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Rating: One thing is certain: what we are after crossing a bridge is inevitably different from what we were before crossing it. Bridges are everywhere, and willingly or not, human beings venture onto them (both individually and collectively), and are irresistibly fascinated by them.
But what happens on a bridge? There, where everything is becoming and nothing is crystallized. Hard to say, but a second thing is equally certain: trying to discover it is the most interesting thing of all.
Let us think, for example, about the Western civilization's conception of Time: B.C. and A.D. to mark the continuum. The connection is the years of Christ's life, the Savior, the son of God, the symbol of the passage between before and after, the link (for believers) between the Divine and Man, the bridge.
Think of the poetic production of Mandel'stam.
His first lyrics saw the light in the first decade of the 1900s, a period when the dense mist of Russian Symbolism (with Blok's sinuous Gypsy romances and Belyj's iridescent mysticism at the forefront) began to be perceived by the people and the intelligentsia as a useless pastime, a pretentious and outdated game, a vacuous floating of the pen incapable of nourishing the heart and spirit of new generations seduced by Marxist narrative, by literature addressing issues more consonant with their lives, by poetry with sharper and clearer outlines.
Mandel'stam adhered to Acmeism, a literary movement that proposed itself as an antidote to the stylistic features of Symbolism and attributed to itself, through the formal care of verses, the mission of chiseling out crystalline and sonorous images that would immediately resonate in the reader's consciousness.
He (along with Akhmatova and Gumilyov) became one of its most representative members: small artifacts with a classical taste and geometric precision in which the Mandel'stam-man was literally overwhelmed by the Mandel'stam-poet; true Greek marbles standing in space with expressive impersonality.
And then nothing more. For five years (from '25 to '30) an unnatural silence. Inspiration dried up, images exhausted.
And then suddenly everything returns. The dam bursts, and poetry resumes flowing uninterruptedly, in waves. And how different it is now! Painful lyrics, excessively personal, lyrics dripping with blood, lyrics like wounds in which the author repeatedly turns his sharp sculptor's chisel. The ancient statue has shattered, and in its place remains the torn flesh of a martyr, of a poet who feels all the suffering of that part of the population torn apart first by civil war and then suffocated by the Stalinist yoke.
But what happened in those five years of retreat from poetry? It's simple: Mandel'stam was devoting himself to prose, or rather, he was crossing a bridge. "The Noise of Time" (the title of the first of the four writings collected in the book) aims to shed light on that very period.
Step by step, we follow the poet who, with chin down and hands in pockets, moves away from one shore and still does not see the other. His gaze is elsewhere. His attention and posture are those of a person folding in on themselves, reconsidering and weighing their journey (human before artistic) asking only a simple question: "What happened?".
In these proses, Mandel'stam tells us about the streets, the squares, the churches, the lavish military parades of pre-revolutionary Petersburg; he welcomes us within his family's walls, showing us their congenital idiosyncrasies, inveterate oddities, and the multifaceted and multilayered chaos of "Jewish chaos" that characterizes it; he presents strange characters that seem to have come from Gogol's pen and that instead are the decisive encounters of his childhood, adolescence, and his escape to Crimea.
An autobiographism embedded in the very noise of an era and which, thanks to it, acquires a sense and specific weight. The spasmodic wait, the cultural upheavals, the curiosity for customs, the incandescent personalities of those years serve as the background, complement, and prelude to the maturity of the author.
If all this might somehow remind us of Proust's gigantic shadow of the cathedral he built, we would be wrong to think so: where the Frenchman was symphonic in progression, fluid in form, and explorative in method, the Russian proceeds with abrupt leaps, abolishes any novelistic pretense, and prefers sudden and striking mental associations, pulverized by the chimes of History that endlessly cover the ticking of his life.
Moreover, Mandel'stam is not trying to untangle any personal Gordian knot: "My memory is the enemy of all that is personal. My memory is driven by hostility and its work removes the past, it does not reproduce it". Sounds, smells, colors, and people seem to peel off from small clumps of memories scattered here and there. True revivas that strike with their vividness and emerge for a moment from the flow of Time only to be submerged by it immediately afterward.
He does not mythologize the past, makes no quick hagiography. It is a highly controlled book in content (which only deals with things firsthand experienced by Mandel'stam who never ventures into expansive digressions) and fragmented in form (with periods and innumerable similes that climb the ridges of memory zig-zagging like mountain goats).
A book whose stylistic hallmark lies in discontinuity and ancillary annotations that pile up along the pages of lived experience: "Destroy the manuscripts, but keep what you have scribbled in the margins, out of boredom, out of ineptitude, and as in a dream. These secondary and involuntary creations will not be lost".
Mandel'stam seeks to navigate an evident paradox: he shuns any individualistic urge, but to convey his truth about the climate of those years, he must necessarily delve continuously within himself. A kind of recording device equipped with emotions trying to offer the reader the continuous intertwining of facts (bare and raw) and how they were interpreted and internalized.
The clarity of lived details and the constant effort towards their depersonalization; the turmoil of a poet's excited senses and the deeply felt need not to be overwhelmed by them. These small prose works are the watershed, the connecting link, the ideal bridge that connects the two so different periods of Mandel'stam's poetry.
I could close by talking about his death. It occurred in a transit camp shortly after his last arrest, at a station during a journey that was supposed to take him to the infamous territories of Kolyma uncovered by Šalamov's stories. Another connection, another bridge.
But, ultimately, what is not a bridge? Life itself is: the supreme bridge suspended over the incomprehensible, connecting two shores of which we know nothing.
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