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93 POETRY IS A SYNE C DOC HE for all aesthetic activity because it seems like the most autonomous, least instrumental art, even as it retains a denotative link to the world at large. This paradoxically concrete signification-for-its-own-sake perhaps explains why almost anything remotely aesthetic may be described as poetic, if not always fictional or musical or architectural. It is appropriate, then, to conclude a book on ethics and aesthetics by examining a poet. Likewise, it is fitting to conclude a book on Levinas and Russian literature with Osip Mandelstam, a Jewish-Russian poet whose work strives toward an aesthetic imperative that is, for him, indistinguishable from ethical urgency and who reconfigures his “Judaism” accordingly.1 Unlike Babel, who spoke Yiddish and had been exposed to a traditional Hebrew education, Mandelstam grew up speaking Russian in a more assimilated Petersburg Jewish household. Odessa and its suburbs would have presented much less rigid models of plural identity for Babel than did czarist Petersburg for Mandelstam, where Jews could only reside by special permit and where the very street grid is an attempt to repress the anxiety that lurks beneath Russia’s fraught identity as a European power. Accordingly, the Yiddish world of Mandelstam’s Baltic grandparents was repellent and alien to him. Also unlike Babel, Mandelstam converted to Finnish Methodism when he was nineteen, largely—though not entirely—to avoid czarist restrictions on university entrance.2 Several scholars have examined the evolution of Mandelstam’s literary attitude toward his Jewish heritage. Clare Cavanagh, for example, views this evolution (and perhaps Jewishness in general) as linked to the idea of the Jew and the poet as outsiders,3 honorable jesters who thumb their noses at the tyranny of ofWcial culture. According to Cavanagh, when Mandelstam, after an early, pre-Soviet period of Hellenistic anti-Judaism, embraces this notion of what she calls the “irresponsible poet-Jew,”4 he is pursuing the kind of subversive modernist ethics that one may Wnd in Hannah Arendt’s “Jews-inspirit ” (Heine, Chaplin, and other pariah Wgures). Nancy Pollak, on the other hand, makes the case that Mandelstam’s late poetics are infused with a “‘Judaic’ principle” that goes deeper than modernChapter Four Osip Mandelstam’s Judaism: Chaos and Cares The Trace of Judaism 94 ist subversiveness.5 To be sure, Pollak agrees with Robert Alter, who writes that “Osip Mandelstam did not believe either in Judaism or Christianity: he believed in poetry. For a time, he was inclined to associate poetry with Christianity because of his notions of Christian order and of the apparent spiritual seriousness of Christianity.”6 However, Pollak notes that by 1933 Mandelstam associated poetry—and authority—with a “Judaic” principle. . . . His conception of order was correspondingly transformed. The late poetry departs from the classical verse forms and lexicon that characterized the earlier periods; poetry came to be equated with the raw material rather than the Wnished product. . . . At the same time, the acute sense of opposition between the poet’s Jewish origins and the orderly Russian milieu is tempered. In the earlier poems the opposition might appear a fatal one, but in the 1930’s, Mandelstam realized . . . the inevitability of the return to Jewish roots.7 I might add that perhaps Mandelstam returned to the benignly chaotic order of his Jewish roots when the “orderly Russian milieu”—a dubious term that can only refer to the crisp European formalities of czarist Petersburg—gave way to a bloody revolutionary farce. In other words, his return to Judaism might have been less “inevitable” without the inexorable degeneration of Russian “orderliness.” Indeed, Efraim Sicher concludes that despite this philo-Judaic tendency in Mandelstam’s late poetics, “there seems to be no incontrovertible evidence that Mandelstam might have reevaluated his [sometimes aloof] relationship with the Jewish people and the Zionist cause, as Kafka apparently did.” And though it may be true that such kinds of basically political positions would have been unappealing (and perhaps unavailable) to an ideologically jaded Soviet poet, the broader point here is well taken. While “Judaism can be discerned somewhere on Mandelstam’s idiosyncratic iconostasis,” ultimately his “poetic credo enshrined play and freedom within a modernistic Xeshing of the word that was christological in its identiWcation of poet and CruciWed Jew, [while] his goddess was classical simplicity.”8 In other words, it would be an abstract exaggeration to imply that Mandelstam ever became anything like a born-again Jew, poetically or otherwise. Then again, Mikhail Epstein argues precisely...

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