“No one hears our speeches…”

A review of Osip Mandelstam: A Biography by Ralph Dutli, translated by Ben Fowkes (Verso, 2023), £25

In November 1933, in the midst of the Stalinist counter-revolution, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) began to recite a poem in the company of a small group of friends and allies:

We live, deaf to the land beneath us
Ten steps away no-one hears our speeches
All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,
The soul corrupter and peasant-slayer
His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,
His cockroach whiskers leers
And his boot tops gleam.

Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders—
Fawning half-men for him to play with.
The whining, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,
One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, to the eye or the groin.
And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete1

This devastating poem, worth quoting in full, become known as the “Stalin Epigram” and would lead to the destruction of both Mandelstam and practically everyone associated with him. For many, Mandelstam stands for creative dissent, emerging from the horrifying decades of Stalinist dictatorship—a visionary poet whose courageous words damned him to death in the eyes of a cruel and
unfeeling tyrant. His friend Joseph Brodsky acclaimed him “a modern Orpheus”, and his poetry remained a source of inspiration, shared in secret by Russian citizens during the Cold War and beyond.2

Mandelstam is now one of the most celebrated Russian poets of the 20th century, a gifted writer whose work encompassed essays, travelogues, literary criticism and even children’s literature. In this literary biography, author Ralph Dutli brings his expertise to bear on the life and work of this remarkable figure, emphasising Mandelstam’s creativity and disavowing the conventions of biographical narrative: “For the whole of his life, he could not be anything other than what he was: a poet…let us calmly follow Mandelstam in reviling biography: biography is tyranny, and its enforced chronology—birth to death—enslaves us”.3 Although this approach opens up interesting avenues, and Dutli proves perceptive and engrossing regarding Mandelstam’s creative development, it does have serious consequences for a book about a man who lived through some of the most tumultuous events of the 20th
century. Providing context is essential, even when dealing with a “genius”.

Mandelstam was born into a relatively privileged Jewish family in Tsarist Russia at the end of the 19th century. His father had a deep love for German culture, its literature in particular; his mother’s background was in the Jewish intelligentsia of Lithuania. Mandelstam began writing poetry while studying in Paris and Heidelberg, offering ideas that would soon be associated with the Acmeist movement in Russia: “Doctrine must be rejected, and the poet should fall back on the dark and unrestrained soul”.4 His work was influenced by the likes of Dante Alighieri, Horace and Pindar, as much as the poetry of Alexander Pushkin, whom he also revered. All these elements competed to form the foundation for Mandelstam’s emerging poetic identity.

Mandelstam would interact with the various poetical factions: first, Symbolism, which emerged in the late 19th century as an aesthetic movement in Europe (in Russia, it was under the leadership of Valery Bryusov), then Acmeism, a modernist “neo-classical” poetic trend of the early 20th century. These interactions drew him into the orbit of the writers Lev Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova, with whom he would form lasting friendships.

Members of the factions, with their fiercely argued and finely articulated manifestos, were published in underground magazines, their words publicly declaimed in bars that constituted literary society at the time. Mandelstam participated in these furious exchanges, calling for “the affirmation of life” in contrast to what he perceived as the negativity of the Symbolists and the blazing radicalism of the newly-formed Futurists.5 Acmeism was defined by Gumilyov and the poet Sergei Godoretsky in their manifesto “The Inheritance of Acmeism and Symbolism”, published in the debut issue of Apollyon magazine in 1912. The manifesto exalted Acmeism as “the element of light, which separates objects off and allows everything to be seen in clear outline.” It also insisted on “the unknowability of the unknowable”.6 This was in contrast to the Symbolists, the origins of which were “in the misty darkness of German forests” and merely concerned with the “dissolution of all images and things”.7

These great explosions of modernist art, culture and literature prior to the First World War are unfortunately passed over in little more than a page, a sign of things to come in this biography. The close attention paid to Mandelstam’s every creative and personal step is not replicated when it comes to the wider forces at play. The problem increases as the biography progresses.

Dutil delves deeply into the love life of a man who devoted his creative talents to expressions of that love. His biographer explores Mandelstam’s affairs with Marina Tsvetaeva, Olga Vaksel and Maria Petrovykh, as well as his defining marriage to Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina, illuminating how these women inspired some of his finest poetry as well as enriching his life as kindred human beings. The emotional toll that these extramarital relationships would have on his marriage to Nadezhda Mandelstam, though, was considerable. The complexities of their personal lives together and apart are rendered sensitively. This is not the case when Dutli traces Mandelstam’s political affiliations. His teenage associations with the Socialist Revolutionaries, a political party oriented around agrarian reform with roots in the Narodnik movement, led to him being considered for membership of one of the group’s “combat organisations”. Dutli ascribes this involvement to “the gushing, ephemeral enthusiasm of a 16-year-old”, but this downplays the radicalisation of millions of young people in the wake of the 1905 Russian Revolution and the repression that followed.8

Mandelstam’s political engagement did fade, although he continued to compose anti-war poetry during his brief time as a medical orderly during the First World War. This period is where the biography’s more problematic elements rise to the surface. Dutli describes the world-shaking events of the October Revolution of 1917 as “a simple, unspectacular putsch” and “a phantom revolution, rather than a mass uprising”.9 This would be contentious enough, but Dutli goes further, citing a passage from Mandelstam’s mentor Zinaida Gippius’s memoir, alleging that mass rapes of women by revolutionaries took place during the storming of the Winter Palace. At this point, a large editor’s footnote systematically refutes any evidence of this taking place. One has to ask why include the quote at all, given that it has no basis in fact?

It should come as no surprise that in 2024, the centenary of Lenin’s death, historians such as Anthony Beever and Robert Service resurfaced with new books on the 1917 Revolution, seeking, among other things, to resurrect the reputation of Alexander Kerensky.10 Kerensky headed the provisional government ultimately overthrown by the October Revolution. Dutli describes him as “the embodiment of the individual who revolts against arbitrary power and demands both freedom and citizens’ rights”.11 This in the context of a poem Mandelstam wrote against the October Revolution, smearing Lenin as a usurper, published in the Socialist Revolutionary newspaper Volia Naroda (Will of the People).

Mandelstam’s politics were constantly in flux and full of contradictions. He described himself as a “loser of the revolution”, reflecting, according to Nadezhda Mandelstam and Dutli, a mortal fear of those in power, specifically the Cheka, and a longstanding personal feud with the Chekist officer Yakov Blumkin. Mandelstam once fled from a building upon hearing that Leon Trotsky was nearby and had some of his work published abroad by emigre pro-Tsarist publishing houses. Yet, he was arrested by “White” (counterrevolutionary) forces as a suspected “Red” during the civil war and was later employed by the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment. His literary gifts would be cultivated and protected by the Bolsheviks Nicholai Bukharin and Anatoly Lunacharsky, although in 1923, Valery Bryusov, the head of the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment, and a talented Symbolist, made a searing assessment of his poetry:

Detached as it is from social life and social and political interests, from the problems of the world, the poetry of Mandelstam feeds only on the subjective experiences of the poet and on abstract “eternal” questions of love, death and so on, which in their entirely metaphysical aspect have long been hollowed out and emptied of any real content.12

Dutli places Mandelstam’s famous Epigram in a personal context, that of Mandelstam’s inner anger towards Stalin, but there were wider issues helping to explain this anger. They included Stalin’s policy of “dekulakisation”, a vast campaign of repression launched against better off peasants by in 1929, as well as the starvation Mandelstam had himself witnessed in the Crimea. The poem was never actually written down by Mandelstam until his trial in 1938. There is no doubt that someone within his inner circle had already transcribed it for the Stalinist secret police. Dutli does not follow this reader, at least, in implicating as prime suspect Maria Petrovykh, for whom Mandelstam wrote what Anna Ahkmatova described as “the most beautiful love poem of the 20th century”.13 During his trial, Mandelstam was compelled to write a year-by-year political biography, describing his “political depression, caused by the harsh methods used to put into effect the dictatorship of the proletariat” in 1918 and a “deep depression caused by the liquidation of the ‘kulaks’” in 1930.14 However, it was the “Epigram” itself that was most damning, described by the prosecution as a “counter-revolutionary pamphlet against the leader of the Communist Party and the State”.15

Mandelstam’s strengths as a poet and a writer of other forms of literature, such as his memoir The Noise of Time and the brilliant travelogue Journey to Armenia are repeatedly praised here, but this biography unmoors him from any real sense of comradeship with his contemporaries. This comradeship was combined with a querulous streak that led him into acts of recklessness and a perennial reliance on favours and loans to eke out an existence, even before he was forced into a life of penury and vagrancy under the Stalinist regime. His recklessness included challenging writer Viktor Khlebkinov to a duel, slapping Alexei Tolstoy in the face, lacerating close friends and associates in print. We learn little about his readership or his standing with the public in the nascent Soviet state, only that his last public appearances were well received by those in attendance.

First ostracized and then repeatedly exiled, Mandelstam, at the age of 47, would die a piteous and ignoble death in 1938­—as did so many thousands during the nightmare years of Stalinist dictatorship. Mandelstam was a mass of contradictions: a classicist who looked to the future, an insular prevaricator whose creative voice could not be silenced, a dissident of the most diffident demeanour.

Kevin McCaighy is a member of the Socialist Workers Party and a writer and activist based in York.

Notes