By an obscure process that has left no written traces, Mandelstam turned suddenly toward Jewishness1 a short time before beginning to write Le Timbre Égyptien (The Egyptian Stamp). Unfortunately, nothing in the texts lets appear or sense where this fragile and elusive moment is situated: there exists no prose or verse similar to Le Timbre Égyptien whose mechanism one might dismantle, whose course one might follow that led him from the unnuanced revolt against everything Jewish in Le Bruit du Temps (The Noise of Time) to the acute sense of belonging to a people in La Quatrième Prose (The Fourth Prose).
To the unequivocal rejection of what he named by the global term of Judaism, there gives way a benevolent curiosity doubled with an interest not devoid of sympathy for the Jewish world.
In 1926, Mandelstam spends the summer in Kyiv. The spectacle of the Ukrainian capital with its dense Jewish population charms him, moves him, delights him: “I hear a muttering beneath my feet. Is it a kheder? No… A house of prayer in a cellar. A hundred venerable men in striped talles are settled like schoolboys at narrow yellow desks. No one pays them any heed. It is the painter Chagall who is needed here!”2
In the course of this same summer, he discovers, still in Kyiv, the State Jewish Theater3 and the gripping performance of its principal actor, a pure theatrical genius, Solomon Mikhoels. These pieces played in Yiddish awaken in him resonances as deep as they are unexpected. Mandelstam is under the effect of an emotional shock whose echo goes well beyond the theatrical performance offered to his eyes. He is in true communion with the Jewish people that the actors incarnate. Behind these figures of actors, Mandelstam recognizes the pure Hasidic Jews, holders of a true, multimillennial tradition, whose aesthetic force is the translation of an ethical force that overwhelms him.
“All the force of Judaism, all the rhythm of dancing abstract thought, all the pride of the dance whose sole motif is, in the end, compassion toward the earth, all this passes into the trembling of the hands, into the vibration of the thinking, inspired fingers, like an articulate language.”4
One can scarcely believe that Le Bruit du Temps and the article Mikhoels were written by the same hand and that less than two years separate these two texts. The parallel Mandelstam — Kafka imposes itself of its own accord.
Independently of the radically different historical, geographical, and political givens, leaving aside the surrounding milieu and the linguistic context, and although the life of Mandelstam, his childhood in its everyday detail, his relations with his father, with his mother, with his brothers remain, to this day5 — contrary to Kafka’s childhood — a practically inviolate territory, one cannot fail to be astonished, sometimes even seized and somewhat disconcerted, by the similarity of the attitudes, of the reactions of the two writers: the same flight in adolescence before what Kafka called “the phantom of Judaism,” the same fear of being absorbed, disaggregated by the Jewish world at once devoid of meaning, sclerotic, and threatening, the same aversion toward the father responsible for their flaw and their original misfortune — certain pages of Le Bruit du Temps might have been entitled Lettre (ouverte) au père (Letter [open] to the father) — the same desire to merge into the world of others, to efface their difference, the same will to possess the language, to hold its slightest secrets, the same relentless determination to enter literature so as to be inhabited by it alone, to live only by and for it. The same feeling of guilt — toward others because the difference is indeed there, toward their own for having disowned and betrayed them, toward themselves above all, for those very reasons. The same morbid quest for identity, the same anguished Who am I? to which Mandelstam, for his part, had the good fortune to find an answer.
Le Timbre Égyptien, the only fiction in Mandelstam’s work, undeniably has Kafkaesque accents. The ceilings there are as irrationally low as in Kafka’s books. “The ‘he’ that [Kafka’s novels and tales] stage,” writes Marthe Robert, “is never anything but the ‘I’ of the waking dream, a schematic ‘I’ projected into an experimental space where the Self of the author, stripped of its social appearances and of its accessory qualities, no longer appears except laid bare, reduced to the essential of its situation.”6 Parnok is nothing other than the bared I of his creator projected into that experimental field which is prose itself, strewn with figures of doubles of the author’s double — as is Kafka’s prose — for the sole purpose of attaining an image of the self. The form, the writing of [?M.] is likewise akin to that of Kafka in this subtle art of handling the “fable without subject or hero” where the everyday mingles with the strange, the dream with reality.
Kafka is twenty-eight when he sees performing for the first time the troupe of Löwy and the actors of the Jewish Theater at the café Savoy in Prague. Mandelstam is thirty-five when he discovers the Jewish Theater on the stage of Kyiv. Strangely, it is with the same emotion and the same fervor that they both reacted to the spectacle of another possible Jewish life, of whose existence the one and the other had until then been ignorant. The Mikhoels of Mandelstam, more profound in its reflection, seems to be the prolongation of the notes that Kafka consigned in his Journal on October 5, 1911. It is there that their paths diverge.
No one will ever know what path Kafka would have taken had he lived until the Hitlerian era, nor what would have become of his quest for identity had he known a sovietized Czechoslovakia.
Paradoxically, it is thanks to the horror of the Stalinist era that Mandelstam recovered his inner freedom. It had seemed to him so simple and so obvious to replace his family and the Jewish cesspool with the community of men! But what had it become, that fraternity of which he had dreamed and in the service of which he had put his pen?
For the resounding glory of the centuries to come, For the lofty tribe of men I have lost my cup at the feast of my fathers, I have lost my joy, I have lost my honor. Upon my shoulders falls the century — the wolfhound, But I am no wolf, not I, by the blood in my veins.7
One has the feeling that during these few years — the end of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties — Mandelstam is preoccupied, haunted by his guilt and by the reparation of his fault. What does this poem say if not that he repeats once more what Le Timbre Égyptien expressed in sibylline language and La Quatrième Prose in plain terms? The first two lines might be replaced by “for a frock coat” or else “to conquer the world with my metallic voice.” In the name of an Idea, of a hypothetical ideal, he deprived himself of the essential. But of what did he deprive himself? What did he lose? La Quatrième Prose and certain poems of the early thirties are sufficiently explicit for there to be no possible misinterpretation. Strangely, this poem has been interpreted in a thousand and one ways. Who, then, are these fathers? And what, then, is this blood that flows in his veins? The best is still to leave the floor to Mandelstam himself:
I insist on the fact that the scribbling breed such as it has taken form in Europe and more specifically in Russia is incompatible with the honorific title of Jew of which I am proud. My blood, heavy with the heritage of the sheep-breeders, the patriarchs, and the kings, rebels against the spirit of the gypsy-swindlers of the scribbling tribe. As a child still, I was carried off by a creaking encampment of filthy Romanies, and I dawdled for a number of years along their abject roads, striving in vain to serve the apprenticeship of their one trade, their one art — theft.
The answer is there, it seems, entire, without the slightest ambiguity. By contrast, one may wonder what Mandelstam means by I have lost. Literally, the Russian verb can mean either “I have been deprived” or “I have deprived myself.” Is it a matter of a voluntary, deliberate act, or, on the contrary, of a deprivation undergone? A poem written nearly a month later allows one to answer this question:
And for this, my father, my friend, my rough companion, I, the misjudged brother, the renegade in the family of my people, I promise to build a well […]8
Mandelstam launched the word renegade, and some seized upon it to buttress the thesis “Mandelstam-renegade-in-the-family-of-his-people.” It is indeed in full consciousness that he disowned the family of [his] people, it is in full consciousness that he deprived himself of his cup at the feast of [his] fathers, but the pivot of this stanza, the key word without which it would lose all its meaning — I promise — implies on the one hand that the renegade belongs to a time past, gone by, and on the other hand that the excluded one, the banished, the disowned, the misjudged brother is invested, like his biblical brother Joseph, with the mission of the Chosen.9
A prodigal child seduced by the song of the sirens of Petersburg, of Christianity, of the Romanies of literature, it is now from his father that he awaits forgiveness, it is to his father that he solemnly swears an oath. His father, his misfortune and his dishonor of old, here he is promoted to Jacob, chief of the Jews10!
Joseph and Jesus, Chosen One and prophet, the Poet projects himself into these two merged archetypes. Like Joseph, he swears to be that element of unification and alliance that the well symbolizes. Like Jesus before the Well of Jacob, he prophesies the perenniality of his poetic voice: “whoever shall drink of the water that I shall give him shall become in him a spring of water that shall well up into eternal life.”11
In Le Bruit du Temps, Mandelstam wondered with perplexity what his family “meant,” what it sought to express. Now, he discovers himself a link in this family chain, no longer a child of nowhere but indeed of somewhere; he discovers that the “congenital defect of language” of his family, of his father, far from being a shameful flaw, is a true richness, his richness12.
The image of the father returns again and again, in Le Voyage en Arménie (Journey to Armenia), in L’Entretien sur Dante (Conversation about Dante), most often in a warm and tender father-son dialogue where the son-disciple finds beside his father knowledge, protection, understanding13. This dialogue imbued with an infinite tenderness, Mandelstam wove it with his father, as is attested by the few letters dating from this period that were able to be recovered14.
This return into the paternal bosom, this walking in the footsteps of the father, might be only what Freud called “the return of the repressed.” However, when Mandelstam recognizes himself as a prolongation of his father, one perceives there no accent of any negation whatever of his own individuality, of his own uniqueness. The music that Mandelstam hears is on the contrary that of his filiation, of his genealogy to which he had been deaf for decades, in which he now recognizes his part, from which his voice stands out.
Origins, roots, sources, belonging — Mandelstam clings to these landmarks with the force of despair in this beginning of the thirties. The theme of where I come from with, as its epicenter, the image of the father, runs through the prose of this period, sometimes with violence, sometimes with gentleness, but always along two interdependent, sometimes inseparable lines of force, which have for Mandelstam one and the same resonance: his belonging to a people and his belonging to a literary lineage.
The literature of livelihood revolts him. By force of circumstance, he makes translations that give him a semblance of a means of existence. In 1928, a publishing house asks him to rework two translations of Till Eulenspiegel that had been made one by A. Hornfeld, the other by V. Kariakin. When the new translation, revised and corrected by Mandelstam, appears, only his name figures on the book. What should have been only a banal incident of the little literary world turns into a veritable cabal. An enormous machine sets itself in motion, as senseless as it is implacable. Accused of plagiarism, Mandelstam undergoes trial, exclusion, persecution with an antisemitic connotation. For days on end, he is interrogated relentlessly. In a letter to his wife, he jokes about his Dreyfus affair.
It is in and from this context that La Quatrième Prose is born.
Fifteen pages of a cry now hoarse, now savage, where the intensity of the violence is proportional to that of the pain. Fifteen pages of Wagnerian tempest where Mandelstam howls, defies, insults, and in this unleashing of rage, two words return, tirelessly, a thousand times repeated, proclaimed in the face of the world: I am. Affirmation of the self at the heart of exclusion, defiance of animal fear, defiance of the bloody Soviet land, defiance of literature under control, defiance of the filthy brood of writers intimate with power… Mandelstam raises his head, son of the people with the stiff neck. In one hand, he grips his winter pelisse — free poetry — in the other, his Jewish crook — his claimed difference, his pride, and his freedom.
Yesterday a slave, today a free man. Free to drink straight from the neck of the bottle, free to trample underfoot his literary pelisse, free to write outside the markers.
If Mandelstam feels so acutely his belonging to the Jewish people, if he claims loud and strong his multimillennial heritage15, the notion of belonging to the Jewish community is, on the contrary, totally foreign to him. He castigates them without mercy, the vile Jews — sated bankers, crawling clerks, subordinate, sold-out writers, more guilty and contemptible still than the other boot-licking reptiles because Jews.
“There were two Chénier brothers: the younger, unworthy, belongs entirely to literature; the elder, put to death, himself put it to death.” Voluntary or unconscious association? One and the same blood flowed in the veins of André and of Marie-Joseph Chénier. The younger consorted with power. André, for his part, was “Jewish” in the sense that Marina Tsvetaeva understood it16. Jewish because a Poet all the way to the foot of the guillotine. One and the same blood flowed in the veins of all the Hornfelds and other uncle Monias and in those of Osip Mandelstam, but, if poets are Jews, not all Jews are poets. The honorific title is earned. It is not enough to be called Hornfeld or Kagan to be the heir of the shepherds, the patriarchs, and the kings.
The values, the references have remained anchored, immutable, indelible in the consciousness of Mandelstam. The ancient image of the Judaic Father returns, identical to that of childhood. By a play of displacement, the true father, sublimated, has become Jacob, patriarch, begetter of the Chosen One, of the Poet, and it is literature as an institution that becomes the castrating father, represented under the traditionally Jewish traits of bearded men who give off a repugnant odor of skin17 and move about in a yellow-colored world.
Mandelstam no longer hesitates before the choice between what he names literary circumcision and mortal chilling — the risk run by the one who tears from his shoulders his literary pelisse. In trampling it underfoot, he overcomes his anguish of death, triumphs over his fear, and this triumph is like a farewell to Parnok.
Having reached the paroxysm of the nervous tension provoked by this violence held back at the price of a superhuman effort, Mandelstam collapses, lets escape a barely audible sob: “Ich bin arm.” (I am poor.) In a letter to Nadezhda Mandelstam, he takes up the same words, still in German: “I am alone. Ich bin arm. Everything is irremediable. The rupture is a richness. It must be preserved.”18 What essential succor did he find in the German language in the depths of his solitude? Did he hear in it an echo of Courland?
Notes
For convenience, the terminology proposed by Albert MEMMI is taken up here: - Judéité (Jewishness) is the fact and the manner of being Jewish. - Judaïcité (Jewry) is the totality of Jewish persons. - Judaïsme (Judaism) is the totality of Jewish doctrines and institutions. (A. MEMMI, Portrait d’un Juif — Portrait of a Jew.)↩︎
Kyiv, Complete Works, Vol. III.↩︎
The State Jewish Theater (Goset), which played in Yiddish, was founded in Petrograd in 1919 by Granovsky. Its sets were signed Chagall, Altman, Falk…, its repertoire — Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, Sholem Asch…↩︎
Mikhoels, Complete Works, Vol. III.↩︎
Mandelstam’s younger brother, Evgeny, is said to have written a book of memoirs that has unfortunately never been published (cf. the review Novy Mir No. 10, 1987).↩︎
Marthe ROBERT, Seul comme Franz Kafka (As Lonely as Franz Kafka), Calmann-Lévy ed. 1979.↩︎
Poem No. 227 dated March 17-28, 1931. (Complete Works, Vol. I.)↩︎
Poem No. 235 dated May 3, 1931. Trans. F. Kérel, op. cit.↩︎
“Osip” is a derivative of “Yosif” — “Joseph.” Cf. N. Mandelstam: “Mandelstam always remembered his Egyptian namesake in whose honor he had received his name.” (Vtoraya Kniga — The Second Book.)↩︎
Cf. the poem No. 236 Canzone of May 26, 1931: I will say “sela,”* to the chief of the Jews For his raspberry caress. (* Is it a matter of the word “sela,” which in Hebrew means “pause,” “interlude,” and which one might translate as “respite,” or of “salam” — “shalom” — thus “peace”? One encounters now one term, now the other, depending on the editions.) In her chapter entitled “The Chief of the Jews,” Nadezhda Mandelstam wonders who this chief of the Jews can be, while explaining that the raspberry color refers to the painting by Rembrandt The Return of the Prodigal Son. Now this poem follows chronologically directly upon the poem cited above, and only 23 days separate their composition. It seems clear that Mandelstam takes up here the same biblical image as in poem No. 235 to name his own father.↩︎
John, 4, 14.↩︎
Cf. in L’Entretien sur Dante: “It seems to me that Dante must have studied attentively all the defects of pronunciation, lent his ear to the stutterers, to the lisping, nasal, half-swallowed syllables, and that he learned much from them.”↩︎
For example Virgil/Dante, Ugolino/Anselmuccio in L’Entretien sur Dante, Wilhelm/Felix in the Voyage en Arménie, but also the image of Father Ararat — still in the Voyage en Arménie.↩︎
“Dear papa, […] I am more and more convinced that we have a great deal in common, especially on the intellectual plane — something I did not understand when I was a kid. It is even funny: I am exploring at present, for example, the natural sciences — biology, the theory of life — in short, I am repeating in this domain the stages of my father’s evolution. Who would have thought it?” (December 1932). “Dear little papa, […] More than anything in the world, I would like to see you. […] I would so much like to find myself at this moment in your room with the green divan and our little library.” (December 1936). (One recognizes here the library and the divan of Le Bruit du Temps.) Letters published in the review Novy Mir, No. 10, 1987.↩︎
When Mandelstam proclaims himself a Jew, he employs the biblical term Ioudiei.↩︎
Cf. note p. 27.↩︎
One recalls that Mandelstam’s father was a furrier.↩︎
Letter No. 53, 1930, Complete Works, Vol. III. ↩︎