Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, in his unsurpassed poem "Silentium", which was presented to the general public in 1910, using a special manner of presentation, says that the beginning of all beginnings is a thought.
It is born pure and naked, and when it is brought to life with the help of words, it seems to be impoverished, because the word is not able to fully and fully convey the grandeur of the original idea.
Just like Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev, Mandelstam decided to give the name to his work "Silentium", only discarding the exclamation point at the end of the word. Osip Emilievich had a special relationship with the work of Tyutchev, read to them, and knew many poems by heart.
A small poetic volume did not prevent disputes and versions from arising about what kind of basic idea the author laid down. The name itself is translated as "Silence", but we can single out another basis for writing - "Love".
After all, it mentions the ancient goddess, whose name is forever imprinted in world culture as the personification of love and beauty. The birth of a beautiful feeling is the fundamental principle of everything.
Mandelstam sincerely believed that poetry invariably goes hand in hand with music. They are generated by the embodiment of the strongest of human feelings, firmly uniting.
The author, using the example of his poem, reveals to us his sincere conviction that it was Silence that was born first of all, and not the Word at all. This is a special, refined kind of some kind of art, which is not subject to time, since Silence is the basis of all accomplishments.
The lyrical hero of this literary masterpiece is puzzled by philosophical questions. His highest aspiration is the return of a quiet primevalness, which is the foundation of life. The imperative exclamations with which "Silentium" is written testify to a hot impulse to return the original silence.
Analyzing the poem, the reader has the idea that poetry, like music, the word is based on the initial impulse, on the wave of sudden thought, but no matter how ingeniously the creator filled up his idea, nevertheless, initially it was much deeper, filled with unique images and emotional coloring.
O.E. Mandelstam, with his infinite creation, immerses us in the realization that the inner world of every person, without exception, is inviolable and holy, it is a secret storehouse of consciousness that carefully preserves the indestructible power of the fundamental principle of life.
She hasn't been born yet
She is both music and words,
And therefore all living things
Unbreakable connection.
The seas of the chest breathe calmly,
But, like crazy, the day is bright,
And pale lilac foam
In a black-and-azure vessel.
May my lips find
initial silence,
Like a crystal note
What is pure from birth!
Stay foam, Aphrodite,
And return the word to the music,
And be ashamed of the heart of the heart,
Merged with the fundamental principle of life!
Analysis of the poem "Silentium (Silentium)" by Mandelstam
Osip Emilievich Mandelstam gravitated toward symbolism in his early youth. A typical example of such poetry is the poem "Silentium".
The poem was written in 1910. Its author at that time was 19 years old, he was a lecturer at the University of Heidelberg, enthusiastically studying the medieval poetry of France and began to publish himself. This year is the last year of the material well-being of his family. His poems during this period are pointless, sublime, musical.
By genre - philosophical lyrics, size - iambic tetrameter with a ring rhyme, 4 stanzas. The lyrical hero is the author himself, but not as a person, but as a poet. "Silentium" translates as "silence". Poems with the same name (but with an exclamation point at the end). However, O. Mandelstam puts other meanings into his work. He considers the fusion of words and music to be the fundamental principle of life. In the world of people, these concepts are separated, but if you guess about their single essence, you can penetrate the secrets of being. To connect the word and music, you need to immerse yourself in silence, reject the hustle and bustle, stop the flow of thoughts in your head. The poet calls on Aphrodite "not to be born", not to acquire a specific form, but to remain the sounding and whispering foam of the sea. He himself sets himself the same task: his lips must be silent, and in this deep silence music will sound.
Young O. Mandelstam believes that such a merger is a matter of the future, that all people will someday acquire such an ability, but he, as a poet, wants to become the first owner of sound speech right now. He believes that the life of people after returning to the "primary principle" will completely change, because it is "an inviolable bond of all living things." The vocabulary is sublime, solemn. Epithets: black-azure (that is, with blue), pale, crystalline, original. Comparisons: as crazy as a note. Avatars: breathe the seas of the chest. Metaphor: pale lilac foam. Inversion: breasts breathe, lips will acquire. The intonation of the poem is like a spell: may my lips find, stay, come back. The poet seems to be calling out and commandingly orders, including the ancient Greek Aphrodite. The expression of the last two stanzas is underlined by exclamation marks.
In the work “Silentium”, O. Mandelstam suggests that all the troubles of mankind are due to the rejection of the fundamental principle of being, which he saw in the combination of sound and word. The current fractured reality is a consequence of this refusal.
/ Analysis of the poem "Silentium!" O.E. Mandelstam
In the second half of the 1920s, Mandelstam did not write poetry, which was extremely difficult for him. He is engaged in newspaper chores, translates a lot and without pleasure, publishes a collection of articles “On Poetry” in 1928, a book of autobiographical prose “The Noise of Time” (1925), and the story “Egyptian Mark” (1928). One can rightly call this period of the poet's work "silence".
By the beginning of the 1930s, the poet realized that if everyone is against one, then everyone is wrong. Mandelstam began to write poetry and formulated his new position: “I divide all works of world literature into permitted and written without permission. The first are scum, the second are stolen air.”
During the Moscow period of his work 1930 - 1934. Mandelstam creates poems full of proud and worthy awareness of his mission.
Since 1935, the last Voronezh period of the poet's work begins.
Even the most ardent admirers of Mandelstam evaluate the Voronezh poems differently. Vladimir Nabokov, who called Mandelstam "luminiferous", believed that they were poisoned by madness. Critic Lev Anninsky wrote: “These poems of recent years are ... an attempt to extinguish the absurdity with the absurdity of pseudo-existence ... with the wheeze of a strangled man, the scream of a deaf-mute, the whistle and buzz of a jester.” Most of the poems are not finished or finished, the rhymes are inaccurate. Speech is hectic and slurred. Mandelstam's metaphors here are perhaps even bolder and more expressive than before.
"Silentium" is a true literary debut
O. E. Mandelstam, despite the fact that his first poetic publications appear since 1907. The poem "Silentium", along with four other verses, was published in the ninth issue of the magazine "Apollo" and subsequently became famous.
Silentium
She hasn't been born yet
She is both music and words,
And therefore all living things
Unbreakable connection.
The seas of the chest breathe calmly,
And pale lilac foam
In a black-and-azure vessel.
May my lips find
initial silence,
Like a crystal note
What is pure from birth!
Stay foam, Aphrodite,
And, word, return to music,
And, heart, be ashamed of the heart,
Merged with the fundamental principle of life!
1910, 1935
It seems that Mandelstam's poems arise from nothing. Like living life, poetry begins with love, with the thought of death, with the ability to be both silence and music, and in a word, with the ability to capture the moment of the beginning of beginnings.
Mandelstam begins his poem with the pronoun “she”: who or what is “she”? Perhaps the answer lies in the words "the only unbreakable connection." Everything in the world is interconnected, interdependent.
The poet says: "She is both the music and the word." If for Tyutchev nature is the second name of life, then for Mandelstam the beginning of everything is music:
You can not breathe, and the firmament is teeming with worms,
And no star says
But, God knows, there is music above us...
(“Concert at the station”, 1921)
Music for Mandelstam is an expression of the state in which poetic lines are born. Here's an opinion
V. Shklovsky: “Schiller admitted that poetry appears in his soul in the form of music. I think that poets have become victims of precise terminology. There is no word denoting inner sound speech, and when one wants to talk about it, the word “music” is turned up as a designation for some sounds that are not words; in the end they pour out word-like. Of the modern poets, O. Mandelstam wrote about this. In the last quatrain, this image reappears: “And, word, return to music.”
The second stanza begins with a serene picture of nature: “The seas of the chest breathe calmly ...”, then this peace is almost instantly interrupted:
But, like crazy, the day is bright,
And pale lilac foam
In a black-and-blue vessel.
Here is a contrast: “bright day” and “black-azure vessel”. Tyutchev's eternal confrontation between "day" and "night" comes to mind.
For me, the line was difficult to understand: “But, like crazy, the day is bright.” Why is the day crazy? Perhaps this is about the bright moment of the birth of creativity, because poetry arises from madness in the highest sense of the word.
The third stanza is a poetic interpretation of Tyutchev's "thought spoken is a lie":
May my lips find
initial silence,
Like a crystal note
What is pure from birth!
A person is born unable to speak as a baby, Mandelstam calls this "initial dumbness." Perhaps the poet, writing down these lines, recalls his childhood years spent in St. Petersburg.
The word merges with the music; like life itself with its inviolable bonds, the thought of holiness, the inviolability of the inner world of man enters our consciousness.
Stay foam, Aphrodite,
And, word, return to music,
And, heart, be ashamed of the heart,
Merged with the fundamental principle of life!
Aphrodite is the goddess of love, beauty, fertility and eternal spring in Greek mythology. According to the myth, she was born from the sea foam, which was formed by the blood of the castrated Uranus.
Mandelstam was interested in antiquity. The poet had his own path to antiquity, like all major European poets who linked the search for lost harmony with antiquity.
Osip Mandelstam was a purely urban poet, more precisely the poet of the northern capital of Russia. His most significant poems are addressed to Petersburg. “Stone” embraced both the “yellowness of government buildings”, and the Admiralty “with an air boat and an untouchable mast”, and the great creation of the “Russian in Rome” - the Kazan Cathedral.
From cold Petersburg, the poet mentally leaves for the beautiful, bright Hellas, and with it the sea enters the world of “Stone”:
The seas of the chest breathe calmly ...
Stay foam, Aphrodite...
Love, beauty, word and music are the harmony of the world, “an unbreakable bond of all living things”.
If Tyutchev in his "Silentium!" unusually stingy with trails, then Mandelstam has more than enough of them. Metaphors: “seas of the chest” and “crazy, bright day”, “foam pale lilac”, - all are concentrated in the second stanza; very expressive epithets: “black-azure” or “crystal note”.
The poem is written in iambic, I think there is no disagreement about this:
She hasn't been born yet
She is both music and words,
And therefore all living things
Unbreakable connection.
No matter how much the Poet talks about silence, he cannot do without the Word.
The word is a bridge from the soul and earth to heaven. The ability to cross such a bridge is not given to everyone. “Reading poetry is the greatest and most difficult art, and the title of a reader is no less honorable than the title of a poet,” wrote Mandelstam.
Silence of Osip Mandelstam
Thought spoken is a lie.
"Silentium!" F.I. Tyutchev
No, everything is clear
But what specifically...
"What did you mean" A. Kortnev
Silentium
She hasn't been born yet
She is both music and words,
And therefore all living things
Unbreakable connection.
The seas of the chest breathe calmly,
But, like crazy, the day is bright,
And pale lilac foam
In a black-and-azure vessel.
May my lips find
initial silence,
Like a crystal note
What is pure from birth!
Stay foam, Aphrodite,
And, word, return to music,
And, heart, be ashamed of the heart,
Merged with the fundamental principle of life!
The poem "Silentium" is one of Mandelstam's most famous and most misunderstood poems. To prove this, it is enough to check the comments in various publications, asking the key question for understanding this poem: who is "she"? In each commented edition, we will find the answer to our question - and in each this answer will be new. She is Aphrodite, and music, and beauty, and dumbness (?) ... Are there too many versions for such a small poem?
Meanwhile, a careful reading of the text, it seems to us, could remove this question. The key to a poem is its composition. K.F. Taranovsky, who devoted part of his special article to the analysis of this text, believes that the poem is two-part: each part consists of two stanzas, and the main means of opposing parts is syntax. Syntactically, the first part is a sequence of indicative sentences that form a static description; the second is a series of imperative sentences that form a rhetorical appeal.
All this is true, but there is another level of division of the text - thematic. The poem is not at all as homogeneous in terms of content as it seems, and we see this already in the first stanza. This stanza is a chain of adjoining (since they are united by an explicit or implied connecting link) definitions of what is called by the pronoun "she": "not yet born"; "both music and the word", "an unbreakable bond of all living things"; a kind of matrix of equations with one common unknown variable. However, these definitions obviously no longer have any thematic intersections: only a living being can be born, "both music and the word" refers rather to creativity, and "the connection of all living things" does to natural philosophy. So what is this "X"?
The most obvious answer is contained, as one would expect, in the last stanza: she is Aphrodite. But here's a strange thing: the connecting connection between the elements of the "matrix" is not only preserved, but also strengthened: now it connects not only the predicates of definitions, but the expressions themselves! Thus, "Aphrodite" is a name given to an unknown variable in only one of the expressions, while in other expressions it is not applicable, it cannot be substituted in them! But is there any common name for "X"? Let's take a closer look at the text.
If we establish a connection between the first and fourth stanzas, it is logical to assume that the remaining stanzas are also interconnected, that is, the compositional scheme of the poem is similar to the rhyme scheme used in it: ABBA. At first glance, there is no thematic connection between the second and third stanzas: the sea is there, the mouth is here ... However, there is a connection. These stanzas are a "sweep" of the first two lines of the extreme stanzas: the second develops the theme of the ancient myth of the birth of Aphrodite from sea foam, and the third - the theme of the birth of the word from music.
So, two definitions get their development, but why doesn't the third definition develop? And what, generally speaking, is this third definition talking about? The absence of a stanza dedicated to him, thereby turns him into a marked element of the system, makes you think that this is where the "main name" of our "X" lies.
Let's read it again. "The fundamental principle of life" is a frank reference to natural philosophy. Since the time of Empedocles, it has preserved the doctrine of the presence of two forces that organize the Cosmos: Enmity - the beginning of the separation of everything that exists, and Love - the beginning of a universal connection, connection. But the heart mentioned in the fourth stanza has also always been a symbol of love! And Aphrodite is the goddess, first of all, of love, and only secondarily of beauty, no matter what one of the commentators thinks! "Is the word found?"
In support of this version, another, no less famous poem of "Stone" can serve: "Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails ..." We find in it most of the motives of "Silence": antiquity, the Black Sea (the existing discrepancies are "black-azure" or "cloudy azure", it seems to be more correct to resolve in favor of the first, referring to the black and red vessels of Hellas), silence, "divine foam" - however, in this case, the theme of the poem is beyond doubt: it is love.
But why does Mandelstam choose such a complicated way of naming his theme in "Silentium"? Here it is worth recalling the only compositional element of the text that we have not yet included in the analysis - the title of the poem. It is an undoubted reference to the famous poem by Tyutchev - however, it is a reference, not a quote. The difference between the two names is in the sign. Tyutchev has an exclamation point at the end of the title; Mandelstam has no sign. Tyutchev's title is a call to silence; Mandelstam's title is an indication of something significant in the text itself. But for what? On the topic? But the theme is love! Or not?
Let's return to Tyutchev's poem. Any thoughtful reader can notice one contradiction between the thought and speech of the author. Tyutchev calls to hide his feelings, referring to the inevitable falsity of any expression, but he does it in pompous and verbose rhetorical forms. Tyutchev's poem is essentially a kind of version of the "liar's paradox": the author calls for silence so as not to fall into the inevitable lie, but since he himself speaks, he lies.
It is this paradox that Mandelstam is trying to get around: he, like Tyutchev, is aware of the inadequacy of human speech for expressing innermost human feelings, but cannot do without it. Therefore, he also turns to rhetoric, but no longer in search of new arguments: he uses a default figure, which alone can help "the heart express itself" without naming feelings by name.
One can see in this a manifestation of the fear of love that dominated the young Mandelstam. But this is only part of the explanation.
In this way of overcoming the "liar's paradox" lies also Mandelstam's invariable desire to overcome the conventions of human culture, to break through to the vital basis that gave rise to these cultural forms. The poet, by his very origin deprived of access to "high" Russian and world culture, tried to establish a connection between it and his own life. This is the secret of his "Hellenism". Mandelstam is looking for life itself in the manifestations of life; in the discoveries of the past there are traces of the revelations that gave rise to these traces.
"Tomorrow at ten," I thought,
and said aloud:
Tomorrow at ten...
"I believe her" A. Kortnev
Actually, the entire "Stone" can be perceived as a gradual movement from the external forms of culture, primarily ancient, to their inner meaning. This is reflected even in the poet's attitude to ancient imagery. If we accept the proposed B.I. Yarkho and the revived M.L. Gasparov’s division of images into independent ones, having “a real existence in the reality offered by this work,” and auxiliary ones, serving “to enhance the artistic effectiveness of the former,” it can be seen how gradually the images of the ancient world move from the category of auxiliary to the category of main ones. In some of the early poems of "Stone" (for example, "Why is the soul so melodious ...", "Tennis", etc.), the poet uses antique images only to create a certain aesthetic effect: these images are designed to create a sense of grandeur, the vastness of what is described. Thus, in the poem "Tennis" a number of "ancient" epithets appear against the background of an expanding space: starting with a description of a tennis game, the poem "increases" to the level of "the world":
Who, humbled rough ardor,
Clothed in alpine snow,
With a frisky girl entered
In an Olympic duel?
The strings of the lyre are too decrepit.
Golden rocket strings
Fortified and thrown into the world
The Englishman is forever young!
Thus, the ancient theme in this poem remains purely auxiliary, but it turns out to be connected with ideas about the special significance of what is happening. Similar in function is the comparison of the frigate with the acropolis in the poem "Admiralty":
And in the dark green frigate or acropolis
Shines from afar, brother to water and sky.
Despite the fact that the image of the acropolis performs an auxiliary function, its presence is a certain prediction of the future development of the ancient theme. Another important fact attracts attention: the mixing of the plans of "reality" and "myth" in the image of Medusa:
Capricious Medusa are angrily molded...
On the one hand, the mythical image of Medusa is recognizable, and at the same time, we are clearly talking about primitive marine animals sticking around standing ships. Such a two-dimensionality of the image can be explained by the idea of the poem: if we consider that the "fifth element" that a person created is time, that time is the strongest of the elements that can break three-dimensional space, then with this understanding of the fifth element, the motif of eternity, life in eternity, which contains all present and past times (as well as the future). The images of the acropolis and Medusa organically enter the structure of the poetic "today", permeated with the cultural "always".
Apparently, it is "Admiralty" and "Tennis" that can be considered as a turning point for the ancient theme in the work of Mandelstam. It is here that Mandelstam discovers for himself the possibility of "recognizing" the "ancient day" in today's day, it is here that the fusion of antiquity and modernity arises. At the same time, the boundary between the main and auxiliary images seems to be erased: antiquity ceases to be an exclusively source of "decorations" and becomes the subject of Mandelstam's close attention.
In the poem "About simple and rude times" the main thing is the process of "recognition" (the term of S.A. Osherov) by a lyrical hero in the world around him of the realities of the ancient era. The noise of horse hooves reminds the poet "of simple and rude times"; Entering the "aura" of this memory, the poet "recognizes" in the doorkeeper's yawn the image of a Scythian, which, as it were, is a clarifying characterization of the time that Mandelstam speaks of: this is the time of Ovid's exile. Thus, although outwardly the poem speaks of a world contemporary to Mandelstam, however, the semantic heaviness is clearly transferred to the "auxiliary" reality of the era of Ovid. A semantic association arises in the mind of the poet, the poet "recognizes" the semantic fragments close to him and "places" them in reality, while more referring to the "other" world:
Reminds me of your image, Scythian.
This poem is close in thought to the poem "I have not heard the stories of Ossian ...", written, however, on the "Celtic-Scandinavian" material (1914):
I received a blessed inheritance -
Alien singers wandering dreams;
Your kinship and boring neighborhood
We are certainly free to despise.
And more than one treasure, perhaps
Bypassing grandchildren, he will go to great-grandchildren;
And again the skald will lay down someone else's song
And how to pronounce it.
In the article "On the Interlocutor", Mandelstam wrote that writing for oneself is madness, addressing one's neighbors is vulgarity, one must write for an unknown distant reader whom fate sends, and one himself must be such an addressee of poets of the past.
The place of antiquity in the semantic space of the poet is gradually changing, it becomes closer to the poet. This position was reflected in the poem "Nature - the same Rome ...". The first phrase "Nature is the same Rome and is reflected in it" is elliptical: nature is compared with Rome, and at the same time we learn that in Rome itself one can see the reflection of nature.
Rome is a metaphor for power, power. For Mandelstam, Rome, according to Richard Pshybylsky, is "a symbolic form of culture. The myth of Rome is the work of the joint efforts of many generations who wanted to free a person from the fate inscribed by the stars and turn dust into a source of constant rebirth. This victory over fate, over time, presented the opportunity to turn Rome into a fixed point of the world, into an indestructible eternal Center of Being. That is why symbolic Rome allows a person to unravel the mystery of existence."
How the poet understood this symbol, we can learn from a poem written in 1914:
May the names of flowering cities
They caress the ear with the significance of the mortal.
It is not the city of Rome that lives among the ages,
And the place of man in the universe.
And in this poem, the image of Rome is in balance with "man's place in the universe." These two images are equally loaded. Despite the fact that in the first stanza the life of Rome among the ages is denied, in the second stanza it turns out that life "without Rome" loses its meaning:
The kings are trying to take over
Priests justify wars
And without it worthy of contempt,
How miserable rubbish, houses and altars!
The Roman theme is developed in the poem "The herds graze with a cheerful neighing ...". It should be noted that this poem belongs to the group of poems that complete the "Stone", as if summing it up. Now Rome for the poet is a newly found homeland, a home. The whole poem is based on "recognition".
May my sadness be bright in old age:
I was born in Rome, and he returned to me;
Autumn was a good she-wolf for me,
And - the month of Caesar - August smiled at me.
In this poem, Mandelstam's self-identification with ancient culture went so far that it made it possible for V.I. Terrace to claim that it was written on behalf of Ovid. Numerous factual arguments cited by the researcher as evidence of this point of view, nevertheless, must be accepted with a certain amendment: given the significant two-dimensional nature of other "ancient" poems by Mandelstam, one cannot help but make a reservation: the poem was written on behalf of Mandelstam, "recognizing" Ovid in himself.
In a certain sense, the already mentioned poem "Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails ..." adjoins this poem, which differs from most of the "antique" poems of "Stone". There are several differences. Firstly, in the poem there is actually no moment of external perception of the surrounding world, etc., a moment that is almost obligatory in previous poems, since it was precisely this moment that was accompanied by the "recognition" of ancient realities in the realities of the present. Secondly, in this poem, almost the only time there is an external motivation for turning to antiquity: the poet reads Homer during insomnia. At the same time, the poem becomes a point of connection into a single knot of several key motifs for the "Stone": speech and silence, the sea, antiquity, love. As a result, the poem becomes a reflection on the cosmic role of love:
Both the sea and Homer - everything is moved by love.
Thus, "Insomnia ..." undoubtedly belongs to the final poems of "Stone" (along with the already mentioned "With a cheerful neighing ..." and "I will not see the famous Phaedra ..."), which reflect the desire poet to see reality through the eyes of a man of antiquity - the desire that determines, as already mentioned, this period of Mandelstam's work.
It is interesting that the poet, as it were, abandons Homer in favor of the sea:
Who should I listen to? And here Homer is silent,
And the black sea, ornate, rustles
And with a heavy roar, he approaches the headboard.
This choice can be interpreted as a symbolic rejection of a no longer needed "assistant": what previously Mandelstam could see only through the ancient author, became so close to him that he no longer needs such an intermediary. At the same time, this acquisition turns out to be associated with a sharp sense of the inaccessibility of the "classical" perception of the world, expressed in the last poem of the "Stone" - "I will not see the famous Phaedra ...". The last phrase of the collection becomes nostalgic:
Whenever a Greek sees our games...
What is the name of this gloomy land?
We will answer: Come on
Let's call it Armageddon
"Armageddon" A. Kortnev
In the collection "Tristia" antiquity becomes the center of Mandelstam's poetic world. L.Ya. Ginzburg wrote: "In the collection "Tristia" Mandelstam's "classicism" finds its completion... The Hellenic style no longer serves to create the image of one of the historical cultures, it is now becoming the author's style, the author's speech, accommodating the entire poetic world of Mandelstam."
The name "Tristia", according to S.A. Osherov, "caused in the Russian reader associations, first of all, with the elegy from the book of the same name by Ovid, known under the conditional name "Last Night in Rome." Ovid is also indicated by the "science of parting" (called the elegy as the antithesis of the "Science of Love"), and "plain-haired complaints" (Ovid refers to his wife's hair ritually loose as a sign of mourning), and "cock's night"; the first line of the elegy "Cum subit illius tristissima noctis imago" - "Just as soon as that night comes to mind the saddest image" - Mandelstam himself quotes in the article "Word and Culture." This collection is even more cyclic, the poems are even more interconnected than in "Stone". The cyclic nature of the collection is explained by the poet's special attitude to the word, to the image. Repeating from poem to poem, the word carries already acquired meanings. Zhirmunsky wrote: "Mandelstam liked to combine in the form of a metaphor or comparison the most distant concepts from each other." Tynyanov somewhat later explores the emergence of these countries meanings: "The hue, the coloring of the word is not lost from verse to verse, it thickens in the future ... these strange meanings are justified by the course of the entire poem, the course from hue to hue, ultimately leading to a new meaning. Here the main point of Mandelstam's work is the creation of new meanings. "What Tynyanov observed within a single poem, later researchers - Taranovsky, Ginzburg - extended to wider contexts.
So, the word carries a certain meaning, drawn from already created contexts. Moreover, in "Stone" the poet uses the memory of "foreign" contexts, often directly named ("Ask Charles Dickens.") In "Tristia" the word accumulates mainly the meanings accumulated in the poet's own verses.
All the poems of "Tristia" are connected in one way or another. It is interesting to note that the poet also emphasizes the connection between the collections, ending "Stone" with the poem "I will not see the famous Phaedra ..." and starting "Tristia" with a poem dedicated to Phaedra: "How these covers ..." This poem is a variation on theme of the first monologue of Phaedra from the tragedy of Racine. The three couplets of Racine's tragedy, translated in iambic hexameter, are interrupted by the comments of the ancient choir in eight-foot choreas. Phaedra's criminal love, embodied in death and blood, contains the main themes of the collection. For the first time, the motif of the black sun, the funeral, appears.
So the collection includes the image of death. The concept of "transparency" is attached to the image of ancient Hades (and wider than death), and at the same time - Petersburg.
In the transparent Petropolis we will die,
Where Proserpina rules over us.
At the same time, transparency can also be explained "materialistically":
I'm cold. transparent spring
Petropol dresses in green fluff.
"Transparent spring" - the time when the leaves are just beginning to bloom. These two poems are adjacent, and therefore Proserpina turns spring Petersburg into Hades - the kingdom of the dead, which is assigned the property of transparency. Confirmation of this connection is in the poem "Asphodels are still far away ...": "Asphodels are the pale flowers of the kingdom of shadows, the transparent spring of asphodels is the departure to Hades, to death." (Osherov); in a 1918 poem we find:
At a terrible height, a wandering fire,
But is that how a star twinkles?
Transparent star, flickering fire,
The named trinity - transparency - Petersburg - Hades (death) - becomes a single semantic space of many works, and the motif of death is found in almost all the poems of the collection.
It is important to note that death for Mandelstam is not just a "black hole", the end of everything. The kingdom of death has its own cultural and semantic structure: it is also a world, although it is appropriately painted in oppressive, dark and at the same time transparent, ethereal tones; a world in which there are ancient denominations - Proserpina, Lethe. At the same time, this world is extremely poor, limited in every possible way compared to the "world of the living"; the existence of those who find themselves in the kingdom of death is the existence of shadows. Due to the fact that this is still being, thought is able to look into the realm of death, imagine what is there, and then live with this idea, with the consciousness of its doom.
The revolution, as he foresaw in 1916, is turning the world upside down, plunging it into a world of death. And in the 1918 poem, the prediction from the verses two years ago is repeated almost verbatim, but already as if it had come true:
Your brother, Petropol, is dying.
Let's pay attention to the fact that Petersburg is called here by the ancient name "Petropolis". This is a symbol of the outgoing high culture, a part of that world, that cultural space, very dear to the poet, whose death is observed by Mandelstam.
In the poem "Cassandre", the poet more openly declares the loss of "everything":
And in December of the seventeenth year
We lost everything, loving:
One robbed by the will of the people,
Another robbed himself.
This poem is dedicated to Akhmatova, but in the context of other poems in the collection, it acquires another level of interpretation. In fact, the "farewell to culture" continues here.
The poem "Venetian life, gloomy and barren ..." is about the death of not only Russian, but European, world culture. It begins with sleep and death: "A man dies at the theater and at an idle party", and ends with "everything passes", including death, "a man will be born", and Vesper flickers in the mirror, a two-faced star - morning and evening .
The idea of the cycle of "eternal return" is for Mandelstam the last support in his opposition to the chaos of reality. At the center of this cycle is a timeless point, "where time does not run", a place of peace and balance. For Mandelstam, it is associated with the golden age, the Greek islands of the blessed. Hope for rest finds expression in a cycle of poems headed by two Crimean poems - "A stream of golden honey ..." and "On the stone spurs of Pieria ..." (1919). The first verse begins with a symbol of stopped time:
Golden honey flowed from a bottle
So tight and long...
Peculiar signs of the frozen time of ancient Taurida are "white columns", past which the characters - the poet and the mistress of the estate - "went to see the grapes"; "everywhere Bacchus services", "smells of vinegar, paint and fresh wine from the cellar", and nothing reminds of the twentieth century, the revolution and so on. Silence is an indispensable attribute of this world:
Well, in the room as white as a spinning wheel, there is silence ...
The emerging image of Penelope is associated with the image of the spinning wheel. She, as you know, also tried to "stretch" the waiting time for her husband with the help of needlework:
Remember, in a Greek house, the beloved wife of all -
Not Elena - different - how long did she embroider?
The last phrase of the poem naturally introduces the image of Odysseus: "Odysseus returned, full of space and time." It can be assumed that the poet identifies himself with Odysseus returning home, having found peace after a long search, having found the embodiment of his ideal of "Hellenism", a habitable space commensurate with a person, "in rocky Tauris". Let us also note the change of priorities: not Elena the Beautiful, forcing men to fight, but Penelope, patiently waiting for her husband - this is the new ideal of a woman.
The second key poem of the cycle, "On the stone spurs of Pieria", according to M.L. Gasparov, is "a set of reminiscences from early Greek lyric poets". There are no signs of the "outside world" in the poem, the time and place of the poem is an eternal spring poetic holiday, a poetic utopia, "islands of the blessed", or, as the poem says, "holy islands", corresponding to the "archipelago", that is, the islands in the Ionian sea.
This poem contains many images that are key to the entire collection. So, V.I. Terras points to the image of the industrious bee as a metaphor for the poet, and accordingly to the image of poetic creativity as "sweet honey":
To, like bees, lyre-blinds
We were given Ionian honey.
The action takes place on the island of Lesvos, as evidenced by the mention of Sappho and Terpander - the first famous poet and musician born on this island. Mandelstam depicts the era of the birth of art, and the symbol of this is the lyre turtle lying in the sun and waiting for Terpander. It is impossible not to recall in this connection the poem "Silentium", since we again found ourselves at the moment of the birth of the word. However, the attitude of the poet to this moment is already different. If silence is preferable for the early Mandelstam, then in this poem the time when "On the stone spurs of Pieria the Muses led the first round dance" is perceived by him as a utopia, a beautiful "somewhere". This utopia is marked by a set of attributes of "Hellenism" already known to us: these are "honey, wine and milk", and "cold spring", and such lines that stand out against the symbolic background of the entire poem with their earthly character:
A tall house was built by a hefty carpenter,
Chickens were strangled for the wedding
And the clumsy shoemaker stretched
On the shoes, all five oxhides.
The poems of this cycle are characterized by the mention of certain substances: honey, wine, wax, copper, and so on. It can be assumed that this materiality for Mandelstam was opposed to the incorporeality of the world of shadows, the world of death. The mention of them becomes so characteristic that some poems in which there are no ancient names are nevertheless perceived as related to antiquity (for example, "Sisters - heaviness and tenderness - your signs are the same ...")
The title poem "Tristia" ("I learned the science of parting...") becomes a peculiar point of intersection of many semantic lines of the collection. The poem consists of two parts, outwardly not correlated with each other. The key word of the first part is "parting", and in the context of the entire poem, it should be perceived not only as a parting of a person with a person, but also a person with a certain "old life". It is no coincidence that in two stanzas the rooster is mentioned three times - "the herald of new life." We can say that this part of the poem is correlated with those verses of the collection, which deal with the world of death, since the action takes place in "the last hour of the vigils of the city."
The second part is closer to the "Hellenistic" poems of the collection. Here we find both an image of needlework ("a shuttle whirls, a spindle buzzes"), and a frank declaration:
Everything was old, everything will happen again,
And only a moment of recognition is sweet to us.
Interestingly, in this part of the poem, wax and copper are opposed. As already mentioned, these are original primary elements of the inhabited, human world. At the same time, they are involved in another much deeper layer of being. So, wax, due to its transparency, becomes an instrument of divination "about the Greek Erebus", that is, Hades. At the same time, wax is an accessory of the female world, as opposed to copper, which acts as an accessory of the male world (it should be noted a subtle game with the grammatical category of gender: “wax” is the masculine gender, as the embodiment of the feminine world and “copper” is the feminine gender, as the embodiment male).
Copper and wax are not only opposed to each other, but in a certain sense they are identical:
Wax is to women what copper is to men.
We only draw lots in battles,
And it was given to them, guessing to die.
Thus, a complex system of juxtapositions and oppositions is built up: wax as an instrument of divination gives women the same thing that men give copper as a weapon, namely, involvement in another world (for women to men and vice versa; apparently, this explains the morphological inversion noted above) , but for both, touching a foreign world means death.
So, Mandelstam hopes that the life-giving force inherent in simple human existence will make it possible to overcome the incorporeality of the kingdom of Persephone. The death of culture has come, but life goes on. And even if you have to pay for life with oblivion, then this is a worthy price for the acquired land:
We will remember in the letey cold,
That the earth stood for us ten heavens.
One of the most famous poems by Mandelstam, The Swallow, is also connected with the motive of oblivion. In fact, the entire poem is a complaint about the loss of the ability to remember (recognize). The poet considers himself a member of the world of shadows, since he is deprived of this ability:
And to mortals the power is given to love and to know,
For them, and the sound will spill into the fingers,
But I forgot what I want to say
And the ethereal thought will return to the hall of shadows.
But the poet leaves the world of the dead, gaining the ability to speak. This step is connected with the return to St. Petersburg:
In St. Petersburg we will meet again -
Like the sun we buried in it -
And a blissful, meaningless word
Let's say it for the first time.
The process of returning to life cannot but be associated for Mandelstam with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, therefore, in the poems that marked this milestone, "In St. Petersburg we will meet again ..." and "A ghostly scene flickers a little ..." these names are mentioned. But simultaneously with the return to life, Mandelstam has a feeling of theatricality of what is happening. It is significant that Mandelstam of the period of "The Stone", gaining the ability to "recognize" the ancient world in the present world, at the same time came to a sense of the theatricality, artificiality of this real world.
The poem "A ghostly scene flickers a little ..." is also interesting because in it, for the first time, Mandelstam speaks of the special responsiveness of the Russian language:
Sweeter than the singing of Italian speech
For me, my native language
For it mysteriously babbles
A spring of foreign harps.
A peculiar example of such interpenetration of the antique and Russian is the poem "When the city's moon comes out on the haystacks ...". On the one hand, this is the case when there is not a single ancient name in the poem, but the motives associated with the "ancient" verses of the collection make us perceive it as a continuation of the ancient theme. However, the first line of the second stanza "And the cuckoo is crying on its stone tower ..." makes us remember the "Lay of Igor's Campaign" - the cry of Yaroslavna. So the ancient Russian epic turns out to be part of his Hellenistic world for Mandelstam.
So, the ancient and "near-antique" poems of the collection "Tristia" can be interpreted as a supertext, telling about the premonition of the poet's loss and loss of antiquity as a world of high culture and about the subsequent acquisition of the "Hellenistic" world in simple human existence, in the elements of the Russian language.
These verses form a certain skeleton, the frame of the collection, other poems are also referred to them, not externally connected with antiquity, but using the language formed by ancient verses. Yu.N. Tynyanov in the already cited article "Gap": "Equivalent to each other by a single, well-known melody, the words are colored by one emotion, and their strange order, their hierarchy become obligatory ... These strange meanings are justified by the course of the entire poem, the course from shade to shade, leading in the end to a new meaning. Here the main point of Mandelstam's work is the creation of new meanings." It is worth adding only: the creation of new meanings also occurs during the transition from poem to poem.
Antiquity itself becomes the "language" of the poet, since Mandelstam builds, if not absolutely logical, but an integral personal mythology (however, not a single mythology, except for purely rationalistic, that is, dead, was logical). In this mythology there is a place for the kingdom of life and death with the gods and heroes inhabiting them (Persephone, Athena, Cassandra, Orpheus and Eurydice, Antigone, Psyche); blissful islands of eternal spring, belonging to poets and artisans; there is also a place for people who wonder about their fate in this world in accordance with their lot (mythologems of wax and copper), or who have calmed down, reconciled with the world around them (like Penelope and Odysseus). Time in this mythological space, in full accordance with Plato, is cyclical, and the process of creativity, like love, is Recognition (cf. Plato's definition of knowledge as recollection).
This world is sometimes extremely cruel, you have to pay for existence in it, but one thing cannot be denied: its vitality. There is no allegorical coldness of antiquity of the classicists here, rather, it is an attempt, characteristic of modernism, to resurrect the past, return the lost, repeat what was said, making it new, unusual, even incomprehensible, but alive, saturated with flesh and blood. It is hardly by chance that the collection ends with a cycle of poems dedicated to the poet's love for O.N. Arbenina - love is completely carnal (see, for example, the poem "I am on a par with others ...", which is very unusual in its frankness and openness of feeling). Life wins; culture is dying out, leaving behind the "blissful, meaningless word," which becomes for Mandelstam a path to life. Did time justify the poet's hopes for the return of the "forgotten"?
Enemies retreated to the river,
and you can smoke safely
Forget about stupid marches
and polka Pokrassa ...
"Jazz Club" A. Kortnev
The next epoch was reflected in the poems contained in the last collection of poems published during Mandelstam's lifetime. "Poems of 1921 - 1925" preserves the memory of the revelations of previous eras, primarily of the "Hellenistic", humanized world discovered by the poet. But the place of the distant Taurida is occupied by the Russian village: hay, wool, chicken manure, matting - these are the "primary substances" that make up human life. However, the life of the village for Mandelstam is no less alien and exotic than the life of ancient Taurida. He is trying to find a way to comprehend this life, perceiving it the way he perceived the forms of ancient culture, penetrating from the outside into the center that organizes it. But his main tool, the poetic word, more and more fails him. Mandelstam is acutely aware of the discrepancy between the "Aeolian miraculous order" and the chaos of reality:
Not rustling with our scales,
We sing against the wool of the world,
We build a lyre, as if in a hurry
Grow with a shaggy rune!
The connection of all living things is inexorably disintegrating; it is impossible to keep it in borrowed forms, the only hope is to acquire a new, "native" word:
From the nest of fallen chicks
Mowers bring back.
I'll break out of the burning rows
And I will return to my native scale,
To pink blood connection
And herbs dry-handed ringing
They parted: one - holding fast,
And the other - in an abstruse dream.
So there is another "primary substance" - blood. Sacrificial blood should hold together "vertebrae of two centuries";
To wrest the century from captivity,
To start a new world
Knotty knee days
You need to tie a flute.
The poet, like Hamlet, sees his mission in introducing the age into the natural sequence of events from which it is broken, and at the same time he feels more and more strongly his impotence to fulfill his destiny. Mandelstam is trying to find a way to the "native scale", referring to the speech of Tyutchev and Lermontov ("Concert at the station", "Slate ode"), Pushkin ("Found a horseshoe", reminiscent of the moment of inspiration depicted in "Autumn"), Derzhavin ( "Slate ode") - but more and more removed into a riddle, understatement, silence. His poetic sense of life does not find support in the established order of the age-ruler, the age-beast. Life is not even a theater, but a gypsy camp; instead of sea foam - lace foam:
I will rush around the camp of the dark street ...
And only to the light that in the starry prickly lie!
And life swims through the theater hood with foam,
And there is no one to say: "From the camp of the dark street ..."
Poet Osip Mandelstam falls silent for five years - until 1930.
* * *
When the last bummer comes
I will go out into the world and become a pillar.
How can I be to be myself...
"Last bummer" A. Kortnev
The speech will return to Mandelstam when he abandons his attempts to "become on a par with the age," when he understands that his poetic power is not in proximity to life, but in approaching it. In order to acquire this power, he must withdraw from life, "destroying himself, contradicting himself." Mandelstam takes this last step, creating poems in which he finds expression of a feeling that organizes his entire life around him - a feeling of fear. In the contemporary world of Mandelstam, this feeling is nameless: no one dares to admit that he is afraid. Naming it, the poet at the same time pulls himself out of the stream of life and turns to him. He does not get rid of fear - he overcomes it. The energy of overcome fear, like the energy of love once, gives him the strength to overcome silence.
Fear makes him dream of salvation from the "wolfhound century", hoping for a "hot fur coat of the Siberian steppes" - but, in addition to fear, the consciousness of his own superiority over the failed murderer also speaks in him:
Because I'm not a wolf by my blood
And only an equal will kill me.
He challenges the age, ready for anything. "Under a terrible secret" he reads to more than a dozen people:
We live, not feeling the country under us ...
The poet is ready for anything - but not for the fact that the age will get cold feet. Mandelstam was preparing to die. But the living embodiment of fear will beware of killing the poet - Stalin will try to break him. In part, he will succeed: Mandelstam was never a seasoned fighter capable of a long confrontation with force, a confrontation most likely doomed to defeat. A person turned off from the automatism of the death penalty cannot help feeling confused. Such confusion covers Mandelstam as well: he tries either to thank the "savior" or to provoke him to finish the job. But the feeling that fear retains its power over the era, and not only over the country, but also over Europe, which once seemed a refuge of culture ("It's cold in Europe. It's dark in Italy. Power is disgusting, like the hands of a barber"), will not leave Mandelstam until his death; the ultimate attempt to express all the horror that fills the world will be the unfinished Poems of the Unknown Soldier. Death will not keep you waiting.
All the work of Osip Mandelstam is a monument, no, just a memory of human courage. This is not the confident courage of a mighty man who fears nothing because of his strength; it is not the insane courage of a fanatic, protected from fear by his faith; it is the courage of the weak who overcomes his weakness, it is the courage of the coward who overcomes his cowardice. Perhaps not a single Russian poet knew so "fears, congenial to the soul", from the fear of falling in love to the fear of dying. Silence was Mandelstam's lot, his fate; but his speech, his poetry, is evidence of man's ability to overcome his fate.
Finding your feelings is always a risk. Let the heart not be allowed to "express itself" in its entirety; but if you don't try, no one will ever know you had a heart. Osip Mandelstam sacrificed his life, but saved his existence for us - how many of his contemporaries who saved their lives can we say that they existed? Let it sometimes seem that the existence of one person is an insignificant smallness; but without this smallness can the great exist?
There are many mysteries in the poetry of Osip Mandelstam. But she is alive as long as there is someone who is trying to solve them. Each new reader brings to life some new part of his world - including this part in his own world. Can we do more for a person than let him become a part of us?
... And we, like a flock of fish, swim into the light,
And we call our fishermen by their first names.
We compose a farce, but it remains for us
A dozen more rhymes, a dozen more phrases ...
"I believe her" A. Kortnev
Therefore I lie!
Waste!
"Wolf and Lamb" I. A. Krylov
"Silentium" Osip Mandelstam
She hasn't been born yet
She is both music and words,
And therefore all living things
Unbreakable connection.The seas of the chest breathe calmly,
But, like crazy, the day is bright,
And pale lilac foam
In a black-and-azure vessel.May my lips find
initial silence,
Like a crystal note
What is pure from birth!Stay foam, Aphrodite,
And return the word to the music,
And be ashamed of the heart of the heart,
Merged with the fundamental principle of life!
Analysis of Mandelstam's poem "Silentium"
The poem "Silentium" was first published in the ninth issue of the famous Apollo magazine in 1910. Subsequently, Mandelstam included it in his debut collection "Stone". According to most literary critics, this book combines the "childishness of Verlaine" with the "severity of Tyutchev." The first feature is manifested in the ease of presentation of topics. The second is in the seriousness of the motives chosen for the lyrics. Osip Emilievich perceives the word as a stone. The poet acts as a builder, an architect. It is worth dwelling on Mandelstam's relationship with Tyutchev in a little more detail. The genius of the twentieth century was very familiar with the work of the great predecessor. Osip Emilievich knew many poems by heart, which his wife noted in her memoirs. "Silentium" is a clear reference to . The difference in names is observed only at the level of punctuation marks. Fyodor Ivanovich has an exclamation mark at the end of the title, Osip Emilievich has nothing.
There is still debate about who or what is meant by the pronoun "she" in Mandelstam's Silentium. There are a huge number of versions, which is quite unusual for such a small poem. One of the options - Osip Emilievich talked about love. The key argument in favor of this interpretation is the mention of the Greek goddess Aphrodite. To this day, her image remains perhaps the main symbol of love and beauty in world culture. The next argument in favor of the version expressed here is that the “fundamental principle of life” is mentioned in the work, which refers readers to natural philosophy. According to its provisions, the Cosmos is formed by two forces: Love as the beginning of a universal connection and Enmity as the beginning of the division of everything that exists. As an indirect confirmation, another poem from the collection "Stone" - "Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails ... ". His main motive does not raise questions - definitely love. This work has several intersections with "Silentium". In particular, we are talking about the ancient theme and the mention of the sea.
The line “she is both music and the word” is interesting. Mandelstam considered poetry to be related to music. In his opinion, a real composer is always on the way with a true poet. If we take into account the version that “Silentium” speaks of love, it turns out that such a strong feeling is able to absorb poetry and music, generate and unite them.
