The Bookshelf: Dutli’s Mandelstam.

One of the glaring gaps in biographical literature has been the lack of a good life of Osip Mandelstam, one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Two decades ago Ralph Dutli, a Swiss translator of Russian and French poetry, published his Meine Zeit, mein Tier: Ossip Mandelstam; now Ben Fowkes has translated it into English as Osip Mandelstam: A Biography. It’s officially available as of today from Verso Books (whose Red May sale extends through tomorrow, if you want to stock up), and they were kind enough to send me a review copy, which I’ve spent the last week or so reading with absorbed fascination — though I slowed down toward the end as the events described became more and more awful.

Donald Rayfield, in the Literary Review, calls the biography “thorough and fair,” and that’s accurate. Dutli intersperses translations of the poetry with discussions of what was going on in the poet’s life, and I learned a lot of useful background. The chapter that opens with Mandelstam’s birth in Warsaw includes this excursus on his family:

The Mandelstam family had emigrated in the eighteenth century from Germany to Courland. Now part of present-day Latvia, the area lay between the Baltic Sea and the lower reaches of the River Düna (Russian: Dvina; Latvian: Daugava). Artisans had been invited into the country by its duke, Ernst Johann Biron (1690–1772). One of them was a Jewish watchmaker and jeweller who was descended from a rabbinical family, and still retained his ancient Hebrew name. The Mandelstams regarded this man as their ancestor. Osip only learned this fact of genealogy many years later, in the summer of 1928, in the Crimean resort of Yalta, when he brought Nadezhda’s watch to be repaired. The watchmaker’s wife was also a Mandelstam. As if by magic, she produced his family tree.

The Mandelstams, therefore, did not belong to the branch of Polish Jewry that had experienced its ‘Golden Age’ under the Polish–Lithuanian kingdom, the period of economic prosperity and rich erudition which preceded the catastrophe of 1648, when the Cossack forces of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky made an incursion into Ukraine, slaughtering over a hundred thousand Jews during their uprising against Polish rule. It was a frightful anticipation of all the later pogroms. At that time, though, Mandelstam’s ancestors were still living in Germany, in a ghetto located in a town whose name we do not know.

Those ancestors may well have travelled to Germany along the Central European route. They were Ashkenazim (a name which derives from ‘Ashkenaz’, the word coined to describe Germany in medieval rabbinical literature). It is also possible that they did not start to move north until 1492, when the Jews were driven out of Spain (‘Sefarad’) by Queen Isabella of Castile. That is what Mandelstam himself preferred to believe. When he was in exile in Voronezh in 1936, he read a book about the victims of the Inquisition, and he picked out the name of a Hispano-Jewish poet, insisting that ‘at least a drop of his blood’ ran in his veins. Nevertheless, Mandelstam’s attitude towards his own Jewishness was not determined by ‘the call of the blood’. As we shall show, it was complex and variable. […]

Dutli then discusses the surname:

And the name Mandelstam? It is derived from the drupe of the almond tree, its seed kernel, and hidden within it there is a biblical association, a sign of election, because it refers back to the story of Aaron’s rod. In the fourth book of Moses (Numbers 17:7) it is related that Aaron, of the house of Levi, was chosen as the first high priest, as his rod was the only one of the twelve that budded and produced almonds: ‘And it came to pass, that on the morrow Moses went into the tabernacle of witness; and behold, the rod of Aaron was budded, and brought forth buds, and bloomed blossoms, and yielded almonds.’ In a poem written in 1914 in memory of Vladislav Ozerov (1769–1816), the last playwright of the classical age of Russian literature, Mandelstam alludes to this scene, without naming either Aaron or his rod: ‘Pain flowered for us in solemnity / As the prophet’s holy staff flowered in the shrine.’

The almond tree, with its fruit now sweet, now bitter, plays a significant part in the Old Testament. In the book of Kohelet, also known as The Preacher Solomon (Ecclesiastes 12:5), it is a symbol of evil days to come. Solomon warns the young to remember the Creator, and the inevitability of ageing and death: ‘when … the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and the caper-berry shall fail because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets’.

Almond blossom is traditionally associated with the white hair of old age. The almond tree appears as nature’s mourning representative in Mandelstam’s political poem of May 1933, in which he condemns the famine inflicted on the Ukrainian peasantry by Stalin’s policy of forced collectivisation:

The views are hazy, it is as beautiful as ever
The trees are in bud, swelling slightly,
And are the real outsiders, and the almond,
Blossoming with yesterday’s stupidity, arouses pity.

That should give you a good idea of how the book proceeds; it concludes with a chapter on Nadezhda Mandelstam’s almost miraculous survival and stewardship of the poetry, so that we are able to enjoy it today. The book is well produced, with a good selection of photographs and not too many errors; I’ll mention a couple of problems that could mislead the unwary reader. On page 112 there is a reference to “Butomo Nezvanova’s concert,” which makes it sound like Butomo is a given name (and the index correspondingly has an entry “Nezvanova, Butomo” among the N’s); in fact, the singer was Olga Butomo-NezvanovaNazvanova (Ольга Бутомо-Названова, 1888–1960), a bizarre-sounding name (the only Nezvanova I know of is Dostoevsky’s heroine, and Butomo doesn’t sound Russian at all) — anybody know anything about it or her? And on p. 35, referencing a discussion on Bergson (in whom I am quite interested), a footnote cites “A. Faivre Dupaigre, ‘Bergsonovskoe chuvstvo vremeni,’” which the bibliography says is in “Mandel’shtamovskie Dni v Voronezhe. Materialy, Voronezh 1994, 27–31″; that book happens to be online, but it doesn’t include the essay by Anne Faivre Dupaigre, which turns out to be in Mandel’shtam: Poetika i tekstologiia [Мандельштам: Поэтика и текстология], Moscow 1991, 27–31. I trust that such things will be fixed for future editions.

Addendum. January First-of-May points out in the comments that the singer “was actually Olga (Nikolayevna) Butomo-Nazvanova […] her husband’s last name was Nazvanov, so presumably Butomo was her maiden name.”

Comments

  1. Trond Engen says

    The watchmaker’s wife was also a Mandelstam. As if by magic, she produced his family tree.

    The Mandelstammbaum.

  2. Heh.

  3. January First-of-May says

    in fact, the singer was Olga Butomo-Nezvanova (Ольга Бутомо-Незванова, 1888–1960), a bizarre-sounding name (the only Nezvanova I know of is Dostoevsky’s heroine, and Butomo doesn’t sound Russian at all)

    She was actually Olga (Nikolayevna) Butomo-Nazvanova; here’s a photo of her memorial stone, with this spelling. AFAICT her husband’s last name was Nazvanov, so presumably Butomo was her maiden name.

    I’m not sure what it means. She was born in Bykhov (now Mogilev Oblast, Belarus), and a quick search did find a few more people named Butomo from Belarus, including a composer Nikolay Ivanovich Butomo from Gomiel who’s a few decades too young to be her father (1905-1983) but could easily have been her cousin or nephew (his father apparently came from Mogilev).

     
    EDIT: here’s a reference [I wonder if this link works for you…] to the Nezvanova spelling that was corrected in the explanatory footnote. Perhaps someone/some people misremembered her name as that of the Dostoyevsky character.

  4. Wow, thanks very much for that! I’ve corrected my copy of the book and will add a note to the post. I’m glad I asked!

    EDIT: Yes, the link works; thanks. I’m sure the Dostoyevsky character influenced the misspelling.

  5. January First-of-May says

    Update that didn’t make it into the editing period: a genealogy discussion about the Butomo surname. (Not a lot of information, but about half a dozen other names.)

    Apparently there are a few people surnamed Butoma (Бутома) from the same area and those might be related. The thread doesn’t mention O.N.Butomo-Nazvanova, but I’d be surprised if she wasn’t related too. (None of the listed names could be her father.)
    There’s a Soviet minister with the last name Butoma, but he grew up in Dagestan and I couldn’t figure out if he could be related to the Belarussian bunch.

  6. J.W. Brewer says

    What’s the idiomatic meaning of Dutli’s German title? “My Time, My Animal [or “human characterized as bestial/animalistic”]” seems implausible for a book about a poet, but maybe I’m missing something important about Mandelstam?

  7. It refers to one of his major poems, “Век мой, зверь мой“; you can read a translation (by whom?) here and another by James McGavran here.

  8. What’s the idiomatic meaning of Dutli’s German title? “My Time, My Animal [or “human characterized as bestial/animalistic”]” seems implausible for a book about a poet, but maybe I’m missing something important about Mandelstam?

    It’s simply the translation of the beginning of one of Mandelstam’s poems of the early 1920s (https://rvb.ru/20vek/mandelstam/01text/vol_2/01versus/01versus/2_011.htm).

  9. J.W. Brewer says

    Ah. So the apparent assumption is that German-language readers will either recognize the allusion or at least be intrigued by it, but English-language readers not so much?

  10. I think Dutli’s biography was originally published with the readers of his translations of Mandelstam in mind. And Век is one of OM’s most famous poems.

  11. He’s done a ten-volume translation/edition/explication of OM: Das Gesamtwerk in 10 Bänden (Zürich: Ammann, 2001).

  12. David Marjanović says

    And the name Mandelstam? It is derived from the drupe of the almond tree, its seed kernel

    That’s interesting, because Stamm is “trunk” – y’know, “stem”.

    I wonder if a dialect like mine was involved, where Stein comes out as /ʃtã/…

  13. @David Marjanović: Yeah, that puzzled me too. I had assumed that Mandelstam was essentially synonymous with Mandelbaum (a very ordinary Ashkenazic name). Given that “drupe of the almond tree, its seed kernel” is nonsensical,* I find myself strongly doubting the claimed etymology.

    * Quoth Wikipedia: “In botany, a drupe is an indehiscent fruit in which an outer fleshy part surrounds a single shell of hardened endocarp with a seed inside.”

  14. I wouldn’t trust a poet/translator/biographer for etymological information. He probably didn’t know what he was talking about.

  15. well, disappointingly, none of that makes me think this writer knows much of anything about central & eastern european jewish culture or history, which seems pretty disqualifying for a biographer of mandelstam.

    /begin rant

    still retained his ancient Hebrew name

    is a hilarious non-sequitur. there’s no such thing as an “ancient Hebrew” family name – surnames didn’t exist in central and eastern european jewish practice until they were imposed by the various empires starting in the late 18th century. before that, the names in use for formal purposes were given name and patronymic (or series of patronymics), sometimes with a clan identification (“halevi”, “cohen”, occasionally “כּ″צ” [kohen ha-tsedek], and informally, given name and byname (with all the usual variations, with more emphasis on mothers’ and wives’ names than is usual in christian practice), often with a separate version for non-jewish contexts.

    and when it comes to given names (to allow for the possible alternate reading), it’s similarly incoherent. the core stock of formal names (shem hakodesh) used in yiddish jewish communities is pretty old, even arguably “ancient”. but only parts of it are hebrew. there are also plenty of names that are from aramaic (ezra, nehemiah), presumed-akkadian (mordekhay), and other sources. with names as with pretty much anything jewish, a writer using the phrase “ancient Hebrew” is an excellent indication that they don’t know what they’re talking about and haven’t made even a cursory attempt to learn.

    the branch of Polish Jewry that had experienced its ‘Golden Age’ under the Polish–Lithuanian kingdom…which preceded the catastrophe of 1648… Khmelnytsky made an incursion into Ukraine

    a family that went from the german-speaking lands to courland – itself german-ruled even while a fief of the Rzeczpospolita – most likely never lived in a poland of any kind. so the only sense they could be part of any “branch of polish jewry” is in relation to minhag polin, which begins at the Dammtor and ends in moscow. but that understanding seems far past this author’s ken, so i think it’s more likely just sloppiness. (and it’s a pity, because latvian jews have a quite specific and complicated history that is distinct from (and entangled with) polish jewish history, not some kind of subset of it.)

    the idea that the “golden age” ends with khmelnytsky is popular, but that’s precisely because it entirely subsumes jewish history to the narrative of the polish-lithuanian state, which did indeed enter a period of crisis then. but the polish jewish “golden age” was centered in the northern/western parts of the Rzeczpospolita, which khmelnytsky didn’t touch. podolia and volhynia were not where the scholars and other defining figures of the “golden age” were; past lublin, there were some rich men, but mostly exactly the jews the ornaments of the “golden age” considered barely worthy of the name (even before they got the sabbatean and then the frankist fever). and let’s be clear: the baal shem tov wasn’t even born until 1698, and the vilna gaon til 1720, and those aren’t figures of decline. (the vilna gaon being particularly relevant if osip’s family arrived under von biron’s rule, when he was in his prime and defining the litvak period of the polish jewish golden age.)

    and, large though the khurbn of 1648-9 rightly looms large in yiddish historical memory, the displaced jewish communities overwhelmingly returned to podolia and volhynia remarkably quickly – most, if memory serves, within less than two decades (partly, i assume, to escape the wars with russian and sweden that were a more significant problem for the more important communities than bogdan ever was).

    but perhaps more tellingly about the overall problems, where exactly is this “incursion into Ukraine” supposed to have been from? khmelnytsky was a hetman from polish-lithuanian ukraine – he didn’t cross a border or mount an invasion, he raised an insurrection within the Rzeczpospolita, in which cossacks and ukrainians rose up against the polish nobility but mostly killed jews (and probably roma). he’s a genocidal shit of a national hero, but his revolt was no kind of “incursion”.

    Mandelstam? …refers back to the story of Aaron’s rod

    can you get more credulous? “mandelstam” is a bog-standard state-imposed yiddish jewish surname, assembled like a vast number of such bureaucratically-assigned names* from a pair of german elements. in the most common format, as in osip’s surname, the first part is a plant or mineral, matched with a plant-part or geological feature. one of my patriline’s names, eisenberg, is exactly the same in form and origin, but on the mineral side of the line (and from novorossiya rather than courland). the tale of the yalta watchmaker must have been great at parties, but it’s a biographer’s job to know that damn near any pair of jews in early-20thC russia whose families were assigned the same surname by mid-to-late-19thC bureaucrats would be able to find a matching sequence of two or three given names somewhere in their lineages – and that it means very little about whether they’re actually related**.

    let’s not even get into the even more transparent fabulation about a sefardi origin, which was all the rage at the time since sefardim were the classy, sophisticated, simultaneously “authentically hebrew” and “truly european” jewish group in the popular imagination.

    but
    ‘Ashkenaz’, the word coined to describe Germany in medieval rabbinical literature
    is impressive itself. if you know that “ashkenaz” comes from medieval rabbinical wriitngs, you certainly ought to know that it’s a biblical geographic label applied to the german-speaking lands (just like sefarad, tsarfat, knaan, and the rest). and i just said that in one fewer word than fowkes/dutli’s inaccurate version.

    i hope that the parts of the book that deal with the events of mandelstam’s life are more reliable, and perhaps even well-informed, but that sample does not inspire confidence.

    /end rant

    .
    * the rest being adapted from patronymics (aaronson and the like), clan names (levitsky/lewinsky/levins/etc., cohen/cahan/kahn/etc.), and bynames (e.g. bashevis [belonging to batsheva]; shnayder/portnoy/etc. [tailor]; slutsky [from slutsk/słuck]; katz [כּ″צ]; etc.)

    ** the name-stock really is impressively limited. it took until last year for me to sort out that several decades of confusion among previous delvers into family history was because there were two couples named benjamin and rose schrager, of almost identical ages, living in the bronx in the 1920s and 30s, some of whose children had the same names. and that’s dealing with a gap that barely reaches the edge of living memory, not the 160+ years between duke von biron and osip’s trip to crimea.

  16. PlasticPaddy says

    Re Butomo, there is also Butmak. So these names could be based on a place name like Butom in Silesia. With Mandelstam, the officials in Kleindorf may have had a list, so that there would not be a disproportionate number of Kleindorf burghers going by the identical name of Abraham or Sarah Mandel, so they added syllables to make Mandelbaum, Mandelzweig, Mandelstamm, Mandelkern(not Stein)…

  17. i do remember reading someone’s version, in which there was a literal list that got divided among the registrars (presumably with some duplication above some geographic level (gubernia? smaller?)). but i don’t remember if it was someone reliable, like alexander beider, or one of the more, um, inventive people.

    in that version, though, it could be exactly that. in this town, this quarter of the families are all related to each other, so they’re all mandel-s, or eisen-s or whatever. no matter what, i feel like a lot of it is the whims and ethics of the registrars, and how much a family or town decided they cared about it.

  18. John Cowan says

    khmelnytsky was a hetman from polish-lithuanian ukraine – he didn’t cross a border or mount an invasion, he raised an insurrection within the Rzeczpospolita, in which cossacks and ukrainians rose up against the polish nobility but mostly killed jews (and probably roma).

    I think it would be fair to say that he attacked (or invaded) the shtetls in Ukraine.

    the word coined

    That’s the result of treating coined as if it meant ‘used’ or ‘applied’ rather than ‘invented, devised’.

    the whims and ethics of the registrars

    Hence the Sweaty-Dog family.

  19. rozele: Thanks very much for that excellent rant! Dutli’s story sounded dubious to me, but I didn’t know enough to deconstruct it. Why do people feel compelled to go on at length about matters they understand so little? It’s not as if you need that (alleged) family background to understand the poet’s life.

  20. I think that’s Numbers 17:23, not 7.

  21. Dmitry Pruss says

    Rozele already did the due rant, so I just add that the legend of German / French/ Italian origin was commonplace in the invented Eastern European Jewish genealogies. I remember discussions with an actual researcher of the roots of Osip Mandelstamm and off the top of my head they migrated from Lithuania rather than Germany. Will check when I have better Internet access

    Update. Yes, the Riga clan of the Mandelstams was an offshoot of a well studied family from the vicinity of Saulai, a shtettke of Novo-Zhagory, where they are attested since the 1770s at least. No Courland (Riga was next to it but not a part of it in terms of Jewish status) and no Germany of course. But with a big Black Sea sub branch)

  22. Yes, my mother-in-law’s family has one of those French-origin myths.

  23. David Marjanović says

    I didn’t know the word drupe and just skipped it…

  24. Dutli’s explanations are of course full of mistakes and misunderstandings, but honestly, who cares (many thanks to rozele for a detailed rebuttal, nonetheless)? He is not writing a history of Ashkenaz. What would be valuable if this muddled history and genealogy represented correctly what Mandelstam believed about himself. In the most striking instance, the surname Mandelstam has nothing to do with the Bible, but if Mandelstam believed in the connection (either historical or prophetic), it would be an interesting morsel of information. Ditto about some scion of rabbis with ancient Hebrew name (which, honestly, can be just Cohen for someone being kohen). Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that we can trust Dutli on this score either.

  25. David Eddyshaw says

    LsnguageHat, where even the rants are educational.

  26. J.W. Brewer says

    Yeah, an ideal biographer of Mandelstam would accurately understand both a) his own and his community’s self-understanding-at-the-time re ancestry and family tree etc.; and b) the extent to which that self-understanding was accurate versus full of trendy-at-the-time myth and fable that would not survive any sort of serious critical examination. And someone who is only competent to talk about a) would do well to flag that b) is a separate issue they’re not delving into. Now maybe some of the stuff in rozele’s rant was outside the scope of even a), but it sounds like a significant chunk of the falsities ranted against were indeed the sort of falsities that were characteristically subjectively believed by many Ashkenazim in the relevant time and place.

    It would be funnier (from a 21st century U.S. perspective) if Mandelstam’s self-understanding included a fascination with never-fact-checked family lore that he was actually 3/128 (or whatever comparably small fraction) Cherokee by descent.

  27. What would be valuable if this muddled history and genealogy represented correctly what Mandelstam believed about himself. In the most striking instance, the surname Mandelstam has nothing to do with the Bible, but if Mandelstam believed in the connection (either historical or prophetic), it would be an interesting morsel of information.

    yes, absolutely! but i don’t think it’s possible to write anything useful about that unless you-the-writer understand that it is fiction (and, i’d say, can assess how transparent the fiction was at the time; my money’s on Very, but i don’t actually know). that’s the necessary first step to be able to understand what it meant for osip nadezhdas, for his family, for his jewish and non-jewish communities – all of which could be quite different (or not), and any of which could easily be important to thinking about his writing.

  28. Oleg Lekmanov published his biography of Mandelshtam two years before Dutli, in 2003. It has been reprinted in Russian more than once; an English translation appeared in 2010. Three excerpts:

    According to family legend, Mandelstam’s ancestors originated from Spain, and the founder of the family name was, supposedly, a jeweler at the court of the Duke of Courland, Biron.

    “Legend” and “supposedly”: compare this with Dutli’s presenting hypotheses as facts.

    The Jewish-German family name, “Mandelstam,” can be translated from the Yiddish as “the trunk of an almond tree,” causing the reader of the Bible to recall the budded almond rod of the high priest, Aaron… and the prophet Jeremiah’s vision: “I said: I see the rod of the almond tree”…

    No causality implied.

    Mandelstam would frequently play upon the origin of his family name in his poetry:

    As the tsar’s staff in the sanctuary of prophets,
    There bloomed a ceremonial pain.

    (“There is an unshakeable scale of values,” 1914)

    “The origin” sounds misleading here – I’d prefer “etymology” instead. Anyway, it’s the same Ozerov poem Dutli refers to in his disquisition on the almond tree. The poem is probably best known for its first line – particularly the line’s last word, an amalgam of the Italian scala and the Russian skalá “rock.”

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