An old teacher O.I.Nosovich lives in Klepiki. She has been retired for a long time and, although she is already in her late nineties, she is still cheerful and tireless. Olga Ivanovna never tires of studying her native land and its history. She not only reads books, but also conducts excavations herself, and during the meeting she showed me the act of donating several antiques to the Ryazan Regional Museum of Local Lore.

There is also an important problem, to which today the attention of both the literary community and numerous fans of Yesenin’s poetry is riveted, and, of course, the media mass media. Behind Lately Many articles and publications appeared with “versions” about Yesenin’s death. Let's notice right away. Interest in the poet last year his life and to all the circumstances connected in one way or another with Yesenin’s passing from life, in our days - is natural and logical.

Only twenty years have passed from the time Alexander Blok wrote the first poems that made up the Ante Lucem cycle to the poem “The Twelve,” which crowns his creative path. But what masterpieces the great poet created over these two decades. Now we can trace Blok’s path by studying his biography, the history of individual poems, leafing through the pages of old newspapers and magazines, reading the memoirs of his contemporaries. And gradually the beautiful and mysterious soul of one of the most soulful singers in Russia is revealed to us.

*** “The bread is poisoned and the air is drunk”

It is difficult, and hardly possible, to find in the Old or New World as many major poets from the Jewish intelligentsia, each of whom is certainly significant for the language, as in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. O. E. Mandelstam, B. L. Pasternak, S. Ya. Marshak, B. K. Livshits, later D. S. Samoilov, A. A. Galich, I. A. Brodsky - the path of the Russian poet they chose is hardly can be explained by rational considerations. People of wide talent, they were well aware of what it meant to be a poet, what it meant to oppose oneself to the entire literary gang of brothers, “a race with a nasty smell of skin and the dirtiest methods of cooking,” as N. S. Gumilyov once knew, “what is this violin, what is the dark horror of the beginner of the game.” And one warrior in the field: to go out, to act, to say, trusting in the “providential interlocutor”, “distant descendant”, “secret friend”, “distant friend”, “friend in the generation”, the word - to express it in spite of thousands of Shvonders marching with portraits of the Kremlin highlander - and, to the end, to stand alone against millions of poisoned propaganda, screaming, chorus of singing guards and their slaves. “After all, poetry is the consciousness of one’s own rightness,” understood O. E. Mandelstam (“About the Interlocutor.” P. 236). Woe to those who have lost this consciousness!..
It’s good (!) to address your comrades and descendants at the top of your voice, being sacredly confident in the rightness of your cause, walking at the head of the column as the loudmouth leader of the revolutionary class! It’s worse to say quietly, but no less confidently, not bravoly, but out loud (“voice is personality”): “I insist that writing in the form it has developed in Europe and especially in Russia is incompatible with the honorary title of a Jew, of which I am proud. My blood, burdened with the inheritance of sheep farmers, patriarchs and kings, rebels against the thieving gypsies of the literary brood.” (O. E. Mandelstam. “The Fourth Prose.” P. 187).
“My blood, burdened with the inheritance of sheep farmers, patriarchs and kings...” - and this was a dozen years after the execution of the royal family, during the years of collectivization of the “sheep farmers,” on the eve of a new wave of repression and genocide! This was said when all historicism was adjusted to the standard of the party leadership, and disagreement with the socialist fatherland was punishable by “ten years without the right to correspondence” or, beyond that, a couple of blows to the head with an ice pick.

The bread is poisoned and the air is drunk.
How difficult it is to heal wounds!
Joseph sold into Egypt
I couldn't be more sad!

Under the starry sky Bedouins,
Closing my eyes and on horseback,
Compose free epics
About a vaguely experienced day.

A little is needed for inspiration:
Who lost a quiver in the sand,
Who traded the horse - events
The fog clears;

And if it is truly sung
And with full breasts - finally
Everything disappears: everything remains
Space, stars and singer!

The corruption of his contemporaries left no chance. The venality of doublethink - the readiness to approve any, the most terrible state initiative. Corruption for fear, not for conscience.

“Animal fear knocks on typewriters, animal fear makes Chinese edits on sheets of closet paper, writes denunciations, hits the bedridden, demands execution for prisoners. Just as boys publicly drown a kitten on the Moscow River, so our grown-up children playfully press, during the big break they press the oil: “Hey, pile on, press, so that the very one who is being pressed cannot be seen - this is the sacred rule of lynching.”
The clerk on Ordynka hung a worker - kill him!
The cashier cheated by a nickel - kill her!
The director foolishly said nonsense - kill him!
The man hid rye in the barn - kill him!
A girl comes to us, dragging herself on a crutch. One of her legs is shortened, and the rough prosthetic shoe resembles a wooden hoof.
Who are we? We are schoolchildren who do not study. We are Komsomol freemen. We are troublemakers with the permission of all saints.”
(O. E. Mandelstam. “The Fourth Prose.” pp. 179–180)

The sensitive hearing strains the sail,
The widened gaze becomes empty,
And the silence floats
A silent chorus of midnight birds.

I'm as poor as nature
And as simple as heaven
And my freedom is illusory,
Like midnight birds' voices.

I see a month without breath
And the sky is deader than canvas;
Your world, painful and strange,
I accept, emptiness!

Who are we? – the other side of the question “Who am I?” But if we are Komsomol freemen, then party literature is much more important to us than free creativity. O. E. Mandelstam could not belong to such a “freedom” and find comrades in schoolchildren who do not study and do not want to study.
“Acmeism is a longing for world culture,” he formulated.
He knew that jailers, more than anyone else, needed literature that served one purpose - to help those in power keep soldiers in obedience, and judges to inflict punishment on the doomed. These bosses are surrounded from the threshold by secretaries, like nurses, guarding them as if they were seriously ill. Under them, writers are “a cross between a parrot and a priest,” “a race that wanders and sleeps on its own vomit, expelled from the cities, persecuted in the villages, but everywhere and everywhere close to the authorities, who assign them a place in the yellow quarters, like prostitutes.” The mortal enemy of writing and “literature,” Osip Emilievich himself was one of the doomed - those “debtors of the revolution” whose gifts it did not need. His works were never “authorized” - they were “wild meat”, “crazy growth”, “stolen air”:

“I divide all works of world literature into those that were authorized and those written without permission. The first are scum, the second are stolen air. I want to spit in the face of writers who write pre-authorized things, I want to hit them over the head with a stick and seat everyone at the table in the Herzen House, putting a glass of police tea in front of everyone and giving everyone a Gornfeld urine test.
I would forbid these writers from getting married and having children. How can they have children - after all, children must continue for us, finish the most important thing for us - while fathers are sold to the pockmarked devil for three generations ahead.
This is a literary page.”
(O. E. Mandelstam. “The Fourth Prose.” P. 182)

Oh how we love to be hypocrites
And we forget easily
The fact that we are closer to death in childhood,
Than in our mature years.

More insults are being pulled from the saucer
Sleepy child
And I have no one to sulk at
And I am alone on all paths.

But I don’t want to fall asleep like a fish,
In the deep swoon of the waters,
And free choice is dear to me
My sufferings and worries.

In 1922, in his work “On the Nature of the Word,” the poet established the relationship:
“The Russian language is a Hellenistic language. Due to a number of historical conditions, the living forces of Hellenic culture, having ceded the West to Hellenic influences and quenched for a long time in childless Byzantium, rushed into the bosom of Russian speech, imparting to it the self-confident secret of the Hellenistic worldview, the secret of free embodiment, and therefore the Russian language became precisely the sounding and speaking flesh .
If Western cultures and histories close the language from the outside, enclose it with the walls of statehood and churchliness and are read by it in order to slowly rot and bloom at the proper hour of its collapse, Russian culture and history are washed and girded on all sides by the formidable and boundless elements of the Russian language, which cannot accommodate any into what state and church forms.” (p. 245).
Language, which became a sounding and speaking flesh and does not fit into any state or church forms, led O. E. Mandelstam through and above the revolutionary elements. Through: “The October Revolution could not help but influence my work, as it took away my “biography”, a sense of personal significance. I am grateful to her for once and for all putting an end to spiritual security and existence on cultural rent,” (“The Poet About Himself”), said sincerely and not without sarcasm. Above: the poet always surpassed the inevitability of historical reality. Its history is genuine and cannot be rewritten, for it is a letter in which everything historical, the history of language, is written. His own seemingly subjective metaphysical state, when objectified in poetic form, embodied the life of language itself.

Why is the soul so melodious,
And there are so few cute names,
And the instant rhythm is just an accident,
Unexpected Aquilon?

It will raise a cloud of dust
Makes noise with paper leaves
And he won’t come back at all - or
He will return completely different.

Oh, the wide wind of Orpheus,
You will go to the sea, -
And, cherishing the uncreated world,
I forgot the unnecessary "I".

I wandered in the toy thicket
And opened the azure grotto...
Am I real?
Will death really come?

In the early 1920s, O. E. Mandelstam was lured by new literary groups: Abram Efros and Sofia Parnok proposed creating a group of “neoclassicists”, Vladimir Narbut and Isaac Babel - “neo-Acmeists”. O. E. Mandelstam translated a lot, published critical articles in “Russian Art”, a new collection of his poems “Tristia” was published in Berlin, the title of which, in Mandelstam’s absence, was invented by M. A. Kuzmin, Gosizdat again published “Stone” and “ The second book" of the poet. And yet, O. E. Mandelstam refused both the neoclassicists and the neo-Acmeists. Until the beginning of 1923, he waged an active literary struggle - “on the right” with symbolism, “on the left” with futurism, with LEF. After 1923, literary activity came to naught, and, with the exception of translations, the poet did not publish anything. (See: “Works and days of O. E. Mandelstam.” pp. 505–506).
“The life of language in Russian historical reality outweighs all other facts by the fullness of phenomena, the fullness of being, which represents only an unattainable limit for all other phenomena of Russian life. The Hellenistic nature of the Russian language can be identified with its existentiality. The word in the Hellenistic understanding is active flesh, resolving into an event. Therefore, the Russian language is historical in itself, since in its entirety it is a roiling sea of ​​events, a continuous embodiment and action of intelligent and breathing flesh. No language resists naming and applied purposes more than Russian. Russian nominalism, that is, the idea of ​​the reality of the word as such, animates the spirit of our language and connects it with Hellenic philological culture, not etymologically or literary, but through the principle of internal freedom, equally inherent in both of them.” (O. E. Mandelstam. “On the nature of the word.” P. 246).

Where the Roman judge judged a foreign people -
The basilica stands, both joyful and first,
Like Adam once, spreading his nerves,
The light cross vault plays with its muscles.

But a secret plan reveals itself from the outside:
Here the strength of the girth arches was taken care of,
So that the heavy weight of the wall does not crush,
And the ram is inactive on the daring arch.

A spontaneous labyrinth, an incomprehensible forest,
Gothic souls are a rational abyss,
Egyptian power and Christianity timidity,
Next to the reed there is an oak tree, and everywhere the king is a plumb line.

But the closer you look, the stronghold of Notre Dame,
I studied your monstrous ribs
The more often I thought: out of unkind heaviness
And someday I will create something beautiful.

Russian nominalism - an idea of ​​the reality of the word, which would be more correctly called realism - could not help but demand from the poet to be extremely honest, open and never, ever, under any circumstances, bend his soul. Without fulfilling this condition, internal freedom could not take place: “and the free choice of my sufferings and worries is dear to me” - the ability to speak in rhyming speech, to hear the call of being, to be a language. In this way and only in this way can one expect to be heard by a “providential interlocutor”, a “secret friend”:

“Yes, when I talk to someone, I don’t know the person I’m talking to, and I don’t want, I can’t want to know him. There are no lyrics without dialogue. And the only thing that pushes us into the arms of our interlocutor is the desire to be surprised by our own words, to be captivated by their novelty and surprise. The logic is inexorable. If I know the person with whom I am speaking, I know in advance how he will react to what I say - no matter what I say, and therefore I will not be able to be amazed by his amazement, rejoice at his joy, love him with love. The distance of separation erases the features of a sweet person. Only then do I have a desire to tell him something important that I could not say when I owned his appearance in all its real completeness. I will allow myself to formulate this observation as follows: the taste of communication is inversely proportional to our real knowledge of the interlocutor and directly proportional to the desire to interest him in us. It's not the acoustics that you should worry about: it will come on its own. It's more about distance. It's boring to whisper with your neighbor. It is endlessly tedious to drill into your own soul (Nadson). But exchanging signals with Mars - of course, without fantasizing - is a task worthy of a lyric poet.”
(O. E. Mandelstam. “About the interlocutor.” P. 239)

I hate the light
Monotonous stars.
Hello, my old delirium -
Lancet towers rise!

Lace, stone, be
And become a web
Heaven's empty chest
Use a thin needle to wound.

It will be my turn -
I can feel the wingspan.
Yes - but where will it go?
Thoughts are a living arrow?

Or, your way and time
Having exhausted myself, I will return:
There - I couldn’t love,
Here - I'm afraid to love...

The one who went on air without permission and dared to “exchange signals with Mars” has many enemies. In their machinations, they are inventive and aggressive to such an extent that the repressive machine of the authoritarian state does not immediately keep up, with difficulty. The poet has a small reserve of time to be himself among this shantrapa: not to fight, not to shy away from clashes, not to lean and not to lean on, not to spread out and not to be afraid - just to be. What does it matter if they point at the poet with the clumsy fingers of their thoughtlessness? The self-confidence with which they are bursting with the importance of the affairs arranged in everyday life, words spewed into the literature, is insignificant. So what? All of them have long been excommunicated from the word.

“At such and such a year in my life, bearded adult men in horned fur hats raised a flint knife over me with the goal of emasculating me. Apparently, these were the priests of their tribe: they smelled of onions, romanas and goat meat.
And everything was scary, like in a baby’s dream. Nel mezzo del'cammin di nostra vita - in the middle of life's road I was stopped in a dense Soviet forest by robbers who called themselves my judges. They were old men with wiry necks and small goose-like heads, unworthy to bear the burden of years.
For the first and only time in my life, literature needed me, and it crushed, pawed and squeezed me, and everything was scary, like in an infant’s dream.”

(O. E. Mandelstam. “The Fourth Prose.” pp. 188–189)

The cloudy air is humid and echoing;
It’s good and not scary in the forest.
Light cross of lonely walks
I will humbly carry it again.

And again to the indifferent fatherland
Reproach will fly like a wild duck,
I'm taking part in a dark life
Where one to one is lonely!

The shot rang out. Above the sleepy lake
The ducks' wings are now heavy.
And double being reflected
The pine trunks are drugged.

The sky is dim with a strange glow -
World misty pain -
Oh let me be too vague
And let me not love you.

What's important? What gives O. E. Mandelstam self-confidence in the knowledge that he is right?
“Chaadaev, asserting his opinion that Russia has no history, that is, that Russia belongs to an unorganized, unhistorical circle of cultural phenomena, missed one circumstance, namely: language. Such a highly organized, such an organic language is not only a door to history, but history itself. For Russia, a falling away from history, separation from the realm of historical necessity and continuity, from freedom and expediency, would be a falling away from language. The “numbness” of two or three generations could lead Russia to historical death. Separation from language is tantamount for us to separation from history. Therefore, it is absolutely true that Russian history is moving along the edge, along the bank, over the cliff, and is ready every minute to fall into nihilism, that is, into excommunication from the word.” (O. E. Mandelstam. “On the nature of the word.” P. 247–248).

Give Tyutchev a dragonfly -
Guess why -
Venevitinov - a rose.
Well, what about the ring? No one!

Baratynsky soles
Amazed by the dust of centuries,
He has no stitching
Cloud pillowcases.

And he is also free over us
Lermontov is our tormentor,
And always sick with shortness of breath
Feta greasy pencil.

And also God-protected
Always sticks out on a nail
At the gates of Jerusalem
Hamster's beard.

May 1932. Moscow

In an essay about Komissarzhevskaya (1925), the poet showed how he wants to talk - not to talk about himself. He wants to follow the age, the noise and the germination of time: “My memory is hostile to everything personal. If it were up to me, I would only wince, remembering the past. I could never understand the Tolstoys and Aksakovs, the Crimson grandchildren, in love with family archives with epic home memories. I repeat - my memory is not loving, but hostile, and it works not to reproduce, but to remove the past. The commoner does not need memory, he just needs to talk about the books he has read, and the biography is ready. Where among happy generations the epic speaks in hexameters and chronicles, there I have a sign of gaping, and between me and the century there is a gap, a ditch filled with noisy time, a place reserved for family and home archives. What did the family want to say? I don't know. She was tongue-tied from birth, and yet she had something to say. The tongue-tiedness of birth weighs heavily on me and many of my contemporaries. We learned not to speak, but to babble - and only by listening to the growing noise of the century and whitened by the foam of its crest, we found language.” (“The Noise of Time.” P. 99).
M.I. Tsvetaeva will call his book vile, but “Khomyak’s beard,” “the ruddy, prickly Russian-Mongolian face” of Bagrov’s grandson was never hostile to Mandelstam, much less despised by him. For him, it was one of the many faces of world history and culture.
The commoner - and it’s true - does not need memory:

“Fet’s sore, inflamed eyelids made it difficult to sleep. Tyutchev had early sclerosis and a layer of lime in his veins. The last five or six symbolic words, like the five fish of the Gospels, pulled back the basket: among them a large fish: “Genesis.”
They could not feed the hungry time, and I had to throw out the whole heels from the basket and with them the large dead fish “Genesis”.
Abstract concepts at the end of a historical era always stink of rotten fish. Better is the angry and cheerful hiss of Russian poetry.”
(O. E. Mandelstam. “The Noise of Time.” P. 104)

Impressionism

The artist depicted for us
Deep swoon of lilac
And the colors of the sonorous steps
He laid it on the canvas like a scab.

He understood the thickness of the oil -
Its a baked summer
Heated by the lilac brain,
Expanded into stuffiness.

And the shadow, the shadow is getting purpler,
A whistle or a whip, like a match, goes out -
You say: the cooks are in the kitchen
They cook fat pigeons.

You can guess the swing,
The veils are missing,
And in this sunny collapse
The bumblebee is already in charge.

Historical death has been wandering around Russia for a century. Not allowing generations to “go numb”, to teach them to understand the word, to hear the “earthly axis”, the call of existence is one of the few chances to overcome the venality of businessmen, to avoid the historically inevitable. This is the poet’s ultimate task, which the consciousness of his rightness sets for him:
“We don’t have an Acropolis. Our culture still wanders and does not find its walls. But every word of Dahl’s dictionary is a nut of the Acropolis, a small Kremlin, a winged fortress of nominalism, equipped with the Hellenic spirit for a tireless struggle against the formless elements, non-existence, threatening our history from everywhere” (O. E. Mandelstam. “On the Nature of the Word.” P. 251) ;
“Invention and memory go hand in hand in poetry; to remember also means to invent; the one who remembers is the same inventor. The root disease of Moscow's literary taste is oblivion of this double truth. Moscow specialized in invention at any cost” (O. E. Mandelstam. “Literary Moscow”. P. 328).

Smile, angry lamb from Raphael's canvas -
On the canvas are the lips of the universe, but it is no longer the same...

In the light air the pipes dissolved the pain of pearls,
Salt has eaten into the blue, blue color of the ocean chenille...

The color of air robbery and cave density,
The folds of stormy peace spill over the knees.

On a rock staleer than bread, young reeds of groves,
And amazing power floats through the corners of the sky.

S. S. Averintsev notes that in articles from the early 1920s the poet seemed to be in a hurry to say the most important thing. One of them, entitled “Human Wheat,” gives “a stunningly intelligent, sober, realistic experience about the spiritual situation of the era of the masses, when the “wheat” that has escaped obedience does not allow “bread” to be baked out of itself, and the traditional symbols of state “architecture” are transformed to the props department. This article alone would be enough to forever refute the myth of Mandelstam as a “bird of God”, unable to connect two thoughts according to the laws of rational thinking” (S. S. Averintsev. “Fate and News...” P. 245). The poet speaks of the disintegration of “nationalities” into a simple human grain, from which it is almost impossible to bake bread - a people, integrity in the old imperial sense of unity. In 1990, an outstanding Russian literary critic, with whom the poet now has one more providential interlocutor, exclaims: “The article, which exposes in advance the emptiness, historical unjustification, dead end of all upcoming attempts to renew the bloody pathos of state “greatness,” seems to be addressed directly to us . It seems that we are only now able to properly evaluate its formulations” (p. 245).
Lord, if only it were so! If there were enough such interlocutors for her formulations to be appreciated, if not in 1991, 1994, 2000, but at least in 2014, even before the “Crimean” epic, what a shame, blood, dead end could have been avoided!
However, more than 70 years of experience in the battles to build socialism turned out to be not enough: bitter experience is not enough - the memory is short! And again, now after S.S. Averintsev, as well as after O.E. Mandelstam, it remains (once again!) to rely on the understanding of the poet’s thoughts by the millers and bakers of human grain:
“The era of messianism has finally and irrevocably ended for the European peoples. Every messianism says approximately the following: only we are bread, you are just grain, unworthy of grinding, but we can make you become bread. Any messianism is unscrupulous in advance, deceitful and calculated to create an impossible resonance in the minds of those to whom it addresses such a proposal. No messianic and ornate people has ever been heard by another. Everyone was talking into emptiness, and delusional speeches flowed simultaneously from different lips, without noticing each other.” (O. E. Mandelstam. “Human Wheat”. P. 82–83).
The article seems to be addressed directly to us.
It seems that we are only now able to properly evaluate its formulations.

Your image, painful and unsteady,
I couldn't feel in the fog.
"God!" - I said by mistake,
Without even thinking about saying it.

God's name is like a big bird
It flew out of my chest!
There's a thick fog ahead,
And an empty cell behind...

April 1912

By the mid-1920s, the inventive fever of poetic Moscow had cooled down, giving way to socialist realism, as the most suitable for the “pockmarked devil” in the Kremlin and therefore the only literary direction in demand by the party: “all patents have already been applied for, there have been no new applications for a long time.” O. E. Mandelstam doomedly stated: there is not a single real poetry school in Moscow, not a single living poetry circle, because all associations are on one side or the other of the divided truth. (See: “Literary Moscow”. P. 330).
During these years, the poet - a representative of heroic Hellenism, militant philology - guarded with his life the Acmeism adopted in his youth:
“Acmeism is not only literary, but also social phenomenon in Russian history. With him, moral strength was revived in Russian poetry. “I want a free boat to float everywhere; I will glorify both the Lord and the devil equally,” said Bryusov. This wretched “nothingness” will never be repeated in Russian poetry. The social pathos of Russian poetry has so far risen only to the “citizen”, but there is a higher principle than “citizen” - the concept of “husband”.
Unlike the old civic poetry, the new Russian poetry should educate not only citizens, but also the “husband.” The ideal of perfect masculinity is prepared by the style and practical requirements of our era. Everything has become heavier and larger, therefore man must become harder, since man must be harder than anything else on earth and relate to it like a diamond to glass. The hieratic, that is, sacred, character of poetry is determined by the conviction that man is harder than everything else in the world. The century will cease to make noise, culture will fall asleep, the people will be reborn, giving their best strength to a new social class, and this whole stream will carry with it the fragile boat of the human word into the open sea of ​​the future, where there is no sympathetic understanding, where a dull commentary replaces the fresh wind of hostility and sympathy of contemporaries. How can one equip this boat for a long journey without providing it with everything necessary for such a stranger and such a dear reader? Once again I liken the poem to the Egyptian boat of the dead. Everything for life is in store, nothing is forgotten in this boat.” (O. E. Mandelstam. “On the nature of the word.” pp. 258–259)

Enough of the cackling! Let's put the papers in the table!
I am now possessed by a glorious demon,
It's like hitting the root of your head with shampoo
Hairdresser Francois gave me a wash.

I bet I'm not dead yet
And, as a jockey, I guarantee my head,
What else can I do to cause trouble?
On a trotting track.

I keep in mind that today is the thirty-first
A wonderful year in the bird cherry blossoms,
That the earthworms have matured
And all of Moscow is sailing on skiffs.

Do not worry. Impatience is a luxury
I will gradually develop speed -
Let's take a cold step onto the path -
I kept my distance.

Reviews

Thank you, Oleg, for “...the winged fortress of nominalism, equipped with the Hellenic spirit for the tireless struggle against the formless elements...”..., thank you for returning to the roots, to our great value - the Russian language and the Russian word. Sometimes it happens that “...the poet is a representative of heroic Hellenism...”, who conveys the truth to us, is not very “Russian” in blood, but absolutely Russian in spirit.
And yet, you make very frequent comparisons with Hellenism, with the era with which, I think, European civilization began. At the very beginning of my novel, in describing Sergei’s appearance, I mention that his nose has a Hellenic hump. Somehow they wanted to correct me and suggested that it was not from Hellenic, but from Greek...
What can we say to this, sometimes only nicknames remain in history, at first offensive, such as “Ashtray-Cinderella”, “Greek Hellenes”, but then everyone gets used to them and no longer remembers how it was from the very beginning. Okay, I guess so be it. After all, modern Greece is not Hellas at all. But we will not lose hope; not everything in history can be explained logically. Otherwise we wouldn't exist anymore...
Thank you, Oleg, for your historical and poetic excursions!
Sincerely,
Victor Reshetnev.

Osip Mandelstam

(1891-1938)

The four poems of Osip Emilievich Mandelstam (1891 - 1938), placed in this book, make up a small part of his works related to biblical issues, but they can give the reader an idea of ​​how and for what purpose the poet connects or correlates the images he creates with the images of the Bible . The poems mark the milestones of Mandelstam’s creative path - from the first collection “Stone” (1913), published in St. Petersburg, to the handwritten “Voronezh Notebooks” (1934 - 1937), the publication of which began only three decades after the poet’s death in a transit camp near Vladivostok.

The most important features of Mandelstam’s “biblical studies,” as well as his creative style in general, can be discerned already in the earliest of four poems - “The bread is poisoned and the air is drunk” (1913). It begins with a powerful metaphor in the first verse, which also became the title. The metaphor is perceived by the reader so sharply, directly, as if he himself, transported to the atmosphere of the eve of the First World War, had a tight throat. But already the third verse - “Joseph sold into Egypt...” immensely expands space and time, leading the reader into the world of the Old Testament. And then the appearance of the Bedouins under the starry sky of the desert seems inevitable, especially since their songs, awakened by the simple events of nomadic life, reveal the essence of all poetic “inspirations,” and poetry itself as a takeoff from everyday life to the sky:

And, if truly sung
And finally, with full breasts,
Everything disappears - everything remains
Space, stars and singer!

* * *

The bread is poisoned and the air is drunk.
How difficult it is to heal wounds!
Joseph sold into Egypt
I couldn't be more sad!

Under the starry sky the Bedouins,
Closing my eyes and on horseback,
Compose free epics
About a vaguely experienced day.

A little is needed for inspiration:
Who lost a quiver in the sand,
Who traded the horse - events
The fog clears;

And, if truly sung
And finally, fully
Everything disappears - everything remains
Space, stars and singer!

* * *

A. V. Kartashev

Among the priests, a young Levite
He remained on the morning watch for a long time.
The night of the Jews was gathering over him,
And the destroyed temple was gloomily rebuilt.

He said: “The yellowness of the sky is alarming.
It’s already night over the Euphrates, run, priests!”
And the elders thought: it’s not our fault;
Behold the black and yellow light, behold the joy of Judea.

He was with us when, on the bank of the stream,
We swaddled the precious flax on Saturday
And the heavy seven-branched lamp illuminated
Jerusalem is night and the children of oblivion.

* * *

What a cool thing in the crystal pool!
The Siena mountains intercede for us,
And crazy rocks and thorny cathedrals
Hanging in the air, where there is fur and silence.

From the hanging ladder of prophets and kings
The organ comes down. Holy Spirit fortress
Shepherd dogs have a cheerful bark and kind ferocity,
Shepherds' sheepskins and judges' staffs.

Here is the motionless earth, and with it
I drink the cold mountain air of Christianity,
Cool “I Believe” and the psalmist rested,
Keys and rags of the apostolic churches.

Which line could convey
Crystal of high notes in the fortified ether,
And Christian mountains in astonished space,
Like Palestrina's song, grace descends.

last supper

The sky of the evening fell in love with the wall, -
Everything is wounded by the light of scars -
Fell into it, lit up,
Turned into thirteen heads.

Here it is - my night sky,
Before whom I stand like a boy:
My back gets cold, my eyes ache.
I catch the battered firmament -

And under every blow of the ram
Stars without heads crumble:
The same painting brings new wounds -
Unfinished eternity darkness...

* * *
Here is the monstrance, like the golden sun,
Hanging in the air - a magnificent moment.
Only Greek should be heard here:
The whole world is taken in your hands, like a simple apple.

Divine services solemn zenith,
Light in the round temple under the dome in July,
So that we can breathe deeply out of time
About that meadow where time does not pass.

And the Eucharist, like eternal noon, lasts -
Everyone takes communion, plays and sings,
And in full view of the divine vessel
Inexhaustible joy flows.

A comment

“Among the priests, a young Levite...”

Leviticus - originally a descendant of Levi, according to the Old Testament, the third son of the patriarch Jacob; one of the tribes of the Levites, during the period of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, received the right to perform divine services in temples and to be junior clergy (Second Book of Moses, XXXII, 25 - 29).

“On guard of the morning...” - judging by the Book of Nehemiah (UI, 1-5, XI, 1, 2), the guard was established by him to protect Jerusalem, destroyed and devastated by the troops of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II (588 BC).

“And the destroyed temple was gloomily rebuilt...” - judging again from the Book of Nehemiah (II, III, IV, VI), it can be assumed that this implies the restoration of the Jerusalem temple, which was carried out under the leadership of Nehemiah.

Euphrates - The river, originating in the Armenian Highlands, flows through the lands of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, in its lower reaches it merges with the Tigris River and flows into the Persian Gulf.

Judea - part of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah (XIII - X centuries BC), an independent kingdom in the X - VI centuries. BC, conquered by Babylonian troops in the 6th century. BC.

Saturday - a holiday, according to the ideas of the Jewish faith, established by God himself at the time of the creation of the world.

Seven-veshchnik(seven-branched candlestick) - a lamp of seven branches, belonging to Jewish and Christian worship.

“What a cool thing in the crystal pool!”

Written in 1919, first published in 1922; judging by the biographical circumstances, it was inspired by the impressions of a trip to Armenia, but, like all the poet’s lyrics, cannot be interpreted in a narrow biographical or regional spirit. “The mountains of Siena intercede for us...” Siena is a province in Italy (the center is a city with the same name, which has preserved many medieval monuments - cathedrals, churches and palaces); the mountains of Siena are famous for their beauty and syenite - rock, used in construction for decorative purposes since ancient times.

"The sheepskins of the shepherds and the staffs of the judges." - Here and further, images arise in which the impressions of a mountain journey are inseparably combined (see Mandelstam’s book “Journey to Armenia”, 1933) and the memory of the mountains of Palestine, the region where Christianity was born.

ANALYSIS OF A POEM BY O. E. MANDELSHTAM. ...It would seem that everything is already known, every line of Mandelstam’s “Stone” is familiar as if you wrote it yourself, you know every poem almost by heart... But turning through its pages, you suddenly catch yourself thinking that it all just seems: the secret of the attractiveness of poetry Mandelstam is like the mystery of a Japanese rock garden - it gives birth to strings of thoughts, helps to understand the world of nature and the world of human feelings, but itself continues to remain a mystery.

The bread is poisoned and the air is drunk:

How difficult it is to heal wounds!

Joseph sold into Egypt

I couldn't be more sad.

Under the starry sky the Bedouins,

Closing my eyes and on horseback,

Compose free epics

About a vaguely experienced day.

A little is needed for inspiration:

Who lost a quiver in the sand,

Who traded the horse - events

The fog is clearing.

And, if it is truly sung,

And finally, with full breasts,

Everything disappears - everything remains

Space, stars and singer!

This is one of the masterpieces of the collection “Stone”, which, like a mirror, reflected the poet’s “cosmic” philosophy (his dream of establishing a connection between worlds lost in the space of the Universe and the world of the human soul), and the desire to look into the depths of centuries and revive in memory peoples and civilizations that have disappeared into oblivion, and, finally, Mandelstam’s truly universal ideas about morality and beauty, which we, today’s admirers of his talent, so lack.

Researchers of the poet’s work have long noticed his enthusiastic attitude towards antiquity, his passion for the culture of the early Middle Ages, and the heritage of the Renaissance. Mandelstam had another very deep interest - in ancient Jewish culture, in particular, in the Bible.

In the above poem, perhaps for the first time, if we talk about Mandelstam’s entire creative heritage, biblical motifs take on real forms. The legend of ordeal and suffering youngest son Patriarch Jacob, sold into slavery by his brothers, is woven into the fabric of the lyrical plot by threads of associations, becoming an integral part of the work.

It would seem that there is a reason for moralization, but Mandelstam takes the basis of the lyrical plot from a legend when human passions are heated to the limit, when satanic envy triumphs, pushing the sons of Jacob to commit a crime, and the heart of Joseph, who was sold into slavery, bleeds.

The greatest of injustices is happening in the world: the brothers killed their half-brother, depriving him of that without which a person cannot be called a person - freedom. Why didn’t the sky open up and incinerate the criminals with lightning? Why are the stars silent? Do Bedouins sing and not cry? “The bread is poisoned and the air is drunk. ." The atmosphere of life is poisoned: hatred, anger, envy have crowded out kindness and compassion from the human soul. And the starry sky is unable to help, because the natural world, although it includes the world of people, has no longer governed it for a long time.

Melancholy filled the heart of the lyrical hero, a premonition of universal grief wounded his soul. “How difficult it is to heal wounds!” Who, if not a poet, is able to absorb all the world's melancholy and cast it into words?

The fourth stanza of the poem is a combination of the “cosmic” idea of ​​a common interplanetary brotherhood with the idea of ​​saving the world with beauty: “Space, stars and a singer...” - this is the result of this unity.

Universal reconciliation is the key to human prosperity. This is the poet’s thought, which is included in the associative circle of the poem “The bread is poisoned and the air is drunk...” Its relevance today is indisputable.