The Noise of Time     by Osip Mandelstam, Translated by Clarence Brown Original title: Sum vremenic Original language: Russian Published by Viking Penguin Pub. Date: 1993 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 0.49 x 7.67 x 4.98 ISBN: 0140187065 List Price: $9.95, £5.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £6.33

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Osip Mandelstam may have been the single most brilliant Jewish writer of this century. Sir Isaiah Berlin, for example, spoke of ’the cascades of Mandelstam’s glittering or tranquil images leaping out of one another, the historical, psychological, syntactical, verbal allusions, contrasts, collisions, whirling at lightning speed, dazzle the imagination and the intellect.’

It may be a surprise to find Mandelstam in a book dedicated to fiction as he established his literary reputation as a major Russian poet but his prose pieces — perhaps more satisfying than the poetry to read in translation — are quite unforgettable. Not exactly fiction, the prose pieces are often described as ’vignettes’. One of the most famous The Noise of Time recalls, from the vantage point of the turbulent 1920s revolutionary Leningrad a vanished, genteel Saint Petersburg of minor literary figures, grandparents and family trips. The description of this city, Mandelstam’s greatest inspiration, a strange neo-classical pile all built at once, is affectionate but with a vivacity reminiscent of Louis Aragon’s masterpiece Paris Paysan, (see French Babel Guide), itself a brilliant ’vignette’ of a legendary city.

Part of The Noise of Time is a gentle, teasing section on what Mandelstam calls ’Judaic Chaos’ by which he seems to mean, in his impressionistic way, the combination of a passion for life with a certain nervous over-eagerness. This story, like other places where he directly speaks of Jewish characters, reflects too the mixture of influences in an educated urban Jewish milieu in St. Petersburg, then the cultural capital of Russia. Under the heading The Bookcase he describes this part of the family’s furniture as having descending shelves of Hebrew, German and Russian books; part of the ’chaos’; the lack of a single stable centre in the cultural universe he beheld. Isaiah Berlin’s ’leaping images’ are perhaps partly an attempt to find a way to write the complexity of his times and his (Jewish) place in them. Mandelstam was as much as anything a genuine, a fabulous cosmopolitan and his travel sections such as Finland in The Noise of Time or the separate short work Journey to Armenia reflect an enormous excitement about and awareness of the differences of the new people and places he encounters. One quickly loses oneself in his fantastically redolent worlds.

Another famous prose piece in both The Noise of Time and The Prose of Osip Mandelstam collections is The Egyptian Stamp, a child’s vision with a force like the first part of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Like Joyce he creates with minute localised references, the building-blocks of personal consciousness, even including the history of the associations we, child and adult, make to ’feel the world’; ’There is an obscure heraldry of moral ideas going all the way back to childhood: the ripping sound of a torn cloth can signify honesty, and the cold of madapollam cloth — holiness’.

In fact Mandelstam constantly, gleefully surprises with his uses of words and associations; a synagogue he sees as ’a Jewish ship’ while as a boy he tells us he had a mania for collecting nails which he calls ’my spiky wealth’. There is the sense that Mandelstam — whose parents (amongst the first fully Russian-speaking Jews) spoke Russian in a stilted way, while he felt an immense freedom with Russian, a language free for him of what he called ’Jewish ruin’ — the various mundane (and unhappy) associations of Jewish exclusion and persecution. Russian on the other hand was his beautiful toy, no more and no less than a wonderful plaything to spin out glorious worlds.

Bruce Chatwin, the great English travel writer (and much more than that) called Mandelstam’s Journey to Armenia ’breathtaking elliptical prose’. In Armenia Mandelstam discovers amazing natural beauty on the island of Sevan and a cast of extraordinary characters wherever he goes. Journey to Armenia, particularly the first part, is a brief joy to read. The editor who published it in Stalin’s Soviet Union was immediately sacked. Mandelstam, the Russian Jewish genius, was tipped into a Labour Camp in freezing Vladivostok to die.

’The Polish serving girl had gone into the church of Guarenghi to gossip and to pray to the Holy Virgin. That night there had been a dream of a Chinaman, bedecked in ladies’ handbags, like a necklace of partridges, and of an American duel in which the opponents fired their pistols at cabinets of chinaware, at inkpots, and at family portraits.

I propose to you, my family, a coat of arms: a glass of boiled water. In the rubbery aftertaste of Petersburg’s boiled water I drink my unsuccessful domestic immortality. The centrifugal force of time has scattered our Viennese chairs and Dutch plates with little blue flowers. Nothing is left. Thirty years have passed like a slow fire. For thirty years a cold white flame has licked at the backs of mirrors, where the bailiff ’s tags are attached.

But how can I tear myself away from you, dear Egypt of objects ? The clear eternity of dining room, bedroom, study. With what excuse cover my guilt? You wish Walhalla? The warehouses of Kokorev! Go there for salvation! Already the porters, dancing in horror, are lifting the grand piano (a Mignon) like a lacquered black meteor fallen from the sky. Bast mats are spread like the chasubles of priests. The cheval-glass floats sideways down the staircase, manoeuvring its palm-tree length about the landings.’ (The Egyptian Stamp)