Journey to Armenia

The potter’s art had brought the red clay of Armenia into the human circle.

lassicism in Mandelstam’s mind was associated with that ‘fullness of life’ natural to the Armenians, and also with ‘their noble inclination for hard work’. He had listed among the utensils by which man is consciously surrounded ‘a baking dish, a pair of tongs, an earthenware jug with milk’; and it is the pottery of Armenia that he calls in one poem

of the surrounding world; the environment heated with the most delicate teleological warmth. Hellenism is any stove near which a man sits, prizing its warmth as something related to his own inner warmth.

Hellenism means consciously surrounding man with utensils instead of indifferent objects; the metamorphosis of these objects into the utensil, the humanization

He admired the Armenians for ‘their splendid intimacy with the world of real things’. There could be no surer evidence that they had retained a truly classical civilization. As he wrote earlier about Innokenty Annensky:

Am I really like the dreadful child who turns in his hand a pocket mirror and directs into all the places he shouldn’t the dazzle from the sun?

late poem. It was symbolized for him by the cold air of the mountains, and clothed in Apostolic poverty. Mount Ararat, visible on the southwest horizon of Armenia, was ‘rich with a Biblical carpet’, and in the verse fragment from which that phrase comes, Armenia is called a ‘Sabbath land’.

andelstam’s idea of Western culture corresponds to what Eliot means by ‘the mind of Europe’. It is a culture formed by the merging of four streams – the Hebraic, the Christian, the Hellenic and the Latin. Within this tradition developed the distinct but intercommunicating literatures of the modern world, its art and its music. Mandelstam’s conception of the European mind is more hospitable than Eliot’s with his predominantly Latin (and Catholic) bias, for it includes Goethe (tardily accepted by Eliot) and the German poets, and also, of course, his own literature, which in his view had the task of realizing a ‘domestic Hellenism’. (The poet Annensky, much admired by the Acmeists, had shown how this should be done.)
Soon after Scriabin’s death in 1915, Mandelstam wrote a memorial essay, of which only fragments are left, seeking to define there his conception of Christian art.
No necessity of any kind, even the highest, clouds its bright inner

insist that writerdom, as it has taken shape in Europe and especially in Russia, is incompatible with the honorable title of Jew, of which I am proud. My blood, burdened with its inheritance from shepherds, patriarchs and kings, rebels against the shifting gypsydom of the writers’ tribe.

because the man of letters addresses his contemporaries, while the poet converses with the unknown ideal reader waiting for him, providentially, in the distance. The man of letters has his whole being in the contemporary world; the poet exists in the timeless.