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Dialogue as “Lyrical Hermaphroditism”: Mandel shtam's Challenge to Bakhtin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Svetlana Boym
Svetlana Boym*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

Osip Mandel'shtam, “Fransua Villon”

Mikhail Bakhtin, “Slovo v romane”

The two epigraphs disclose a crucial “genre gap” between Osip Mandel'shtam and Mikhail Bakhtin. If for Mandel'shtam dialogue is essential to lyric, for Bakhtin the dialogical discourse identifies the novel as a genre in opposition to monologic, self-centered and self-sufficient poetic language. In his essays “Fransua Villon” and “O sobesednike,” Mandel'shtam discusses different dimensions of dialogue—the dialogue between various historical epochs—modernity and Middle Ages, Ancient Greece and Renaissance, the dialogue between the author and the distant reader, and finally, the dialogue between the poet's diverse selves. The latter is called “lyrical hermaphroditism” and described in its multiple incarnations, including “ogorchennyi i uteshitel', mat’ i ditia, sudiia i podsudimyi, sobstvennik i nishchii.“ Mandel'shtam's “lyrical hermaphroditism” does not signify a Platonic ideal of androgynous wholeness, a reconciliation of two polarities.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , Spring 1991 , pp. 118 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1991

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References

1. Osip, Mandel'shtam, “Fransua Villon,” in Sobranie Sochinenii, 4 vols. (New York: Inter-Language Literary Association, 1971) 2:305 Google Scholar. All references to Mandel'shtam's essays follow this edition. For the English translation see Osip Mandel'shtam, Complete Critical Prose and Letters, trans. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1979).

Obviously, the idea of a poet's androgyny is not unique to Mandel'shtam; one encounters it in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marina Tsvetaeva, and other nineteenth and twentieth century poets.

2. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiatel'nosti” in Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979) and Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1979) especially, chapter 2, 54-89.

3. Bakhtin, Mikhail, “Zametki,” in Literaturno-kriticheskie stat'i (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literature, 1986), 526 Google Scholar. For the discussion of Bakhtin's conception of the novel and narrativity see Holquist, Michael's introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982).Google Scholar For the most recent discussion of Bakhtin's cultural contexts and the contemporary implications of his theory see Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work, ed. Gary Saul Morson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

4. Mandel'shtam, Osip, “Literaturnaia Moskva: Rozhdenie fabuly” in Sobranie Sochinenii 2:334 Google Scholar.

5. For the theoretical discussion of the notion of the “death of the author” see Barthes, Roland, “The Death of the Author,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Howard, Richard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 49–56 Google Scholar, and Foucault, Michel, “What is an Author” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Bouchard, Donald (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–139.Google Scholar I develop some ideas of the death of the author and the poets’ mythologies in my book Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). Clare Cavanagh has elaborated the connection between Mandel'shtam and T. S. Eliot in the framework of modernism in her dissertation entitled “Mandel'shtam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1988). I am grateful to Clare Cavanagh, with whom I had many stimulating and inspiring dialogues.

6. Osip Mandel'shtam, Egipetskaia marka in Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 2. All Russian references follow this edition. For the English translation see The Prose of Mandel'shtam, trans. Clarence Brown (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965).

7. On the problems of autobiography see Jane Gary Harris, “Autobiographical Theory and the Problems of Aesthetic Coherence in Mandel'shtam's The Noise of Time,” Essays in Poetics 9, 2 (1984) and her introduction to Osip Mandel'shtam, Complete Critical Prose and Letters.

8. Mandel'shtam, Osip, “Konets romana,” in Sobranie Sochinenii 2:66–70 Google Scholar

9. Clarence Brown, introduction, Prose of Mandel'shtam, 47.

10. Quoted in Sofiia Poliakova, introduction to Sofiia Parnok, Sobranie stikhotvorenii (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1979), 12. All information on Sofiia Parnok is taken from this book, Diana Burgin in her paper presented at the AATSEEL conference in San Francisco, December 1987, discussed the “triangle” Parnok- Tsvetaeva-Mandel'shtam, offering yet another interesting perspective on the relationship between Mandel'shtam and Parnok.

11. Quoted in Poliakova, introduction, Parnok, Sobranie stikhotvorenii, 15.

12. Mandel'shtam, Osip, “Literaturnaia Moskva,” in Sobranie Sochinenii 2:328 Google Scholar.

13. On the poetess as a cultural construct and the ways it affects women authors, see Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

14. Mandel'shtam, Osip, “O prirode slova,” in Sobranie Sochinenii 2:258 Google Scholar.

15. In the same essay Mandel'shtam goes further to suggest that some literary movements such as symbolism and futurism can be regarded as feminine, lacking in the historicity and cultural receptivity characteristic of a more “virile” and classic movement—acmeism.

16. Mandel'shtam, Egipetskaia marka, 36.

17. West, Daphne, Mandel'shtam: The Egyptian Stamp, Birmingham Slavonic Monographs, no. 10 (1980), 41–42 Google Scholar.

18. For the description of mythical books see, for instance, Stéphane Mallarmé, “Autobiographie,” in Oeuvres Complètes, 661 -666, and Borges, Jorge Luis, “Libro de Arena,” in Libro de Arena (Buenos Aires: Alianza Emecè, 1984)Google Scholar.

19. Isenberg, Charles, Substantial Proofs of Being: Osip Mandelstam's Literary Prose (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1987), 121–132 Google Scholar.

20. Iurii Levin, Dmitrii Segal, et al., “Russkaia semanticheskaia poetika kak potentsial'naia kul'turnaia paradigma,” Russian Literature 7/8 (1974).

21. Mandel'shtam, Sobranie Sochinenii 2:413.

22. Freidin, Gregory, A Coat of Many Colors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 213 Google Scholar.

23. Barthes, Roland, “Mythologies Today,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Howard, Richard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 66–67 Google Scholar. See also Roland Barthes, “Avant-Propos,” in Mythologies (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970).

24. Baudelaire, Charles, “À Arsène Houssaye,” in Petits poèmes en prose (Paris: Flammarion, 1967), 31–32 Google Scholar, and Mallarmé, Stèphane, “Crisede vers,” in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 360–369 Google Scholar.

25. Charles Isenberg, Substantial Proofs of Being, 129-131.