The Language of Alienation

Asserting contradiction as its primary principle in its very first verse—sebe protivorecha—“K nemetskoi rechi” depicts the poet's relationship to language in mutually exclusive terms: the language of his choice is at once the element of his deepest origins, and foreign to him and the Russian community he identifies with, “us.” Stanza 7 unfolds the implications of this paradox for the poetic subject: language is for him both a foreign tongue, an outward coating, and his inherited essence: “Long before I ventured to be born, / I was a letter, a line of grapevines, / I was the very book you're dreaming of.” The poet's physical and historical self, defined by his audacious birth in Russia, is transferred into a textual tradition of books and verses (“lines of grapevines”) which is both foreign and historically distant. In a poetic language metaphorically associated with eighteenth-century Germany, Mandel΄shtam's discursive self emerges from this tension between history and poetry, as a consciously distorted reflection of his historical existence and origins.

Mandel΄shtam's autobiographical account of his first encounters with German in The Noise of Time (Shum vremeni, 1925) already interrogates this gap between the languages of literature and historical belonging. He narrates about the reading and speaking habits of his mother who read Pushkin and enjoyed “her Great Russian speech,” and his father, “fighting his way as an autodidact into the German world out of the Talmudic wilds.”Footnote ¹⁹ His “speech was tongue-tie and languageless,” or rather a “completely abstract, counterfeit language, the ornate and twisted speech of an autodidact, where normal words are intertwined with the ancient philosophical terms of Herder, Leibniz, and Spinoza.”Footnote ²⁰ “In essence, my father transferred me to a totally alien century and distant, although completely un-Jewish, atmosphere. It was, if you will, the purest eighteenth or even seventeenth century of an enlightened ghetto somewhere in Hamburg.”Footnote ²¹ Here as in “K nemetskoi rechi,” an “alien country”—eighteenth-century Germany with its literature, “Schiller, Goethe, K[ö]rner, and Shakespeare in German,”—becomes quite literally the poet's long lost literary fatherland.

Through biographical anecdote, this fragment stages the crucial distinction between everyday speech and the difficult, defamiliarized language of literature that played a central part in Formalist literary theory enthusiastically endorsed by Mandel΄shtam.Footnote ²² Viktor Shklovskii's seminal essay “The Resurrection of the Word” (Voskreshenie slova, 1914) hailed the reemergence of poetic language:

In his famous essay “The Interval” (Promezhutok, 1924) Iurii Tynianov used a similar critical idiom to praise Mandel΄shtam's mastery of stylistic nuance:

His work on the literary language is the work of one who is almost a foreigner.Footnote ²⁴

If this trope was ever politically harmless, that time was long gone by 1932, as Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam recalls when criticizing the circle around Osip Brik, another prominent Formalist, for their tight connections to Cheka where Brik worked:

In his 1932 poem, Mandel΄shtam's persona claims to assume a foreign idiom, exploring the tensions between the language associated with poetic utterance, and the native tongue—tensions that at once provided the basis for poetry's aesthetic effect and shaped the poet's hopeless position within the taxonomy of repression. The right to self-contradiction proclaimed in the opening stanza compels the poet to assume the role of the regime's worst enemy, the traitor; when writing the poem Mandel΄shtam described his interest in German poetry as treason (izmena), a betrayal of the anti-individualistic ethos.Footnote ²⁶ In the “Slate Ode” (Grifel΄naia oda, 1937) he famously defines himself as dvurushnik, a “double-dealer with a divided soul.”Footnote ²⁷ The poet's posture enacts essential features of poetic language, while the very principle of poetic defamiliarization of language acquires—or reveals—crucial political resonances.

In his own study of the laws of poetry, Conversation about Dante, Mandel΄shtam defines poetic utterance as “something intelligible, grasped, wrested from obscurity, in a language voluntarily and willingly forgotten immediately after the act of intellection and realization is completed.”Footnote ²⁸ Similarly, “K nemetskoi rechi” pretends to revive for a moment a forgotten tongue, eighteenth-century German, in order to make a statement in Russian relevant for the current historical moment. The interplay of intelligibility and strangeness in poetic language was theorized in Tynianov's Problem of Verse Language (Problema stikhotvornogo iazyka, 1924) which equated poetic effect with poetry's capacity to evoke and intensify the faded “oscillating signs [aspects] of the meaning” of words, kolebliushchiesia priznaki znacheniia. According to Tynianov, this effect was only possible when a word was disjoined from its original historical and social context: “In a strict sense, each word has its lexical coloring (created by the epoch, nationality, and environment), but [its] lexical distinction is recognized only outside this epoch and nationality.”Footnote ²⁹

Writing shortly before a full-scale crackdown on hooliganism, Tynianov reinforces linguistic hermeneutics with a reference to practices of judicial persecution and exclusion: “In this sense, lexical coloring serves as evidence. In a Berlin court, one word of Gaunersprache is sufficient, or of ‘thieves’ music’ with us, for the word to become evidence, besides still bearing its principal sign of meaning, and even in spite of it. (In the same way, foreign and dialectical coloring of speech has this character of evidence or shibboleth).”Footnote ³⁰

Doomed by the nature of his art to resort to improper speech, the poet is equated with a criminal whose very idiom exposes him to prosecution. Developing Tynianov's theory in his Conversation about Dante, Mandel΄shtam shifts the political framework for poetic utterance from campaigns against hooliganism to political terror. His Dante inhabits a world whose thinking is defined by prison: “Nightmares of prison life were imbibed with the mother's milk. The Trecento tossed men into prison with astonishing unconcern… . The interest in prisons was exploited by the prison wardens as well as by the fear-inspiring machinery of small states. There was a lively intercourse between the prisons and the free world outside resembling diffusion, mutual infiltration.”Footnote ³¹

Prison as a cultural paradigm shapes the poetic fashioning of the subject: “prison … supplements and acoustically conditions the vocal work of the autobiographical cello.”Footnote ³² Prison forms both poetic language and the poet as its agent and medium: calling Dante, in a Tynianovian turn of phrase, kolebatel΄ smyslov, “one who shakes up meaning,” Mandel΄shtam derives his predilection for ambiguity from the politics of fear: “Here I would like to point out one of the remarkable peculiarities of Dante's psyche: he was terrified of the direct answer, perhaps conditioned by the political situation in that extremely dangerous, enigmatic and criminal century.”Footnote ³³

Ambiguity and multiplicity of meanings inherent in poetic language implied a particular mode of political subjectivity (“psyche”) framed by an attempt to avoid repression without renouncing one's own voice, even while such an attempt itself qualified as subversion. According to memoirists, Mandel΄shtam's own relationship to the regime unfolded between “opposing impulses,” so that his “craving for unison” would be immediately “replaced by repulsion.”Footnote ³⁴ In the very first line of “K nemetskoi rechi,” the poetic I is defined by diglossia and self-contradiction, both immediately associated with imminent ruin. Admitting to a traitor's duplicity, the poet in a later stanza anticipates death as its necessary consequence: “We rushed into the grave.”

Poetry and Calamity

In “K nemetskoi rechi,” Mandel΄shtam explores the tensions between historical and poetic existence through a half-explicit juxtaposition of his own “I” with the German poet Ewald-Christian von Kleist (1715—1759), a Prussian officer mortally wounded by Russian troops during the Seven Year's War (semiletni а ia voina, 1756–63). Mandel΄shtam bought an edition of Kleist's works, most probably the late nineteenth-century volume edited by August Sauer, and was fascinated by his biography.Footnote ³⁵ “K nemetskoi rechi” originally took shape as the sonnet “Khristian Kleist,” praising its protagonist as the paragon of “seriousness and honor,” a role attributed in the final text to the German nation as a whole.Footnote ³⁶ Kleist's death in the war emerges in Mandel΄shtam's poem as the central trope for the conflicted relationship between the poet, his oeuvre, and a historical crisis.

In stanza 7 Mandel΄shtam's poetic “I” is defined by its potential engagement in new seven years’ wars: “they‘re recruiting me still / For new plagues, for seven-year slaughters.” Conversely, the appearance of the officer Kleist in stanza 3 is preceded by an assertion of poetry's productive relationship with calamity: “Thunderstorms do you good, poetry.” This formula evokes a particular vision of poetry's place in political history outlined in the Conversation about Dante and in Mandel΄shtam's earlier essay “The Wheat of Humanity” (Pshenitsa chelovecheskaia, 1922). Comparing Dante's poetic speech to mined rock, Mandel΄shtam concludes: “Granular admixtures and veins of lava indicate a single fault or catastrophe as the common source of formation.”Footnote ³⁷ Similar metaphors were developed in the “The Wheat of Humanity” where European culture of the Ancien Regime, represented by eighteenth-century Germans (Kant and Goethe) and the Russian odic poetry of Mikhail Lomonosov, is defined by its dependence on political catastrophe: “The soul of politics—its nature—is catastrophe, the unexpected fault-shift, destruction.”Footnote ³⁸

Even while Mandel΄shtam declares traditional politics of national confrontation obsolete, replaced after World War I by international economics of the universal household, Russia and its poetry complicate this vector. Emerging as a vessel for the common “feeling of Europe” earlier suppressed by national rivalries, the Russian canon simultaneously preserves the culture of catastrophe: the cosmopolitans Nikolai Karamzin (who gives an account of Kleist's death in his “Letters of a Russian Traveler”) and Fedor Tiutchev “felt the soil of Europe [specifically, Germany and Switzerland] most powerfully where it reared up on mountains, where it preserves the living memory of geological catastrophe.”Footnote ³⁹ In “K nemetskoi rechi” Mandel΄shtam claims for himself the role of a virtual Russian traveler to German lands reviving the antiquated poetic language of calamity.

The Seven Years’ War emerges as a historical trope aggregating important motifs and concepts from Mandel΄shtam's own oeuvre and from outside of it. Stanza 4 situates the vantage point on the war in Frankfurt before the era of Goethe's fame. “Frankfurt” is a reference to Frankfurt an der Oder where Kleist died from his wounds, but primarily to Frankfurt am Main where Goethe experienced the war as a child, as he later narrated in his autobiography Poetry and Truth (Dichtung und Wahrheit, 1831), which Mandel΄shtam intensely engaged with and used for a radio play on Goethe's life. Goethe's childhood recollections of the war, colored by a peaceful tone captured in Mandel΄shtam's stanza, are accompanied by a reflection on the war's formative role for German “national poetry”:

Given the official celebration of Goethe, these lines could have read in 1932 as a blueprint for an aesthetic of poetry shaped by revolution, civil war, and the ensuing autocracy. A fratricidal war resolves in a political consensus framed by a downright cult of the leader (which certainly existed around Frederick the Great): “Among us there is praise without flattery.” Judged by its capacity to glorify general calamity and singular authority, poetry emerges as the medium where this consensus forms and unfolds, while a poet achieves “most complete effectiveness” when he assumes the voice of a “fellow-combatant” on the battlefield. Mandel΄shtam's formula linking political catastrophe to poetic revival—“Thunderstorms do you good, poetry”—both summarizes Goethe's argument and echoes Bolshevik aesthetics. To give one example, Trotskii in Literature and Revolution (Literatura i revolutisiia, 1924) linked the emergence of futurism in the 1910s to the anticipated revolutionary crisis: “All this weighed heavily on poetry at a time when the air, charged with accumulated electricity, gave sign of impending great explosions.”Footnote ⁴¹

The appearance of the corresponding poet figure, “the German officer,” confirms the claim that calamity is beneficial for poetry. Devoid of a proper name in the poem's final version, the German officer becomes an “unknown soldier”; he represents an “ideal type” of a particular mode of literary and political existence defined by war and service. As a trope of mobilization, war was deeply embedded both in Mandel΄shtam's Acmeist idiom and in Bolshevik rhetoric. In “On the Nature of the Word” (O prirode slova, 1922), Mandel΄shtam had claimed that Acmeism was much more than a poetic school but a “social phenomenon,” as it restored a “moral force” to Russian poetry and reinforced civic duty with an archaic ethos of militarized manly valor, poniatie “muzha.” Footnote ⁴² In the famous 1914 poem, “I have not heard the tales of Ossian” (Ia ne slykhal rasskazov Ossiana), poetic immortality is conflated with military accomplishment of ancient warriors. In the Soviet context, this motif came to resonate with the omnipresent vision of the soldier as a paradigm for the new subjectivity shaped and subsumed by self-sacrificial service to the official cause. Shortly before his suicide in 1930, Maiakovskii conjured up an image of a poetic death on the battlefield in “At the Top of My Voice” (Vo ves΄ golos):

In his own turn, Kleist predicted his death in the Ode an die preußische Armee im Merz 1757 (Ode to the Prussian Army, in March 1757):

Drawing on Kleist and the two key concepts of his last line, honor and death, Mandel΄shtam develops his own uneasy amalgamation of historical death and poetic eternity. In the eulogies of Kleist quoted by Sauer, his death was unequivocally praised as a feat of a loyal state servitor. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing mourned the “honorable man” (ehrlicher Mann), and heroic warrior (simultaneously suspecting him of suicidal intent), while Thomas Abbt claimed that Kleist's patriotic self-sacrifice overshadowed his poetry: “How far behind … does the dying warrior leave the immortal poet!”Footnote ⁴⁵ Similarly, “K nemetskoi rechi” all but starts with an appeal to learn honor from Kleist and the Germans (“Let's study solemnity and honor / From a foreign family in the West”) before proceeding to glorify valorous death and honorable friendship in stanzas 6 and 8–9.

In the idiom of “K nemetskoi rechi,” in line with its self-proclaimed principle of poetic and political self-contradiction, both intertwined concepts of death and honor acquire radically opposed meanings. As a bearer of a historical ethos specific to one era and remembered in another, the poem's “German officer” resonates with Mandel΄shtam's reflections on the shifting visions of honor in the Noise of Time:

Similar to Rostov, Mandel΄shtam's Kleist stems from the long-gone era before revolutionary catastrophes, a world where honor, war, and death could be associated with glory, roses, wine, and love for one's monarch. In this sense, the poem's plea to learn honor from the Germans can be read as an attempt to escape the Russian tradition that turned the Rostovs of the later generations into revolutionaries, and to develop instead a poetic language of political conformity, or tozhdestvо. In “On the Nature of the Word” Mandel΄shtam opposed western cultures that “lock their language in from the outside, surround it with the walls of State and Church” to the Russian language, “the threatening and boundless element of which cannot be contained within any governmental or ecclesiastical form”.Footnote ⁴⁷

Indeed, in “K nemetskoi rechi” a pastiche of eighteenth-century Germany is consistently associated with political conformity. Together with its draft versions, the poem refers to Goethe and Weimar, where he served as a courtier and minister. Inspired by the official celebration of Goethe, allusions to his poetry and that of his German contemporaries are employed to style the death of the warrior poet as an ultimate gesture of obedience, the honor of a monarchy's subject. Literary immortality symbolized by Heine's Gott Nachtigal, a poetic deity with a Christ-like capacity for resurrection (and by Kleist's middle name—Christian—used in Mandel΄shtam's original sonnet instead of the usual “Ewald”), is associated with Valhalla, the service paradise of Germanic heroic warriors. The poem's second line adopts Goethe's famous allegorical image of a butterfly whose existence fulfills and perpetuates itself through a self-inflicted death at a candle: Stirb und werde! (Die and become!) In Mandel΄shtam's play Goethe's Youth (Molodost΄ Gete, 1935) this dialectic is reconnected with a Marxist understanding of history and politics: Werther's emblematic suicide in fact “served only to strengthen the vitality of his class,” the still progressive bourgeoisie.Footnote ⁴⁸ The voluntary death and immortality of a literary figure—and its author—are thus inscribed into the official and triumphant pre-history of Stalinist socialism.Footnote ⁴⁹

While “K nemetskoi rechi” thus ostensibly unfolds in historical, national, and linguistic spaces of German loyalism, in the poem‘s semantic texture, permeated with self-conscious contradiction, conformity is constantly accompanied by its opposite, an admission of treacherous dissent.Footnote ⁵⁰ For all its thrust to escape from Soviet Russia(n), it remains firmly bound to its own language and history. In a poem written in 1932, poetic vocabulary cannot be detached from the history of honor and glory, which, according to the Noise of Time, for Mandel΄shtam's own generation came to designate conspiracy and self-sacrificial resistance. A poet loyal to Russia (and an opponent of actual emigration), Mandel΄shtam is firmly rooted in the Russian tradition of intellectual opposition, outlined in the Noise of Time and succinctly summarized by Ginzburg: “disagreement with the established order was the experience of Russian culture as a whole.”Footnote ⁵¹ Mandel΄shtam's Kleist is both the loyalist counterweight to Russia's dead poets traditionally regarded as dissidents and victims of oppression, and a reference to their distinguished cultural lineage. In Kleist's biography, Mandel΄shtam was most struck by the fact that he was killed by Russians, a victim of the same national autocracy that Mandel΄shtam and his contemporaries were subject to. Mandel΄shtam's Kleist could be construed as a reference to Nikolai Gumilev, a personal friend, poet, and officer in the imperial army: at once a royalist and a dissenter, he was executed by the Bolsheviks as a member of a monarchist conspiracy.Footnote ⁵² Speaking in 1934 of the death of Maiakovskii and clearly thinking of Gumilev, Demian Bednyi remarked that “Russian poetry was being ‘shot dead.’”Footnote ⁵³

In Kleist‘s death Mandel΄shtam finds a trope for the fundamental tensions and contradictions framing the Soviet subject. “In the Bolshevik tradition,” Igal Halfin argues, “[d]eath could be a sublime, highly positive experience of self-sacrifice, or a negative experience, in which one's expulsion from the society of men was rendered eternal.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Through carefully-crafted semantics of ambiguity, Mandel΄shtam captures the entwinement of two alternatives that counted as opposites in official discourse but together framed the Soviet experience. Echoing Kleist's image as his king's loyal soldier, the poem aligns his fate with a fear both defied and confirmed by his valor: “We rushed into the grave, fearless down the steps.” Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam devotes a special chapter to the fear instilled by constant repression, identifying it as the strongest emotion known to her generation. Unlike most, her dissenting husband (she writes) was “immune to terror” and “lived his life unafraid,” prozhil bez strakha, just as the likes of Kleist met their deaths in his poem.Footnote ⁵⁵

Dead Poets’ Society: Repression and the “Lyric Hero”

As a poetic and political gesture, “K nemetskoi rechi” articulates the poet's anticipation of his death, inscribed into national calamity. This attitude was later described by Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam, whose indispensable memoirs amalgamate biographical narration with a sophisticated analysis of poetry and its place in history that engages the conceptual heritage of Formalism. She interprets Mandel΄shtam's anticipation of death in double terms, as an aesthetic strategy and a political sensibility. There is little wonder, she writes, that artists can predict their deaths, since death is their “last act of creation,” “a cardinal element—one to which all else is subordinate—in the structure of one's life.”Footnote ⁵⁶ At the same time this prescience amounts to a clear-sighted understanding of the logic of terror not limited to poets: “M. steered his life with a strong hand toward the doom that awaited him, toward the commonest form of death, ‘herded with the herd.’”Footnote ⁵⁷

Indeed, the death of poets (Aleksandr Pushkin, Blok, Gumilev, Sergei Esenin, Maiakovskii), anticipated in their oeuvre and canonized by subsequent commemoration, was a central trope of early Soviet aesthetics. It focalized some of the central themes explored by Mandel΄shtam in “K nemetskoi rechi,” namely, the dialectics of inheritance and erasure that shaped the relationship of Soviet literature to the canon of the past, as well as the dialectics of submission and defiance that governed the status of the author and subject in the totalitarian situation.Footnote ⁵⁸ In their conceptually charged 1921 obituaries for Blok, Formalists analyzed his death as a “literary fact,” a juncture that revealed the structure of the authorial voice in the context of the historical moment.Footnote ⁵⁹ It is here that Tynianov introduced the concept of the “lyric hero”: a poet's discursive persona that can claim only a false similarity with his historical self.Footnote ⁶⁰ Arguing along similar lines, Boris Eikhenbaum in his essay “Blok's Fate” (“Sud΄ba Bloka”), praised by Mandel΄shtam in his own obituary, interpreted this discrepancy between the poet and his alter ego as a fateful consequence of historical and cultural crisis. As a witness to the crisis of Symbolism, Blok's poetic self is defined by a “tragic awareness of both the incompatibility and essential unity of all things, an awareness of irreconcilable contradictions demanding reconciliation.” After the revolution, he “begins anew his restless search for a fusion of art, life and politics” but fails. In the end, he speaks of an obligation of the artist to glorify the new political order. According to Eikhenbaum: “When the artist speaks of “obligation” [obiazannost΄], he betrays art, and art does not forgive him. Blok did not succeed in saving himself—retribution came. Concealed behind the tribune's sober words is the presentiment of some future, inevitable deathly gloom.”Footnote ⁶¹

The poetic persona of “lyric hero” is understood as a cultural illusion, “the mask of the tragic actor,” which emerges “[i]nstead of a real (and, of course, impossible) fusion of life and art” in a doomed attempt to transcend the collision of “art, life and politics.” As a function of the poet's ruin, the concept of “lyric hero” is framed by political oppression: “The poet dies because he can no longer breathe; life has lost its meaning.”Footnote ⁶²

In a similar vein, the fundamental political implications of the “lyric hero” were later explored by Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam in the chapter of her Second Book titled “Literary Theory.” For her, Tynianov's theoretical invention of a fictional and interchangeable intermediary figure between the poet and his public was symptomatic for the 1920s as a formative moment of the repressive regime with its disregard for personality:

While critiquing Tynianov's theory as contrary to true ethics of poetry, she endorses it as a key to the political anthropology of the early Soviet situation:

She then proceeds to discuss the implications of this theory for writers’ fates in the Soviet regime. An understanding of the poetic “I” as a mask that can be changed at will seemed to allow for strategizing and adaptation: “Tynianov quite seriously proposed that certain events in Mandel΄shtam's life should be accepted as ‘facts of his literary biography,’ while others should be disregarded.” But “Tynianov himself was not good at adapting himself and was constantly hounded,” while the only new role accessible to the Mandel΄shtams was that of beggars. Generally, the actual reasons for shifting roles lay far beyond literary strategy: “The commonest break in our biographies was to be turned into a convict doing hard labor, that is into a camp inmate.” As a concept, “lyric hero” can thus only represent, quite literally, “the process of diminishing and destroying the personality.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The Mandel΄shtams suspected that Tynianov modeled his historical conduct after Aleksandr Griboedov—a one-time political conspirator, canonical author, military officer, and diplomat killed in Persia who became the protagonist of Tynianov's historical novel The Death of Vasir-Mukhtar (Smert΄ Vazir-Mukhtara, 1927): “It is not much fun being a Griboyedov either, but at least Griboedov got a brief respite and died at the hands of foreigners, not his own people—which is always a little easier to bear.”Footnote ⁶⁶

In a similar vein, “K nemetskoi rechi” constructs Mandel΄shtam's poetic double, the “German officer,” as a prefiguration of his ruin. Conjuring the imminent death of the author, the poem makes it a matter of poetic language and trope, attributing it to a literary personality, a discursive double with a claim to the “immortality” of a fictional figure. This doppelgänger is explicitly separated from the author and his times, and yet provides a model and a vocabulary for his poetic and historical self-reflection. In line with Eikhenbaum's formulations, the deadly self-contradiction between life and art amounts here to treason, a conflict between the poet's idiosyncratic idiom and the Russian language to which he is bound by obiazan[nost΄], cultural debt as well as political duty. Just as Eikhenbaum's Blok turned to Catilina as the “Roman ‘Bolshevik,’” Mandel΄shtam seeks “analogies from the past in order to understand his own century and to justify his own destiny.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Emotional Oscillations

In Mandel΄shtam's pastiche of Kleist's poetic era in stanzas 3–6, the principle of contradiction is transposed into poetic style which manifestly derives from Russian voices of the Golden Age. Kleist‘s death during the war, framed by his historical status as a Prussian officer and glorified in advance by the grave diction of his political poetry, is counterpoised by the lighter tones of private, “Anacreontic” hedonism more characteristic of Kleist's prewar oeuvre. Far from incidental, this dynamic captured what Tynianov considered a primary tension that drove the evolution of poetic style from the eighteenth century to his own day. From Lomonosov and Karamzin to Pushkin's dialog with the “archaists” to Maiakovskii's rivalry with Esenin, Tynianov argued, poetic development unfolded in a perpetual competition between lighter, private modes such as elegy and song and the grand rhetoric of the political ode, its analogs and derivatives. In his analysis of Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin, Tynianov discussed the uneasy mix of the two poetic principles in the figure of Lenskii, the patron saint of Russia's dead poets. This paradigmatic poet figure, he argued, was not static but structured by a series of dynamic tensions reflected in the “emotional oscillation” (emotsional΄noe kolebanie) of Lenskii's portrayal and poetry.Footnote ⁶⁸

In “The Interval,” Tynianov used similar terms to define Mandel΄shtam as a “pure lyricist” incapable of “going beyond the lyric”; a “poet of small form” whose poetic techniques would not work in the “epic form.” This was a concept linked in Tynianov's criticism to Maiakovskii and political spaces of the rally, the hallmark of the early Soviet regime.Footnote ⁶⁹ If in 1937 Mandel΄shtam understood his attempts at conformist poetry as a direct repudiation of Tynianov's assessment, in “K nemetskoi rechi” he staged the very poetic principle, or zakon as Tynianov calls it, of emotional oscillation. Footnote ⁷⁰ This oscillation emerges as another form of inherent self-contradiction which permeates the poetic language and political existence of Kleist's and Mandel΄shtam's generations. In some copies of the poem, the tone is set by an epigraph from Kleist:

The contrast between life's pleasures and imminent death is a usual Anacreontic motif, evoked in Russian in Pushkin's early poem “Krivtsovu” and Anton Delvig's imitation of Kleist's same verses that Mandel΄shtam could have hardly known.Footnote ⁷¹ In “K nemetskoi rechi,” this contrast is reinvigorated (or “dynamized”) by the fact that the anticipated death no longer appears as a matter of poetic abstraction and convention but as historical actuality. As such, it forms the poem's central topic, suggested by military props (ofitser, efes, koni) before it emerges undisguised in stanza 6. It was this tension between historical catastrophe and the lyric themes of private joys of wine and friendship, found in Kleist's oeuvre and fulfilled by his fate, which made him a valid historical and poetic proxy for Mandel΄shtam's reflection on the Soviet experience. Kleist‘s poetic stance towards honor and death varied depending on the choice of genre, Anacreontic or political.Footnote ⁷² Lyric with its canonical language(s) manifested itself as the medium equipped to stage the crucial disjunction between one's public and private selves, the same fatal and historically palpable discrepancy between “life and politics” that was revealed, according to Eikhenbaum, in Blok's “lyric hero” and his death.

An emotional oscillation between fear and joy, happiness and grief, toska, as a consequence of “exclusion, or at least the fear of it” was a constant feature of the early Soviet experience of subjecthood, spanning private diaries of “simple people” and high-brow literature.Footnote ⁷³ For Ginzburg, this oscillation represented an element of the totalitarian situation, an “adoptive mechanism—the double mechanism of distraction from suffering and attraction to pleasure” which defined her generation's mode of survival: “The very same people who, in the morning, had received news of the loss of their loved ones … then attended the ballet, were entertained as guests, played cards and relaxed at the dacha… . And all the while, as we enjoyed ourselves, conscience never once intruded. Probably because we knew something might happen to any one of us at any moment. Just like in war.”Footnote ⁷⁴

This was immediately relevant for Mandel΄shtam, as both Ginzburg's notebooks and his widow's memoirs confirm on many occasions. Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam remembers: “We were able to go on treating ourselves to the feast of life only because he infected me with his own joy, not allowing the imminent catastrophe to cast a shadow on the beautiful moments of the present.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In a conversation reported by Ginzburg, the two women discussed the poetic narcissism of Blok or Akhmatova, evoking once again the concept of “lyric hero.” Acknowledging that Mandel΄shtam was generally free from it in his writing, Ginzburg asked whether he was completely exempt from the temptation to fashion himself as a “tragic, persecuted poet.” The response was: “No, you know, it was enough for friends to show up with wine and some food for him to forget immediately that he was a tragic poet.”Footnote ⁷⁶

This biographical anecdote, confirmed by many similar accounts, shares with “K nemetskoi rechi” and its poetic semantics a dynamic of admission and suppression of fear, a hedonism intensified and underwritten by the ever-present threat of annihilation which it illusorily suspends. Tynianov, once again, mediated the transfer of this dynamic between the political present and the poetic past. Tynianov's historical novels, Kiukhlia (1925) and The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar—viewed by the Mandel΄shtams as projections of Soviet experience—interwove the poetic language of the Golden Age into a subtly politicized portrayal of a generation of officers and poets who witnessed the succession of the failed revolution of 1825 by Nicholas I's repressive autocracy.Footnote ⁷⁷ The much poeticized drinking parties and friendship bonds of that era appear in Tynianov as alternative political spaces, where dissent, conformity, and careerism are played out in constant tension and interplay between political roles and private behavior. Mandel΄shtam's warrior poet inhabits a similar private space of friendship (a concept which surfaces three times in “K nemetskoi rechi”), associated with an “Anacreontic” poetic idiom that both distances itself from and points to the cadre of historical calamity.

Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam outlined and criticized Mandel΄shtam's bookish, historically misplaced vision of masculine friendship. According to her, “M. set the highest value on friendship among ‘men’ [muzhi] with its ‘handshake at moments of danger’ [and] ‘battle.’” This vision was out of place in Soviet reality, where “civic courage is a much rarer thing than military valor” because being a soldier only requires “submission to discipline” rather than a sense of “honor and duty (how many people still know what these are?) … M. did not survive until the outbreak of war, and in his moment of danger there was not one ‘man’ ready to shake him by the hand.” Later she concludes: “We were on the threshold of a new era in which ‘men’ ceased to exist.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In “K nemetskoi rechi,” Mandel΄shtam himself evokes the antiquated political ideal of friendship and at the same time infuses it with tensions and ambiguities that conditioned the actual experience and language of Soviet subjectivity. Juxtaposed with the poem's dedication to Boris Kuzin, Kleist's death on the battlefield emerges at once as a circumlocution for the historical situation of terror and a doomed attempt to substitute it for a heroic myth.

Kuzin, a Germanophile biologist, became the Mandel΄shtams’ friend during their trip to Armenia in 1930 and was arrested in 1932, the year when “K nemetskoi rechi” was written. Crediting Kuzin for the return of his poetic voice after a long silence, Mandel΄shtam evokes in his poem the ancient friendship between Orestes, persecuted by the gods, and the loyal Pylades, celebrated in Goethe's tragedy Iphigenie auf Tauris (1786). Mandel΄shtam's protagonist longs for the fate of Pylades and is “awakened” by friendship just as Goethe's character who admits to Orestes: “’Twas then my life began when first I lov'd thee” (II, 1). ^{Footnote 79} His friendship with Kuzin provided Mandel΄shtam with a poetic space for the oscillating meanings of the poem's central concepts, just as it encompassed Mandel΄shtam's constant hovering between dissent and conformity.Footnote ⁸⁰

The honor of the second stanza, the principal feature of the muzh, could signify allegiance to the state just as easily as loyalty to its victims, as Nadezha Mandel΄shtam's usage confirms. The ethics of friendship is also simultaneously aligned with defiance of historical calamity and subjection to it.Footnote ⁸¹ This double vision unfolded in Mandel΄shtam's 1933 letter to Marietta Shaginian pleading for Kuzin's release. Here, Mandel΄shtam credited Kuzin with his own acceptance of Soviet reality but simultaneously revived his reputation for dissent: “Who am I? . . . an imaginary outcast (mnimyi otshchepenets).” From this position of discursive and political instability, Mandel΄shtam asserts his allegiance to the repressive forces that hold Kuzin (“these hands carry out work both savage and alive”) but insists Kuzin should be returned his “outward freedom” as a “small extension of the enormous inner freedom already granted to him by our epoch and our country.”Footnote ⁸² Both here and in stanza 5 of “K nemetskoi rechi,” freedom itself emerges as a counterintuitive consequence of submission and victimhood, as it is framed by future death and present repression and constraint: “What was that freedom you possessed, / What border signs [vekhi] did you place for me.” In her chapter on fear Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam refers to “inner freedom” before she outlines various strategies of adaptation developed by poets and intellectuals, contrasting them to “slaves” who “never have this sense of their own dishonor.”Footnote ⁸³ Yet, in the poem just as in real life, it was “personal friends”—along with fellow intellectuals including Tynianov and Eikhenbaum—who broadcast the repressive thrust into the spaces of “personal freedom,” “out of genuine friendship for [Mandel΄shtam], they wanted to help him ‘reform’”.Footnote ⁸⁴

These bitter paradoxes of freedom apply to poetry just as they do to the private existence of poets and their friends. Blok's historical demise in 1921, Eikhenbaum reminds us, was preceded by his speech “On the Poet's Calling” (O naznachenii poeta) where he vehemently denied the value of public politics and political liberties, arguing instead for a “personal freedom” as a true space for the poet's work. But this concession, as Blok immediately admits, fails to save poetry from suffocation under the oppression of “bureaucrats who plan to direct poetry along channels of their own, encroaching upon its inner freedom.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Here, Eikhenbaum writes, “[t]he cycle has ended,” as Blok claims to have “overcome ‘the lyrical’ in himself . . . cleared the path for a classical art that is not bound by any ‘obligation’ and free within its very limitations.”Footnote ⁸⁶

“K nemetskoi rechi” self-reflectively situates poetic utterance and language (“art”) within a similar set of tensions: the poet's wish to escape from his obligation towards Soviet Russian and embrace instead a freedom of poetry and friendship cannot but reflect his subjection to political violence. Eighteenth-century Germany provides a model of a “classical art” which firmly inscribes “the lyrical” within aesthetic and political boundaries (vekhi). According to Lunacharskii's semi-official survey of European literature (1924, 1930), eighteenth-century German letters were indeed shaped by an over-powerful despotism which made any resistance impossible, confining writers like Lessing, Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller to private spaces of friendship and illusions of aesthetic freedom.Footnote ⁸⁷

The dialectic of emancipation and constraint that permeates the poem's poetics and politics culminates in one of its final images: “Sound has thinned. Words hiss, rebel.” The poetic voice is compared here to sparkling wine ready to burst from a bottle's narrow neck, an analogy anticipated by the earlier reference to wine. Mandel΄shtam alludes to an image with a long history in Russian poetry, from Pushkin and his contemporaries to Blok. It appears, famously, in Evgenii Onegin, and in the narrative poem The Feasts (Piry, 1821) by Pushkin's friend and rival Evgenii Baratynskii:

The “Anacreontic” depiction of wine is expressly aligned here with a particular mode of historical existence merging private hedonism with Decembrist political freethinking, a combination explored by Mandel΄shtam in his poem “The Decembrist” (Dekabrist, 1917).Footnote ⁸⁹ This cultural space, where the poetic voice originates, is associated with politicized notions of courage and freedom of speech and mind: just as the poet(s) in “K nemetskoi rechi” know no fear, and wine-like words revolt. On the other hand, in Baratynskii as in Mandel΄shtam, the political virtues of wine can be construed as little more than metaphorical ornament for the politically innocuous, if not conformist, private and poetic joys. Parallel to the repressive imagination equating friendship with conspiracy, poetic language (and the wine imagery that represents it) mediates between political defiance and escapist resignation. Just as admiration for the Decembrists was nourished by the repression that crushed them, Mandel΄shtam's poetic revolt can only claim an aesthetic effect that is made possible by the bottleneck of political constraint. As a private voice par excellence, the lyric cannot but mirror and immortalize the political conditions—“seven years’ slaughters”—which frame its appearance, reproduction, and annihilation.

Conclusion: Lyric and the Subject under Stalinism

Important recent studies have highlighted the discursive complexity and repressive violence of the Soviet subject. In his seminal, expressly Foucauldian book, Oleg Kharkhordin explores the process of Soviet individuation and the emerging Soviet discourse of selfhood, lichnost΄. Mediating between individual autonomy and the erasure of the self in the collective, this concept is grounded in repressive regimes of self-exposure and denunciation alongside textual practices of self-analysis.Footnote ⁹⁰ Similarly, Irina Sandomirskaia investigates the interplay of repression, utterance, and historical consciousness in Soviet literature as a case of modernity's violent alienation of language.Footnote ⁹¹ In this context, my reading of Mandel΄shtam's “K nemetskoi rechi” aims to highlight the significance of what Foucault defines as “the author function” as a point of assembly of repressive subjectivity. The Soviet lichnost΄ finds its medium in poetry's literaturnaia lichnost΄, conceptualized by the Formalists, Ginzburg, and Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam on the crossroads of literary and political analysis.

In “What is an Author?” Foucault emphasizes “the author's disappearance which, since Mallarmé, has been a constantly recurring event.” In modernism, he writes: “The work, which once had the duty of providing immortality, now possesses the right to kill, to be its author's murderer” as “the writing subject cancels out the signs his particular individuality . . . he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing.” These critical metaphors can acquire a physical reality, for the “author function” emerged “to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive.” These constellations—spectacularly enacted in Mandel΄shtam's suicidal Stalin epigram—are not limited to professional literary production but must serve as a starting point for a reexamination of “the privileges of the subject,” “the subject's point of insertion, modes of functioning, and system of dependencies.”Footnote ⁹²

A variant to Mandel΄shtam's “Fourth Prose” (Chetvertaia proza, 1929–30) reveals this oscillation between author and subject, self-assertion and self-effacement, repression and language. Here, Mandel΄shtam claims as his own the language and the “philology” of “Stalin, who implements the party line, the Bolsheviks who torment each other for every last letter, force each other to recant till dawn: I love their language. It is my language.”Footnote ⁹³ Language is the medium where identities are forged by the violently imposed and enforced orthodoxy (the reference to political trials is unmistakable). Mandel΄shtam's vehemently asserted Soviet “I,” the central referent of his phrase, appears—if only for a moment—at the crossroad of language and repression (a crossroad termed “philology”). Reviving the “philologies” of Mandel΄shtam and his contemporaries—that of victims and dissidents no less than that of Stalin—would mean recognizing their theoretical awareness of the complex interdependencies between subjectivity, language, and the apparatuses of violence.