Authors

Rolf Hellebust¹;  ¹ The Brilliant Club, UK

Discussion

Invoking the thaumaturgic potential of the artistic word (in the broadest sense of the Russian slovo), Silver Age writers such as Andrei Bely echo the ecstatic enthusiasm of Dostoevsky’s novoe slovo – but also his unspoken anxieties about just how far actual words can go in meeting the maximalistic demands placed on literature by 19th-century critics such as Belinsky. Of course the pagan epithet of Bely’s 1910 article “Magiia slov” does not come from the Orthodox Dostoevsky. We only see it explicitly a generation later, in the Silver Age, in the era of Symbolist and post-Symbolist poets. Among the latter, Osip Mandelstam stands as perhaps the last significant representative of the tradition of viewing the word as sacred – if not magic per se. For an Acmeist the “magic word” is too much a Symbolist category, especially for a writer like Mandelstam who started his career as a Symbolist and thus had a reason to make his new loyalties crystal clear – as he did in his 1913 manifesto “The Morning of Acmeism.” The Symbolists allowed themselves to write explicitly about word magic; the price they paid was a maximal distance of this magic from any real-world utility. In this sense, Mandelstam is not really opposed to Belyi and Co.: he merely goes one step further in effacing the word’s utility. Its power, “full of Grace and Truth,” as he writes, is taken to the limit, but its use as a tool is now reserved not even for the inspired poet, but for the Almighty alone.