2. o. mandel′shtam, The Noise of Time

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a creature accustomed to watery mud and now finding itself in dry dust. there was the boredom of a man who had got so used to life in defence and requisition detachments for he to be the one who gave orders, and now it was a young lady like this who was replying, breaking off and bashful, and bored because the pattern of proper conversation was here reversed and destroyed. it was, finally, that put-on tendency to boredom that lends the appearance of complete ordinariness to something completely unprecedented. and, knowing full well how unheard-of the pattern of recent times must seem to this young lady, he played the fool, as if he couldn’t guess what her feelings must be, and as if he had never ever breathed the air of anything but dictatorship. this is very good. as with mandel′shtam, this is prose based on thought, and not stylistic exercises trying to scare up thought. if there is less creative imagination in both mandel′shtam and pasternak than in the best of the ornamental everyday-life writers2, they offer schooling that is much less doubtful and more therapeutic. and the question arises of whether all our prose writers since andrei Bely have been going down a false road, whether a new intellectualism is replacing formalism, and whether this ought to be welcomed on all sides.

prince D.sviatopolk-mirskii

o. mandel′shtam, the noiSe of time, leninGrad, vremia publishers, 1925 ‘o. mandel′shtam, Shum vremeni’, Sovremennye zapiski, xxv, 1925, pp. 341-343 mandel′shtam occupies a firm and generally acknowledged place as one of the most eminent poets of our time. His lofty verbal artistry combines in a singular manner with his “lofty tongue-tie” to lend his poetry a singular and exclusive charm. not all mandel′shtam’s readers, though, have noticed the other qualities that shine through his poetry, namely acute intelligence and percipient historical intuition. these qualities are obscured by the tongue-tie, and this same tongue-tie lends an odd confusion to his remarkable but very little known prose. His articles are scattered about the periodical press, mainly that part of it concerned with aesthetics, whose readers have been and continue to be exceedingly little interested in intelligence and history. even if they did read it, the readers of Apollo could not have appreciated mandel′shtam’s article on Chaadaev, published as far back as 1915,

2 mirsky has in mind here the stylistic descendants of andrei Bely, such as pil’niak, and also perhaps Remizov.

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which already gave the full measure of his cultural-historical insight. Just as in some of his poems, so in these articles mandel′shtam is concerned with cultural-historical values that with him are free of any philosophical symbolism, but which are instead concrete, individual, efficacious, and at the same time related to the broad fabric of the historical process. mandel′shtam is particularly interested in the vagaries of nineteenth-century Russian history. He is extending the line of historiosophical thought laid down by Herzen, Chaadaev, and grigor′ev, but with a greater density of historicism, and with greater ‘disinterestedness’. His thought is also linked with Blok, the author of Retribution3, especially in view of the concreteness of his historical outlook, which amounts to genius, but his complete freedom from symbolism places a sharply defined boundary between him and Blok. mandel′shtam’s articles remain uncollected to this day, but his new book, The Noise of Time, completes them and represents a new and even more valuable achievement. it is no exaggeration to state that The Noise of Time is one of the three or four most significant books of recent times, and with its combination of seriousness of content with artistic intensity it could very well take first place. this high evaluation, though, relates only to the first two thirds of the book, which are concerned with the author’s childhood and student years (the 1890s and the 1900s); the final third, unconnected to the remainder, is occupied by his impressions of the Crimea during the Civil war, and although they contain many vivid and powerful pages, they cannot claim any significance on a par with the first part. as for the first seventy pages of the book, they are ‘weightier than a multitude of volumes’4 . these chapters are neither autobiography nor memoir, even though they concern the author’s environment. Rather (if this did not have such a whiff of the secondary school) one could call them ‘cultural-historical scenes from the period of the decay of autocracy’. this feeling of the period’s decomposition, provincialism, lack of originality, mediocrity, is the principal leitmotif of the book – a feeling in respect of which mandel′shtam is especially close to Blok – and it is with a half-quotation from the latter that he begins the book: ‘i well remember Russia’s obscure years, the ’nineties, their sluggard crawl, their endless calm, their profound provincialism – a quiet backwater, the ter-

3 the autobiographical and historiosophical long poem (1910-11, unfinished) by aleksandr Blok (1880-1921). 4 a standard Russian phrase, from the poem ‘on a Book of tiutchev’s poems’ by afanasii Fet (1820-92): ‘this small-sized booklet/is weightier than a multitude of volumes’.

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minal refuge of a dying age’5 . once having begun, one wishes to go on and write out the entire book, which is an uninterrupted quotation, densely saturated with thought and content, astonishingly vivid in its dense particularity. the author grows up in a petty urban middle-class Jewish family, which has liberated itself from ‘Judaic chaos’, but still not left it behind, with a mother who is a Russianised and airy-fairy member of the 1880s intelligentsia, and a father who has been uprooted from his Jewish soil but has not become party to the Russian, and is filled with the spirit of ‘an enlightened ghetto somewhere in Hamburg’ of the eighteenth century. During his childhood there is ‘infantile imperialism’, being entertained by the may parades, horror at ‘the Judaic chaos’ familiar from his grandfather’s family, and a striving towards Russia and europe, which is embodied in ‘st petersburg, that stately mirage’. the funeral of alexander iii goes by, then the ‘progresses’ of nicholas ii, then the institution of riots on kazan square (and i do mean ‘institution’), pavlovsk6, the Dreyfus affair, the concerts by Hofmann and kubelik7 in the hall of the assembly of nobles in 1904 (‘Here it was not musical curiosity, but something threatening and even dangerous that rose up from a great depth, as it were a thirst for action, an obscure prehistoric disquiet – the year 1905 had not yet struck – and then spilled forth as strange, almost khlystian ritual rejoicing8 by the old faithfuls of mikhailovsky square’)9; the tenishev school10; the young revolutionaries going into the revolution like nikolai Rostov joining the Hussars; the sinani family11; sergei ivanovich the ‘literalman’, teacher of Revolution12 . it is difficult to give an idea of these chapters,

5 mandel′shtam is paraphrasing a famous lyric by Blok that begins: ‘those who were born in obscure years/do not remember their path./we, the children of Russia’s fearful years/are incapable of forgetting anything’. 6 a town about 30 km south of petersburg, site of a magnificent imperial palace and its park, with a railway station and adjacent entertainment area. mandel′shtam’s family lived there from 1892 to 1897. 7 gofman (1876-1957) was a polish pianist; kubelik (1880-1940) a Czech violinist; their concerts were extremely popular. 8 the khlysts were an underground religious sect who practised trance-like dancing (radenie). 9 the square in central petersburg next to the prestigious mikhailovsky theatre. 10 a famous petersburg private secondary school, attended besides mandel′shtam by vladimir nabokov. 11 the family of mandel′shtam’s school friend Boris sinani (1889-1910), headed by the famous psychiatrist B.n. sinani (1850-1922?); they supported the social Revolutionary party. 12 ‘For me, sergei ivanych embodied the year 1905. there were many of them, tutors of revolution. one of my friends, an arrogant man, used to say, not without foundation, ‘there are book-people and there are newspaper-people’. poor sergei ivanych would not have fitted