The Bookcase

I spent part of the afternoon rereading Osip Mandelshtam’s The Noise of Time (masterfully translated from Russian by Clarence Brown) in my favorite café on Melrose Avenue. I had forgotten how great it is, especially the third chapter, entitled "The Bookcase." This new encounter with M—’s quirky memoir made me realize that there was no bookcase in my house growing up, other than an endtable heaped with my father’s college text books (mostly sociological) and a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order. My father wasn’t a reader. He worked all day as an upholsterer, napped after dinner, then drank the evening away in his workshop. My mother did in fact read. She loved reading romances on the beach, but this love competed with an other: smoking cigarettes. She could put away some four to five packs in a day when I was growing up. Smoking proved the greater and thus cuckolded her reading down to perhaps two books per summer. These books, however, never made it onto any bookshelf or even into a box and packed away in the closet. She either threw them out when she was finished with them or gave them to one of her girlfriends.

It wasn’t until junior high that books began to enter the house en masse. My asthmatic older brother had developed a taste for fantasy and science fiction. So as a good little brother, I dutifully tried to emulate my big brother by attempting to take on each one he finished: The Lord of the Rings, Fafred and the Gray Mouser, The Stainless Steel Rat, the Conan the Barbarian series, Thieves’ World, and Sword of Shannara are just a few that come to mind.

Then came college and I became and English major and started flirting with the likes of Joyce, Hemingway, Pound, Orwell, Faulkner, &c...; entertained a brief stint with all the Black Power writers, the Italian Futurists, the Surrealists, Existentialists, &c...; before finally settling comfortably with the Russians. Consequently, my collection has grown. But for the past six months, I’ve been without a bookcase of my own. Everything save for a few Russian dictionaries and grammars, my Mandelshtam collection, and a few random necessary poetry collections and novels (mostly Russians from the begining of the 20th century: Blok, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Chornyi, Khlebnikov, Gumilyev, &c..., but some oldies too like Pushkin, Turgenyev, Lermontov, Dostoieveski, Tolstoy, &c...), everything is in storage at my brother’s house in New Jersey — even my Issak Babel! What, was I drunk or something? Of course I was drunk.

But this afternoon, while enjoying a latte at my favorite café, I was happy to realize that I’ve read every thing on M—’s childhood bookshelf, except for his Hebrew primer. In fact, I own most of them and we will be reunited in a month or so when I move back to New York into an apartment I'll share with another Ph.D. student, and a freshly minted professor. Our combined collection rivals that of the library at Alexandria....

Yes, I typed the following chapter myself. Insomnia will make you do that....

As a little bit of musk fills an entire house, so the least influence of Judaism overflows all of one’s life. Oh, what a strong smell that is! Could I possibly not have noticed that in real Jewish houses there was a different smell from that in Aryan houses? And it was not only the kitchen that smelled so, but the people, things, and clothing. To this day I remember how that sweetish Jewish smell swaddled me in the wooden house of my grandfather and grandmother on Klyuchevaya Street in German Riga. My father’s study at home was itself unlike the granite paradise of my sedate strolls; it led one away into an alien world, and the mixture of its furnishings, the selection of the objects in it were strongly knitted together in my consciousness. First of all, there was the handmade oak armchair bearing the image of a balalaika and a gauntlet and, on its arched back, the motto "Slow but Sure" — a tribute to the pseudo-Russian style of Alexander III. Then there was a Turkish divan completely overwhelmed with ledgers, whose pages of flimsy paper were covered over with the minuscule gothic hand of German commercial correspondence. At first I thought my father’s occupation consisted of printing his flimsy letters by cranking the handle of the copy machine. To this day I conceive of the smell of the yoke of labor as the penetrating smell of tanned leather; and the webbed kidskins thrown about the floor, and the pudgy chamois skins with excrescences like living fingers — all this, plus the bourgeois writing table with its little marble calendar, swims in a tobacco haze and is seasoned with the smells of leather. And in the drab surroundings of this mercantile room there was a little glass-front bookcase behind a curtain of green taffeta. It is about that bookcase that I should like to speak now. The bookcase of early childhood is a man’s companion for life. The arrangement of its shelves, the choice of books, the colors of the spines are for him the color, height, and arrangement of world literature itself. And as for books which were not included in that first bookcase — they were never to force their way into the universe of world literature. Every book in the first bookcase is, willy-nilly, a classic, and not one of them can ever be expelled.

There was nothing haphazard in the way that strange little library had been deposited, like a geological bed, over several decades. The paternal and maternal elements in it were not mixed, but existed separately, and a cross section of the strata showed the history of the spiritual efforts of the entire family, as well as the inoculation of it with alien blood.

I always remember the lower shelf as chaotic: the books were not standing upright side by side but lay like ruins: reddish five-volume works with ragged covers, a Russian history of the Jews written in the clumsy, shy language of a Russian-speaking Talmudist. This was the Judaic chaos thrown into the dust. This was the level to which my Hebrew primer, which I never mastered, quickly fell. In a fit of national contrition they even tried hiring a real Jewish teacher for me. He came from his Torgovaya Street and taught without taking off his cap, which made me feel awkward. His correct Russian sounded false. The Hebrew primer was illustrated with pictures which showed one and the same little boy, wearing a visored cap and with a melancholy adult face, in all sorts of situations — with a cat, a book, a pail, a watering can. I saw nothing of myself in t hat boy and with all my being revolted against the book and the subject. There was one striking thing in that teacher, although it sounded unnatural: the feeling of national Jewish pride. He talked about Jews as the French governess talked about Hugo and Napoleon. But I knew that he hid his pride when he went out into the street, and therefore did not believe him.

Above these Jewish ruins there began the orderly arrangement of books; those were the Germans — Schiller, Goethe, Kerner, and the Shakespeare in German — in the old Leipzig and Tübingen editions, chubby little butterballs in stamped claret-colored bindings with a fine print calculated for the sharp vision of youth and with soft engravings done in a rather classical style: women with their hair down wring their hands, the lamp is always shown as an oil lamp, the horsemen have high foreheads, and the vignettes are clusters of grapes. All this was my father fighting his way as an autodidact into the German world out of the Talmudic wilds.

Still higher were my mother’s Russian books — Pushkin in Isakov’s 1876 edition. I still think that was a splendid edition and like it more than the one published by the Academy. It contained nothing superfluous, the type was elegantly arranged, the columns of poetry flowed freely as soldiers in flying battalions, and leading them like generals were the clear reasonable years of composition, right up to 1837. The color of Pushkin? Every color is accidental — what color could one choose for the purl of speech? Oh, that idiotic alphabet of colors by Rimbaud…!

My Isakov Pushkin was in a cassock of no color at all, in a binding of schoolboy calico, in a brownish black, faded cassock with a tinge of earth and sand; he feared neither spots, nor ink, nor fire, nor kerosene. For a quarter of a century the black-and-sand cassock had lovingly absorbed everything into itself — so vividly do I sense the everyday spiritual beauty, the almost physical charm of my mother’s Pushkin. It bore and inscription in reddish ink: "For her diligence as a pupil of the Third Form." The Isakov Pushkin is bound up with stories about ideal schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, ruddy with consumption and shod in ragged boots: the 1880s In Vilno. The word "intellectual" was pronounced by my mother, and especially by my grandmother, with pride. Lermontov had a greenish blue binding with something military about it; not for nothing was he a hussar. He never seemed to me to be the brother or relative of Pushkin. Goethe and Schiller I regarded as twins, but in Pushkin and Lermontov I recognized two men alien to each other and consciously kept them apart. After 1837, blood and poetry both rang differently in the ears.

And how about Turgenev and Dostoevsky? Those were supplements to The Field. In external aspect they were identical, like brothers. They were bound in boards covered with athin leather. Prohibition lay upon Dostoevsky like a gravestone: it was said that he was "heavy." Turgenev was altogether sanctioned and open, with his Baden-Baden, Spring Torrents, and languid conversations. But I knew that the tranquil life in Turgenev had already vanished and was nowhere to be found.

Would you like to know the key to the epoch, the book that had become white-hot from handling, the book that would not under any circumstances agree to die, that lay like someone alive in the narrow coffin of the 1890s, the book whose leaves, perhaps from reading or from having been left in the sun on a bench at someone’s dacha, had yellowed prematurely, whose first page bore the features of a youth with an inspired arrangement of the hair, features that became an icon? Gazing into the face of the young Nadson, I am astonished by the genuine fieriness of those features and at the same time by their total inexpressiveness, their almost wooden simplicity. Does this not describe the whole book? Does it not describe the era? Send him off to Nice, show him the Mediterranean: he will go on singing his ideal and his suffering generation — with the possible addition of a seagull and the crest of a wave. Do not laugh at Nadsonism: it is the enigma of Russian culture and the essentially uncomprehended sound of it, for we do not understand and hear as they understood and heard. Who is he, this wooden monk with the inexpressive features of an eternal youth, this inspired idol of students. — especially of students, that is to say, the elite of certain decades — this prophet of school recitals? How many times, knowing already that Nadson was bad, have I still reread his book and, putting away the poetic haughtiness of the present and pity for the ignorance of this youth in the past, tried to hear it as it sounded to his generation. How greatly was I aided in this by the diaries and letters of Nadson: the continual literary drudgery, the candles, applause, the burning faces; the tight ring of his generation and, in the center, the altar — the lecturer’s table and its glass of water. Like summer insects above the hot glove of a lamp, an entire generation was carbonized and scorched by the flame of literary celebrations with garlands of allegorical roses, enormous assemblies which bore the character of a cult and expiatory offering for the generation. Hither came those who wished to share the fate of their generation right up to the point of ruin — the haughty ones remained to one side with Tyutchev and Fet. Actually, all that was serious in Russian literature turned away from this consumptive generation with its ideal and its Baal. What was left to it? Paper roses, the candles of the school recitals, and the barcaroles of Rubinstein. The 1880s in Vilno as mother recalled them. It was everywhere the same: sixteen-year-old girls tried to read John Stuart Mill and at public recitals one could see luminous personalities who — with a certain dense admixture of pedal, a fainting away on the piano passage, and blank features — played the latest things of the leonine Anton. But what actually happened was that the intelligentsia, with Buckle and Rubeinstein and led by the luminous personalities — who in their beatific idiocy had completely lost the way — resolutely turned to the practice of self-burning. Like high tar-coated torches the adherents of the People’s Will Party burned for all the people to see, with Sofia Perovskaya and Zhelyabov, and all of them, all of provincial Russia and all of the students, smouldered in sympathy: not one single green leaf was to be left.

What a meager life, what poor letters, what unfunny jokes and parodies! I used to have pointed out to me in the family album a daguerreotype of my uncle Misha, a melancholiac with swollen and unhealthy features, and it was explained that he had not merely gone out of his mind — he had "burnt up," as that generation put it. They said the same of Garshin, and any were the deaths reduced to that single ritual.

Semyon Afanasich Vengerov, a relative of mine on my mother’s side (the family in Vilno and school memories), understood nothing in Russian literature and studied Pushkin as a professional task, but "one thing" he understood. His "one thing" was: the heroic character of Russian literature. He was a fine one with his heroic character when he would drag slowly along Zagorodny Proskpekt from his apartment to the card catalog, hanging on the elbow of his ageing wife and smirking into his dense ant beard!

Comments

[Tatyana]

See what Tsvetaeva thought about it.

[anna gimein]

I am trying to find the English translation for a phrase from Mandelshtam's "The Noise of Time" - I am in a country where English books are not easy to come by on short notice. It is the part that follows "Komisarzhevskaya", and has to do with entering the present as into a dry riverbed. Any answer? (Так входишь в настоящее, в современность,
как в русло высохшей реки.)