Net, ves&soft; ja ne umru: Pu&shachek;kin, Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam, and
The Return of the Deadin the
Though many share Iosif Brodskij's and Anna Axmatova's view that
Pu&shachek;kin is Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's
predte&chachek;a,
the extent to which Pu&shachek;kin's
life and art is a palimpsest underlying Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's
life and art has not been fully appreciated. In this paper I argue
that an understanding of what I term the imitatio (of)
Pu&shachek;kin
(after Thomas Mann's notion of the
imitatio Goethe
) is particularly important for an
analysis of Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's Vorone&zhachek; poetry. I also
argue that a revised version of Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety
of influence may assist us in studying the
Pu&shachek;kin-Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam poetic
relationship. Significant ways in which Pu&shachek;kin's life and art
are reflected in Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's have been analysed by Omry
Ronen, E. Toddes, V. Musatov, B. M. Gasparov, M. L. Gasparov, A.
Wachtel, and others, but the extent to which and the ways in which
Pu&shachek;kin's influence acquired for Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam a
fatidic meaning has still to be fully
recognised. Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's construction in his poetry of
various myths of the poet is underwritten by a three-fold
identification with kenotic models. He identifies himself with the
values and heroic character
of Russian literature and
the Russian intelligentsia as a whole; more importantly, he views his
life and death as an imitatio Christi; most important of all, he seems
to have considered it his destiny to rewrite and relive
Pu&shachek;kin's art, life and death—but in his own way.
Too many of the apparently more straightforward Vorone&zhachek;
lyrics have been read too innocently
(notable
exceptions include various readings by Pollak, Cavanagh and in
particular Ronen). I shall analyse three poems written in January 1937
(during the centenary celebrations of Pu&shachek;kin's death, when
Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's identification with Pu&shachek;kin was most
acute) and reveal the strange ways in which Pu&shachek;kin and key
Pu&shachek;kinian themes inform works which, on the surface at least,
appear to have little or no Pu&shachek;kinian content. Two of the
poems, the magic of the successful
apophrades
: although these defences of poetry owe much to
Pu&shachek;kin (and to Blok), it is Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's poems
which seem (for many readers in the West in particular) the most
eloquent defence available of the poet's aesthetic and ethical
autonomy, of his inner rightness.
The third poem, Pu&shachek;kinian
theme—the death of the poet. In
it Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam, through a series of elusive
(transumptive
) allusions and echoes, composes a
necrology of Russian poets and investigates which fate awaits him in
his isolated, exiled disgrace. The poem is Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's
version of to be or not to be,
and a complex
intertextual conversation involving Pu&shachek;kin, Belyj, Pasternak,
Majakovskij, Gumilev, Fet, and Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's own poems
ends by suggesting that Pu&shachek;kin has fixed his canon against
self-slaughter for any true heir.
Pace Bloom, a Russian poet's anxiety before his precursor or his
ambivalence regarding the consequences of following in the father's
footsteps may in large part arise from his understanding that to
experience what Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam called the direct,
canonical influence of Pu&shachek;kin
may somehow place one
under an obligation to imitate his death too—not only
symbolically, in the creation of one's literary myths, but
literally. I conclude by pointing out some ways in which Bloom's
ideas, if revised to take greater account of the importance of the
life and the death of the poet in the Russian context, may
nevertheless offer additional insights into how, in David Bethea's
words, literary material seems to prefigure and shape the
real-life outcome
in the tragic u&chachek;ast&soft;
russkix poètov.