Osip Mandelstam’s Conversation About Dante is the major Russian work on the great Florentine poet. Ever since it appeared, and perhaps even before it did, we have known that this conversation would turn out to be about something different: about “time and the self,” as another poet wrote. Dante’s optical devices, his mirrors and his loupes, were designed for the intense scrutiny of the fabric of his contemporary world: its decaying weave, which was nonetheless destined inexplicably for salvation. Perhaps this is why his Commedia becomes more important when the possibility of salvation is more remote, or so it seems. At the beginning of 1933, Mandelstam arrived in Leningrad to take part in two evenings of poetry arranged especially for him. His evening at the Grand Hotel Europe (then called the European), where he was staying, was attended by Leningrad’s literary beau monde. The only one missing that evening was Anna Akhmatova, who was only fleetingly present to hear Mandelstam read and then departed after a brief and almost formal exchange of words with him. They would meet later, and without anyone present, in her room in a communal apartment. He had only just mastered Italian and he raved about Dante, reciting whole pages by heart. We talked about the Purgatorio and I read a passage from Canto XXX, the appearance of Beatrice. sovra candido vel cinta d’uliva a woman donna m’apparve, sotto verde manto vistita di color di fiamma viva. …….. ……….Men che drama di sangue m’e rimaso non tremi: conosco i segni de l’antica fiamma. a woman showed herself to me: above white veil, she was crowned with olive boughs Her cape was green; her dress beneath, flame-red. ……… ………I am left with less than one drop of my blood that does not tremble: I recognize the signs of the old flame. (Translated by Allen Mandelbaum) Osip began to cry. I was terrified. “What’s wrong?” “Nothing, nothing — just those words, and in your voice.” The relationship between Mandelstam and Akhmatova at that point was what we might call complicated. Its complexities continue to occupy Russian literary scholarship, and I am merely summarizing here what has been recently revealed. Mandelstam’s views on literature, politics, and life had by now converged to a point where he was compelled to engage in the anxieties and the issues of the day — a high-risk will to action and the building of a new age on new principles. His choice of acquaintances was surprisingly catholic (to the consternation of the reader now as well as his friends back then), including Nikolai Bukharin, the high Bolshevik official and editor who often protected the poet against the regime, and Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD, whom he had met in one of the Central Committee’s sanatoriums, as well as Komsomol leaders from the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. His article in the newspaper Izvestiya in 1929, a contribution to a debate about literary translation, demanded that “the shoddy, pointless direction of production” be destroyed at the root, and that literary initiative be “wrestled from the grasp of artisan-entrepreneurs” — he even called for someone to be taken to court for “unprecedented wrecking.” He cast off his own literary past and accumulated Symbolist capital as so much ballast: “I don’t want to be living off my ‘Mandelstam-ness,’” he wrote to his wife. Against this backdrop, his relationship with Akhmatova — who had deliberately and for a long time been shrinking her connection with the literary world to almost nothing, neither publishing nor performing her poems, and hardly writing at all — was extremely important. They were connected by a common history, an intimate friendship and, what was even greater, a linguistic intimacy, which allowed them to “listen to and understand each other” without concession or correction — even if it was often accompanied by mutual irritation. Akhmatova’s position, her preference for the path of apparent inaction and literary and political non-participation, seemed to him to be alternately a temptation and an inappropriate anachronism. He himself was unable to stop “acting, making a noise, and giving everyone the run-around,” as his wife put it. In 1933 Mandelstam was reading Dante compulsively — “day
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