John Michael Coetzee

Giving Offence

In 1933, Mandelstam, then 42 years old, composed a short but powerful poem about a tyrant who orders executions left, right, and center, and relishes the deaths of his victims like a Georgian munching raspberries. Though the tyrant is not named, the reference is clearly to Stalin.

Mandelstam did not write the poem down, but recited it several times to friends. In 1934, his home was raided by security police looking for the poem. Though they did not find it—it existed solely inside the heads of the poet and his friends—they arrested him. While he was under arrest, the poet Boris Pasternak had a telephone call from Stalin. Who is Mandelstam, Stalin wanted to know? In particular, is he a master? (The word is the same in Russian as in English.)

Pasternak correctly inferred the second half of the question: Is Mandelstam a master or is he disposable? Pasternak replied, in effect, that Mandelstam was a master, that he was not disposable. So Mandelstam was sentenced to internal exile in the city of Voronezh. While he was living there, pressure was brought to bear on him to pay tribute to Stalin by composing a poem in his honor. Mandelstam gave in and composed an adulatory ode. What he felt about this ode we will never know, not only because he left no record, but because—as his wife persuasively argues—he was mad when he wrote it, mad with fear, perhaps, but mad too with the madness of a person not only suffering the embrace of a body he detests, but having to take the initiative, day after day, line after line, to caress that body.

From this story I isolate two moments: the moment when Stalin asks whether Mandelstam is a master, and the moment when Mandelstam is ordered to celebrate his persecutor.

'Is he a master?' We can be sure Stalin was not asking because he regarded great artists as above the state. What he meant was something like. Is he dangerous? Is he going to live, even if he dies? Is his sentence on me going to live longer than my sentence on him? Do I have to be careful?

Hence the command later on that Mandelstam write an ode. Making the great artists of his day kowtow to him was Staling way of breaking them, of making it impossible for them to hold their heads up—in effect, of showing them who was master, and of making them acknowledge him as master in a medium where no lie, no private reservation, was possible: their own art.