Books: A Raspberry in Stalin’s Mouth

One gloomy afternoon in 1934, a Russian poet named Osip Mandelstam made the worst mistake of his life. He dropped in on Boris Pasternak at his Moscow apartment. Pasternak he knew he could trust, but there were four other Russian writers in the room. But Mandelstam was too wrought up to be wary. He passionately recited an “epigram” he had written about Stalin.

We live. We are not sure our land is under us. Ten feet away, no one hears us. But wherever there’s even a half-conversation, we remember the Kremlin s mountaineer. His thick fingers are fat as worms, his words reliable as ten pound weights. His boot tops shine, his cockroach mustache is laughing. About him, the great, his thin-necked, drained advisors. He plays with them. He is happy with half-men around him. They make touching and funny animal sounds. He alone talks Russian. One after another, his sentences like horseshoes! He pounds them out. He always hits the nail, the balls. After each death, he is like a Georgian tribesman, putting a raspberry in his mouth.

A few days later, the Georgian tribesman in the Kremlin, who was known to like raspberries, put a ripe one in his mouth. Betrayed by one of the writers in Pasternak’s parlor, Mandelstam was arrested on Stalin’s personal order and banished to Siberia. His poetry was suppressed and is still almost entirely unknown in the Soviet Union, while in the West his reputation has been obscured by trite translations.

Now, three decades after his death, the world is beginning to realize that the man Stalin destroyed was an extraordinary writer and possibly even a great one. In The Prose of Osip Mandelstam (Princeton University; $5). Slavonist Clarence Brown recently provided accurate and arresting translations of the poet’s principal stories, and in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Poet Robert Lowell has published renditions of nine poems that sometimes in raw power and sometimes in fine artistry support comparison with the best poetry of the century.

Hard Choice. Mandelstam could have had an easy life if he had wanted one. Born in 1891, he was the only son of a wealthy Jewish merchant. His father treated him to a grand tour of Western Europe before sending him to the University of St. Petersburg and offered young Osip a safe future in the leather business. But Osip opted for the dangerous life of letters, and his father cut him off without a ruble. Nothing daunted, Osip moved in with the Acmeists, a stubborn little literary sect centered in St. Petersburg and set up in opposition to the symbolists, who at that time dominated Russian poetry. In fact, Mandelstam’s esthetic ideal was Athenian, and like the temples of the Golden Age, his poems were constructed with stately simplicity and monumental strength. Says Isaiah Berlin: “Mandelstam’s poetry possessed a purity and perfection of form never again attained in Russia.” His stories, on the other hand, were a wild ebullition of image and idea, and his essays an icefall of glittering intellectual fragments.

By 1917, when he published his second book of poems, Mandelstam was 26 and already recognized as a master. But the master, as one friend remembers him, looked like a child—”a thin young boy with a twig of lily-of-the-valley in his buttonhole and eyelashes so long that they covered half his cheek.” Other friends said that he looked like a startled chicken, but it soon became clear that this chicken had a lion’s heart.

Mandelstam hated the Bolshevik tyranny from the day it took power, and with a crazy courage that still takes the breath away, he made his feelings known. One night he saw a secret-police official swilling vodka in a public house and drunkenly transcribing the names of political undesirables on a large stack of execution writs. Outraged, the pint-sized poet charged across the room, snatched up the warrants, ripped them to shreds and ran out into the night.

The Outsider. Trotsky’s sister, who was impressed by Mandelstam’s poetry, saved his life on this occasion, but thereafter he was a marked man. All through the ’20s, he lived with his young wife in poverty and in fear. In 1931 he wrote:

I am hanging on the outside of a terrifying time, a moving bus. I do not know why I live.

He was 43 when Stalin sent him to Siberia. His sufferings there disastrously aged his body but wondrously matured his art. Lowell has translated an elegy on exile that suggests how near to the bone his later poems strike.

My body, all that I borrowed from the earth, I do not want it to return here—some flour-white butterfly. My body, scratched and charred with thought, I want it to become a street, a land—It was full of vertebrae, and well aware of its length. The dark green pine needles howling in the wind look like funeral wreaths thrown into the water . . . how our pastimes and life were drained away!

In 1937 Mandelstam was briefly set free. But his energies were drained away by illness, and he was still in a sickbed when he was arrested again on a trumped-up charge of counter-revolutionary activity and sentenced to five years in a concentration camp in far-eastern Siberia. The shock of his new sentence drove Mandelstam out of his mind. Under the delusion that his own food was poisoned, he began to steal food from other prisoners. Time and again his fellow prisoners caught him and beat him cruelly. In the end they threw him out of the barracks into 30-below-zero cold. Filthy, emaciated, dressed in rags, he lived on for several weeks, sleeping in sheds and eating garbage. And then he died.