Annotation to "Gaiety"

In his introduction to „Hope Against Hope. A Memoir” by Nadezhda Mandelstam (translated by Max Hayward; Atheneum, NY 1970), Clarence Brown remarks on the specific gaiety of Osip Mandelstam:

“But the buoyancy … depends upon the central figure of Osip Mandelstam himself. Nadezhda Yakovlevna calls him in one place ‘endlessly zhizneradostny’. The words is usually rendered as ‘cheerful’ or ‘joyous’ – rather feeble counters for an original that means, in its two parts, ‘life-glad’. Those who seek the roots of poetry in a close equivalency with life will find it perfectly astonishing that there are so few sad poems in Mandelstam. But while this or that fact of his tragic existence can explain the brute meaning of many lines, nothing can explain the poetry of them other than the wild joy that he took in the Russian language. It is not astonishing, ‘Pechal moy svetla’, Pushkin wrote, ‘My sadness is luminous’; and Mandelstam not only could but did use the line. (…) In an early essay on Pushkin and Scriabin, of which only fragments remain, Mandelstam was evidently trying to find the source of this joy within the terms of Christianity. Christian art is joyous because it is free, and it is free because of the fact of Christ’s having died to redeem the world. One need not die in art nor save the world in it, those matters having been, so to speak, attended to. What is left? The blissful responsibility to enjoy the world. Such, I take it, was the argument, as one can see it, from what is left. Whether in later years Mandelstam would have sought quite this underpinning for his innate gladness in life, I cannot tell. Perhaps the missing segments of this same essay might have modulated the statement in some way. But that is beside the essential point, which is that Mandelstam habitually converted not only the prose of life but even its truly darker moments into poems from which a sense of pleasure, even beatitude, is seldom absent.”

If compared to Jorge Luis Borges one sees the essential difference of their respective gaiety: Mandelstam a religious poet, Borges a nonbeliever. Yet the one common aspect remains: the importance and source of beauty and joy of language.