Family Romances in The Noise of Time: Mandelstam's Autobiography as an Allegory for Literary Activity

In this article I analyze Mandelstam's autobiography The Noise of Time in order to reassess the accepted narrative in contemporary criticism of Mandelstam's rejection of the personal element in the twenties and then return to it in the thirties. It is an accepted practice to read The Noise of Time as a text in which Mandelstam puts forth his affiliation with the impersonal and which also forms the unspoken promise of his return to the personal in the thirties. The autobiography is interpreted as a statement of Mandelstam's disaffiliation with the marginalized Jewish culture of his family as he strove to fully assimilate into the political and literary culture of post-revolutionary Russia. Reading The Noise of Time as a text in which affiliation with Russian culture has to be chosen over that of the personal and the family, where the former is seen as the desirable center and the latter as an unwanted periphery, sets the stage for the argument that in the thirties Mandelstam overcame the incompatibility of the two realms, as his attitude toward his Jewish roots was, if not reversed, then certainly reexamined. The goal of this essay is to reassess the narrative of Mandelstam's turning away from and the subsequent embrace of the personal by questioning the initial part of the dialectic–the rejection of the personal. I argue that in The Noise of Time, Mandelstam–against his own declarations of enmity towards the personal–examines his relationship with the family to use it as a template for literary practice. In the text of the autobiography, the “family” becomes not only a metaphor for literature, but also an allegory for literary activity. Through a series of allegorical substitutions Mandelstam gradually transports his vision of the family and its complicated dynamics onto literature and culture. Thus, I also argue that the family principle supersedes the Jewish one–ultimately, it is the family ethos, elaborated in The Noise of Time, which provides Mandelstam with a framework in which personal ethics does not stand in opposition to civic responsibility. In this sense, The Noise of Time can be seen as a procedure in which the dichotomies of “personal” and “cultural” are successfully “grafted” onto each other: literature adopts the dynamic (Oedipal) tension of the family; it also offers Mandelstam a space in which such tension–overwhelming within the space of the family proper–provides parameters for responsibility and accountability. Thus, I propose to see The Noise of Time as a text in which Mandelstam lays the ground for the strategies of artistic self-representation in the thirties. Published in 1925, the year in which Mandelstam's poetic output ceased for the next five years, The Noise of Time is a text in which the poet goes back into his own past to articulate the possibility of a union between the personal and the historical, where the tension between the two forms the ethical nature of their relationship. As such, it stands alongside The Fourth Prose and the poetry of the thirties. In the article I first examine how Mandelstam utilizes the concept of the family to define the function of literature in one of his major article of the twenties, “On the Nature of the Word.” I proceed with a detailed analysis of The Noise of Time in order to elucidate the narrative and rhetorical strategies used by Mandelstam to allegorize the family dynamics in order to explore and formulate his personal relationship with Russian literature and culture.