Abstract
The aim of this article is to examine the thought of Hannah Arendt and the work of Osip Mandelstam from a unified conceptual stance. Arendt provides the grounds for this in her remarks about Mandelstam (alongside Rilke and Auden) in two major fragments from her final work “The Life of the Mind.” Arendt (here following on from Heidegger) speaks of the unity of poetry and praise, which, in turn, illustrates the affinity between thought and gratitude. However, the great modernist poets that Arendt mentions perform their praise within an existential and historical context in which praise proves a kind of impossible, paradoxical event. We attempt to discern Mandelstam’s poetic thought through the optics proposed by Hannah Arendt and to describe several aspects of his “poetics of praise.”
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Notes
Possibly, Arendt placed Mandelstam next to Rilke and Auden, already were well known to her, because she had been impressed by the poet’s image, and it is this image which could become a guide to his poems. She may have discovered it from the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, which Arendt had considered so important that she sent its German translation (Mandelstam, 1971) as a gift to Martin Heidegger. Heidegger thanked her for the parcel in a letter of July 3, 1973 (154) (Arendt Heidegger, 2016, p. 260). Arendt herself may have read the English translation of 1970.
I use this well-known metaphor with the same meaning as that given in the paper of Ulrika Björk: “In this essay I have presented the eclipse of the transcendent (what Nietzsche metaphorically referred to as the “Death of God”) as both background and point of departure for Heidegger’s existential philosophy, Arendt’s political-theoretical project of critical remembrance, and Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Heidegger and—to a lesser extent—Arendt respond to this eclipse, and the feeling of cultural-existential meaninglessness it generates, by dismantling the Platonic-Christian-metaphysical model of a transcendent source of meaning” (Björk, 2018, p. 124).
“It is in the Will's nature to double itself, and in this sense, wherever there is a will, there are always ‘two wills neither of which is entire [tota], and what is present to one of them is absent from the other.’ For this reason you always need two antagonistic wills to will at all. It is ‘not monstrous therefore partly to will and partly to nill (“Et ideo sunt duae voluntates, quia una earum tota non est.... Non igitur monstrum partim velle, partim nolle”). The trouble is that it is the same willing ego that simultaneously wills and nills: “It was I who willed, I who nilled, I, I myself; I neither willed totally nor nilled entirely–and this does not mean that I was of ‘two minds, one good, the other evil,’ but that the uproar of two wills in one and the same mind ‘rent me asunder’” (Arendt 1981 (Willing), p. 94).
A word representing the voice of authority, Mikhail Bakhtin’s term (Bakhtin, 1975).
Cf. survey (Bassel, 2015).
Maybe this is the point of insanity,
Maybe this is your conscience—this,
The knot of life, wherein we are recognized.
And untied in order to exist.
Thus transcendent crystal cathedrals,
Like a diligent spider, light.
Stretches out over ribs, then gathers them.
Once more in a single beam.
Beams of pure lines, grateful ones,
Steered by a quiet ray.
Will gather, will meet someday.
Like guests with their heads unbared.
Only not in the sky, but on earth,
As in a house filled with song.
How not to harm, not to frighten them?
If only we live so long…
For what I am saying, forgive me…
Softly, softly read it to me… (Bernstein, 2014, pp. 69–70).
He is an echo and a hello, a milestone—no, a plowshare.
The stone-and-air theater of growing ages.
Has risen to its feet, and everybody wants to see everybody –
Those who were born, the deadly, and the deathless (Bernstein, 2014, p. 50).
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This study is supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research project 20-011-00927 “Defining Nothingness: Conceptions of Negativity in Continental Philosophy.”
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Faybyshenko, V. Is praise possible in modernist poetry? Mandelstam through the lens of Hannah Arendt. Stud East Eur Thought 75, 161–178 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-021-09444-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-021-09444-z