U groba
simvolistskogo geroja: Blok in Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's Pust&soft; v du&shachek;noj komnate &ellipsis;
Stuart
Goldberg
In the entire period from 1908 to 1915 (the period in which the
poems of Kamen&soft; were written),
Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam wrote only six sonnets (in addition to the
tercets of Net, ne luna, a cvetlyj ciferblat which
clearly functions as a sonnet fragment). Other than Sport
(1913), all of them were written in 1912. Three and a
half
of these followed in order in the 1916 edition of
Kamen&soft; and form the cornerstone of
Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's Acmeist reprisals with the Symbolist
aesthetic (to which the cathedral poems make little open
reference). The last two sonnets are
&Shachek;armanka—the image is most likely a send-up
of the staraja pesnja
the Symbolists have
become—and Pust&soft; v du&shachek;noj komnate, gde
klo&chachek;&soft;ja seroj vaty. Pust&soft; v
du&shachek;noj komnate, published in the Acmeist journal
Giperborej (1913 no. 8) alongside
Paden&soft;e—neizmennyj sputnik straxa, was not
included in the poet's collections and, to my knowledge, has never
been analyzed in the critical literature.
However, Pust&soft; v du&shachek;noj komnate plays an
inordinately large role in delineating Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's
relation to Blok in the younger poet's early Acmeist period. While
there is much high quality analysis of the problem of
Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam and Blok spread throughout books and articles
on Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam (cf. especially Ginzburg's O
lirike [1974], Ronen [1983], Freidin [1986]), there is a
surprising dearth of articles which make the question of Blok's poetic
influence on Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam the focus of their
attention. (One might name only Jurij Ivask's 1976 article,
Venecija Mandel&soft;&shachek;tama i Bloka, which
treats the problem far more superficially than the scholars mentioned
above.) This may be due to the diversity of the voices permeating
every Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam poem and making an analysis focusing on
any one poet or source seem precariously one-sided. Still, there
remain many elements of the Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam/Blok relationship
which would profit from closer critical attention.
This paper is part of a longer work in progress focusing on the
influence of Blok and Ivanov on Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's developing
poetics. In Pust&soft; v du&shachek;noj komnate, as in the
loose cycle of sonnets to which it belongs, the poet struggles to come
to terms with and expel from his poetics many elements of the
Symbolist heritage. (Shortly thereafter, some of these elements will
come creeping back.) In particular, this sonnet may be the only place
in Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's earliest Acmeist poetry where he
deals—almost—openly with the problem of Blok and Blok's
poetics. (Interesting in this regard is Admiraltejstvo,
which polemicizes with the Symbolists, and in an early, unpublished
version, as noted by Ronen, contained an obvious intertextual
reference to Blok.)
If the poetry of any one of his Symbolist predecessors demanded an
answer, it was certainly Blok. (Cf. V su&shachek;&chachek;nosti
futurizm dol&zhachek;en byl napravit&soft; svoe ostrie ne protiv
buma&zhachek;noj kreposti simvolizma, a protiv &zhachek;ivogo i
dejstvitel&soft;no opasnogo Bloka,
Burja i
natisk [1923].)
In my paper, I analyze Pust&soft; v du&shachek;noj
komnate, discussing its ramifications for the poet's perception
of Blok and placing it in the context of Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam's
other Acmeist sonnets (the form, as well as some subtextual evidence,
points to the influence of Annenskij's Tixie pesni
[1904], a book which takes a thoughtfully critical stance toward the
contemporary poetry of the younger
Symbolists). In
Pust&soft; v du&shachek;noj komnate, Blok's lyric hero is
manifested through his marked absence (the bol&soft;noj providing a
portrait in relief) in conjunction with the presence of a series of
Blokian subtexts, most prominently &Shachek;agi Komandora
(1910–1912) and Moej materi (1905). Moreover, I
will argue that, in the sonnet, it is primarily Blok's lyric hero (or
the expectations derived from his latent presence) which
Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam seeks to drive out of his poetic world.