Commentary on Osip Mandelstam's Poem We Live Without Feeling

Osip Mandelstam (born 1891 and "reported dead" by the Russian government in Dec. 1938), a famous 20th century Russian poet, depicts powerful images of Stalin in his poem "We Live Without Feeling". By the time Mandelstam wrote "We Live Without Feeling" in the 1930's, he had apparently succumbed to his sense of overwhelming doubt regarding the prospects of a Communist Russia. "We Live Without Feeling" is one of his last poems, and Mandelstam's blend of acemeism (for an enlightening description of what acemeism is, and more importantly, what it is not, see the Literary Encyclopedia's article) and the prior symbolist movement makes for some interesting reading.

According to The Middle Stage, Mandelstam had just returned to writing poetry after a hiatus of several years. "We Live Without Feeling" casts its pessimistic and hopeless shadow on Stalin himself as much as it does on brand of communism Stalin is contained within (i.e. Stalinism)

In what follows, I attempt to assess the meaning of some of the more manifestly complex expressions within the poem. An online version of the poem is available here.

The second, third, and forth lines ("Our words can't be heard ten steps away/Yet when the smallest talk takes place/The Kremlin mountaineer comes up always) depict the fact that, during Stalin's reign, Russian talk was idle and silenced by the government, or else it was considered treacherous and dangerous to the State. Russian's aren't heard in the sense of being acknowledged, but the government reacts to even the slightest of remarks, especially where the regime can easily "fail to apprend" the insignificance of simple chatter.

The character of 'talk' is considered elsewhere in the first stanza; "His words are as crushing as heavy weights," relates to the authority of the communist party, first reducing speech to insignificance or treachery, then countering (communist construed) potential threats with words that spring from the well of the communist ideological spring.

I wasn't quite sure what "Thin-necked leaders" referred to immediately. Upon reflection, one possible extension of this would be to Stalin himself, or those that echo the kind of dangerous ideological fanaticism Stalin was immersed in. The fact that the leaders have thin necks may imply, among other things, that they have their 'heads in the clouds,' so to speak. (For some reason thin necks parallel long necks, in my perception of the matter; of course long necks imply a head that is higher than some normal level, and this higher head implies detachedness and over-theorizing, I think.) Having a thin neck may imply a high head, and a high head might be one in the realm of idealist (i.e. communist idealist) retribution.

Based on the content and overall feel of the poem, it seems unlikely that Russians immediately could have read this, given the policy regarding restricted publishing rights, if one could even call them rights. This brand of communism, which the poem seems to be in relation to, dehumanizes people ("He plays with the services of semi-humans/Some whistle, some miaow, some whine/He alone shouts and pokes them in the chest") and displaces a kind of destruction which hits many parts of society ("hitting some in the groin, some in the brow or eye").Mandelstam 's poetic bluntness is offset only by the vagueness of the intention behind rather grammatically simple constructions.

I suppose that's one thing I like about Mandelstam: his blunt style does little to hide his mood (i.e. the sense of dread and hopelessness) but clads the referants (i.e. what his descriptions are directed at/denote) of his expressions in deceptive but elegant grammatical simplicity.