Sirventa

The 125th anniversary of Osip Mandelstam found the country in an inappropriate position to discuss the hero of the day. For some, a poet who, according to many, perished for an accidental epigram on Stalin, which in any case is not considered the highest poetic achievement, is not a very convenient sight for this day. To others, the “man of the Moskvoshway era” reminds too much—of course, not openly, since it is doubly indecent to compare oneself with the greats and to measure ourselves against the times, but still we compare and measure ourselves—of our possible future. After all, if they cut down the forest, chips will certainly fly, even the frail and out-of-this-world Osip Emilievich was not spared, but the man lived a purely private life, had his head in the clouds, wrote children's poems, translated Petrarch, counted ships in Homer in insomnia. The senselessness and absurdity of the persecution of Mandelstam is one of the cornerstones of the public understanding of the formation of a totalitarian state as a tragedy in the ancient sense. All-powerful supra-mundane forces, with the hands of their tyrant puppets, play games incomprehensible to mortals and, due to their inhuman nature, completely inhumane games - the result will always be hecatombs, human sacrifices, a poet in a transit camp in Vladivostok. You should stay away from all this, the multifaceted and meaningless political kills the only possible meaningful, poetic. Low matter strives to take revenge on the high spirit, and it invariably succeeds. What kind of morality can there be here?

It’s strange to talk about Osip Mandelstam as a politician, but this is precisely the absurdity that I want to do - in many ways, what is considered to be Mandelstam’s oddities, eccentricities, eccentricities, in fact there is an extremely sharpened, but nevertheless norm of reflection on that part of reality that we and now we call them political issues. The poet who wanted “the thinking body to turn into a street, into a country” deserves to be understood, including literally.

I don’t think it’s fair to consider Mandelstam an accidental victim. On the contrary, perhaps we are thus missing part of his message: no matter how dangerous it is, thinking and talking about things that you cannot change, and first of all about power, about society, about the country, is necessary, because we that's what they ask.

And even more so, they ask for this from someone who is able to speak, but is silent.

* * *

Dozens of works have been devoted to Mandelstam’s poem “Canzona,” written on May 26, 1931; everyone who wrote about Mandelstam has dealt with it in one way or another. Like many poems of 1930–1934, it is generally considered “dark” - in any case, no commentator is able to talk about “transparency”, the literal sense of the poem. However, what can I say - here it is in full:

Will I really see tomorrow -
On the left the heart beats, glory, beat! —
You, bankers of the mountain landscape,
You, holders of the mighty shares of gneiss?

There's a professor's eagle pupil, -
Egyptologists and numismatists -
These are gloomy-crested birds
With tough meat and wide chest

Then Zeus twists it really well
With the golden fingers of the cabinetmaker
Wonderful glass bulbs -
A gift from the psalmist to the seer.

He looks through the beautiful binoculars of Zeiss -
Dear gift from King David, -
Notices all the gneiss wrinkles,
Where is the pine tree or the nit village.

I will leave the land of the Hyperboreans,
To nourish the outcome of fate with vision,
I will say “sela” to the chief of the Jews
For his crimson caress.

The edge of the unshaven mountains is still unclear,
The stubble of the small trees prickles,
And fresh as a washed fable,
Green valley to set your teeth on edge

I love military binoculars
With the usurious power of sight.
There are only two colors in the world that have not faded:
In yellow - envy, in red - impatience.

Based on the “mountainous” setting of the text and the message (however, rather uncertain) of Nadezhda Mandelstam in the “Second Book”, “Canzona” - a text that appeared as a result of a trip to Armenia - Mandelstam’s prose of the same name mentions Armenian professors, and mountains, and even binoculars and green valley. True, in reality these pictures are found in the chapter “Sukhum” to be completely unemotional, but birds, eagles and stones calm almost everyone, although not completely - versions of what exactly is encrypted by Osip Mandelstam in this text are numerous. Mikhail Gasparov, for example, saw in “Canzone” a poetic study of the nature of vision, and other authors, along with him, saw Mandelstam’s search for a synthesis of antiquity, Judaism and Christianity. The color scheme of the text sometimes even gives rise to incidents. So, one of the authors saw the alternation of green, yellow and red as a change in traffic lights. It’s interesting, but in the spring of 1931 Mandelstam could see the traffic light in both Leningrad and Moscow; they just appeared there as an experiment. The problem is that both on Petrovka in Moscow and on 25 October Avenue in Leningrad they looked like a lantern-clock with an arrow dial: a single arrow in a circle pointed to the green, white and red sectors, so for the colors of “Canzone”, of course, were still unusable. In real traffic lights, which appeared in 1933 in capitals everywhere (the first were experimental), yellow was already in its usual place, red, as in “Canzone”, at the bottom, but green was replaced here and there by blue: “green light” became a permanent synonym for the “open road” only a few years later, and traffic light colors were finally legalized in the USSR in 1959.

Naturally, the texts of the psalms were also involved in the analysis of the Canzona, and, as usually happens in such cases, productively. Finally, some researchers could not ignore the obsessive political notes that haunt everyone who reads “Canzona” in parallel with other no less “dark” and seemingly allegorical texts by Mandelstam of this time. And for some reason “golden fingers” are always associated with Stalin’s “thick fingers” from Mandelstam’s epigram, which ultimately cost him his life. But practically no one wants to tinker with these parallels specifically: how exactly in Osip Emilievich’s magical head Armenia, birds of prey, the pupil and Stalin were connected, only he can know for sure, so all guesses will remain guesses. Moreover, like most poems of this period, “Canzona” provides almost unlimited possibilities for many abstract interpretations - sometimes it even occurs to oneself that Mandelstam himself, not at all an example of clarity and linear logic, probably would not have been able to understand quickly enough what a complex train of thought is attributed to him by commentators.

I don’t think that I will take away bread from literary scholars, who will undoubtedly continue to study “Canzona” professionally and meticulously. I’ll just tell you how I understand this text; perhaps my considerations will be useful - in any case, for other texts of the same period, a little more transparent, such considerations will obviously be more banal and certainly completely secondary. After all, the jubilee calls for offerings—and bringing something of your own to this altar, not general considerations.

* * *

The circumstances under which Osip Mandelstam wrote “Canzona” are unknown, although this period of his life has been well studied. In January 1931, the Mandelstams, after almost a year's absence, returned to Moscow - from Leningrad, where they tried to move after traveling to Abkhazia, Georgia and Armenia from March to October 1930. We owe these two months in Leningrad the lines “I returned to my city...” But no, he didn’t: from the beginning of 1931 until his exile to Cherdyn in 1934, the poet would live in Moscow, and in the first year even not so much to live somewhere specific, but to look for a corner and casual income wherever God sends. The trip to Armenia itself, as we know from Mandelstam’s “Fourth Prose,” was a kind of attempt to escape from Moscow in the style of 1929—Moscow “the year of the great turning point,” and the following year mass arrests in the “academic case” (“Platonov’s trial”) -Tarle”), and arrests in the upcoming “Industrial Party trial”. It’s not that Mandelstam was directly threatened by something; in any case, he could not consider his defamation in the “Gornfeld case” to be literally political. Nevertheless, Mandelstam demonstrated more than once the desire to stay in Armenia, as far as possible from the already terrible political circumstances, and he perceived the semi-forced return to Moscow with horror. Not only has nothing changed, but it has been increasing: for example, from March 1 to 9, another show trial is taking place in Moscow in the case of the Union Bureau of the Mensheviks.

Mandelstam already knew well what show trials were: in 1928, he became famous in the narrow circles of the Moscow intelligentsia for his desperate and furious defense of five elderly members of the board of the Mutual Credit Society against Nikolai Bukharin - which is typical, a successful defense, in any case, the execution of bankers (and this is for my first clue to the meaning of “Canzona”) was canceled. In 1933, the poet once again successfully used the powers of the celestials, through Marietta Shaginyan, achieving the release of the arrested biologist Boris Kuzin - it was probably with him, having met in Yerevan, that Mandelstam discussed, among other things, issues of geology (in the context of “Canzona”, important), how and many other questions. And it was precisely at this time - from January to August 1931 - that almost newspaper quotes and, in any case, allusions in Mandelstam’s new poems were constant. Then the “bear - nature’s eternal Menshevik” will come out in “Midnight in Moscow. Luxurious Buddhist summer...” - it was written just at the same time as “Canzona”. Then Mandelstam characterizes himself as “a renegade in the people’s family” in “Save My Speech...” - two weeks before the “Canzona”. That is “unemployment” in “I’m still far from being a patriarch...”. Finally, on June 6, Mandelstam writes quite frankly:

I really love Moscow laws,
I don’t miss the water of Arzni.
In Moscow there are bird cherry trees and telephones,
And the days there are famous for executions.

And, in essence, all the texts created by the poet during this period, until the sharp change of mood on June 7 (“Enough of the cackling! Let’s put the papers on the table!..”) and the subsequent June 25, the already confident “Today you can take off the decalcomani...” ( in which Mandelstam even allows himself to polemicize with the “White Guards,” who also constantly appear in Soviet newspapers), is one large text. And this is an absolutely wonderful text about what Moscow is like in 1931 - and only Mandelstam with this text makes it clear what this city looks like, in which he has not been, in fact, for a year (and a very important year in history!), not in individual details, but in general. This large text has it all. There is the famine that began in 1931 with collectivization in “Untruth” (“a decoction of baby navels” and Stalin’s six-fingered tongue), and “Lenin’s” mass housing construction, and “frozen blocks”, and “pneumatic mail”, and “hemp soul”, and "civil funeral".

And the completely harmless “geese-swans” in Russian fairy tales, which Mandelstam vainly calls “home”. And among all this stereoscopic, months-long text intersecting with itself - “Canzona”.

Initially, in the draft, this text was called “Geography”. The “Armenian” version of “Canzona” is, perhaps, even confirmed by this - it was in moving somewhere, even to a Siberian camp “cap in hand”, that Mandelstam saw salvation and did not give up hope of leaving for Yerevan again, and, apparently, these hopes in There really is a Canzone. But this is moving into the future. In the final version, “Canzona” begins precisely with the future: “Will I really see tomorrow...” However, in the draft there is no “tomorrow” yet: there is today, and the poet sees this today as if with his own eyes, now.

* * *

If you approach the landscape of “Canzona” without pre-reading, without the presumption of a benevolent mood, then it is drawn as follows. In front of us is a mountainous landscape, a mountain above a valley. Birds of prey sit on a mountain ledge, one of which in the turn (volte) of the introductory (fronta) - although the “Canzone” is not described by Dante, whom Mandelstam was reading these days, the actual classical canzone , the classical scheme of its construction is maintained - is Zeus . It is reasonable to assume that other birds of prey are also the Olympian gods on the cliff. From above they observe (Zeus the warrior - through military binoculars) the gorge in which the valley is located, and without much pleasure. The author, looking up at them, agrees in advance with the verdict rendered by the celestials, which will be the denouement of his life. We are talking about exile - the “land of the Hyperboreans” will have to be left, and this, in comparison with other options, is a “weasel,” although, apparently, still fatal. (To this I would also like to add a portrait of the “celestial being” Zeus: every time they look at you through binoculars from above, you imagine that you are looking through binoculars from below, and you see the face of the beholder magnified a hundred times. It is “unshaven”, “stubble prickles from the fine trees” However, this is already a liberty - there is no reason to attribute the same logic to Mandelstam, who actually repeatedly saw faces in landscapes in his texts.)

If the case takes place in Armenia, then the text, frankly speaking, loses most of its hopes for meaning. Moscow is another matter: the gorge, where celestial birds of prey sit on a granite cliff and look at the surroundings through binoculars, is familiar to anyone, even the most slow-witted resident of Russia. For Mandelstam, by the way, it was absolutely amazing to see this place in the spring of 1931. The Mandelstams left Moscow in April 1930. It was at this moment that Red Square, which had previously had no paving stones, began to be paved with the current gray-black diabase (not to say “gneiss”, in any case, it is very easy for an amateur in geology to confuse granite, diabase and gneiss, and granite in Mandelstam’s dictionary almost always associated with Neva granite). And on the site of the wooden second Lenin Mausoleum, in October 1930, the current Mausoleum, lined with red porphyry, grew.

Moreover, on May 1, 1931, it was here, on Red Square, that something happened that in Moscow, and not only in Moscow, was talked about for a very long time, for weeks, and photographs of this action were published by all self-respecting magazines. Military parades and demonstrations on Red Square until 1930 were, although large-scale, quite compact events. In May 1931 everything changed. The Chicago Tribune, clearly exaggerating, said that 1,900 thousand people took part in the May Day demonstration in Moscow. Of course, the entire adult population of the capital would definitely not be able to come to Red Square. Nevertheless, according to newspaper reports, the procession of workers at the demonstration alone took 6.5 hours - it followed an hour and a half military parade.

With almost one hundred percent probability, Mandelstam did not participate in this story; it is difficult to imagine that this went unnoticed. However, talk about this demonstration went on for a very long time. It was outstanding not only in scale, but also in its surroundings - for the first time, the GUM building was hung with huge red banners with slogans in the main languages ​​of the world: Chinese and Arabic texts hung opposite the Mausoleum, and at the demonstration itself, for the first time in history, workers carried gigantic banners, several meters tall, portraits of Joseph Stalin. Stalin himself first observed the procession in military uniform - from the cliff of the side platform of the Mausoleum.

Who was in his company? Of course, the military, whose symbol since the Civil War has been precisely the artillery binoculars—we will return to this later. In addition, prominent figures in science and government. “Egyptologists” - in Mandelstam’s texts, especially with the use of biblical notes, Egypt is naturally deciphered as “the country of Egyptian captivity.” “Bankers” and “numismatists” are specialists on monetary issues from the Supreme Economic Council and other departments. By the way, in the draft of “Canzona” they are even more transparently named - “templars of basalt”: although basalt is not granite, Mandelstam may well not have been precise in these terms, but the Lenin Mausoleum is absolutely a “temple”. The meeting of the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on the steps of this ziggurat - and we remember that these are mainly people of economic power, government - looks quite like a meeting of the banking board of directors - professors, “bosses”, shareholders.

And it is from there, from the heights of the Mausoleum, that these mountain eagles, I think, are looking at Mandelstam at that moment. Vultures and scavengers, let's say more specifically. The “broad chest” of one of them corresponds so well with the “broad chest of the Ossetian” that it is impossible not to be wary.

What can Stalin see from above? Here's what (fragment dated June 12, 1931):

Like a community of people
Breaking the ground into sweat,
Multi-tiered herd
Dusty armada
Floats right into my head:

Chicks with tender sides
And spoiled bulls,
And behind them the ships
Buffalo girls with buffaloes
And bull priests.

By the way, Dante did not disdain the political canzone (for example, in the “New Life”), but the political canzones of Petrarch, translated a little later by Mandelstam in the collection of “Canzonietta,” are better known. And even if Mandelstam did not get to them at that moment, he definitely at that moment was already reading “Experience in Verse and Prose” by Konstantin Batyushkov, who with pleasure and some errors quotes Petrarch’s canzone LIII, considering it an appeal of the Italian poet to the famous tribune and the 14th-century tyrant Cola di Rienzo. The plot with Di Rienzo, who seized power in the first Rome on behalf of the republic and then became a madman, a tyrant and a state killer, in Marxist through Moscow was known well - Friedrich Engels at one time played a play about him. And Petrarch’s office could not be unknown to Mandelstam:

... fires the house of the Lord swept over,
But if you extinguish the hearth or two
With a decisive hand,
The dishonor will go out the bearer
And God will bless the deed.
Eagles and snakes, wolves and bears
Sometimes a marble column is harmful
And so they harm themselves a lot.

And the "Chancers" is already, apparently, an analogue of a special type of Canticon, called "Sirvent", is a chancers dedicated to blasphemy and ridicule of a political enemy.

* * *

It’s not my business, I repeat, to insist on such a reading, which nevertheless seems more successful to me than the search for the reasons why Zeus in the image of a mountain eagle looks into the binoculars on the slopes of Armenia, talking with Mandelstam located in Moscow (the “land of the hyperboreans” Still had to leave). If we accept the proposed version of geography, temptations with slightly less confidence to decipher the “Canzon” extremely many, although this is also quite unreliable.

For example, Zeus-Stalin's “golden fingers” are quite obvious: he himself is on the rostrum of the Temple-Mavzoley-an idol, a golden statue. The presence of Stalin Binoculars (photos are not fixed by Iosif Dzhugashvili on the mausoleum precisely with binoculars) is undeniable - military binoculars, however, not Zeisovsky, but the American company Bausch, appears in the descriptions of the interior of the Stalin’s cabinet constantly, the subject is now in the museum collection and is exhibited. The “insight” of the eagle-Stalin is that in 1929 the newspaper stamp of the Stalinist USSR began to form, the emphasis on the force of foresight of the leader was constantly placed. But who is a psalmist, King David, who gave Zeus “wonderful glasses-glass”?

My assumption is debatable here, but it seems to me the only possible. In the memory of Mandelstam, military binoculars are an attribute of another military leader of the USSR, known in the old, still in the sand of Red Square, military parades, the People's Commissar of the Lev Trotsky. Trotsky really “gave” military and political power to Stalin in 1927-by the way, after the failed autumn Trotskyist demonstration on Red Square, which was well remembered in Moscow. Tsar-David is a Jew and a psalmist-orator. Leo is the king of animals in whom the middle name turns into a name.

By the way, in this case, the fresh “washed fable” looks much more voluminous below, which is really similar to Krylovskaya “green valley”. What kind of fable - and why is it “washed”, that is, washed, cleaned from dirt? This is quite simple. The main official fabulist of the USSR of those times is Demyan Poor, who just at the end of 1929 wrote panic letters to Stalin about the prohibition of the Politburo, as they were saying now, “Russophobic” poetic feuilletons. On May 22, after a fairly hassle of Demyan, the poor with his fables was “washed”: the newspaper Pravda officially congratulated him in the newspaper editorial on the 20th anniversary of creative activity, and without the recommendation of Stalin, she would not certainly do this.

By the way, in Moscow there were also very definite rumors about why and when the poor had problems in relations with Stalin. This happened in 1926 after the poor wrote the “Forest Beasts” fable, the content of which transparently hinted at the active struggle of a lion (“Times of Saul and David”) for the implementation of the so -called Lenin testament. Joseph Stalin did not like people who reminded him of the “will of Lenin”, but the poor in 1930 became a necessary ally in the collectivization case, and his fables from that moment were sustained ideologically. So, it is necessary to wash and return to the system: the fable was shaven again, although tired of her place.

Finally, the most non-obvious "Zeus reducer." Mandelstam was well immersed in the writer's environment, which, like the century before that, ate rumors, copies of private and public letters, conversations. Politics and literature at this moment crossed very often. And it was in the spring of 1931 that he was temporarily taken out of the disgrace and released on a foreign trip - and, apparently, not without the assistance of Stalin, who was already at the same time with animal seriousness - a good familiar Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pilnyak. This happened after the 1928 Red Tree Anti-Soviet Tale, published in the 1929th emigrant publishing house in Berlin, was dashingly and already completely pro-Soviet manner of built into the socialist novel “The Volga flows into the Caspian Sea”. It is likely that the “Krasnoderevets” is a master of this kind of operations.

But what does Mandelstam expect from Stalin? Let me remind you that the rates of Osip Emilievich are very high - on March 2, he already wrote:

Chop eyelashes. A tears clung in the chest
I feel without fear that there will be a thunderstorm.
Someone miraculous rushing me to forget.
Stuffy-and yet I want to live to death

With the bunny, rising to the first sound that has been heard,
Wildly and sleepily looking around,
So the cheerful song sings with a rough song ...

I don’t think that Mandelstam was counting on Armenia - rather, still on expulsion to Siberia. Nevertheless, he continued to write what he writes: "Where is the pine tree il village-Ryda." Pine in the texts of the same period is often associated with the poet himself. But the “village-Ryda” is already a very intelligible political attack: 1931-the year of completion of mass collectivization in the village, the year of mass eviction of fists from villages to the north and Siberia. It is precisely her yawn-liner that peeps into Zeisov glass. By the way, Trotsky also knows and remembers this to Mandelstam, there was absolutely the same opinion - the Lev Davidovich began the workshop and the fight against the peasantry, so the gift of the “beautiful binoculars” to the successor to the red people's tribune Joseph Vissarionovich looks like an action, in general natural.

Red and yellow colors, meaning impatience and envy, are also unlikely to need this version for complex clarifications. Red is the color of the impatience of revolutionary transformations, the color of murders for the sake of a socialist future (and it makes no sense to deny that Osip Mandelstam on political views - a convinced left, socialist, and for him the question of a “tear of a child” is not solved as, as, I hope, I hope For us now). Yellow is the color of gold, the color of power, the color of an idol-golden body, the color of envy.

And, finally, in this reading becomes clear and very strong, the beginning of the "Cantice". First, a deep breath “can I see tomorrow” - and then a hysterical exhalation: “The heart beats on the left - Glory, beat!”. Probably, no one has yet disclosed the meaning of totalitarian unity in Russian poetry more understanding and frankly. And it is clear why Mandelstam says “villages”, “let it be like that” from the psalms, the “head of the Jews”. The same Pharaoh Egyptian considers himself the head of the Jews. But in reality, the Jews have a god who decides everything: to whom to live and to whom.

But “let it be so” to tell the pharaoh for “raspberry affection” is also meaningful. He could also shoot, as a friend of Mandelstam Nikolai Gumilyov, who wrote a rather shallow, but completely politicized “Canteson II” in 1921. In the end, that this is a “raspberry” affection? Everyone recalls Malina Mandelstam from the anti-Stalinist epigram, for some reason considered the logic of the “thieves”. But after all, there are-already after the “Stalinist” verses of the 30s, in which there are also easily intersections with the “Cantice” and the “large text” of the 1931 spring, as a whole, and the beginner of the Osipa Mandelstam texts from Osipa Mandelstam March 6, 1937, dedicated to Voronezh, and maybe Moscow: "On the board of Malinova, Chervonnaya ..."

After all, there are places in Russia and the wise of Voronezh.

* * *

It remains only to inform why it was so controversial to say so long things. In the end, this strange and beautiful Mandelstam meant something, rhyming his lines. Somewhere he could talk about politics-well, the “chancers” either about politics, or not about politics, but what have we what?

For me, Osip Mandelstam is indeed a poet who, extremely naturally, understanding what politics is and what it really should be - freely defending its views in any way possible for you. Imagine a person who does not have a piece of bread, housing, minimally necessary clothes, a life prospect of a fifth ten years necessary for calm coexistence with a society of minimal reliability, understandable and stable family ties. There is nothing at all. There is only some strange gift-to compose words in such a way that in the resulting text is packaged by an order of magnitude more meaning than in any other case. He lives in an explanatory fear in a country where, according to official ideology, there is simply no place. His colleagues sold their souls a line. His friends died. Its readers are few. His views on the surrounding reality are little understandable and almost inexplicable. It is not published.

And this person nevertheless does everything to freely think about the life of the society surrounding him, formulate a witness to the text and spread these texts. Actually, this is politics, social activity in one of the best of possible forms. The XX century, including the murder of Osip Mandelstam, approved the alienation of an ordinary person - and Mandelstam, among other things, was quite simply thought about himself - from the forms of social activity, which are usurped by state power and a simple person: how I will have it. , and even more so to spread your opinion on the government, economics, architecture, but anything? There is a narrow circle of those who are important, for whom the power is a profession, and a normal person will always be outside - either a critic, or above this, but will never climb on a wack, with a pork snout in a feces, where he was not called and he was not called and Not called. This is not our business - we were so accustomed.

Anyone accustomed us to this, but not Osip Mandelstam. Actually, he paid precisely for this, from the point of view of the authorities, insisting on what is, is completely deserved. It's not about the epigram. The fact is that a poetic understanding of social reality, reality is much more effective than political, and it is clear in whose hands the power actually should be. In the hands of those who are not ready to abandon her, because they know - an awareness of the essence of the processes taking place in society, and there is the basis of power that is necessary and will be at least tolerant.

I think that Stalin was really afraid of him, and there was something to be afraid. After all, he won in the end, now - Mandelstam, not Stalin. One was at the top. The other disappeared in the camp. From the first, only a loud name and the glory of the tyrant remained. From the second - a whole world for many generations ahead.