Books

World Books Review: A Crown of Thorns for Mandelstam

“The Stalin Epigram” is offered as a novelist’s homage to Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, but it is rather a crown of thorns, a posthumous offense to a writer who has few defenders at the ready to fence for his honor.

The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell. Simon & Schuster, 384 pages, $26.

Reviewed by Anna Razumnaya

Since the fall of the Soviet regime in Russia and the Eastern Bloc, fossils of its past have become a highly profitable commodity in the Anglophone world. The book market is no exception to this trend. Tired of its quotidian virtues, the liberal reading public yearns for an inkling of what individual experience might be like under greater outside pressures—for example, the pressure from a hostile government —where the stakes in moral dilemmas are high, preferably life-or-death, and where suffering is real and intense. Countless books appeal to this psychic need and so face the difficult task of talking about anguish without indulging in the pornography of suffering.

Robert Littell’s new novel, “The Stalin Epigram,” trespasses on that undesirable territory with respect to Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), the poet who embodied both a new era in Russian poetry and the martyrdom of Russia’s intelligentsia under Stalinism. Mandelstam’s life is still awaiting a dedicated biographer, but a broad circle of perceptive (if not always accurate) memoirists, notably the poet’s wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, have produced a vibrant body of Mandelstamiana, which the author appears to have used in the novel. Mandelstam was an example of first-magnitude talent in confrontation with the turbulent epoch in Russian history inaugurated by the Revolution; however, Littell’s way of isolating the sensational sides of Mandelstam’s life out of the rich documentary and memoir material results, paradoxically, in a rather insipid novel.

Littell exploits the aspects of Mandelstam’s life with the greatest populist appeal: his avowal of ménage à trois as a marriage ideal, his poetic challenge to Stalin, and his agonizing end in the GULAG system. With respect to all three, the author is remarkably consistent in never rising above platitudes, never offering an illuminating observation, and never failing to reduce the intimate, the delicate, or the piquant to the merely sordid. Littell’s overall strategy is to make the most of an important subject while sidestepping the responsibility to treat it with the integrity owed by any historical fiction to its real-life protagonists. Tellingly, the book’s flap informs the reader that Mandelstam’s epigram on Stalin, a sixteen-line poem composed in November of 1933—was penned in 1934. Although this error might seem trivial, it should discourage even a charitable reader from taking the narrative between the covers on faith.

Mandelstam began to feel intensive political pressures from the Soviet literary establishment as early as 1930. After a long, stimulating trip to Armenia and Georgia, he returned to Russia and found himself accosted by homelessness and unemployment. The dire poverty and uncertainty of his and Nadezhda’s situation in Leningrad and then Moscow and his increasingly obvious status of a persona non grata led to Mandelstam’s suicidal poetic act—his lampoon on Stalin, which opened with the lines (translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin):

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.

At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

But whenever there’s a snatch of talk

it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,

his words like measures of weight….

Defying the pact of silence he had described, Mandelstam began to recite the epigram first to close friends, and then to a growing circle of acquaintances chosen with less caution. The poem condemned Stalin with unrestrained force:

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,

One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.

He rolls executions off his tongue like berries….

It was a dangerous privilege to be privy to the text, and it certainly put Mandelstam’s confidants in a challenging position. The inclusion in this select group also had ambiguous personal implications. Emma Gershteyn wrote of her mixed feelings: “I thought that it had all been buried very deep. Before Mandelstam’s conviction I never told a soul about his poem and certainly never recited it. But one time, the Mandelstams began to discuss it in front of me, and Nadya said blithely that Nina Nikolayevna Green preferred one of the variants. It turned out that I had been left uninitiated into the secret.”

Russian Poet Osip Mandelstam

Among those who heard the epigram was Maria Petrovykh, a poet and translator with whom Mandelstam was intensely infatuated in 1933-34. A contemporary of Petrovykh, Yakov Khelemsky, described her as a fragile, vulnerable person, “protected by nothing but her own quiet charm.” “Her face is not striking,” Khelemsky wrote, “but very lovely, framed in full, light hair; a wavy fringe covers half of her high, smooth forehead; her gray eyes gaze at the world almost meekly.” The Mandelstams had met Petrovykh through Akhmatova. Mandelstam later told Akhmatova that had he not been married to Nadya, he would live only for this new love. To Petrovykh he addressed several lyrics filled with images of fantastic escapes into worlds where circumstances do not stand in the way of love’s fulfillment.

The glaringly artless seduction of Zinaida Zaitseva-Antonova (a character that appears to be an amalgamation of two real-life prototypes—Petrovykh and Olga Glebova-Sudeikina, an actress and a friend of Anna Akhmatova) is served up on the very first pages of the novel in what can only be understood as a desperate bid for the reader’s attention. Littell cannot write well about ménage à trois because his erotic imagination never transcends the numerous mentions of breasts “swelling” or else being “crushed” implausibly into someone’s wrist. The plodding amorous rhetoric ascribed to Mandelstam—“Take off your clothing and the three of us shall repair to the bedroom for a conversation that doesn’t require a knowledge of dialectical materialism”—fails to amuse.

Mandelstam’s puckish sense of humor and his exuberantly gallant or alternately unceremonious manners have been documented by many memoirists. One of them described how, at the end of his visit to Mandelstam, the poet insisted on helping him into his coat. Noticing his guest’s embarrassment, Mandelstam exclaimed: “Don’t you know that famous English proverb? In the struggle of man and coat, take the side of man!” Natasha Shtempel, a friend of the poet during his Voronezh exile, recalled Mandelstam’s compulsive need to read his poetry to others and the demand she heard him shout into a payphone: “No, listen!!! I’ve got no one else to recite to!” When he hung up, Shtempel learned that the person at the other end of the line was a secret police investigator. Another memoirist described Mandelstam’s plot to slap the writer Aleksey Tolstoy on the face in return for a rather trivial insult. Mandelstam recruited Anna Akhmatova’s son, Lev Gumilyov, and the two men spent weeks in ambush waiting to take revenge on Tolstoy.

“The Stalin Epigram” is “a shadow of a shadow” of these vivid and often strange accounts of Mandelstam’s real-life personality. It makes up for that deficiency with false Russianisms and implausibilities such as yellow leather coats and Akhmatova repeatedly addressing the poet Boris Pasternak by the affected diminutive “Borisik.” In ascribing to Mandelstam the profound naïveté of writing the famous epigram as a childish experiment in bringing down the regime by the power of free speech, Littell condescends to Mandelstam as well as Pasternak and Akhmatova, shown as his co-conspirators. The three poets are presented as a coterie of plotting schoolchildren oblivious of the depth of Russia’s catastrophe that, in reality, all three of them were harrowingly aware of.

Shortly after the composition and the performances of the epigram, Mandelstam was arrested and interrogated in the basement of Lubyanka. At this moment in the novel’s plot, Littell lists the expected attributes of martyrdom—torn clothes, fractures, bruises, and feces—with all the empathy of a canned telemarketing pitch.

Mandelstam's final photo, taken by the NKVD at the time of his second arrest in 1938

Stalin’s telephone conversation with Pasternak, who found the courage to defend Mandelstam at his own risk, resulted in the ruler’s famous directive: “Isolate but preserve.” Consequently, Mandelstam’s sentence was only of exile, at first in Cherdyn, a small town near Perm, and later in Voronezh. In 1938, Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to five years in correction camps. He never reached the destination of his term but died in a transit camp in Vladivostok.

“The Stalin Epigram” is offered as a novelist’s homage to Mandelstam, but it is rather a crown of thorns, a posthumous offense to a poet who has few defenders at the ready to fence for his honor. Mandelstam once remarked that Russia is the only country where poets are taken seriously enough to be killed. The disparity between the force of that dictum and Littell’s dodging of responsibility to Mandelstam shows that no poet today is taken seriously enough to be safe from a commercially viable insult.

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Anna Razumnaya is a freelance translator and a doctoral student at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. Her translations of two poems by Osip Mandelstam are forthcoming in Pusteblume.