sunlight, but at first light of day remains firmly closed, its pollen inaccessible to bees and other insects who pass on its essence from generation to generation. There is no more cross-fertilization, no more fecundity to the garden. One would think that given such a stark, cultural reality there would be one or more distinctive voices to emerge out of the endless inauthenticity that surrounds us daily, but there are none, and if there are, there is no way to hear their voices beyond the static of today’s digital miasma.

So reading Oleg Lekmanov’s life of the Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam—arrested during Stalin’s 1930s purge of all opposition to his rule of the Soviet state, stricken first to internal exile within Russia, barely able to survive with his wife, eventually arrested in 1938 and sentenced to five years in a labor camp in the Russian Far East for writing a poem critical of Stalin, and ultimately dying a year later at a transit camp near Vladivostok—is a stark reminder of what happens in a society that descends mindlessly into authoritarianism wherein all things human in time are rendered meaningless.

Lekmanov’s concise, fact-driven biography charts the heartbreaking story of Mandelstam’s hounded life in sharp detail. Though not over-written or burdened with critical commentary of Mandestam’s poetry, Lekmanov wisely puts any critical appraisal of his work aside, and instead follows a precise chronology of the poet’s life, avoiding merely a recitation of episodic events. Though the record of Mandelstam’s life is increasingly overshadowed by darkness, leading to his arrest and ultimate death, Lekmanov includes with exactitude and objectivity the memoirs of family, friends and other poets who recorded their impressions of the poet, providing a critical bedrock underlying the poet’s story. In addition, it provides an important added dimension to Lekmanov’s biography that is integral to understanding Mandelstam’s importance as one of Russia’s greatest poets, making his biography all the more noteworthy.

The end result is a biography that allows the reader to weight the impact and prejudice of all who knew or encountered Mandelstam along the way as he struggled to keep alive his poetic muse under incredibly oppressive circumstances. As such, Lekmanov lays out the poet’s evolution in clear details laid side-by-side in his narrative without burdening the reader with an overarching historicity applied to Mandelstam’s place in Soviet Russian literary history, though this point cannot really be ignored.

“The question as to whether or not it was possible to enter the new era with baggage from the previous culture was not only Mandelstam’s concern in the early twenties,” Lekmanov points out. “The uniqueness of Mandelstam’s approach consisted of the attempt to establish the links between the epochs and generations through the affirmation of historical continuity between new Russian poetry and the old, pre-revolutionary, as well as with the cultural tradition of classical antiquity.”

Mandelstam understood that he was, like all true poets, the inheritor of the best and worst of the past, and that assuming the responsibility for such a bridge was also the recognition that he felt chosen, right or wrong, to carry forth the best of the past into a new modality of thought and poetical expression that fit a new age coming into being, Unfortunately, it was a new age of darkness and death under Stalinist socialism masquerading as benevolent reforms for the Russian people we know now turned out quite the opposite.

Ultimately incapable of compromising, Mandelstam wrote to a friend only a few years before his final arrest. “I am once again at the same crossroads. I am not being accepted by Soviet reality… All that is loathsome rises within me from the bottom of my soul. Hunger has made me an opportunist. I was able to write a handful of really good poems but because of my subservience I have strained and lost my voice. It is the beginning of a vast emptiness.“ His wife so feared he would attempt suicide, she would turn back the hands of the clock when he slept in order to forestall his obsession everything would end at a certain hour.

There are periods in history I believe when collective insanity takes over a culture. It starts as a rip in the fragment of society that loses resiliency, its freedom to evolve. Everything that denotes life suddenly becomes death, every collar, crazy fashion turns drab, art disappears and poetry becomes a lost language. Beauty inverts to ugliness until the senses are no longer perceptive enough to respond to the real world. It becomes an unreachable mirage that no longer inspires, but dies in a perpetual blur. And what is one left with but endless stretches of emptiness spread out over years that turn in on themselves, until all is subsumed under an umbrella of unending gray. The heart is no longer a reflection of one’s essence but something it was never meant to be.

Mandelstam wrote in 1921 “There is nothing hungrier than the contemporary State, and a hungry State is more terrifying than a hungry man. To show compassion for the State which denies the word shall be the contemporary poet’s social obligation and heroic feat.” This kind of commitment is a high calling, but as Mandelstam well knew—it was a calling that the true poet cannot avoid or deny without personal consequences, that to live and ultimately flower is to live authentically in an inauthentic world.

Sources:

• Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, (Atheneum, 1970)
• Osip Mandelstam, The Complete Critical Prose, edited by Jane Gary Harris (Ardis, 1979)