Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Pasternak

Could Pasternak have saved Mandelstam from his arrest and exile which broke his physical and perhaps his mental health even prior to the extremes of poverty he and his wife suffered after his release and before his second arrest and subsequent death in 1938? Anna Akhmatova is ambivalent on this point but wonders about it in her essay on Mandelstam in MY HALF CENTURY, her selected prose, (Ardis Publishers, Ann Arbor, 1992).

"At the close of his letter to Stalin, Bukharin wrote: 'And Pasternak is worried as well.' Stalin stated that an order had been issued so that everything would be put right for Mandelstam. Stalin asked Pasternak why he hadn't exerted himself on Mandelstam's behalf, saying, 'If my friend were in trouble, I would do everything to help him.' Pasternak replied that if he hadn't done anything, Stalin would not have found out about the matter. 'But why didn't you turn to me or to the writers' organizations?' 'The writers' organizations haven't been involved in matters like this since 1927.' 'But isn't he your friend?' Pasternak hesitated and after a brief pause Stalin continued his queston, 'But he's a master, isn't he?' Pasternak answered, 'That's beside the point.' Pasternak thought that Stalin was testing whether he knew about the poems and that was his explanation for his shaky answers. 'Why are we spending all our time talking about Mandelstam? I've wanted to have a chat with you for a long time.' 'About what?' 'About life and death.' And Stalin hung up." (pp. 102-103)

She goes on to say (footnoted p. 375) that "Everything about this phone call requires the utmost scrutiny." Akhmatova also notes that Zina, Pasternak's wife, "hated the Mandelstams with a passion and thought they had compromised her 'loyal husband.' "



Well, who knows what one would do in a situation when you could be imprisoned, tortured, killed. Pasternak may well have been trying to save his own skin, in addition to aggrandizing himself and insinuating himself further into Stalin's good graces. It happens all the time, this cowardice, dissembling, back-scratching, brown-nosing among writers and poets, reference the recent controversies surrounding the actions of the young Milan Kundera. Or the egregious example of Gunter Grass in his Waffen SS days.

Or the refusal of poets in London to help organzise, provide a venue for, or even, out of fear, attend any readings in support of Salman Rushdie after the fatwa was issued.

F.R. Leavis at Gregynog, Wales, 1969

"By the close of the 17th century the conditions of Shakespeare's kind of greatness had vanished for good. Shakespeare could be at one and the same time the supreme Renaissance poet and draw as no one since has ever done on the resources of human experience, the diverse continuities, behind and implicit in a rich and robustly creative vernacular. By 1700 a transformation as momentous as any associated with the development of modern civilization had taken place, never to be reversed. The new Augustan culture represented by Pope and The Tatler entailed an unprecedented insulation of the 'polite' from the popular. There could be no reversal: the industrial revolution, which by the end of the 18th century was well advanced, worked and went on working inevitable destruction upon the inherited civilization of the people. Dickens was the last great writer to enjoy something of the Shakespearian advantage....What has been achieved in our time is the complete destruction of that general diffused creativity which maintains the life and continuity of a culture. For the industrial masses their work has no human meaning in itself and offers no satisfying interest; they save their living for their leisure, of which they have very much more than their predecessors of the Dickensian world had, but don't know how to use it, except inertly....But it is fatal to let the cultural inertness of the technological age spread and prevail till everything else is forgotten and incredible....What we are rapidly heading for is the hopelessness of America."

Dr. David Craig, Lecturer at the University of Lancaster and a Marxist theoretician, asked Dr. Leavis "how can the man in the street be helped to appreciate literature?" Dr. Leavis' answer was that he did not believe that they could. The days are gone, he said, when Shakespeare was both an author esteemed by the intellectuals of the day, and the great national entertainment as well....The study of English literature, he said, should give people a sense of the continuity of our literature and this sense should be instilled through a whole range of studies in which mediaeval ideas and mediaeval texts should be as freely discussed as the moderns, so that in studying the mediaeval period we should become aware of of the mediaeval tradition behind the development of Shakespeare. It was only towards the end of the seventeenth century that the break came between popular and sophisticated literature.