Mandelshtam's Acmeist Manifesto

Abstract

There is a peculiar significance which attaches to the title of this work. To call an Acmeist manifesto published in 1919 Morning of is to dispute the accepted notion which puts that year in the very late afternoon if not in fact the night of the movement first publicly proclaimed in 1913. The words may also be charged, as is customary in Mandelshtam, with more than superficial meaning, for if morning can stand for incipience it can also signify those qualities of clarity and freshness, of brilliancy and wholesomeness, which characterize so much of the work of the Acmeists. By this time the first Guild of Poets (Tsekh poetov) had long since been dissolved, and Apollon, the journal which had become the Acmeist citadel, was defunct, but Mandelshtam seems to be declaring that Acmeism as a literary method was very far from ceding the day entirely to Futurism. As a document this manifesto has an obviously independent importance. But as one of the chapters in Mandelshtam's ars poetica it must be read in the context of the rest of his criticism. Though his highly original insights remained remarkably consistent and clear over the whole extent of his published work, they tend to be conveyed in any given instance in so sharply elliptical a style that the thought appears, electron-like, to have jumped from point to point without moving through the intervening space. It moves in fact through the body of common knowledge and culture which Mandelshtam tacitly assumes his reader to share with him. But it cannot be denied that one's comprehension of the clarion rhetoric in this manifesto will be enhanced by a reading of Mandelshtam's other critical essays. Much of the great essay on Dante, for instance, and of the smaller one on Villon will appear to be expansions of what is said here about the ethos and aesthetic of the Middle Ages. Utro Akmeizma was first published in Sirena, No. 4-5 (30 January 1919), 69-74, an illustrated fortnightly edited in Voronezh by Mandelshtam's fellow Acmeist, Vladimir Narbut. The text used for the present translation is that published in N. L. Brodsky, V. Lvov-Rogachevsky, and N. P. Sidorov (eds.), Literaturnye manifesty (Moscow, 1929), pp. 45-50. In this version the numeral at the head of section 5 occurs at the top of p. 49, where it interrupts the paragraph which, in this translation, I have assumed to be the first paragraph of that section. C. B.