Tristia by Osip Mandelstam

First published: 1919 (English translation, 1967)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Osip Mandelstam’s second collection of verses, Tristia, was published in 1922 under unusual and intriguing circumstances. The manuscript was taken to Berlin, and the poems were arranged by a fellow poet, Mikhail Kuzmin, who also gave the work its title, after one of the best poems in the collection. Mandelstam borrowed that poem’s title from Ovid’s work by the same name. Mandelstam was not satisfied, however, with the way the publication was handled. When he published the second edition in 1923, he changed the title to Vtoraia kniga (second book) and rearranged the poems. Because the collection was republished as Tristia, and because Mandelstam later referred to it as such, Tristia is now accepted as its only legitimate title. Perhaps the reason Mandelstam accepted the title was that, like Ovid, he wrote most of the Tristia poems on the shores of the Black Sea, and he brought the manuscript from there. Moreover, Mandelstam’s life, in which he was frequently on the run, mostly as an internal exile, parallels that of Ovid. His lifelong fascination with classical antiquity also identifies him with Ovid.

The forty-five mostly untitled poems in Tristia were written between 1916 and 1920. The poems mark the highest achievements in the early stage of Mandelstam’s poetic career, and they represent some of the best poems he wrote. There is no unifying subject in the collection, but several distinct themes can be discerned. What strikes the reader the most are the preponderant references to classical antiquity. The most obvious theme, already familiar from Mandelstam’s first collection, Kamen (1913; Stone, 1981), is the poet’s homage to Rome and its civilization. The theme reflects his fascination with the Mediterranean culture and with the unity between cultures that it represents. In a poem of beautiful visual images, “Venetian Life,” he uses a Renaissance painting to sing an ode to Rome, the beautiful city on the Adriatic where “jewels are heavy” and where “there is no salvation from love.” A Georgian woman who has lost her cameo resembles a beautiful Roman woman (“I’ve lost a delicate cameo”). Persephone—the Greek goddess of the afterlife and the wife of Hades, but also used by Mandelstam as a Roman goddess—is mentioned in several poems (“I am cold,” “Swallow,” “As Psyche-Life goes down to the shades”). Mandelstam expresses his greatest veneration of Rome in the short poem “Nature’s the same as Rome”:

Nature’s the same as Rome, was reflected in it.We see images of its civic mightIn the clear air, as in the sky-blue circus,In the forum of fields, the colonnades of groves.

Mandelstam asserts that nature has found its most perfect embodiment in Rome, where nature and culture are one and where “stones exist in order to build.”

While the references in Stone are mostly to Rome, in Tristia, Mandelstam dwells on ancient Greece. References to the classical world appear in many of the poems—for example, Phedre (in “No matter how I concealed them”), “the sacred mace of Heracles” (in “The Menagerie”), and the immortal roses of Kypris (in “In Petersburg we’ll meet again”). In “The Greeks planned for war,” Mandelstam sees Europe as the new Hellas, and he beseeches it to save the Acropolis and Piraeus. The long poem “The thick golden stream of honey took so long” best expresses Mandelstam’s love for ancient Greece, where the proverbial golden honey flows in the streets, “the service of Bacchus is everywhere,” and “the peaceful days roll by.” The poet ends his apotheosis with a mournful cry:

Golden fleece, where are you, golden fleece?The sea’s heavy waves roared the whole way.Abandoning the ship, its sail worn out,Odysseus returned, full with space and time.

This poem, written during World War I and the Russian Revolution, expresses Mandelstam’s yearning for more peaceful times and sunny shores. Mandelstam identifies peace, happiness, and plenitude with ancient Greece.

The poem “Tortoise” is another apotheosis of the beauty of ancient Greece. Here “blind lyrists, like bees, give us Ionic honey,” “cicadas click like hammers forging out a ring,” and “the honeysuckle smells, to the joy of the bees.” The poem is an idyll of an arcadian landscape, yet it is an idyll different from that of the Parnassians. Mandelstam felt that the quintessential art in classical Greece was music, not visual arts—hence the metaphor of a tortoise resembling the form of a lyre, an instrument. Moreover, because he wanted to use poetry to reflect the vicissitudes of his own fate—in this instance, the danger of the loss of artistic freedom—Mandelstam wove pictorial and musical images into his own canvas of a land that he placed in the Arcadia and in the islands of the Greek archipelago, the symbol of ancient Hellas.

The third frame of reference in Tristia is Jewish culture and history. Though Jewish by origin, Mandelstam was drawn first to Catholicism and then to classical antiquity; he attempted to find in them a sense of his own orientation. He not only preserved his Jewish background but also used his background as a bridge between the Christian and Judaic cultures—a kind of symbiosis that best reflected his own thinking and achieved the unity he desired. In “This night is beyond recall,” Mandelstam re-creates the funereal atmosphere shortly after the death of his mother: “And the voices of the Israelites/ Rose above the mother./ I awoke in a cradle, shone upon/ By a black sun.” This poem illustrates the poet’s ability to use personal experience to transcend a fixed moment in history—in this case, the world war. The fact that the persona awakes in the cradle alone signifies the poet’s danger of losing his roots altogether, without finding a new mooring. The foreboding of the potential demise of the ancient and Christian cultures is underscored by the personal tragedy of “the Israelites.”

Similar concerns are expressed in “The young Levite among the priests,” where the Levite futilely warns his older compatriots of the dangers threatening them all. At the end of the poem, however, Mandelstam sees hope: “We swaddled the Sabbath in precious linen/ With a heavy Menorah lit the night of Jerusalem.” The reference to Christ corresponds to the poet’s long-harbored desire for a rejuvenation of the two cultures. In “Go back to the tainted lap, Leah,” Mandelstam completes his vision of unity by stating that the Hebrew, Leah, must, and will, undergo a change: “You are in love with a Jew,/ You will vanish in him, and/ God will be with you.” Finally, Mandelstam combines classical antiquity and its heir, Eastern Orthodoxy, with his Jewish roots and Catholicism in order to express his yearning for unity among all these cultures, as symbolized by a metaphor of the “eternal cathedrals” of Sofia (the East) and Peter (the West) in the final poem of the collection.

Mandelstam did not always seek refuge in antiquity; he was painfully aware of his own time and place. Even when he fled to the past, he used these excursions to fend off the problems besetting him. Nowhere is this more evident than in “Tristia,” the title poem of the book. Here, through his knowledge of classical antiquity, the poet foreshadows a separation from his dear ones. The poem parallels the fate of the Roman poet Ovid, who was banished for political reasons to the shores of the Black Sea, where he wrote poetry and where he died. Many of the details in Mandelstam’s poem closely follow Ovid’s elegy of the same title.

“Tristia” reflects the mood of a man leaving his home, his city, and, possibly, his country—an experience that was always present in the poet’s mature life and that turned out to be his final destiny. Stating that he has learned the “science of parting,” he gives expression to melancholy mixed with stoicism, even defiance; to hope mixed with latent despair; and to his tacit understanding of what life is about. In this sense,“Tristia” is one of the most essential poems in all of Mandelstam’s works. At the time he wrote the poem, he was threatened by numerous dangers, and he had several close calls. The possibility of involuntary parting must have occurred to him often, and his thorough knowledge of classical literature enabled him to give artistic expression to such thoughts and sentiments, using Ovid as a model. The typically Mandelstamian formal aspects—striking images and metaphors, a mixture of lyrical and reflective passages, sporadic departures from the main train of thought, frequent interventions on the part of the poet, and the unique rhythm—all enhance the artistic qualities of “Tristia.”

Other references to Mandelstam’s own time and place abound. The references concern his beloved city, St. Petersburg, and the looming danger of the Bolsheviks. St. Petersburg is, for Mandelstam, the epitome of an urban society founded on spiritual values. He mentions St. Petersburg again and again, calling it Petropolis as a perfect model of a life-giving city. He is also aware of the dangers of betrayal and decay, as in the poem “At a dreadful height, a wandering fire”:

Above the black Neva, transparent SpringIs smashed, the wax of immortality is melting.O, if you, star, are Petropolis, your city,Your brother, Petropolis, is dying.

The source of this concern is the rise of the Bolshevik menace. In one of his most powerful poems, “The Twilight of Freedom,” Mandelstam at first urges his “brothers” to glorify the twilight of freedom, which was one of the first goals and promises of the Bolsheviks. When the ship of the state is set at sea, however, the destination is ambiguous; it could lead to a new dawn or to perdition. Even though the poet urges his countrymen to have courage and try (“We will recall even in Lethe’s frost,/ That our land was worth ten heavens”), and even though Mandelstam hints at Lenin taking the nation’s helm, the poem has its ambiguities, beginning with the title (the Russian sumerki, for example, means either dawn or twilight). Written in 1918, at the beginning of the Russian Revolution, the poem reflects Mandelstam’s ambivalence toward that movement.

Among other noteworthy efforts in Tristia are the three poems to Olga Arbenina, a woman with whom Mandelstam was briefly in love (“I am cold,” “I want to serve you,” and “If I am to know how to restrain your hands”). Another often-cited and exquisitely crafted poem is “Solominka” (the straw), about the death of a beautiful woman in love. “Just for joy, take from my palms” is one of the most beautiful poems of the collection; in this work, Mandelstam uses the daring metaphors of bees and honey as symbols of artistic creativity.

Tristia is one of Mandelstam’s most important works, and it contains many poems of lasting value. Translations of individual poems collected in Tristia have been published in various volumes over the years. The first attempt at publishing most of the poems in one group was made by Bruce McClelland in The Silver Age of Russian Culture in 1975; in 1987, McClelland published the entire collection in a bilingual edition.

Bibliography

Brown, Clarence. Mandelstam. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Stresses the artistic merits of Mandelstam’s poetry. Chapter 12 analyzes several poems in Tristia, and chapter 13 deals with the classical elements of the collection. One of the best studies of Mandelstam’s work available in English.

Broyde, Steven. Osip Mandel’štam and His Age: A Commentary on the Themes of War and Revolution in the Poetry, 1913-1923. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975. Presents detailed analysis of Mandelstam’s poems about the Russian Revolution. Includes several poems from Tristia.

Cavanagh, Clare. Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. Thorough study focuses on the modernist aspects of Mandelstam’s poetry based on classical traditions. Includes discussion of poems contained in Tristia.

Loewen, Donald. The Most Dangerous Art: Poetry, Politics, and Autobiography After the Russian Revolution. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2008. Describes how three Russian poets—Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Boris Pasternak—used their autobiographies to defend poets and poetry against the restrictions of the Soviet government in the decades from the 1920’s through the 1950’s.

Mandelstam, Nadezhda. Hope Against Hope. Translated by Max Hayward. New York: Atheneum, 1970.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Hope Abandoned. Translated by Max Hayward. New York: Atheneum, 1974. Two-volume memoir by Mandelstam’s widow relates the personal circumstances that guided his life and works. Indispensable for an understanding of the poet, the genesis of many of his poems, and efforts to preserve them from destruction.

O’Brien, Kevin J. Saying Yes at Lightning: Threat and the Provisional Image in Post-Romantic Poetry. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Examines poems that were written in response to cataclysmic events. Chapter 4 focuses on Mandelstam’s poem “The Horseshoe Finder,” which was written after the publication of Tristia; the chapter also contains information about Tristia.

Vinokur, Val. “Osip Mandelstam’s Judaism: Chaos and Cares.” In The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2008. Uses the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, a Lithuanian-born French Jew, to analyze the relationship of ethics and aesthetics in the works of Mandelstam and other Russian writers.