What distinguishes human beings more than anything is their use of language. And literature matters profoundly because it is a central example of the use human beings make of words to explore and understand all experience. Great writers work at the frontiers of language. They are deeply engaged with the struggle for clarity and meaning. Because they wrestle with and refine language in order to be lucid and expand the imagination they are, in the most crucial sense, guardians of the accumulated richness of our written and spoken inheritance. And if a nation forgets or neglects such an inheritance its soul dries up, however great its material success.
If language becomes separated from moral and emotional life – if it becomes just a trail of clichés or a parade of dull practicalities which fail to quicken and excite the mind of the reader – then we run the risk of depriving citizens and children in particular of the full and vital resources contained in language. Ezra Pound pointed out long ago that literature, among other things, is a way of keeping words living and accurate. It is the essential place of literature to restore in us a sense of exuberance and vitality and excitement and passion in the acquisition of language and in the power and savour of words.
My whole life I have never doubted the deep and abiding importance of poetry. Language is the most potent force in any society and poetry is the purest form of language. When language in this purest form is neglected, soon language itself will be corrupted and perverted. When societies descend into such a condition true poets find it hard to exist and, in despair, go into exile. Soon a vicious circle of corrupted society and poetry in exile begins to spin. Such a phenomenon is well known. What is less measurable is the incidence of internal exile arising from a cultural indifference to native creativity and contempt specifically for the art of writing poetry. Who can forget the devastating judgement of Derek Walcott that the contempt in which some people hold their own culture has done proportionally as much destruction to the individual artist as political imprisonment or purges.
Because it can influence men and women so decisively, writing can be a dangerous occupation. Recall years ago Salman Rushdie on the run from an Ayatollah’s fatwa. Great writing is often greatly subversive. Throughout history powerful regimes, entrenched creeds, have feared the solitary man with a pen in his hand as much as they have feared an army of swords. Never was this more true than in Stalin’s Russia. As Joseph Brodsky wrote with restrained anger: “In educated circles, especially among the literati, being the widow of a great man is enough to provide an identity. This is especially so in Russia, where in the thirties and in the forties the regime was producing writers’ widows with such efficiency that in the middle of the sixties there were enough of them around to organize a trade union.”
Osip Mandelstam was the greatest poet Russia produced in the 20th century. Because of that it was inevitable, given the nature of the regime that Stalin established, that he would be killed. Mandelstam himself always said that they knew exactly what they were doing: the aim was to destroy not only people but the intellect itself. And in Russia, among intellectuals, poetry had a very special place. As Osip Mandelstam’s widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote in her great book about her husband, Hope Against Hope: “Poetry is the golden treasury in which our values are preserved; it brings people back to life, awakens their conscience, and stirs them to thought. Why this should happen I do not know, but it is a fact.”
The poem that led directly to Osip Mandelstam’s death was written in November 1933. It was never published, of course, simply written and read “to eleven people all told,” Mandelstam said during his interrogation. But that was enough. News of it got out. According to Mandelstam’s interrogator the poem was “a terrorist act.” Nadezhda Mandelstam, writing in the 1950s, made the following comment on this: “From their point of view, M’s was a real crime – a usurpation of the right to words and thoughts that the rulers reserved exclusively for themselves, whether they were enemies or friends of Stalin. This presumption became second nature to our rulers. Your right to an opinion is always determined by your rank and status in the hierarchy. Not long ago Surkhov [Editor of the Literary Gazette and, later, secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers] explained to me that Pasternak’s novel is no good because its hero, Dr Zhivago, has no right to make any judgements about our way of life – ‘we had not given him this right.’”
Osip Mandelstam was arrested on May 20, 1934 and later deported. Some time in 1938, the exact date is not known, he died at the Vladivostok transit camp on his way to the even more notorious camp at Kolyma. He was forty-seven. Here, translated by Robert Lowell, is the poem that killed him.
Poem
We live. We are not sure our land is under us.
Ten feet away, no one hears us.
But whenever there’s even half a conversation,
We remember the Kremlin’s mountaineer,
His thick fingers are fat as worms,
His cockroach mustache is laughing.
About him, the great, his thin-necked drained advisers.
He plays with them. He is happy with half men around him.
They make touching and funny animal sounds.
He alone talks Russian.
One after another, his sentences hit like horseshoes! He
pounds them out. He always hits the nail, the balls.
After each death, he is like a Georgian tribesman,
putting a raspberry in his mouth.
Osip Mandelstam
